Seven Lies (23 page)

‘So,' she said, ‘have you been back?'

‘Back where?'

‘Prenzlauer Berg, of course.'

‘No.'

‘You wouldn't recognise it. All chichi boutiques now.' She laughed, then gave a large, somewhat theatrical sigh: ‘What a time that was! Those poets! All those crazy friends of my brother's, busy informing on each other day and night. No wonder they had a problem with plain language!' She glanced at me. ‘You knew about that, right, the informing?' ‘More or less.' ‘My brother got most of the notoriety but they were all at it – Paul Boeden, Uwe Wardezky; Reinhard Kolbe's father was the Firm's own officer for cultural affairs!' I listened impassively as she continued, my face a mask of neutral attentiveness. She knocked back her drink – something staged in the recklessness of the gesture, I remember thinking, as though she felt it necessary to go through the motions of relinquishing self-control, for appearances' sake, before she could allow herself to unleash whatever mischief she had in mind. ‘And it wasn't just the poets either,' she continued. ‘Half the peace activists too. Sitting around discussing plans for some illegal anti-nuclear protest one minute, then scurrying off to tell their controls all about it! Hilarious, really! And nobody was above it. That's my considered opinion. Nobody at all. Not me, not you, not anyone. Amazing what a little fear will do to people!' She paused, drawing deeply on a cigarette and looking at me with a provocative grin, as if waiting for me
to raise an objection. I was aware of a tightening in my chest, but I said nothing, not wanting to make things easier for her. ‘The theatre people also,' she went on, blowing out her smoke, ‘none of them had their hands clean. Not a single person. Not one.' She was locked on her target now, I could feel that; coursing forward on some riptide of malice. ‘Benno Mautner,' she continued, ‘he's the one who got the Stasi along for that swords-to-ploughshares performance –'

‘All right Margarete –' I interrupted her.

‘What? You don't remember? Where his actors all wore those insignias . . .'

‘I remember, but –'

‘But what? You don't want to hear?'

‘Not really. I'm not that interested any more.'

‘Well, here's something that'll interest you –'

It occurs to me that if I had allowed her to seduce me she might have spared me this. A purely chivalrous infidelity, that would have been! Protect the honour of your beloved by going to bed with her rival . . . But on the other hand, given her and her brother's peculiar gifts, she would more likely have found a way of having her cake and eating it.

‘I doubt it,' I said.

‘Inge.'

‘Very funny.'

‘Yes. Your lovely wife. Not then, but later.' Her eyes had darted up to gauge my reaction. ‘You didn't know, did you? What I thought. Well, don't go blaming her. She had every right to turn on Thilo after he dumped her like that. Still, I heard that without her testimony they wouldn't have got the conviction that put him away. Your own contribution was apparently ruled inadmissible on account of your vested interest in the matter. You remember what sticklers for procedural
correctness they were. Might as well have kept your hands clean! Wait – where are you going, Stefan? Have I upset you?'

I had stood up, and was putting on my coat.

‘Don't be upset! No one cares about this shit any more –'

‘Go to hell, Margarete,' I said, turning my back on her.

My body was trembling. I strode back across the lobby and on out through the revolving doors to the street. There was no question of my believing Margarete's repulsive slander, but just hearing it spoken, hearing Inge's name dragged like a shot-down swan through the mire of this goblinous procuress's vindictive imagination, was unbearable. If I could have foreseen that her brother was going to blackmail me a few years later, on precisely the basis of Inge's untarnished integrity, her absolute dissimilarity from myself and all these other fiends, I would have flung that in her face too (though, come to think of it, maybe my visceral reaction to Margarete's lies was in fact what gave Menzer the idea that I might be susceptible to blackmail in the first place!). I felt nauseous, dizzy, disgusted. Plunging blindly up past the Gendarmenmarkt, I found myself heading east on what must have been Karl-Liebknecht-Strasse, then before I knew it, crossing Alexanderplatz to Prenzlauer Allee. Only here did any thought of revisiting the old neighbourhood come to mind, and even then it was more a kind of helpless, passive gravitation than anything considered. The rain had thinned to a wet mist in which the new illuminations of the quarter shone glassily. Here were Saarbrücker Strasse, Metzer Strasse, Strassburger Strasse – so familiar and yet all so changed, as though I had travelled back in time only to find the past itself altered. The old brick warehouse with its barred portholes was gone, in its place a French
parfumerie
, the display cabinets behind its plate-glass window shedding a violet glow. I stared in, trying
to picture the interior as it had been: an effort at first, as though the image were ashamed of its plainness in the face of the luxurious resplendence that had usurped it, and reluctant to be exhumed. But after a while I found myself imagining again the dark, tatty auditorium that had once occupied this space, and from there I was able to summon the figure of Inge as I had first beheld her, bringing her to mind in all her savage purity, until I could feel her luminous, incandescent spirit flooding into me once again, unblemished, purging the corrosive poison of Margarete's words, and shining inside me with the light of an inextinguishable reprieve. I can say in all truth that it has been burning there steadily ever since: my own figure of Liberty, standing sentinel at the threshold of my own incorruptible America.

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