Novel-in-progress: Leipzig
(an excerpt)
You’re sitting in a booth in the language lab. You have headphones on and Frau Aner’s voice is in your ear.
“Ubung macht den Meister,” she’s saying.
Practice makes perfect. She thinks this is funny and you see her smile to herself. You hate the way her voice rasps, very close, like she’s in your head.
The language lab is on the twenty-third floor of the ‘Uni-Riese’, a steel and concrete skyscraper built in the 1970s. It’s meant to look like an open book, but it doesn’t, not even slightly. The one good thing about it is the view. From it you can see Leipzig seeping out into the surrounding plain in all its multifarious manifestations. You wish you could see the view now: the ring road that corrals the patched-up, war-damaged remains of the mediaeval city; the sumptuous villas to the West, once home to the comfortable bourgeoisie, now the preserve of high-ranking Party officials and consular delegations from ‘the Socialist abroad’; the bleak blocks of modern flats to the south; and to the north the flat spaces of the Messegelände, which come alive every year in October when the foreign guests arrive for the Leipzig trade fair.
Frau Aner's grasp of political ideology is loose to say the least, but that doesn’t stop her. She has the kind of nose for dissent that would make her a useful foot soldier in any regime
But today the blinds are drawn and your only possible view is of Frau Aner, the language lab leader, sitting up at the control console, sliding the various black buttons back and forward. Frau Aner is a red-faced cardigan-wearing woman in her mid-forties, who bounds about the place sniffing out ideological impurities like an overexcited dog on the scent of a rabbit. Her grasp of political ideology is loose to say the least, but that doesn’t stop her. She has the kind of nose for dissent that would make her a useful foot soldier in any regime.
This, presumably, is why Frau Aner has been put in charge of the language lab component of the Interpreting & Simultaneous Translation in the Non-Socialist Abroad course. It’s certainly not because of her English language skills. She speaks English with a comedy German accent, like in the British war films they occasionally show undubbed on West German TV, and she machineguns it with errors. They probably like that, the powers that be. They like to give people responsibilities they’re not quite competent to discharge.
There’s a whirring in your ear that means the tape is being rewound.
“We are going to run through this scenario one more time,” Frau Aner says. “And this time I think our effort will be repaid.”
You wish you could get out of here. You wish you were sitting in a café somewhere smoking a cigarette and drinking a bitter black coffee. But you also don’t. Part of you is glad to be in a booth, tucked away out of sight. Because your wearing their clothes today and really you don’t like to be seen like that.
Dressing the part is the hardest bit for you, the bit you struggle with so much it hurts. It’s one thing to act like you want to conform, quite another to dress like it. Clothes have always been your thing, your constant rebellion, your fuck-you-fuck-you-all. Everyone is this country has to have somewhere to go and that’s where you go. Went. It was your very own version of internal exile: you didn’t wear their shit, you just didn’t.
The trouble was your internal exile was external. People can see it. And that wasn’t good. You know it’s part of it now, dressing like them. (That’s how you see it: You and Them; dressing like them.) It’s part of fitting in, playing the role, being a committed Party member, a diligent student of a dangerous language from the non-Socialist abroad. If you do your own thing, plough your own fashion furrow, you’re taking a risk. If Marek has told you once, he’s told you a thousand times: it might seem like a small thing, but it’s not.
The thing is: you’ve worn your own stuff for so long now it’s hard to stop. The other day you went to the Kaufhof and you had a go, you really did, you tried hard. But in the end you could not bring yourself even to try on the plastic shoes, the stiff fake jeans, the floral-print nylon blouses that they stock there. You were like an alcoholic with a bottle of mineral water. You didn’t want them; you wanted something stronger.
Today, you’re wearing a pair of stiff poplin trousers the colour of sick and a stripy acrylic jumper that irritates your skin. You hate them, you hate them more than you can say, but not as much as you hate the grey loafers with thick white stitching that Marek bought for you because you wouldn’t go to the shoe shop yourself. You drew the line at the loafers this morning. Who’s going to see your feet anyway? Instead, your wearing your favourite boots, the knee-high black lace-up boots from a shop in Schöneberg that a West German girl on a day trip to the East once gave you, that you’ve polished and nurtured and stitched and patched so diligently that they look as good today and they did when you first got them five years ago.