The Valley of Unknowing (20 page)

Blaming the hallucinogenic powers of industrial alcohol and the hypnotic effects of television, I gathered myself and reached for the dial again. Before I could touch it, I found myself looking at Theresa – or rather at two Theresas. I was on the point of giving the set a thump when I realised there was nothing wrong with the picture.

The first Theresa was sitting on a sofa in a television studio. The second covered most of the back wall, where she appeared surrounded by the same smoking ruins that decorated the cover of
Survivors
. The creature in the studio I hardly recognised. She wore a shimmering dress that left her shoulders bare, the unsupported curve of her breasts discernable through the fabric. She sat with her legs folded under her, her golden hair partially woven into plaits, one plait circling the crown of her head. With black pearl earrings and a necklace made up of many fine strands – gold or silver, I supposed – she brought to mind a priestess or a sacrificial virgin. Here was my fantasy Theresa come to life. Here was the vision I had dreamed up that first night, while I waited to receive my medal. Even the little dent in her forehead, the subtle flaw left by her twin, was invisible. It seemed Eva Aden, novelist, had no twin.

The interviewer, a middle-aged man with a high forehead and an aquiline gaze, sat canted forward on his swivel chair.

‘Since then, Eva, you’ve been called the most important new voice in German literature since Günter Grass. Others have described you as a feminist visionary. Is that how you would characterise your work, as essentially feminist in outlook?’

The director cut to a close-up. Theresa frowned. ‘I made a promise that I wouldn’t look at any reviews for
Survivors.
And so far I’ve kept that promise.’

‘You don’t agree with the critics?’

‘I haven’t read them.’

The interviewer leaned even closer, as if preparing to launch himself on to the sofa. I dug my fingers into the pungent bedding, amazed at Theresa’s cool.

‘That’s extraordinary. Can you tell us your reasons?’

‘I suppose you could say it’s because I don’t want anything to change. I want the next book to come about in the same way, in the same circumstances, as the last.’

‘Do you mean in isolation?’

‘I wouldn’t call it isolation. Being a little apart, perhaps, yes. But maybe that’s necessary for a sense of independence. And for perspective.’

For a moment the picture concertinaed, voices giving way to hiss. I smacked the top of the set.

‘Chekhov once said that critics were like horseflies: they only prevented the horse from ploughing. Is that how you see them, as a distraction?’

Theresa shook her head. ‘I find critics very useful when I’m trying to decide what to read. But as far as
Survivors
goes, and any other books that follow, I don’t think my reading reviews would serve any useful purpose.’

It was a good answer; only she and I knew how good. And in that moment, in the confidence and cleverness of that answer – an answer that could never come back to haunt her when the truth was out, the way any other answer would have – it struck me: Theresa had done more than grow into the role. She had
become
the role. She was flourishing as she had never flourished with a viola in her hand, even under the glare of the lights, even with millions watching. This was the freedom she had talked of, the freedom that came with not being herself. For the first time in her life she was free from the ghost of her dead twin, free from the dread of self-celebration: because Eva Aden didn’t
have
a twin. Her triumph was not a triumph over anyone, let alone a blameless infant sister.

‘Some people,’ – the interviewer’s unctuous tone made it clear he was not among them – ‘might say yours was an arrogant attitude for a newcomer.’

‘I hope not. I don’t think the purpose of reviews is to educate writers, to show them where they’ve gone wrong or gone right. Their purpose is to inform the public.’

‘And what do you see as
your
purpose?’

Theresa looked down at her hands, as if not sure what they were doing there. I knew that gesture. It was the first thing in her whole performance I recognised.

‘My purpose is to bring these stories into the world, so that they can be shared by whoever wants to share them.’

‘You talk almost as if they weren’t yours, as if you’re no more than a midwife.’

Theresa smiled. ‘Midwives are important people. Without them many of us wouldn’t be here.’

The interviewer chose this moment to strike an especially pretentious pose, leaning far back in his chair with both index fingers tapping thoughtfully against his lips. ‘You strike me as remarkably detached from your work – detached from its fate, at least. Is it that, for you, it’s the
act
of writing that’s important? Are you answering an inner need?’

Theresa took a moment to answer. The camera had her in close-up again, and profile, but now it zoomed out slowly, revealing throat, shoulders, lightly veiled breasts. At that moment, I felt certain, thousands of cultured men up and down the German
Länder
would be experiencing an involuntary rush of blood to their loins. No doubt some of them would find a way to reach her. No doubt some of them would call. Theresa had told me she was often lonely. She wasn’t going to be lonely much longer.

‘I’m doing what I want to do,’ Theresa said. ‘And yes, for me it is about need. Definitely. There are some stories that have to be told, whatever the consequences.’

From above my head came a loud thump and a peel of raucous laughter. Footsteps clunked down the steps from the attic, shaking the whole apartment.

‘It looks like the consequences will be fame for you, perhaps enduring fame. Isn’t that something you want?’

Theresa looked away from the interviewer, her mouth pinched as if unimpressed by the question. ‘It’s not something I can control,’ she said. ‘It’s not in my hands.’

The interviewer moved on to the thorny issue of the sequel. What was next for Alex and Old Tilmann? What more was there to learn? Behind me a floorboard creaked. I turned to see Michael Schilling standing in the doorway of the bedroom, his raincoat draped over his arm, staring at the television. I guessed from his stunned expression that he had been there for some time.

I stood up. ‘Michael, there are some things I need to tell you.’

‘So, a sequel, is it?’ he said, eyes still fixed on the flickering screen. ‘The master follows the pupil follows the master. Very nice. Very incestuous.’

It was too late. He knew everything.

‘Michael, you don’t understand.’

‘You’re right, I don’t.’

I tried to explain: how I’d had to publish under a false name, otherwise the whole project would have been traced back to its point of origin, to me and to him. Even dead East German writers needed help to be published in the West. It was an explanation I’d been rehearsing for months.

Schilling just stared at me, shaking his head.

‘I was protecting Richter’s family, too,’ I said. ‘They’re still here.’

‘So they know about this?’

‘They will.’

‘You’re incredible.’

‘It was either this or burn the manuscript. Which would you have done?’

The Hartl party had grown tired of the attic and were filing back into the apartment in search of further inebriation. I turned back to the television and flipped the dial back to DFF-1, where the General Secretary of the Central Committee was being applauded by a large roomful of people. By the time I turned back again Schilling had gone.

I went out into the living room and was relieved to see him greeting the Hartls just as if nothing had happened, apologising for his lateness and blaming a last-minute automotive failure. I looked for an opportunity to explain myself more fully to him, to apologise for keeping him in the dark, to plead for his discretion (which I never seriously doubted), but that opportunity never came.

At around eleven I heard Schilling’s motorbike outside. I went to the window and watched him ride away down the hill, vanishing behind a funnel of dust. When it was my turn to leave I noticed that he had forgotten to take his raincoat with him.

35

There had always been two choices where Michael Schilling was concerned: tell him everything or tell him nothing. Anything else, any palatable halfway house, would have involved telling lies and I didn’t want to do that.

Of the two choices, full disclosure was the safest. Michael was my friend. He knew what it was to be in love, how it could lead a person to do reckless things. His own marriage was a perfect example. Silence left him free to discover the fraud behind
Survivors
for himself, which in turn opened up the possibility that he might one day confront Theresa (somehow, somewhere) in the course of which encounter she would learn the truth about who really wrote it. Yet on this occasion I had not taken the safe option. I had pushed the issue to one side, rather than deal with it. Schilling did not have access to Western books. It was perfectly likely he would never hear about Eva Aden and her novel, let alone read it. (Had it not enjoyed instant success, he wouldn’t have done.) But the truth is that I was embarrassed to admit to my deception. My work had apparently inspired Richter’s; but to claim his work as mine – even to one person – there was something cannibalistic about that. Like cannibalism itself, it smacked of desperation, the abandonment of all that was civilised.

Be that as it may,
Freizeit-Forum
changed the equation. Now I had no choice but to tell Schilling the whole story. I set out for his apartment the following morning, armed with his coat, fully intending to apologise and make a clean breast of everything, but even as I sat waiting at the tram stop, trying to ignore a young couple ravenously kissing and groping each other in the corner of the shelter, I had to acknowledge the uncomfortable duality of my motives: I was acting to preserve a friendship, but I was also acting to prevent the spread of a dangerous secret. It was a duality that would be as obvious to Schilling as it was to me.

My friend lived opposite a disused cemetery in the southern district of Südvorstadt. The origins of the four-storey apartment building were pre-war. In its heyday it would have boasted a stucco façade, modelled to look like stone, but this had been replaced under Actually Existing Socialism with a soot-encrusted pebbledash that was now coming away in chunks, revealing patches of livid pink brickwork, like a leper’s sores. It was a building whose hydrological entrails I knew well. Their age and disposition made them highly susceptible to blockage, and I had made several remedial visits over the years at Schilling’s request, armed with caustic soda and drain rods.

I pressed Schilling’s buzzer, but to no effect. I couldn’t even be sure the buzzer was working. Finding the doorway unlocked, I decided to make my way up to the apartment. I was on the second-floor landing when the door opposite opened.

‘He’s not in.’

It was Schilling’s neighbour, a garrulous and moon-faced widow by the name of Grabel, who smelled permanently of cats, her apartment being home to at least four felines of various ages and degrees of incontinence. As she spoke a tabby slipped between her legs and ran away down the stairs.

‘Do you know when he’ll be back?’

It was then Frau Grabel recognised me, after a fashion: ‘Herr Klempner, she said,
Klempner
being German for plumber. ‘What brings you here?’

‘A social call.’

She looked relieved. Blockages in Schilling’s building tended to produce unpredictable and malodorous side effects. No one was immune. ‘He’s gone to Berlin. Quite suddenly.’

‘Berlin?’ It occurred to me that the Ministry of Culture was in Berlin, and all the other ministries to whom a cultural scandal might be of interest. ‘Did he say why?’

Frau Grabel hesitated. ‘Well, it’s not my business . . .’ She sucked her teeth. ‘Anyway, why don’t you come in? Since you’ve come all this way.’

Normally I would have resisted Frau Grabel’s pungent hospitality. I was still haunted by the memory of the banana cake she had served me during my last visit, which turned out to contain – I can still feel it catching on my tonsils – a large fur ball. But at that time any unexpected movement on Schilling’s part was a cause for concern and would be until I knew where we stood.

No sooner was I inside than Frau Grabel began lamenting the state of her washers. Every tap in her apartment dripped, she said. Rust stains were playing havoc with her enamel. It soon became obvious that this was to be the price of her information, doubtless gleaned via the telephone line that she and Schilling were obliged to share. I protested that I did not have my tools, but it turned out that the late Herr Grabel had left his spouse a well-equipped toolbox, which she proudly extracted from under some cat litter. I found a few ancient but serviceable washers in a brown paper bag.

I turned off the water and set to work in the kitchen.

‘So why the disappearing act?’ I said. ‘What’s the big attraction in Berlin?’

Frau Grabel needed no further encouragement. The story of Schilling’s recent past came tumbling out, sugared with phoney sympathy and spiced with anecdote. Chronology was largely lost in this outpouring, likewise any distinction between fact and supposition. Certain essentials were nonetheless discernible. In the early hours of the morning Schilling had received a phone call from his ex-wife, Magdalena, in Berlin. She was in what Frau Grabel described as ‘a frightful state’. It seemed their son Paul had been taken into custody by the police – whether arrested or merely questioned was unclear. Magdalena seemed to think drugs were involved (at this point, I imagine, Frau Grabel had been obliged to hang up and was tiptoeing across the landing in her nylon fur slippers), although whether these directly prompted the police action was also unclear. Privately I suspected the worst. The last time I had seen Paul Schilling, I had been struck by his unhealthy appearance: the drawn cheeks, the lank hair, the bad skin. Of course, heroin addiction did not officially exist in the Workers’ and Peasants’ State, being a Western malaise arising from bourgeois capitalism and its constant need to subvert proletarian class consciousness. Under Actually Existing Socialism such addicts as existed were deemed to be mentally ill and locked up indefinitely in psychiatric hospitals. This, I imagined, was what had prompted Magdalena’s desperate phone call.

Frau Grabel took a seat at the kitchen table, her back to the old tiled
Kachelofen
that kept the frost at bay. ‘That boy’s been nothing but a source of grief,’ she said, manoeuvring an obese Persian on to her lap. ‘And
so
unlike his father. It makes you wonder . . . well, that Magdalena, she was never what you’d call a good girl. Not in the least.’

I ignored these insinuations regarding Schilling’s paternity, which I felt sure were unfounded. Either way, I preferred not to imagine what Paul’s incarceration would do to my friend, the maelstrom of dread and guilt that was sure to engulf him. At the same time I couldn’t help feeling relieved that the small matter of Wolfgang Richter’s novel had nothing to do with his sudden dash to Berlin and that the former was unlikely, given his urgent family concerns, to occupy more than a fleeting place in his mind.

‘I hope I can rely on you not to repeat what I’ve said, Herr Klempner,’ Frau Grabel said, as I struggled with a heavily corroded headgear nut. ‘It’s just that I know how concerned you are about your friend.’

It dawned on me that the old woman thought Klempner was really my name. Herr Tailor, Herr Baker, Herr Plumber. She had no idea that I was also Herr Krug, the author of
The Orphans of Neustadt
and People’s Champion of Art and Culture. A year earlier I would have enlightened her, but those days were already long gone.

I returned to Schilling’s scabrous residence the next evening, likewise unannounced, but again he was not home. It was not until the Monday night that I saw the lights on in his apartment. I walked up and banged on the door, but no one answered.

‘Michael, it’s me,’ I said. ‘Open up.’

From at least two places at once I heard a faint shuffling and a creaking of floorboards, as if the whole building were slowly coming alive.

‘Michael, I’ve got your coat.’

Stillness descended again. I knocked one more time, but with the same result. There was nothing I could do but leave, taking the raincoat with me.

Reluctantly I resorted to the telephone, calling Schilling’s office first thing Tuesday morning. I caught him just as he was arriving.

‘Michael, I owe you an explanation. Can we meet somewhere?’

‘You don’t owe me anything, Bruno.’ Schilling’s tone was reassuringly breezy. ‘If it’s that book you’re referring to, as far as I’m concerned it’s history.’

‘You seemed quite upset on Friday.’

‘I was just surprised. Caught off guard. Seeing you there in the bedroom, hunched over that television. I’ve never seen you look so hunted.’

‘Hunted?’ I explained that, for all manner of reasons, I’d preferred to watch
Freizeit-Forum
unobserved.

‘Anyway,’ Schilling said, ‘I’m sure you did the right thing, given the circumstances.’

‘It was better than the alternative. Better than what we planned to do.’

‘Absolutely.’

‘Better than burning it. At least this way –’

‘Nothing important is lost. I couldn’t agree more.’

‘But I should have told you. You were his editor, or would have been. I should have explained.’

Schilling’s breath pushed against the mouthpiece. Maybe he was sighing, or maybe he thought what I’d just said was humorous. ‘No, we agreed, didn’t we? I never saw the book and I never read it. Better that way for everyone.’

‘Well, in a way, yes.’

‘The less you know, the less you’re implicated.’

‘So you’re not unhappy?’

‘Why should I be?’

This was going very well. I hadn’t expected such an effortless absolution. But my friend had been so excited about his literary discovery; so horrified at the thought of losing it. Wasn’t it unnatural that he should already feel divorced from its future, having no stake and no entitlement? On the other hand the mere possibility that handling Richter’s work might incur official displeasure had sent him scurrying for cover. ‘Safety First’, in the Workers’ and Peasants’ State, was not a bad motto. I had lived by it myself very happily for as long as I could remember.

And then there was Paul. What were the needs of a dead writer – or, for that matter, a living one – next to those of your own flesh and blood?

‘I heard you went up to Berlin,’ I said. ‘Is everything all right?’

Schilling took a moment to answer. If we hadn’t been on the telephone I might have had some inkling as to why.

‘Who told you?’

‘Frau Grabel. Her cats are spying on you.’

Schilling didn’t laugh.

‘Everything’s fine. Paul’s got a new job. Right up in the north. He won’t be visiting so much for a while. I wanted to see him before he left.’

There was a tightness in Schilling’s delivery that told me this was not a matter he was keen to talk over.

‘So what kind of job is it?’

‘On the docks.’

‘The docks? Are you kidding?’

‘It’s a clerical position. Magdalena pulled some strings.’

I said I was pleased. ‘Let’s hope he sticks with it this time.’

‘I’m sure he will.’

I didn’t interrogate Schilling further. I didn’t ask about the heroin or the arrest, or if his ex-wife would really call him in the middle of the night to inform him of a filial change in career direction. After all Frau Grabel, from whom I had heard all this, was a mad old woman who smelled of cats’ urine and who had nothing better to do all day but eavesdrop on her neighbours. Out of loyalty I would have relayed her shameless gossip to my friend, had I not felt instinctively that of the two accounts relating to his recent comings and goings, hers was the one that rang true.