New Lives
Page 50
At the next repeat of the clip I am already on the podium, just two steps behind Wolf, and as the concert of whistles reaches its high point, I shout, “Comrade General!” Wolf glances my way, I take aim and say, “You’re gone!” As he turns around his eyes reflect incredulity to the point of doltishness. “You’re gone!” I shout once more, and point the barrel toward the stairs. For several seconds no one moves. Then, in a monstrous failure to grasp his situation, Wolf reaches inside his coat—the Napoleonic gesture, or so I think. We stare at each other as if turned to stone. Wolf grows smaller and smaller. The motion with which he pulls out his gun scurries before my eyes like a shadow. Then the shot rings out, and the hot cartridge bounces across the podium.
I see the little silver pistol in Wolf’s right hand, its barrel aimed down and away, and I’m still wondering how much lighter, more modern, and accurate it may be, when he falls full length right in front of me, his pistol skidding past the tip of my shoe and vanishing under a loudspeaker.
I use the moment to look out at the crowd, where the whistles are ebbing away. I leave the podium unmolested. I have to walk a long way before I spot the first squad car. Relieved and happy, I hand over my weapon, because I have now done what it was in my power to do.
The whole time she watched, Michaela had been jotting down notes and working on the first draft of her speech for the following Sunday. Once in bed, she fell asleep immediately.
Around half past midnight I got up, went to my room, and sat down at the foot of the couch. As if my task were to awaken a beast and release it from its cage, I was afraid to open the cupboard door.
The weapon had been well taken care of and the clip was full. All the standard procedures came back completely naturally.333 Even removing the ammunition proved to be no problem. Bracing my left hand against my hip, I took a breath, raised the weapon above the target, and slowly lowered it along the window frame until the bottom edge of the window handle was in line with the front and rear sights at the precise moment your breath rests between exhale and inhale and your finger presses the trigger. The first shot yanked my hand way off target. And on my next tries it was the especially hard action that gave me problems and drew the weapon off its ideal position. It would barely have been possible to hit a target more than twenty feet away. I practiced for a while, then stuffed the bullets into a matchbox334 and wrapped the gun in the undershirt I had tossed over the back of the chair as I had undressed. I washed my hands several times, but they still smelled of smoky gun oil, as if I had emptied the whole clip.
After a few hours’ sleep I woke up in a fright because, just as a month before in Dresden, I thought I heard the doorbell ring. I assumed a squad car would pull up in front of our building at any moment. Shortly after seven the doorbell did ring. Michaela ducked into Robert’s room. I answered.
Emilie Paulini’s daughter Ruth stared at me in a dulled daze. I asked her in. “She’s dead, Herr Türmer,” she said. “She’s dead now.”
I again invited her in. “She had waited for you to come see her, Herr Türmer, ah, she waited and waited.” Ruth took two steps into the entryway and then stopped.
Michaela greeted her with equal amounts of relief and annoyance. But Ruth ignored her outstretched hand and words of sympathy. Ruth’s gaze was fixed on me. “Why didn’t you stop by?” she whined. “Aaah, Herr Türmer! How our mommy waited for you.”
I said that there had been so much going on this autumn. We had scarcely been home at all in the last few weeks, Michaela said in my defense. “Aaah, Herr Türmer!” Ruth exclaimed. “Why didn’t you stop by just once for an hour or so? Nooo!” As if by way of punishment, my question as to when her mother had died was left unanswered.
“You will be coming to the funeral,” Ruth commanded. She gave the date, turned around, opened the door, and vanished without a good-bye.
Once Ruth had departed the scene, my fears returned. I spent the whole day interrogating myself. In the same way that we can get caught up in imagining our own funeral, I began making a detailed and water-tight inventory of what I had done over the last three days or tried to recall exactly when I had gone to bed two weeks before.
Then I again found myself being tried as Markus Wolf’s assassin. As a result of my deed, tanks had rolled across Alexander Platz, and now they were in every town, side by side with the Russians, martial law had been declared. I was to be found guilty in a show trial. Like Dimitrov335 I presented my own defense before the eyes of the world.
That evening I drove to the theater and hid the pistol in props, where no one was now in charge. I thrust the bullets into the soil of a flowerpot on the desk of one of my colleagues.
I drove with Michaela and Robert to Leipzig that Monday. It was to be my dress rehearsal. But there was no longer a single uniformed man in sight. After marching around the Ring, the demonstrators quickly dispersed. Everyone wanted to get home in time to watch themselves on the news.
On Tuesday I was called into the general manager’s office. And who was sitting there—just as I had expected? Two policeman, one blond, one black-haired. Jonas said he was merely putting his office at our disposal, nothing more.
Of course I was the obvious suspect. “Why should I want to steal a pistol?” I planned to reply with as much amusement as possible. They had put on deeply serious faces, they looked tired. Their chitchat about a “partnership for safety” for the demonstration on the 12th could only be a pretense. Although far more people had volunteered to help keep order than they could possibly use, they still couldn’t banish their reservations. They made statements like, “That’s a presumption we can’t make,” or “The comrades need to know what is going to happen.” I said nothing because I didn’t want to encourage a harmless conversation out of which would burst the surprise of the real question. Finally there we sat, helplessly staring in silence at the general manager’s empty throne.
Later that day something happened that actually did take me by surprise. Constantly revolving around death and corpses, my thoughts evidently obeyed an old reflex—suddenly an idea lay before me, the idea for a story, in the science-fiction genre. In the society I was going to describe, hardened criminals were imprisoned for life on a well-guarded island, the Island of Mortals, where they truly lacked for nothing, not even amusements. All the same—and this is their real punishment—they are doomed to die a “natural death.” As the result of gene manipulations or brain transplants, everyone else can count on living, if not for eternity, for one or two thousand years.
The rest of the story followed from the premise. A man condemned to normal mortality—his youth gene had been removed, and he was aging from day to day—escapes from the Island of Mortals and strikes terror in the heart of the capital. Because he really has nothing to lose, people consider him to be without any scruples. In the minds of those living “eternally,” it’s all the same to him whether he’s shot or dies a natural death after twenty or forty years.
Suddenly I was back at my desk. I worked on describing daily reports in the media aimed at inflaming the public to feel fanatically disgusted by mortality. Anyone who no longer enjoys eternal life—so the upshot of such stories—is a priori a ruthless man.
My hero talks about his fear of death and how creepy the thought of death is, because he’s so alien to everyone else. I kept finding new starting points from which I could circle the moment of death, the inconsolability that is part of experiencing something all alone.336
What spurred me on was the hope of returning to the German Library. I could see myself plowing through all the relevant medical journals. Weren’t the body and death the last topics still open to me?
When she returned home late from dress rehearsal, Michaela was surprised to find me at my desk. She smiled and went straight to bed.
On Wednesday Robert woke me very early. He was standing in the middle of the room, shouting something. The first thing I saw was Michaela’s calves. Michaela was running. And then I heard it—way too loud—the radio.
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bsp; Robert’s voice, the garish light of the lamp, the weather report—suddenly I felt unending shame in having yielded to the temptation to write. Now I understood what Robert was shouting.
The fall of the wall felt like stern but just punishment for my regression. I pulled the covers up over my head.
“Nobody will be coming to our demonstration now,” Michaela grumbled. Later I thought I heard her heels clacking on the sidewalk. Alone now, I was overcome with the sense of being personally responsible for the fall of the wall, because I had hesitated, because I had never managed to simply pull the trigger. I had never been in the vicinity of an actual deed. So this was the 6 to 3, the inconceivable fifth goal scored in the second half, the end, the knockout punch.
Michaela returned almost cheerful. She had phoned her mother, had got her out of bed, and said how strange it made her feel to tell someone about IT, about how odd the moment was, because the other person was blindly continuing to live in the old world.
At the dress rehearsal—and this is the only memory I have of it—I said in the presence of both Jonas and Norbert Maria Richter that I would advise against a premiere. Jonas agreed with me, but left it up to Norbert Maria Richter whether his production should open.
Whereupon Michaela called me a traitor. “I’m living with a traitor!” I was obviously trying to pick a fight, evidently all I wanted to do was destroy, everything, willfully destroy everything—family, work, everything.
Michaela and I said scarcely a word to each other until Sunday, and then only to discuss the demonstration. I asked her to plan at most two minutes for my speech on Market Square. She asked what I was going to talk about. “The future,” I said, a remark that in regard to myself sounded absurd, since I no longer saw any future whatever.
Only half as many people came to the demonstration as on November 4th. In front of the Stasi villa and Party headquarters there was the usual music of catcalls, but no one halted. There were traffic wardens everywhere—Michaela had distributed white armbands, was wearing one herself, and had offered both Robert and me one. I saw the fat policeman from the previous Sunday again—Blond and Black, however, didn’t show.
As the procession turned onto Market Square, I saw red flags and GDR flags being held high in front of the speaker’s platform by a group of a hundred or two hundred people, almost all of them women. They were also carrying old banners and signs: THE GDR—MY FATHERLAND or SOCIALISM AND FREEDOM.
A short, mustached man kept circling this bunch and shouting, “Keep together, keep together!” although not one of them had stirred from the spot. Surrounded now, the Red bunch was being pelted with a seemingly never-ending chorus of “Shame on you!” In response they waved their flags.
Standing on the speaker’s platform I could see the angry, but also frightened look in these women’s eyes. One of them, way at the front, was resting her head on her neighbor’s shoulder and sobbing. It may sound rather strange to you, my dear Nicoletta, but I can honestly say that these women were the first people I had ever met who championed the cause of the GDR of their own free will.
I had put together a note card with a list of my points. I didn’t want Michaela to think I was taking the matter too lightly.
While giving my short speech, I gazed steadily at those women. I spoke to them like a doctor trying to explain to his patients what therapeutic measures need to be taken. Basically I said what I had said in Berlin three weeks before when Thea had confronted me.
I was the only person that day to offer a few remarks about money. “In West Berlin the exchange rate for the D-mark to the East-mark is one to seven.” That’s what I claimed, I didn’t know exactly what it was, but Vera had mentioned it once. Plus I invented a minimum wage of eleven D-marks an hour and said anyone could figure out how many days a man would have to work in the West to earn what he earned here in a month. “For most of us,” I said, “it probably wouldn’t take two whole days.” This earned me some applause. But the woman whose shoulder had supported her weeping friend’s head shouted that money isn’t everything.
“We have only two alternatives: either we close the wall again, or we introduce a market economy here too, otherwise no one will stay.” I had to repeat my conclusion over the enraged howls of the Red bunch. They hurled curses you might have heard shouted at strikebreakers at the beginning of the century. “Capitalist lackey” was among them, and “reactionary” and “counterrevolutionary.” Someone—alluding evidently to my white armband—called out that I belonged in the White Army. The women had the upper hand until the large crowd whipped itself up again to a “Shame on you!” and drowned them out.
The sooner we understand, I shouted, that there is only an either-or, the better it will be for all of us. “Or do you want to go to Paris as beggars?” Unable to read my next point, I stepped back from the mike and turned to one side—with the result that the applause for my last statement continued to grow. As backup music to my departure, the women had struck up the “International,” and no sooner had I reached the pavement than their singing could be heard above the applause. At first there were some whistles; then, however, the majority of the crowd likewise began to sing the “International,” just as I had heard people do in Leipzig.
I planted myself on one of the concrete flower boxes and hoped the whole circus would be over soon.
You probably can’t suppress a suspicion that what I’m trying to do here is to put myself in the best light after the fact, to paint myself as the only person who knew so early on what lay down the road ahead.
But that’s not the case. Just as in a game of chess, I was merely trying to calculate a few moves in advance. I certainly didn’t see reunification coming, although even then there were a few already demanding it. And as I’ve said, I had no concept of any future. With the fall of the wall, my personal future had dissolved into nothingness. Had I not had to climb the orator’s pulpit for Michaela’s sake, such pronouncements would never have passed my lips. Of course I could have said something different, too. But what? What else was there to say? There wasn’t anything else to say.
Whenever Michaela took the podium to announce the next speaker and, as the Leipziger Volkszeitung put it, request that the crowd show “moderation and decorum,” she seemed so free and self-assured—and earned more applause for her quick wit than most of the others had for their speeches. But now that she had managed to extract herself from the cluster of people wanting to talk with her and came over to us, she seemed depressed. She didn’t deign to give me a single glance. On the drive home her mood toppled into total darkness. I took it to be stage fright before a premiere.
Once we were home and I was finally able to ask her what had happened, she said, “Nothing,” and vanished into our room. She was crying.
“Is this it?” she asked when I entered. She held the envelope up. “Is this why you’re the way you are?” I recognized Nadja’s handwriting on the envelope. “You don’t need to worry about us,” Michaela said, “we’ll manage all right.” She blew her nose.
It was one of the few moments in my life in which my conscience was pure, ready for any kind of interrogation.
I asked Michaela to open the envelope. She shook her head. “Please,” I said. “No,” she said. She wouldn’t subject herself to that.
I slit the envelope open with a nail file lying on her nightstand, unfolded the sheet of paper, and began to read aloud. Right at the start Nadja wrote that she was aware that I now had a family. She herself was living with Jaroslav, a Czech, and was expecting her first child at the end of February. She asked about how my manuscript was going and complained about her work.
Michaela said nothing. Even when I laid the letter down in front of her, she didn’t budge. Finally she asked if she could have the stamps. Then she folded the letter back up and inserted it in its envelope.
“So then what is the reason?” She stared at me.
“For what?” I asked.
“For being the way you are.”
“Justice triumphs!” she cried. She spoke very loudly, carrying on like someone hard of hearing, and each of her movements was accompanied by a rattle, rasp, or jingle.
Loyally devouring his cheesecake, Robert didn’t let Mother’s chatter disturb him. The fall of the wall was her personal triumph, and she made fun of us for not having been in the West yet. She definitely wanted to travel to Bavaria, because the “welcome money” was highest there,337 and together it would come to 560 D-marks, a sum that you could actually do something with.
Later, at the theater, my mother admitted how shocked she had been by the way Michaela looked. Weren’t we happy because of what had happened?
Except for one woman whom nobody knew the whole first row was empty. The balcony hadn’t even been opened. Of just short of sixty people in the audience, fifteen belonged to Norbert’s entourage and about thirty were friends and family of the actors, just like us.
At first the audience fell into old habits and applauded every punch line. But this enthusiasm soon faded, as if they finally realized what had happened over the last few days.
After intermission several people did not return to their seats, and the play simply sickened and died. Since there was no reaction to the punch lines now, the actors rushed their lines all the more.
At the end Norbert Maria Richter barely managed to get a bow in.
Tuesday I was called to the general manager’s office again.
Jonas and Frau Sluminksi were both sitting at his desk, as if they were doing homework together. They both stood up at the same time, extended a hand without saying a word, and we all sat down. Jonas looked at a letter in front of him. His hair fell down into his face. “I’m leaving,” he said. And then, raising his head and flipping his hair back, he added, “I’ve resigned.”