But as I watched him now, his cropped head with its elegant, gaunt features and silver-grey eyes roving attentively between Erhardt, the enrapt guests and myself, I had a faintly sickening sensation that some hidden and intimate area of myself that I had until now considered inviolably private was about to be forcibly exposed to public view.
Sure enough, as soon as the reading was over and the applause had begun to die down, I heard my uncle’s rather high-pitched voice with its clipped enunciation, calling to me from across the room.
‘Stefan, young fellow, what about you? Why don’t you read something of yours now?’ He was looking at me with a kindly expression – there was always something very proper and clean and good-natured about him; merry, one might almost say – but at that moment his smiling face seemed to me full of menace and barely concealed cruelty. I remember observing the same dignified and innocent expression of warmth on his face and feeling the same chilled response in my own heart many years later, when I was brought to him in his comfortable rooms at the Office of the Chief of the People’s Police, where once again I found myself at a loss to circumvent some request that from his point of view was wholly reasonable, while to me it seemed to stretch the already abused fabric of my soul to the point of ripping it altogether in two.
His suggestion was immediately taken up by the other guests.
‘Yes, what a good idea,’ a voice cried out. ‘Frau Vogel, ask your son to read us one of his compositions.’
‘I – I don’t have anything prepared,’ I stammered. But my apparent modesty merely fanned the flames of their interest, and I soon found myself at the centre of a chorus of bantering remarks about my shyness and lack of spontaneity. ‘Come on, Stefan, read us something from this great work we’ve been hearing so much about,’ someone called, while another, to my mortification, said, ‘Otto, fetch your brother’s poems. He’s too modest to get them himself.’
Otto turned to this speaker with the look of surly impassiveness that he had been perfecting over the past year. He too had been a target for my mother’s ‘artistic’ reinvention of our family. Since he had always been good with his hands, he was chosen to represent the pictorial muse. He had been sent to drawing classes and presented with a box of high-grade French charcoals and some handmade paper sketchbooks finagled by my mother through our surviving connections in the higher levels of the privilegentsia. After the first few classes he had abruptly refused to attend any more. My mother tried to change his mind, but he stood his ground. Even when she rather unsubtly attempted to pander to his burgeoning interest in girls by offering to find him a class with live nude models, he resisted. And when finally she threatened to punish him if he didn’t keep at it, he broke the charcoals, ripped the sketchbooks to pieces and exploded at her with such savage virulence that she – even she – had been forced to back down. Otto now occupied an anomalous, private, decultured zone within the family: tolerated, but not much more.
I’m not sure whether I simply lacked his courage to be himself, or whether I had allowed myself to become tainted by the thought that I might actually be that potent and glamorous thing, an artist. Perhaps, despite my shyness and horror of exposure, I secretly craved the kind of attention that had just been lavished on Franz Erhardt. Instead of coming out and confessing that I didn’t in fact have anything to read to the assembled company, I merely stood there, inwardly writhing, unable to speak, while the guests continued baying at me from all corners of the room.
It was my father, to my surprise, who saved me, though it would certainly have been better for me in the long run if he hadn’t.
‘Perhaps next time, Stefan, eh?’ he said quietly. ‘That way you’ll have time to prepare something for us.’
It was so rare for him to assert himself in any way at these gatherings that I think people in their uncertainty attributed more authority to him than he actually possessed. He was deferred to: the baying stopped, and with a few waggings of fingers and stern warnings not to forget, I was given a month’s reprieve.
AS THE DAYS passed, the question of how I was going to acquit myself at the next soirée grew rapidly from a faint unease to a consuming preoccupation that soon formed the single focus of my life. Theoretically it still would have been possible to own up to my lack of material and back down, but as I have often felt when faced with a choice between a healthy and a harmful course of action, I had the distinct sensation of the harm having already been done, without my conscious consent or even participation, so that the apparent choice was in fact no choice at all. At any rate, the thought of making a clean breast of things, disgracing myself before my mother and looking foolish in front of her friends barely crossed my mind. With the same odd mixture of submissiveness and furtive ambition, I lay awake at nights, next to my sleeping brother, racking my brains for a solution. I had tried the most rational thing: to sit down and write. But it had become painfully clear to me that whatever faculties of imagination and verbal ingenuity were required to bring something even remotely coherent, let alone interesting, into existence on a blank page, I was entirely devoid of them. The feeling I’d had as I sat at my table trying to coax words out of myself was more than simply one of impotence; it was a kind of vast, inverted potency: the sheer inert mass of blankness that I had attempted to breach reverberating violently back through me, as though I had tried to smash through a steel door with my fist. I soon gave up.
It was on a morning a few days before the soirée that my anxiety, roused by now to a condition in which it actually functioned as a kind of substitute imagination, formed the first in what turned out to be a long series of dubious solutions, each of which immediately raised new and more serious problems.
As Kitty opened the larder in search of some jam for my mother’s toast, I happened to glimpse the double row of aquavit bottles at the back of the top shelf. Unreplenishable since my father’s fall from grace, these had now acquired the value of precious heirlooms, and my parents were extremely sparing in their use of them as bribes. From the sight of these bottles, my mind turned to Herr Brandt, and from him to the last expedition Otto and I had made to the basement, in search of the von Riesen linen. And suddenly I remembered those leather-bound volumes of World Poetry in Translation.
That afternoon, during the quiet hour after my return from school, when my parents were both out and Kitty was in her room enjoying a moment of leisure before preparing our dinner, I stole one of the little frosted-glass bottles from the larder and went downstairs to ask Brandt for the key to the storage room. He stared at me, so long, and with such vacant dullness, that for a moment I wondered if he now considered it so far beneath his dignity to acknowledge me that I had actually become invisible to him. But eventually he gave his weary sigh and got up to accompany me.
Doing my best to imitate my brother’s confident, worldly tone, I told him I could manage on my own, if he would just give me the key. I took out the aquavit bottle and nonchalantly offered it to him. ‘Here, this is for you. Compliments of the house.’ A glint of something approaching amusement appeared in his eye. My contemptible absurdity had apparently just sunk to new depths of preposterousness. He took the bottle with a disdainful shrug of his heavy, soft shoulders. I waited for him to give me the key, but he merely looked at the bottle, wiping the mist from the frosted glass with the pad of a thumb so fleshy and nail-bitten it looked like one of those pastries where the risen dough all but engulfs the dab of jelly at its centre.