by Ingo Schulze
One of the few rituals observed in our family occurred whenever I tried to revive my earliest memories. I had achieved my goal whenever my mother would exclaim, “Impossible! You were barely two!”—or, “At eighteen months, out of the question!” She would successfully manage a good five such exclamations of astonishment. It gave me deep satisfaction to find my memories confirmed. Each incredulous shake of my mother’s head made me feel like some sort of wunderkind. (My sister Vera never failed to offer some corrections; I had no chance against her four-year head start and always had to hear how happy everyone had been before I arrived.)
Here’s one of my showpieces. I wake up, the room is still dark, but in the next room there’s light and voices. My mother carries me out, my grandmother says, “Sweetie pie.” A hat lies on an armchair, two coats with fur collars are draped over its back—strangers! There are strangers in our apartment. I start to cry. The strangers are hiding. Someone gives me a Duplo candy bar that sticks out of its wrapper like a half-peeled banana. My sister has a Duplo too. I can’t understand why she’s so unconcerned. The Duplo is meant to help me get over these strangers, who are going to move in. I’m given a little red car. A bright rod sticks out between the front wheel and the door on the driver’s side. That’s for steering it. The headlights are glass beads. “Diamonds,” my mother says, “from the West.”
Present after present is lifted out of suitcases and shown to my mother. My grandpa tickles my palm with an electric razor. It all comes from the golden West. I can see most of the room, but the strangers are hiding. They’re whispering with my grandpa.
Back in my bed, I ask whether the strangers are going to stay for a long time. I’m certain they’re going to move in with us. I don’t believe my mother.
I’m afraid, I’m impressed—toys with diamonds, and they come from a world made of gold. That’s also the reason why we’re not allowed to go to the West. Of course we’d all rather live in the West. I’m not allowed to play with my car outside, in fact no other kids are supposed to know about my car. Otherwise they’d be jealous because they don’t have a red car. The red car is irreplaceable, you can’t just buy one. Only a few kids here have Matchbox cars and Lego blocks and tins of Kaba powder. I also had shirts and pants from the West, and in time I would look just as handsome as the boy on that chocolate drink for kids. Actually I was a child of the West myself.
Are you still listening to me? Or do you think by now I’m utterly mad? Let me finish my story. With each passing year I understood better: We had things other families didn’t have and couldn’t have, no matter how much they longed to have them, even if they earned more than my mother and had more money in the bank than my grandpa. Items from the West were like moonstones, either they were given to you or they remained out of reach. Our relatives in the West were just like God and the Lord Jesus—they loved you, although you didn’t know them and never ever saw them face-to-face. And anyone who laughed at me because I believed in God was at least envious of my red car.
There were five special days in the year. St. Nicholas, Easter, my birthday, Christmas—Christmas was the high point, but Christmas was out-shone by the day when my grandparents returned from their visit to the West. The evening of their arrival at the Neustadt train station in Dresden was the real, unsurpassable Christmas Eve.
Every year my mother took off work for the day, and we were allowed to come home for our noon meal. After doing our homework, we helped her with chores, which gave us the feeling that by dusting thoroughly and polishing lots of shoes we were adding to the number of presents.
In our best clothes we walked to the streetcar after darkness fell.
What was so splendid, if not to say colossal, about it all was that it was we who had been chosen. How could other people live a life in which there would never be a day, an evening like this? I felt sorry for my schoolmates. I pitied them as I pitied Africans who had no Sport Aktuell, no coverage of four ski-jump tournaments to watch on Saturdays.
Once on the streetcar, where all the vacant seats only increased the thrill, we gazed rather haughtily at the other passengers. We were unrecognized royal children, and I was happy to be no one but me.
Then it began—the back-and-forth of deciding which platform the train would arrive on. We listened expectantly to the crackling loudspeakers, trying to sort out the syllables “Be-bra” from the rest of the cacophony. And what would the waiting have been without the train running late, or the autumn air without the steam of the locomotives.
There were no disappointments, there couldn’t be any, for every present from the West was a priceless treasure all by itself. The stories our grandparents told went beyond our powers of imagination—for example, escalators, escalators in a department store. You stepped on a carpet, held fast to a richly ornamented railing, and were borne soundlessly upward, floating like an angel on the ladder to heaven.
In the West the streets were heated from below ground, the gas stations never closed, and when people in the West didn’t know what else to improve, for the fun of it they tore up streets only recently paved with asphalt. Neon signs flashed above every shop, every door, the nights were bright as day and flooded with more traffic than filled our streets after a May Day parade. All the same, in the West you could always find a seat on a tram, bus, or train. In the West gas smelled like perfume, and train stations were tropical gardens where travelers could buy the most marvelous fruits. In the West people had hair down to their shoulders and wore jeans and chewed gum that let you blow bubbles as big as your head. And what was more, the global market was in the West. I didn’t know exactly where, but it was definitely in the West. When you pronounced the word “East,” didn’t your mouth spread in a simpleton’s grimace? Whereas “West” hissed like a Lamborghini Miora speeding off on superfast tires. “East” sounded like cloudy skies and omnibuses and abandoned excavations. “West” like asphalt streets with glass gas stations, terraces where the drinks came with straws, and music drifting across a blue lake. Cities with names like Cottbus, Leipzig, or Eisenhüttenstadt couldn’t possible be located in the West. What a different sound places like Lahr, Karlsruhe, Freiburg, or Graching had. Vera and I—despite all our quarrels—were always in agreement when it came to the West.
Just one thing more (please be patient with me): packages were something that by definition came from the West. Their contents weren’t immediately put away, but left lying out on the living-room table. It was New Year’s before the coffee, soap, stockings vanished into cupboards and drawers, where they never lost the aroma of their origin. They were resistant to all attempts to blend them into the world, were a category of things all to itself. They didn’t lose their value when used or eaten. The idea would never have entered our heads to throw away an empty tin of Kaba or Caro. Our cellar storage space was full of such cans and tins.
I would often go down into the cellar just like Willi Schwabe entering his attic—does the name Willi Schwabe mean anything to you?88 And just as he might find a roll of film or maybe some other object that reminded him of an actor, the Kaba and Caro tins filled with nails or screws spoke to me of happy holidays and the West. Today I’d say that they first had to lose their use-value to become sacred objects.
These treasures also proved that Aunt Camilla and Uncle Peter had always thought about us, had always known our most secret wishes, and wanted only the best for us.
When I prayed, I prayed to God, who knew everything about me, always thought of me, and would always be there for me. And although he didn’t look like Aunt Camilla and Uncle Peter, he must in fact have been like Aunt Camilla and Uncle Peter, except more so.
Robert’s alarm just went off.89 I’m going to make breakfast, wait for the mail carrier, and then go to the doctor again this afternoon.
With you in my thoughts, I remain
Your Enrico T.
PS: It was from Aunt Camilla that I first heard I was a writer, because in my thank-you letter I described what our Christmas was like
and how we had barely been able to wait to open her package—which was a lie, since Aunt Camilla always stuffed it with candy (and coffee and, rather absurdly, condensed milk—truly no rarity for us), whereas in Uncle Peter’s package you might find Matchbox cars or even a cassette, which always made his package a real event. Aunt Camilla wrote back that my letter was the loveliest letter she had ever received, a real short story, which she often read aloud to other people.
Monday, March 12, ’90
Ah, Verotchka, you were two hours early!90 And now you’re paying for your mistake with worry. But this message is sure to get lost like all the others. It’s so absurd.
If only it had been Georg or Jörg who picked up the phone. But Ilona! An accident! His sister! How marvelous! She told me she calmed you down and provided you all the details. I can just imagine how she calmed you down. By the time she was done you probably thought it was a stroke of good fortune that your brother ended up in a wheelchair instead of in Hades.
There’s a rumbling inside my skull—a concussion, but nothing more than that. What did she tell you about Nicoletta? She came away with just some bruises.
We had left Leipzig and were heading for Frohburg by way of Borna. We were on our way to the Schwind pavilion.91 It was actually nobody’s fault. A Lada (a white one, I think) had passed us in a curve to the left, slipped back in between us and the car ahead of us because of oncoming traffic, I braked, and in the same moment the windshield shattered—nothing but ice crystals up ahead.92 I banged it with my hand, trying to see something, the car went into a skid, and we plunged headlong down the embankment—I think I heard, and felt, the second loud crash. Sudden silence. We had come to a halt and were staring through a big hole in the windshield. The silence came straight out of a fairy tale.
I wasn’t in any pain, but what I wanted most was just to sit there. We had managed to sail right through a gap between trees; on Nicoletta’s side the clearance wasn’t two feet.
I didn’t notice the blood until later. Nicoletta used her handkerchief to dab at it. And then—you know me—I started to feel sick to my stomach. I tipped my seat back, closed my eyes, and left everything to Nicoletta. The people who came to our aid were more of a nuisance. Someone spread a blanket over me and kept trying to tuck it under me on both sides. I pushed the guy away because I thought I was going to throw up. From this position I studied the little piece of ground beside the car for a good while.
By the time the police and ambulance arrived my nausea had given way to a nasty headache.
Everything took forever, the ride to Borna, the X-rays, the neck support, the police again, the endless sitting around, then finally the taxi ride to Altenburg. There are suddenly more taxis than you can shake a stick at. Robert stared in horror at my neck support and turban à la Apollinaire. Nicoletta told the cabdriver to take her to the train station right away.
She lives in Bamberg. People like her can’t or don’t want to believe that I left the theater voluntarily. She has contributed a lot to our newspaper,93 and since she’s writing about De Chirico and Moritz von Schwind is supposed to have been one of his favorites, I had arranged for her to visit the frescoes in Rüdigsdorf.
I’ll write about Barrista some other time. Thanks to his boots and Astrid the wolf he’s already become a fixture in town. He’s interested in everything and everybody, and he gawks at women’s breasts with his google-eyes. But that “von” in front of his name, his mission on behalf of the hereditary prince, and, last but not least, his courtesy and consideration—including a phenomenal memory for names—have not failed to have an effect. Was he ever one of your unrequited admirers?
Ah, Verotchka, my darling, how long must this waiting last?
Kisses from
Your Heinrich in his neck support94
Tuesday, March 13, ’90
Dear Nicoletta,
I’m feeling better, much better. I plan to give the office a try on Wednesday, just for a few hours. And what about you? How are you doing? When I catch myself not thinking about you, it scares me, as if I had lost my wallet.
For some strange reason you’re the only person with whom I feel free to talk about my past and to explain why I’ve become the way I am.95
There’s something I want to mention first, however.
My father was an actor—not even a mediocre actor, otherwise he would have had better roles—employed by various stages in Saxony. He had heart problems and knew that he would probably never make it to forty. Maybe that’s why he became such a tyrant. He was obsessed with the notion that my sister Vera was blessed with great talent, was an actress the likes of which appear only once in a generation. Vera was twelve when he died.
Sometimes I’m afraid that even now she still believes the only thing that kept her from a spectacular career was the lack of a father. At sixteen, seventeen, she was still blaming me for his death (he was supposed to pick me up at the afterschool club, was late as usual, and stepped out into the path of an oncoming car). Besides which, he stubbornly insisted that it was because of the long commute that he had rented a room in Radebeul, where the central office for all the state theaters was located.
In fact he lived in that room with a singer from the chorus and slept at home only when my mother had the night shift. The singer regarded him with the same awe in which my mother had once held him. He could once again tell her how he hoped to die onstage, and she could console him for having to live with a woman as hardhearted as my mother, who, according to him, once told him that, given the roles he played, no one would notice if he did die onstage, and to finally leave off harping about it.
If it weren’t for photographs I probably wouldn’t know what my father looked like—or his peculiar smile with just the left corner of his mouth raised. He thought it made him look Mephistophelian. Vera—there’s a snapshot of her—dressed like an adult for the funeral, all in black. She didn’t cry, or if she did, then only when she was alone, just as she didn’t speak to us about it, but confided things only to her diary. No one knows why Vera rejected my mother—well before the accident even, before puberty. Whereas, as long as I can remember, Vera was the favorite, which I felt was perfectly natural, since Vera gave the impression she had lost both parents and was forced to live with us—while I had my mother, after all. Our mother worked hard at fulfilling her husband’s prophecy and did all she could to turn Vera Türmer, Dresden’s admired “recitation prize winner,” into a stage diva, a Dietrich.
Although my mother was and is truly a good surgical nurse and, thank God, had no artistic ambitions, so-called normal professions were considered unimportant in our home. On our walks across the Dresden Heath the conversation was always about Mozart, who had been buried in a pauper’s grave, about Hölderlin, who went mad, about Kleist, who committed suicide, about Beethoven, whom his audience would laugh at. Had not every true genius been mocked, hadn’t they all—with the exception of Goethe—suffered horribly, and yet despite everything, hadn’t they created something for which humankind must be infinitely grateful today? To struggle out of darkness into light!
My mother’s experience with my father had changed none of that; on the contrary, she simply ratcheted up her notions of the genius and his work just that much higher. In other words, if my parents had been halfway satisfied with their life, they would have spared us, especially my sister, a lot of problems.
I’m sharing all this with you just to fill in details, they explain everything and nothing.
I’m not trying to tell you my life story, I merely want to trace the path down which I went so miserably astray, but my description of it may ultimately result in a kind of story, a painful story, which might not be without some purpose as a cautionary tale.96
Three weeks of my summer vacation after the seventh grade—I started school a year later than other kids my own age, so I was almost fourteen—were spent with my mother in a cottage. It stood in the middle of a pine forest, near a little clear-water lake, in Waldau, southeast o
f Berlin.
This country place belonged to a childless couple from Jüterbog, friends of my father, who spent their summers in Bulgaria or Hungary, but whose continued loyalty to us was not entirely unselfish. My mother, who paid rent for our stay, was also the one who cleaned the gutters, washed the curtains, beat the carpets, pulled a handcart to the flea market, had the propane bottles refilled, called in the man to clean out the septic tank, and even initiated little improvements like the installment of an outdoor light—she wasn’t about to step on a toad a second time.
The cottage didn’t have a television, and even before we left I was afraid I’d be bored. Boredom defined my life in general. I was bored every day, although three times a week I took target practice—I was considered to have some talent at Olympic rapid-fire pistol.
There’s a snapshot of me in Waldau—I’m wearing shorts and sitting bent over the table, staring straight ahead and massaging my calves. I still know exactly what I was thinking at that moment: I was dreaming of the new soccer season and of Dynamo Dresden winning game after game with a perfectly balanced team, of their becoming league champions and taking the cup.
When I was in kindergarten I thought of reading as something magical, that when you reached a certain age you mastered it without even trying. But when the day came that I realized reading was all about a tedious, monotonous combination of letters and syllables, it turned into just another dreary subject in school.
So when my mother asked what books she should pack for me for our vacation, it was a question of almost unsurpassable hypocrisy.
For my sake she played badminton, chess, or battleships. I rode my bike and did the shopping at the village Konsum store, where the Sport Echo went on sale after eight in the morning. As an early riser I spent the first hours of the day on a rickety man’s bicycle, riding through the woods, listening to my music cassettes played on our landlord’s Stern tape recorder that I tied to the basket.