New Lives

by Ingo Schulze

  And so I traveled to Altenburg, and after only ten minutes the general manager (a long-haired man in his late thirties, who wore his shirt open halfway to his navel) informed me that I would be hired—providing I passed my internship—turning my first walk through town into a tour of the arena where my real life was to begin.

  It was snowing. The approach to the castle lay in spotless white before me. I had a headache from all the excitement and because of my spare pair of glasses, which had a different prescription from my regular pair (Vera had them on her conscience). Snowflakes big as postage stamps were falling faster and faster with every step I took. When I turned around and looked down as if through a veil to the theater below me and to the town rising off to the west, I could scarcely see my own footprints.

  After a circuit of the castle courtyard (this was before the fire), I walked to the park, whose paths were now discernable only because they lay between rows of benches. At the foot of the hill, but removed into the distance by the drifting snow, stood the Lindenau Museum. All I knew about it were illustrations of its vases from antiquity. I don’t need to describe to you what happens when, having climbed the stairs and stridden across the octagon, you enter that suite of rooms hung with Italian paintings. I knew almost nothing about the Sienese, and very little about the Florentines,242 and yet I felt I had arrived. Perhaps you’re thinking that I’m just mouthing your words.243 But just as some people suffer when they must do without the Elbe or the sea, I would never be able to move to a place if I knew there wasn’t such a treasure somewhere nearby.

  The great collections in Dresden, Prague, Lódź, Budapest, or Leningrad lack a certain serenity. Here, however, you are alone with each painting. Even the guards remain hidden and you are reminded of them at most by a distant creaking of floorboards. I was already in Italy here. It was here that I understood that the best of the Renaissance comes from the pre-Renaissance. Here I could let pass in review the two hundred years so decisive not only for Italian art, but also for the intellectual spirit of all of Europe.244

  To this day the same paintings that I took into my heart that afternoon have remained my favorites. Of course the three Guido da Sienas, Man of Sorrow by Lorenzetti, the Madonna by Lippo Memmi, the Adoration by Taddeo di Bartolo, the crucifixions by Giovanni di Paoli, everything by him really and by Lorenzo Monaco, and of course Masaccio; but I’m almost even fonder of Fra Angelico’s St. Francis’ Trial by Fire, with its skeptical sultan on his throne, but also his saints, plus the St. Jerome by Lippi, Botticelli’s stern St. Katherine, Signorelli’s artistic torturers, the Madonnas in his Internment, the Annunciation by Barnaba da Moden, Puccinelli’s Madonna with its angels and saints, and the joy of the one to whom the baby Jesus has turned his face.

  As I left the museum a bluish red patch of late-afternoon sky shone bright above me.

  Three weeks later I passed through the theater’s portals with a nod of my head, managed to catch the grated door before it closed behind a dancer in her warm-up outfit—and froze at the sound of a shrill “Halt!” The gatekeeper had jumped up and was pressing her forehead to the pane of her booth. Called to account as to who I was and where I was headed, I finally answered with “Hoffmann! Undine!”

  “Step back! All the way back!” My shoulder bag and I were blocking the way for others. I was told to explain why I had tried to “break into” the theater. When I asked her to call the general manager, she laughed, grabbed the telephone receiver, and took her eye off me only long enough to jab a finger into the dial. With each new arrival she again asked me to give my name. I was forced to shout “Enrico Türmer” several times, and to repeat it a little louder, “if you please,” to spell the two words—so that every newcomer had learned the name of this stupid young fellow at the gate before I even got inside the theater. “Do you know a Türmer, Enrico maybe?”—or in her dialect: Dürmer, Ähnreegoh. That indefinite article before my name obliterated me.

  I begged her to inform the chief dramaturge. The outraged gatekeeper laid the receiver down, put a finger to the cradle, and pressed hard. She was well aware of what she had to do, she didn’t need instructions. Besides which, people there would have no more idea of who I was than she did.

  “He don’t even know where he wants to go,” she shouted into the receiver once more as two ballerinas came tripping by, “that’s what got me so riled, that’s the problem,” to which I could only keep on replying, “Hoffmann, Hoffmann!”

  “Nobody knows you here,” she declared, and set down the receiver. Giving me another once-over, she leaned back in exhaustion and started to thumb through whatever it was that had been lying before her the whole time. It was unclear whether she was going to pursue my case or had already filed me away for good.

  “Wait!” she cried out, still turning pages, but as she reached for the receiver again a woman in a white blouse emerged out of the darkness of the stairwell, bounded down the last three steps, and cast me such a friendly glance that I was afraid she had mistaken me for someone else.

  “I know who you are,” she said with a smile, linked her arm under mine, and guided me in the direction of the gatekeeper.

  “May I introduce you, Frau”—here she inserted the gatekeeper’s name—“to Herr Türmer, our new dramaturge…” This time it took the gatekeeper two tries to get up out of her chair; she extended a hand through the oval hatch in the pane and exclaimed, “Why didn’t he say so right off!” And with that we strode through the portal.

  The woman in the white blouse ushered me through a labyrinth of hallways and stairs. Every few feet the odor changed. We passed the ballet room, a canteen, skirted a baroque sandstone stairwell, and stood there in the dark. I heard a key and followed her into a room where light barely seeped through the curtains. The odor was of midday meals.

  On the way back we stopped in front of white french doors and listened. Suddenly my guide pressed down the door handle and shoved me inside, just as a piano struck up again.

  Who was I, what did I want, who had sent me?…My good fairy had vanished, the director, hardly any older than I and with a haircut that highlighted the back of his head, had interrupted the rehearsal and was paging quickly through the piano reduction.

  I gave my name, I repeated my name. I was informed by the director, who went right on paging through the score, that one did not attend a rehearsal uninvited, nor did one interrupt it. One needed to request permission in advance from at least the director, if not the entire ensemble. “In advance!” he repeated and finally stopped turning pages. Had I done that? No, I replied, I had not. It was too late for any excuses for my misconduct. A gentleman kneeling on the floor expressed in a bass voice his outrage at such a disregard for his person. How long was he supposed to keep crawling around, didn’t we people have eyes in our heads. He said “people,” but he had looked only at me.

  Over the next five weeks, during which I was allowed to audit Tim Hartmann’s production of Undine, there was little I could do to improve the situation I had got myself into when making my entrance. I made it worse by using formal modes of address. Tim Hartmann took it as an insult that I did not call him Tim like everyone else. Just opening the door to the canteen was awful, leaving the counter with my tray of bockwurst and coffee was awful, taking a seat at an empty table was awful, joining other people at a table was awful. What’s more, I smelled like the kitchen, which was directly under my room.

  Every so often the assistant director, a tall, beautiful woman from Berlin, took pity on me. When she stood before me, I realized what might have saved me: something to do.

  Although I did like sitting in on rehearsals. At first I thought I needed to say something that would prove my theatrical credentials. I amazed myself at what all occurred to me. At the end of the first week I handed Tim Hartmann a list of suggestions. I hoped in this way to commend myself as a worthy partner in the conversation. At the start of the next week of rehearsals the assistant director asked me to refrain from taking notes from now on.
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  When there was no evening rehearsal I attended performances, where I sat in one of the first rows with program in hand and tried to memorize the faces of the cast. As if my future depended on it, I devoted great energy, indeed passion, to learning names. Which was why the last week of Undine rehearsals was especially important, because I could now coordinate names and functions even for people who never appeared onstage, but whom I knew by sight. I found it easy to learn names and equally difficult to correct my mistakes. For example I thought the lighting director was the man in charge of painting sets, and took the director of the set workshop for the lighting director.

  I considered my audit to have concluded on a conciliatory note when I was assigned to write the press release, which Tim Hartmann then handed out at dress rehearsal, all the while repeating “à la bonne heure.” At the premiere I was even allowed to spit three times over the left shoulder of Undine herself, who had ignored me longer than anyone else.

  Tim Hartmann’s production was no thundering success, but the audience applauded until he appeared onstage in a black suit, bowed, and rocked his head back and forth in the hope that everyone would notice his brand-new stub of a ponytail.

  At the cast party I was given lots of hugs. I expected a speech from the general manager, a few words about the production and the singers’ fine performances. And I hoped he would also remember his promise to me.

  He congratulated Tim Hartmann, shook hands all around the table, and also responded to a few bons mots with a laugh that was almost indistinguishable from a cough. But he refused to sit down and join us. His entourage, recruited mainly from stage actors, but especially from the ballet, were waiting for him two tables down.

  I drank and chain-smoked and for the first time felt at home in the canteen. The assistant director introduced me to Antonio, a young Chilean from Berlin. Antonio asked what I thought of the production, which he himself termed a “yawn.” Antonio told me to sit down beside him, and pulled a chair over for me to join the “Jonas” table—he called the general manager by his first name. How easy it all was. Antonio offered me some vodka. Everybody at the table was drinking vodka.

  In claiming that marriage and fidelity were unnatural, pointless, and ridiculous, Jonas managed to antagonize most of the women, which didn’t prevent him from plowing right ahead. He kept brushing strands of hair from his face while shifting his gaze from one person to the next. As our eyes met I automatically nodded as if I agreed with him. I was angry at myself for doing it, and all the more so since the actress Claudia Marcks loudly contradicted him, even laughed in his face—which he took half as an offense, half as confirmation of this theory about women.

  I admired Claudia Marcks. I had never been able to strike up a conversation with her, I hadn’t even managed to work my way into her vicinity. Everything about her was beautiful and desirable, I especially loved her hands. They led a life of their own, which no one except me seemed to noticed. Suddenly I wanted nothing more than to feel the touch of those hands—today, tomorrow, whenever—and then to kiss them. And I was strangely convinced that that hour was no longer all that distant.

  I asked Jonah whether he himself believed the stuff he was spouting.

  He stared at me with reddened eyes. “Why don’t you just go get laid!” he shouted. “Why don’t you just…” Jonas repeated the sentence two, three times, four times, until the whole canteen had fallen silent.

  Instead of laughing in his face as Claudia Marcks had done, I thought of Nadja. And now I heard myself saying, “Why should I do that?”

  Everyone joined in the laughter. Even Claudia Marcks and Antonio. Antonio said he admired the people who were pure intellect, people like me. It was hell.

  Sometime long after midnight the assistant director asked if she and Antonio could spend the night in my quarters, the bed in the guest room was nice and wide, after all, and they had missed their train. Neither of the two slept a single minute.

  Lying at the edge of a bed and having to listen to those two beside me seemed to me the perfect metaphor of my life as an outsider. Jonas had humiliated me before everyone, and tomorrow Antonio would tell him about this night. Wasn’t the reason I hadn’t defended myself that I was afraid of losing my position, my job as dramaturge? How life takes its revenge on you, I thought, when you want something else from it. My life was that of a storyteller. And for telling stories a man needs distance and a cold eye. How could I have forgotten that.245

  In the middle of June, a few days after Vera’s departure, I was back again in Altenburg. One more unpleasant experience—and what else was I supposed to expect from the theater?—and my desire to follow Vera would have been all the stronger.

  The chief dramaturge handed me a small bright orange book, for which I had to give her a receipt. From bottom to top I read: Bibliothek Suhrkamp/Fräulein Julie/August Strindberg. I wouldn’t be staying in the guest room this time, but in the Wenzel. Flieder, the director, had not yet arrived.

  That evening in the hotel I opened Vera’s imitation-leather silverware pouch, sorted the bills, laying them out in separate rows on the floor. At three thousand marks, more than my stipend for a whole year, I stopped counting.

  From the bed I watched as the bills were caught up in a draft from the open window and began overlapping as if trying to couple, and finally I just closed my eyes and listened to their rustling. When I woke up the bills were strewn about the room, in one corner they had formed a little pile of leaves.

  I showered, sat down at a breakfast setting in the restaurant, and, as the clock struck ten, headed off for the Lindenau Museum. After that I took a walk through town, circled the Great Pond, looked for the house of Gerhard Altenbourg, and had my noonday meal at the Ratskeller. Then I lay down in the park and read. In the evening I went to the movies. That was more or less how I spent the whole week.

  My favorite pastime was to sit in the garden café beside the Great Pond and imagine I was with Vera somewhere on the Landwehr Canal in West Berlin, recovering from the interviews I had had to deal with all day.

  That Friday I traveled to Dresden to see my mother. Despite my having announced my arrival, she wasn’t waiting for me at the station, nor was she at home. Nothing in the apartment indicated a welcome—no note, no stew in the refrigerator, my bed hadn’t even been made up.

  When Mother arrived—after all, I ought to know she worked late sometimes—we spoke only about Vera. Vera should have left a lot sooner, Mother said, her path had been blocked from the start, she had been robbed of valuable years. I said that Vera had enjoyed her life and had learned more about the theater and read more books than I had at the university. How could I say that! That had all just been makeshift. Vera belonged in a drama school, they should have accepted her at the Deutsches Theater in Berlin. I hadn’t any idea of just how desperate Vera had been at times.

  For supper Mother placed an unwrapped camembert on the table, I opened a tin of fish, the bread was stale. I felt miserable. This shabbiness toward both herself and me was something new.

  I arrived late for Monday’s rehearsal discussion. It was a bad omen that Flieder likewise had a ponytail, even if it was just bound-up remnants of his wreath of hair and hung gray and scraggly over his collar. As was to be expected he didn’t turn to look at me when, after first knocking, I opened the door and took a seat at the table. As was also to be expected he had me repeat my name. Imagine my terror when I saw Claudia Marcks sitting at the table. She hadn’t been listed as a cast member.

  “So this is our Enrico,” Flieder said, “Enrico will be helping us with everything here. At least I hope so. Good thing you’re here, Enrico.” No one laughed.

  The only others at the table besides Claudia Marcks were Petrescu (Kristin, cook, thirty-five years old) and Max (Jean, servant, thirty years old). I also got a wave from Flieder’s young female assistant, a long drink of water with short hair, who was also the set designer and was perched on the arm of a chair off to one side, sipping at her Karo.r />
  What followed was more like a seminar than a rehearsal. And I wasn’t prepared. It was just for me, or so it seemed, that Flieder went on at length about the book that he had left at the front gate for me, along with a note inside. As he paced back and forth, giggling every now and then, he began to look more and more like a faun or a satyr. His assistant repeated and augmented his comments, talked about behavioral research, squinting each time she took a drag on her cigarette.

  At the noon break, Claudia Marcks took a seat beside me. “Do you know each other?” Flieder asked.

  “Yes,” I said. Claudia Marcks looked at me. “Where from?”

  “Undine, the premier, the cast party, at this very same table.”

  “Oh, please, no,” she cried. “I was so sloshed, so sloshed, oh please, I’m sorry.” And as if by way of apology she laid a hand on my forearm and asked almost anxiously if we had drunk to our friendship that night.

  “Sad to say, no,” I replied, “but I would have been happy to.”

  “Just call me Michaela,” she whispered. “Okay?”

  “Happy to, Michaela,” I said, repeated my first name for her, and gazed at her gorgeous hand, still lying on my forearm.

  Your Enrico T.

  Thursday, May 17, ’90

  Dear Nicoletta,

  Before I tell you any more about Michaela, I need to insert something that happened in the summer of 1987, but that I didn’t mention to anyone, since it didn’t seem worth mentioning. And how was I supposed to understand it anyway?

  Maybe in fact there is something in us beyond our conscious and unconscious mind, something akin to the sixth sense animals have that lets them register an earthquake or storm, long before we do. Should I call it instinct, or the power of premonition? Or simply a heightened sensitivity?

  In August I had gone to Waldau for two weeks so that I could finally do some more work on my novella. One night I awoke and thought I heard a shot reverberating through the house, through the whole woods.