He tousles his son’s hair, then gets up and returns to his chair, as if reminded by his own calm eloquence of the seriousness of the matter at hand.
‘You’re wondering what I have to say about the Soviet SS 20s,’ he continues with a smile. ‘That’s all right, we can discuss anything here. Well, I’ll tell you: having made quite an extensive study of these things, I can state categorically that the idea of being able to make peace without a credible threat of one’s own is a suicidal illusion. We would simply be swallowed up into the capitalist order, where we would incidentally occupy the very lowest rung. Anyone proposing unilateral peace has to be in effect proposing the end of socialism, which means the end of hope for all but the most powerful and predatory groups of people on the planet, and finally of course the end of the planet itself. Which is why certain potential leaders of the movement have to be considered hostile-negative forces. They may be full of noble intentions but unfortunately that doesn’t make them any less dangerous. Do you see?’
I felt that the lieutenant believed what he was saying; that his words were his own and that he had come to them by his own processes of thought. Unlike my uncle, whose ‘innocence’ was no doubt largely a matter of an innate disposition to serve the prevailing system as cheerfully and faithfully as he could, Lieutenant Hager seemed to have thought hard about the cause he worked for. He prided himself on his idealism and his moral integrity (the Lege set was a case in point: only a zealot would have inflicted that dismal knockoff of Western Lego on his child; most men in his position would have obtained a set of the real thing). His lean, smooth-drawn face, with its lines like fine wrinkles accidentally ironed into a shirt, had a distinctly monkish quality, and I have no doubt that in his own imagination he was playing the role of the hero of conscience, so pure of heart he could engage in activities of a nature that might have tainted a less sterling soul than his own.
And maybe he was right: maybe what was so catastrophically damaging to me was entirely harmless to him. Who am I, after all, to look back at that face and say with such confidence: ‘Demon’? What do I have to support this view other than my own sense of injury? History? A dubious ally: suppose its verdict had gone the other way (and after all, it has given the victor’s laurels to plenty of questionable causes over time, while cutting off plenty of noble ones before they had a chance to flower); suppose his system had triumphed, flourished into the egalitarian paradise it was all along intended to become, then how would my judgement of the lieutenant itself be judged? With precisely that incredulous scorn we reserve for all those pitiful figures from the past who failed, out of stupidity or narrow-mindedness to perceive which way the wind was blowing.
Blickfeldmassnahmen: our professional term for the act of ‘keeping someone in view’.
Abschöpfung: our word for ‘pumping’.
I was to keep Thilo Hartman ‘in view’. And, in my capacity as editor of a new and daringly outspoken oppositional magazine, I was to look for opportunities to ‘pump’ him.
THREE FORTY. Bare twigs gleaming like polished wires in the low sun. Lichen on tree trunks showing a gaudy bluish green. A breeze comes down over the clifftop; blows a flurry of yellow leaves off the birches, throwing them out into the lake of air where they spin down, catching the sunlight like gold coins.
Always this feeling of something being conveyed, in some not quite intelligible language, by that other world. Sense of being appraised by the stones, recognised for what I am by the trees. And not just from my Bausoldaten days of cutting them down.
This strange yearning they provoke in me! What the ancients had in mind with their idea of the self-slaughtered living on as trees in the afterlife? A projection of precisely this intense desire to sidestep one’s own consciousness and merge into the backdrop, the landscape?
That time, right after our marriage, when I almost made a clean breast of things to Inge. Sudden sense, as I turned to her, of the power of words to explode in the air like dynamite, and kill. I kissed her instead.
Inge. Thilo marrying that other woman was out of love for you; you must have half known that: free you from the impossible difficulty of being his lover by trying to make you hate him. Though by the time you figured it out you were here, past the point of no return, while he was – where? In jail? On trial? Alive? Dead? We didn’t know: you didn’t want to know. Your guilt about leaving required you to imagine the worst, and to live as if that were so.
That curious mood of good-humoured resignation he was in during the hour he and I spent together in the little office of my ‘magazine’. As though he knew perfectly well there was as much chance that I was in the process of betraying him even as we spoke, as that I was the sympathetic spirit I pretended to be. Choosing, out of what seemed nothing more than sheer gentlemanly magnanimity, to believe the latter, or at least to act as if he did; to respond to my casual probing with such cordial frankness I was left with the sense that even in the part of his mind that must have intuited, in general terms if not precise detail, the wire leading from the pen in my pocket to the transmitter in the heel of my shoe, he bore no ill will, and possibly even forgave me in advance (almost the hardest part for me to bear, that feeling of forgiveness; of being left entirely alone to absorb all reverberation of harm). That moment, after he had shown me the scar on his arm from biting himself in the attempt to master his own feelings of jealousy while you were dutifully following his injunction to ‘spend time’ with other men; right after that, how I abruptly changed the subject – catch him off his guard, as Lieutenant Hager had instructed me – to the question of the Soviet presence on our soil and then the even more taboo subject of reunification; how, as he gave me his truthful, treasonous answers (handing me his own smiling head on a platter), I felt as though I were traversing a rift in nature, from the far side of which all the previous stumbles and tumblings in my lifelong career of falling seemed in comparison to have occurred in a universe of almost childlike innocence!
Yesterday I bought a hunting rifle. I wrapped it in plastic and took it up to the top of the cliff. There’s an enormous fallen tree there, with several smaller trees splintered and crushed beneath it. Under its torn-up roots is a hole the size of a bomb crater. I climbed down into this and laid the rifle under a ledge of bedrock jutting in through the dirt near the bottom. Menzer has clear instructions how to find it. Assuming he comes (and I am inclined to think he will), he’ll park on the old service road for the transmission tower and make his way up the rocky path to the top of the cliff. From there, having found the rifle, he will move towards the edge of the cliff, where, peering down through the birches below him, he will see the mound of bluestone rubble with the stone bench where Inge’s ‘lover’ will be seated, wearing a fawn-coloured hat, looking out at the view as he does every afternoon between four and five o’clock. He will take one shot, which will cause no particular alarm, hunting season having opened today. Then he will go home and wait for me to contact him, which, unless I am seriously mistaken about the nature of what awaits me, will take, as they say here, for ever.
THREE FIFTY. A sheen on the horizon now; a tint of green like a tight-stretched band of silk. What else to set down? I went back a few years ago. Back to Berlin: February of 1999, for my father’s funeral. He had died of a blood clot in the cerebellum, while playing chess at his social club.