Fear of Mirrors Read online

  Men, women and children were living and dying for these new states. In the past they had done the same for the big empires, but with this difference: in the old days they had fought reluctantly and cynically. It could have been any old job. Today they went to war with a sullen obstinacy, their heads and bodies distorted by an intolerant zeal. It would end badly. Of this Vlady was sure. In the last few years, he had abandoned many certainties. The bureaucratic-command-economy system was over, but its demise did not mean that what survived was superior or preferable. Only last week, one of Vlady’s star pupils, a poet whose verse had once been pregnant with promise, had been arrested and charged with attempted murder. His victim, a Turkish stallholder in Kreuzberg, had survived, but was now blind in one eye.

  Now, as he thought about it, Vlady recalled that the poem which had impressed him the most had been an evocation of old Königsberg, where the boy’s grandparents had lived before the war and from where they had fled after the defeat and just before Königsberg was renamed Kaliningrad. Even though the spirit of Immanuel Kant had been invoked, the poem was a subconscious yearning for old frontiers. Perhaps he was reading too much into it and all this was nothing more than the alienation they had all, to some degree or the other, felt from the structures of the DDR.

  He paid his bill and left the gallery. His planned visit to the Tiergarten abandoned because of Evelyne, he caught a bus back to the East. When he arrived home, it was just four o’clock. The apartment was untidy. He cleared up the mess in the kitchen and cleaned the sitting room. His own room was tidy. He lay down on the bed. There were times he envied those who had retreated so deep into their own worlds that nothing else mattered to them. History was none of their concern.

  Take Sao, for instance. Sao, who had abandoned history and turned to commerce. Try as he might, Vlady could not escape from history. There was no retreat to the forest for people like him. His upbringing, his milieu, his premises were totally different from Sao’s. Nothing was immutable. Society had to be changed. The painfully restrained fury of the poor could not be held back permanently.

  In the midst of these lofty thoughts he fell asleep. He woke up after about an hour and was startled by the dark outside, but it was only five o’clock. No need to panic. He rose slowly and walked to the bathroom. The cold light hurt his eyes as he began to shave. He was a tall, well-built man. His swarthy complexion, high cheekbones and just a hint of a slant in his brown eyes had led to numerous taunts at school. He had put on weight over the last year. Otherwise he had the look of a man in an Italian fresco, darkened by age. His hair had turned grey many years ago. He put on his faded green corduroy suit, brushed his hair and left the apartment.

  At one in the morning, the rest of the party wanted to move on to a new gay nightclub, on a side-street off the Kantstrasse. Vlady was worn out. A quiet pain had stirred his heart. He often thought of Evelyne and he had been pleased at their accidental meeting, but he was unprepared for the celebration. He had assumed it would be a small and discreet celebration in some well-appointed restaurant. Instead he was confronted with an absurdist fancy-dress dinner in a deserted film studio.

  They were seated on medieval benches, eating off a table decked with Turkish delicacies and lit like a film set. The waiters wore multicoloured cod pieces. From the edges of the studio they were observed by suggestively lit models of vampires, skeletons, Marx-Engels-Lenins, knights-in-armour and the proletariat.

  He looked at the self-important faces that surrounded him. Were they real? Why were their energy tanks not depleted? Could it be just the difference in age or were they intoxicated by imagined successes? Bored by his immediate neighbours, bemused by Evelyne, Vlady’s eyes began to wander.

  She had been looking at him and was surprised when their eyes met. She smiled. She was dressed in a red silk waistcoat, with black and gold embroidered designs and loose black trousers. He smiled. Like him, she, too, had turned down the invitation to change into cinematic fancy dress after the preview. He felt they had met before. He tried to recall her name. His memories were usually impressionistic, composed of words and images. The people themselves, what they were wearing, their physical features or peculiarities remained a blur.

  Suddenly he recognized her: Leyla. Kreuzberg-Leyla. The painter who had inadvertently wrecked his life. The first post-Wall exhibition. Leyla’s striking self-portrait, inspired by Frida Kahlo. Her hair was the colour of honey. Her eyes were green. In the painting she saw herself with black hair and brown eyes. Her paintings had an unreal quality. They were certainly not decorative. The figures and colours were taken from memories of her Anatolian childhood, but the setting was unmistakably Berlin. Turkish children, their faces filled with longing, peeping from behind their windows at German children playing on the streets. Two cars on the road. One packed with anxious Turkish faces. The other being driven by a fat German bourgeois with a turgid nose and placid, complacent, self-satisfied face. Dancers pass them by, their legs fantastically silhouetted on the windscreens. And then there was Stolen Kisses, which Helge had seen one rainy day; she had come home and finally walked out of his life. Helge would have hated this occasion.

  He put on a pained expression, signalling to Leyla the desolate shape the evening had taken. She nodded sympathetically. Perhaps she was also bored with it all: the shrieks of insincere laughter, the loud, over-keen voices greeting Evelyne’s success, the fake bonhomie, the triumphalist banalities. How Evelyne had changed. The audacious student with shining eyes who had temporarily occupied his heart had become an egocentric monster. Or had she? Perhaps she was just trying to shock, in which case she hadn’t altered a great deal.

  As if dealing with Evelyne wasn’t bad enough, Vlady was hailed by a corpulent, clean-shaven man, who was vaguely familiar, despite his silly costume. He was drunk and it was the swollen sensual nose that reminded him that this was Albert, whose lean face and coal-black beard had dominated many a clandestine discussion in the old days. The same Albert who had written a wonderfully obscure philosophical critique of the DDR and the whole system of social relations in Eastern Europe. The manuscript had been smuggled to West Berlin and published in Frankfurt. Albert had spent a month in prison.

  Few in the West had understood him or the Marxist categories he deployed with some skill against those who claimed to rule in the name of Marx, but he had been drenched in prize money and, for a while, his book, Questions Without an Answer, had graced every fashionable coffee-table in Western Europe. The old fools who ran the country had not allowed him to return from Frankfurt where he had been a guest lecturer, courtesy of the Ebert Foundation. Albert had become a celebrity.

  Now he was back in Berlin in a new guise. Albert had become a leading Green ideologue, who believed in the civilizing mission of NATO bombs in the Gulf, the Horn of Africa and, most recently, the Balkans.

  ‘Hello, Vlady. We’ve been changing the world long enough. Time once again to interpret it. You agree or not?’

  Vlady smiled vacantly, giving the man a half-nod. He was about to turn away, but Albert’s patronizing smile enraged him.

  ‘You talk such high-flown shit, Albert. I suppose it’s got to come out somewhere. We all heard that your liver was permanently pickled, but I never thought your brain would atrophy so much.’

  Albert lunged in the direction of the insults, but Vlady had stepped aside and his old comrade was helped up by the waitresses. Vlady felt nothing, neither sorrow nor pity. Three days ago, a Turkish family had been burnt to death in a small town in Germany, while the police and the populace had stood and watched the spectacle, and now some idiot dressed as a Roman centurion was telling him that all was well.

  Vlady was trying to catch Leyla’s eye again when Evelyne’s shrill tones silenced the entire table.

  ‘Vlady!’

  The leer on Evelyne’s face was illumined by the harsh theatrical lighting and the grotesque make-up combined to make her look hard and ugly. She was wearing a short black leather skirt and a matching b
ra.

  ‘Why are you staring at Leyla in that way? She’s mine. Keep off. All these people here tonight are my friends. They appreciate me. They know I’m much more talented than the film-makers you worship. Everybody, answer me. Do you love me?’

  Drunken faces smiled and waved at her, but verbal support was not forthcoming. Vlady smiled, but his eyes were hard and stern. He regretted that he had accepted her invitation. Evelyne had always been insecure, manipulative, wildly ambitious, but also intellectually sharp, receptive to new ideas, allergic to orthodoxy. Her energy, suppressed for so long in the DDR, had now exploded on the screen. Pity it was such a bad film.

  In reality it wasn’t such a bad film. Vlady, unable to break out of his melancholy, had misunderstood its aim and failed to appreciate the gentle self-mockery that underlay the film. He had been so busy wallowing in self-pity that he had missed the satire.

  He looked at Evelyne and sighed. She had wanted so much to shock him with this absurd evening. It was an old tune, a parody of Weimar decadence. In a different mood he might have enjoyed the evening, but he was tired. He wanted to go home. He exchanged a last glance with Leyla, who smiled and waved. He left the party. Leyla must have her own plans, he thought ruefully as he put on his old Russian hat and pulled his overcoat tight around him.

  As he breathed the freezing cold, misty early morning air, he sighed with relief. He had escaped. He was wrong. A horribly familiar voice disturbed the Berlin dawn.

  ‘Vlady!’

  He turned round and saw Evelyne framing the doorway. She had removed her top and her breasts were shrouded in the mist.

  ‘Vlady, you old shithead!’ She shouted; her reverberating voice cruelly disrupted the silence and brought a group of revellers to her side. With her audience in place she addressed her old lover again.

  ‘Why are you so unremittingly solemn? Why are you leaving now? What’s the matter? Don’t you want a fuck tonight? It can be arranged, unless it’s Leyla you want and not me. That would –’

  ‘No thank you, Evelyne. Neither you nor Leyla tonight. Thanks for the offer.’

  He had to admit she looked magnificent. A modern Cleopatra, who ‘loved men’s lusting but hated men’. Dante’s Cleopatra, not Shakespeare’s. He almost told her, but it was late to discuss the circles of Hell and nor was Vlady in a mood to hear Dante described as a Tuscan arsehole. Instead he bade her a friendly farewell.

  ‘Please go back before you catch a chill. I hope the movie’s a big success.’

  As he walked out of the giant courtyard he heard the disembodied echoes of her voice.

  ‘Dumbhead! Arsehole! Communist! Wanker! You even wank with a condom. That’s how safe you’ve become. Fuck off!’

  Vlady laughed. It was an old line she’d used when he had refused to sleep with her, just before their affair had begun. He began to walk briskly. What an awful evening. It was not just that the jokes were awful. That was bad enough. The fact was that the forced humour was all part of a mask worn by Evelyne’s new friends. They were all trying desperately to hide their unhappiness. They were living empty lives. Bereft of hope, bereft of belief, bereft of loyalties. They could not understand this, let alone acknowledge it and, for that reason, lived each day as it came.

  Slowly his concentration returned. The animated aimlessness that had gripped him when Leyla had entered his fantasies during dinner had receded. His head was clear. He began to enjoy Berlin. His Berlin. It was the only time to really feel the old city. Trafficless. A friend of his had recently written a monograph calling for all cars to be restricted to certain zones and the old Berlin tramlines to be rehabilitated.

  As he walked back home, Vlady revelled in the solitude. It was almost two in the morning. A chill wind was blowing and the ground was partially frozen. There was still some ice on the pavements, treacherous in places, so he walked slowly. Vlady smiled to himself. He was fifty-six today. What had loomed in the distance like a giant iceberg had finally caught up with him, but he had survived the encounter. He was still alive. Despite everything, he had not thrown himself under a train. He was still there and that was enough reason to celebrate.

  A grey dawn broke just as he reached the Tiergarten. It must have been a night like this that they killed Rosa Luxemburg on that fateful January in 1919. He paused, nodded sadly as he saw the memorial to Rosa overlooking the canal, then walked over to the bridge to the Karl Liebknecht monument. The Junkers had never forgiven Liebknecht for announcing to the world in 1914 that a patriot was nothing more or less than an international blackleg. None of this mattered to his son’s generation. His son, Karl, who had, uncharacteristically, shouted at him on the last occasion he had mentioned Rosa. ‘What do I care about your dead gods, Vlady? Surely now you must understand it’s finished for ever. It was a bad dream. A nightmare. Try and forget. Please.’

  All they cared about was the present. The cursed present. Vlady remembered a line Heine had written in the middle of the eighteenth century. ‘What the world seeks and hopes for now’, the poet had written, ‘has become utterly foreign to my heart.’ The problem was that young Karl was in the very heart of that which had become so foreign to his father.

  As he put the key in his door, Vlady was, for once, not thinking about the past, but the future. Would Karl have children? Would Vlady still be alive? Could Karl end up as an SPD minister? Vlady shuddered at this particular thought, but it made him even more determined to make a supreme effort and build a bridge on which both of them could meet – at least halfway. Unlike many of his friends, Karl did enjoy reading books. Vlady would write an account of his life. A partial confession, partial explanation. Not for posterity. Just for Karl. Yes, that was the solution. He would sit down and write everything he knew.

  Did Vlady know everything? There were some crucially important gaps in the chronology bequeathed to him by his mother, Gertrude. He knew little about his father except tales of heroism and the fact that he had been killed on Stalin’s orders a few months before Vlady was born in December 1937.

  He often thought of his father, but how much his mother had left out of her accounts. She belonged to a generation that had no difficulty in subordinating truth to the needs of Moscow or even her own personal needs, to protect her new post-war identity in the new Germany. He had never believed her rosy accounts of life in the twenties and thirties.

  The truth, or at least a minuscule segment of it, lay in the KGB archives. He needed access and, amongst his circle of acquaintances, there was only one person who might be able to help him.

  Vlady recalled his old friend Sao, the one-time Vietnamese guerrilla turned entrepreneur. A man who wore his custom-tailored Parisian suits just as proudly as he used to wear his black Vietcong pyjamas. Sao had contacts in the new Russia where everything was for sale. Nowadays the Russians were finding paintings in the Hermitage, incunabula in private collections, and KGB crooks hawked their memoirs at the Frankfurt Book Fair as openly as the Generals sold vital military equipment before they withdrew from Berlin. Uranium and missiles could also be bought if you had the right contacts. Yes. There was no other way. Sao was his man and Sao was arriving in Berlin tomorrow to take Vlady out to dinner.

  Overcome by exhaustion, Vlady undressed and sank gently on to his bed. It was already dawn and sleep came quickly to the rescue. He might have slept through the day, but at midday he was woken by the persistent ring of the phone. Bleary-eyed and chilled to the bone, he put his head under the blanket, cursing the heating system, which had collapsed a few days ago. The phone kept ringing. The thought that it might be Sao sent an electric current through his head. He jumped out of his bed, draped himself with a blanket and lifted the receiver.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Happy birthday, Vlady. Are you there? I was beginning to get worried. Vlady?’

  It was Karl from Bonn. Vlady was touched, but his voice remained aloof. ‘Hello Karl. Thanks a lot. I’m fine. You well?’

  ‘Yes, yes. What news on the apartment?’

&n
bsp; ‘I’m still here, aren’t I?’

  ‘But …’

  ‘I think the Heuvels will have to wait another few years before they can have it back. The scum actually offered me money!’

  ‘How much?’

  ‘Fifty thousand marks.’

  ‘For that amount you could not buy an apartment anywhere.’

  ‘At last we are in agreement.’

  ‘I’m coming to Berlin next month, Vlady. I can stay in my old room?’

  ‘You mean you will stay here and not with your boss in the …?’

  ‘Vlady. Please.’

  ‘Of course, of course, Karl. This will be your home till the Treuhandt throws me out. By the way, tonight I’m having dinner with your old Uncle Sao. Remember him?’

  Five

  IT WAS A COLD NIGHT in February 1982. Dresden, where Vlady and his wife Helge were visiting her ill mother, was drenched in rain. After a week looking after Helge’s mother, who had suffered a severe stroke, and comforting her eighty-year-old father, Vlady had insisted that they accept an invitation to dinner. The evening had passed off well. Over a dozen dissidents had been assembled in the tiny flat where they had exchanged experiences, discussed the situation on the Politburo and consumed a great deal of beer.

  As they were walking back, Vlady had caught sight of a dapper Vietnamese with an attractive young German woman on his arm. Helge had wondered whether the Vietnamese was a student or a slave-worker, indentured to a local factory. Suddenly three or four figures had emerged from nowhere and surrounded the couple. Sao was flung to the ground and while one of the assailants held the girl, three pairs of boots descended on Sao. Then two of them sat on his chest, while the third pulled down Sao’s trousers and brandished a knife.