it. You agree or not?’
Vlady smiled vacantly, giving the man a half-nod. He was about to turn away, but Albert’s patronizing smile enraged him.
‘You talk such high-flown shit, Albert. I suppose it’s got to come out somewhere. We all heard that your liver was permanently pickled, but I never thought your brain would atrophy so much.’
Albert lunged in the direction of the insults, but Vlady had stepped aside and his old comrade was helped up by the waitresses. Vlady felt nothing, neither sorrow nor pity. Three days ago, a Turkish family had been burnt to death in a small town in Germany, while the police and the populace had stood and watched the spectacle, and now some idiot dressed as a Roman centurion was telling him that all was well.
Vlady was trying to catch Leyla’s eye again when Evelyne’s shrill tones silenced the entire table.
‘Vlady!’
The leer on Evelyne’s face was illumined by the harsh theatrical lighting and the grotesque make-up combined to make her look hard and ugly. She was wearing a short black leather skirt and a matching bra.
‘Why are you staring at Leyla in that way? She’s mine. Keep off. All these people here tonight are my friends. They appreciate me. They know I’m much more talented than the film-makers you worship. Everybody, answer me. Do you love me?’
Drunken faces smiled and waved at her, but verbal support was not forthcoming. Vlady smiled, but his eyes were hard and stern. He regretted that he had accepted her invitation. Evelyne had always been insecure, manipulative, wildly ambitious, but also intellectually sharp, receptive to new ideas, allergic to orthodoxy. Her energy, suppressed for so long in the DDR, had now exploded on the screen. Pity it was such a bad film.
In reality it wasn’t such a bad film. Vlady, unable to break out of his melancholy, had misunderstood its aim and failed to appreciate the gentle self-mockery that underlay the film. He had been so busy wallowing in self-pity that he had missed the satire.
He looked at Evelyne and sighed. She had wanted so much to shock him with this absurd evening. It was an old tune, a parody of Weimar decadence. In a different mood he might have enjoyed the evening, but he was tired. He wanted to go home. He exchanged a last glance with Leyla, who smiled and waved. He left the party. Leyla must have her own plans, he thought ruefully as he put on his old Russian hat and pulled his overcoat tight around him.
As he breathed the freezing cold, misty early morning air, he sighed with relief. He had escaped. He was wrong. A horribly familiar voice disturbed the Berlin dawn.
‘Vlady!’
He turned round and saw Evelyne framing the doorway. She had removed her top and her breasts were shrouded in the mist.
‘Vlady, you old shithead!’ She shouted; her reverberating voice cruelly disrupted the silence and brought a group of revellers to her side. With her audience in place she addressed her old lover again.
‘Why are you so unremittingly solemn? Why are you leaving now? What’s the matter? Don’t you want a fuck tonight? It can be arranged, unless it’s Leyla you want and not me. That would –’
‘No thank you, Evelyne. Neither you nor Leyla tonight. Thanks for the offer.’
He had to admit she looked magnificent. A modern Cleopatra, who ‘loved men’s lusting but hated men’. Dante’s Cleopatra, not Shakespeare’s. He almost told her, but it was late to discuss the circles of Hell and nor was Vlady in a mood to hear Dante described as a Tuscan arsehole. Instead he bade her a friendly farewell.
‘Please go back before you catch a chill. I hope the movie’s a big success.’
As he walked out of the giant courtyard he heard the disembodied echoes of her voice.
‘Dumbhead! Arsehole! Communist! Wanker! You even wank with a condom. That’s how safe you’ve become. Fuck off!’
Vlady laughed. It was an old line she’d used when he had refused to sleep with her, just before their affair had begun. He began to walk briskly. What an awful evening. It was not just that the jokes were awful. That was bad enough. The fact was that the forced humour was all part of a mask worn by Evelyne’s new friends. They were all trying desperately to hide their unhappiness. They were living empty lives. Bereft of hope, bereft of belief, bereft of loyalties. They could not understand this, let alone acknowledge it and, for that reason, lived each day as it came.
Slowly his concentration returned. The animated aimlessness that had gripped him when Leyla had entered his fantasies during dinner had receded. His head was clear. He began to enjoy Berlin. His Berlin. It was the only time to really feel the old city. Trafficless. A friend of his had recently written a monograph calling for all cars to be restricted to certain zones and the old Berlin tramlines to be rehabilitated.
As he walked back home, Vlady revelled in the solitude. It was almost two in the morning. A chill wind was blowing and the ground was partially frozen. There was still some ice on the pavements, treacherous in places, so he walked slowly. Vlady smiled to himself. He was fifty-six today. What had loomed in the distance like a giant iceberg had finally caught up with him, but he had survived the encounter. He was still alive. Despite everything, he had not thrown himself under a train. He was still there and that was enough reason to celebrate.
A grey dawn broke just as he reached the Tiergarten. It must have been a night like this that they killed Rosa Luxemburg on that fateful January in 1919. He paused, nodded sadly as he saw the memorial to Rosa overlooking the canal, then walked over to the bridge to the Karl Liebknecht monument. The Junkers had never forgiven Liebknecht for announcing to the world in 1914 that a patriot was nothing more or less than an international blackleg. None of this mattered to his son’s generation. His son, Karl, who had, uncharacteristically, shouted at him on the last occasion he had mentioned Rosa. ‘What do I care about your dead gods, Vlady? Surely now you must understand it’s finished for ever. It was a bad dream. A nightmare. Try and forget. Please.’
All they cared about was the present. The cursed present. Vlady remembered a line Heine had written in the middle of the eighteenth century. ‘What the world seeks and hopes for now’, the poet had written, ‘has become utterly foreign to my heart.’ The problem was that young Karl was in the very heart of that which had become so foreign to his father.
As he put the key in his door, Vlady was, for once, not thinking about the past, but the future. Would Karl have children? Would Vlady still be alive? Could Karl end up as an SPD minister? Vlady shuddered at this particular thought, but it made him even more determined to make a supreme effort and build a bridge on which both of them could meet – at least halfway. Unlike many of his friends, Karl did enjoy reading books. Vlady would write an account of his life. A partial confession, partial explanation. Not for posterity. Just for Karl. Yes, that was the solution. He would sit down and write everything he knew.
Did Vlady know everything? There were some crucially important gaps in the chronology bequeathed to him by his mother, Gertrude. He knew little about his father except tales of heroism and the fact that he had been killed on Stalin’s orders a few months before Vlady was born in December 1937.
He often thought of his father, but how much his mother had left out of her accounts. She belonged to a generation that had no difficulty in subordinating truth to the needs of Moscow or even her own personal needs, to protect her new post-war identity in the new Germany. He had never believed her rosy accounts of life in the twenties and thirties.
The truth, or at least a minuscule segment of it, lay in the KGB archives. He needed access and, amongst his circle of acquaintances, there was only one person who might be able to help him.
Vlady recalled his old friend Sao, the one-time Vietnamese guerrilla turned entrepreneur. A man who wore his custom-tailored Parisian suits just as proudly as he used to wear his black Vietcong pyjamas. Sao had contacts in the new Russia where everything was for sale. Nowadays the Russians were finding paintings in the Hermitage, incunabula in private collections, and KGB crooks hawked their memoirs at the Frankfurt Book Fair as openly as the Generals sold vital military equipment