Free Seven Lies by James Lasdun Page B

the footsteps of our devout, industrious parents. Foreign and domestic dignitaries were constantly being wheeled into our morning assembly to impress on us the heroic nature of our destiny. Abrassimov, the Soviet ambassador, pinned Red Star badges on our chests one morning, carrying himself with the fantastical frostiness he was famous for, and that he evidently thought appropriate to his viceregal status in our republic. Alexander Schalck-Golodowski came to talk to us about so-called ‘German–German’ relations. Erich Mielke, Politburo Member for Security, led us in our Pioneer Greeting one morning, before going on to address us on the joys of a career in counterintelligence. Guenter Mittag came to us from Economic Affairs . . . Illustrious names once; names to conjure with, their mere utterance sufficient to induce that sensation of awe reserved for remote, solemn powers – all gone now, disgraced, ridiculed, forgotten.
    My mother’s visit to my class at the time of our abortive move to New York turned out to have had one lasting effect: it had seriously compromised my position among my classmates. Although I hadn’t been actively shunned, I had been put into a kind of social quarantine, a limbo-like condition where I was under close scrutiny pending the appearance of further symptoms that would indicate a full-blown case of unpopularity.
    Unpopularity, as any schoolchild knows, is a highly specific spiritual sickness which can strike almost anybody at any givenmoment. It is as irrefutably real as the measles, and in its own way almost as contagious. Once a person has been diagnosed with it there is nothing he can do except wait patiently for it to run its course. Attempts to deny it or overcome it by ingratiating oneself with the uncontaminated will only result in ever crueller forms of rejection.
    My fall from grace came about almost casually. One afternoon in summer, during our annual Hans Beimler athletic and paramilitary contests, I saw a group of my classmates sitting together on the grass of one of the playing fields. I had just won my quarterfinal in the two-hundred-metre dash, qualifying me for the next round, and I was feeling buoyant enough to join the group without being invited. They had been laughing, but by the time I joined them they had fallen quiet.
    â€˜Let’s try it on Stefan,’ somebody said. They had evidently been playing some game. I looked about cheerfully, always ready to offer myself as a source of entertainment.
    A girl called Katje Boeden spoke. Katje was the daughter of a high-ranking official in Hermann Axen’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and I had a private connection to her. A short time before my father’s debacle in New York, her family had made a friendly overture to mine, and we had visited them at their house in the Wandlitz compound outside the city. It was a warm home, full of games and toys, and decorated with tribal art from Zanzibar, which gave it an almost bohemian flavour. Katje had been wearing a smocked green dress. On her blossoming body it had seemed to gather up all the innocent wonder of childhood and draw it surreptitiously into a strange new context – that of imminent sexual awakening. The effect on me had been powerful. While Otto went off with her older brother Paul, she took me into the garden whereshe had a tree house in a half-dead beech tree. We sat talking for what seemed hours – about what, I have no recollection, but I was bewitched by her. Unfortunately, my father lost his job soon after, and our visit was neither returned nor repeated.
    Over the next two or three years, Katje had grown extremely pretty – petite, with sharp, delicate features, sparkling blue eyes and fair hair which she wore in a tight, gleaming crown of braids. Though she never made any reference to our meeting at her home, she was always friendly towards me.
    â€˜Name the first three animals to come into your head, Stefan,’ she