‘Could I have the key, please?’ I asked, attempting to control a faint tremor in my voice. Herr Brandt smiled and raised two obese fingers. ‘Zwei Flaschen,’ he said, ‘one for privacy, one for the key.’ It struck me that the peculiar warped affinity that existed between us had somehow made it apparent to him that I was here on personal rather than family business, and with his lugubrious but unerring instinct for such things, he realised he had found an opportunity for extortion. Aware of my own powerlessness as well as the jeopardy I had placed myself in, I swallowed my protests and went silently back upstairs for a second bottle.
Kitty was now in the kitchen peeling potatoes. It was imperative that I get her out immediately: I sensed that if I were gone longer than a minute or two Brandt would consider himself justified in renegotiating the terms. I could picture exactly the ponderous way he would look at his watch and shrug off any attempt to hold him to his word. As is often the case with me, acute necessity brought forth invention – or at least a short-term expedient. I remembered that Kitty had been unhappy a few weeks ago when some man she had been seeing had suddenly vanished. Tearfully she had admitted to my mother that the man had been a member of a group that met once a week in a church to discuss world peace. Thinking he had been arrested, she had begged my mother to use her influence to help him. My mother had retorted with a stern lecture on the impropriety of a member of our household having anything to do with such a person, and that was the last I had heard of the matter.
‘Jürgen’s outside,’ I told Kitty. ‘He asked me to come and get you. He’s in the alley by the coal-hole. He looks like he’s been living rough.’
Gasping, Kitty ran out of the room, her hands still wet from the potatoes. I took the second bottle, rearranging some canned celery to fill the space at the end of the row, and, with a feeling of venom in my heart, went back downstairs.
This time I was careful not to give Brandt the bottle until I had the key. Even so, he managed to make me jump through one more hoop. Instead of actually handing me the key, he merely pointed to the bunch hanging at his waist and told me to come and unhook it myself. This I did, reluctantly, but feeling that I had no choice. As I fumbled with the key ring, I was unpleasantly aware of his sour smell and the soft paunch of his stomach wobbling against the back of my wrist.
With the key finally in my hand, I went down to the basement. Only one of the two bulbs hanging in the storeroom worked, and the place was gloomier than ever. The trunk’s brasswork gleamed faintly among the shadowy bric-a-brac of our cubicle. I opened the lid, releasing the familiar musty odour, and took out the six-volume set of World Poetry in Translation. There was no question of bringing these upstairs: even if I had found somewhere to hide them, they would have been discovered. My mother had once discovered a West German comic book under Otto’s mattress, and since then she had been in the habit of regularly turning the place upside down. I had brought a pencil and paper with me, my plan being to copy out one of the prose translations down here, and convert it into poetry upstairs. If anyone saw the copied-out translation, I would claim it was ‘notes’ for a poem.
With this in mind, I tipped one of the volumes to the light and began looking through it. I was searching for something that conformed in spirit to the quasi-abstract but unequivocally ‘upward-aspiring’ tenor of the artworks favoured in our home. I read quickly, aware that the longer I took, the more likely it was that I would have to account for my absence. Many years later, I heard a literature professor on the radio declare that the only valid criterion for judging a piece of writing was whether it could ‘save your life’. Remembering my feverish ransacking of these volumes in the grainy darkness of the storeroom, I felt that I understood exactly what he was talking about.
I found what I was looking for, copied it out, put away the volumes and ran back upstairs, returning the key to Brandt.
Kitty was back. So, fortunately, was my mother, making it temporarily impossible for Kitty to question me about my alleged encounter with Jürgen. She gave me an anguished look, which I ignored. Just before dinner, I found her waiting for me as I came out of the bathroom. ‘He wasn’t there,’ she whispered. I tried to look surprised. ‘Maybe someone recognised him. He seemed nervous.’ ‘You said he looked -’ Kitty managed, breaking off guiltily as my mother came out of the kitchen.
She regarded us a moment. The notion of Kitty and myself having any kind of relationship independent of the rest of the household, let alone something to whisper about, clearly both surprised and disturbed her. With a little movement at the back of her protruberant eyes, suggestive to me of a camera shutter opening and closing, she seemed to absorb the situation and store it away for further reflection, before ushering us on into dinner.
It was our custom to sit in the living room after dinner and listen to the latest instalment of one of the Russian novels that were continually being serialised on the radio. My father would sit back in his armchair with a glass of plum alcohol and pass into what seemed a state of innocent, genuine contentment. My mother fidgeted, torn between a sense that there might be something not altogether highbrow about this method of ingesting culture, and the relish she took in telling people that this was how we passed our evenings as a family. (When she did this, she would deliberately stress the humble nature of the entertainment, implying, with her genius for suggestion, something simultaneously populist and austere in our tastes.) Perched restlessly on her chair, she would nod gravely at the passages of sententious generalisation, smile mysteriously at odd moments, as if to suggest an attunement to notes of humour too rarefied for the rest of us to catch, and sometimes sigh, ‘Ah, yes,’ apparently remembering a passage from her numerous readings of the book in her youth. Otto and I sat for the most part stupefied with boredom, though lately Otto had begun paying more attention. Since entering adolescence, he had made a private cargo cult out of any scraps of drama that could possibly be construed as erotic, hoarding them away for use in his private fantasies, and continually on the lookout for more. Kitty was seldom present: she usually went out in the evenings; if not, she stayed in her room.
That evening I announced that I would not be joining the family in the living room. I waited to be asked why, and with a joyful sense of importance answered that I needed to work on one of my poems. A bright, shining truth that seemed to bathe me in a fluorescent aura as I uttered it. I was immediately excused.
In my room, I took the prose translation from my pocket and set to work. The name of the poet I had stumbled on, and who, in the company of one or two others, was to prove so fatefully useful to me over the next few months, meant nothing to me at the time. But just as our janitor had for many years provided me with my mental image of the West German chancellor, simply because he bore the same name (leading to a great pang of bittersweet surprise when I first saw the exquisite, civilised, elfin face of Willy Brandt in the newspapers on the occasion of his momentous visit to Erfurt in 1970), so between Walt Disney (a controversial, if not actually unmentionable name at that time) and the word ‘Witz’, meaning joke or wit, I formed the image of my stolen poetic persona as a kind of goofy, playful, disreputably capitalistic character. Though I couldn’t read English, I had noticed that his lines were long, uneven and unrhymed. On a whim, I decided to reverse each of these qualities. Almost as soon as I began, I found myself strangely enjoying it – not that I discovered any great talent for producing short, regular, rhyming lines, but the very process of this weird inversion had a peculiarly natural, almost familiar feeling about it, as though I had already been doing it for years.