New Lives

by Ingo Schulze

  I now began spending an occasional night at Emilie Paulini’s. The idea that I could have at my disposal materials dealing with war, flight, looting, and rape—perhaps even with Jews and the SS—lent me a sense of strange superiority.

  I began modestly by keeping track of Emilie Paulini’s routine: when she went to the toilet or to the kitchen, what she had Ruth buy for her, which noonday meals that People’s Solidarity brought her she liked and which stood in the kitchen until the next day. Her television habits were all too audible. I was sometimes awakened in the night by Emilie Paulini’s mumblings, which were indecipherable despite a very thin wall. I had to give up trying to slink up to her door because at the first creak of floorboards she would fall silent.

  I never missed a Wednesday evening. Just as I had hoped I was always invited into her room, which I knew only by dim twilight, because Emilie Paulini skimped on electricity. The older any object that I could make out with Argus eyes, the more I expressed my admiration for it, in hopes of rousing the Paulinis to conversation. But there were no “prewar goods.”256 I was hoping for photographs, but was shown no others than the ones that stood framed on the sideboard.

  I asked about Czechs, Jews, the outbreak of war. Nothing, and certainly nothing gruesome, occurred to her. By this time I was sure Emilie Paulini had realized there was some purpose behind my curiosity. She said of her husband, “They fought to the bitter end!” and burst into high laughter. I learned more in the kitchen. But Ruth’s aaah’s and nooo’s were so loud that Emilie Paulini would immediately come scurrying in from her room. Her husband had been a member of the Special Field Force, a bandog, and had been reported missing in action. Not so much as a picture of him was left. Long before her marriage and while still underage, Emilie Paulini had given birth to a son. He had grown up in an orphanage, volunteered to join the navy, been badly wounded in Norway, and in the end had died in an air raid on Bremen. Ruth had spoken about him with her mother only once. There had to be letters from him somewhere. But there was no point in asking her mother, Ruth said. The two of them couldn’t even talk about Hans, the Russian boy—but then Ruth didn’t want to talk about her half brother either.

  I used index cards marked with felt pens. Black for household habits, red for Emilie Paulini’s stories, green for Ruth’s, blue for objects that arrested my interest. I hoped that at some point, by arranging themselves all on their own, so to speak, my notes would spin out my tale. Michaela read a whole stack of books about the end of World War II and swamped me with suggestions.

  I had never had so much time to write as I did at the theater—we were required to be on the premises only from ten till two, and for that I got paid! And what’s more, my gross salary of nine hundred marks left me a take-home pay of seven hundred, which could only be called a princely sum.

  I was in charge of the annual Christmas fairy tale, a reworking of Andersen’s Snow Queen, in which I even appeared onstage a few times as a wise raven. I waited in vain for a director the likes of Flieder.

  The best productions were still those of Moritz Paulsen, who earned his living with fashion shows and who demanded extensive lighting rehearsals of two to three days. What won me over to Moritz Paulsen was his decision to turn a so-called glasnost play into a revue, the high point of which was a series of short scenes that interrupted the plot, each beginning with a shouted phrase he’d coined: “The Party flamingo!” All the actors stopped and, smiling radiantly, gazed up at an imaginary Party flamingo evidently winging its way across the stage sky. We figured we had a good chance of being closed down after the premiere. But except for an angry outburst by Jonas, the general manager—nobody was going to understand the point we were trying to make—there were only feeble protests. A teacher who had attended a performance with his class criticized us for stabbing pedagogues in the back instead of using our art to raise Party consciousness. Letters of that ilk, which we posted as trophies, remained few and far between.

  You might say we were a happy family during the second Christmas we spent together. The presence of both grandmothers calmed Robert down. He spoke when spoken to and didn’t walk away when I sat down beside him to watch television.

  And then, the morning of the second day of Christmas, I suddenly knew how my novella would end. I couldn’t understand why it had taken me almost three years to see it.

  It must have had to do with the general mood, a mood influenced by what we were reading at the time. Michaela was busy with Eco’s Name of the Rose, and I had given Robert Tim Thaler, or Don’t Sell Your Smile as a present. Laughter was in the air, and all of a sudden Titus, the hero of my novella, could smile. Titus was no longer going to let himself be blackmailed. His suffering was replaced with irony. He had become an adult.

  I was going to begin all over again, right from page one, but this time with a sure voice. Titus’s smile bathed the novella in a cheerful light and freed it from the sour tragedy of puberty.257

  As the new year began I set to work. I couldn’t write as fast as the ideas bombarded me. And because I was now spending a good deal of time in my refuge—our Herr Türmer is always friendly and in a good mood—Emilie Paulini was a happy woman as well.

  These days everyone believes that with the local elections258 that spring they heard the tolling of the system’s death knell. Viewed after the fact, that seems plausible.

  Whereas at the university there had been major discussions about what time a student should appear at his polling place—that is, no later than fifteen minutes after it opened—no one at the theater paid any attention to elections. After Ceauşescu was awarded the Order of Karl Marx,259 Jonas himself had threatened to quit the Party.

  Election Sunday was May weather at its finest. We got out our bikes and set out for an excursion. I can’t begin to give you any notion of the terror that used to accompany me on the way to my polling place. Or of how you always tried to conceal from yourself—just as everyone else was doing, and each well aware that he was—that your path led to the ballot box. Standing in line at the polls was like standing in a pillory.

  We picnicked beside a lake near Frohburg and didn’t start back until well into the afternoon, when hardly any voters were still out and about. We had just stretched out when the doorbell rang. Robert answered. I thought it was his friend Falk. A woman and a man wanted to speak with us, Robert said. We got dressed again.

  I felt up for a fight! I would take care of the matter with a few explicit words.

  The woman was around fifty and was bouncing up and down on our landing as if on a diving board. Her bright red lipstick held an old smile in place. He was in his mid-thirties, had scraggly yolk yellow hair, and wore a black leather jacket. In order to prop his left elbow casually on the railing he had to lean ridiculously to one side. A ballpoint pen was thrust up out of his fist. He was holding a satchel in his right hand.

  He spoke, she observed our game of Q-and-A.

  No, I said, we had no intention of heading for the polling place before six o’clock, no, our reason had nothing to do with local politics, no, we didn’t know the people on the ballot, they didn’t interest us, we had a very different notion of what an election is.

  I worked hard telling myself not to smile. But first Michaela and then the yolk-haired fellow himself began to grin. And even the woman tried to no avail to prevent her bright red lips from breaking into a smile. By now his elbow had slipped off the railing.

  Did they need any other information, Michaela asked in such a friendly voice that it sounded as if she were offering them a glass of water. No, he said, they had no further questions. They were grateful for our being so candid with them, and they could now inform the polling place that the volunteer staff wouldn’t have to stay on and that the mobile ballot box needn’t stop by at our place.

  “Well then, your visit hasn’t been completely in vain,” I said. And Michaela added, “So at least you can enjoy the rest of your Sunday.”—“Ah, wish we could,” Herr Yolk-Yellow exclaimed, laughing
and rapping his satchel with his pen. We came close to extending our hands in farewell.

  Michaela had to calm down Robert, who had been listening and was afraid he would be called out of class at school because of us. He was crying, threw himself on his bed and shouted, “Why can’t you be like everybody else?” When the doorbell rang again, he cringed. This time it was his friend Falk.

  I’m not sure I can make you understand. But the wretchedness of one side made the wretchedness of the other all the more obvious. From that day on I was overcome with a sense of absolute futility. Wasn’t it absurd to sit down to work on my novella again? Wasn’t it a kind of unintentional parody? Just as in the scene on the landing, everything took on an undertone that provoked laughter. Every accentuation ended up vacuous, every gesture, every protest was superfluous. And my cool observer’s eye seemed equally incongruous. It was the most ridiculous thing of all, the purest kitsch.260

  I sat down at my Rhinemetall and hammered away. I didn’t comprehend what I was writing. But I did suspect that it no longer had anything to do with literature.

  It was a kind of farewell; I was driving myself out of paradise. Or maybe I should say, was driving it out of myself—sacrificing my individuality, my own distinctive voice, to the extent that I had ever had one.

  I thought what I was doing was a necessary infliction of self-punishment. And by doing so, I was castigating all the others, the whole country, the whole system. What I was fabricating here was crap, but I, this nation, this society deserved nothing but crap. Maybe, I thought, this was a little like what Duchamp had felt in declaring his urinal to be a work of art. Just as he was perhaps tortured by the certainty that he could never again pick up a brush, never step up to his easel or smell the paints on his palette—that’s what this eruption felt like to me. It was a brutal exorcism I felt forced to perform. With each sentence of my election story, of my primitive fecal orgy, I was moving farther and farther away from Arcadia.261

  I was outraged not by the revolting and disgusting facts, but by the realization that these revolting and disgusting facts could no longer be communicated in any traditional way, as if every attempt to tell the truth and to call lies “lies” made distinguishing among them all the more difficult.

  For me the massacre on Tiananmen Square in Peking262 was above all a signal that the world would remain just as it was. That it would roll along like this for an eternity. I had not expected anything else, or had I? I couldn’t understand why such horrible news left me with a sense of relief.

  During the summer theater break we loaded a tent into the car and drove to Bulgaria. In Achtopol on the Black Sea—where Robert burst into tears when he saw a dolphin stranded on the beach—I was struck with the idea of using Nikolai Ostrowski’s How Steel Is Tempered263 as the basis for a truly caustic work.

  What all had actually happened that summer didn’t become clear to me until the start of the new season. We in dramaturgy laid bets as to who would be returning to work and who had already exited. Max, our Jean, and his family had traveled to Hungary. He was generally viewed as the favorite for clearing out. Max returned too late to attend the opening general meeting and couldn’t understand why he was greeted so effusively in the lobby. It was a strange mixture of joy and disappointment—yes, maybe there was even a little disdain involved too, as if people had expected more of him.

  At the same time Michaela and I had been having arguments, or better, disagreements. Although Michaela had now turned thirty-five, we wanted a child of our own.264 It used to be, she said, that it was a relief to see the blood, but nowadays she just got more depressed every time. Each new menstruation ended up as a reproach to me. Michaela insisted I get a checkup. I found that humiliating, but to have argued the point would only have made things worse. The checkup was exactly how I’d pictured it. I stood there in a toilet cubicle reeking of disinfectants and suddenly didn’t even know what woman I was supposed to be fantasizing about. A week later I handed Michaela my certificate. “Funny,” she said, and that was her only comment about the matter.

  Your Enrico T.

  Monday, May 21, ’90

  Dear Jo,

  Gale warnings were sounded here early this morning. Waiting at the door were Black and Blond, two policemen I recognized. I asked if they wanted to search our apartment.265 “Last night,” they said without any change of facial expression, “someone broke into your newspaper.”

  Black and Blond weren’t authorized to give me any further information, including an answer to the most crucial question: Were the computers still there?

  I would have loved to hug and kiss that big screen. I turned on one machine after the other as if inquiring after their health, and stood there happy amid the humming. Everything else, I thought, is secondary. The metal cabinet in my office had been broken open, Ilona’s box containing last Friday’s cash take was missing—not more than three hundred marks. In Fred and Kurt’s office the petty cash had been plundered. It all looked more like a prank by some kids. Black and Blond took their leave.

  We should be glad they found something, the detective said. Upstairs they had pulled drawers out and left Jörg’s, Marion’s, and Pringel’s manuscripts strewn across the floor.

  I asked about Käferchen and her husband. The detective didn’t understand my question—we already knew each other from the police page, a squat fellow with a handshake like a vice and eyes like portholes.

  We groped our way up the dark stairwell. The detective kept stumbling on the uneven and badly worn stairs. I searched for the doorbell by the flame of his lighter. The door was unlocked, but could be pressed open only a crack. He held the light up to the door frame. “Crowbar,” he said. The lock itself dangled loose. I called out Käferchen’s name, two, three times. In reply came—my blood froze!—I have to put it this way: an inhuman howl. Even the detective winced.

  I didn’t recognize the old man’s voice at first. I shouted my name. The old man bellowed. “Butchers! Oooh youuu fouuul butchers!” The old man cursed us as bandits too.

  With the help of two more cops we managed to get the door open, shoving the wardrobe to one side. The old man came at us with an ax, the lighter went out. All the same, the two cops managed to grab hold of him. I heard the ax sliding down the stairs.

  The old man gave off an awful stench. He kept rasping his gruesome “Butchers!” in an almost toneless voice and threatened to wring our necks.

  Frau Schorba pushed me into the computer room and offered me one of her green tranquilizers. She had arrived at seven o’clock and had reacted perfectly as per guidelines—back in Lucka she had been given instructions on how to handle a break-in.

  Through the window I could see the flashing blue light. Shortly afterward I heard the old man’s voice as he and Käferchen were brought downstairs.

  We set out on a tour with the team of detectives. Each of us had to say what was missing or damaged at their workstation. At first I thought I had come off scot-free. But then I could hardly believe it: the photograph of Robert, Michaela, and me had vanished. It had been lying among my papers. The burglars had dealt with Ilona’s framed family portrait by tossing it to the floor and stomping on the glass. Then they had dumped the contents of her “opera bag” over it. Surely I knew, she sobbed, what that meant. She was talking about the mirror. Ilona is superstitious. It’s seven years of bad luck, I explained to her, only if you break the mirror yourself. She shook her head, no, no, that’s not how it is.

  The burglars had got in through the hardware store’s only window to the courtyard. The cash register had been emptied and was still open. Evidently they had been looking just for money—the only other thing missing was a mixer. There were crowbar scars in our space as well. Hardly neat work, the shorter detective said disparagingly. I couldn’t keep my eyes off his hands. He had more strength in two fingers than I did in my whole arm. Although the cup was hot, he held it like a mug, but with his pinkie sticking out. He is the older of the two, but evidently ranks lo
wer. He always lets his partner through the door first. Even when I offered him coffee, he waited for his partner to say yes. His boss seems unsure of himself, is always quick to agree with us or laugh at some remark, while not a muscle stirs in Shorty’s face. He nodded, however, when his boss suggested it didn’t take much imagination to picture what they had done to the two old folks. Käferchen, he said, had been lying there wrapped in a sheet, whimpering. “It’s a disaster uptop” Shorty said, “Everything busted to smithereens.” The grandfather clock had been knocked over, the blanket shredded. How those oldsters had managed to push that wardrobe in front of the door is still a mystery.

  The two detectives were just about to take their leave when Jörg arrived. They extended their hands to him too. But instead of shaking hands, he took a step back. Shorty said something to the effect that we had set up cozy offices here in this old ramshackle place—a harmless remark, it seemed to me.

  He’d do better to refrain from such comments, Jörg responded with an icy stare, then shrouded himself in silence until they had left.

  He was not going to put up with such insinuations, he exploded. And why had I let somebody like that sit down at a desk? I said that I had often sat at a desk with those two and that I’d had no other choice, because otherwise I would have had to stand to fill out a report they were filing solely on our behalf.

  Jörg thought the remark had insinuated something about our office furniture. He had met these same two guys during the occupation of Stasi headquarters and had assumed they were both Stasi themselves. The whole bunch had been on a first-name basis. Only gradually had he realized that he was talking with a prosecutor and police detectives, and that the ones who kept their mouths closed belonged to the Stasi. “I mean,” he corrected himself, “officially belonged.” And it was in fact ironfisted Shorty who had accused him, Jörg, of being aggressive. Jörg was not about to let himself be calmed down.