San Francisco. Her grandfather was a colonel in the SS, a great favourite of Heinrich Himmler. Her mother was a Maoist and is now a primary school teacher. Her father? He died in Stammheim. Monika is certain that he could never have committed suicide. She insists he was murdered. I don’t know.’
‘I can see why she is removed from politics.’
‘Sometimes she is cruel. When we row I’m just another shitbag desperate to get into the Bundestag, tell lies and line his pockets. When I remind her that she’s making more money than any SPD member of the Bundestag, she claims her loot is not gained through deception, but by playing the market, without breaking any rules. I love her, Eva. I want her to have my children.’
‘And here I was, beginning to think you were just a robot and fearful that your girl might turn out to be another robot. Some mouse or the other from the apparatus on Ollenauerstrasse. You’ve really surprised me. I wonder what she sees in you? Bring her to me next week. Supper on Wednesday?’
‘Fine. I do not speak for Monika.’
‘Tell her my Matthias sings with a crazy rock band. It might make me a little less unattractive. Tell her what you want but bring her to me.’
Karl spent the whole day preparing a briefing paper on the possibility of a new coalition. He wanted the SPD in power. He wanted Scharping as Chancellor. He wanted to stay in Bonn till 2000. By then the scars would have healed. He could even begin to see Vlady again. He made a note in his diary. Last year, at the height of his alienation from the past, he had forgotten his father’s birthday. There must be no repetition.
He realized how much he still loved Vlady. The discovery shocked him.
VLADIMIR MEYER was on a high. Yesterday’s Neues Deutschland had published a long piece by him on the new trends in Russian literature. It was a polemical essay, written with a keen sense of the comic, describing how ‘socialist realism’ had been replaced by ‘market realism’, and with equally disastrous results. A precious pornography had replaced the ritual references to various First Secretaries.
This was his first published essay since the dismissal from his post at Humboldt. The results pleased him. A minor triumph. A clear signal to the enemy that he would not take defeat lying down. He would show young Karl that they were more than flecks of foam. He was going to fight back with his literary fists.
Several old friends had rung to congratulate him. In the old days Gerhard would have been the first to call. But Gerhard was dead. He knew me well, Vlady thought. He knew exactly how to drag me out of my melancholy. His judgements were sober and reliable. Not a trace of envy in his make-up. Gerhard, soft-hearted Gerhard, had not asked much of this world, but he had ceased to resist. Fatal. Death, in the mask of the new German order, had claimed him.
Outside it was night and a blanket of mist covered the street. Vlady had decided to stay at home. Better to be surrounded by ghosts, he thought, than to engage in the forced frivolity of the tavern. He read, paced up and down his room, read old letters, talked to himself, to Karl, to Helge, to Gerhard and then, as the clock struck two in the morning, he fell asleep.
That was yesterday. Today it was already late when he awoke. The day was clear, but the winter shadows were already beginning to mark the landscape. In a few hours the light would vanish. He jumped out of bed, dressed quickly and walked out into the street. Vlady wandered aimlessly, and, at the end of an hour and a half, feeling sad and lonely, he found himself in a second-hand bookshop on the Ku-Damm. The sight of bookshelves cheered him a little.
‘What are you doing here?’
Evelyne was standing behind him. Surprise registered on both their faces. She smiled and hugged him with real warmth. ‘The same old overcoat. The same old Vlady. Why haven’t you shaved?’
He smiled and shrugged his shoulders. For a moment his depression disappeared. The sight of Evelyne had despatched his anxieties to the future. They walked to a tiny art gallery which dispensed the best coffee in Berlin. Evelyne behaved as if nothing had ever happened between them. She treated him as if he were just her old professor, pressed him to attend the press preview of her first feature film that evening and join the cast and crew for a celebratory dinner afterwards. Vlady looked doubtful. He was on his guard, not at all eager to be rejuvenated.
‘You can meet my husband and his boyfriend. Come on Vlady. It’s obvious you’re not doing anything. My movie is a comedy. Even you will laugh.’
He accepted her invitation, thinking to himself that he could always change his mind.
‘Have you found a new job?’
Vlady shook his head.
‘Or a new politics?’
He shook his head again.
‘Stop living in the past, Vlady. Wake up. I’ll see you later.’
After she had left, he ordered another coffee. The next hour was spent in deep contemplation. Only a few hours ago, Vlady had ignored the beautiful autumn sun as he thought of the desperately empty day that lay ahead of him.
Could Evelyne be the remedy to his ills? Vlady shut his eyes, remembering the time they had spent together, but it was of no use. The world he did not want to see was buried deep inside his head. It seemed as if it would never go away.
It had been shattered by reality, but it was still there in his dreams and nightmares. Intact. Untouched. The old Prusso-Stalinist DDR with its maze of bureaucratic laws; its own peculiar customs; its deeply embedded irrationality; its habitual cruelty; its distorted lens through which one could only see a disfigured world. He was now compelled by history to live in a new world which had deprived him of his dignity as a citizen. Many others thought like him. Once he had complained bitterly to Gerhard, who had become impatient.
Vladimir Meyer was not alone in thinking that there had been aspects of life in the old DDR that were preferable to what existed today. Many saw their problems as the temporary result of a painful transition from a state-ownership system to the free market.
Vlady differed. He refused to write everything off as an unmitigated disaster. When he expressed these thoughts to old friends, they would reply, ‘Of course things are bad for us, Vlady, but here in Berlin we do not wake up every morning and wonder whether we will still be alive at the end of day as many do in Sarajevo and Moscow.’
Vlady did not like such arguments. The blind worship of accomplished facts always led to passivity. Why should one come to terms with the present? Such an attitude would never have brought down the Wall. He refused to accept what existed simply because happenings elsewhere were much worse. History became an alibi. It was a cursed history whose womb was producing tiny new republics. Monstrous creations. How could they be otherwise, deformed as they were by decades of unnatural confinement?
Men, women and children were living and dying for these new states. In the past they had done the same for the big empires, but with this difference: in the old days they had fought reluctantly and cynically. It could have been any old job. Today they went to war with a sullen obstinacy, their heads and bodies distorted by an intolerant zeal. It would end badly. Of this Vlady was sure. In the last few years, he had abandoned many certainties. The bureaucratic-command-economy system was over, but its demise did not mean that what survived was superior or preferable. Only last week, one of Vlady’s star pupils, a poet whose verse had once been
