I took the early bus down to New York. A beautiful morning. It had rained in the night, then cleared. Light streaming down over the mountains. Cables looping forward between the utility poles, thick and heavy and glittering with gold raindrops like ropes of celestial gossamer. (The strange compulsion to note these things down. About as useful as a corpse growing fingernails!)
I had an hour to kill before our appointment. As I wandered slowly downtown, I became aware of a distinctly cooler appraisal of the city forming at the periphery of my familiar affection for the place.
Or perhaps it was more a kind of double vision, as if I were seeing things through a pair of mismatched spectacles: one lens rose-tinted, the other skewed by a disfiguringly merciless clarity.
Outside the Manhattan Fish Market, where I used to linger admiringly every time I passed, I fell into something like my old marvelling delight. But it seemed unstable now, encroached on by some looming unease that required a deliberate effort to resist. What was this? Inge’s scepticism superimposing itself on my own more ardent or gullible view? Some dim sense of raped oceans, poisoned seabeds? Could it have been the customers themselves, my fellow citizens, crowding at the counter to take delivery of their dinners, unaware that their guileless faces, their soft-fleshed bellies hanging before them like gentle, spherical pets, their wallet-waving arms, had by some strange quirk of fate come to form the universal hieroglyph for that blunt, plundering motion by which power avails itself of whatever sustenance it requires? Brandt’s gesture, it occurs to me; reaching down inside me for what he wanted. My own too, of course, back in Berlin, helping myself to Inge.
I wondered if it was possible that I had misread this city the first time around; mistaken its apparent vigour for a springtime ebullience when in fact what I was witnessing was the hectic gaudiness of the downward, the catabolic, cycle. The invisible worm, to quote myself, ha, that flies through the night, in the howling storm, hurtling down along the city’s cracks and fault lines to the sick heart, splash! – these flags everywhere its streaming blood, its autumnal foliage?
Menzer was staying in a loft on Bond Street: tall and narrow with dark alcoves off the far end and a clutter of artworks and plants and mismatched grandiose furniture strewn throughout its immense length. It reminded me strongly of his place off Saarbrücker Strasse; so strongly in fact that as I went in I had the feeling not so much of entering a room as stepping into an aura, an enveloping atmosphere of privileged bohemianism that was apparently inseparable from the man himself.
In his own person too he seemed barely changed: a little thinner, a little greyer; his features drawn a little more tightly, as if by some slowly rotating inner ratcheting mechanism, around the uneven contours of his skull. But otherwise no visible concession to the years that had passed since I had last seen him, and certainly no discernible imprint of trauma from his public disgrace. As if being Klaus Menzer were an eternal proposition, not subject to the laws of mutability and decay that govern the rest of us.
He shook my hand.
‘Coffee?’
‘Sure.’
He made a pot of coffee in the open kitchen; lifting pans and jars with a droll carelessness; the handling of such humble objects being apparently a somewhat comical anomaly in the life of an eminence such as himself.
The same crumpled suit and drab T-shirt as he had always worn in the past drooped in the same ways over his elongated frame. The same silver-rimmed glasses alternately magnifying and concealing his eyes.
We sat with our mugs in armchairs of padded corduroy and gilded wood. I said little: I had made up my mind not to incur humiliation by engaging Menzer in nervous small talk. I would outsilence him: force him to work his own way towards whatever communication he had summoned me here in order to make. He gave a faint smile, seeming to take note of this, and to be amused by it.
‘So. Here we are in America,’ he said.
‘Yes.’
‘How long, for you?’
‘Since ’86.’
‘You must like it.’
‘I do.’
‘Inge also?’
‘Yes.’ I had no intention of opening up my private life to him.
‘No plans to go back?’
‘No.’
‘Me neither. I like it here. Did I tell you why I came over?’
‘No.’
‘Would you like to hear?’
‘OK.’
‘A film producer wanted to make a movie about me!’ He gave a laugh. ‘How about that? He brought me over from Berlin earlier this year and we flew to Hollywood together. Have you ever flown first-class? There were little pink shreds all over the bathroom. I thought someone had been tearing up the toilet paper, but it was rose petals! In Hollywood I had a house to myself up in the hills with glass walls looking onto the ocean and a garden full of orange trees. The ocean there isn’t blue, which would be almost boring, but sort of a fluorescent violet, with gold sparks on it at night . . .’
I sat back in my baronial chair, sipping my coffee, a little surprised that the great Menzer should think it worth the effort to give me his impressions of Hollywood, but content to hear him out. A chrome lamp hung from a long, snaking stem, its base far away in another part of the enormous room, so that the light it shed on us seemed somehow stolen or siphoned off.
‘We had meetings with studio executives every day. Those studios are like fiefdoms from the middle ages – they have their own private armies and transportation systems, their own livery, even their own language. Paramount is the Vatican, hacienda-style. The executives are all from tiny, specialised countries like Iceland or Finland. We sat in their offices and told them my life story. The leader of the Prenzlauer Berg avant-garde poetry scene who turns out to have been a Stasi informer: that was our pitch. They thought it was hilarious.’
Strange sensation – a kind of simultaneous pain and numbness – as he alludes in that matter-of-fact way to his betrayals. As if treachery were just some private habit you could make socially acceptable by coming out of the closet about it; shifting the burden of shame from speaker to listener . . . I tried not to flinch, but Menzer’s sensitive antennae picked up my unease immediately. He smiled:
‘You were never Gaucked, were you, Stefan?’
‘What?’
He spoke quietly. ‘Your file was never opened, was it?’
‘Not to my knowledge,’ I replied. I refrained from adding that I imagined he already knew that.
‘What I thought,’ he said.
He paused, the sign of some sort of delicate quandary appearing on his expressive face. That face! Under our cone of light every tilting plane in it, every meandering gully seemed brimmingly inhabited by him; the dwelling place in which some particular refinement of his elaborate spirit was lovingly housed, like the different parts of an instrument in its plush-lined case.
‘Well. To get back to my movie . . .’ The story began unfurling from him once again. I supposed now that he must have some purpose in telling it to me in such detail, that it was not merely a preamble to something else, and I began listening with a sort of guarded attentiveness.
Despite the enthusiastic responses, the meetings had come to nothing:
‘They all had the same problem,’ Menzer said, smiling. ‘They loved the idea but in the end they couldn’t see a way to present someone who betrays all his friends as a “sympathetic” character; someone audiences can “root for”, whatever that means . . .’
Back in New York the producer had settled Menzer’s account at the Pierre, where he had been putting him up, and moved on to other projects. But instead of going back to Germany, Menzer had decided to stay on in New York.
‘I’m like you,’ he said. ‘I like it here. I want to stay.’
His plan, he told me, was to try to get this film of his off the ground by himself, as an independent production.
‘So I don’t get my million dollars,’ he said, with a shrug that managed to convey both an unabashed sense that he was owed such a sum for his life story, and a princely indifference to being deprived of it. ‘But from what I hear you can still do all right with these New York companies who make lower-budget films where you don’t have to root for the hero. Now, this director Inge worked with; the one who used to visit us in Berlin?’
‘Eric Lowenthal?’
‘Lowenthal. Yes. I was thinking, since he has this prior interest in things East German, he was someone I should maybe get in touch with . . .’
For a moment now I began to wonder whether I had seriously misgauged Menzer. Though I hadn’t formed any precise idea of what his reasons for bringing me here might be, I had invested them with a degree of malice in proportion to my belief in the man’s limitless capacity for harm. And yet here he was with apparently nothing more sinister in mind than to hustle me for Inge’s old connections in the film business!
‘Well . . .’ I said warily, ‘that might not be a bad idea . . .’
‘So I was wondering if you thought Inge would be willing to give him my proposal.’
I answered carefully, half daring to hope that if I could placate him in this minor practical matter, I might after all be able to prevent any more menacing demand from entering his mind; half suspecting that this entire apparent reversal of our usual roles, with him as supplicant and myself as potential benefactor, was merely another way of amusing himself at my expense.
‘Yes . . . I think she would. I’m sure she would . . .’
It didn’t seem the right moment to mention that Inge and Lowenthal had ceased to be on speaking terms many years ago.
‘What about the money side?’ Menzer continued, casting off another of his disconcerting half smiles into the darkening room. ‘Do you think she would be able to put me in touch with investors?’
‘Inge?’
‘Yes, Inge.’
‘Well . . . possibly . . . I mean, I . . .’
As I was blustering, he yawned suddenly and looked at his watch:
‘Just a moment.’
Then, to my surprise, he called out towards an alcove at the far end of the room:
‘Lilian, it’s four o’clock.’
A woman emerged from the alcove. A lover, I supposed. A pang went through me. Had disgrace taken nothing from him? His old arrogant manner still intact, this choice piece of Manhattan real estate at his disposal and now, to cap it all, some girl, no doubt adoring as they always were, with nothing better to do than wait around in his bedroom in the middle of the afternoon? She came towards us in the dark room, picking her way through the bric-a-brac like a deer through trees; moving on past the freestanding kitchen. Just before her features came into the light of our chrome lamp, I realised, with the body’s quicker apprehension than the mind’s, who she was.
She came to a halt at Menzer’s shoulder, looking at me with an empty expression.
Without her pearls, without the glamorous atmosphere of Gloria’s party, without the sting of Harold Gedney’s snub still reverberating inside me, she seemed a less imposing figure than my memory had made her. Even so, I felt stunned, caught badly off my guard. And as though she had just thrown her glass of wine at me again I felt a burning sensation spreading down across my face and chest.
‘This is Lilian,’ Menzer said, ‘she’s studying design at Parsons. She has to go to class now. Right, honey?’
‘Right.’
‘See you later. Be good.’
He squeezed her hand and she left, smiling as she passed me by.
A silence ensued after she closed the door. Menzer seemed to be lost in a reverie of private delight at his little coup de théâtre, while for my own part I was so shaken I didn’t trust myself to speak. I wonder now how I could have failed to see beforehand that my drenching at Gloria’s party was connected to Menzer’s reappearance out of the blue by more than just the vague fatefulness to which I had attributed both things. Not that it makes much difference what form or combination of forms one’s designated Furies assume when they awaken. All that matters is that one recognise them, and even I was capable of that.
It was Menzer who finally broke the silence.
‘I thought you’d appreciate the allusion,’ he said, smiling, ‘as a fellow poet.’
I managed to muster a more or less dignified terseness:
‘I missed it.’
‘Ascalaphus. The dead man splashed by Proserpine for informing on her. You a Sinn und Form poet too!’
‘How did you know I’d be at that party?’
‘At the museum? Lilian’s old roommate told us. She’s a friend of Gloria Danilov’s social secretary. She –’
But I suddenly didn’t care:
‘What do you want?’
He feigned bafflement at the question. I rephrased it:
‘How much money do you want?’
‘Oh, you mean for my movie?’
‘Whatever.’
‘Well, let’s see, I was thinking of offering individual shares to potential investors at five thousand dollars apiece. How does that sound?’
I absorbed this, struck by the realisation that what I was encountering here was one of the abiding motifs of my existence: that act of predation I had been thinking about earlier; the actual naked plundering motion in which a human being becomes for a moment demon-like. I looked at Menzer; peered into his face, into the light-dashed lenses over his eyes, half expecting, hoping even, to catch some outward sign of transfiguration, if only to see how I myself had appeared when I had put the demon mask over my own face.
There was no visible change, of course.
‘It’s sort of fascinatingly expensive, isn’t it, New York?’ he was saying, evidently immensely pleased with the way things had gone. ‘I have this fantasy –’
‘How about fifteen thousand?’ I interrupted him again. An idea had come to me. It had just seemed to spring up fully formed out of that fast-moving, dubiously inventive region of my mind, my sprinter’s imagination – absurd, outrageous, unconscionable, and yet in its very preposterousness, irresistible.
Menzer looked as if he were trying very hard not to show surprise.
‘Five thousand when I get home,’ I said, ‘then another ten if you do something for me.’
A mirthful gleam came into his eye, as though the thought that I should have things in my humble life of such apparent momentousness entertained him greatly.
‘Do what?’ he asked.
I told him. He listened in silence, and made no comment when I had finished.
‘Take it or leave it,’ I said, and got up to go. He remained seated, grey and gaunt in the surreptitious light of the chrome lamp.
‘Let me think about it,’ he said as I opened the door.
‘I’ll call in a few days,’ I told him as I let myself out.
‘Inge has a lover,’ he called out suddenly. ‘Is that what we’re talking about here?’
I turned to him, struck by the inadvertant poignancy of this.
‘Yes, as a matter of fact it is.’