Seven Lies (12 page)

‘No, Stefan,' she said without rancour. ‘Not like that. Here . . .'

She put her hands on either side of my head and, gently bringing my lips to hers, began pouring her soft, wounded, passionate being into mine with a tenderness so entirely novel to me it was a source almost as much of bewilderment as of pleasure. Still kissing me, she placed my hands on her breasts, which were considerably softer than those of Kurt Teske's bronze nude, a fact that didn't exactly surprise me, but clashed distantly against some unconscious preconception I must have held concerning the pliability of female breasts, and, murmuring, ‘Gently, Stefan; gently, gently,' proceeded to initiate me into her own peculiarly sweet-natured brand of love.

An unaccustomed warmth filled me in the aftermath. When my mother came home, I smiled at her affectionately, and found myself lavishing praises on the new canvas she was
carrying. She glanced at me, a brief wariness stirring in her eyes, but seeing that I was sincere, she softened, growing almost bashful.

‘Oh, it's just a mess, don't you think?'

‘Not at all, it's gorgeous. They all are.'

‘Really? Do you mean that, Stefan?'

A feeling of tenderness brimmed in me – it had been years since I had glimpsed this childlike, vulnerable creature she guarded under her formidable exterior.

‘I do.'

‘You don't think they're horribly amateurish?'

‘I think they're wonderful.'

I looked from her to the paintings leaning against the living room wall – a series of semi-abstract seascapes, each one favouring a different shade of blue.

‘Hmm. Well, perhaps I'll donate one or two of them to the local DFD,' she said. ‘These branch offices never have anything interesting on the walls. Or perhaps I should just burn them. What do you think, Kitty?'

‘No, don't burn them,' Kitty said with a dutiful look of alarm.

‘You think they're worth holding on to?'

‘Yes! They're pretty.'

‘Pretty!' my mother scoffed. ‘Well, if that's all they are, I certainly
shall
burn them.'

‘Oh, no! I didn't mean – I just – I don't know anything about art . . .'

This brought a more forgiving look from my mother. ‘Ah, but there's nothing you need to know,' she said, ‘all you need is to be able to look with your
eyes
and
feel
. Look at this one here. I've tried to make the ocean express a sort of mood – do you see? Something a little sombre, even sad.'

‘Oh, yes. It
is
sad! It's very sad –'

‘Sad but –'

‘I feel sad just looking at it now.'

‘Ah, but wait,' my mother said patiently, ‘it's not as simple as that. Look up in this corner, here. See?'

‘These blobs of yellow?'

‘Well, think of them as a tonality, relative to the rest; a modifier.'

Kitty looked lost. A bewildered, innocent expression settled on her.

‘It's lighter here, isn't it?' my mother persisted. ‘Lighter than the rest. Like a little, subtle suggestion of –'

‘You mean a ray of hope!' Kitty exclaimed.

‘Well, that's putting it more crudely than I would hope was the case, but yes.'

‘A picture of sadness with a sort of gleam of hope. I
see
now. That's so beautiful. Isn't that beautiful, Stefan?'

I nodded, smiling rapturously at her. It was all I could do to stop myself from kissing her, right there in front of my mother.

As it turned out, she had enough wisdom, or instinct for self-preservation, to bring our affair to a firm end before we got back to Berlin. On our last night in Rügen I crept quietly into her room. Instead of letting me into her bed as she had the previous nights, she frowned.

‘No, Stefan, no,' she whispered. ‘This isn't sensible at all. Go back to your room.'

‘What? Let me in!'

‘Ssh! Your mother . . .'

‘I'll make it creak even louder if you don't –'

With a look of reproach, she moved to the side of her narrow bed. I climbed in beside her, enveloping myself in the still-intoxicating stale sweetness of her sheets.

She wore a ruffled white nightgown. I started to kiss her cream-moistened face. She pulled away.

‘What's the matter?' I whispered.

She switched on a reading light and thrust her face close to mine.

‘Look at me, Stefan.'

‘I'm looking.'

‘I'm twelve years older than you. Look at these dark circles under my eyes. They don't go away, you know. Not any more. And these little furrows around my mouth. Soon they're going to start bunching up like there's a drawstring under them. Find someone your own age.'

I planted a kiss on the offending mouth, then slid my hand over her nightgown. She threw back the covers and yanked up the cotton shift, baring herself. Grabbing my hand, she squeezed it onto the flesh of her inner thigh.

‘Feel how loose that is?' she hissed. ‘It's about to start really sagging. Same with these.' She moved my hand to a gravity-shallowed breast. ‘See? I'm like a piece of melting cheese. Is that what you want in a woman? I'm too old for you.
That's
what the matter is.'

She eyed me resentfully. I felt obscurely flattered. A sensation of manly protectiveness swelled inside me. I kissed her again; felt her take pleasure in it in spite of herself. Her fatigued, careworn prettiness touched me to the quick. The room, lit by her reading lamp, was neat and absolutely bare – herself its single ornament. I felt as though I were embracing a bouquet of fragile, frailly tinctured flowers. I could see nothing beyond my need to prove myself as a man capable of taking full possession of his woman. The more she resisted, the more imperative this need became. I ran my hand down over her waist.

‘No, Stefan, really . . .'

‘Why not?'

She sat up, covering herself again. ‘You're practically my brother, Stefan. Doesn't that disturb you?'

‘No.'

‘Well, it should. This is – it's incest!'

She gave a little winsome laugh as she said this. I smiled, pulling her back down to the pillow and bringing her mouth to mine, emboldened by a thin, metallic confidence that had been steadily awakening in me since we first made love. She yielded a little: confused, warily responsive. I was beginning to understand the mechanisms within her that had set the patterns of her life; the little cogs and levers of self-doubt, kindness, irrational passion.

‘Please, Stefan, please.'

‘But why?'

Her pale cheeks were flushed, her eyes wild. ‘I'm a vulnerable person. I'm very emotional. If we go on now, I'll get attached to you. That's the way I am.'

‘So?'

‘You don't want that.'

‘I do, Kitty. That's exactly what I want.'

‘Why? So you can feel how powerful you are when it comes time to move on to the next woman?'

‘Kitty, don't be ridiculous . . .' However accurate the image of wrinkles and melting cheese she seemed intent on evoking may have been, this feeling of imminently triumphant possession was the more powerful reality, gilding her physical body with a layer of pure erotic substance that sent waves of desire through me at every touch. It was inconceivable to me that I might ever not want this.

‘I don't want any other woman,' I said, surprising myself at how nobly sentimental the words made me feel.

But it was apparently these words that gave her the strength she was looking for. She drew away from me, gently but decisively, pulling her nightgown back down around her.

‘Go to bed now, Stefan,' she said, smiling calmly at me. ‘We'll be friends this way. Go on.'

And as effortlessly as she had set the current flowing between us, she made it stop. It was as though some very simple problem had been resolved. The desire sluiced out of me. Without further protest, with even a certain feeling of relief, I went back to my room. Neither of us ever alluded to the matter again.

But for some time afterwards, I was in an exalted state. That such intensities of joy as I had just experienced had all these years been lying in wait for me, hidden inside those days like a purse of gold lying on a traveller's path in some folktale, violently contradicted my sense of what life could possibly hold in store for me. It seemed after all that there was every reason to hope for happiness in this world.

After I left Humboldt, I worked for a government organisation creating posters promoting ‘Peace, Friendship and Anti-Imperialist Solidarity'. The posters were put up in schools, offices, hospitals and other public places. Sometimes they solicited donations for Account 444, a public fund set up to support developing countries, but their main intent was to foster an image of the GDR as a beacon of conscience in a cynical and dangerous world. Given the historic idealism of my countrymen, who enjoy nothing better than the sensation of exclusive occupancy of the high ground in any landscape, moral or otherwise, this was not a difficult task. Even the dissident types I was soon to meet approved of our campaign. It takes a dubious sophistication to object to a poster condemning apartheid, on the grounds that the body condemning it isn't exactly a picture of health itself. At any rate we didn't trouble ourselves with such scruples, and other than the faint background suspicion that
everything
one could do in that land was inherently tainted with futility and fraudulence (our equivalent, perhaps, of the so-called ‘hum of life', the G-sharp that whines when all other noises stop), the work was free of the more obvious kinds of stress.

Liaising between a state committee – the
Solidaritätskomitee der DDR
– and the Academy of Arts (whose president
was a close friend of Uncle Heinrich's), we commissioned and produced posters in support of the ANC, the Palestinians, the Laotians, the socialist opposition in Nicaragua, Chile and El Salvador and so forth. Our formula was simple: a compassion-arousing image of suffering in the third world, combined with an allusion to US imperialist culpability. A naively rendered Tree of Life, for instance, filled with delicate fruits in Sandinista colours, would stand with an air of tender pathos, about to be crushed by Uncle Sam's boot. A small African child would sit stoically, bound in huge chains embossed with the words ‘US Steel'.

After a few months I was assigned to a group working on a series of purely anti-American posters – no pretext of
supporting
some other country. We showed the Statue of Liberty setting off a nuclear explosion with her torch; we had the stripes of the American flag rendered as the bars of a prison encompassing the entire planet. Anything we could think of that might stir up feelings of hatred for America was considered fair game. Hatred occupied a more reputable position in the spectrum of emotions back in the GDR than it does here in the States. I remember that among the sentiments chiselled on the walls of our assembly room at school were the words of Dr Lange, minister of education in the Soviet Zone after the war: ‘Youth must be filled with hatred for the enemies of our peaceful constructive work.' There was nothing strange to any of us, therefore, about the idea of devoting ourselves to the arousal of this emotion in our compatriots. Our medium was the substance of righteousness itself. Handling it filled us with an almost luminous moral glow, like some benign form of radioactivity. I myself was no exception in this. I was entirely fulfilled in this job. I found I had a gift for propaganda – the triangulating of powerful
images with latent phobias, to create a precisely targeted impulse of aggression – and I enjoyed exercising it. It also amused me to swap ideas with the skilful artists we summoned to our spruce-panelled offices on Lichtenberger-Strasse, and furthermore to find my suggestions being listened to with respect.

Best of all, the work brought me once again into a relationship with America. A treacherous relationship, of course, but as I have since found to be the case in so many circumstances, my private feelings of devotion not only survived within that outward form of hostility, but flourished. The more ingenious my contributions to our campaign of defamation, the more intense my feeling of secret connection to the US became. I have often wondered, in fact, whether betrayal and renunciation, far from negating people's attachments, might in fact be the means by which they make them indestructible.

I
T WAS AT
this time that I met Inge. At one of my mother's gatherings, a young composer named Walter Meyer was talking about new plays. He and his wife Clara, a television editor, were voracious consumers of contemporary culture, so abreast of the latest developments in all the arts that even my mother claimed to find them daunting. Walter mentioned a play by an avant-garde group that had just opened in Prenzlauer Berg.

‘Clara and I were thinking of seeing it,' he said to me. ‘Perhaps you'd like to come with us?'

I thanked him and said that I would. We arranged to meet the following weekend.

Prenzlauer Berg in those days was something like the East
Village was when Inge and I first arrived in New York: a mixture of the decrepit and the bohemian. Most of the workers' families who used to live there had moved out of the crumbling old Wilhelmine tenement houses to Marzahn or one of the other new satellite cities. In their place all sorts of misfits, outcasts and dubious artistic types (the kind my father had been afraid my mother might be introducing to our house all those years ago) had moved in, lacing the dark backyards and factory halls of the greenless quarter between Schönhauser and Prenzlauer Allee with a network of galleries, bars and performance spaces. I'd never spent much time there myself, but its vaguely disreputable aura had impressed itself on my imagination, and I set off to meet Walter and his wife that Friday evening with a feeling of adventurousness.

Walter and Clara were waiting for me outside the theatre, an old warehouse with tiny barred windows.