The Valley of Unknowing Read online

  ‘What’s it about?’

  ‘The future. At least, it’s set in the future. A future. The whole thing has a mythic quality.’

  The last mythic novel I had tackled had been written by the leading literary grande dame of our little republic: an ancient Greek legend revisited from a Marxist-feminist perspective. I hoped it wasn’t one of those.

  ‘You think I’ll like it?’

  ‘I won’t predict your reaction, although . . .’ Schilling checked himself. ‘Let’s just say, you’re uniquely qualified to appraise it. I mean that literally. I’m very anxious to know what you think.’

  I wasn’t a critic, at least not the kind whose name appears in newspapers and literary journals. My views on contemporary literature were given sparingly and always off the record. But it was hard not to be touched by Schilling’s faith. He had never given up the hope that I would one day write something as heartfelt and successful as The Orphans of Neustadt; that the old creative force still dwelt within me, waiting only for the appropriate socio-intellectual conditions to burst forth.

  ‘So who’s it by, then?’

  Schilling looked cagey.

  ‘Wait a minute.’ An idea had occurred to me, one which, for some reason, I found comic. ‘It’s you, isn’t it? This is your book.’

  ‘What’s so funny about that?’

  I must have laughed, which was not polite.

  ‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘I’m surprised, that’s all. You never said anything about . . .’

  Schilling leaned closer. ‘It’s not my book, all right? I haven’t written a book. For God’s sake, what would I write about? What do I know?’

  Melted ice cream was running over his knuckles. He cursed, switching the cone from one hand to the other.

  ‘I didn’t mean . . .’

  ‘It doesn’t matter. Look, if you’re too busy . . .’

  But I wasn’t too busy. I hadn’t been too busy in years. We both knew that very well.

  I was still feeling guilty about my hurtful outburst when we left Tutti Frutti and hurried back towards Ferdinandsplatz. By this time it was raining in earnest and soon Schilling was sneezing. His raincoat was old and leaked at the seams. After use it left him looking as though he suffered from a terrible sweating problem, with wet patches under his arms and down his back.

  ‘I meant to tell you,’ I said, as we ducked into a doorway. ‘I bought this new raincoat at the Intershop. A good one, English. Then I got it home and found it didn’t fit. Would you believe it? Too narrow at the shoulders. You can have it, if you like. It’d fit you much better than me.’

  If Schilling wasn’t convinced by my story, it wasn’t for lack of effort on my part. After I had extemporised upon the difficulties involved in obtaining a refund he said, ‘I could certainly do with a new one. How much would you . . . ?’

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ I said. ‘I’ll be glad to give it a good home.’

  It was time to go. I held out my hand for the manuscript. Schilling began extracting it from the document wallet, then changed his mind and gave me the whole thing.

  A tram pulled up at a nearby stop, passengers spewing out as if under pressure. I shook my friend’s hand and jumped aboard.

  ‘Bruno!’ he called after me. ‘Be careful with that, will you? It’s the only copy.’

  I made a big show of tucking the novel under my jacket and gave Schilling a wave through the closing doors. It didn’t strike me as odd that the manuscript had not been copied, the right to textual reproduction being restricted in the Workers’ and Peasants’ State to the organs of government, the church and public libraries. If Schilling had not made a copy, I assumed this was due to the technical and bureaucratic difficulties involved. That he might be anxious to protect the author (and himself) from some unspecified threat occurred to me hardly at all.

  2

  ‘Have you ever considered a sequel, Herr Krug? If it’s not an impertinent question. I’m sure you must get asked it all the time. But is there any chance?’

  I was lying on my back in Frau Helwig’s lavatory, attempting to fit a new spud washer to the back of the toilet bowl. The apartment was cold and my fingers painfully stiff. Frau Helwig herself, seventy-four and silver-haired, dressed in sheepskin slippers and a floral-print smock, stood at a respectful distance, a copy of The Orphans of Neustadt sandwiched between her palms like a book of prayer.

  ‘I’ve thought about it,’ I said, which had been my standard answer for the best part of twenty years. ‘I’m still thinking. Nothing’s been decided.’

  ‘Oh, I am glad,’ Frau Helwig said. ‘I feel – I’ve always felt – that, yes, it does end. It ends beautifully. But there’s so much one doesn’t know. What happens to Sonja? And to Thomas? Will they be happy in the end? One is so desperate to find out.’

  At that point I grimaced, not at the simplicity of her literary criticism, but because the old spud washer, being made of an inferior grade of rubber, had glued itself to the ceramic and could only be removed with a tug. In the past, when I plumbed professionally and wrote on the side (instead of the other way round), my work had been channelled into the heroic projects of mass reconstruction: the apartment blocks, schools and factories of the new society. Where sanitary ware was concerned, installation and modernisation were the order of the day. Now, twenty-five years later, it was all patch and mend, effluential disaster threatening on every side. I had never been more in demand.

  ‘Forgive me, Herr Krug,’ Frau Helwig said. ‘Such trivial considerations. What must you think of me? The Orphans is so much more than a story. It says so much about the human spirit, about history. And here am I demanding you tell us what happened next. Like some silly romance.’

  I wiped the purée of rotten rubber and limescale from my hands. ‘What would you like to happen, Frau Helwig? What do you think did happen to Sonja and Thomas?’

  There was a long silence. I looked up, craning my neck round the outside rim of the bowl. Frau Helwig was still there, but her reverential bearing was now supplemented by a beatific smile, her shoulders hunched and her eyes cast upwards, seemingly towards some divine entity that dwelt behind the mouldy plaster of her ceiling.

  I should explain, for those unfamiliar with The Orphans of Neustadt, that the ending is an open one, at least by the standards of popular literature. Thomas Schwitzer, the teenage black marketeer, who has survived and prospered in the bombed-out ruins of the city through a combination of guile and petty thuggery, finally abandons his criminal gang for Sonja Bruyn, a young communist organiser who is devoted to the cause of rebuilding a new society. The ending is ambiguous in several ways, at least according to the various introductions and commentaries that have appeared in Western editions. Firstly, we do not know if the bright future the young people envisage will prove attainable, or if disillusionment will set in. Secondly, we do not know whether Thomas’s decision to abandon his predatory way of life is motivated by idealism or by his desire for Sonja. There is optimism and belief, but the survival of their love is ultimately as uncertain as the future of their world.

  Open endings appeal to certain kinds of novelist, myself being one. They are more true to life. Human experience rarely conforms to the demands of narrative structure. It is messier, less focused. There is little that begins or ends cleanly, inviting the credits to roll (besides death). Justice is elusive. And the redemptive arc, the path to self-discovery so beloved of Anglo-Saxon films and Anglo-Saxon books, is stubbornly absent from real lives, no matter how bravely lived. But an open ending is destroyed by a sequel. The ambiguities are cleared up, the possibilities reduced to one. To every question there is now an answer, definitive and inescapable.

  Frau Helwig’s speculative reverie continued for a few moments longer. Having Thomas’s and Sonja’s future in her hands was an opportunity not to be squandered. ‘They run away together,’ she said at last. ‘Far away, to an island, where all the houses are white. Brilliant white in the sun. With blue roofs.’

  �
�Greece?’

  Frau Helwig looked at me, sprawled out on the linoleum, and her smile vanished. ‘But of course that’s ridiculous. And foolish. Sonja would never be so irresponsible.’

  I shrugged, although, given my orientation, the gesture was probably futile. ‘People can change. Maybe Sonja changes.’

  ‘Not Sonja,’ Frau Helwig said. She sounded panic-stricken. ‘Sonja is a good person, a wise person. Sonja would never run away. Sonja is a socialist.’

  I propped myself up on my elbows, partly so as to communicate more effectively, partly to relieve the cramps in my stomach, but Frau Helwig had already gone. She reappeared a few moments later bearing a large jar of pickled artichokes, delicacies she cultivated with great care on her small allotment half a mile away.

  ‘Now, I’ve some gherkins for you too,’ she said. ‘My nephew grew them. They’re sweet as a nut.’

  I always refused such payment-in-kind from widows and the elderly, as I’m sure Frau Helwig was aware, but it seemed she was anxious to move on from the Sonja and Thomas discussion as quickly as possible.

  I went back to work. Frau Helwig had nothing to fear from me. I was not about to repeat her musings, indiscreet or otherwise. But then, the old lady couldn’t be sure of that and any attempt to reassure her would only have made her more uneasy still.

  ‘My nephew’s a great admirer of yours too,’ she added, still audibly jumpy. ‘And his son Heiko absolutely loves the Factory Gate Fables. They’re his favourites.’

  ‘Really?’ I said. ‘And how old is Heiko?’

  Frau Helwig thought for a moment. ‘Nine next birthday,’ she said.

  3

  That evening I sat down in my favourite armchair – an ancient leather affair, alternately scuffed and shiny, positioned in front of the main window with its view across the rooftops – and took out Schilling’s manuscript. At first glance, it looked like any other: three hundred and fifty pages, held together with a rubber band, typed, double-spaced, with amendments and corrections made by hand in blue ink; here and there a sentence struck out with black felt pen. But something was missing. There was no title, no authorial name, not even a date; just a blank page. Then the story began: They kept always to the edge of the road . . .

  I turned the manuscript over. It ended in the same way, with a blank page. I checked the document wallet carefully, but there was nothing else inside.

  I turned back to the beginning, curious to see how the first sentence ended: They kept always to the edge of the road, where their shuffling, silent progress was hidden among the shadows of the trees.

  As opening sentences went, it wasn’t bad; the use of two adjectives was extravagant, but the alliteration was quite effective.

  Schilling hadn’t wanted to influence me, he’d said. It was important I had an open mind. Was it in that spirit that I had been deliberately deprived of the title page? Or had it simply been mislaid? On reflection, some kind of accident seemed most likely. All books have titles and all novels have authors, even if those authors don’t always choose to be honest about their identity.

  Page 1: seven people on a road, walking. A child holding his mother’s hand; the others in single file. It is dusk, the sky overhead ash-coloured, the sun a red smear across the eastern horizon. Most of the group wear backpacks. The mother carries a suitcase. They are bedraggled, weary but alert. They hug the side of the road, which is bordered by a slope of brambles and dark trees. As the road bends, one of them, a youth called Alex, goes ahead while the others hang back. The mother holds her son close. No one speaks. They listen. The trees creak in the wind like old timbers. There is no birdsong. The birds are all long gone . . .

  Why was there no title page? The question would not go away. It was annoying to be kept in the dark, deliberately or not. I told myself it didn’t matter. A title was just a title. A name was just a name. Read on.

  Page 2: Alex is alone now. The others are out of sight. But the bend has become a corner and still he doesn’t know what lies round it. He feels in his pocket for the greasy black revolver. Should he go back for the others or scout a little further? They have only the one gun between them. Old Tilmann has a hatchet, which he hides up the sleeve of his big overcoat, but what good will that be if they’re caught by surprise? Alex is hungry. They’re all hungry, but what they need most – what they need first – is more guns.

  Maybe Schilling removed the title page for a different reason, it occurred to me: because his name was on it. Maybe it really was his book after all. I couldn’t go on without knowing.

  It was eight o’clock. Schilling’s apartment in Südvorstadt enjoyed the dubious privilege of a party line (telephonic, not ideological), but there was a chance I could still catch him at the office. I picked up the receiver and dialled the number. It was Schilling who answered.

  Anxious not to repeat my earlier mistake, I started with the question of the title.

  ‘It doesn’t really have one yet,’ Schilling said.

  ‘What do you mean, doesn’t really? Either it does, or it doesn’t, Michael.’

  Schilling sniffed. ‘It doesn’t.’

  I was not convinced. Would any writer who had laboured to produce a full-length novel really leave it untitled? Symphonies might have numbers, but novels, paintings and children have names. Without a name a book is incomplete and unrecognised. It has no place in the world.

  ‘Why not?’ I persisted. ‘Why isn’t there a title?’

  ‘It’s undecided.’

  ‘Then who’s it by? Or are you going to tell me that isn’t decided either?’

  There was a pause on the line. I heard a voice in the background, someone saying goodnight. A door closed.

  ‘No one you know,’ Schilling said. ‘Does it really matter?’

  ‘I imagine it matters to him,’ I said. ‘Or to her. What is it, a state secret?’

  ‘Of course not. It’s just . . . Well, never mind. He’s a screenwriter, a local boy. I don’t suppose you’ve ever seen Two on a Bicycle?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘Well, he wrote it. Wolfgang Richter’s the name. He just moved back here from Berlin.’

  ‘I can’t say I’ve ever heard of him,’ I said, which was not true.

  In fact, I remembered Wolfgang Richter only too well. During the previous decade he had turned up regularly at public meetings organised by the Writers’ Union to discuss and critique my work. He would sit at the side, making pointed or ironic remarks that made everybody laugh. It seemed he was not a fan of the Factory Gate Fables, which, at the age of eighteen, he clearly considered too unsophisticated for his literary palate. I was sure he only turned up because my meetings always had a larger contingent of young women in the audience than most of their kind. More than once, thanks to him, the generally indulgent mood of the crowd turned quite hostile. I was never accused of abandoning the socialist viewpoint, but my work was called patronising, simplistic, unconstructive. It was unpleasant for me and embarrassing for the organisers. It also made the social dimension of the occasion much more awkward. To put it another way, Richter might have left with girl in tow, but his presence invariably ensured that I did not.

  As for Two on a Bicycle, a mildly satirical farce set on a collective farm, I had seen it, although it was not until the credits appeared that I noticed Richter’s name. I was dragged to see it by one of his youthful conquests (as it turned out), a girl called Anna, whom he had brazenly picked up at one of my public meetings. Though it was years since Richter had moved to Berlin to take up a job with the Gruppe Babelsberg film company, it was clear that she still harboured feelings for him: she left the cinema with tears in her eyes (‘cigarette smoke,’ she claimed) and became too depressed to sleep with me. Nor was this the worst of it. In Two on a Bicycle, one of the characters – a gap-toothed peasant possessed of an earthy wisdom one is supposed to admire – is seen reading the second of the Factory Gate Fables. Later in the film there is a close-up of the selfsame volume dangling upside do
wn from a metal hook. The camera zooms out to reveal that the book is now in the gap-toothed peasant’s lavatory, its pages intended not for pre-evacuatory reading, but for post-evacuatory use. It was a throwaway moment, a sly joke most audiences wouldn’t notice. But I noticed it.

  I said goodnight to Schilling and closed the blinds. Richter’s manuscript lay where I had left it, on the seat of my favourite armchair. It looked quite at home, nestled between the cushions, protected by the white cover sheets that I had lovingly shielded from the rain. And it came to me that it was not just a book in embryo, but an egg – a cuckoo’s egg slyly planted in my writer’s nest. I was supposed to nurture it, to bless it with my good opinion and my good name, to treat it as one of my own – without stopping to ask from whose rear end it had dropped.

  Was this Schilling’s plan? Was this why I had been kept in the dark: so that I would read Richter’s novel without prejudice? But if Schilling knew I would be prejudiced, why send me the book in the first place?

  I stared at the manuscript and the answer came to me: it was Richter’s idea. He had wanted me to see his work. He wanted me to give my assessment, to put it on the record where it could not be retracted. I was still the author of The Orphans of Neustadt. I could still be useful. But I had to be useful unwittingly.

  I swallowed two shots of plum brandy and carried on reading. My hands trembled as I turned the pages. Many novels started with a strong opening scene, I told myself. Such visions were often the inspiration for writing a book in the first place. But then came the hard part. Focus and momentum had to be maintained even as the canvas widened, through the passages of explanation and explication, through each new introduction of character and circumstance. And then came the yawning chasm of The Middle, that graveyard of the inexperienced and the underprepared, where developments had to seem natural – even, in retrospect, inevitable – and at the same time unexpected. People like Richter, who wrote films, might encounter these problems, but only in miniature. Their middles were one hour long; fifty or sixty pages. A novelist’s was two or three hundred. And the novelist had no music, no lighting, no hushed movie theatre in which to work his magic. The best he could hope for was a comfortable chair and silence. Richter was a novice. The odds were stacked against him.