Fear of Mirrors. Tariq Ali

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 pregnant with promise, had been arrested and charged with attempted murder. His victim, a Turkish stallholder in Kreuzberg, had survived, but was now blind in one eye.

      Now, as he thought about it, Vlady recalled that the poem which had impressed him the most had been an evocation of old Königsberg, where the boy’s grandparents had lived before the war and from where they had fled after the defeat and just before Königsberg was renamed Kaliningrad. Even though the spirit of Immanuel Kant had been invoked, the poem was a subconscious yearning for old frontiers. Perhaps he was reading too much into it and all this was nothing more than the alienation they had all, to some degree or the other, felt from the structures of the DDR.

      He paid his bill and left the gallery. His planned visit to the Tiergarten abandoned because of Evelyne, he caught a bus back to the East. When he arrived home, it was just four o’clock. The apartment was untidy. He cleared up the mess in the kitchen and cleaned the sitting room. His own room was tidy. He lay down on the bed. There were times he envied those who had retreated so deep into their own worlds that nothing else mattered to them. History was none of their concern.

      Take Sao, for instance. Sao, who had abandoned history and turned to commerce. Try as he might, Vlady could not escape from history. There was no retreat to the forest for people like him. His upbringing, his milieu, his premises were totally different from Sao’s. Nothing was immutable. Society had to be changed. The painfully restrained fury of the poor could not be held back permanently.

      In the midst of these lofty thoughts he fell asleep. He woke up after about an hour and was startled by the dark outside, but it was only five o’clock. No need to panic. He rose slowly and walked to the bathroom. The cold light hurt his eyes as he began to shave. He was a tall, well-built man. His swarthy complexion, high cheekbones and just a hint of a slant in his brown eyes had led to numerous taunts at school. He had put on weight over the last year. Otherwise he had the look of a man in an Italian fresco, darkened by age. His hair had turned grey many years ago. He put on his faded green corduroy suit, brushed his hair and left the apartment.

      At one in the morning, the rest of the party wanted to move on to a new gay nightclub, on a side-street off the Kantstrasse. Vlady was worn out. A quiet pain had stirred his heart. He often thought of Evelyne and he had been pleased at their accidental meeting, but he was unprepared for the celebration. He had assumed it would be a small and discreet celebration in some well-appointed restaurant. Instead he was confronted with an absurdist fancy-dress dinner in a deserted film studio.

      They were seated on medieval benches, eating off a table decked with Turkish delicacies and lit like a film set. The waiters wore multicoloured cod pieces. From the edges of the studio they were observed by suggestively lit models of vampires, skeletons, Marx-Engels-Lenins, knights-in-armour and the proletariat.

      He looked at the self-important faces that surrounded him. Were they real? Why were their energy tanks not depleted? Could it be just the difference in age or were they intoxicated by imagined successes? Bored by his immediate neighbours, bemused by Evelyne, Vlady’s eyes began to wander.

      She had been looking at him and was surprised when their eyes met. She smiled. She was dressed in a red silk waistcoat, with black and gold embroidered designs and loose black trousers. He smiled. Like him, she, too, had turned down the invitation to change into cinematic fancy dress after the preview. He felt they had met before. He tried to recall her name. His memories were usually impressionistic, composed of words and images. The people themselves, what they were wearing, their physical features or peculiarities remained a blur.

      Suddenly he recognized her: Leyla. Kreuzberg-Leyla. The painter who had inadvertently wrecked his life. The first post-Wall exhibition. Leyla’s striking self-portrait, inspired by Frida Kahlo. Her hair was the colour of honey. Her eyes were green. In the painting she saw herself with black hair and brown eyes. Her paintings had an unreal quality. They were certainly not decorative. The figures and colours were taken from memories of her Anatolian childhood, but the setting was unmistakably Berlin. Turkish children, their faces filled with longing, peeping from behind their windows at German children playing on the streets. Two cars on the road. One packed with anxious Turkish faces. The other being driven by a fat German bourgeois with a turgid nose and placid, complacent, self-satisfied face. Dancers pass them by, their legs fantastically silhouetted on the windscreens. And then there was Stolen Kisses, which Helge had seen one rainy day; she had come home and finally walked out of his life. Helge would have hated this occasion.

      He put on a pained expression, signalling to Leyla the desolate shape the evening had taken. She nodded sympathetically. Perhaps she was also bored with it all: the shrieks of insincere laughter, the loud, over-keen voices greeting Evelyne’s success, the fake bonhomie, the triumphalist banalities. How Evelyne had changed. The audacious student with shining eyes who had temporarily occupied his heart had become an egocentric monster. Or had she? Perhaps she was just trying to shock, in which case she hadn’t altered a great deal.

      As if dealing with Evelyne wasn’t bad enough, Vlady was hailed by a corpulent, clean-shaven man, who was vaguely familiar, despite his silly costume. He was drunk and it was the swollen sensual nose that reminded him that this was Albert, whose lean face and coal-black beard had dominated many a clandestine discussion in the old days. The same Albert who had written a wonderfully obscure philosophical critique of the DDR and the whole system of social relations in Eastern Europe. The manuscript had been smuggled to West Berlin and published in Frankfurt. Albert had spent a month in prison.

      Few in the West had understood him or the Marxist categories he deployed with some skill against those who claimed to rule in the name of Marx, but he had been drenched in prize money and, for a while, his book, Questions Without an Answer, had graced every fashionable coffee-table in Western Europe. The old fools who ran the country had not allowed him to return from Frankfurt where he had been a guest lecturer, courtesy of the Ebert Foundation. Albert had become a celebrity.

      Now he was back in Berlin in a new guise. Albert had become a leading Green ideologue, who believed in the civilizing mission of NATO bombs in the Gulf, the Horn of Africa and, most recently, the Balkans.

      ‘Hello,