New Lives

by Ingo Schulze

  I learned soon enough how unnecessary my scruples were. Nadja had a gift for making me feel like the inventor of all these unfamiliar caresses.

  Then, it was toward morning, there came a moment when I feared I had spoiled all our happiness. Nadja’s head had returned to my shoulder, and automatically I said “Thanks”—everything she had done seemed so incredible. But the instant I uttered it, I felt her stiffen, and I knew how wrong, how stupid I had been. Her face appeared above me, she propped her head on one hand, stared at me, smiled, and wanted to know what number she was for me. I hesitated. “Out with it,” she said. I raised my left hand and spread my thumb and forefinger.

  Nadja said I couldn’t fool her. First she made fun of me, then suddenly accused me of not having waited for her. When I refused to tell her about Katalin, she even turned angry.

  At breakfast Dora plopped down between our chairs. Frau Zoubková gave us knowing nods. If we had left any traces in the kitchen they were long since wiped away.

  Like somnambulists Nadja and I found the city’s loveliest spots, took the train up to Petrin Hill, got out halfway up, walked through the spin-drift of blossoming cherry trees, and lay down in the grass.

  Near the Moldau, just a few hundred yards from the Charles Bridge, we inadvertently stepped through the arch of a portal and found ourselves in an enchanted park, at the far end of which were wide stairs leading up to a terrace of brown sandstone, where a copper beech stood. I was about to touch its leaves—from a distance I had thought they were withered—when we heard something rustling behind us. We spun around and saw two peacocks, both fanning their tails simultaneously.

  When I brought Nadja to her train, all that was left of her baggage was one suitcase, and we barely spoke. We crossed the train station without a word. On the platform where her train was due any moment, Nadja remarked that next time I would have to tell her about my manuscript, she wanted to know all about it, since after all it would be her job to smuggle it into the West. If there was one thing still lacking in my happiness, it was those very words.

  Back in Jena, the first sentence I wrote to Nadja took on a tone that set me on my way without any larger concept, without my even really having to think about it. As I folded the pages I was already formulating the first lines of letter number two.

  I wrote Nadja every day, on a typewriter now, and was amazed that my everyday life was not at all as unliterary as I had thought.

  Once I had received her first reply—the pale blue envelopes came rolling in every four or five days—in which she labeled my letter “wonderful prose,” I began to lay carbon paper between my pages.

  I had started too late to cram for a three-subject exam looming up ahead: the literature, art, and history of Rome, plus the languages, and tests on eighteenth-century German drama and political economics (or was it dialectical materialism?). That left me no time for Vivat Polska!, not unless I interrupted the flow of my letters—and if I had put off telling Nadja about my daily life until later, the tone would have been ruined. And so the only work I did on my novel was to report to Nadja how well I was progressing on it. At regular intervals I noted the conclusion of a chapter.

  That’s funny, don’t you think? You can see, can’t you, that, given everything you know about me, my behavior was totally untypical? Why, particularly at that time in my life, did I toss my manuscript in the corner? Yes, love, you’ll say, yes love was to blame. Yes, I did love Nadja. But even love has to fit in with all the rest somehow.

  I no longer know which letter it was, but after only a few days I was already convinced that I was writing an epistolary novel. And it was powerful! If my letters found their way to Nadja—or so my calculation—the work would essentially write itself.206

  I found myself once again in a situation much like the one in Oranienburg. Everything I saw and did became literary material. Without my intending it, each letter unfolded as a kind of narrative. I was surprised how widely disparate events suddenly wove themselves together as if they were part of some plan of composition. The moment I took the lid off my Rheinmetall, I drifted into storytelling. I barely had to make any corrections, because I was able to enhance my experiences without a second thought, almost automatically. If you know where the roulette ball is going to land, of course you bet on the right number.

  I loved Nadja, I loved Jena, I loved my life, and everyone could see how love had changed me. Only Vera had nothing to say.

  Nadja and I met in Prague, Brno, or Bratislava every two or three weeks, sometimes for only a few hours. We had invented a secret code for our telephone calls, only to get trapped in it ourselves. For our third meeting—in the middle of my exams—I waited in Bratislava for Nadja, who was spending the week in Vienna, where her mother had moved by that time. Her train was supposed to arrive shortly after mine. When notice was posted that it would be an hour late, I took a taxi, asked the driver to recommend a hotel, paid for the night in advance—the two hundred marks were equal to my entire monthly stipendium.207 When I returned to the station, the train was now announced as two hours late. That abbreviation for Vienna South Station, which stubbornly stayed posted even while all the other names of cities changed, became my curse that night. Ever since, I also know that nástupiště means “platform” and příjerdy vlaků is “arrival of trains.” I nursed a hopeless lust for revenge and worked up a nasty critique of the station’s murals—a commentary that I hoped would make me look brilliant in Nadja’s eyes—where Sputnik was skewering the dove of peace high above the heads of all peace-loving peoples. After two hours I felt nothing but an intense hatred and asked for nothing more than that the three sinister figures slinking away at the left side of the mural would turn around and empty their submachine guns on all those socialist faces gazing happily into the future, mow them all down, from the blond steelworker to the granny clad in black. After five hours I begged a cruel Olympus to have mercy on me on last. We had been robbed of five hours, a quarter of our time, a lost evening, half the night.

  Finally, sometime after midnight, the train from Vienna pulled in, but without Nadja. There were still tears in my eyes as I begged the hotel for my money back. They took pity on me. I grabbed my bag and boarded the next train for Brno. Between two and three in the morning I searched the station there for Nadja. Alarmed by the notion that she might have been detained at the border but would arrive on the next train, I leapt on a train heading back to Bratislava. I was lucky no one checked my ticket. From Bratislava I called her mother, who, although I had roused her out of her sleep, said, “Ah, my boy,” in a deep voice and gave me the number of the Hotel Jakub in Brno.

  The people at the Hotel Jakub knew all about our story. A waitress preceded us into the breakfast room and with the gesture of a magician who has just pulled off a trick, garnered loud applause for the happy ending of our crazy trip.208 Wasn’t that the stuff novels are made of? With the help of Nadja’s few schillings, we played the Western couple. Every waitress, every museum guard was drawn into our tale, made a confidant—we found our audience in every passerby, in every person who sat down at our table.

  Once, it was in Prague, Nadja made me feel very unsure of myself.

  I would have stepped on the yarmulke if Nadja hadn’t bent down for it in time. She fastened it to my hair with a hairpin—she kept such utensils stowed in her purse. I think Nadja was curious about what I’d look like in a yarmulke. And since we were only a few steps away from a synagogue that we intended to visit, I kept the skullcap on.

  Back on the street, I forgot to remove it. After we’d taken a few steps—Nadja had linked arms with me—a man spoke to us. He asked where the synagogue was and stared at my yarmulke. I almost tipped it as if it were a hat.

  Why had he addressed us in German, Nadja asked him. Her pronunciation was somewhat like Frau Zoubková’s, except it had a more cutting tone. Why had he thought we would understand German, or that we would prefer to speak it.

  He nodded. With a will-o’-the-wisp look in his
eyes and trembling lips, he searched for an apology. Nadja, still linked arm in arm with me, took a half-step forward and directed an open palm toward the synagogue. “Geradeaus!” she rasped. He gave another nod, smiled suddenly as if redeemed somehow, and exclaimed, “Shalom!”

  Nadja pulled me on ahead. I was waiting for some reaction on her part, perhaps even a laugh. The longer she kept silent, the more uneasy I grew. When I looked at her, we both came to a halt. Nadja was a stranger, sad and proud; yes, almost haughty.

  She didn’t want me to take off the yarmulke, said it looked good on me. The next day we were talking about her mother, and Nadja said there had also been Jews in her family. I don’t know if that’s true. The yarmulke is still lying here among our caps and scarves.

  I had given scarcely a thought to my exams. I believed in my good luck and passed each one, if just barely. The panel obliged me by honoring my term papers.

  The longest time that Nadja and I spent together was eight or nine days in August.

  We had rented a room from a Slovakian woman in the Jizerské Mountains. A picture of John F. Kennedy in a silver frame hung in the stairwell.

  Nadja was apparently determined to clarify our relationship. On our first hike up to the TV tower at Liberec, she asked me how I viewed our future. I said I wanted to finish my book (on which I hadn’t worked for months). Then, if that was truly her wish, I could apply for an exit visa. Those four syllables lasted forever. They crumbled in my mouth like a moldy piece of candy. Nadja asked whether that was truly what I wanted. Yes, I said. She said that she would marry me. I said that would be the simplest way.

  We hiked through the dying forest,209 and it was too late before we realized we had been misled by a faded signpost, which had indicated the remaining distance to be nine instead of nineteen kilometers.

  By the time we reached the restaurant at the TV tower, my throat was so dry it took me two attempts to order a pivo.210

  According to our landlady’s map a narrow-gauge train would take us back to the village, but no one in Liberec knew anything about a narrow-gauge train. We had no choice but to march over the ridge in the dusk. I’ll never forget those minutes on the barren summit. As darkness crept up the slopes, our path was illuminated as if on a stage by the light of the setting sun. The air was clear, the horizon infinitely distant in all directions. Our footsteps were the only sound. When Nadja suddenly hugged me, I could feel the hasty beat of her heart. We held each other tight and gazed out across the highlands, like emigrants about to wander into the landscape.

  Then came three days of rain, and when the fourth day also dawned gloomy, we headed back to Dresden. Frau Krátká closed the front door behind us without a word.

  In order for you to understand Nadja and me, there’s something I have to disclose, something that increasingly disturbed me. Although outwardly the perfect couple, we never really became one.

  At first there was always the one reason: Nadja’s fear of getting pregnant, and she didn’t want to take the pill. Then I would forget condoms again, or we were simply too exhausted from our escapades. I won’t trouble you with any of what were for me unpleasant details. For a good while now, as soon as the door was shut behind us, we would be overcome with an inexplicable shyness.

  For a long time we never mentioned Vera. I had not seen my sister since the day I turned around at Vera’s door to join Nadja. Which meant I could reply to Nadja’s questions with just a shrug. But Nadja would not let go. I became jealous of Vera. In addition, Nadja hinted that she had knowledge of matters that Vera and I had sworn to keep secret.211

  I tried to develop clear plans for a future shared with Nadja. I would tough it out in Salzburg as a cabdriver, and write during whatever time was left me. As soon as my book was published, Nadja wouldn’t have to work anymore and could concentrate entirely on her studies. And on weekends we’d find things to do—hiking, strolling the town, or traveling to Munich, Vienna, or Italy.

  I immersed myself in this new chapter and was aware of how, at the end of each of my monologues, my eyes glistened. Nadja said little, a silence all the more stubborn, the more suggestions I heaped before her.

  I was afraid that she was as relieved as I when it finally came time to leave for the station. But no sooner had we boarded the streetcar than I was overcome with a great sadness and a terrible dread of losing Nadja. I told her that I would give anything to repeat the past few days, even if it meant not changing one single experience. She hugged me, and we held each other tight just as we had on the mountaintop.

  Until then I had had no trouble returning to correspondence after one of our meetings—on the contrary. This time I was thrown into despair. I ripped page after page out of the typewriter and finally lay down on my bed with no idea of where to go from here. When I woke up I was certain that I had lost Nadja during the night.

  From now on I merely tried to keep writing letters as long as I possibly could. Instead of looking forward to her replies, I feared them. I gave up phoning her almost entirely when, in response to my question of whether she had received my letters and what she had been doing of late, Nadja replied: Plugging away, just plugging away.

  “What can I do?” I replied. I would do anything I could.

  We were too short of money to be able to see each other. My bank-book showed zeros. I had used up Aunt Camilla’s D-mark subsidies, asking Vera for help was out of the question. Nadja didn’t have time to write letters. I accepted that, and in time everything else as well. When the semester started, I once again had loads and loads of material for letters.

  During my last call to Salzburg, Nadja suddenly sounded the way she used to when just her whispering my name was like an unbelievably tender caress. “I love you,” I shouted into the phone. “I love you too,” she cried, and laughed. I invoked our love one more time and could hear Nadja sending me kisses over the phone. Then the call ended because I had run out of change.

  My epistolary novel was going to end with that punch line—unless at some point I could come up with a better ending.

  Love,

  Your Enrico T.

  Monday, May 7, ’90

  Dear Jo!

  I’ll say it just once: If you want to study the confusions and complications of provincial life, if you want work and a steady income, let’s talk.212 As a columnist, you’ll be paid two thousand a month after taxes—after July, two thousand D-marks—and we’ll also find a decent place for you (and your family?) to live. We’re going to need new people in any case. The only question is when we’ll make our decisions. We could start printing in Gera tomorrow. It would be a third cheaper, on better paper, with needle-sharp photos. We can vary size by fours213 —we’d have no limit on the amount of advertising, and we wouldn’t have to break up pages already set or postpone articles. Next thing to paradise! If only we could master the computer. Andy wanted eighteen thousand for everything, including software. We’re to be his showcase and are to give him a couple of free ads. He’ll get his money for the pasting machine and layout tables in July. (Even though I think we’ll make it through July 1st quite well, I sometimes wonder what would have happened if we had exchanged our twenty thousand back then for East-marks, which very soon now could end up amounting to sixty or seventy thousand D-marks, maybe even more.)214

  The Leipziger Volkszeitung is a sad bunch. Nobody there even thought it necessary to show up at the Auerhahn on Sunday, even though all the bigwigs—except from the Party of Democratic Socialism, of course—gathered there to wait for results to come in.215 They greeted us as kings, because they know that we know that the whole lot of them weren’t exactly the spearhead of the revolution. That’s one of Jörg’s favorite topics. At the end of December he nominated Karmeka, who’s our new mayor, to be chair of the opposition Round Table although he was still a nobody—and that marked the start of Karmeka’s rise. Jörg probably expects too much to come of contacts with his “pupil” (as he calls him a bit too often), but certainly the connection doesn’t wo
rk against us. It isn’t clear yet who the new district councilor (the title reminds you somehow of junkers and the kaiser, doesn’t it?), but he’ll likewise be a Christian Democrat. If we’re lucky, it’ll end up being one of Fred’s buddies. Even today, three days later, there’s still not one line about it in the LVZ. We have Karmeka headlined on the front page, with interview and photo. And the Altenburgers will learn the rest of what’s going on from us first too. No wonder people like the managing director think they’ll have an easy time of it here.

  On Sunday I had a long talk with Marion and Jörg. I told them about Barrista’s city maps, bonus gifts for new subscribers, and his “acquisitions brigade.” As for a computer, he literally had to carry one up to our office himself.

  After two hours I had Marion to the point where she at least agreed to contract Barrista as a consultant. I had suggested a thousand a month, and that would have been a ludicrously low fee as it is. But the five hundred they agreed to is really little more than an embarrassing gesture.

  When we made our offer, he thanked us, but appeared more surprised than pleased. What was it we expected of him? Jörg wanted to run his own ideas past him, Marion talked about organizing the workload, and I said that he should help us choose and train our sales reps—and have a look at our books, because none of us here understands the first thing about accounting.

  The baron listened to us for a while, then stood up quite suddenly, and stepped behind his chair, as if it were a lectern. “Would I be correct in stating,” he said, his voice languid, his eyelids heavy, “that you have evidently not yet answered, indeed not even asked the fundamental question that needs to be resolved at the start of every business endeavor.” Barrista tensed his body and took a deep breath. “Do you or don’t you want to get rich?” He looked from one to the other and then added, “I admire anyone who decides he does not. That deserves my greatest respect. I merely need to know the terrain we’ve chosen to meet upon.” He interrupted me brusquely when I burst into laughter.