September 26
Another single tree turning – this one a delicate lemon yellow, a poplar down by the pond. Distant, intangible pathos. This other universe, with its own moods and meanings, its own not quite decipherable language for expressing them.
A word I learned recently: ‘catabolic’. Having to do with the breaking down of organic matter. I see myself as a catabolist: my peculiar identification with this season, my gravitation towards autumnal things: forms, sensations, experiences, shaped by their relationship with the extinction towards which they are travelling, rather than the act of creation from which they sprang. The implosive beauty of collapse.
‘I was purchased, my Uncle Heinrich informed me, for two truckloads of oranges…’
God! I can almost hear myself reading it aloud on one of those book programmes on NPR, though it would have to be some Hadean equivalent of that worthy institution, since the publication of such a document would of course be incompatible with my continued existence on this earth.
‘We are delighted to have the late Mr Vogel on our show tonight. Mr Vogel, would you be so kind as to read us the opening passage of your memoir?’
‘I’d be glad to: I was purchased, so my Uncle Heinrich informed me, for two truckloads of Seville oranges. My wife, something of a celebrity in those days, was more expensive…’
Do I dare?
To quote one of my own poems – ha! – Do I dare disturb the universe???
Do I?
But why this persistence in thinking I could possibly have anything left to lose? Just the sheer habit of being alive? Haven’t I always known I was going to have to break this habit some time? Well, that time has come! Splash! Inge, my darling, this is for you. I’d write it in German, but we fled that language, didn’t we? Now I think in English, even dream in it. Here goes. Sell it to the highest bidder…
CHAPTER 1
I was purchased, so my Uncle Heinrich informed me, for two truckloads of grade B Seville oranges. Inge was more expensive. She was something of a cause célèbre in Berlin – a well-known actress in those days, as well as a prominent agitator in the peace movement – and the authorities in the former East Germany, whatever else they might have been, were astute merchants. For her release they demanded hard currency: five thousand dollars’ worth of deutschmarks.
The money and oranges were given by the West German government to the Diaconical Work, a charitable trust of the Protestant Church, who in turn handed it over to the East German Agency of Commercial Co-ordination, Koko, where a friend of my Uncle Heinrich’s was deputy director.
Such was the procedure in what was then known as Freikauf: the selling of dissident flesh for goods or hard currency.
On the eighth of June 1986, an overcast day with dots of moisture sparkling in the warm grey air, Inge and I were escorted in an unmarked van to the Potsdam side of the Glienicker Bridge, which we then crossed on foot, Inge’s eyes full of tears, mine dry, each of us carrying two suitcases; without speaking, without pausing for breath and without looking back.
Two months later we were on a Lufthansa flight to JFK. The Muhlenberg Institute, an organisation of Lutheran pastors who had been in contact with Inge’s father (himself a pastor, who had fallen from favour with the official ‘Church in Socialism’ for his work helping to reunite families divided by the Wall), had sponsored our immigration, guaranteeing a loan to help us settle, and lending us a small apartment above a homeless shelter in the East Village, which we were to supervise in lieu of paying rent.
We had had no intention of settling in West Germany, or for that matter anywhere else in Europe. America was always our destination. Nowhere else would do. In my case this was a straightforward decision: for as long as I could remember, America had been the point of convergence for all the unfulfilled cravings of my parched soul, and the idea of getting out of the East had always been inseparably bound up in my imagination with that of finding some way of transplanting myself into the magically enriching soil of the New World.
So far as one can ever account for such things, I suppose this fixation must have had its origins in my father’s professional failure and the measures my mother then took to find other means of fulfilling her ambitions.
The chain of events began in 1974. My father, a lawyer by training, had been quietly consolidating a career in the diplomatic service of the German Democratic Republic, where his speciality was negotiating fine-print details in the Friendship Treaties springing up between the GDR and other countries in the Eastern Bloc. It was a humdrum if respectable occupation, but after the rest of the free world had followed West Germany in granting full diplomatic recognition to our republic in 1973, and the UN itself had opened its doors to us, my father was selected as a junior member on the GDR mission to that august body, and our lives looked set to change.
For a few months he shuttled back and forth between Berlin and New York: kindly, remote, befogged by jet lag and overwork, but always bearing gifts of a radiant strangeness – Slinkies, watches for deep-sea divers, a wireless that woke you with a cup of instant coffee. These little marvels formed the entire body and substance of my image of New York, and as I discovered many years later when Inge and I flew in, the picture they had created was strangely accurate: there below us were the toys and gadgets from that brief period in my family’s life; metamorphosed into an entire city of hooped and flowing steel, of vast, luminous, multi-dialled watches, of buildings like giant radios with towers of glass and streaming water.
My father’s visits grew steadily longer. There was talk of a permanent posting, even of our being sent out there to live with him…
New York! America! In those dark ages of absolute division between East and West, the very word ‘America’ seemed to bristle with dangerous, glittering energies. Like ‘Moscow’, it named the source of some ultimate fright and power. Bonn was our West German sibling: object of rivalry, contempt, occasional jealousy; but America and Russia were parental figures, and upon them we projected all our fantasies of supernatural and possibly cannibalistic strength. Nominally, of course, one was our friend, the other our enemy, but both gave us the same peculiar excitement to contemplate.
For my mother, the idea of our being sent to live in New York played directly into her sense of our family’s innate superiority. She and her brother – my Uncle Heinrich – were of blue-blooded Silesian descent. Naturally this was not something to brag about in communist East Germany, and they had been quick to drop the ‘von’ from the family name after the war. But in their quietly indomitable way, these two had maintained a sense of themselves as somehow ineffably superior to other people, and moreover they had managed to transmit this sense to those around them, not by any crude arrogance or self-aggrandisement, but by a certain aristocratic froideur; a mixture of haughty reserve and sudden graciousness, which bewildered people, intimidated them, and filled them with a kind of strained awe. My mother in particular was an expert in that particular form of psychological control which consists on the one hand in withholding, or at least delaying, a smile or word of kindness when the situation seems to call for one, and on the other in bestowing her approval of something – when she chose to do so – with a magisterial impersonality, as if she were merely the channel for an objective fact that had been handed down to her by some celestial source of judgement. The effect of the latter was to make one feel elevated, officially congratulated, as it were; as if a medal with the head of Lenin on it had been pinned to one’s chest.