Seven Lies Read Online Free PDF Page B

terms that were acceptable to her, and gaining control over people’s reactions to it.
    It was at this time that the word ‘intellectual’ first entered her active vocabulary. Pretty soon it was joined by other, similar words, such as ‘cultural’ and ‘aesthetic’. ‘So and so is an intellectual fraud,’ she might be heard saying, or ‘So and so has no aesthetic sense whatsoever.’
    At first these remarks had a tentative quality, like somebody trying out a new way of dressing and pretending not to be anxious about what others might think. But people seemed to accept them without protest, and the self-consciousness soon left her. Before long it was apparent that she had constructed a new hierarchy of values by which to organise the world in a manner that once again accorded with her invincible sense of our family’s worth. If we were not to take our place in the inner circle of the political elite, then so be it: we would dazzle and confound others from our eminence in the sphere of real merit , which was to say the sphere of culture and ideas and, above all, Art .
    Given that none of us had accomplished anything at all in this sphere, her successful transformation of our whole toneand image as a family must be counted as quite a triumph. Her own education had been a ramshackle affair, interrupted by the war (though she claimed to have had a tutor at the age of eleven who had made her read ‘everything’), but her brother Heinrich had been through university, and at one time contemplated a career as a man of letters. He still subscribed to the official literary publications, and in his position as senior counsel at the Office of the Chief of the People’s Police, he had easy access to the best artistic circles, which from time to time he still frequented. Naturally my mother enlisted him in her new project. And doting on her as he did (he had no family of his own), he was happy to oblige.
    A new phase of our life began. Uncle Heinrich introduced my mother to a number of officially recognised writers and artists of his acquaintance. We dutifully made the round of their plays, concerts and exhibitions, mingling with them afterwards, and before long they began appearing at our apartment on Micklenstrasse. Naturally obsequious as a breed, and knowing of my mother only that she was the sister of an important government functionary who took an interest in the arts, they were never difficult to entice. In a remarkably short space of time, through sheer force of will, as well as that curious hypnotic power of suggestion that gathered people like sheep into her private fantasies, she turned our household into a gravitational centre for artists and intellectuals of every stripe. My father acquiesced in his meek way. Once, timidly, he asked if she was sure she wasn’t going to ‘receive disadvantage’ for associating with the wrong types, but he was quickly silenced by her acid retort that she hardly thought her brother would be introducing her to charlatans of the kind he was obviously referring to.
    The apartment itself underwent a transformation. Framedprints and reproductions went up. In time, as my mother’s patronage grew, artists began presenting her with original oils and watercolours, and these joined the reproductions on the walls. There were even some sculptures which, like the paintings, were both representational and at the same time sufficiently unrealistic in their distortions and bulbous excrescences to indicate that their creators were fully abreast of the latest developments in modern art. Furthermore, they were uniformly of what I would call an ‘aspiring’ tone. Eyes and hands were often raised upwards in a slyly sublime manner. The darker, more turbulent works were sure to have gleams of light peeping over some horizon in the background.
    The most ‘aspiring’ of them all was a life-sized bronze statue representing a naked