‘I don’t care for it.’ Brusquely, she pulls her arms out of its sleeves and hangs it back on the rack.
‘Let’s go,’ she says more softly, taking Stefan’s arm and leaning into him, ‘you were supposed to be taking me home.’
They move back out into the pale afternoon air.
There should be a word for this, she thinks, this processional journey of two people walking through grey city streets to a house where they know they are going to make love for the first time. She is aware that, however little premeditation she may have given it, she has amply signalled her readiness for this, and that Stefan, in his tactfully low-key way, is already in the process of making the mental transition from companion to lover. There is a quiet purposefulness about him as he walks beside her – an appearance of inward preparation. For her own part, she finds herself moving in and out of the reality of what has begun to unfold. One moment the heavy sweetness of impending desire fills her, bringing with it a sense of darkly consoling oblivion. The next she feels utterly detached.
The house she’s living in is a clean-scoured, semi-legal squat with a floating population comprised mainly of members of the women’s peace movement. There’s a sound of voices from the communal downstairs rooms when she and Stefan arrive.
‘Let’s go up,’ she says quietly.
As they climb the uncarpeted wooden stairs to her attic room, she feels again the sting of Thilo’s remark that she should forget about politics. Her life in this house has been nothing but politics – one long, heated conversation that has made its way through the introduction of female military conscription, the forming of peace workshops, the forging of links with Western anti-nuclear movements, and on to the more recently engaged topics of pollution, eco-activism… Is Thilo accusing her of faking her interest in all this? And the actions she has taken part in – the Dresden rally back in ’82 where they put candles on the Liebfrauenkirche in defiance of that toadying bishop’s orders; the big provocation a year later when Petra Kelly came over the Wall with her West German Greens and they all unfurled banners together in Alexanderplatz until the cops came and arrested them; the time she helped out a friend of Thilo’s who’d smuggled a matrix printer in from the West, persuading her housemates to let him hide it under the floorboards of the attic room, where it still lies, a great dense slab of glowering illegality – is he telling her that this was all somehow fraudulent too?
A by-product of her sympathetic attentiveness to other people is that her initial response to criticism tends to be outright acceptance. This can involve a radical (if only temporary) adjustment in the way she inhabits her own mind: a kind of privately performed impersonation of the alternative Inge that her critic seems to be proposing. What if he’s right? she asks herself. What if I only took part in those things because the people I admired, principally Thilo himself, were doing them, and I wanted to impress them? The possibility comes to her that rather than falsifying her nature with Stefan all day today, she has in fact been doing precisely the opposite: casting off certain grandiose pretensions, and reverting to her true essence: that of an actress; hopelessly shallow and chameleonic. Vain too, she adds for good measure.
As they step into the tiny, mirrorless room, she closes the door behind them and stands still, waiting to see what Stefan will do.
He smiles at her. His eyes are a stony blue, grained with yellow. A small dimple in his chin emphasises the somewhat bland symmetry of his face, but gives it a nice boyishness too. One thing she definitely could not handle at this moment would be some brawny, hairy-shouldered specimen of feral masculinity. Stefan’s slight frame and unassertive physicality seem to demand minimal internal adjustment and threaten minimal disturbance. He takes her hand in his, and with only the slightest sense of being brought across the threshold of her own psyche, she finds herself being kissed gently on the mouth.
With Thilo, lovemaking has -had – always a fraught, almost traumatic quality, articulating both their passion for each other and their almighty struggles against their own possessive instincts. Every caress seemed pressurised, wrung into a state of high tension, by those contradictory forces. In its tumultuous way it was an illumination as well as a catharsis, but it tended to leave her feeling shattered too, and in the wake of it she was often left with the troubling sense that she might not, in the final analysis, be a match for Thilo.
This is child’s play by comparison. The arousal of desire, the disrobing, the entangling of their naked bodies as they lie down on the narrow metal bed, even the statutory pause for the prosaic matter of protection – all proceed with a frictionless simplicity that feels new to her. It has crossed her mind that Stefan might be an inexperienced lover, that she might find herself having to lead the way, but he seems to know what he wants, and in the absence of any conflicting or clearer wants of her own, she becomes ungrudgingly acquiescent. The flat outward gaze of his eyes feeds with evident delight on the surfaces of her body. She is grateful for his apparent ease with the situation. By letting it stand in her mind as the official reaction to it, she is able to marginalise her own unease to the point where it becomes almost imperceptible.
As she tightens against him, matching his steady movements with her own, she begins to feel less like a human being than a machine: a precision-built, pleasure-feeling automaton, effortlessly going through its paces with another of its kind.
And it is no doubt precisely by association with this absence of effort, this unaccustomed, frictionless ease, that the fateful word she utters unthinkingly after they finish precipitates itself out of the drowsy vapours of her mind, idling across her lips as she lies sleepily on his bare shoulder:
Amerika.
‘America,’ she hears herself murmur.
‘America?’
‘America’s where I’d want to go if I ever left this country. I wouldn’t go – I wouldn’t go anywhere German.’
‘Oh? Why’s that?’
She stares up through the rain-grimed skylight.
‘I would want to be in another universe, without any connection to this one, not even the language. Maybe that more than anything…’
‘Oh, yeah?’
‘I could work there too. I have a director friend who comes here sometimes. He’s always saying he wants to put me in one of his films…’
‘That’s very interesting…’
The tone of Stefan’s voice is casual, but with her ear against his chest she can hear that his heart has exploded into life. After a long silence, she feels him clear his throat.
‘What if I could get you there?’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘What if I could get us to America?’
‘How could you possibly do that?’
‘Vitamin B.’
‘Huh? Oh…’
It takes her a moment to translate the rather dated slang.
‘You have connections?’
‘Yeah.’
‘I didn’t know that.’
‘I think I could get us exit visas… I mean, with you being a known artist. Would you go?’
Again, the tone is casual, but under it she can feel the stirring of what appears to be a large preoccupation.
‘Would you?’ Stefan urges.
‘I don’t know.’
He sits up, gazing down at her with a strange vehemence. An uncharacteristic wildness glitters in his eyes.
‘Listen to me, Inge. I’ll tell you something. I’m in love with you. I don’t know if you feel that way about me. But it’s not out of the question that it could happen, right? I mean, you quite like me?’
She nods. No objection there.
‘Well, what I’m saying is there’s no future here. Not even the remotest possibility of happiness. You know that, don’t you?’