The Valley of Unknowing (19 page)

PART FOUR

32

The following September a package arrived at my apartment building by the same mysterious means as Theresa’s other communications. For the preceding two months she had been at home in the West. Her student visa had expired and her studies in East Berlin had not yet commenced. The package contained a hardback book with a glossy black dust jacket, on the front of which, in raised metallic type, was the title:
SURVIVORS
. Beneath the title was the silhouette of ruined buildings – skyscrapers and tower blocks – against an orange fireball of a sky. In the corner, in italics, was the solitary word:
Roman
; and along the bottom of the page, reversed out of the ruins in small, widely spaced capitals, was the author’s name in arterial red: EVA ADEN.

Eva
Aden? Who exactly was Eva Aden?

I stood in the dim light of the hallway, blinking at this strangely terrifying volume. I opened the book and scrabbled my way to the first page of the text:
They kept always to the edge of the road, where their shuffling, silent progress was hidden among the shadows of the trees.

I flung open the door, just so I could examine the cover in daylight. The artwork was striking, but ineffably vulgar by the usual literary standards. The title was completely new to me. Theresa had once told me that ‘the Bernheim people’ weren’t happy with
The Valley
, but the subject had never come up again. It seemed a decision had been made in my absence, but that wasn’t what angered me. What angered me was the name underneath: Eva Aden. Eva was my mother’s name, a fact Theresa knew very well. Without any thought of consulting me, she had stamped it on this fraudulent volume – a work, to all intents and purposes, stolen from the dead – where it would remain for ever, guilty by association. What right had she to do that? Had I
asked
her to intrude on my past, to play games with my mother’s memory? I turned and hurled the book across the hallway. It smacked against the banisters and fell to the floor, the dust jacket flapping like a broken sail. Why couldn’t Theresa have used her own name? Why the sudden need for anonymity?

On one of the floors above a door opened. The noise had made somebody curious. As I closed the front door, I noticed a piece of paper lying on the floor. I realised that it must have fallen out of the book when I opened it. It was a note from Theresa. It said only:

Dear B,

By the time this book reaches you it’ll be in all the shops.
Survivors
was Herr Falkner’s idea. Should I have said no?

There’s a lot I have to tell you, but now isn’t the time. In the meantime, let’s keep our fingers crossed.

I hope you’re happy.

With love,

T

PS Eva Aden was my idea. I wanted there to be something of you in this book, some element of the Krug name. This was the only thing I could think of. I hope you don’t mind.

I went and picked up the book, carefully replacing the buckled dust jacket, smoothing out the creases. I sat down on the stairs and hugged it to my chest, feeling ashamed and not a little disgusted.
I wanted there to be something of you in this book, some element of the Krug name
. How could I have mistaken Theresa’s act of tenderness for intrusion? Why was I so anxious to assume the worst? What was wrong with me?

I think I even asked the last of these questions out loud. For once, I didn’t care who was listening.

33

A few days later I was riding a tram through the Altstadt. Evening sunlight was seeping through the dirty windows, gilding the static bodies and pallid faces of my fellow passengers, so that for a few seconds they looked like works of art. It was then that I spotted Claudia Witt sitting halfway down, a book open on her lap.

Until a copy of
Survivors
had turned up at my apartment, I had been taking the latest of Theresa’s absences well. Her decision to study in the East for another year, together with the success of our literary collaboration, reassured me that I was on solid ground, that I had only to be patient and everything would fall into place. At a propitious moment, I had decided, I would ask Theresa to marry me, though this idea had less significance than might appear, divorce being quicker and easier to obtain in the Workers’ and Peasants’ State than almost anywhere else. I was in good spirits, which was why, in spite of previous chilly encounters, I went over to Claudia and said hello.

She had been reading with great concentration, furtively chewing a thumbnail as she frowned at the pages of a hardback book. Her hair was longer than before, collar-length but lank, and she was wearing a lot of eye make-up, which lent her a self-consciously mournful air, like the tragic clown in
Pagliacci.
She greeted me with a smile and an unusual absence of satire. Perhaps with Theresa gone (from her life, if not mine), I was no longer an irritation. I sat down on the opposite side of the aisle.

‘What are you reading?’

Carefully replacing her bookmark, she handed me the volume. It turned out to be
Survivors.
I hadn’t recognised the book without the dust jacket. But there was no mistaking the title and Theresa’s half-pseudonym punched in gold letters on to the spine. Seeing this counterfeit out and about in the world – above all here, where Wolfgang Richter had lived and died – made me shudder.

‘Where did you get this?’

‘Where do you think?’

‘Not a bookshop, I shouldn’t think.’

‘Look in the front.’

On the title page, where traders in first editions like them, was Theresa’s signature – or rather, her
new
signature – together with the following inscription:
To Claudia, my collaborator in art and life, with love and thanks!

Theresa had left my copy unsigned and it was clear enough why. A signature, by its very nature, is a mark of authenticity. A signature says:
this book is mine.
But we both knew this book, whatever its title, was not hers. To send me a signed copy, then, would have been thoroughly inappropriate. The same considerations did not apply where third parties were concerned. Theresa had to maintain the masquerade for them, I reminded myself, and that included signing copies on request.

I felt a familiar unsteadiness in my belly, a gastro-intestinal inkling of trouble. How much did Claudia know, Theresa’s
collaborator in art and life
? Was it more than I thought? The insouciance of the girl suggested a degree of secret knowledge.

‘What do you think of it?’ I asked.

‘Amazing. She came up with all that. I still can’t believe it.’

Reluctantly, I handed back the book. ‘She’s a very talented girl.’

‘She certainly is. You’re really impressed, though?’

‘Very.’

‘Jealous?’

‘Exceedingly.’

Claudia laughed. ‘I thought so. Writers can’t help being jealous. It stems from their insecurity.’

‘I didn’t know that.’

‘All writers are insecure, the male ones especially. It’s well known. Why else would they spend so much time on make-believe? They’re only happy in their imaginary worlds, because that’s where they’re in charge – where they’re God. Did you know that Hemingway’s mother dressed him as a girl until he was six years old?’

I was not offended by Claudia’s glib psychological theory. Like many glib psychological theories, it struck me as fundamentally correct. But it wasn’t me I wanted to talk about.

‘If that’s true of all writers, it must be true of Theresa,’ I said. ‘She must be insecure too.’

‘She is.’ Claudia opened up her book, her eyes returning to the page. ‘She’s basically uncomfortable with herself. Certainly she’s uncomfortable with her talent – her musical talent.’

‘She said something like that once.’

Claudia put her head on one side. ‘It’s like she doesn’t really deserve it; as if she stole it from someone else. Maybe her dead twin or something.’

With a squealing of brakes the tram drew near a stop. The conversation was suspended for a minute as a procession of people nudged their way towards the door.

‘Have you any plans to see her?’ I asked. ‘It would be a shame to lose touch.’

Claudia closed the book and placed it inside her denim handbag. ‘I should be seeing her the day after tomorrow, with any luck. Though she won’t be seeing me.’

‘What do you mean?’

Claudia got to her feet, a look of amusement on her face. ‘Didn’t she tell you? She’s doing an interview on ZDF.
Freizeit-Forum
, nine o’clock.’ ZDF was a Western channel, impossible to pick up across most of the city. ‘I’d invite you along, but I’m going out of town.’

The doors opened. Claudia gave me a childish little wave and stepped down on to the pavement.

Watching Western television had not been a crime in the Workers’ and Peasants’ State since 1972. The days were long gone when the Free German Youth would organise anti-propaganda sorties, noting the location and address of any aerial displaying a non-socialist orientation and passing the information to the police. But among my acquaintances in the valley there was only one who had no trouble picking up television transmissions from the other side of the inner German border, thanks to the hills that encircled us. Rudi Hartl was a printworks supervisor and aspiring artist, who spent most of his spare cash on paint and canvases, and experimented disastrously with abstractionism. An old friend of Michael Schilling’s (in his youth, Schilling too had tried his hand at the graphic arts), he lived on the upper floor of an old farmhouse in the village of Elbersdorf, five miles east of the city. Elbersdorf and the surrounding hamlets were on high ground and enjoyed relatively good reception as well as good views, although in both cases atmospheric conditions regularly conspired to spoil them. This I knew because Schilling sometimes went out there to watch West German sports broadcasts, tennis being his particular fascination.

Hartl was a jovial man, whose boyish face wore a default expression of pleasant surprise. He was not clever, but his lack of acumen served him well. He believed what people told him – their excuses and evasions – and was therefore immune to the creeping affliction of cynicism. He even believed what he read in the newspapers, enough at any rate to sustain an optimistic view of life. I would happily have spent more time with him, but getting to Elbersdorf involved an inconvenient journey and his printworks were on the other side of town.

I telephoned him as soon as I could and proposed that we meet.

‘I don’t suppose you’re free this Friday evening? I’ve been given some remarkable plum schnapps, which I’m eager to share.’

Understandably Hartl sounded surprised to hear from me after what must have been at least a year. ‘How kind of you to think of me,’ he said. ‘And what a remarkable memory you have.’

The latter remark I did not understand.

He suggested meeting in town, but I objected. ‘I was hoping to get a look at your latest work. I trust you’ve been hard at it.’

‘Not as hard as I’d like. You know how it is. But I have been making progress with the studio. It’s almost finished.’

‘Well, that I have to see. I’ve always thought you needed a proper space to work – and to show your work.’

There was no need for further persuasion. Hartl agreed to pick me up after work and drive me out to Elbersdorf. ‘I’ve a new car now,’ he said. ‘Well, a new
old
car. A gift from my uncle Rolf.’

It was then I remembered that the only thing worse than Rudi Hartl’s painting was Rudi Hartl’s driving. But to behold my beautiful Theresa on camera, to see her playing the role I had created for her, a role I had never yet been privileged to witness; to see her, in effect, playing me (though I, in turn, was playing Wolfgang Richter, authorially speaking), that was something I simply could not miss. That was a spectacle worth any amount of shredded nerves. The fact that Theresa had omitted to tell me about it, for whatever reason, had no bearing on the matter.

34

Hartl’s new old car turned out to be an improvement on his previous vehicle in that the passenger door could be opened and closed, and was not attached to the rest of the chassis with twelve metres of duct tape. The chances of being trapped and incinerated in burning wreckage were therefore happily reduced. It also boasted a radio, which picked up the electrical discharges of the engine over frequent bursts of unintelligible short wave, and which could be neither tuned nor switched off. Our journey to Elbersdorf, during which Hartl enthusiastically updated me on his latest artistic direction, was accompanied by a frenzy of radiophonic wolf-whistling and electro-mechanical raspberries. My contribution was confined to pointing in mute terror at the oncoming traffic and occasionally smacking the radio with the heel of my shoe.

My intention was to converse with Rudi on cultural and aesthetic subjects for an hour, then casually bring up the subject of
Freizeit-Forum
, a segue natural enough not to seem premeditated. I could have come straight out and asked if we could watch the programme on his set. Perhaps no harm would have come of it. But a burning desire to watch broadcasts from over the anti-fascist frontier – even an innocuous arts programme – was not the kind of thing people willingly confessed to in the Workers’ and Peasants’ State. Watching Western television was, like masturbation, a strictly private activity, frequently done but rarely acknowledged, let alone discussed over the telephone.

It was dark by the time we left the road, turning on to a dirt track that snaked its way through woodland towards the house. We were far enough from the infernal glow of the city for stars to shine brightly through ragged tears in the cloud. Unlike their dim urban counterparts, these stars shimmered at immeasurable distance and in immeasurable numbers, so that the world beneath us seemed shrunken and solitary. As the beam of our headlamps swept round the last bend, I thought I glimpsed a spray of golden light among the trees, and I wondered idly if there were fireflies in those woods and if their season could really be this late in the year.

We pulled up outside the house, black and massive against the starry sky. It stood flanked on two sides by dilapidated outhouses that had once provided shelter for chickens and pigs, and which still tainted the air with a faint ammoniacal whiff. I was starting to get a sick, nervous feeling in my stomach. Theresa would soon be on air. What was she going to say? What was she going to reveal? Suppose she chose this moment to tell the truth? What then?

Hartl jangled his keys. ‘Looks like Vera’s gone to her mother’s.’

This at least was good news. Frau Hartl, a plump and uneducated woman who, by common consent, did not deserve her husband, might easily have had her own viewing plans for the evening; and they were unlikely to have included anything devoted to the arts.

‘What a shame. I was hoping to see her. Still,’ – I gently clanked the schnapps bottles together – ‘it’s not like we’re short of company.’

We reached the door. Waiting for Hartl to open it, I was struck by the depth of the silence. To a city dweller there is nothing so unnerving as the absence of ambient noise. It feels unnatural, as if the world all around is deliberately holding its breath. He waits instinctively for an exhalation, or for the trap to be sprung.

Hartl turned the lock and went inside. Stale kitchen smells greeted my nostrils, mingled with touches of old leather and old feet. Hartl flipped on a light switch. Nothing happened.

‘We must have lost the power. I’ve a torch here somewhere.’

My heart sank. ‘Does this happen often?’

‘Just now and again. Not usually for long. An hour at the most. Ah, here we are.’

A sallow beam of light looped through the gloom and came to rest on a staircase at the far end of a tiled hallway. Along the left-hand side of the wall, beside the entrance to the downstairs apartment, was a line of creased and flattened footwear. I wondered if Hartl’s neighbours – an old couple who allegedly put most of their remaining life force into growing vegetables and poisoning slugs – had gone to bed early, or if they were sitting there in the darkness, listening to us pass.

We crept upstairs, silenced by the enveloping darkness, the staircase creaking beneath us like an old hulk. I felt something stir above us, an almost imperceptible shift of weight. Perhaps Hartl heard it too, because he called out his wife’s name.

Nobody answered.

‘At her mother’s,’ he said again, as if repetition would make it true.

Beyond the door of the apartment was a tiny hallway where we left our shoes.

‘Wait here,’ Hartl said. ‘We’ve some candles in the kitchen.’

Then I heard it: a squeak, like a stopper in a bottle, followed by a sigh of escaping air. It had come from the living room. I edged forward and pushed back the glass-panelled door, which squeaked on unoiled hinges. It was then that the lights came on.

‘Surprise!’

I was staring at a room full of faces, none familiar, with the single exception of Vera’s. A groan went up.

‘Where’s the birthday boy?’

Hartl appeared at my side, beaming and feigning a heart attack. The guests burst into a toneless rendition of ‘Happy Birthday’. Glasses of punch were thrust into our hands. Someone put on a crackly Ina Martell record.

Hartl, still grinning, wagged a finger at me. ‘I knew you were up to something, Bruno. All that nonsense about your plum schnapps. I knew there was something else on your agenda – like making sure I didn’t get here too soon.’

‘Guilty as charged,’ I said. ‘Happy birthday, Rudi.’

We drank a toast. The punch tasted like liniment. Still, I had the impression that many people present were already on their third or fourth glass. Hartl set off on a tour of the room, accepting from his wife a basket of sweets and Halloren chocolate wrapped in yellow cellophane. I wasted no time in locating the television: it stood in the corner by the window with a large doily draped over the top of it and a plate of meatballs on top of that. I looked at my watch: it was already after eight o’clock.

As a youth I was often frustrated by the collective nature of my encounters with the opposite sex. Such was the regimented nature of my existence – at the orphanage, in the army, at the
Berufsschule
where I was drilled in my ablutionary trade – that the only way of meeting girls was in large numbers: at rallies, sporting events or formal social gatherings. Females my age had visibility but not tangibility. In other words from an educational point of view, the typical experience had breadth, but not depth. And it was depth I craved, emotionally and physically. I wanted unfettered access, a free hand in every sense. I knew that only a complete demystification of the female sex and the female form would free me from destructive longing, leaving me to live as I wished. But for that I needed to escape the crowd and be alone with my chosen one, a requirement that proved hard to satisfy, private spaces and private time being hard to come by in the Workers’ and Peasants’ State.

Standing in the Hartls’ dingy living room, my second empty glass in hand, listening to turgid conversation and atrocious music, I experienced a similar frustration. Once again I wished the crowd would disappear, so that I could be alone with my object of desire. All that had changed was the scale of my ambition. Instead of a woman, what I sought now was merely the image of a woman, electronically projected on to a cathode-ray tube; and whereas in the past my aim had been to demystify all women, now I was content to demystify one. It struck me how little I had learned since those boyhood days, in spite of the seductions and conquests and affairs that had followed. To know one woman – or even a hundred – no matter how intimately, was not, in fact, to know them all. The goal was unattainable and always would be. This reflection might have filled me with doubt, with a sense of time wasted and opportunities lost, had I not been so determined to see that night on Rudi Hartl’s television the girl I was sure I had been waiting for all my life.

It was thanks to Rudi that I hit upon my disastrous plan, the consequences of which were long to outlast the night.

‘Are you still keen to see the studio?’ he asked me when everyone else had been greeted and thanked. ‘I’d so value your opinion.’

I had just noticed that his television had wheels and that the cable connecting it to the rooftop aerial ran out through the window.

‘Lead on,’ I said.

We returned to the main landing. In one corner a flight of steps led up to a trapdoor. The attic above, though sizeable, was hopelessly unsuited to painting, having only two small circular windows, one at either end. Hartl had made up for this deficiency with a trio of neon lights fixed to the central beam and by painting everything white: the roof, the beams, the brickwork, the floorboards. The only things not white were Hartl’s paintings: lurid, splashy creations, like the outpourings of a paint factory slewed over canvas, with here and there the suggestion of an eye socket or a mouthful of bared teeth.

‘Remarkable,’ I said, standing before one especially gruesome
oeuvre
. ‘Brings to mind Edvard Munch.’

‘Do you really think so?’ Hartl said eagerly.

‘Very much so. But never mind what I think. Let’s consult the people.’

‘The people?’

‘The people downstairs.’

Hartl shook his head. ‘Oh, no, I don’t think they’d . . . My wife’s friends . . . I don’t think it’s their thing at all.’

‘Their
thing
being strictly figurative painting, I suppose.’

‘I’m afraid so.’

I declared this to be an elitist and unproletarian sentiment (as only a Champion of the People can) and told Hartl to stay put. Before he could object further I went back down the stairs and into the apartment. There I turned off the music and made an announcement: Herr Hartl’s latest creations – which, in my opinion, were extraordinary – were now on display in his studio. It would be the making of his birthday if the assembled company were to go and view them right away.

With some hesitation the assembled company did as it was told, taking its drinks with it. I followed as far as the landing, a schnapps bottle in each hand, topping up glasses as I went. To Frau Hartl (more flushed than usual and sweating through an excess of make-up), I bowed low before administering a triple shot and complimenting her extravagantly on her coiffure. Visibly flattered, she vanished up the steps, coyly pulling at the hem of her frock in a faux attempt to avoid showing me her underwear.

Alone at last, I checked my watch.
Freizeit-Forum
was due to start in two minutes. Heart pounding, caution blunted by alcohol, I disconnected the television and wheeled it into the bedroom, where a bedside light revealed an unsanitary landscape of crumpled bedding and discarded clothes. I never took Vera Hartl for a fastidious hausfrau, but these were the sleeping quarters of a sloven. Obscured behind a ball of used tissue, upon which a vision of her small mouth was imprinted in lipstick, I found the power socket. All that remained was to capture the end of the aerial cable, which now swung unattached from the edge of the roof. I found a wire coat hanger in the wardrobe, but that proved too short. I had better luck with a broom, which I found in the kitchen. I was leaning out of the window at a precarious angle, fishing in the darkness for my elusive catch, when it came to me – the realisation as striking as it was useless – that I had not seen fireflies on the drive up the hill, but the red and orange reflectors of motor cars and bicycles. Hartl’s friends had left them out of sight among the trees, so as to maintain the element of surprise. A motorcycle was labouring its way up the hill now, its importunate roar muffled only by the surrounding foliage.

At the third or fourth attempt, I managed to snag the cable round the end of the broom head and pull it in. When everything was reconnected I turned on the set and sat down on a corner of the double bed, clearing the minimum space necessary of Frau Hartl’s voluminous underthings. With a whump and a crackle of static a black-and-white picture bloomed on to the screen. Two cowboys were arguing in a saloon. They were smooth shaven and strangely clean. This was definitely not
Freizeit-Forum.

I turned the dial.

A female newsreader was sitting in the middle of a snowstorm. Behind her was a photograph of a missile launcher in a forest. The signal strengthened. The newsreader wore sensible glasses and spoke like a recorded announcement.

I turned the dial

An image ghosted across the screen: a blonde girl, running across a meadow in slow motion, hair backlit by the sun. A shampoo bottle appeared in the corner.

I turned the dial.

Another newsreader, another missile launcher, this time with the missile captured mid-launch, the word PROTEST stamped diagonally across the screen. The newsreader wore a smart suit and looked grave.

I turned the dial. Nothing but white noise. Could it be the ZDF transmitter was out of range? Claudia had said she was going out of town. Maybe you
had
to go out of town – further than Elbersdorf – to pick up
Freizeit-Forum.
I turned the dial more slowly, trying to squeeze a signal out of the electro-magnetic storm. I caught hints of forms and faces, warped and muffled voices that seemed to emanate from a different world – and then
one
face, a face I knew. But it was not Theresa’s.

I jumped, retreating across the bed. It was Wolfgang Richter. He drifted into focus and then out again, dissolving into white noise. I know I saw him on that screen. I can still recollect the image precisely: his long black coat, the tall windows of the Tolkewitz Crematorium behind him. Most clearly I remember his stare: neither reproachful nor accusing, but empty, as if he were simply observing me and waiting (for what I couldn’t guess). At the same time I know I could not have seen him. No such image of Wolfgang Richter exists in the real world and, even if it does, why would anyone have been broadcasting it that night? I record the incident only as being indicative of my state of mind. For the truth is the memory of that vision, of Richter’s terrible, hollow stare, came back to me often in the months that followed. I can picture it still.