Perhaps I should simply tell what happened from Inge’s point of view; that way I could get around certain more delicate matters arising from my visit to my uncle, without being untruthful.
If I did this, the story would present Thilo’s sudden rejection of Inge as an act of inexplicable callousness on his part, unwarranted even by the fact of his latest arrest, this time on the graver than usual charge of sedition.
Out of the blue (this version would go), hand-delivered by our ever-solicitous friend Margarete Menzer, Inge receives a smuggled jail note from her fiancé, telling her coldly to forget about him, advising her to forget about politics too and concentrate on her acting, since that was evidently where her heart was, and then laconically informing her that a few days before his arrest he had married an old girlfriend in Jena, a full-time activist in the peace movement. Margarete solemnly confirms the story, citing the testimony of a friend of hers in Jena who was present at the wedding ceremony.
Distraught, and unable to make contact with Thilo himself, Inge increasingly takes refuge in the sympathetic companionship of her new friend, Stefan Vogel. The quietly supportive attentions of this young man have already won her affection, so that when the bolt from the blue arrives – Thilo’s arrest and sudden marriage – his friendship assumes a new importance.
What follows does so with a rapidity that feels at once exhilarating and utterly out of step with any real developments in her heart. The latter will come in their own time, she tells herself. Meanwhile, she finds it strangely pleasurable to violate the delicate mechanism of her own emotional nature; to subvert or even destory the Inge Leibus on whom the pain of rejection by the one man she has ever loved has been inflicted.
One Saturday, on a perverse whim, she suggests to Stefan that they go to the horse races, something she has never had the slightest interest in doing before now. Ever obliging, Stefan takes the S-Bahn with her out to the Hoppegarten Racetrack. They sit together in the sunny freshness of the spring day, high up in the red brick grandstand, with a copy of the Rennkurier, picking out horses for each other to bet on. The racetrack has a pleasantly raffish atmosphere. With its smells of sweat and beer and horse dung, not to mention the distinctly uncommunist financial activities permitted to take place within its precincts, it gives one the feeling of having been released into a tolerant, almost relaxed universe. This isn’t of course the case, as the large number of purple-trousered Soviet officers strolling about with their girlfriends testifies, but even this sanctioned, illusory freedom raises the spirits. And perhaps because the horses themselves, by their sheer vividness and grandeur, succeed in temporarily ousting any civic agency from the centre of one’s consciousness, it allows one to occupy one’s body as an animal of flesh and blood for a moment, rather than as a ‘citizen’ or a ‘comrade’.
A fraught joy takes hold of Inge. The pain of Thilo’s disappearance continues to ache inside her, but over it a thin euphoric sheen appears to have formed. Impulsively, she puts her hand on Stefan’s shoulder and brushes his cheek with her lips. He laughs his quiet, serious laugh.
‘Choose another horse for me,’ he tells her.
‘All right.’
She picks a name at random; a rank outsider. He goes down, places the maximum stake: ten marks. A little later she’s gripping his hand tightly, as they watch the horse thundering past its rivals into the final stretch.
‘I’ll take you out to lunch’ Stefan offers, fanning the winnings in his hand.
They lunch at the Müggelturm Restaurant, Inge ignoring her heaped plate of steak and mushrooms in favour of the sweet Bulgarian wine, gazing with increasingly heavy-lidded eyes at the sleek faces of the party functionaries and their pampered-looking mistresses feeding around them.
‘What am I doing here?’ she murmurs. Stefan smiles gravely, takes her hand across the table, squeezes it gently, brings it to his lips with a look of tentatively ironic gallantry and plants a kiss on it. She smiles, feels a pang of longing for Thilo that threatens to spill over into a sob, and swallows it back down with a gulp of syrupy wine.
‘Take me home, Stefan.’
As they walk arm in arm down the street, they pass one of the Exquisit boutiques where imported luxuries are sold for Western currency. As with the racetrack and the restaurant, Inge has never before entered such a place. In the high-minded world of her father’s home and the peace movement, it is second nature to believe that the one thing worse than failed communism is successful capitalism.
But after all, she has just been betting on the horses, hasn’t she; getting half drunk at a well-established symbol of the hypocrisy of the higher echelons of the party; and wasn’t it Thilo himself who told her to forget about politics? All right, then: so be it. Let the cup of degradation be drunk to its dregs! They slow to a halt at the entrance to the boutique, then wander in together without a word.
The goods – heavy binoculars and cameras, thick crystal bottles of perfume, lustrous Italian shoes and ties – have a charged presence unaccounted for by their ostensible function. Bathed in the brownish light of their display cases, they seem to her like ceremonial objects from some occult religion. In her heightened state, she feels as though she has entered the force field of some immense and distinctly sinister power. She touches the black lamb’s-wool collar of a short, beautifully tailored coat made of green suede. A little to her surprise she sees that it is communist-built rather than Western: Interpelz, the label reads. Down some new conduit of thought, opened no doubt by the Bulgarian wine, runs the somewhat chimerical idea that this, unlike the Western items, would be an acceptable possession; that it represents not the familiar idea of luxury based on exploitation and exclusion, but a token fetched back from some egalitarian utopia of the future, where everyone will be dressed in such a coat, and that to own it would merely be to assert one’s faith in such a future.
‘Why don’t you try it on?’ she hears Stefan say.
‘Don’t be ridiculous! Look how much it costs.’ She holds the price tag out to him.
‘Try it on anyway. I’d like to see how you look.’
With an apprehensive glance at the store clerk, Inge slips off her flimsy anorak and swims her hand down the fleece-lined sleeves of the coat. It fits perfectly, gloving her long-armed torso like a second skin, the collar soft against her neck.
‘My God, you’re beautiful,’ Stefan murmurs. The words seem to come from him involuntarily. He is gazing at her in what appears to be a state of mesmerised admiration. It makes her a little uncomfortable, but also – she has to admit – excited. For a moment, as though trying on a new personality along with the coat, she finds herself imagining what it might be like to be the powerful partner in a relationship, the object of such an intense, helpless-seeming veneration.
‘I think you should look in the mirror,’ Stefan says.
She hesitates.
‘Come on, have a look.’
An odd habit of hers, inculcated in her at an early age, is to avoid looking in mirrors.
‘Come on, it won’t hurt you,’ he whispers again with a grin. And in the spirit of wilful self-desecration that has been upon her all day, she moves with him across the floor to the full-length mirror.
‘How about it?’
She looks in the mirror. As always on reacquainting herself with her appearance, she has the troubling sense of being confronted by a competing destiny: a happy, thoughtless existence based on physical beauty. The chic cut and glamorising detail of the coat seem to pull her almost irresistibly into this glazed, alternate image of herself.