Margarete insisted on taking me over to meet her properly. She was listening to an agitated old man with thick-lensed glasses and purple, spittle-flecked lips. He was lecturing her on some peace-related matter, and words like ‘Friedenssicherung’ and ‘Friedenswerkstätten’ came sizzling out of his mouth in an angry effluvium of white foam.
Inge noticed me as Margarete and I drew near, and from a brief stilling of her blond-lashed eyes on mine (as pleasurable as being settled on by some beautiful blue and white butterfly), she seemed pleased to see me. But the old man kept haranguing her, and she either couldn’t or wouldn’t initiate the process of polite disengagement that convention allows at such moments.
I watched her listening to him: nodding respectfully, almost meekly, as he laboured through his points (an old-time utopian socialist, it appeared, he was cranking out some line about the inherent pacifism of orthodox Marxism); too sweet-natured to manoeuvre herself out of range of his saliva, or rather (as I came to understand) too conscientiously preoccupied with matching his urgent communicativeness with an answering attentiveness of her own, to notice.
This attentiveness was one of the qualities I came to love most deeply about Inge; this helpless, profligate giving of herself to whatever creature, human or otherwise, came before her with its needs and demands. In practical terms it could be exasperating – the world’s most crashing bores and self-pitying narcissists, who have an unerring instinct for this kind of natural listener, tended to converge on her wherever she went, and I often had to resort to quite brutal means of dragging her away. But when I picture her now I always see her in this attentive state: her slender body tilting, slightly attenuated, towards the other person, her head at a quizzical angle in its straight-hanging arch of silken hair, her lips which seemed to have a little extra upturning red length at the corners (as if for the expression of joys beyond the capacity of normal humans to experience) open in a gentle smile, her serious eyes proffered like pools of grey-blue, restorative waters.
The old man certainly wasn’t about to give her up without a fight. When Margarete finally put her hand on Inge’s arm to interrupt her, he just went on talking, only louder and faster, as if his life depended on it, glaring at me furiously. I started to back away, but Inge, aware now of the possibility of wounding someone else’s feelings in addition to his, made a confused attempt to acknowledge Margarete and myself, while still listening to him. I dwell on these minutiae in order to give a sense of what I perceived about Inge at that moment: that she was possessed of an extreme, perhaps even overdeveloped human feeling, and that she was someone for whom the world was evidently too much at times: someone perhaps in need of protection.
When the old man finally shut up (standing his ground, though, with his lips ominously pursed as though waiting for the first opportunity to unleash another torrent), and Margarete introduced us, I said the first thing that came into my head, which was that I didn’t want to take any of her time, but I just had to tell her how wonderful I thought her performance had been in Macbrecht. Instead of laughing off the compliment, as I expected her to do, she coloured deeply and gave me an awkward smile.
‘Did you really think so?’ she asked.
‘Absolutely!’ I assured her.
She seemed uncomfortable with the flattery, and yet when the old man seized her back and I moved politely away, I did so with the distinct feeling that she had been half hoping for me to continue in the same vein.
CHAPTER 10
Early evening. Fifteen or twenty people grouped around the chipped marble tables of the Mikado Café. I wandered in, taking a seat at the edge and nodding at my new acquaintances. Inge was there. She smiled at me, but distractedly, and before I even consciously registered who the person sitting next to her must be, I felt my spirits sinking.
He was a large man, tall and very broad, with a reddish complexion that gave his lightly pigmented eyes a hot quality. I sensed immediately that he was not one of my kindred spirits from the privilegentsia: a decade or two of physical labour was clearly visible in the knotted ligatures of his enormous hands, which sat restlessly before him on the round tabletop, crouched and alert-looking.
I didn’t hear him speak much on that occasion, but he was unmistakably the centre of attention. The impact of a recent graffiti campaign in Weimar was being discussed, and most of the remarks were addressed directly to this man. He acknowledged each with a smile – brief, but managing to convey considerable warmth in its short moment.
He was from Jena, that much I knew. What Prenzlauer Berg was to Berlin, Jena was to our republic as a whole. Napoleon had smashed the Prussian army there. Marx received his doctorate from the university. The Workers’ Uprising that nearly toppled Ulbricht and his cronies in ’53 was sparked off in its streets. And now, thirty years later, it was a hotbed of what our security services labelled ‘hostile-negative activity’. Doubtless I was projecting a certain envious admiration, but all this seemed contained in this man’s fiery aura.
Inge looked tense beside him, I remember thinking; a bit diminished in his presence. She was hanging on his words, his silences rather, with her characteristic watchful attentiveness, though in a manner more suggestive of anxiety than the simple generous empathy it usually conveyed. The two of them left the café soon after I got there, followed by a man I took to be their tail (these things were conducted with blatant openness), and the gathering quickly lost its coherence.
‘Thilo Hartman,’ came the voice of Margarete, who had sidled up behind the gilt-bronze chair I’d perched myself on. ‘Inge’s fiancé. Turned up last night. They’re in a big fight already.’
I nodded, having by now guessed who the man was. I didn’t ask what the fight was about – I was feeling suddenly reluctant to acknowledge any interest in Inge, even to myself. Margarete told me the story anyway. Thilo had arrived in Berlin last night, but instead of going to see Inge in Macbrecht (the actors had been released, and the play was on again, without the badges), he had spent the evening with another friend, a woman.
‘They have an open relationship,’ Margarete informed me with a knowing look, ‘both ways, though only Thilo takes advantage of it these days. He’s always pushing her to go out with other men, but she won’t – not any more. She claims not to care about the girlfriends. What makes her mad is he refuses to take her acting seriously. Won’t even bother seeing her plays.’
‘It doesn’t sound as though they’re too well suited to each other,’ I said, affecting a yawn of indifference.
‘He was just in prison,’ she continued, ignoring my comment. ‘Supposed to’ve been serving a three-year sentence, but they let him out…’
I listened to the story, unsure whether Margarete was trying to taunt me with the feebleness of my achievements next to those of my rival, or spur me into action, but either way I found myself feeling increasingly deflated as she spoke. He and some others had staged a silent protest in the main square in Jena, sitting in a circle and unfurling a banner with the word Peace on it. A so-called ‘Working Class Combat Group’ had beaten them up and dragged them off to jail, where they would have been languishing still, had there not been an international outcry on their behalf, prompting the authorities to free them. Most of the protesters had been expatriated – sold to the West for hard currency under the Freikauf system that Inge and I were eventually to take advantage of. But not Thilo: