by Ingo Schulze
Instead of replying to her, I sent Mother’s report on to Vera. Until the wall came down I received mail from Vera on a regular basis. From week to week Geronimo’s diarylike epistles grew more and more expansive, as if he felt he had to prove something to me. Evidently only I no longer knew what I should write. In Berlin I hadn’t even risked giving Vera a call,322 that’s how unsure of myself I’d become.
I could have written about Michaela, about her practically boundless energy. In an era when sorcery and exorcism were part of daily life, someone might have presumed that I had transferred all my energy to her. After our argument about Schmidtbauer we had less to say to each other. I tried to chauffeur Michaela as often as possible, and then wait for her in the car. As long as no one from the theater rapped on the wind-shield, waiting for her was a cozy way to pass the time.
Once I was back home, I no longer left our four walls. I was happiest when I was alone. Even Robert was too much for me. I was usually startled by the sound of his arrival.
There were little things I liked to do. I remember having been downright proud to have come up with the notion of cleaning the refrigerator. The mere idea of being able to spend a whole hour or more tidying things up lifted my spirits. I plunged into the farthest corners, tracked down moldy half-empty jars of marmalade, removed a dried-out mustard container from its permanent position, and emptied a vodka bottle that had been saved for months for the sake of one tiny sip.
The next day I went to work on the spice rack, then the silverware drawer. Later I rearranged the dishes and separated our plates from those that came from our mothers’ households, which, since they were smaller, were always on top and had to be lifted up whenever we wanted to eat from our own.
Between bouts of cleaning up, sorting out, and throwing away, I went shopping. In the afternoon I would finish off a bottle of beer that had already been opened so that I could get rid of it along with the other empty bottles, but made sure each time that I bought more bottles than I took back.
It wasn’t until I was cleaning the toaster with the vacuum—a method I still think makes good sense—that I noticed Robert eyeing me with some suspicion.
Sensing I was being watched, I sought shelter in my room. I played records. I wanted them to hear me listening to music. But since the records I owned confronted me with memories I preferred not to be subjected to, I bought new ones. I grabbed them up almost at random, especially jazz, because I’d never listened to jazz before.
But after Michaela’s snide remark about how once again the German spirit was uplifting itself with music, it was clear there was nothing I might do that she wouldn’t find fault with.
At the theater people interpreted my silence and reticence as a kind of radicalism. Michaela was prepared to allow me a certain amount of time, to tolerate me for a few weeks, simply by holding out and living life as usual with no questions asked. She told others it was a matter of distribution of labor.
Climbing into bed at night, I was glad when she fell asleep quickly. Sometimes she would first press her back against me, pull my arm over her shoulder, and say, “This is nice,” as if all I needed was a sense of security, a little reassurance, and I would soon be my old self again. But there were other nights too.
The people who rang our doorbell all through October wanting to join the media committee were almost exclusively men, who seldom showed up a second time. Michaela and I received anonymous letters, threatening to rip the masks from our faces and accusing us of demagogy and addling people’s brains.
Each day brought with it some unprecedented event, and perhaps I ought to list those that I can recall to give you some approximate sense of the situation in which we found ourselves.
But I need to finally bring this to a conclusion, which is why I’ll now set my sights on November 4th.
Our request for a demonstration was refused—we hadn’t given long enough notice. Instead we were granted permission for a demonstration on Sunday, November 12th. The hitch was that Michaela and I were required to sign a statement in which we guaranteed that no demonstration would be “initiated” by us on November 4th. No one could possibly have predicted Michaela’s reaction. She had no problem signing that, she said. But the authorities wouldn’t be doing themselves any favor. Everyone in the room froze and watched as Michaela stepped up to the desk, unscrewed the cap of her fountain pen, bent down over the sheet of paper, signed her name, and passed the pen to me—thus giving the whole affair the look of some diplomatic ceremony.
Two days later, she reported in triumph, there had been boos and nasty catcalls when she described in church what she had done. But then she had said, “I’m sorry, but evidently some of you didn’t hear correctly. I said I would not initiate a demonstration starting from the theater at one o’clock on November 4th. You don’t agree with that?”
On Saturday the 4th we drove to the theater at around half past twelve. “Good God, what have we started,” Michaela exclaimed when we saw the huge crowd. It was the largest demonstration Altenburg had seen until then. Anyone who had been in Leipzig wouldn’t have been particularly impressed by twenty thousand people. But Altenburg was home territory, and in so small a city the throngs looked all the larger. Although Michaela said that she and I were the only ones who weren’t allowed to do anything today, she cleared a path for us to the steps of the theater. At the very top, Schmidtbauer, plus the Prophet with his long beard and big eyes and Jörg had taken up their posts like three field commanders.
And once again I sensed how much of an anomaly I had become amid all this glee and excitement and expectation.
People were enjoying the beautiful weather that the good Lord had granted them yet again. As church bells rang the hour the crowd grew restless, people looked up at us and then all round, waiting for a signal of some sort. The chanting began on our right, and that set the crowd into motion. Those at the head were marching beneath a wide banner, but instead of taking Moskauer Strasse, they turned left down the Street of Worker Unity. I burrowed through the crowd—I had to get away from Schmidtbauer!—to a police car blocking the way to the Old Stables. The blond and black-haired cops were joined by a fat one. From their standpoint they had only just now noticed the shift down Worker Unity.
I advised them to drive to the Great Pond, where the procession would turn right down Teich Strasse. You remember Teich Strasse, I’m sure, one dilapidated ruin after the other, the epitome of devastation. They would also have to close off Teich Strasse at the far end, I said.
All three agreed with me, and the blond asked if I wanted to ride with them. “Yes, please, come along,” the fat one shouted, squeezing onto the backseat while I was allowed to take a seat up front. With blue lights flashing we zoomed up Frauen Gasse. It was too late now to turn off at the little bridge. We couldn’t turn onto Worker Unity until we were between the Small Pond and Kunst Tower, and then raced with sirens blaring to the intersection at the Great Pond. I tried to calm the three of them down. Even if we were too late to block off Teich Strasse from the other side, I said, they would be able to drive at the head of the demonstration. In Leipzig, I filled them in, that had never been a problem. Only the blond, who as the driver was also in charge of the radio, stayed with the car while the other two went to block off Kollwitz and Zwickauer Strasse—which was absurd, since those two streets were the only ones that offered a detour around the paralyzed center of town. I told the blond that. He nodded, grabbed for his cap, and dashed off to the others.
In the quiet of a sunny afternoon I leaned against the squad car and listened to the chants.
And suddenly there it was—a pistol. Or better: a white leather belt with a holster with the pistol in it, right below the driver’s door. And just as suddenly I knew: It’s yours! I bent down, picked up the belt, took out the pistol, shoved it casually inside my waistband, and pulled my sweater down over it. With a kick I slid the empty holster under the car.
I think I smiled, as if I had cracked a joke. The blond retu
rned, plopped into the driver’s seat, called some code into the radio mic, looked up, and said, “Hunky-dory.”
My dear Nicoletta, I should have been at the office long ago.323 To be continued. With warm greetings as always,
Your Enrico T.
Monday, June 11, ’90
Dear Jo,
I’m so sorry that you had to learn about it the way you did. Of course I should have been the one to tell you about our separation. I simply couldn’t bring myself to put it to paper, as if that would make the loss irrevocable, as if it would mean giving up my last hope. I wanted to talk with you about it here, it was going to be the first thing you would hear from my lips. And then you go and run straight into the new couple…324
My dear Jo, what can I say?
Last year during those long weeks while I lay buried alive in bed, I was forced to watch Michaela go crazy watching me. I was empty and numb, and yet every fiber in me could sense how her love for me was draining away, day by day, bit by bit.
Believe me: when I awoke from that nightmare I was full of hope and full of love. And I knew what I had to do. Michaela has never understood that it was for her sake that I gave notice at the theater. Yes, I did it for Michaela and Robert, for us three.
It was during a walk the three of us took at the beginning of the year—it had snowed, and we had taken off across the fields—that I suddenly saw how wonderful my life could be. I realized how wretched, calculating, and loveless my behavior had been. It was no longer possible to go on living as I had—and it was impossible for me to write. Instead of breathing life into my characters, I had let my own life wither in the pestilent air of art. All of which came to me as Robert was leading me across the field—I had gotten a splinter in my eye. I wanted to save myself and thus Michaela as well, and above all the boy. I hoped for a new life that would bring us happiness. Michaela and I even started sleeping together again, and I was certain she would soon be pregnant.
In my despair I sometimes think Michaela’s love would have had to last only a few more weeks, so that if Barrista were to arrive in town now, his sorcery could no longer accomplish anything. And yet it was I who prepared the soil for him, I literally led Michaela to him. I spin these cobwebs in my darkest hours. I still don’t want to believe it’s true: Michaela and Barrista! He simply took her by surprise. He’s the surprise attack in person.
Michaela sees things differently, of course. In her opinion our separation has followed an inner logic. She had fought for me to the point of self-destruction. And then who had left her in the lurch? I had, by betraying her and the theater. She was left behind alone, her back to the wall. She claims we were already no longer a couple when the baron showed up. That isn’t true, of course, along with a lot of other things she now claims. Michaela saw very clearly what all a relationship with the baron would make possible—and couldn’t resist. He not only rescued her, he has also provided her a sense of gratification, maybe even of retribution. With one swift move, she eclipsed everyone—including, last but not least, me. As she gazes down from the heights now, I’m just one of a host of clumsy tyros. Even her larger-than-life Thea is now merely one of many people forced to prostitute themselves onstage. Michaela told you, I’m sure, about flight school. She doesn’t talk about anything else now. To circle the town on high, while all other earthbound creatures creep to their labors, is for her the epitome of her triumph.
Her bad conscience, however, leaves her testy, especially since Robert has taken my side. Presumably Michaela told you about Nicoletta—the woman who was sitting beside me when I had the car accident last March. Michaela read some letters I wrote her325 —and of course found nothing improper in them. But she has managed to magnify into grounds for separation her conviction that I confided things to a “woman who’s a total stranger” that I had “held back” from her. Ah, Jo, I actually wish her accusations were true, because it would probably make it easier for me to deal with the separation. It’s so absurd. I don’t even know if Nicoletta has a boyfriend, or if she lives alone or with someone or even what she thinks of my epistles, which I write early in the morning when I can’t sleep. Nicoletta is the ideal person—at least the Nicoletta I imagine when I’m writing—for me to tell about the past. By picturing her, I can understand what has happened to us.
Nicoletta didn’t believe me when I told her that I had voluntarily left the theater to put together a provincial newspaper. Her ideas about writers and artists are similar to those my mother entertains—even though she now sees the world with “businesslike objectivity.” Besides which, Nicoletta has read ten times more Marx and Lenin than all of us put together. She’s not like Roland, Vera’s old admirer, but she still goes on and on about exploitation and capitalism, even concepts like “aggressive imperialism” or “the military-industrial complex” (allegedly a term first used by former U.S. president Eisenhower) flow from her lips with no problem.
I suffered irredeemable loss of status in her eyes when I began “working in tandem” with Barrista. To her Barrista is unadulterated evil. I am not going to try to convince her otherwise, but I have every intention of making clear to her why I have chosen this life. And someone can only understand that if they know how we used to live.
I’m really not talking about love. I’m not in any condition yet for that either.
Besides which—and up until now it wasn’t even a possibility—I want love between equals, between people who act on the same assumptions. I want love without quirks and contortions. I want an alarm clock ringing in the morning and supper at the same time every evening, I want vacations and Sunday outings. I want a family. Yes, I long for a bourgeois life, for order, both within me and around me. Nicoletta would probably run for cover if I confessed that to her.
Did you read the article about the Lindenau Museum in our next-to-last issue? Nicoletta is behind all those plans. What’s more, she has her heart set on reconstructing Guido de Siena’s altar at the Lindenau—she’s already been to Eindhoven, where one panel is—the others are at the Louvre, in Princeton, and of course in Siena. The Dutch have evidently already agreed—a reconstruction would be a sensation!326
As soon as my apartment is ready to be moved into, Vera is coming to Altenburg for a few weeks or months.
She has separated from Nicola, or he from her, which she would never admit—Vera’s vanity, her feminine vanity, is too easily wounded for that. Which makes it so difficult for me to console her. But she still can look very chic. No one would believe she lives out of two suitcases. Beirut turned out to be a bit too much of an adventure for her. Nicola’s mother’s constant chatter about kidnappings left her terribly anxious, the power keeps going out, generators make a deafening racket and pollute the air. There’s no such thing as a “green” movement there. The sea is a sewer, and cars speed through the streets at sixty miles per hour, brake hard, then speed away again—for fear of snipers. Compared to West Beirut, West Berlin is as expansive as a prairie. The only thing that worked to her advantage was that she was baptized. That’s accepted. But please, no atheism!
Nicola thinks he’s about to make some big money. His oracle is a glazier: if people are buying window glass, there’s hope for peace. So people are sure to buy up everything he has in stock.
She definitely doesn’t want to go back to Dresden, and she no longer has a job in Berlin—in her beautiful West Berlin. She’s giving up her apartment and closing out Nicola’s shop, dumping everything at a loss. And if her luck runs out she may even end up with debts to pay. So you’ll be seeing each other here.
Give yourself and Franziska a couple of weeks to get acclimatized. As far as the business goes, the baron takes a very down-to-earth view of things. Don’t let it bother you. I’ve already written you about my first meeting with him. Pringel and Frau Schorba have no reservations whatever, and as far as our élèves327 are concerned, you’re a celebrity already. They’ll probably fight over who gets to initiate you in the arcana of layout. Jörg is jealous of you bec
ause of the book. He and Marion really didn’t expect to see someone like you at my side.
Anton Larschen, who was on the verge of turning into an evil spirit, is back to extracting fine items from his backpack. Your suggested changes are “correct from start to finish.” Frau Schorba will be typing the text into the computer this weekend.
Let me worry about the business end of things. Time is on our side. We’ll pay for your driving classes, and you no longer need to get on a waiting list. Come autumn, then, you’ll be driving the LeBaron.
You’ll be able to move into your new place by September at the latest, since the construction firm has to shell out for every day of overrun past August 31st—it’s in the contract. The rent will be modest. Did I tell you that the plans are not just for a snazzy tub in the bathroom, but a real small-size whirlpool?
Just picture a late-summer afternoon, the scent of apples drifting up from below, everything up top smells a little new yet, the castle rises up before you, behind it hills and, in the distance, mountains. You’ll have enough money, no worries about the future, and each of us can peacefully pursue whatever he wants. And next year we’ll all go to Italy or fly to the U.S. for lobster.
Give Franziska a kiss for me,
Your Enrico
Tuesday, June 19, ’90
Dear Jo,
I’ve thrown myself into work—I really don’t have a choice, either. The situation is sorting itself out faster than I would have thought possible. Hardly a week has passed and already our newspaper is taking shape in the midst of all the mayhem.
And we are undergoing a transformation too. Whether it’s Frau Schorba or her husband, who’s our distribution manager, or Evi and Mona, our élèves at the computer, even our bruised Pringel—we all are not just working faster and more focused, downright impatient to tackle each new task, but we’re also more cordial and open—we have nothing to hide, nothing to lose! This is what the daily routine should always look like. Yes, this is how things should stay.