‘I don’t want any other woman,’ I said, surprising myself at how nobly sentimental the words made me feel.
But it was apparently these words that gave her the strength she was looking for. She drew away from me, gently but decisively, pulling her nightgown back down around her.
‘Go to bed now, Stefan,’ she said, smiling calmly at me. ‘We’ll be friends this way. Go on.’
And as effortlessly as she had set the current flowing between us, she made it stop. It was as though some very simple problem had been resolved. The desire sluiced out of me. Without further protest, with even a certain feeling of relief, I went back to my room. Neither of us ever alluded to the matter again.
But for some time afterwards, I was in an exalted state. That such intensities of joy as I had just experienced had all these years been lying in wait for me, hidden inside those days like a purse of gold lying on a traveller’s path in some folktale, violently contradicted my sense of what life could possibly hold in store for me. It seemed after all that there was every reason to hope for happiness in this world.
CHAPTER 7
After I left Humboldt, I worked for a government organisation creating posters promoting ‘Peace, Friendship and Anti-Imperialist Solidarity’. The posters were put up in schools, offices, hospitals and other public places. Sometimes they solicited donations for Account 444, a public fund set up to support developing countries, but their main intent was to foster an image of the GDR as a beacon of conscience in a cynical and dangerous world. Given the historic idealism of my countrymen, who enjoy nothing better than the sensation of exclusive occupancy of the high ground in any landscape, moral or otherwise, this was not a difficult task. Even the dissident types I was soon to meet approved of our campaign. It takes a dubious sophistication to object to a poster condemning apartheid, on the grounds that the body condemning it isn’t exactly a picture of health itself. At any rate we didn’t trouble ourselves with such scruples, and other than the faint background suspicion that everything one could do in that land was inherently tainted with futility and fraudulence (our equivalent, perhaps, of the so-called ‘hum of life’, the G-sharp that whines when all other noises stop), the work was free of the more obvious kinds of stress.
Liaising between a state committee – the Solidaritätskomitee der DDR – and the Academy of Arts (whose president was a close friend of Uncle Heinrich’s), we commissioned and produced posters in support of the ANC, the Palestinians, the Laotians, the socialist opposition in Nicaragua, Chile and El Salvador and so forth. Our formula was simple: a compassion-arousing image of suffering in the third world, combined with an allusion to US imperialist culpability. A naively rendered Tree of Life, for instance, filled with delicate fruits in Sandinista colours, would stand with an air of tender pathos, about to be crushed by Uncle Sam’s boot. A small African child would sit stoically, bound in huge chains embossed with the words ‘US Steel’.
After a few months I was assigned to a group working on a series of purely anti-American posters – no pretext of supporting some other country. We showed the Statue of Liberty setting off a nuclear explosion with her torch; we had the stripes of the American flag rendered as the bars of a prison encompassing the entire planet. Anything we could think of that might stir up feelings of hatred for America was considered fair game. Hatred occupied a more reputable position in the spectrum of emotions back in the GDR than it does here in the States. I remember that among the sentiments chiselled on the walls of our assembly room at school were the words of Dr Lange, minister of education in the Soviet Zone after the war: ‘Youth must be filled with hatred for the enemies of our peaceful constructive work.’ There was nothing strange to any of us, therefore, about the idea of devoting ourselves to the arousal of this emotion in our compatriots. Our medium was the substance of righteousness itself. Handling it filled us with an almost luminous moral glow, like some benign form of radioactivity. I myself was no exception in this. I was entirely fulfilled in this job. I found I had a gift for propaganda – the triangulating of powerful images with latent phobias, to create a precisely targeted impulse of aggression – and I enjoyed exercising it. It also amused me to swap ideas with the skilful artists we summoned to our spruce-panelled offices on Lichtenberger-Strasse, and furthermore to find my suggestions being listened to with respect.
Best of all, the work brought me once again into a relationship with America. A treacherous relationship, of course, but as I have since found to be the case in so many circumstances, my private feelings of devotion not only survived within that outward form of hostility, but flourished. The more ingenious my contributions to our campaign of defamation, the more intense my feeling of secret connection to the US became. I have often wondered, in fact, whether betrayal and renunciation, far from negating people’s attachments, might in fact be the means by which they make them indestructible.
IT WAS AT this time that I met Inge. At one of my mother’s gatherings, a young composer named Walter Meyer was talking about new plays. He and his wife Clara, a television editor, were voracious consumers of contemporary culture, so abreast of the latest developments in all the arts that even my mother claimed to find them daunting. Walter mentioned a play by an avant-garde group that had just opened in Prenzlauer Berg.
‘Clara and I were thinking of seeing it,’ he said to me. ‘Perhaps you’d like to come with us?’
I thanked him and said that I would. We arranged to meet the following weekend.
Prenzlauer Berg in those days was something like the East Village was when Inge and I first arrived in New York: a mixture of the decrepit and the bohemian. Most of the workers’ families who used to live there had moved out of the crumbling old Wilhelmine tenement houses to Marzahn or one of the other new satellite cities. In their place all sorts of misfits, outcasts and dubious artistic types (the kind my father had been afraid my mother might be introducing to our house all those years ago) had moved in, lacing the dark backyards and factory halls of the greenless quarter between Schönhauser and Prenzlauer Allee with a network of galleries, bars and performance spaces. I’d never spent much time there myself, but its vaguely disreputable aura had impressed itself on my imagination, and I set off to meet Walter and his wife that Friday evening with a feeling of adventurousness.
Walter and Clara were waiting for me outside the theatre, an old warehouse with tiny barred windows.
I was wearing a sports jacket and pressed pants from the Jumo department store. I remember becoming rapidly self-conscious about my over-formal appearance as we filed into the black-painted auditorium. Most of the other members of the audience were casually dressed, the men in faded jeans (real ones), the women in exotic, trinket-spangled garments I couldn’t even name. Even Walter and Clara, though not exactly scruffy, knew enough to blend in.
With this petty but curiously upsetting matter on my mind, I found it hard to pay attention to what was happening onstage, at least until the main actress appeared. And when she did, far from making me concentrate on the play itself, the effect she had was simply one of bewilderment; bewilderment tinged with outrage. Here’s something else you’ll never be able to have, was the idea her presence aroused in me.
Undemonstrative to the point of seeming almost drugged, she gave an appearance of immense, stilled, almost angry concentration, like some powerful and potentially dangerous machine. Physically she seemed imposingly tall and very slender (in reality she turned out to be of average height and weight). Her deep-set, blond-lashed eyes, high cheekbones, and excessively pale skin gave her a wraith-like look, further abetted by the blades of utterly straight white-blond hair falling either side of her face, and the curt slash of fringe across her forehead.