Seven Lies by James Lasdun Page B

locate.
    â€˜No.’
    â€˜What are your plans in life, Stefan?’
    â€˜I don’t know.’
    â€˜I had a son a few years older than you. An engineer. He wanted to design a car. A fast car. A beautiful fast machine for travelling on the open road. By which he did not mean a new-model Trabant on the Allied Transit Route.’ He gives a dry, violent laugh. ‘And by the tarot, I mean of course the socialist tarot. The Theoretician. The Party Chairman. The Enemy of the People. The Hanged Comrade. That’s one for you, perhaps, Stefan?’
    I see myself beside him at the table, my guard too firmly up against further questioning to take in anything he might be trying to convey to me, let alone anything instructive in the sight of my own rib cage hanging luminously before me on the light box. And I see Dr Serkin peering at the two images, into them, rather, as if he were staring into deep space. The ethereal skeins of tissue, the ghostly vein branches outlining the lungs’ lobules of infundibula, look like maps ofthe heavens, full of star clusters, strange nebulae, hazy auroras. Closing one eye, the doctor holds his pen up to each X-ray in turn. With his air of powerful, suppressed disquiet, he seems less like a doctor than a tutelary spirit, trying to lead a reluctant initiate to the brink of some new realm of knowledge. A Fluchthelfer .
    â€˜What happened? Did you try to hang yourself?’
    â€˜No!’
    From a tree in an old quarry in Friedrichshain, Dr Serkin. Overlooking the Spree River. A birch tree with its own diseased core; a rotten branch that broke when I jumped. I didn’t know then that a birch among taller trees was more than likely to be dead; light-starved, decaying from within. I fell onto my back, then the heavy branch, still roped to my neck, came crashing down onto my rib. Not so much a Werther type as a circus clown.
    â€˜Well, anyway,’ says the doctor, ‘ Felix culpa . Isn’t that what they say? Lucky fall? I mean, if you hadn’t fallen, you wouldn’t have found out about the TB – perhaps until it was too late.’
    You mean if I hadn’t tried to kill myself, I might have died? Is that what you were telling me, Dr Serkin?
    He never mentioned his son again, and I never asked what had happened. One has to feel vaguely human oneself before one can start caring about other humans. Sorgen : to care; so much more absorptive, somehow, of the world’s sorrows than the English word, but not a part of my active vocabulary before I met Inge.

CHAPTER 6
    Speaking of feeling human, it is now the moment for me to say a few words about our ‘lodger’, Kitty.
    Katerina Rust (to give her her full name) was the daughter of a serving girl, Lotte Rust, who had spent most of her short life on the estate of my mother and uncle’s family near Breslau, in Silesia.
    During the war Lotte and my mother stayed together at the house (a small castle, by all accounts), which was turned into a convalescent home for wounded officers. When the Red Army arrived on German soil and the Reich began falling into the pandemonium that preceded its final collapse, the two women, both still in their teens, fled west together, preserving, by mutual agreement – so my mother claims – the hierarchy of their relationship through thick and thin, surviving refugee camps, marauding troops from General Chuikov’s army, cold, hunger and numerous other indignities arising out of our nation’s unappreciated attempt to spread the gift of itself to the rest of the world. After the dust settled, they found themselves reunited with Heinrich (who had served in the army) in Soviet-occupied Berlin.
    It seems Lotte was an attractive woman. She formed a liaison with a young Russian Comecon officer, a connection that gave the new household definite advantages in terms ofpolitical protection and basic necessities. The affair ended abruptly when the officer was posted