“Honest. My father is a professional liar, my mother a gifted amateur. If they’re the ones who are thriving, what does it say about this country? Do you know the Rolling Stones song ‘Have You Seen Your Mother, Baby’?”
“‘Standing in the Shadow.’”
“The very first time I heard it, on RIAS, I could tell in my gut that everything they’d told me about the West was a lie. I could tell it just from the sound—there was no way a society that produced that kind of sound could be as oppressed as they said it was. Respectless and depraved, maybe. But happily respectless, happily depraved. And what does that say about a country that wants to forbid that kind of sound?”
He was saying these things just to be saying them, because he hoped they would bring him closer to Ursula, but he realized, as he said them, that he also meant them. He encountered a similar irony when he went home (he still lived with his parents) and tried to write something that Ursula might mistake for actual poetry: the initial impulse was pure fraudulence, but what he found himself expressing was authentic yearning and complaint.
And so he became, for a while, a poet. He never got anywhere with Ursula, but he discovered that he had a gift for poetic forms, perhaps akin to his gift for realistically drawing naked women, and within a few months he’d had his first poem accepted by a state-approved journal and made his debut at a group reading. The male bohemians still distrusted him, but not the females. There ensued a happy period when he woke up in the beds of a dozen different women in quick succession, all over the city, in neighborhoods he’d never dreamed existed—in flats without running water, in absurdly narrow bedrooms near the Wall, in a settlement twenty minutes by foot from the nearest bus stop. Was there anything more sweetly existential than the walking done for sex in the most desolate of streets at three in the morning? The casual slaughter of a reasonable sleep schedule? The strangeness of passing someone’s hair-curlered mother in a bathrobe on your way to her heartrendingly hideous bathroom? He wrote poems about his experiences, intricately rhymed renderings of his singular subjectivity in a land whose squalor was relieved only by the thrill of sexual conquest, and none of it got him in trouble. The country’s literary regime had lately relaxed to the extent of permitting this kind of subjectivity, at least in poetry.
What got him in trouble was a cycle of word puzzles that he worked on when his brain was too tired to do math. The soothing thing about the sort of poetry he wrote was that it limited his choice of words. It was as if, after the chaos of a childhood with his mother, he craved the discipline of rhyme schemes and other formal constraints. At another cattle-call literary event, where he was given only seven minutes at the podium, he read his puzzle poems because they were short and didn’t betray their secrets to a listener, only to a reader. After the reading, an editor from Weimarer Beiträge complimented him on the poems and said she could fit a few of them into the issue she was closing. And why did he say yes? Maybe there really was something suicidal in him. Or maybe it was the looming of his military service, which it was already a small scandal that he’d deferred, given his father’s lofty position. Even if, as was likely, he served in an elite intelligence or communications corps, he couldn’t imagine himself surviving the military. (Poetic discipline was one thing, army discipline another.) Or maybe it was just that the magazine editor was about the same age as his mother and reminded him of her: somebody too blinded by self-regard and privilege to recognize what a total tool she was. She must have fancied herself a sensitive advocate of youthful subjectivity, a woman who really understood young people today, and it must have been inconceivable to her and her supervisors that a young man even more privileged than they were could wish to embarrass them, because none of them noticed what everyone else did within twenty-four hours of the magazine’s distribution:
The hullabaloo that followed was delicious. The magazine was yanked from every shelf and trucked away for pulping, the editor was fired, her boss demoted, and Andreas speedily expelled from the university. He left the office of his department chair wearing a grin so wide it made his neck hurt. From the way the heads of strangers swiveled toward him, from the way the students who knew him turned their backs at his approach, he could tell that the entire university had already heard the news of what he’d done. Of course it had—talking was pretty much the only thing that anyone in the Republic, except maybe his father, had to fill their days with.
When he went out onto Unter den Linden, he noticed a black Lada double-parked across from the main university entrance. Two men were in the car, watching him, and he gave them a wave that they didn’t return. He didn’t really see how he could be arrested, given who his parents were, but he also didn’t mind the thought of it. If anything, he’d relish the opportunity to not recant his poems. After all, didn’t he adore sex? Didn’t he dearly love coming? And so, if you took him at his literal word, what more heartfelt tribute to socialism could he offer than to dedicate his MoST gLoRIOUs orgasm to it? Even his wayward dick rose to attention and saluted it!
The Lada tailed him all the way to Alexanderplatz, and when he emerged from the U-Bahn at Strausbergerplatz, a different car, also black, was waiting for him on the Allee. For the previous two nights he’d been hiding out at the Müggelsee, but now that his expulsion was official there was no point in avoiding his parents. It was February, and the day was unusually warm and sunny, the coal pollution mild and almost pleasant, not throat-burning, and Andreas was in such sunny spirits that he felt like approaching the black car and explaining to its occupants, in a lighthearted tone, that he was more important than they could ever hope to be. He felt like a helium balloon straining skyward on a slender string. He hoped he might never in his life be serious again.
The car tailed him to the Karl Marx Buchhandlung, where he went inside and asked a bad-smelling clerk if they had the latest issue of Weimarer Beiträge. The clerk, who knew his face but not his name, briskly replied that the issue wasn’t in yet.
“Really?” Andreas said. “I thought it was supposed to be in last Friday.”
“There was a problem with the content. It’s being reissued.”
“What problem? What content?”
“You didn’t hear?”
“Why, no, I didn’t.”
The clerk evidently considered this so unlikely as to be suspicious. He narrowed his eyes. “You’ll have to ask someone else.”
“I always seem to be the last person to find out …”
“A stupid adolescent vandal caused a lot of trouble and cost a lot of money.”
What was it about bookstore clerks and their powerful body odor?
“They ought to hang the guy,” Andreas said.
“Maybe,” the clerk said. “What I don’t like is that he got innocent people in trouble. To me, that’s selfish. Sociopathic.”
The word landed in Andreas’s gut like a punch. He left the store in a state of deflation and doubt. Was that what he was—a sociopath? Was that what his mother and motherland had made him? If so, he couldn’t help it. And yet he had a horror of diagnostic labels that suggested there was something wrong with him. As he headed up the Allee toward his parents’ building, under a sun that now seemed wan, he mentally scurried to rationalize what he’d done to the magazine editor—tried to tell himself that she’d gotten only what every apparatchik deserved, that she was being punished for her own stupidity in failing to notice the obvious acrostics, and that, in any case, he was suffering consequences easily as dire as hers—but he couldn’t get around the fact that he hadn’t thought once, let alone twice, about what he might be doing to her by giving her his poems. It was as if he’d chosen to commit vehicular suicide by swerving at high speed into a car filled with children.
He racked his memory for an example of his having treated another human being as anything but an instrumentality. He couldn’t count his parents—his whole childhood was a sense-defying brainfuck. But what about Dr. Gnel? Hadn’t he felt compassion for the psychologist and tried to take care of him? Alas, the label sociopath reduced the example of Gnel to shit. Seducing the shrink who was investigating his sociopathy? His motives there were suspect, to say the least. He thought of the women he’d slept with on his poetry-sponsored spree and how grateful he’d felt to each of them—surely his gratitude counted as evidence in his favor? Maybe. But he couldn’t even remember half their names now, and the work he’d done to give them pleasure seemed in hindsight merely a device to heighten his own. He was dismayed to find no evidence at all of having cared about them as people.
How strange that he went through life loving who he was, savoring himself, enjoying his capabilities and levity, only to see something loathsome when a store clerk uttered a chance word and he saw himself objectively. He recalled his jump from the bridge—at first a delicious sense of floating on air but then a merciless acceleration, the ground lurching up at him viciously uncontrollable momentum body impact pain. Gravity was objective. And who had set him up to jump? It was so easy to blame the mother. He was her instrumentality, the accouterment of her sociopathy. There was a submerged but killing violence in what she’d done to him, but being a killer didn’t accord with her selfregard, and so, to help her out, he’d jumped from the bridge, and so he’d published those poems.
The black car shadowed him to their building and stopped when he went inside. Upstairs, on the top floor, he found the flat filled unusually with cigarette smoke, an ashtray heaping on a faux-Danish end table. He looked for Katya in her bedroom, in her study, in his own room, and finally in the bathroom. She was on the floor by the toilet, in the half-uncurled position of a stillbirth, her eyes staring at the toilet’s base.
For a moment, his guts twisted up. He was a four-year-old again, stricken at the sight of his beloved red-haired mother in distress. It all came back, especially the love. But the fact that it was coming back made him angry.
“Ah, so here we are,” he said. “What happened—the cigarettes make you sick?”
She didn’t move or answer.
“It’s wise to go slowly when you take up a habit again after twenty years.”
No response. He sat down on the edge of the bathtub.
“It’s just like old times,” he said jovially. “You on the floor in a fugue state, me not knowing what to do. It’s remarkable how high-functioning you are, for an insane person. I’m the only one who gets to see you on the floor.”
She breathed out and her lips grasped feebly at the exhalation, forming a few faint fricatives but nothing like a word.
“Sorry, didn’t catch that,” Andreas said.
Her next exhalation seemed to form the words what’s wrong with you.
“What’s wrong with me? I’m not the one on the floor in a fugue state.”
No response.
“I bet you’re rethinking your decision not to abort me, right around now. It turns out to be so much more painful to wait twenty years for me to do it myself.”
Her eyes weren’t even blinking.
“I’ll be in my room if you want me,” he said, standing up. “Maybe you’d like to come and watch me masturbate—speaking of taking up old habits again.”
In truth he had no inclination to jerk off and wasn’t sure he ever would again. Nor was he sleepy or depressed—didn’t feel like lying down. He was in a state unlike any he’d ever known, a state of having absolutely nothing to do. No point in studying math or logic, no point in writing poetry, no interest in reading, no energy for throwing things away, no responsibilities, nothing. He thought of packing a bag, but he couldn’t think of a single thing he wanted to take to wherever he was going. He was afraid that if he went back into the bathroom he would kick his mother, and although it was true that his father could slap her out of her states, he somehow doubted that blows from him would do the trick. He perched on a windowsill and looked down at the black car on the street. The man in the passenger seat was reading a newspaper. This seemed to Andreas a poignant futility.
After a few hours, the telephone rang. He guessed that the caller was his father and that he wasn’t supposed to answer the phone himself. This was convenient, because he was afraid of speaking to his father. And maybe he wasn’t a total sociopath after all, because the thought of his father’s anger and shame and disappointment brought tears to his eyes. His father was the earnest little German boy who believed in socialism. He worked hard, he had a disturbed wife, and he’d lovingly raised a child who wasn’t his, not even spiritually. Beyond pity, Andreas had a sense of identification with him, for sharing the burden of Katya.
The phone rang and rang. It was a form of slapping but one so attenuated by distance that he counted more than fifty rings before he heard Katya stirring. The uncertain padding of her little feet. The ringing stopped, and he heard her murmur a few times and then hang up. Then sounds of her putting herself back together. By the time she approached his room, her steps were brisk, her false self reassembled.
“You have to leave here,” she said from the doorway. She was holding a lighted cigarette and the ashtray, which she’d emptied.
“You don’t say.”
“For now, you’re safe from arrest, thanks to your father. Of course, that could change at any time, depending on how you behave.”
“Tell him I appreciate it. Seriously.”
“He’s not doing it for you.”
“Even so. It’s nice for me, too. He’s been a good stepfather.”
Rather than take the bait, she dragged hard on the cigarette, not looking at him.
“How are those tasting, after all these years?”
