New Lives

by Ingo Schulze

  Marion leads him around by her apron strings. Last week he admitted to me that ever since the day Piatkowski visited our offices, he’s been trying to write an article about him.266 “Winners Can Be Insufferable” is to be the headline. But the moment he sees that headline in front of him, he goes totally blank. No sentence, no phrase that he doesn’t immediately strike. He feels like a fly banging against a windowpane, over and over—even though the article is a matter of self-respect for him, of self-respect and independence.

  Then we shouldn’t have agreed to buy the building, I said. Yes, Jörg replied, it wasn’t appropriate, and he hadn’t actually agreed to it. What was that supposed to mean, I asked. He couldn’t say really, and it wasn’t intended as criticism of me—he’d been happy about it himself, as I could see at the time, and he wasn’t trying to offer excuses by blaming the baron. “But it isn’t right, it isn’t right.”

  “The voters elected Piatkowski,” I said. “He’s justified in claiming that at any rate.”

  He understood that, he rejoined. But he can’t bear it when someone like Piatkowski floats right back up to the top, that really cheapens everything else. Doesn’t it? He just wanted to pose the question—at least that, a question.

  “What are we supposed to do with people like those detectives? ‘Send the Stasi to the mines’ only works in socialism,”267 I said. I helped him tidy things up.

  Jörg is a man full of scruples. After we published our scandal issue he was afraid that Meurer, the school director, whom he had attacked in his article, might become suicidal. Which is why he was happy when he spotted him on the street. Meurer, however, doesn’t know what Jörg actually looks like. People here in town really are afraid of Jörg. I likewise profit from his reputation.

  I had to force myself to sit down at my own desk and get back to work. I would have loved to have asked the Catholic priest—he had accompanied the baron to “entrust” us with an article about the Altenburg hand reliquary—to move from room to room with his censer, cleansing everything with the proper ritual. Ilona once again burst into tears when the priest spoke a few comforting words to her. From hour to hour she was getting more and more wrought up over something that she herself couldn’t actually say what it was. Frau Schorba was filling in for Ilona after having sent her back to the kitchen, where I could hear her sobbing. Astrid the wolf loped from room to room sniffing excitedly, as if following a trail. I drove Ilona home. We drank some more coffee in her kitchen. She couldn’t stop talking about herself—for example, about how at age eighteen, after only a few months of marriage, she had been ready to throw herself in front of a train.

  When I got back, Kurt—who normally doesn’t say a word—asked if I’d had a nice time at Ilona’s and gave me a nod, a thoroughly approving nod.

  I first noticed Kurt wearing one of the bombastic watches that the baron had brought a whole boxful of. They say an authentic original costs hundreds if not thousands of dollars, but the baron gets them for just nine marks apiece. They’re intended as an incentive for new subscribers. Anyone who subscribes to the Altenburg Weekly prior to July 1st and pays 45.90 marks in advance gets a watch—while the supply lasts.

  The problem is we need to provide ourselves with a little buffer so we can get past July. If just a thousand people respond to the offer that would come to 45,900 marks, minus nine thousand for the watches.

  By evening the locksmith had got all the doors more or less back to normal. We had him repair the old folks’ door at the same time.

  Hugs, Your Enrico

  PS: I spent two hours running the figures yesterday and put together a paper with my ten theses that I want to hand out tomorrow. We have to act. If we just keep on going as we have up till now, we’re done for. Marion—who reproaches me for having accepted an ad from South Africa268 —thinks that polishing doorknobs to get ads is demeaning, yes, humanly degrading for anyone, especially women. It borders on prostitution. I of all people should be able to sense the discrepancy between what is of importance to us—which is why we put out a newspaper at all—and what it is I’m planning. When I said nothing, she kept at it: Could I imagine that kind of door-to-door promoter on a stage or in a novel as anything but a wretched character. I don’t know if she noticed her mistake269 as she said it or if she now fell silent because Manuela270 had appeared in the door, beaming.

  Ascension Day, May 24, ’90

  Dear Nicoletta,

  I do so hope that my ruminations about my need to write aren’t boring you. But my weal and woe depended on my writing. For if writing was a blunder, then I was a blunder.

  By writing one reassures oneself of the world—it’s a platitude, but I filled it with life. As long as there are blasphemers, we needn’t worry about God. In my case that meant: as long as I succeeded in raging with a pure heart, something out there must exist—big game, monstrosities, socialism as it really exists, the Other, or whatever you want to call it.

  You can see what thin ice I was already moving across. Security was reduced to a pure heart. Call it, if you like, a sense of style, or a regard for what was appropriate.

  Michaela found my grotesque brain children amusing, but didn’t take them all that seriously and continued to torment me with suggestions for my Paulini piece. Geronimo never mentioned them. Vera, on the other hand, sent me a congratulatory telegram. She thought that precisely by abandoning my self, my ego, I would find my way to a unique position. I had, she said, discovered a shortcut on the road to fame and eternity. I’m afraid she still believes that. Just early last January she assured me that I am a player in an “immortal game.” My art, and it alone, was worth living and suffering for—she had long since staked her own life on just that, on her brother’s talent.271

  Despair alternated with euphoria. Eureka! I cried jubilantly, convinced that I had developed and radicalized my method. (Sitting on the john I discovered too late that there was no toilet paper and reached for a newspaper close at hand. As I departed, I noticed that one article had been torn on an angle and was missing its conclusion. What was left was a series of lines, each shorter than the previous and concluding in mutilated words that yielded a throttled stammer I found touching. The penultimate line ended with a “hear,” the last line with a “t.” I would never have been able consciously to achieve so convincing a linguistic disintegration of persons, things, and ideas as had inadvertently emerged here. When I typed it out, maintaining the same length of lines, what I finally pulled from my typewriter was a page that looked like a poem.) But no sooner did I have my effort in hand than I sank back into melancholy. What would such reductionism get me?

  That was two days before the Hungarians opened their borders.272 Until that point I had ignored the Hungarian vacationers as best I could. I don’t know what I had expected, maybe a compromise that would allow them to return, but never that the borders would be opened. A permanent gap in the wall was unimaginable. Michaela said we had to toast the event. And so Robert drank his first glass of wine to the health of the Hungarians. “Maybe,” Michaela said, “something will come of West Berlin after all.”

  I didn’t correct her, because her failure to understand seemed too fundamental to me.

  Norbert Maria Richter, the director of Nestroy’s Freedom in Gotham, was trying at the time to have me replaced as dramaturge. Our differences were, he said, unbridgeable.

  As far back as June, Norbert Maria Richter had wanted to turn the play into a kind Knights of the Roundtable,273 a farce about a betrayed revolution, about revolutionaries turned nabobs, about history and how they prettify it by remembering lies. And all of it with lots of glitter and show.

  And now, in September, Norbert Maria Richter thought he could see in the piece the spirit of revolution.

  Precisely because it was this Norbert Maria Richter who told me about the founding of the New Forum—calling it “a significant step in the direction of democratizing our society”—I wanted nothing to do with it.

  Nevertheless that same d
ay Ramona, one of my colleagues, laid a couple of filled-out applications for membership in the New Forum on my desk. Michaela had promised her to take them along to a contact address in Halle.

  I had no choice; I likewise had to fill out a form with my name and address. I knew what a stupid move it was, what childishness. Now I was playing “opposition” too. And sooner or later I would be shown this same form during an interrogation.

  Michaela, on the other hand, wasn’t acting like someone risking her own existence and the future happiness of her child, but more like someone who had finally found the right role in the right theater.

  The last Monday in September, the day on which we were supposed to drive to Halle, I couldn’t find the applications in my pocket. I ransacked my desk at the theater—but didn’t dare let my colleagues notice what I was up to. The idea that in my negligence I might have put Michaela and the others in jeopardy was unbearable.

  I drove home, I could barely speak. “Gone,” I panted, “the applications are gone.”

  Michaela had taken them out of my pocket to write down the addresses of the others.

  As we drove along we saw several police cars, but even the highly unlikely possibility that we—Robert was with us—could have been waved out of the car and searched had lost all its terror.

  Michaela was glad to make the acquaintance of someone named Bohley, evidently a relative of Bärbel Bohley.274 Except for a functioning doorbell and a nameplate on the mailbox, nothing suggested that the house was still occupied. The whole block looked as if it had been designated for demolition. Michaela was disappointed. We decided to come back later and drove to the center of town. We ran up and down the market square and ordered the most expensive ice-cream concoctions at a milk bar. We tried to describe for Robert what Feininger’s painting of the cathedral looks like; we extended our walk to the Moritzburg and then down to the Saale River. Michaela didn’t want to visit the Albert Ebert275 house or buy shoes, although she saw some she liked. She didn’t want to appear on the Bohley doorstep with a shopping parcel.276

  We had no luck this time either. Application forms in hand, Michaela hesitated, looking first at me, then at Robert, and back to me, as if wanting to give us a final chance to stop her from doing something stupid. Or was her point to consecrate the moment in some way, because from now on nothing would be as it had been before? The slips of paper vanished soundlessly into the mailbox.

  We hardly talked to one another in the car. On the highway from Leipzig to Borna I felt as if I had finally put something behind me for good. I hadn’t weaseled out, I had signed—and I wouldn’t deny it or take it back—and had sacrificed half a day doing it. I felt as if this justified me to go ahead calmly with my work. Even in the midst of that lunar landscape, even in Espenhain, the gentleness of that autumn was palpable. I thought of the smoke of burning potato plants after the harvest, of hiking the Saubach Valley near Dresden, all the way to the mill with its giant waterwheel, of country roads littered with windfall fruit, leaving you drunk on the scent of overripe apples and plums, on air quivering with wasps. I thought of the first home games at Dynamo Stadium, of the Königstein Fortress and the taste of bockwurst and herbed cider. My Dresden novella reminded me of some favorite book I hadn’t read for a long, long time.

  The next day it was Jonas, our general manager, who told me—as if he had just accidentally happened to have been there—about Leipzig. There had been ten thousand people, ten thousand demonstrators! I would gladly have believed his fairy tale that they were all applicants277 —but ten thousand was too many, far too many.

  Michaela told me that cameras had been set up on the roof of the Leipzig post office. She repeated everything Max had told her as if to say, “And what were you doing while this was going on? Where were you?”278

  What I found so ridiculous about the demonstration was its “workaday” quality. One conscientiously does one’s job, then it’s off to demonstrate, but not for too long, because one wishes to report punctually and with renewed energy for work the next morning.

  On Wednesday Michaela bought a new radio.

  Norbert Maria Richter had scheduled an evening rehearsal for the next Monday. Michaela took this to be an alibi, a pro forma announcement. To judge from Norbert Maria Richter’s behavior and the way he had reacted to Max’s descriptions, the crew could only assume he would be the first to take off for Leipzig. Norbert Maria Richter, however, had no such intention whatever. Michaela called him a shifty bastard. Anything anyone wished to say, Norbert Maria Richter remarked, could best be said onstage. The latitude of the stage was a privilege to be used for the benefit of the audience—a responsibility that must be respected and not cavalierly misused.

  Those who would play at rebellion, Petrescu allegedly interposed in best Stanislavsky tradition, could and ought not shirk from studying it. It would be a betrayal of one’s duty as an honest actor not to make full use of this opportunity. Otherwise some lovely day we, the people of the theater, would find ourselves being instructed by the audience as to what rebellion and revolution look like. Norbert Maria Richter spoke of being considerate of those who thought differently about the matter and of how necessary it was at precisely this juncture to maintain discipline and, by good work, demonstrate one’s irreproachability.

  Michaela declared she would report in sick. As we listened to the news about the refugees in the Prague embassy, we fell silent, and Michaela made a gesture whose message was: There, you can hear for yourself, we have to go to Leipzig!

  Monday noon Michaela appeared in the dramaturgy office. She just wanted to tell us that no one was going to Leipzig. There she stood, Miss Eberhard Ultra, our revolutionary in chief, in her leg and ankle warmers, a scarf flung over her shoulder. “It’s all so absurd,” she said, “I’m so ashamed.”

  “Then I’ll go alone,” I said, as if that were the only possible reply.

  Of course I had no real desire to. But to have missed the whole thing would have been reprehensible. If there was ever going to be a second demonstration, then it would be on that Monday, the last one before October 7th.279

  No sooner had I said it than Michaela decided she didn’t want me to go. She kept going on about Krenz, about how he had just got back from China—and everybody knew what that meant.280

  They couldn’t just take aim and mow down ten thousand people, I replied, at least not in Leipzig, and they couldn’t arrest them all either. I concluded by telling her I’d leave the car somewhere near Bavaria Station—and handed her the second set of keys.

  We said good-bye, and Michaela actually appeared then on the balcony and waved as I drove off.

  The sunlight was dazzling, late-summer warmth lay like a heavenly blessing over the day. The landscape in the rearview mirror was the paradise to which—after this final ordeal, filled with countless observations and sensations—I would be returning.

  By four o’clock I was in the German Library, where I ordered up a couple of books on Nestroy and found an empty desk in the reading room. The lamp didn’t work, but that didn’t bother me; on the contrary. I was content just to be able to sit here in this asylum, aboard this ark.

  Before me lay the script of Freedom in Gotham. When I pushed my sleeve up past my watch, my cold fingers felt like the touch of a stranger.

  I figured I would be revealing my intentions if I were to leave at five on the dot. So I had hung on for a few more minutes, asked about the books I’d ordered, and then went to the restroom. Who knew when I’d have another opportunity.

  After parking the car near Bavaria Station and stashing my Polish leather briefcase in the trunk, I slung an empty bag around my wrist as if I were going shopping.

  At a pedestrian stoplight I ran into Patrick, Norbert Maria Richter’s assistant director. “Playing hooky?” The question just slipped out. He replied like a student caught in the act and avoided my gaze. He introduced the woman beside him as his fiancée, Ellen.

  We were walking past the Gewandhaus when I h
eard the first chanted slogans. I couldn’t make them out. “Stasi raus!” Patrick repeated like someone forced to quote something embarrassing. He couldn’t have said it more softly.

  Ellen was free only until seven o’clock. She had a piano lesson in Connewitz281 at eight. The two of them discussed whether—and if so, when—streetcars would be running again. Even if she had to go on foot, Patrick said, a quarter till eight would work, otherwise she’d miss the best part. I figured it was inappropriate to ask what he thought the “best part” was.

  I checked out everyone close by, from head to toe. Like an overeager dog, I let my eyes wander from one to the next, because now—it was a little before six, in the vicinity of St. Nicholas Church—there could be no one who was actually here to shop or simply on his way home from work.

  Although close to the Krochhaus now, I saw no indication of anything overwhelming, although the chanting of slogans never stopped.

  On the square in front of St. Nicholas people were standing shoulder to shoulder. Unable to move ahead, we craned our necks. That was quite enough for me. Ellen, however, was able to twist and wriggle her way through the crowd. People yielded to her as if she were a waitress. She would have made it even farther if Patrick hadn’t run into an acquaintance. Without exchanging names, we shook hands.

  I stood on my tiptoes. I don’t even know anymore how I came to recognize the group shouting those outrageous words. Was there more light there? Were their arms raised? I can no longer match the image I still have today with what I saw that day on the square in front of St. Nicholas. All of it—the people, the twilight, the warm air, the underground current that flowed from that group—seems like a dream or a vision to me now.

  Instead of registering each detail, each vibration, I felt less and less. All the same I was convinced I was experiencing a historical moment. Even if the partylike mood were to vanish in the next moment—the square would be easy to block off—this nevertheless would have been the biggest protest since 1953. People would soon recall October 2nd in much the same way they remembered June 17th.