I was purchased, so my Uncle Heinrich informed me, for two truckloads of grade B Seville oranges. Inge was more expensive. She was something of a cause célèbre in Berlin – a well-known actress in those days, as well as a prominent agitator in the peace movement – and the authorities in the former East Germany, whatever else they might have been, were astute merchants. For her release they demanded hard currency: five thousand dollars’ worth of deutschmarks.
The money and oranges were given by the West German government to the Diaconical Work, a charitable trust of the Protestant Church, who in turn handed it over to the East German Agency of Commercial Co-ordination, Koko, where a friend of my Uncle Heinrich’s was deputy director.
Such was the procedure in what was then known as Freikauf: the selling of dissident flesh for goods or hard currency.
On the eighth of June 1986, an overcast day with dots of moisture sparkling in the warm grey air, Inge and I were escorted in an unmarked van to the Potsdam side of the Glienicker Bridge, which we then crossed on foot, Inge’s eyes full of tears, mine dry, each of us carrying two suitcases; without speaking, without pausing for breath and without looking back.
Two months later we were on a Lufthansa flight to JFK. The Muhlenberg Institute, an organisation of Lutheran pastors who had been in contact with Inge’s father (himself a pastor, who had fallen from favour with the official ‘Church in Socialism’ for his work helping to reunite families divided by the Wall), had sponsored our immigration, guaranteeing a loan to help us settle, and lending us a small apartment above a homeless shelter in the East Village, which we were to supervise in lieu of paying rent.
We had had no intention of settling in West Germany, or for that matter anywhere else in Europe. America was always our destination. Nowhere else would do. In my case this was a straightforward decision: for as long as I could remember, America had been the point of convergence for all the unfulfilled cravings of my parched soul, and the idea of getting out of the East had always been inseparably bound up in my imagination with that of finding some way of transplanting myself into the magically enriching soil of the New World.
So far as one can ever account for such things, I suppose this fixation must have had its origins in my father’s professional failure and the measures my mother then took to find other means of fulfilling her ambitions.
The chain of events began in 1974. My father, a lawyer by training, had been quietly consolidating a career in the diplomatic service of the German Democratic Republic, where his speciality was negotiating fine-print details in the Friendship Treaties springing up between the GDR and other countries in the Eastern Bloc. It was a humdrum if respectable occupation, but after the rest of the free world had followed West Germany in granting full diplomatic recognition to our republic in 1973, and the UN itself had opened its doors to us, my father was selected as a junior member on the GDR mission to that august body, and our lives looked set to change.
For a few months he shuttled back and forth between Berlin and New York: kindly, remote, befogged by jet lag and overwork, but always bearing gifts of a radiant strangeness – Slinkies, watches for deep-sea divers, a wireless that woke you with a cup of instant coffee. These little marvels formed the entire body and substance of my image of New York, and as I discovered many years later when Inge and I flew in, the picture they had created was strangely accurate: there below us were the toys and gadgets from that brief period in my family’s life; metamorphosed into an entire city of hooped and flowing steel, of vast, luminous, multi-dialled watches, of buildings like giant radios with towers of glass and streaming water.
My father’s visits grew steadily longer. There was talk of a permanent posting, even of our being sent out there to live with him . . .
New York! America! In those dark ages of absolute division between East and West, the very word ‘America’ seemed to bristle with dangerous, glittering energies. Like ‘Moscow’, it named the source of some ultimate fright and power. Bonn was our West German sibling: object of rivalry, contempt, occasional jealousy; but America and Russia were parental figures, and upon them we projected all our fantasies of supernatural and possibly cannibalistic strength. Nominally, of course, one was our friend, the other our enemy, but both gave us the same peculiar excitement to contemplate.
For my mother, the idea of our being sent to live in New York played directly into her sense of our family’s innate superiority. She and her brother – my Uncle Heinrich – were of blue-blooded Silesian descent. Naturally this was not something to brag about in communist East Germany, and they had been quick to drop the ‘von’ from the family name after the war. But in their quietly indomitable way, these two had maintained a sense of themselves as somehow ineffably superior to other people, and moreover they had managed to transmit this sense to those around them, not by any crude arrogance or self-aggrandisement, but by a certain aristocratic froideur; a mixture of haughty reserve and sudden graciousness, which bewildered people, intimidated them, and filled them with a kind of strained awe. My mother in particular was an expert in that particular form of psychological control which consists on the one hand in withholding, or at least delaying, a smile or word of kindness when the situation seems to call for one, and on the other in bestowing her approval of something – when she chose to do so – with a magisterial impersonality, as if she were merely the channel for an objective fact that had been handed down to her by some celestial source of judgement. The effect of the latter was to make one feel elevated, officially congratulated, as it were; as if a medal with the head of Lenin on it had been pinned to one’s chest.
You might imagine that in a socialist society a personality such as hers, with the distinctly unegalitarian idea of life that it projected, couldn’t possibly thrive. But somehow she managed to short-circuit the mental processes by which people might form a criticism of her in political terms, and confront them instead on a more intimate and primitive level of the psyche, where authority, if it succeeds in imposing itself as such, is unquestioningly believed in and – how shall I put it? – quaked before.
She was no beauty, with her sturdy little frame clad always in the drabbest brown and grey clothes, her crooked, slightly jagged-looking front teeth that dominated one’s initial impression of her face, and made even her oldest acquaintances prefer to shake hands with her than exchange kisses. But there was something forceful, even magnetic in her appearance. Her dark brown, slightly protruberant eyes, encased in folded, lashless lids, possessed an unusual mobility and expressiveness. As they narrowed attentively, tilted to admit a faint sardonic lightness, gathered into their corners the traces of a codified smile, flashed with anger or coldly averted themselves from your gaze, drawing behind them an almost visible portcullis, one felt – with the fascination of seeing anything naked – that one was observing the fluctuating movements of the very organism to which the names Frieda, Frau Vogel, Mother, all referred. For as long as I can remember, there was a patch of pure white in her greyish brown hair, such as you see in certain city pigeons, and this too seemed the mark or brand of some quality that set her apart, though I was always uncertain whether it represented something done to her, or something she was liable to do unto others.
All of this – the haughtiness of her manner, the crooked teeth, the naked, imposing eyes, the little arctic patch on her head – was contained in, and to some extent tempered by, an overall burnish of tragedy; a kind of final, stabilising layer that had been added to her portrait during the middle part of the 1970s. This was the tragedy of thwarted ambition, and my father was to blame for it.
In his profession hard work and competence landed you in Hungary or, God help you, Romania; above-average skills might get you as far as one of the West European Permanent Representations; a certain type of well-connected career lackey would end up in Moscow. But in the private hierarchies of my mother’s imagination, a mission into the Imperium Americanum was an acknowledgement to those entrusted with it that they were the very crème de la crème, the crack troops, the elite. As our posting there grew more certain, all the chilly potency of that vast opponent seemed, by virtue of our association with it, to decant itself into our lives, and for several weeks we emitted an eerie glow among our friends, like that of immortals from legend, imprisoned for a term among mankind, but now at last able to reveal their true lineage.
Naturally my mother pretended to make light of these developments, even to disparage them. At the mention of America, or New York, or the United Nations, her lips would purse with a look of involuntary annoyance, as if some ancient personal grievance were being referred to, after which she would rather affectedly change the subject. Nevertheless, she saw to it that people were told of our imminent elevation. Allusions to my father’s jet lag were dropped nonchalantly into conversations with our neighbours. Our friends in the Politburo, the Gretzes, were invited to dinner with Uncle Heinrich, who could be counted on to raise the subject with a twinkle of indiscretion, and thereby ensure that they were properly confounded. Heinrich himself, whom my father had helped get a job in the Office of the Chief of the People’s Police, spread the word among our acquaintances in the security community.
Once, to my chagrin, my mother made an appearance at the school my brother and I attended, asking to be allowed to sit in on my history class. The subject was a comparative analysis of the emancipation of the serfs in Russia and the abolition of slavery in the United States. The idea being instilled in us was that the Americans had had no ideological interest in freeing the slaves, and only happened to do so by accident, whereas the Russians, as their subsequent history showed . . . et cetera. My mother sat at the back of the classroom with a stern expression. Halfway through the class she stood up and called to me in a quiet voice:
‘Stefan, come with me, would you, please?’
Writhing inwardly, I rose and made my way towards her under the puzzled eyes of my teacher. We went to the office of the principal, whom my mother proceeded to harangue about the poor quality of the class.
‘I don’t see that the interests of our children are well served by quite such a crude portrayal of the Western powers,’ she declared. ‘I hardly think that those of us obliged to have direct contact with the capitalist system’ – placing a hand on my arm – ‘are likely to benefit from being taught about it in terms of caricature . . .’
I stood beside her; oppressed, heavy, numb; assuming the posture that now seems characteristic of my entire adolescence: hunched, eyes averted, blank-faced; a kind of permanent, petrified shrug.
The principal eyed us shrewdly from beneath her portraits of Marx and Engels. She must have been trying to decide whether my mother was raving mad, or was perhaps privy to some new educational policy development forming itself in the higher echelons of the party. Luckily for us she seemed to choose the latter. She promised to investigate the matter personally and see to it that the teacher in question was properly reprimanded. With a curt nod my mother thanked her and we departed.
The culminating act in her folie de grandeur (it amounted to that) came one evening while my father was away in New York. She, my brother Otto, myself and our ‘lodger’ Kitty (our maid in all but name) were seated at the dinner table, which, as usual, Kitty had covered with a cotton cloth before laying, when my mother suddenly exclaimed, ‘The linen! The von Riesen linen! We’ll take it to New York!’
It turned out that a trunk full of family belongings had survived not only the war but also the upheavals following Yalta that had left my mother and her brother orphaned and penniless in what became East Germany. The trunk was in my mother’s possession, stored in the basement of our apartment building. Among other things it contained a full set of Irish linen, including tablecloths and napkins, every piece embroidered with the von Riesen initials and family crest. Upon some fantastical new whim, my mother had taken it into her head that this linen, spread on a communist table in New York (I suppose in her imagination she saw herself as some sort of society hostess in the diplomatic world), would strike just the right note of mystery and coolly ironic humour, while at the same time impressing people tremendously.
‘Nobody will know what to make of us,’ she declared. ‘And we won’t explain. Just –’ and she gave a sort of aloof shrug as if indicating to some fascinated inquirer that she personally had never troubled her head to wonder about anything so trifling as a set of initials that happened, yes, since you ask, to coincide with those of her own maiden name. On these rare occasions, when the outward guard of her demeanour was let down to reveal the rather childlike cravings and fantasies it served to advance, there was something endearing about her. Our hearts went out to her then; we felt we were being gathered into some rich and vulnerable conspiracy, and our loyalties were aroused.
Otto and I were sent down to fetch the linen as soon as dinner was over. To do this we had to get Herr Brandt, the janitor, to let us into the storage room.
‘Try to keep Brandt from poking his nose into our things, would you?’ my mother asked. ‘Not that we have anything to be ashamed of. But he can be a nuisance. Here, take him one of the miniatures and ask for the keys to let yourselves in. Tell him you’ll give them back to him when you’re finished.’
It went without saying that Brandt was a police informer, and my mother was probably right in imagining he would think it his duty to make a report on something even so trifling as the retrieval of a set of initialled linen from a trunk. It was also known that he could make himself obliging over practically any matter in return for small gifts, preferably alcoholic. He was especially partial to the Schaad-Neumann brand of aquavit, impossible to get hold of in the GDR, and my father made a point of bringing back a set of miniatures whenever he went to the States, for the express purpose of lubricating Herr Brandt. Thirty or forty of them were lined up in a double row at the back of a shelf in our larder.
Taking one of these frosted, cylindrical bottles, Otto and I went down to Herr Brandt’s headquarters on the ground floor.
Ours was a modern building, constructed from the cheapest materials, but well maintained, and with a few grandiose trimmings, as befitted its inhabitants, who were mostly party officials of one kind or another. Four white pillars stood incongruously in the middle of the brick front, marking the entrance. The lobby was floored with polished slabs made of a pink and white agglomerate, like slices of vitrified mortadella. A bronze bust of Lenin, looking oddly piratical, stood on a plinth by the elevator, which generally worked. On every floor was a plastic indoor plant, the leaves of which Herr Brandt could be seen laboriously squirting and buffing on Sunday mornings. A powerful odour compounded of floor polish and boiled meat pervaded the stairwell, and there was a more or less constant sound of toilets flushing.
Brandt was in the glass-walled office to the side of the main entrance, surveying the empty lobby with his usual dull stare. He wore a crumpled brown jacket over a sweat-soiled undershirt in which his womanly breasts and very large stomach bulged and sagged like pumpkins in a sack. Black stubble glinted on his whitish skin in the artificial light of the little booth, and the bulging roil of scar tissue between his throat and ear gleamed like satin. This scar, so he claimed, was from a grenade wound received during some battle on the Eastern Front. To my youthful and admittedly subjective eye, it was a decidedly unheroic-looking scar, and in fact had something furtive and guilty about it, like some malignant companion that had attached itself to this otherwise vague and uninteresting person. It was the scar – it seemed to me – that compiled reports on the comings and goings of the inhabitants of our building; the scar that had to be propitiated with bottles of Schaad-Neumann aquavit. Brandt himself gave the impression of living under its tyranny. For his own part he would have been content to pad around the place keeping the plants shiny, the floor waxed, supplying the tenants with cheap eggs from the poultry co-operative where he had a special concession. But some incomprehensible malignancy had settled upon him, and he was now its servant.
Once, when I was quite young, I had seen him carrying a parcel to the door of an elderly couple who lived on our floor. The parcel, which evidently contained either a mirror or a framed picture, slipped from his hands and fell to the floor with a smash and tinkle of breaking glass. He stooped down at once to examine it, prodding the wrapping with his fingers, an expression of grave concern on his face. Then all of a sudden a most extraordinary cynical sneer took possession of his features. Fully aware of me looking at him, he dumped the parcel at the door of the elderly couple and padded off, shrugging as he passed me by, as if to say, Nobody will know it was me who broke it, and even if they suspect, there’s nothing they can do about it. Furthermore, he seemed to convey that my having witnessed it, far from alarming him, in fact implicated me in the deed itself, making me no better than him. And the strange thing was, I did feel mysteriously implicated, and guilty too. It was the first time I had seen an adult do something patently and knowingly ‘wrong’, and the idea that such a thing could be came as a profound shock. From then on, whenever I ran into Brandt on my own, he would give me a contemptuous, almost taunting look, as though to say that he and I knew each other too well to have to pretend to be respectable citizens.
Otto told him we needed to get into the storeroom. He rose with a lugubrious sigh, evidently meaning to accompany us.
‘No need for you to come,’ Otto said suavely. ‘Just give us the key and we’ll let ourselves in. Here, this is for you. Compliments of the house.’
Brandt hesitated, holding the bottle in his hand as if he didn’t know what to do with it. Then he winked unpleasantly – or rather it seemed that his scar winked – and unhooked the key from the ring at his belt.
The storeroom occupied a large area of the basement and consisted of a series of open cubicles behind a single steel-mesh fence with a padlocked door in it. We opened this door with the key Brandt had given us, and by the dim light of a couple of naked bulbs found the cubicle that corresponded to our apartment, picking our way between the many glue traps Brandt had set out, in which insects and the occasional mouse lay in odd contorted positions, some of them still twitching with life.
There in our cubicle, among bits and pieces of old furniture which we no longer used, lay my mother’s trunk: not so very large, but with ornate hasps of tarnished brass at every corner and great florid brass buckles that intimated a world of strange and remote ceremoniousness. I suppose I must have seen it before, but I had never taken much notice of it, and certainly never looked inside.
A sweet, mildewy smell rose as we opened the heavy lid. It was neatly packed, everything stowed in small boxes or bundles. The linen was in one corner, in a rust-coloured cotton sack, itself monogrammed with the intertwined initials and three falcons of the von Riesen crest. My brother looked on impassively, apparently less intrigued than I by this faintly mouldy-smelling exhumation of our family’s past, while I poked around, turning up a set of silver spoons, an old marbled photograph album and a case of pocket-sized books beautifully bound in dark green leather.
‘Come on,’ Otto said, grabbing the pile of linen, ‘the mother’ll start fretting.’
I looked at the case of books. Of all things, it was a set of poetry: World Poetry in Translation, Volumes I to VI. I didn’t know or for that matter care very much about literature, but I had an instinct for contraband, and the thought of anything – poetry included – that might not be officially approved of automatically excited my interest. I opened one of the books: poetry on one side, German prose translation on the other, but Otto was growing impatient.
‘Let’s split,’ he said, ‘it gives me the creeps down here.’
Closing the trunk, we went back upstairs, Otto waiting for the elevator with the linen while I returned the key to Herr Brandt.
Seeing me alone, the man immediately relaxed into that familiar contemptuous expression.
‘So did you find what you were looking for?’ he asked.
I muttered that we did.
‘And what was that?’
I looked at him, more surprised perhaps than I should have been by this flagrant reneging on his tacit contract to turn a blind eye: here after all was a man who had obviously broken every bond of decency with his fellow human beings. His face, or rather the swelling tissue at his neck, seemed to stare at me with a brazen leer as if to say, So what if I accepted a bribe to mind my own business? You know me better than that . . . However, it was apparently out of personal amusement, to remind me that we were both contemptible creatures, that he asked, rather than any real interest, for when I said, ‘Oh, just a few odds and ends,’ he merely gave a chuckle and let the matter drop.
Upstairs, my mother and Kitty unpacked the linen. It had lain so long in the trunk that the folds seemed to have made permanent creases in the material, and the creases themselves had discoloured slightly, forming a grid-like pattern over everything we unfolded. But the silk-embroidered monograms were intact on every corner, shiny as the calm areas on ruffled water, and in spite of the poor state of the linen itself, my mother still seemed entirely satisfied with her idea.
She and Kitty spent the next day washing the linen and wringing it through the mangle. The following morning, when my father returned from New York, he found them ironing it in the kitchen.
It was evident that all was not well with him. Normally he was fastidious about his appearance, careful to keep his wavy black hair well combed, aspiring to a well-groomed anonymity in his dark suits, plain ties and clean white shirts. Even after his all-night flights back from New York he would look spruce and tidy, if a little tired. But this time there was a strange raggedness about him: his tie loose, his shirt dishevelled, his jacket crumpled as if he had used it for a pillow. Most unusually, he had not shaved at the airport. And there was a haggard look in his red-rimmed eyes as they roved around the pieces of linen draped all over the kitchen.
‘What’s this?’ he asked, turning up the corner of a tablecloth and examining the embroidered initials.
My mother told him, ‘I thought it might come in useful when we go to New York.’
‘Put it away. Get rid of it.’
It was extremely rare to hear him speak sharply to my mother. She retorted at once:
‘What’s the matter with you, Joseph? Didn’t you sleep on the plane?’
‘Kitty, leave us, would you?’
Kitty slipped out of the kitchen. My father waited till he heard her close the door of her room.
‘Are you out of your mind?’ he asked my mother.
‘Joseph, please don’t speak to me in that manner.’
‘As if your family isn’t enough of a liability already, you have to go flaunting your ridiculous heirlooms in front of strangers . . .’ He waggled the embroidered corner at my mother. ‘Von Riesen . . . What do you think this is, the Hapsburg Empire? The court of King Ludwig? Are you crazy?’
‘I would hardly call Kitty a stranger.’
‘You have no idea who she talks to.’
My mother’s eyes gleamed dangerously. She asked in a tone of deadly self-control:
‘Joseph, what is the matter? Did something happen in New York?’
‘No!’ he shouted. He seemed to quiver. And for a moment a look of fear crossed his tired, careworn face.
For my mother was right. Something had happened in New York. It appeared my father had made a blunder. What he had done, I learned later, was to have slightly overestimated his own licence to make concessions in the finer detail of an informal round of arms negotiation; a minute conciliatory gesture that he had believed himself empowered to offer, but which had been relayed to a member of the Soviet SALT II negotiating team stationed in Geneva and promptly aroused that personage’s imperial ire. On the diplomatic stage at that particular moment in history, when the two sides of the globe had worked themselves into an inflammable sweat of paranoid terror about each other’s intentions, the smallest things were charged with an exaggerated significance. There was the well-known incident of the Soviet official who forgot to remove his hat when he greeted President Nixon in Moscow for the signing of the SALT I treaty. The negligence was interpreted by the Americans as a deliberate affront, and the newspapers spent many days speculating on what precise grievance was being symbolically expressed. Given that this year, the year of my father’s blunder, happened to be the very year in which our state was prevailed upon to change its constitution, and proclaim itself ‘for ever and irrevocably allied’ with the Soviet Union, my father had good reason to be worried. History doesn’t relate what happened to the official who forgot to take off his hat, but there is little reason to believe that he was forgiven for his error.
At any rate, my father wasn’t. A few days after his return he was told that he had been removed from the UN team.
My father must have guessed that that was to be his last trip; in addition to the usual case of miniatures for bribing Herr Brandt, he had brought with him presents of an especially poignant ‘Americanness’: a raccoon-skin hat for my mother, a New Mexican turquoise pin for Kitty, a calculator for Otto, and for me a set of metal ballpoint pens, each in the shape of a famous American skyscraper. These joined the other knick-knacks and gadgets he had brought home on earlier trips, and because they were now part of a finite series, never to be further augmented, they acquired a hallowed quality in our household. They were the sacred relics of a brief, visionary connection with a reality larger than our own; one that had tragically eluded our grasp.