My life with her was a special way of being alone. It was like living on intimate terms with a creature from another species; she was to me as remote and inaccessible as some large, harmless herbivore. At times I thought there was no mystery to her at all, that she was as blank as she seemed, then at others I grew convinced that this appearance of unmoving calm that she displayed was a mask she had fashioned for herself behind which she too must be locked in frantic strategies of calculation and control, practising, like me, for a part she did not believe she would ever be able to fill convincingly. In the state of mutual incomprehension that was our life together we were forever surprising each other. She was alarmingly well read, as in the early days I had frequent and shame-making cause to discover. Already I had made myself adept at appearing deeply learned in a range of subjects by the skilful employment of certain key concepts, gleaned from the work of others, but to which I was able to give a personal twist of mordancy or insight. In everything I wrote there was a tensed, febrile urgency that was generated directly out of the life predicament in which I had placed myself; I was fashioning a new methodology of thinking modelled on the crossings and conflicts of my own intricate and, in large part, fabricated past. I could discourse with convincing familiarity on texts I had not got round to reading, philosophies I had not yet studied, great men I had never met. My assertive elusiveness, as one critic rather clumsily called it, mesmerised the small but influential coterie of savants who sampled and approved of my early pieces. Though they might question my grasp of theory and even doubt my scholarship, all were united in acclaiming my mastery of the language, the tone and pitch of my singular voice; even my critics, and there were more than a few of them, could only stand back and watch in frustration as their best barbs skidded off the high gloss of my prose style. This surprised as much as it pleased me; how could they not see, in hiding behind the brashness and the bravado of what I wrote, the trembling auto-didact hunched over his Webster's, his Chicago Manual, his Grammar for Foreign Students? Perhaps it was the very bizarreries of usage which I unavoidably fell into that they took for the willed eccentricities in which they imagined only a lord of language would dare to indulge.
Do not misunderstand me: I have no doubt that I possess genius, of a kind. It is just not the kind that it has pretended all those years to be. I sometimes think that I missed my calling, that I could have been a great artist, a master of compelling inventiveness, arch, allusive, magisterially splenetic, given to arcane reference, obscure aims, an alchemist of word and image. Indeed, my critics often grumble at the desolate lyricism of my mature style, seeing behind it the pale hand of the poet. I take their point. Mine is the kind of commentary in which frequently the comment will claim an equal rank with that which is supposedly its object; equal, and sometimes superior. In my study of Rilke, an early work, there are passages of ecstatic intensity that world-drunk lyricist himself might have envied, while those long, twinned essays on Kleist and on Kafka are as desperate and inconsolable as any of the plays or the parables of those two hierophants of dejection. Shall I bow before these great ones? Shall I bend the knee to their eminence? Damned if I will. I hold myself as high as any of them, in my own estimation. What troubles me only is the thought of all I might have done had I been simply – if such a thing may be said to be simple – myself.
Magda was apparently as impressed by me as everyone else was, and took my poses and my brilliant pretences at their face value. If she knew I was a fraud, she did not seem to mind; seemed, indeed, to admire me, in her detached way, for my nerve and resourcefulness. There was a particular, small smile I would occasionally catch fleeting across her face when I was expounding to a spellbound company on some dense text she knew I had done no more than glance at. She had read Hegel and Marx, and much else beside. She could reel off quotations as by rote, for she had a remarkable memory, even if little of what the quoted passages might signify had stuck; she carried her knowledge of all those titanic thinkers like an atrophied limb, the intellectual equivalent of my useless leg. She had obediently studied the century's revolutionary texts at the bidding of the Pole, since he was not a great reader himself, but was determined they should be the perfect Party pair, he the hammer of activism, she the sickle of ideology. She shrugged, telling me this, and smiled, fondly, as at the recollection of some not entirely innocent childhood game of make-believe. Yes, she saw through us all, in her mute, intuitive fashion. Was that the reason I chose her above the others? Was that the reason she chose me? Was she my protectress, the guardian of my borrowed, my purloined, reputation? It comes to me with mournful force that these questions now will never be answered, or not by her, certainly.
She regarded the past as a sort of huge, unavoidable mistake, a whole set of wrong beginnings that had now, at last, been put right. If she had any anger for all that had befallen her it was directed not at the devisers of the vast project of destruction in which she had been caught up and from which she had barely escaped with her life, but at the very victims of it, all those who had not escaped, even her bewildered parents, her sister who had been so vain of her dark beauty, her little brother, still clutching his toy bugle as he was marched away. It was not that she blamed them for not resisting, or for being hapless and confused and self-deluding – her mother before being hustled to the trucks had squeezed her hand and made her promise to write – but for the simple fact of their having existed, of their having been there in the first place to be taken away from her in the last. She had kept nothing of them, no photograph, no document, no lock of hair, only her memories, and these she would willingly have relinquished, had she been able. That she of all of them was the only one to have survived, because her name had somehow slipped from the lists, was only another cause for baffled, mute anger.
We had been together for some months before she would tell me any of this. Late one raw November afternoon we had been to the cinema – or the movies, as I was learning to call them – and were sheltering from the cold in a coffeehouse on Bleecker Street when she began to weep, quietly, almost pensively. In the interval of the double bill a newsreel had been shown of scenes from the ruins of Europe, and the sight of those seemingly endless ranks of corpses had jogged something in her, and now she could not stop telling me what had happened to her. Sitting beside her as she talked, I held myself motionless, barely breathing; my fist, lying on the table by her hand, felt so heavy it seemed I would never be able to lift it again. Her recollections of flight and escape were fitful, lit in flashes: the sharp white stones on a mountain track; massed, dark trees moving past in the headlights of a lorry in which she lay hidden under sacking; a boy soldier at some dusty border post offering her an apple from his tunic pocket. It was as if she had made the perilous journey not in linear time, but in great leaps, from stopping place to stopping place, between each of which she had somehow been absolved from consciousness. When she had finished I had to tell her my story, of course, the etiquette of our predicament as survivors demanding it. Story is right. We had left the coffee shop by then and were walking down the street in the bitter cold and the gathering dusk, the traffic flowing along beside us through the slush like wreckage being carried on a river in sluggish spate. She leaned heavily on my arm, a dragging weight. She did not want to hear the things I was telling her, she was tired of them; she resented the burden of her tragic fate, and mine. In the light of her resistance my inventiveness burgeoned; never before or since did I spin my tale so well or so convincingly as I did that night, weaving through the lies a few, fine, shining threads of truth, as the wet white flakes fell fast around us and the huddled, faceless figures of passers-by loomed up at us suddenly out of the lamplight and as quickly vanished behind us into the dark. I could not but admire my own performance. What a fabulist I was; what an artist! And I never did tell her the real, the whole, the tawdry truth.