She didn’t say anything more, but he was highly precocious and immediately felt ashamed of kicking her. She never had to tell him what not to do, and she never did. He began to paw and prod her, trying to rouse her, saying, “Mama, Mama, I’m sorry I kicked you, please get up.” But now she was weeping—real tears, not make-believe. He stopped pawing her and didn’t know what to do. He ran to his bedroom and did some crying of his own, hoping she would hear him. He ended up howling, but she still didn’t come to him. He stopped crying and went back to the living room. She was still on the floor, in the exact same position, her eyes open.
“Mama?”
“You didn’t do anything wrong,” she murmured.
“I didn’t hurt you?”
“You’re perfect. The world isn’t.”
She didn’t move. The only thing he could think to do was to go back to his room and lie very still, like her. But this was boring, so he opened a book. He was still reading it when he heard his father come home. “Katya? Katya!” His father’s footsteps sounded stern and angry. Then Andreas heard a slap. After a moment, a second slap. Then his father’s footsteps again, and then his mother’s, then a clatter of pots and pans. When he went out to the kitchen, his mother gave him a warm smile, her familiar warm smile, and asked what he’d been reading. At dinner the parental conversation was the same as ever, his father mentioning the name of some person, his mother saying something funny and slightly mean about this person, his father replying “From each according to his ability” or something similarly sententious and correct, his mother turning to Andreas and giving him the special wink she liked to give him. How he loved her! Loved both of them! The earlier scene had been a bad dream.
Many of his other early memories were of attending committee meetings at the university with her. She gave him a chair in the corner of the meeting room, away from the table, and he precociously read chapter-books—in German, Werner Schmoll, Nackt unter Wölfen, Kleine Shakespeare-Fabeln für junge Leser; in English, Robin Hood and Steinbeck—while the gathered professors outdid one another in proposing new ways to align the Anglistik curriculum with class struggle and better serve the German worker. Probably no meetings at the university were more suffocatingly doctrinaire, because no department was more inessential and embattled. Andreas developed an almost telepathic connection with his mother; he knew exactly when to look up from his book and receive her special wink, the wink that told him that she and he were suffering together and together were smarter than anyone else. Her colleagues probably didn’t love having a child in the room, but Andreas had a preternaturally long attention span and was so in tune with his mother that he knew what might embarrass her and never did it. Only in extreme situations did he get up and tug on her sleeve so that she could take him to the ladies’ room to pee.
At one of the longest of these meetings—so Katya’s story went; Andreas didn’t remember it—he became too drowsy to read and nestled his head on the armrest of his chair. One of Katya’s colleagues, trying to be tactful in the presence of her son, and presumably unaware of his language skills, suggested in English that perhaps the boy should go lay down in her office. According to Katya, Andreas immediately sat up straight and shouted out, in English: “To say ‘lay’ when you mean ‘lie’ is a lie!” It was true that he’d learned the distinction between lie and lay at some point, and that his estimation of his own intelligence was very high, but he still couldn’t believe that he’d been clever enough, at six, to say such a thing. Katya insisted that he had. It was one of many precocity stories that she liked to retell: how her six-year-old’s English was better than her tenured colleague’s. Her retellings didn’t embarrass Andreas as much as he later came to feel they should have. He learned early to tune out her pride in him, to take it as a given and move on.
He saw less of her as he advanced through the regimentations and indoctrinations of lower school and afterschool programs, but by then he was already convinced that he had the world’s best parents. He still loved coming home and matching wits with his mother bilingually, he was better able now to read her favorite plays and novels and be the person his father wasn’t, a person who read literature, and although he could also see better that she wasn’t entirely stable (there were further mental collapses, on the floor of her study, in the bathtub, and occasional unaccountable absences followed by unlikely explanations) he felt a kind of noblesse oblige toward his friends and classmates, taking it as a given that their mothers were less wonderful than his. This conviction persisted until puberty.
In theory, psychologists were unnecessary in the Republic of Bad Taste, because neurosis was a bourgeois malady, a morbid expression of contradictions that by definition could not exist in a perfect workers’ state. Nevertheless, there were psychologists, a few of them, and when Andreas was fifteen his father arranged for him to see one of them. He stood accused of having tried to kill himself, but his presenting symptom was excessive masturbation. In his opinion, excess was in the eye of the beholder, and in his mother’s opinion he was going through a natural adolescent phase, but he allowed that his father might be right in thinking otherwise. Ever since he’d discovered a secret passageway out of self-alienation, in the form of giving himself pleasure while also receiving it, he’d increasingly resented any activity that took him away from it.
The most time-consuming of these was football. No sport was less interesting to the East German intelligentsia, but by the age of ten Andreas had already absorbed his mother’s disdain for the intelligentsia. He argued to his father that the Republic was a workers’ state and football the sport of the working masses, but this was a cynical argument, worthy of his mother. Football’s real attraction was that it separated him from classmates who fancied themselves interesting but weren’t. He compelled his best friend, Joachim, for whom he was the glass of fashion and the mold of form, to sign on with him. They went to a sports center agreeably distant from Karl-Marx-Allee, and with their talk of Beckenbauer and Bayern München they made their classmates feel left out. Later on, after he saw the ghost, Andreas pursued the sport obsessively, practicing with his clubmates at the sports center and by himself at the Weberwiese, because he imagined himself as a star striker and it spared him from thinking about the ghost.
But he was never going to be a star striker, and the ease of masturbation only heightened his frustration with the defenders who kept thwarting his attempts to score. By himself, in his room, he could score at will. There, the only frustration was that he became bored and depressed when he’d scored too many times and couldn’t do it again for a while.
To sustain his interest, he had the inspiration of making pencil drawings of naked girls. His first drawings were extremely crude, but he discovered that he had some talent, especially when he could work from a model in an illustrated magazine, undressing her as he copied, and that by drawing with one hand and touching himself with the other he could prolong the pleasurable suspense for hours. The less successful drawings he came on, balled up, and threw away. The better ones he saved and improved and delayed adding filthy captions to, because, although the idealized faces and bodies remained lovely to him, the words he imputed to them embarrassed him the next day.
He informed his parents that he was quitting football. His mother approved ipso facto of everything he did, but his father said that if he quit he would have to find other healthful and commensurately time-consuming activities, and so, one evening, on the way home from practice, he jumped off the Rhinstraße bridge and down into the trashy bushes where, as it happened, he’d last seen the ghost. He broke his ankle and told his parents that he’d jumped on a stupid dare.
The one thing everyone in the Republic had plenty of was time. Whatever you didn’t do today really could be put off until tomorrow. Every other commodity may have been scarce, but never time, especially if you had a broken ankle and were extremely intelligent. Homework was a laugh for a boy who’d been reading since three and doing multiplication since five, there was a limit to the pleasure he could take in entertaining the boys at school with his intelligence, the girls didn’t interest him, and ever since he’d seen the ghost he’d stopped enjoying conversations with his mother. She was as interesting as ever, she dangled her interestingness at the dinner table like a piece of luscious fruit, but he’d lost his appetite for it. He lived in a vast proletarian desert of time and boringness, and so he didn’t see anything wrong or excessive in devoting a good chunk of each day to producing beauty with his hands, transforming blank paper into female faces that owed their very existence to him, transforming his dinky worm into something big and hard. He became so unashamed of his drawings that he took to working on the faces on the living-room sofa, sometimes touching his pants to maintain a moderate level of stimulation, sometimes becoming so absorbed in his art that he forgot to be stimulated.
“Whose face is that?” his mother asked him one day, looking over his shoulder. Her tone was coy.
“No one’s,” he said. “It’s just a face.”
“It must be someone’s face. Is it a girl you know at school?”
“No.”
“You seem very practiced. Is this what you’ve been working on with your door closed?”
“Yes.”
“Do you have other drawings that I can see?”
“No.”
“I’m really impressed with your talent. Can’t I see your other drawings?”
“I throw them away when I’m done with them.”
“You have no others?”
“That’s right.”
His mother frowned. “Are you doing this to hurt me?”
“Honestly, the thought of you never crosses my mind. You should be worried if it did.”
“I can protect you,” she said, “but you have to talk to me.”
“I don’t want to talk to you.”
“It’s normal to be excited by pictures at your age. It’s healthy to have urges at your age. I’m just interested in knowing whose face that is.”
“Mother, it’s an invented face.”
“Your drawing looks so personal, though. Like you know very well who that’s supposed to be.”
Without another word, he put the drawing in a binder and went and shut himself in his bedroom. When he opened the binder again, the penciled face looked loathsome to him. Hideous, hideous. He tore up the paper. His mother knocked on the door and opened it.
“Why did you jump off the bridge?” she said.
“I told you. It was a dare.”
“Were you trying to harm yourself? It’s important that you tell me the truth. It would be the end of the world for me if you did what my father did to me.”
“Joachim dared me, just like I said.”
“You’re too intelligent to do something so stupid on a dare.”
“All right. I wanted to break my leg so I could spend more time masturbating.”
“That’s not funny.”
“Please go away so I can masturbate.” The words just popped out of his mouth, but the shock of hearing them jolted something loose in him. He jumped to his feet and came at his mother, trembling, grinning, and said, “Please go away so I can masturbate. Please go away so I can—”
“Stop!”
“I’m not like your father. I’m like you. But at least I keep to myself. I don’t harm anyone but myself.”
She blanched at the goal he’d scored. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“No, of course not. I’m the crazy one. I can’t even tell a hawk from a handsaw.” He knew the line in English.
“Enough with the Hamletizing.”
“A little more than kin, a little less than kind.”
“You have some thoroughly wrong idea,” she said. “You got it from a book and it annoys me, all this hinting. I’m starting to think your father’s right—I let you read things when you were too young for them. I can still protect you, but you have to confide in me. You have to tell me what you’re really thinking.”
