Seven Lies (19 page)

I leafed back, saw a piece comparing the new powers of surveillance permitted under the Patriot Act with those exercised by the totalitarian regimes of the former Eastern Bloc countries. I flinched at this; balked, found myself unable to read on. Hard for me – impossible, really – with all I have staked on my faith in the greatness of this nation, to swallow such a comparison. I need to believe that what de Tocqueville declared of America remains true in spite of everything: ‘America is great because she is
good
.'

Snip-snip, snip-snip
. . . As if she were methodically cutting away the very ground under my feet!

Apropos of which, a few years ago we were told our refugee status might be questioned if we ever travelled abroad, and we were advised to apply for citizenship. After several months of filling out forms, being fingerprinted, interviewed, having our English tested, we were given a date to go to the US Southern District Courthouse in Lower Manhattan and be sworn in as American citizens.

Inge was noticeably tense on the bus ride down. She had seemed, when we embarked on this process, to accept my presentation of it as a purely practical matter, without deeper implications. Naturally, I was relieved at her lack of resistance: my priority, as ever, was to keep her with me, on whatever terms and at whatever cost, and the more unified the outward circumstances of our lives, it seemed, the less power our internal fault lines had to push us apart. But now all of a sudden, in the face of this imminent rite of passage into a new nationality, her breezy indifference appeared to be faltering. I wasn't altogether surprised, but given that we had come this far, I didn't expect anything dramatic to develop. Still, I kept a watchful eye on her.

At the courthouse, we went up to the ninth floor, joining
the crowd of other initiates outside the oath room. The atmosphere was oddly subdued: none of the festive excitement I had read about in reports of these occasions. People were muttering to their lawyers, talking on cell phones, thumbing their Palm-Pilots: all business. I could feel Inge taking this in, and sensed that it was stoking her misgivings. She stood beside me, more agitated by the minute. I resisted the impulse to try to calm her down, afraid this would make matters worse. The important thing, I told myself, was to get through the ceremony. We could talk about what it meant afterwards.

A US marshal appeared and shepherded us into rows of benches in the wood-panelled oath room. Then a judge entered and gave a speech about the Constitution. It was an enlightened speech, emphasising the importance of tolerating voices of dissent in a democracy, and it seemed to me that Inge ought to be reassured by it. But as we listened I could sense her discomfort growing. Her eyes were darting around the room. I followed her glance, wondering uneasily what she was seeing in the expressionless faces of our fellow initiates. After the judge had finished, he told us all to rise.

‘We will now say the Pledge of Allegiance to the flag.'

It was at that moment that Inge fled.

‘I'll wait for you downstairs,' she whispered, stumbling past the other people in our pew. Before I could say anything, she simply ran off down the aisle, brushing by the astonished marshal without a word of explanation.

‘There's no re-entry, ma'am . . .' he called after her.

I stood there, stunned, sensing at once the momentousness of what she had done; feeling its impact, like an axe blow, on what remained of the connection between us, realising that if I wanted to salvage anything I should go after her, and yet already experiencing that curious retroactive
fatalism of mine: the sensation, once again, that this was after all nothing new; that it had
already happened
.

The ceremony ground on without her. I pledged my allegiance along with the rest of the initiates, and swore to bear arms for my new country. I added my voice to a tuneless, droning chorus of the ‘Star-Spangled Banner'. I signed my naturalisation certificate, shook the judge's hand, and picked up my crookedly photocopied letter from the president telling me that ‘Americans are generous and strong and decent not because we believe in ourselves, but because we hold beliefs beyond ourselves'.

Inge was waiting for me downstairs. She didn't offer an explanation and I didn't ask for one. What was there to say? We had become, literally, foreign to each other.

B
UT WHAT
I was intending to write before the sound of Inge's scissors distracted me has nothing to do with any of this.

Menzer called yesterday. Klaus Menzer.

Inge was at work. I was in, but didn't pick up. He left a message asking me to call him back. He was here, right here in America. The number he gave had a New York area code, a fact I absorbed with a lurch of dismay. I erased the message without taking it; a futile gesture, I realised even at the time.

My head was reeling. I went out – up to the quarry, Lena trotting ahead of me. Fall in full spate up there. Raspberry-coloured sumacs. Fiery orange creepers running up the radio tower. I sat on the stone seat under the cliff, wondering what he could be doing in this country, and what reason he could have for wanting to get in touch with me – with
me
– after all these years. Impossible to imagine he could be calling out
of some impulse of innocent nostalgic sociability; not that coiled and involuted man.

Are you Stefan Vogel? Yes. Splash.

And now Menzer. A second missile coming at me out of the past!

He called again this morning. This time I picked up: didn't want to risk him calling again while Inge was in. He was blandly friendly, chatting casually as if there had been no decade-and-a-half gap since we last spoke, and certainly no convulsions on the world stage worth mentioning. He asked if I had plans to come down to the city any time soon so that we could ‘get together'. I made a non-committal answer and attempted to change the subject.

‘Are you still writing poetry?' I asked him.

‘I really hope you can come down, Stefan,' he replied. ‘It would be almost a blast . . .'

I caught at once the old, languid coerciveness in his voice, and sensing I might have more to lose by resisting him than by giving in, I agreed to meet him next week.

I took the early bus down to New York. A beautiful morning. It had rained in the night, then cleared. Light streaming down over the mountains. Cables looping forward between the utility poles, thick and heavy and glittering with gold raindrops like ropes of celestial gossamer. (The strange compulsion to note these things down. About as useful as a corpse growing fingernails!)

I had an hour to kill before our appointment. As I wandered slowly downtown, I became aware of a distinctly cooler appraisal of the city forming at the periphery of my familiar affection for the place.

Or perhaps it was more a kind of double vision, as if I were seeing things through a pair of mismatched spectacles: one lens rose-tinted, the other skewed by a disfiguringly merciless clarity.

Outside the Manhattan Fish Market, where I used to linger admiringly every time I passed, I fell into something like my old marvelling delight. But it seemed unstable now, encroached on by some looming unease that required a deliberate effort to resist. What was this? Inge's scepticism superimposing itself on my own more ardent or gullible view? Some dim sense of raped oceans, poisoned seabeds? Could it have been the customers themselves, my fellow citizens, crowding
at the counter to take delivery of their dinners, unaware that their guileless faces, their soft-fleshed bellies hanging before them like gentle, spherical pets, their wallet-waving arms, had by some strange quirk of fate come to form the universal hieroglyph for that blunt, plundering motion by which power avails itself of whatever sustenance it requires? Brandt's gesture, it occurs to me; reaching down inside me for what he wanted. My own too, of course, back in Berlin, helping myself to Inge.

I wondered if it was possible that I had misread this city the first time around; mistaken its apparent vigour for a springtime ebullience when in fact what I was witnessing was the hectic gaudiness of the downward, the catabolic, cycle. The invisible worm, to quote myself, ha, that flies through the night, in the howling storm, hurtling down along the city's cracks and fault lines to the sick heart,
splash!
– these flags everywhere its streaming blood, its autumnal foliage?

Menzer was staying in a loft on Bond Street: tall and narrow with dark alcoves off the far end and a clutter of artworks and plants and mismatched grandiose furniture strewn throughout its immense length. It reminded me strongly of his place off Saarbrücker Strasse; so strongly in fact that as I went in I had the feeling not so much of entering a room as stepping into an aura, an enveloping atmosphere of privileged bohemianism that was apparently inseparable from the man himself.

In his own person too he seemed barely changed: a little thinner, a little greyer; his features drawn a little more tightly, as if by some slowly rotating inner ratcheting mechanism, around the uneven contours of his skull. But otherwise no visible concession to the years that had passed since I had last seen him, and certainly no discernible imprint of trauma from
his public disgrace. As if being Klaus Menzer were an eternal proposition, not subject to the laws of mutability and decay that govern the rest of us.

He shook my hand.

‘Coffee?'

‘Sure.'

He made a pot of coffee in the open kitchen; lifting pans and jars with a droll carelessness; the handling of such humble objects being apparently a somewhat comical anomaly in the life of an eminence such as himself.

The same crumpled suit and drab T-shirt as he had always worn in the past drooped in the same ways over his elongated frame. The same silver-rimmed glasses alternately magnifying and concealing his eyes.

We sat with our mugs in armchairs of padded corduroy and gilded wood. I said little: I had made up my mind not to incur humiliation by engaging Menzer in nervous small talk. I would outsilence him: force him to work his own way towards whatever communication he had summoned me here in order to make. He gave a faint smile, seeming to take note of this, and to be amused by it.

‘So. Here we are in America,' he said.

‘Yes.'

‘How long, for you?'

‘Since '86.'

‘You must like it.'

‘I do.'

‘Inge also?'

‘Yes.' I had no intention of opening up my private life to him.

‘No plans to go back?'

‘No.'

He nodded.

‘Me neither. I like it here. Did I tell you why I came over?'

‘No.'

‘Would you like to hear?'

‘OK.'

‘A film producer wanted to make a movie about me!' He gave a laugh. ‘How about that? He brought me over from Berlin earlier this year and we flew to Hollywood together. Have you ever flown first-class? There were little pink shreds all over the bathroom. I thought someone had been tearing up the toilet paper, but it was rose petals! In Hollywood I had a house to myself up in the hills with glass walls looking onto the ocean and a garden full of orange trees. The ocean there isn't blue, which would be almost boring, but sort of a fluorescent violet, with gold sparks on it at night . . .'

I sat back in my baronial chair, sipping my coffee, a little surprised that the great Menzer should think it worth the effort to give me his impressions of Hollywood, but content to hear him out. A chrome lamp hung from a long, snaking stem, its base far away in another part of the enormous room, so that the light it shed on us seemed somehow stolen or siphoned off.

‘We had meetings with studio executives every day. Those studios are like fiefdoms from the middle ages – they have their own private armies and transportation systems, their own livery, even their own language. Paramount is the Vatican, hacienda-style. The executives are all from tiny, specialised countries like Iceland or Finland. We sat in their offices and told them my life story. The leader of the Prenzlauer Berg avant-garde poetry scene who turns out to have been a Stasi informer: that was our pitch. They thought it was hilarious.'

Strange sensation – a kind of simultaneous pain and numbness – as
he alludes in that matter-of-fact way to his betrayals. As if treachery were just some private habit you could make socially acceptable by coming out of the closet about it; shifting the burden of shame from speaker to listener . . . I tried not to flinch, but Menzer's sensitive antennae picked up my unease immediately. He smiled:

‘You were never Gaucked, were you, Stefan?'

‘What?'

He spoke quietly. ‘Your file was never opened, was it?'

‘Not to my knowledge,' I replied. I refrained from adding that I imagined he already knew that.

‘What I thought,' he said.

He paused, the sign of some sort of delicate quandary appearing on his expressive face. That face! Under our cone of light every tilting plane in it, every meandering gully seemed brimmingly inhabited by him; the dwelling place in which some particular refinement of his elaborate spirit was lovingly housed, like the different parts of an instrument in its plush-lined case.

‘Well. To get back to my movie . . .' The story began unfurling from him once again. I supposed now that he must have some purpose in telling it to me in such detail, that it was not merely a preamble to something else, and I began listening with a sort of guarded attentiveness.

Despite the enthusiastic responses, the meetings had come to nothing:

‘They all had the same problem,' Menzer said, smiling. ‘They loved the idea but in the end they couldn't see a way to present someone who betrays all his friends as a “sympathetic” character; someone audiences can “root for”, whatever that means . . .'

Back in New York the producer had settled Menzer's
account at the Pierre, where he had been putting him up, and moved on to other projects. But instead of going back to Germany, Menzer had decided to stay on in New York.