New Lives

by Ingo Schulze

  We now have four extra pages. We’re lucky if we’re done before one in the morning.

  This morning the baron stopped by to tell us about his latest discoveries. Astrid the wolf always trots straight for her water bowl.

  He had more to tell us about the Madonna. Evidently no one knows how it ended up in the parsonage. He has already invited an expert from Hildesheim who is supposed to offer some clarifications. “Shall we pilfer her from the clerics?” Barrista asked. From his attaché case he pulled an illustrated volume,121 wrapped in the same washable protective jacket as Robert’s textbook atlas. He read to us from it—the purport being that in its Sienese and Florentine panels Altenburg possesses a collection in which can be traced the birth of postclassical art in the West. He asked if I could guess his intentions.

  “Just picture it—the hereditary prince arrives, and the Madonna enters the museum in triumphal procession.”

  To be honest I don’t understand why that should be so important.

  As he spoke Barrista ogled the plate of pancakes Ilona had set dead center in the table. I told him to dig in. Which he did, and with gusto, and forgot all about his Madonna. He pursed his lips, licked at the sugar, and opened wide. Ilona’s eyes grew bigger with each new pancake Barrista gobbled down. She was still chewing on her first. Once his plate was empty, Barrista sighed. Lost in thought, he patted his potbelly, slipped down deeper into his chair, and licked the fingers of his right hand, one after the other. He left it to the wolf to clean up his left hand dangling at his side. Ilona chewed and chewed some more.

  An older gentleman burst into this idyllic scene. He asked for Georg—they had an appointment, and he was right on time. Georg and Jörg had left for Leipzig to read proofs. I hoped that would take care of the matter. “No-o-o,” he bleated, this time he was going to insist on speaking with someone in charge, even if evidently only people who pulled up in black limos could get a hearing here. He meant the LeBaron. But a yawn from Astrid the wolf and one glance at its blind eye were enough to disconcert him.

  “Pohlmann—from Meuselwitz, Thuringia,” the man said, introducing himself, greeting first me, then the baron, with a handshake. Still chewing, Ilona jumped up and ran into the kitchen.

  The man was not, as I had feared, a local folklorist, at least not one with the usual photographs of the kaiser. Once we were alone in the next room he seemed calmer, more friendly.

  “You should know,” he said, and addressed me by name, “that I have waited forty years for this moment.” An enlarged passport photo lay on top. “Siegfried Flack,” he said, “my ninth-grade German teacher, was arrested on March 27, 1950.” Pohlmann listed the names of teachers and students, most of them from Karl Marx High School, who had passed out flyers and painted a large F (for freedom) on building walls—which had cost all of them their lives, except for the few who managed to flee to the West. One of the leaders of the group, a pastor’s son, had smuggled flyers in from West Berlin on several occasions. At some point they nabbed him. It wasn’t until 1959 that his parents were informed by the Red Cross that he had “passed away” in Moscow’s Lubyanka prison in 1951. Pohlmann spoke with deliberate calm, and sometimes his sentences sounded rehearsed. As he handed me the folder, he stood up. “We must break the silence. Truth must see the light of day at last.” I assumed these were his parting words and thanked him. But Pohlmann sat down again and gazed at me. I paged through his folder. I flinched each time he thrust his hand between the pages. Again and again I was forced to leaf back and submit to yet another explanation, even if the previous one was far from finished. And all the while I could hear the baron’s singsong coming from the editorial office.

  Pohlmann had entrusted me with letters and minutes of conversations, all meticulously dated and footnoted. I asked what he wanted done with them, and just as he shouted, “Publish them!” Ilona burst into the room. Ashen pale she stood on the threshold, staring at me as if I were a ghost. “Oh, here you are,” she said lamely, and retreated.

  Ilona had frequently rescued me from annoying visitors. But this time something really must have happened. Pohlmann had likewise been disconcerted by the sight of her.

  I asked him to wait and walked across to the editorial office. The baron was leaning against the table, waving a fan of hundred-D-mark bills. “All you need to know is right here,” he said, spreading the money on the table as if showing a winning hand. The wolf shook itself, its collar rattled. “They didn’t ask for a receipt,” the baron said, tugging at his right lower eyelid with one finger, and was gone.

  There were twelve, twelve D-mark hundreds. All I could read was GRAND OPENING, and to each side a rather deftly sketched hand extending an index finger.

  Hoping to learn more about what had occurred, I entered the little kitchenette. Ilona cringed. I touched her shoulder; she collapsed onto the low stool.

  I crouched down beside her. I was hit with the scent of Ilona, a mixture of perfume and sweat that doesn’t usually pervade the office until noon.

  “I’m so embarrassed,” she whispered. “I’m so embarrassed!” Steering clear of any questions, I took her cold hands between mine, and only then did Ilona start to talk, although it was all so muddled that I constantly had to interrupt.

  She had thought she was alone in the office, except for me and Pohlmann, of course. She had cleared the table, but also stacked the platter with more pancakes, and started to wash up. There was a knock and she was about to go to the door, when to her surprise she heard my voice—at least, she thought it was mine. She had felt sorry for me, because once again it was me who had to play receptionist.

  But then—and she swore she never eavesdrops—it had been such fun listening to me deal with the two Westerners. They finally came around to admitting that they were interested in getting in on the ground floor of the video business “in a big way.”

  She had had to chuckle at how good I was at describing the local appetite for videos, particularly special videos—I knew what she meant, right?

  I had claimed we couldn’t possibly take any more ads for next week, that we already had more than we could use—actually, I had said “overcommitted”—and deeply regretted, given present circumstances, that we were in no position to increase the number of pages from one day to the next. She had especially admired this last assertion.

  One of them kept asking what it would cost—and it was immediately clear to her what he meant, but I had played dumb. In the end she ventured to step across into the office. At first she had seen only backs—two charcoal gray overcoats bent over the table. And then, yes then, she saw Herr von Barrista in the swivel chair, his sticky hands folded across his stomach. Barrista had spoken in my voice, even grinned at her, and gone right on talking in—yes, she would swear to it—in my voice.

  I gave her time to have a good cry, and then tried to get back to basic facts as quickly as possible.

  I asked Ilona what was so horrible about all this. She had simply confused the voices coming from the room on her left with those coming from the right—they were both about the same distance from the kitchen. An acoustical illusion, that was all. Why would the baron imitate me?

  But Ilona just shook her head. What was that supposed to mean? I asked. She shook her head again; to everything I said she just kept on shaking her head.

  Suddenly Pohlmann was standing at the door. He offered to leave his folder here with me for a few days. I thanked him.

  “The money,” Ilona suddenly exclaimed. “Where’s the money?” It was still lying there fanned out on the table. But instead of calming down now, Ilona pointed at the platter and whispered, “He ate every one, all by himself!”

  I sent Ilona to the bakery. The fresh air did her good. She kept mum too, since I could hardly tell Georg that it was Barrista who had accepted the ad for us. We got into enough of a squabble as it was, because Steen’s full-pager also had to appear in our next issue. Georg says we’re digging our own grave for the sake of short-term financial benefi
ts. And I’m offering all the wrong arguments in claiming that the article is yet to be written that would increase sales by twelve hundred D-marks.122 Jörg said not a word until I offered to return both the money and the ad. Because actually none of it is really any of my business.

  Hugs,

  Your E.

  Friday, March 30, ’90

  Dear Nicoletta,

  I’m not sure whether all the things I’m allowed to experience these days should be called compensation for those I’ve missed out on until now. Believe me, I love to wake up and to fall asleep, brushing my teeth is as much a joy as shopping or vacuuming. I love to calculate the price for a half-page ad at 20 percent discount as a standing order plus a 50 percent surcharge for being on the last page. No matter what I do I am suffused with a quiet sense of passion, a contentment that is very difficult to describe. It’s not a sense of being lost to the world, like a child at play, although it’s probably more that than anything else. It’s as if I can now take up in my hand every object that I could only look at before, as if it’s only now that I’m able to experience the world as space and myself as a body. As if I’ve finally been granted permission to participate in life. Each memory, precisely because it brings such misery with it, allows me to judge how wonderful the present is.

  I’ve been trying to describe my fall, my original sin, to you, just the way I remembered it before I began to write my novella. Because now there’s hardly a memory left—at least in regard to those days in October—that I can trust. I’ve toyed with these images too often.

  Picture the hiking map outside a country inn and the red dot that says, “You are here,” until it’s erased by countless fingertips tapping at it day in and day out. Over the years that white spot gobbles up its environs, the local tourist sights and outlook points vanish, then a village, a city—it’s all merely a question of scale.

  Of course this is no special inadequacy peculiar to me, but rather the standard practice of every writer. Not an experience that isn’t trimmed away at and twisted, that doesn’t undergo amputation and then get fitted with a more efficient prosthesis. It’s really quite simple, but until you realize it, your most important memories have already been bungled. There’s truly no lack of examples.

  Which is why, for example, I always imagined the autumn of my second summer in Arcadia to have been cradled in the sounds of Schütz motets. Their spiritual tones seemed to have flung open the school windows, they filled late Saturday afternoons in the Church of the Holy Cross,123 and resounded every day from my record player. Like some comforting prophecy, they accompanied me, enveloped me.

  Ten years later, as I was working on my novella (I always called it a novella, although its oversize torso had grown to several hundred pages),124 I only needed to put on The Seven Last Words and I would react like one of Pavlov’s dogs. In a flash those days of September and October would reappear: the chestnut trees in front of the school, the rusty bicycle stands, the wind—at times a wild ocean gale that would scoop up the wet leaves still lying shimmering yellow on the asphalt, at other times a warm breeze that seemed to hold within it the last days of summer as it swept down across the Elbe from the slopes of Loschwitz with its Italianate villas. My characters emerged out of those voices, and I could see the muted light of trams, see clouds angled against the wind in the bluish pink late-afternoon sky; but I could also hear the rattling key chain of Herr Myslewksi, our homeroom teacher, whenever he led us down to the cellar for one of his “private talks,” as he called his interrogations.

  After I had given up on my novella—so that The Seven Last Words reminded me more of my attempt at writing than of that autumn—I noticed the dedication on the back of the album cover: For Enrico, Christmas ’79, from Vera. Which meant I had been given the motets two years afterward. And to this very day I own no other Schütz recording.

  In writing to you about all this, I have to pull my memories out from under the opulent scenes of my novella the way a medic pulls bodies out from under a wreck, not knowing whether they are alive or dead.

  Holy Cross School,125 with its looming dark walls, was my Maulbronn.126 Enmeshed in my Budapest dreams and the freedom of my vacation reading, I could regard this building, which I would enter and leave for the next four years, only as the setting for a novel. At the same time I wanted to take seriously the inscription written above its main portal: “To the glory of God, in honor of its founders, and for the benefit and piety of the young.”127 From the first day after my return from Budapest, when I inquired about the shortest route to school, that motto fit nicely into my Hermann Hesse world. As did Schiller Platz with its Café Toscana, the Elbe with its ferries and meadows, the Blue Wonder Bridge, the Elbe Hotel, the Wilhelminien villas and palaces in Blasewitz—they all enlivened my dream world. Farther up the Elbe one could trace the rocky plateaus of Saxon Switzerland, beyond which—after a hike of several days—lay Prague. Just as in Montagnola,128 a pilgrim in search of the good and the beautiful could stop to sojourn in all these places. Reread Narcissus and Goldmund or Beneath the Wheel and you’ll understand what I saw.

  The drama of the weeks that followed, however, was not because of Myslewski, who called us boys, one by one, to the cellar, where in a locked chamber full of oscillographs he began my interrogation with the question of why I thought world peace was unimportant. Nor was the drama a matter of my suddenly getting Cs and Ds instead of As and Bs, plus an F in spelling. I might even have been able to cope with the loss of my free time had it not been for HIM. HE left me in a despair unlike any I had known until then—and would not experience again until last autumn.

  Geronimo129 was a choirboy whose voice was cracking and who sat beside me at our desk. He was the only one who didn’t wear a blue shirt, having declared himself a conscientious objector at age fourteen—even though the lenses of his glasses could have been made from the bottom of soda bottles. All the things I had imagined in my boldest summer daydreams, he managed almost offhandedly—like finishing his homework on the walk home, while I brooded over my textbooks on into the evening. He was playing the role that I wanted to claim for myself later. And he played it magnificently. He was not only the head of the class, who spoke only in sentences ready to be set in print and used a slightly old-fashioned vocabulary that coming from anyone else would have made people laugh, but he was also loved by his schoolmates and teachers alike. And those who didn’t love Geronimo at least respected him in a way that I had never before seen among boys my age. In Geronimo’s case, the “private talks” were conducted not by Myslewski, but by the principal.

  Geronimo was my nightmare—even though I ought to have been grateful to him. He never contradicted me in German class, never inundated me with English or Russian vocabulary words I couldn’t possibly know. He slipped me his homework for problems that to me seemed beyond solution. In music class, however, he did cover his ears whenever I finished one of my attempts at singing, amid the laughter of the whole class. He was a total failure only at sports.

  Geronimo had chosen me to be his pal, or better perhaps, his attendant. Every week he demanded I supply him a new Hesse. In return I received dog-eared tomes by Franz Werfel jacketed in newspaper. I never touched them, if only because their stained and yellowed pages disgusted me. He, on the other hand, took potshots at Hesse, although he also quoted him often enough. No one suspected that I had read the books too, let alone that I had supplied them to him. I would have accepted that as the price I paid for his forbearance in other matters, but likewise not a week went by that he didn’t ask me: Why do you do it? Do what? I would ask in return each time, blushing and breaking into a sweat. He would eye me through his deep-sea glasses and his lips would form a pained smile. What he meant was: If you’re a Christian, why aren’t you a conscientious objector too, why do you agree with the proposition that existence conditions awareness, why don’t you say grace before meals, why does your voice sound high and thin when Myslewski says something to you, why do you waste so much tim
e on this school crap? Geronimo didn’t have to ask any more questions. I knew them all by heart.

  Every day began with the prospect of my being subjected to a painful examination. I began my walk home each day either relieved that for once I had escaped him, or suffering the torments of hell. For I never had an answer for him, and hoped the school bell would soon end our strange dialogue, which often concluded with his offering me a Bible quote: “Fear not, for I am with you always even unto the end of the world.” Once he said, “It’s my guess that you’d make a very good catechumen.” It was left to me to be content that Geronimo, who planned to study theology, at least found me good for something.

  I was no better at keeping up my diary or praying—apart from a fervent Lord’s Prayer or two—than I was at providing Geronimo with answers. What was I supposed to write, or pray for? I really did know right from wrong. There were lies, and there was the truth—you could be either a traitor or a man of God. I didn’t have to put my self-indictment in writing. I knew as well as anyone that there was not a single argument I could offer that would not have been an admission of my guilt. Cowardice, duplicity, doubt, weakness—why couldn’t I act like Geronimo? Why was I living my life like everyone else?

  The conflict once again grew more intense at the end of October, in the week after fall break, during which the flu had preserved me from worse torments.

  That Monday Myslewski ordered me to join him in yet another cellar conversation. I felt honored, was surprised that I was the only boy to be summoned for a second round. Geronimo made sure everyone heard that he would be waiting for me at the school door—to lend me his aid, to stand by me.

  Myslewski was apparently unprepared for my refusal to become an officer in the National People’s Army or at least to serve for three years as a noncom with weapon in hand defending the homeland against all enemies. He stammered with outrage, struggling to deal with this from my first “no” on. Suddenly he shoved a book at me, in which he said I would find all the information necessary to deliver a ten-minute report about the aggressor, the West German Bundeswehr, during Friday’s physics class. He smiled and patted me twice on the arm, so paternally that I felt a need to thank him, to cheer him up, to tell him that I would reconsider serving in the NPA for three years. Yes, I would not have minded staying there with him a while longer. I left school through the side entrance and, making a wide detour, ran to the bus stop.