Fear of Mirrors. Tariq Ali

his man and Sao was arriving in Berlin tomorrow to take Vlady out to dinner.

      Overcome by exhaustion, Vlady undressed and sank gently on to his bed. It was already dawn and sleep came quickly to the rescue. He might have slept through the day, but at midday he was woken by the persistent ring of the phone. Bleary-eyed and chilled to the bone, he put his head under the blanket, cursing the heating system, which had collapsed a few days ago. The phone kept ringing. The thought that it might be Sao sent an electric current through his head. He jumped out of his bed, draped himself with a blanket and lifted the receiver.

      ‘Yes?’

      ‘Happy birthday, Vlady. Are you there? I was beginning to get worried. Vlady?’

      It was Karl from Bonn. Vlady was touched, but his voice remained aloof. ‘Hello Karl. Thanks a lot. I’m fine. You well?’

      ‘Yes, yes. What news on the apartment?’

      ‘I’m still here, aren’t I?’

      ‘But …’

      ‘I think the Heuvels will have to wait another few years before they can have it back. The scum actually offered me money!’

      ‘How much?’

      ‘Fifty thousand marks.’

      ‘For that amount you could not buy an apartment anywhere.’

      ‘At last we are in agreement.’

      ‘I’m coming to Berlin next month, Vlady. I can stay in my old room?’

      ‘You mean you will stay here and not with your boss in the …?’

      ‘Vlady. Please.’

      ‘Of course, of course, Karl. This will be your home till the Treuhandt throws me out. By the way, tonight I’m having dinner with your old Uncle Sao. Remember him?’

       Five

      IT WAS A COLD NIGHT in February 1982. Dresden, where Vlady and his wife Helge were visiting her ill mother, was drenched in rain. After a week looking after Helge’s mother, who had suffered a severe stroke, and comforting her eighty-year-old father, Vlady had insisted that they accept an invitation to dinner. The evening had passed off well. Over a dozen dissidents had been assembled in the tiny flat where they had exchanged experiences, discussed the situation on the Politburo and consumed a great deal of beer.

      As they were walking back, Vlady had caught sight of a dapper Vietnamese with an attractive young German woman on his arm. Helge had wondered whether the Vietnamese was a student or a slave-worker, indentured to a local factory. Suddenly three or four figures had emerged from nowhere and surrounded the couple. Sao was flung to the ground and while one of the assailants held the girl, three pairs of boots descended on Sao. Then two of them sat on his chest, while the third pulled down Sao’s trousers and brandished a knife.

      At first neither the assailants nor Sao and his friend had raised their voices. Vlady and Helge had been paralysed by this silent tableau, which from a distance appeared as a grotesque display of shadow puppetry. Then the girl had screamed for help, and Vlady and Helge had rushed across the street screaming abuse and calling for the police. The assailants had run away. Vlady helped to lift Sao, whose nose was bleeding. Helge undid her scarf and used it to stem the flow of blood. The young girl was sobbing.

      ‘Are you OK?’

      ‘My balls are still here,’ Sao had replied, managing a weak smile. ‘As for the rest, you can see. Thank you.’

      ‘Who were they?’ inquired Helge.

      Sao’s friend spoke for the first time. ‘Young Communists!’ she hissed. ‘One of them’s been after me for months. When he found out I was seeing Sao, he threatened to kill him.’

      ‘I hope you will report this to the police,’ Vlady said somewhat pompously. ‘I would be happy to be a witness. Do you know his name?’

      Sao laughed. ‘The boy who wanted to castrate me? Of course, but do you know that his father is the party boss in this town? If you complain, I am the one who will suffer. They will deport me.’

      ‘How can you be so calm?’

      ‘I am not at all calm,’ Sao replied, keeping his anger under control. ‘I am very angry, very embittered and filled with thoughts of revenge, but I am also powerless here in your very Democratic Republic. If I lost my self-control, I would be dead within a few weeks.’

      A bewildered Vlady indicated that he could not follow Vietnamese logic. Sao smiled through the blood. ‘I’m a trained soldier. A war veteran. I was taught to kill the enemy silently. I could have broken their necks if you had not arrived. And then the Stasi would have engineered an incident in my factory. Something heavy would have fallen on me. A small accident, another foreign worker dead. So you see, my friend, you saved my manhood and my life. Now please, we must go home. She to her mother’s apartment, I to my dormitory.’

      Helge insisted on taking Sao back to her own home. There she treated his wounds, none of which were severe, and overcame his reluctance to impose on them any further. Sao had a bath and, later, after an improvised meal, Vlady drove him to the Vietnamese dormitory, an ugly prison-style structure on the edge of the town. They arranged to meet the next day. Thus was their friendship born.

      A year after the Dresden incident, Sao disappeared. Nobody knew where he had gone. One day a letter arrived from Moscow. Sao wanted Helge and Vlady to know that he had settled there and was happy. He had cousins, friends, fellow veterans from the Vietnam War dotted all over the Soviet Union. He was in constant communication with them all and travelled a great deal. He hoped Vlady, Helge and little Karl were well. He would see them soon. That was all the letter said.

      Over the next few years they received the odd postcard; on occasion a visitor from Moscow would bring them a present from Sao, usually a large unmarked tin of caviar with a note from their friend informing them that this was a caviar specially designated for the Politburo. After tasting it, Vlady and Helge realized that Sao was not joking. They talked of him often, speculating as to his activities and whereabouts.

      Vlady now recalled his many conversations with Sao. After a while he had begun to ignore his friend’s endless fantasies, all of which revolved around making money. The two men could not have been more dissimilar. Their contrasts reflected their conditioning and origins.

      Vlady Meyer had imbibed German idealism. Despite his addiction to many aspects of Marxist thinking, he was, deep down, a romantic agonizer. A living example, if not a parody, of why the German vocabulary current in the world language, English, has to contain words like Weltschmerz, Angst, Zeitgeist.

      Once an ardent Young Communist, Sao had almost lost his life in the war, and seeing what was happening now he was impatient with abstractions. He came from a middle-peasant family. His father had fought in the French Army. For a long time, Sao had obliterated memories of his origins, but in the deprivation and gloom of the postwar years, he remembered his mother and uncles and how important verbs like buy, build, exchange and sell were to their everyday life. Increasingly alienated from the state for which he had fought, Sao moved backwards in time and forward simultaneously. He now appreciated the merits of the old peasant economy and pre-urban family relations. These could not be recreated, but the memory was important in helping him to reconstruct his own social status. He did not want to deaden the shocks produced by the new order that existed in the world. Whereas Vlady’s instinct was to see the new realities as a depressing intrusion, Sao was determined to take advantage of them. It was this side of their family friend that appealed to young Karl.

      Vlady was a useful counter-balance. Their regular exchange of ideas and experiences laid the basis for a relationship that had become fruitful for both of them.

      Ten years passed. One day in 1992, Sao turned up without warning and knocked on the door of Vlady’s apartment. At first Helge did not recognize him. Then she screamed with pleasure, bringing Vlady and Karl to the door. All three