It went without saying that Brandt was a police informer, and my mother was probably right in imagining he would think it his duty to make a report on something even so trifling as the retrieval of a set of initialled linen from a trunk. It was also known that he could make himself obliging over practically any matter in return for small gifts, preferably alcoholic. He was especially partial to the Schaad-Neumann brand of aquavit, impossible to get hold of in the GDR, and my father made a point of bringing back a set of miniatures whenever he went to the States, for the express purpose of lubricating Herr Brandt. Thirty or forty of them were lined up in a double row at the back of a shelf in our larder.
Taking one of these frosted, cylindrical bottles, Otto and I went down to Herr Brandt’s headquarters on the ground floor.
Ours was a modern building, constructed from the cheapest materials, but well maintained, and with a few grandiose trimmings, as befitted its inhabitants, who were mostly party officials of one kind or another. Four white pillars stood incongruously in the middle of the brick front, marking the entrance. The lobby was floored with polished slabs made of a pink and white agglomerate, like slices of vitrified mortadella. A bronze bust of Lenin, looking oddly piratical, stood on a plinth by the elevator, which generally worked. On every floor was a plastic indoor plant, the leaves of which Herr Brandt could be seen laboriously squirting and buffing on Sunday mornings. A powerful odour compounded of floor polish and boiled meat pervaded the stairwell, and there was a more or less constant sound of toilets flushing.
Brandt was in the glass-walled office to the side of the main entrance, surveying the empty lobby with his usual dull stare. He wore a crumpled brown jacket over a sweat-soiled undershirt in which his womanly breasts and very large stomach bulged and sagged like pumpkins in a sack. Black stubble glinted on his whitish skin in the artificial light of the little booth, and the bulging roil of scar tissue between his throat and ear gleamed like satin. This scar, so he claimed, was from a grenade wound received during some battle on the Eastern Front. To my youthful and admittedly subjective eye, it was a decidedly unheroic-looking scar, and in fact had something furtive and guilty about it, like some malignant companion that had attached itself to this otherwise vague and uninteresting person. It was the scar – it seemed to me – that compiled reports on the comings and goings of the inhabitants of our building; the scar that had to be propitiated with bottles of Schaad-Neumann aquavit. Brandt himself gave the impression of living under its tyranny. For his own part he would have been content to pad around the place keeping the plants shiny, the floor waxed, supplying the tenants with cheap eggs from the poultry co-operative where he had a special concession. But some incomprehensible malignancy had settled upon him, and he was now its servant.
Once, when I was quite young, I had seen him carrying a parcel to the door of an elderly couple who lived on our floor. The parcel, which evidently contained either a mirror or a framed picture, slipped from his hands and fell to the floor with a smash and tinkle of breaking glass. He stooped down at once to examine it, prodding the wrapping with his fingers, an expression of grave concern on his face. Then all of a sudden a most extraordinary cynical sneer took possession of his features. Fully aware of me looking at him, he dumped the parcel at the door of the elderly couple and padded off, shrugging as he passed me by, as if to say, Nobody will know it was me who broke it, and even if they suspect, there’s nothing they can do about it. Furthermore, he seemed to convey that my having witnessed it, far from alarming him, in fact implicated me in the deed itself, making me no better than him. And the strange thing was, I did feel mysteriously implicated, and guilty too. It was the first time I had seen an adult do something patently and knowingly ‘wrong’, and the idea that such a thing could be came as a profound shock. From then on, whenever I ran into Brandt on my own, he would give me a contemptuous, almost taunting look, as though to say that he and I knew each other too well to have to pretend to be respectable citizens.
Otto told him we needed to get into the storeroom. He rose with a lugubrious sigh, evidently meaning to accompany us.
‘No need for you to come,’ Otto said suavely. ‘Just give us the key and we’ll let ourselves in. Here, this is for you. Compliments of the house.’
Brandt hesitated, holding the bottle in his hand as if he didn’t know what to do with it. Then he winked unpleasantly – or rather it seemed that his scar winked – and unhooked the key from the ring at his belt.
The storeroom occupied a large area of the basement and consisted of a series of open cubicles behind a single steel-mesh fence with a padlocked door in it. We opened this door with the key Brandt had given us, and by the dim light of a couple of naked bulbs found the cubicle that corresponded to our apartment, picking our way between the many glue traps Brandt had set out, in which insects and the occasional mouse lay in odd contorted positions, some of them still twitching with life.
There in our cubicle, among bits and pieces of old furniture which we no longer used, lay my mother’s trunk: not so very large, but with ornate hasps of tarnished brass at every corner and great florid brass buckles that intimated a world of strange and remote ceremoniousness. I suppose I must have seen it before, but I had never taken much notice of it, and certainly never looked inside.
A sweet, mildewy smell rose as we opened the heavy lid. It was neatly packed, everything stowed in small boxes or bundles. The linen was in one corner, in a rust-coloured cotton sack, itself monogrammed with the intertwined initials and three falcons of the von Riesen crest. My brother looked on impassively, apparently less intrigued than I by this faintly mouldy-smelling exhumation of our family’s past, while I poked around, turning up a set of silver spoons, an old marbled photograph album and a case of pocket-sized books beautifully bound in dark green leather.
‘Come on,’ Otto said, grabbing the pile of linen, ‘the mother’ll start fretting.’
I looked at the case of books. Of all things, it was a set of poetry: World Poetry in Translation, Volumes I to VI. I didn’t know or for that matter care very much about literature, but I had an instinct for contraband, and the thought of anything – poetry included – that might not be officially approved of automatically excited my interest. I opened one of the books: poetry on one side, German prose translation on the other, but Otto was growing impatient.
‘Let’s split,’ he said, ‘it gives me the creeps down here.’
Closing the trunk, we went back upstairs, Otto waiting for the elevator with the linen while I returned the key to Herr Brandt.
Seeing me alone, the man immediately relaxed into that familiar contemptuous expression.
‘So did you find what you were looking for?’ he asked.
I muttered that we did.
‘And what was that?’
I looked at him, more surprised perhaps than I should have been by this flagrant reneging on his tacit contract to turn a blind eye: here after all was a man who had obviously broken every bond of decency with his fellow human beings. His face, or rather the swelling tissue at his neck, seemed to stare at me with a brazen leer as if to say, So what if I accepted a bribe to mind my own business? You know me better than that… However, it was apparently out of personal amusement, to remind me that we were both contemptible creatures, that he asked, rather than any real interest, for when I said, ‘Oh, just a few odds and ends,’ he merely gave a chuckle and let the matter drop.