New Lives

by Ingo Schulze

  Hugs, Your E.

  PS: Maybe it would be better to publish Anton Larschen’s memoirs with Georg. I think Georg would be pleased, and the book would have a real publisher.

  Sunday, June 3, ’90

  Dear Nicoletta,

  I hadn’t actually been all that surprised that my mother had shown up at our place on October 9th. But after Robert was in bed, she said, “I’ve got something to tell you two.” And after a short pause: “I was arrested.”

  My mother’s report was far less detailed than Mario’s. She had also been arrested on Friday evening, that is, on the 6th, in front of the Dresden Central Station. She had wanted to verify with her own eyes what she had heard in the clinic and on the radio. But no sooner had she stepped off the streetcar—that is, well before she was able to get any sort of sense of demonstrators and uniformed personnel—than she was grabbed and thrown into a truck. They had beaten and cursed her. After her release on Sunday morning, she had taken a streetcar to Laubegast, to see Gunda Lapin, a painter and friend of hers. She had recuperated there until Monday morning. She had then had herself examined at the polyclinic and placed on medical leave for a week. If she were still locked up, she said, no one would know where she was.

  Listening to her was pure agony. Michaela fought back her tears and tried to clasp Mother’s hands in hers. That seemed wrong to me, because it was like a restraint on my mother, and I was glad when Michaela left to call Thea from a phone booth. Being left alone with Mother, however, was even less bearable. I turned on the television. But neither she nor I watched. We cleared the table without saying a word, and didn’t break our silence as we made up her bed. Mother went to the bathroom, and I could hear her gargle and spit into the basin. I sat in front of the television—I had turned it back off—and gazed at my silhouette on the dark screen. I kept taking deeper breaths, until the rise and fall of my shoulders was clearly visible in the reflection too.

  Suddenly my mother was standing before me in her underwear and asked me to rub her with lotion. Her back was covered with bruises, they had even struck her on the thighs and calves. She braced herself against the table and bent forward. There was a slight odor of sweat. In prescribing such things, she said, few doctors actually thought about the fact that old people are usually alone and can’t rub themselves down. We exchanged good-night kisses. My mother hadn’t turned the bathroom light off or screwed the top back on the toothpaste. Her towel lay on the toilet lid.

  Michaela asked what that odor was, and then said that Thomas had just rubbed Thea down with liniment too. The word had a cozy sound, as if we’d put everything behind us now.

  By Tuesday there was no longer any way to prevent the Dresden resolution from being read from the stage. Except for Beate Sebastian, who was unwilling to take part in such an action unless the Party gave its approval, the whole house was for it.

  As for as the resolution itself, I didn’t share the others’ enthusiasm. When I proposed we write our own, I was told that the orchestra, most of the singers, and the corps de ballet had already agreed to it and that we couldn’t start all over again now.

  The whole tone was taken from the ritual of criticism and self-criticism. There’s a worried functionary hiding behind every line, I said. Michaela shook her head, no, I was mistaken. We went through it line by line, and even I was surprised at how with just the slightest pressure on the lever, the pseudorevolutionary rhetoric gave way. For instance, this sentence: “A national leadership that does not speak with their people is not credible.”

  “Don’t you hear the whimpering of some disillusioned lickspittle?” I asked. “Who says I’d ever want to speak with that bunch? Why call them our national leadership when they came to power by fraudulent elections? And what does that mean: with their people? Why don’t they quote Brecht: ‘They should dissolve their people and elect another…’”

  Michaela admitted that those lines could be deleted, but that the formulation “a people forced to be speechless will turn to violent action” was not just courageous, but true as well in the present situation. Why, I asked, didn’t they write: “A people imprisoned for twenty-eight years and treated as property of the state, punished and bullied for the slightest contradiction, has finally taken over the street! Down with a band of criminals who beat defenseless people, mock and torture them.”

  Michaela didn’t reply. “Why,” I asked, “don’t they simply say: Tear down the wall, throw out the Socialist Unity Party, establish human rights, take to the streets, be brave, don’t let them bully you anymore.”

  “That’s going too far,” Michaela said, “that calls everything into question.”

  “Of course,” I shouted, “it calls everything into question! Leipzig calls everything into question, what happened to my mother, to Thea, calls everything into question. We have to call everything into question.” Why was she willing to put up with the same old crap from the pens of apparatchiks? “‘It is our duty,’” I quoted scornfully, “‘to demand that the leadership of our country and Party restore their trust in the population.’ Isn’t that disgusting? To conclude with that? Doesn’t that mean, please don’t beat us, we’re really in favor of socialism? That’s more wretched than wanting some prince to take us by the hand? You know what that Dresden crowd is like.”

  “Then why,” Michaela asked, “don’t you say it?”

  “I will say it,” I replied. “You can depend on it!”

  I have to add that we weren’t alone. We were standing beside the little round table in the dramaturgy office and had those who were sitting at it or leaning against their desks for an audience. Ever since her performance of the day before and our return from Leipzig, Michaela had become the Bärbel Bohley of the theater and I her husband, whose mother had been beaten, no, tortured by the police. One by one the others had all fallen silent. We had spoken the last sentences as if onstage.

  Under their attentive eyes, Michaela walked over to my desk to get her purse. “There is a difference,” she said, returning to her first position, “whether something is said in the theater or on the street. There is no anonymity in the theater—”

  “Which simply means,” I broke in, “that the street needs to enlighten the theater. God knows, not a single person arrested was anonymous. They all had to present their IDs!”

  In her eyes, she said, it would be an achievement for the theater to arrive at a point where the resolution could be read at all. With that Michaela left the dramaturgy office. From my vantage point at the window I saw her walk to the bus stop. Yet another Gotham rehearsal had been canceled.

  My arguments were so irrefutable that I found myself in a state of euphoria. I had given my aversion free rein and, by following it as if it were a divining rod, had discovered a logic that worked. Do you understand me? Suddenly I had cogent reasons why I did not want to be a part of it all.

  My new outlook provided me, I thought, a line of defense that no one would breach all that soon and that allowed me to observe these theatrical follies with a derisive smile. Of course people said I was right, but they took Michaela’s side and talked about small steps, cunning, patience.

  At two o’clock on the dot I drove home. Mother had prepared a meal. She had filled Robert in on what had happened to her. He enjoyed the “extended family” and the “Sunday dinner.” “The longer I think about it,” Mother said, “the more clearly I realize they all belong behind bars, not just their bullyboys and officers, but all of them, Modrow, Berghofer, Honecker, Mielke, Hager, the whole rotten pack. And if they didn’t know anything about it, so much the worse.” Michaela didn’t look up. Had I arrived earlier, she probably would have thought I had coached my mother. For coffee we drove to Kohren-Sahlis. There was poppy-seed cake and whipped cream. Mother ordered seconds and said she’d earned it. Then I drove Michaela to the theater. The Gypsy Princess matinee for retirees had begun at three o’clock.

  While the performance went on up front, backstage the battle over the resolution had flared
up again.

  The orchestra and corps de ballet had voted yes, as had the soloists, with one exception, but the chorus was divided. The gypsy princess herself could not be persuaded to read the resolution. Kleindienst, the conductor, likewise refused. Finally we had a volunteer, Oliver Jambo, our gay heldentenor—I mention this only because Jambo celebrated being our gay heldentenor with every step he took. He would consider it an honor to read the letter. And with that I drove home.

  That evening Michaela told us that the whole thing had fallen apart because of Jonas. He had sat in the smoking corner, smiling. He asked everyone who made the mistake of wandering past to put a hold on “this gesture.” He was asking for just one day. They should wait one day more. He had spoken to Michaela as well. It was difficult even for her to hold her own against him. One day, he kept saying over and over, just one day. When asked how that would change anything, he cited the meeting of the politburo.

  At this point in Michaela’s narrative I couldn’t help laughing. Yes, she said, she found it shameful too, but in the end there had been nothing she could do. The singers were suddenly in favor of a one-day postponement. But the orchestra hadn’t been informed, so they had waited in the wings. Finally Kleindienst called them onstage to receive, or so he said, their well-deserved applause. The musicians had left in such a rage that they probably couldn’t be counted on from now on.

  Wednesday, however, was to be Michaela’s big day. Mother, Robert, and I took our seats for the performance of Emilia Galotti. Michaela wasn’t at her best. At the point where Emilia starts to tell her story, she forgot her lines.

  At intermission I ducked out to go to the dramaturgy office. All the lights were on in the general manager’s office. The technical director, the office manager—she was also a Party secretary, and is currently the general manager—were sitting with three or four others whose voices I didn’t recognize.

  I kept hearing footsteps and the sound of a door opening and closing. All the same I was surprised at how many people had gathered. On the lowest tread of the little set of steps that led to the stage stood Jambo, lost in thought and playing with the cord of his glasses. A woman’s voice whispered, “The general manager!”

  I hadn’t even noticed him. He was sitting at the table, his head resting on his crossed arms as if he were asleep, his shoulders jerking. At first I thought there had been an accident, that someone was dead.

  There was a crackle in the loudspeaker, and Olaf, the stage manager, called the actor playing Odoardo onstage. He left the loudspeaker on, so that we could now follow the performance. “Is no one here? Good, I shall be colder still,” snarled the loudspeaker.

  “Didn’t you hear it on the radio?” Jonas asked in the middle of the line, “He who obeys no law, is equal in power to him who knows none.”307

  Jonas’s eyes, veiled with tears, moved around the room, crawling from one person to the next in search of mercy. “Didn’t you hear it on the radio? Don’t you pay attention anymore? Can you think only in one direction?” He shook his head. “So you don’t know,” he shouted, “you don’t know about the most important change in decades. Haven’t any of you heard the politburo’s announcement this evening?”

  “Hah!” Jambo exclaimed. “Is the wall gone?”

  Jonas bellowed, his voice exploded into the room. Michaela claimed later that you could even hear him through the steel-plated door. His head turned such a livid red that I expected to see him collapse onto his desk, eyes staring wide, mouth hanging open.

  The cord had got tangled on the bridge of Oliver Jambo’s glasses, so that it looked as if he were shaking a thermometer down. “Could you repeat that?” he asked in a low voice.

  Instead of hurling himself at Jambo as I expected, Jonas began to preach. His entire statement was so silly that I don’t remember any of it except two sentences, which he repeated several times: “There won’t be any Chinese solution,” and “The politburo wants an honest face-to-face dialogue with the nation.”

  The applause at the final curtain was now coming over the loudspeaker. Jonas kept on talking. He was starting in again with his “face-to-face” when, a little short of breath, Michaela’s voice could be heard from the loudspeaker: “Okay, here we go!” “Ladies!” Jambo said, holding the steel-plated door open. I was the last to follow. When I turned around once more, I saw Jonas standing there with one arm raised, pointing vacantly.308

  Michaela stepped forward and began. One couple stood up and dashed for the exit. In the dim light cast over the audience I could see Mother and Robert, both sitting up ramrod straight and listening as if Emilia Galotti had risen from the dead to take her revenge on Marinelli. Her tone of voice when she said, “We’re stepping out of our roles here,” was the same with which she had said, “But all such deeds are from times past!”

  I felt uncomfortable just standing there, reduced to a physical presence.309

  The audience applauded, most of them stood up, including Mother and Robert. I saw Michaela reflexively want to bow in response to applause. She was just barely able to control herself, but now spread her arms, as if to say, All of us here agree, and then stepped back. People continued to applaud as if waiting for something, a song or a postlude. Some of those onstage followed Michaela’s example and extended their arms to applaud the audience. Instead of an orderly exit, a few of us began to wander offstage one by one. The last ones to leave, including Emilia Galotti, looked as if they were in fact fleeing. The audience, 124 purchased tickets, kept on clapping as if to force an encore.

  When we arrived at the theater the following day, an emissary of the Library on the Environment was waiting for us at the door. “The whole city is talking about what you did,” he said with an earnest nod, and invited us to Martin Luther Church that evening so that we could inform others about our declaration. Since I had never heard about a Library on the Environment in Altenburg, I thought at first he had come from Berlin.

  The invitation extended to us was for a “prayer service.”

  At the noon break Michaela took up residence in the canteen and received her due homage, even from the orchestra and chorus. Nothing like this had ever happened to her, not even after a premiere. Michaela announced who would read the resolution that evening, since she intended to appear at the church.

  Martin Luther Church, that neo-Gothic forefinger rising at the far end of Market Square, was jam-packed. I followed Michaela down the center aisle to the front, where the emissary greeted us. It had been ages since I had been inside a church!

  “Ghastly, truly ghastly,” a woman with short hair and a long, thin scar across her right eyebrow kept repeating. “Truly, truly ghastly!” She was referring to Bodin, the pastor of the church, who had demanded that instead of presenting bombastic speeches they should hold a thanksgiving service. God needed to be thanked for the politburo’s declaration, which was an attempt at reconciliation. There were, moreover, strong elements of his congregation who would have no sympathy whatever for such proceedings. If she and her friends did not understand that, he had no choice but to yield to those members of the congregation and close his church’s doors to a crowd of rowdies.

  Somehow I sympathized with Pastor Bodin, an elderly, totally bald man, who had seated himself in his clerical robes against one wall and now appeared to be deep in thought or prayer.

  Michaela and I were greeted by several people. The founder of the Altenburg New Forum (every town had its own New Forum) fought for air as he told us how that same morning he had found the lug nuts loosened on his Trabant. A gaunt long-haired fellow with an inscrutable Chinese smile was holding a rolled-up banner in his arms like a giant doll. There was a steady flow of young women who introduced themselves as members or chairpersons of environmental and peace groups.

  Women were likewise in the majority among the people thronging the aisles and balconies. “Something has got to happen today!” the woman with the scar said, and planted herself in front of us.

  “What’s supposed to
happen?” I asked.

  “Why, a demonstration,” she exclaimed. “We’ve got to get things started here! Somebody’s got to speak up today for once.”

  The long-haired fellow came over and interrupted her to say, “If someone is going to speak, it ought to be a person no one here really knows.” Strangely enough at that moment that seemed plausible to me. I realized too late that by nodding I had got myself into a precarious situation. The fellow from the New Forum returned to repeat his lug-nut story and said he was already asking far too much of his family. Michaela didn’t budge. “Can’t you do it?” the woman with the scar asked, gazing at me. I was trapped.

  “And what am I supposed to say?” I asked. “Super,” she cried, “that’s really super!” The fellow with long hair bent down over me and patted my shoulder. “Fine, Enrico, very fine!” I was so discombobulated that I asked how he knew my name.310 In the same moment the church orchestra struck up. The bass player, who had given the downbeat, nodded like one of those plastic dachshunds that for a while you saw in every rear windshield.

  After the first few bars I regretted the whole thing, after the first stanza I was desperate. Had I not very wisely kept my distance from such people until now? I could understand Pastor Bodin better and better as he sat there breathing heavily. His pouting lower lip dangled like a trembling reddish blue nozzle through which far too many words had flowed.

  While someone from the civil rights movement was speaking, I was passed a note: “Get ready, you’re up soon. Thanks.”