‘Hey – Menzer’s place!’
The group turned back towards the theatre, picking up stragglers on the way, and then all of them began to move off. I stood there, wishing that I too could be a part of this cheerful expedition, but too shy, too close still to the days of my contagious unpopularity, to dare risking a snub by inviting myself along. Rain was falling, sour on the tongue and eyelids. I was about to cross the street to the U-Bahn when the curly-haired woman turned back to me. She gave me a brisk once-over, appraising me from top to toe. To my great joy, she appeared to judge me acceptable.
‘Coming?’ she asked, almost impatiently.
‘Well, I – I haven’t been invited.’
She tossed her head with a little scornful grimace. ‘Don’t have to be invited. It’s open house at Menzer’s. Everyone’s welcome.’
I joined her.
‘Margarete,’ she said, shaking my hand as we set off together down the wet sidewalk of Saarbrücker Strasse.
‘Stefan Vogel.’
She had a small face with thick brown eyebrows and a sharp red nose like a bird’s beak.
‘Poet?’ she asked.
I looked at her, caught off my guard by this inaccurate but curiously pertinent guess. I found that I didn’t want to deny it, though I couldn’t quite bring myself to affirm it either.
‘You don’t look like a painter,’ she added, as if by way of explaining herself.
‘No -’
‘Wrists too thin.’
‘I’m not a painter.’
‘What I thought.’ She nodded, causing her chin to disappear for a moment into her plump neck.
I was aware of having somehow used an honest answer to establish false credentials.
‘What about you?’ I asked.
She gave a squeaky laugh. ‘I’m nobody. I’m Margarete. Menzer’s sister.’
We turned down an alley of derelict buildings with jet-black oblongs where the windows had been. At the end was a free-standing tenement house in better repair (the ground-floor windows were glazed, and the stucco walls appeared to have been spared the defective latex paint that had been slathered over just about everything in the seventies, only to flake off five years later, along with the stucco beneath). The front door was fastened with a heavy padlock. We stopped here, and stood waiting in the drizzle.
After a few minutes, the tall, bespectacled man I’d seen on the stage before came sauntering down the alley with his own entourage, among them the Macbrecht actor and Inge.
Smiling faintly at the rest of us while continuing his conversation, the man climbed the steps to the front door and unfastened the padlock.
My officious companion tapped me on the arm. ‘That’s Menzer,’ she informed me with a little satisfied pursing of her lips. We followed this illustrious-looking personage into the house.
And so, in that casual manner, I entered into a new phase of my life: the last one before I left with Inge for the West.
CHAPTER 8
I say ‘casual’, and that was how it felt, but of course the more one learns about that place and those times, the less plausible the word ‘casual’ comes to seem in connection with even the most trivial aspects of one’s life. From the vantage of the present it seems to me that even at this early stage in the drama that followed, the likelihood is that I was already under the interested scrutiny of powers outside myself, and was already submitting to the guidance of their first, imperceptibly gentle touches.
Inside Menzer’s house, a bare-floored hallway led into a long, narrow room, cluttered with books, papers, paintings and odd bits of sculpture that on closer inspection turned out to be pieces of furniture improvised out of junk.
As the twenty or so of us trooped in, Menzer wandered across to a table where something appeared to have caught his eye. He picked up a piece of paper and glanced briefly over it. A look of remote amusement appeared on one side of his handsome face.
‘What is it, Menzer?’ a blond-bearded man asked eagerly. This man looked familiar to me, though I couldn’t place him.
Menzer held out the piece of paper by a corner, though before the man could take it, Margarete darted forward and snatched it with a squeak of laughter. She scanned it rapidly.
‘Menzer’s got another Notice to Appear!’ she exclaimed, handing the paper to the other man, who looked at it admiringly, then sent it circulating around the room. It passed through my own hands, though only long enough for me to take in the words Notice to Appear and Normanenstrasse.
‘Why don’t they leave you alone, Menzer?’ a green-eyed young girl – no more than twenty – asked.
Menzer gave a barely perceptible shrug. ‘Probably they just want to show me they can still get in the house without smashing down the door.’ He crinkled one side of his mouth. ‘It’s almost funny.’
‘But what will they do to you?’
‘They’ll keep me waiting in a cell for a few hours, then ask me what Westerners I’ve been in contact with. I’ll say Ronald Reagan and the Pope. They’ll threaten to close down the magazine. I’ll tell them be my guest. Then with luck they’ll give me back my Captain Beefheart albums which they stole last time around, and send me over the Wall in a private chopper.’
Everyone laughed. Bottles of Pilsator beer were opened, cigarettes lit, and some fast, loud music came bursting from a record player in the corner.
I sat on a painted wooden crate by a bookshelf, amazed to find myself here, and aware that the multitude of at once urgent-seeming and completely puzzling impressions I was absorbing would take time to understand. Aside from the laconically domineering presence of this man Menzer, the principal fact for me at that moment was that Inge Leibus was here in the same room as I was. For some time, out of a mixture of shyness and pride, I avoided looking at her, and spent several minutes studying the bookshelf beside me. On it was a row of books by what appeared to be French authors. The books bore the imprint of a West German publisher, which in my eyes was in itself enough to confer on them an aura of something more like necromancy than literature.
‘Who’s out there?’ Menzer called from across the room. He was addressing Macbrecht, who was standing near me, by the window. ‘Yours or mine?’
Macbrecht looked down onto the alley.
‘Yours – I think.’
Menzer ambled over to the window. A crumpled jacket hung from his narrow shoulders, and the flow of bulges and creases in the material was continued above it in his long, narrow, pale grey face, which owed its handsome effect less to any classical perfection of features than to an alluring but not quite decipherable play of asymmetries about the eyes and mouth, and some oddly placed muscular bumps and hollows down the cheeks, as though the whole form had been elongated and subtly misshapen, by stress perhaps, or unnatural use.
He opened the window.
‘Werner,’ he drawled, not bothering to raise his voice, ‘come in, you idiot. It’s too wet for you out there. You’ll catch another cold.’
A moment later a sheepish-looking man with a wet moustache came through the door.
‘Sit down, have a drink,’ Menzer told him. Margarete darted off for a beer and gave it to the man, who looked at it uncertainly.
‘Go on, man!’ Menzer said, hoisting a friendly sneer from one side of his mouth. ‘You think we’d waste our narcotics on the Firm?’
The man assumed a pious air. ‘I don’t acknowledge that I’m with the Ministry of State Security. I don’t deny it, but I don’t admit it either.’
This was greeted with jeering and laughter, not entirely hostile.
Macbrecht lumbered over – a pink-jowled, heavy-breathing man. He planted himself squarely in front of the new arrival.
‘So what was that about, Werner, at the theatre?’