None of which would have been any use to Lowenthal, even if I could have summoned the candour to tell him.
The shoot went grimly on, the economics of such enterprises apparently making it impossible to abort them and put everyone concerned out of their misery. By the end the producer was openly predicting the film would go straight to video without a theatrical release. He was right.
And meanwhile I had problems of my own. Those two words that had started popping up everywhere like a pair of fashionable Russian performance artists – ‘glasnost’ and ‘perestroika’ – had turned out to be more like harbingers of the apocalypse. The world I had grown up in had started collapsing before my eyes. My gathering, dream-like horror as one state after another felclass="underline" Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania… That sense of some monumental dam – solid as a mountain range, one had assumed – suddenly spouting leaks here, bursting out in torrents there, crumbling, exploding; the pent-up waters spilling out in a year-long jubilant frenzy of rebellion, cascading week after week over TV screens and magazine covers… The ghastly comedy of being the one person in the Western world unable to rejoice. Being obliged – in my capacity as one of Gloria Danilov’s ‘dissi-dents’ – to feign the triumphal delight of a man whose solemn principles had been vindicated, when all I could think of was that this was nothing but some cruel cosmic joke directed at me, me personally: that the very freedom for which I had paid so dearly was all along destined to have been given to me, gratis… Not to mention the creeping realisation that with every day’s opening up of secret archives and locked files, the ‘pledge’ I had written out and signed – that little devil’s bargain I had made on the presumption that it was to be kept in utter darkness for ever – was steadily being approached by this tide of light, that it was merely a matter of time before my black hour was made incandescently public…
So that I was suddenly eager to go and bury myself somewhere out of sight of prying eyes.
Inge had never cared for the city, and at this point needed no persuading to leave. We bought an old car and drove up here. It was winter; two feet of snow on the ground. We found the house through an ad in the Aurelia Gazette. Our landlord lent us snowshoes and took us up into the woods – my first excursion into the American wilderness.
The sky above the trees was a dark fluorescent blue. Where the sun came through, the melted and refrozen snow crust gleamed like marble. Fallen trees raised its surface in long, smooth veins. A huge icicle fell from the quarry cliff as we passed, hitting the frozen pool with a wondrous tinkling crash. Then the staggering immensity of this view across the valley. Not a road or dwelling or any other construction visible beyond the transmission tower directly below us (and even that in its lace of frost-flowers more like some outcropping of the rocks than anything man-made), so that you had the sense of gazing back into some prehuman world utterly unconnected to this one.
Astounding, humanless purity of it all! The suspicion I had that what I had been hungering for all my life; what, with my limited terms of reference, I had named ‘America’ – that concentration of unbounded delight and freedom – was something perhaps not human at all, was possibly even incompatible with the condition of being human, and that entering into it might in fact require precisely this: the annihilation of oneself.
Self-destruction: ‘the beginning of all philosophy’. Some other Denker I had to read at Humboldt. My obscure sense, whenever contemplating this particular act, that far from being a gesture of despair, it is actually one of extreme optimism. I think of Dr Serkin’s reversed tarot cards. My life force – my élan vital, as he called it – passing, for tactical reasons, as its opposite… Not a desire to be dead, but to be differently alive: to be rid of a parasitical second self that has so encumbered one’s spirit only the most radical surgery can remove it. One knows, rationally, that such surgery must result in the death of the patient, but that isn’t the point of it at all, and the bulk of one’s mind persists in regarding the extinction as a side effect; regrettable, of course, but not to be confused with the real goaclass="underline" the smashing through into a new, clear, unburdened state of being. The dead man’s grab at life!
TWO THIRTY-FIVE. Clouds filling up with yellow light, their underbellies grey. A smell of fermenting apples on the breeze. No reason to hold anything back at this point, and yet I still feel myself resisting. My old habits of silence and secrecy. Smash them!
‘… Stefan, dear boy. Good of you to come…’
Uncle Heinrich, rising with a warm smile from his desk at the Office of the Chief of the People’s Police. January 1986.
The room comes back to me in vivid detail – the oak cabinets, the rows of law books, the tin globe, the old-fashioned typewriter that looked like the offspring of a church organ and a halved artichoke – preserving itself in memory as if it knew I should be compelled to revisit it constantly over the years, as I have.
‘Look at what I have here!’ my uncle says joyously. ‘It arrived this morning. It’s an advance copy. I knew you’d be terribly eager to see it.’
He hands me the new issue of Sinn und Form.
‘Isn’t that thrilling?’
Inside the magazine are two new ‘poems’ of mine. Aside from not wanting to lose face after my stupid boast, I had sensed that having work published in a prestigious magazine might help me in my pursuit of Inge. Not that I thought she herself would be impressed by such a coup, or even very interested in it (I was right; she couldn’t have cared less), but I felt that it would give me a certain confidence I was lacking; a basis from which to promote myself. It would be a one-off relapse into my old habits, I had vowed, and from the vague nausea filling me there in my uncle’s office as I opened the magazine and went through the motions of gazing with grateful pride at my illegitimate offspring on their crisp white sheets, I knew that I was not even going to be tempted to repeat the experiment. With luck it would give me the credibility I needed in the eyes of my new acquaintances in Prenzlauer Berg, but beyond that, the sooner the whole matter disappeared back into the past, the better.
After making polite conversation with my uncle for a few more minutes, I stood up to leave.
‘Incidentally,’ he said, ‘I’d like you to meet a fellow I know, a colleague of sorts. He thinks you could be of some service to him. I told him I was sure you’d be more than willing to help. May I introduce you to him when you have a moment?’
No hint of shame or awkwardness as he asked. Even in hindsight, I find it hard to say for sure that he was aware of any leverage he might have acquired over me from the favour he had just done, let alone that he was deliberately exploiting it. If there was any notion of reciprocity operating in his mind, it was simply what was fully permitted by social convention: a harmless favour done, a harmless (in his eyes) favour asked in return. If I had refused him outright he might have been a little taken aback, but perhaps that would have been the end of the matter. Anyway, I myself was still too ignorant of these affairs to grasp fully what he was asking me, and other than the usual instinctive reluctance I felt whenever anybody asked anything of me, I had no particular reason for refusing him.
So, from that little leather-upholstered antechamber to hell I found myself proceeding, a few days later, to the living room of an apartment in the quiet suburb of Hohenschonhausen. It belonged to a Lieutenant Hager, case officer in the Operational Group of Main Department XX, responsible for monitoring and penetrating cultural life and political Aussteiger activity in the GDR. A sandy-haired man of forty: red eyelashes, thin-bridged nose, austere mouth; pale, freckled complexion indicative of a certain constitutional delicacy, against which the hair-fine lines under his eyes and at the corners of his lips suggested an opposing effort of disciplined self-fortification. He was married, with a child, a boy of six, who was occasionally present when we met. Our first meeting was to establish that I would be willing, in principle, to work as an Inoffizieller Mitarbeiter, an ‘unofficial collaborator’, and for him to outline the plan of action he had devised for me if I should accept. He made no overt effort to coerce me into accepting, and in fact went out of his way to stress the purely voluntary nature of this service: