Given that none of us had accomplished anything at all in this sphere, her successful transformation of our whole tone and image as a family must be counted as quite a triumph. Her own education had been a ramshackle affair, interrupted by the war (though she claimed to have had a tutor at the age of eleven who had made her read ‘everything’), but her brother Heinrich had been through university, and at one time contemplated a career as a man of letters. He still subscribed to the official literary publications, and in his position as senior counsel at the Office of the Chief of the People’s Police, he had easy access to the best artistic circles, which from time to time he still frequented. Naturally my mother enlisted him in her new project. And doting on her as he did (he had no family of his own), he was happy to oblige.
A new phase of our life began. Uncle Heinrich introduced my mother to a number of officially recognised writers and artists of his acquaintance. We dutifully made the round of their plays, concerts and exhibitions, mingling with them afterwards, and before long they began appearing at our apartment on Micklenstrasse. Naturally obsequious as a breed, and knowing of my mother only that she was the sister of an important government functionary who took an interest in the arts, they were never difficult to entice. In a remarkably short space of time, through sheer force of will, as well as that curious hypnotic power of suggestion that gathered people like sheep into her private fantasies, she turned our household into a gravitational centre for artists and intellectuals of every stripe. My father acquiesced in his meek way. Once, timidly, he asked if she was sure she wasn’t going to ‘receive disadvantage’ for associating with the wrong types, but he was quickly silenced by her acid retort that she hardly thought her brother would be introducing her to charlatans of the kind he was obviously referring to.
The apartment itself underwent a transformation. Framed prints and reproductions went up. In time, as my mother’s patronage grew, artists began presenting her with original oils and watercolours, and these joined the reproductions on the walls. There were even some sculptures which, like the paintings, were both representational and at the same time sufficiently unrealistic in their distortions and bulbous excrescences to indicate that their creators were fully abreast of the latest developments in modern art. Furthermore, they were uniformly of what I would call an ‘aspiring’ tone. Eyes and hands were often raised upwards in a slyly sublime manner. The darker, more turbulent works were sure to have gleams of light peeping over some horizon in the background.
The most ‘aspiring’ of them all was a life-sized bronze statue representing a naked female dancer reaching towards the heavens. Her arms and hands were immensely thin and elongated, as if the intensity of her ‘aspiration’ had literally stretched her about five inches. Her thin legs were more like a flamingo’s than a human’s. Interestingly, though, as if distracted from his lofty purpose by a momentary lasciviousness, the artist had endowed her with full, upward-curving, gravity-defying breasts, which he had very carefully modelled to show the nipples and areolas in minute detail. Otto in particular was fascinated by these breasts, and when our parents were not about, he would entertain me by slinking up behind the girl and grabbing hold of them, murmuring delirious blandishments into her bronze ear. Kitty was embarrassed by her, and could be made to blush when circumstances forced her to acknowledge her presence. My father also objected to her, ostensibly on the grounds that she occupied more than her fair share of the living room. But my mother had pronounced this figure an ‘aesthetic triumph’, and we were given notice that anyone who criticised her ran the risk of being stigmatised as ‘visually blind’ – one of her most deadly put-downs at this time.
It was during this period that I first heard myself being referred to as the family ‘poet-intellectual’. It was done so casually that I didn’t consciously notice it until it had insinuated its way into my own image of myself. I therefore didn’t react to it with the suspicion or perplexity I should have. As our artistic gatherings consolidated themselves into regular soirées and I heard my mother introduce me as our ‘literary man’, our own ‘poet-intellectual’, often adding, ‘He reads all the time. It’s impossible to drag him away from a book once he’s started; just like I was at his age,’ I felt it as one of those immemorial truths about oneself that are so well established they are almost too boring to mention. It was as if she had said, He’s rather small for his age, or He’s always had a sweet tooth. The fact that I had never written a poem, and that I never read a book unless I had to for class, was neither here nor there. The idea was like one of those cloud-forest plants that subsist on air and light alone. It appeared to require no nourishment from reality in order to grow, either in my own mind or in the minds of our acquaintances. Before long it became absorbed into the conversational ritual at our monthly soirées, where guests suffering from the slight awkwardness entailed in talking to the adolescent children of their hostess could now inquire after my poetry. ‘How’s the writing going?’ they might say with a look of respectful concern – or, more facetiously, with a little motion of their wrists, ‘Still scribbling away?’ – to which I would respond with a vague nod and what I hoped was a tantalisingly elusive smile, before changing the subject.
There was an upright piano in the corner of the living room, and from time to time there would be music at our gatherings: a solo recital by some budding young pianist, or a trio or quartet if others brought instruments. Given the obdurately stiff, formal, frosty tenor of the conversational part of the soirées, these interludes were a relief to the company and always greatly appreciated. One day a lull descended on the room when there happened to be no musicians present. A writer named Franz Erhardt stepped forward and ‘begged permission’ to read us something from his novel, which he had brought with him. Permission was granted, and he began to read.
He was a small, sallow man with a forked beard and light blue eyes that always seemed to be at work on some caustic or double-edged little observation. My mother had found him a job at the state TV company, and he told me once, with a strange sort of rueful sneer, that he occasionally dreamed of her, ‘just as the English dream of their queen’. I understand that he went on to become quite a success in the literary world of the GDR, and that by the time the Wall came down he was a top-ranking bureaucrat in the Writers’ Union, with guaranteed sales of a hundred thousand copies of every novel he wrote. A few years ago I read in the New York Times that he had hanged himself after his Stasi file had been opened, revealing that he had been an informer for most of his adult life. I remember that the novel he read from that evening was a strange sort of satirical spoof, unusual in those days of solid socialist realism, taking as its premise President Kennedy’s famous statement ‘Ich bin ein Berliner’ and imagining a patrician American with Kennedy’s decadent appetites and corrupt ideas getting stuck in East Berlin and suffering a series of instructive mishaps that finally turn him into a good and happy socialist.
Judging from the hearty laughter that filled the room, it had plenty of funny jokes. I myself was too young to understand them. Besides, I was distracted. There was something about the very fact of this reading – a novelty in our drawing room – that was making me uneasy. I noticed my Uncle Heinrich staring at me pensively once or twice across the room. For some time I had been dimly aware of his interest in me growing more intense, as if my ‘writing’ and his own former literary ambitions made us kindred spirits. He would often talk to me about writers he admired, sometimes discussing his own youthful efforts, and telling me how much he looked forward to reading something of mine. For my part the whole subject occupied such a dreamy, subterranean part of my consciousness that I find it almost hard to accuse myself of active hypocrisy in allowing him to continue in his delusions about me.