Seven Lies Read Online Free Page A

served to advance, there was something endearing about her. Our hearts went out to her then; we felt we were being gathered into some rich and vulnerable conspiracy, and our loyalties were aroused.
    Otto and I were sent down to fetch the linen as soon as dinner was over. To do this we had to get Herr Brandt, the janitor, to let us into the storage room.
    â€˜Try to keep Brandt from poking his nose into our things,would you?’ my mother asked. ‘Not that we have anything to be ashamed of. But he can be a nuisance. Here, take him one of the miniatures and ask for the keys to let yourselves in. Tell him you’ll give them back to him when you’re finished.’
    It went without saying that Brandt was a police informer, and my mother was probably right in imagining he would think it his duty to make a report on something even so trifling as the retrieval of a set of initialled linen from a trunk. It was also known that he could make himself obliging over practically any matter in return for small gifts, preferably alcoholic. He was especially partial to the Schaad-Neumann brand of aquavit, impossible to get hold of in the GDR, and my father made a point of bringing back a set of miniatures whenever he went to the States, for the express purpose of lubricating Herr Brandt. Thirty or forty of them were lined up in a double row at the back of a shelf in our larder.
    Taking one of these frosted, cylindrical bottles, Otto and I went down to Herr Brandt’s headquarters on the ground floor.
    Ours was a modern building, constructed from the cheapest materials, but well maintained, and with a few grandiose trimmings, as befitted its inhabitants, who were mostly party officials of one kind or another. Four white pillars stood incongruously in the middle of the brick front, marking the entrance. The lobby was floored with polished slabs made of a pink and white agglomerate, like slices of vitrified mortadella. A bronze bust of Lenin, looking oddly piratical, stood on a plinth by the elevator, which generally worked. On every floor was a plastic indoor plant, the leaves of which Herr Brandt could be seen laboriously squirting and buffing on Sunday mornings. A powerful odour compounded of floorpolish and boiled meat pervaded the stairwell, and there was a more or less constant sound of toilets flushing.
    Brandt was in the glass-walled office to the side of the main entrance, surveying the empty lobby with his usual dull stare. He wore a crumpled brown jacket over a sweat-soiled undershirt in which his womanly breasts and very large stomach bulged and sagged like pumpkins in a sack. Black stubble glinted on his whitish skin in the artificial light of the little booth, and the bulging roil of scar tissue between his throat and ear gleamed like satin. This scar, so he claimed, was from a grenade wound received during some battle on the Eastern Front. To my youthful and admittedly subjective eye, it was a decidedly unheroic-looking scar, and in fact had something furtive and guilty about it, like some malignant companion that had attached itself to this otherwise vague and uninteresting person. It was the scar – it seemed to me – that compiled reports on the comings and goings of the inhabitants of our building; the scar that had to be propitiated with bottles of Schaad-Neumann aquavit. Brandt himself gave the impression of living under its tyranny. For his own part he would have been content to pad around the place keeping the plants shiny, the floor waxed, supplying the tenants with cheap eggs from the poultry co-operative where he had a special concession. But some incomprehensible malignancy had settled upon him, and he was now its servant.
    Once, when I was quite young, I had seen him carrying a parcel to the door of an elderly couple who lived on our floor. The parcel, which evidently contained either a mirror or a framed picture, slipped from his hands and fell to the floor with a smash and tinkle of breaking