‘What?’
‘Are we going to get our actors back?’
‘Oh, that.’
‘Yes, that. Are we?’
The man shrugged, wiping his raggy moustache. He looked unhappily at the floor.
‘That’s Werner, with the moustache.’ Margarete had reappeared at my side. ‘Menzer’s tail.’ She nodded importantly.
‘You mean Stasi?’ I whispered. I was utterly bewildered.
Margarete made a harsh tutting sound. ‘No need to whisper. It’s open house here, I told you. Everyone’s invited, Firm included. We’re artists, not politicos. We don’t want to reform the system. We’re just completely bored by it, and we’re too cynical to believe in trying to change it.’
Perhaps it wasn’t quite so absurdly rote-like, what she actually said, but the way she said it made it sound like some kind of official statement of position.
Even so, the words themselves struck a chord in me. Boredom, cynicism… I could relate to that…
‘Did you bring some poems?’ she asked me.
‘Well, no…’
‘I’ll show you some of Menzer’s. Wait.’
She flitted off again. I turned back to the other conversation. It had broadened now, and become a little heated, though amicably so. The disagreement was between the theatre people on one side, and Menzer with some like-minded friends on the other. The Stasi man sat between them, morosely sipping his beer, and trying to put in the odd word of his own.
Menzer was talking. ‘So let me get it straight -’
He had a nasal, bored-sounding voice, this weary prince, though with a note of incipient hilarity in it as you came to know it better, as if he were continually delighting himself with the things he heard himself say.
‘You put on your swords-to-ploughshares badges, you get arrested, then you pretend to be outraged because that was just part of a costume and the cops should have made a distinction between a real illegal display and a metaphorical illegal display, and you create a little disturbance, a little event, and somehow all this is supposed to help avert a nuclear holocaust – is that the idea?’
‘Well -’ Macbrecht huffed.
‘Somehow this is going to persuade the Central Committee to throw down its weapons and abandon the Warsaw Pact -’
‘Well, but -’
‘Menzer’s got a point,’ the Stasi man said.
‘You shut up,’ Menzer told him. ‘Seriously, Benno, you think wearing a badge -’
‘Not in itself, obviously,’ another of the actors began.
‘Do you even know where that image comes from?’
The actors looked uncertainly at each other. I noticed Inge furrowing her brow.
‘Do you?’ Menzer repeated with a grin.
‘You mean the swords-to -’
‘To-ploughshares, yes. That naked muscular blacksmith of yours. You don’t even know where your own emblem comes from? Oh, that’s almost funny!’ He gave a harsh, crowing laugh.
‘I know where it comes from,’ I heard myself call out.
Several pairs of eyes, showing various degrees of quizzical interest, were suddenly gazing at me from across the room. Among them Inge’s.
‘It comes from a Soviet sculpture,’ I said, projecting as much appeasing humility into my tone as I could (the last thing I wanted to do was offend anybody).
‘That’s right, of course,’ Inge said softly. I looked at her directly for the first time now. She had changed out of her costume into a pale dress with blue tights, the plainness of which, far from diminishing her glamour, seemed rather to have been raised by its wearer to the same level of high expressiveness as the stylised robe she’d been wearing before, though this time in the service of simplicity rather than queenliness.
She smiled gratefully at me, and a surge of pleasure went through me.
‘So even our protest symbols come down to us from the forces we’re protesting against,’ she continued. ‘Is that your point?’
As on the stage earlier, her quiet voice commanded one’s ear effortlessly, without the need of being raised, as though simply parting the sea of noise on either side of itself.
Menzer was unfazed: ‘Yes, and I’m glad I don’t have to spell it out, since that would be almost boring.’
‘So what are you proposing?’ the other actor asked.
‘Nothing,’ Menzer said with a smile. ‘There’s nothing you can do. Explore different kinds of silence. Otherwise absolutely nothing. You know as well as I do the whole language is occupied territory – has been for decades. Every time you say a word like peace, all you’re doing is taking your tongue for a swim in a sea of shit.’
‘Then why do you bother with your magazines? Why not just join the party and have a career like everyone else?’
Menzer shrugged. ‘It amuses us to fuck with words. Doesn’t it, Paul?’ He turned to the familiar-looking blond-bearded man who had been standing by his side nodding at his remarks. I remembered suddenly where I had seen him before: in Wandlitz, disappearing off to play with Otto, while I stayed with his sister Katje. He was Katje Boeden’s brother Paul.
‘Yeah. Maybe if we fuck with them enough, they’ll turn into something interesting.’
‘Like an exit visa?’ Inge said, addressing her words to Menzer, but glancing again in my direction, as if in appreciative acknowledgement of an ally.
‘That would be fine by me,’ Menzer replied.
Inge smiled at him, saying nothing. The peculiar latent power I’d sensed humming inside her when she was onstage was still discernible, but I was struck now by the fact that it no longer felt violent or negative – quite the reverse, in fact: as herself, her strength seemed all gentleness. Her face looked softer – less sharply accentuated at the cheekbones, her hair less blindingly white, less severe in the lines it made against her cheeks and forehead. Only a slight burning quality about her eyes remained of the fanatic look she’d had before, and it seemed an entirely benign fanaticism now.
‘Pretty, isn’t she?’ came a voice to my side. Margarete had returned.
I must have frowned involuntarily.
‘It’s OK, I already saw you looking at her in the theatre.’ She grinned mischievously.
‘Fiancé’s in Jena. Ignoring her as usual. Hasn’t even been to her play. Here, Menzer’s poems -’
She handed me a small pamphlet with a nonsensical title made out of numbers and punctuation marks. There was a signed etching of a paper clip on the cover.
I opened it and looked at some of the poems. Though these were made out of real words, they too seemed to me nonsensical, partly no doubt because I was still absorbing the news that Inge had a fiancé, and trying to conceal the absurdly inappropriate dismay this had provoked in me.
CHAPTER 9
‘Inge Leibus was asking who you were after you left the other night,’ Margarete said to me a few days later in the Mikado Café off Kollwitzplatz. Before I had left Menzer’s place Margarete had made a point of telling me I would be welcome at other such impromptu gatherings, giving me the addresses of various locations where they were likely to take place.
‘Really? What did you tell her?’
‘I told her you were a poet. A great admirer of hers – her acting, I mean.’
She smirked at me, sheathing her sharp little chin in its cushion of neck flesh. I assumed that her telling me all this was purely tacticaclass="underline" showing herself to be my ally in my pursuit of Inge, so that she could be my consoler when that pursuit failed. Women of her kind of borderline ugliness (to be blunt about it) had gone after me even at Humboldt, evidently considering me to be within their range.
A day or two later she brought me to an apartment not far from Menzer’s where something between a party and a colloquium was taking place, with people packed into a spartan, smoke-filled room, talking heatedly about the imminent destruction of the planet.
Inge was there; again dressed simply, but costumed in her own pale beauty that set her in another plane of being – so it seemed to me – from the lesser mortals congregated in the room.