by Ingo Schulze
Piatkowski, the Christian Democrat bigwig, who indeed is on the town council again, had sent his wife. She was delighted by the reception and spoke to the hereditary prince so animatedly and warmly, yes, so charmingly, that the prince asked about her later.
The wife of innkeeper Gallus came close to creating a dire scene when her moment came. She attempted a grand curtsy, but landed, whether intentionally or not, on her knees and cried out, “It was suicide! Your Highness! It was suicide!” I hadn’t known that innkeeper Gallus had taken his life only three days before. While the baron offered his condolences and I explained to the hereditary prince the important role that innkeeper Gallus had once played, she just kept on crying, “It was suicide! Your Highness! It was suicide!”
Everyone I had included on my list showed up, except for Ruth (the daughter of my landlady, Emilie Paulini), Jan Steen, and the publisher of the newspaper in Giessen, who did, however, send his regrets.
I was also pleased that Wolfgang the Hulk and his wife attended. We had tried to get together so many times. Along with Vera I’ll be paying them a visit. And Blond and Black, two policemen, came too. We became acquainted last autumn.
Hors d’oeuvres, champagne, and orange juice were already being passed around when Marion and Jörg presented their invitations.
I assumed it was self-control that lay behind the cordiality with which the baron greeted them both, since it seemed unlikely that he hadn’t spotted our newspaper in Marion’s hand. Marion released all her subconscious aggression on the rolled-up Sunday Bulletin, a gesture that could best be described as “wringing someone’s neck.” But then she stared at the object of her repressed hostility and attempted to smooth out its pages. Jörg brushed her cheek with his hand. To make a long story short: the baron presented the two of them. Jörg greeted the hereditary prince with “Your Highness,” and bowed deeply. Then he stepped aside and gave Marion the floor. She instantly went down on one knee like the hero in an opera and held the rolled-up newspaper out to the prince. “Take a look for yourself. I don’t know why anyone would do this. But then everyone is suddenly changing their biography. No one speaks the truth anymore,” she said in a low monotone. He listened to a few more sentences of the same sort, totally absurd stuff. And of course she also informed the hereditary prince why she had forbidden “Herr Türmer” to address her by her first name, since he was a fraud and totally blinded. She however, Marion Schröder, refused to pray for me, for this shadow.
The hereditary prince extended a hand, hoping she would stand up—half the people in the room were gawking now. She misunderstood his gesture. Like a bird pecking for food, she quickly kissed his hand, stood up, and cried, “We shall meet again soon!” Jörg followed her out, catching up with her at the door, and threw an arm around her shoulder.
I was most surprised by Kurt. I had always taken him for a man in his mid-fifties, but Kurt is only in his early forties. His wife is thirty at most and so slight that I took her for his daughter. When Michaela read her profession as “butcher shop clerk,” Kurt’s wife corrected her in a firm voice: “certified vendor of meats and sausages,” which were the only words that I heard her large, lovely mouth utter.
Pringel’s wife, a pharmacist’s assistant, handed the prince a tiny box that contained a four-leaf clover she had found in the castle courtyard. It had brought them such good luck recently, they wanted to pass it on. “Our ace reporter,” the hereditary prince said, and Pringel, who had trimmed his beard short, replied, “Every, every good wish.”
As we were entering the great Hall of Mirrors for dinner, I asked the baron when he had first noticed the newspaper in Marion’s hand. She had had it with her when she arrived, he said. She had used the Sunday Bulletin as a fan, which he hoped hadn’t wounded my vanity. The baron didn’t understand a thing! He even suggested it would be good idea to place a stack of Bulletins outside the door to the Hall of Mirrors right now. I was such a scaredy-cat, he exclaimed, and asked what else I was afraid of at this point.
I’ve got to go.
Hugs,
Your E.
Monday, July 9, ’90
Dear Nicoletta,
I’ve been remiss in writing, but I no longer wish to muse about my past. It’s not that the World Cup has gone to my head. But isn’t the joy I feel at our victory the overt expression of a much greater, more all-encompassing happiness? My wish to begin a new life at your side has never been stronger than now. But since my letters appear not to have achieved that purpose, my hopes are dwindling—for these letters are motivated by nothing else.371
But I must bring all this to a conclusion, just as a losing team dare not leave the field before those ninety minutes are over. And so back to the start of this year.
As I looked back in chagrin on my nocturnal crossroads adventure, I would have much preferred to have regarded it as a dream. And yet it also pleased me to have risked it. What I had thought and felt there, however, had been left behind in the night.
I took a bath beneath laundry hung up to dry. When I went to dress, I couldn’t find any of the things I wanted. I opened the laundry basket and began rummaging in the dirty clothes, and finally just upended it. Everything I picked up belonged to me. Two towels were the dubious exception to the rule. Only then did I notice that the items hung up to dry belonged solely to Michaela and Robert.
Okay, we’re even, I thought.
Michaela was out somewhere. I dined on fried herring and potatoes with Robert. “You’re eating again,” Michaela exclaimed when she returned home, and then announced there would be a meeting in the living room. Meaning, the space was taboo until evening.
Robert protested that he’d be missing one of his TV shows.
Michaela’s media committee arrived on the dot. While they moved chairs around, clicked open their briefcases, and struck up their usual murmurs, I tidied up my room, gleaning underwear, dishes, shoes, records, record jackets, newspapers, and letters from the floor, until slowly but surely the square fiber mats beneath began to emerge. I worked fast, hoping to escape beneath my headphones before the meeting really began. I had already stretched out on my couch when I remembered I still had laundry in the washing machine. I was trapped. To get to the bathroom I had to go through the living room. I had an overwhelming aversion to appearing before strangers—before people I didn’t want anything to do with, didn’t even want to be spoken to by. I spent a good while wondering whether I should knock or not. Finally, out of habit, I knocked—and felt as if someone had pushed me onstage. The light was blinding, the discussion died. Everyone gawked at me as if I had emerged from the wallpaper. “Why, there you are,” Michaela said. She sounded embarrassed. Sitting with propped elbows at the head of the table, she took a drag on her cigarette and blinked as she stared at me. “Don’t let me interrupt,” I said, closing the living-room door behind me.
Later I could recall the sudden clatter of voices. But at that moment I barely noticed, and was angry at myself for my hasty “Don’t let me interrupt.” I could well imagine what was going through Michaela’s head as she saw her barefoot husband whoosh through the room like a ghost.
I stuffed half a load of wet laundry into the spin-drier, pressed the lid shut, and threw myself on top so that I could hold the spout over the bucket.
I took the laundry down from the clothesline and folded it as neatly as I could. Every undershirt, ever pair of panties, every bra was familiar. I had the feeling I was saying good-bye to each piece. Then I hung up my own things.
No sooner had I opened the living-room door than two bearded men got to their feet.
“Herr Türmer,” said the fellow with long legs and a short, skewed torso, “we would like to know…” and the other one, whom I recognized as the Prophet from his cotton-candy beard and thick glasses, broke in with his variation on the question: “We really have no idea…why you don’t want to work with us.” Silence. The third fellow, Jörg, whose beret was lying on the table, leaned back and nodded encouragement li
ke a teacher at an oral exam. The dainty woman with a pageboy hairdo seated across from him gazed at me as if she were infatuated. Only Michaela went on reading the text in front of her.
“There’s no reason, actually,” I said, just to say something.
What was I waiting for? Why didn’t I simply vanish into my room?
Rudolph, “the Prophet,” took a step toward me, extended both hands, and clasped my right hand between them. What great good luck, he said, to have this unexpected opportunity to thank me. He had wanted to do it ever since the first time he had heard me at the church.372 He always told his wife she should never forget what Herr Türmer had done for us. I had been months ahead of events, I had truly spoken the same clear text that they wanted klartext to speak, and if there was anybody in this town whom he trusted, it was me.
Although he was still grasping my hand tightly, his gaze met mine only occasionally.
I should be writing for them, he said. With my name on the masthead he would no longer worry about putting out a newspaper, my name was a “guarantee of success.”
“So grab a chair and sit down here with us,” Michaela said, interrupting my eulogist.
It was like a rehearsal with a cast change—everybody knows what’s going on except the actor at the center of things. But soon the discussion turned to things like cost projections, printers, distribution possibilities, copies per issue, number of pages, departmental assignments—which strangely enough relieved some of my anxiety since I had nothing to contribute and yet listening caused me no distress. It was all both as interesting and as boring as if they were explaining the rules of a parlor game.
Michaela was the only one who opposed the others’ plans. “But that won’t work!” she kept exclaiming.
I finally asked why they were discussing all this instead of proceeding just as before.
“Precisely,” Michaela said, tossing her pencil aside, “that’s what I keep asking myself. Precisely that!”
Jörg burst into laughter. And then for the first time I heard the words: Altenburg Weekly. Jörg didn’t let anyone get a word in edgewise now. When someone tried to speak, his radio moderator’s voice grew louder in anticipation of the objection or comment.
“But it won’t work,” Michaela shouted once more, to which he responded with another laugh and said, “But we’re going to do it anyway!”
After that no one said anything, they all just stared straight ahead. Suddenly the woman with the pageboy turned her head to me with a birdlike jerk and said, “And what about you? Do you want to work with us? We’d consider it an honor.”
It was our job, she continued, to win over public opinion, in fact, to actually create public opinion so that we could help sustain the transition to democracy, to steer and direct it, yes, even to provide a little control—and self-control—when necessary. “Independence is the crucial thing! And we’ll see to it that the New Forum gives us that in writing.” We didn’t need to go into the fact that in a provincial town an effort like this would take a different form than in Berlin or Leipzig. “The wheel of history,” Rudolph the Prophet interjected, “dare not be turned back.” Then Georg said, “We, that is the New Forum, which will be financing us, are planning a weekly, starting in February. In seven weeks we’ll be holding our first issue in our hands.”
I liked the idea.
“And what you do think?” I asked Michaela. She had stubbed out her cigarette and was shifting her puffed-up cheeks back and forth as if rinsing with mouthwash.
She had joined the New Forum out of a sense of responsibility, she had helped found klartext out of a sense of responsibility, she had taken on the role of publisher out of a sense of responsibility. A newspaper, journalism, political activism—those were important things in a time of crisis, but interested her only in a time of crisis. What was essential for real life, however, happened in literature, in art, in the theater. Where, if not in the theater, did society’s problems get bundled up together and take the shape of action? Then she turned to phrases like “the swamps of local politics” and “everyday picayune stuff.”
At first they all listened, but the longer she gushed on about art, the stage, and “real life,” the more restless they grew. Only the pageboy woman was still giving her her full attention. Michaela closed her sermon with the statement, “Only in art do our lives experience justice, only in art is there a language appropriate to justice.”
After that all eyes refocused on me. “It would mean a great sacrifice,” the woman with the pageboy said, “would truly be a sacrifice on your part.”
“Marion,” Jörg said a little testily, “it’s a leap for us all.”373
“That’s absurd!” Michaela cried. It should be clear to me that it would mean my giving notice at the theater, it wasn’t something you could do on the side.
I promised to think it over.
Michaela flared up: “You can’t be serious!”
I repeated that I would think it over.
Michaela disappeared into our room.
This turn of events was a stroke of good luck for Robert. He didn’t even complain about the cigarette smoke, because everyone had departed from the living room just in time for his show to start. I said good-bye to Michaela’s media committee at the door.
Once Robert had gone to bed, Michaela elbowed my door open and turned around to reveal the drawer from her desk suspended like a vendor’s box at her stomach. “Here, you can practice,” she said, as she dumped the contents on the floor and was gone again.
A pile of papers scribbled full, the klartext files, as it turned out—plus bobby pins, Band-Aids, and a nail clipper.
I immediately set about sorting it all: printing costs, income from vendors, income from mailed copies, bills (paid and outstanding), printed texts, unprinted manuscripts, correspondence.
Standing up again at last, I surveyed my little ordered world—and then I removed my manuscript files from the cupboard, emptied the first, erased the title Barracks Heart/Final Version, and wrote “Printing Cost Estimates” in its place. On the pastel blue one that had read Titus Holm, I now wrote “Vendors’ Accounts.” And so on, until only one file was left without a title. I extracted my most recent attempt at prose from it and added it to the others on my desk. It was now the capstone of my collected works. And on the file itself I wrote: “Rejected Manuscripts”—and at that moment I realized how appropriate the title would have been all along. If we’d had a stove, my “Collected Works” would have gone up in flames that same evening.
But after I had turned the pile over with the written side down, it looked like any stack of blank paper. The pages were usable on one side—a metaphoric fact that both frightened and delighted me. The other half ought not to be wasted.374
My dear Nicoletta, I’m not quite finished yet, but that’s enough for today.
This comes with greetings as warm as they are disheartened, from
Your Enrico Türmer
Tuesday, July 10, 1990
Dear Jo,
Referees’ Retreat was our stadium. We celebrated on into the morning. Mother and the hereditary prince held out until just after midnight. They didn’t want to miss a single moment of our Sunday, either. Everyone was there, except for the baron. He was in consultation with Jörg. I don’t know what came of it. I don’t want to know, either. It was unpleasant enough when Fred and Ilona interviewed with us yesterday. We don’t need anyone new at this point. It’s a bitter pill for them, because I was unable to recommend them to anyone in the family375 with a clear conscience—I know them too well for that.
You and Franziska really missed something on Sunday. It will be a while before I’ll see another spectacle like it. Besides which, I would have been interested in your impression—last but not least, from the theologian’s point of view.376 It was truly an extraordinary, yes, a strangely preter-natural event.
After breakfast in our orchard the baron invited us to board a small bus. Except for him I don’t think anyone ha
d the vaguest idea what awaited us. Michaela climbed up front into the driver’s cab. Seated in the back were the hereditary prince, Robert, Mother, Vera, Astrid, and I—each in his own seat upholstered with the same velvety fabric that lined the entire vehicle. The television up front flickered—and the baron and Michaela appeared on the screen. They waved to us, then the screen went blank again. Music was coming from somewhere, Mozart, I think—we were already on our way. The vehicle smelled new and strange, filtered light came through the windows, the cool draft from the air conditioning was pleasant. We could see people halt in their tracks to stare at us. But I knew that all they could make out would be their own reflections in the black windowpanes. We roared out of town in the direction of Schmölln, past the baron’s scaffolded villa, where workers scrambled about like ants. No sooner were the last buildings behind us than I drifted into a kind of half sleep. But at the same time I noticed every detail—each tree and field, each ear of grain and leaf, revealed itself with painful clarity. Even the faces of people working in the fields or waiting at a bus stop seemed to glow as they looked up and waved.
In Grosstöbnitz we turned off the highway. We picked up speed. The houses, gardens, and fields flew past, we started uphill, a steep climb that it seemed would never end. I closed my eyes again—and sank into another world, a world of sounds and melodies. I lost myself in the music, unable to tell whether it came from inside me or from outside. I felt as if I had exchanged my human existence for a different mode of being, and for the first time ever I had the premonition of a redeemed world in the midst of our own. Yes, go ahead and laugh, but there are dreams that the instant they brush our consciousness burst like a fish from the depths of the sea when it’s forced to the surface.
As the door opened, I could feel how the outside temperature corresponded exactly to that in the bus.
In a tone of voice that sounded as if we had been carrying on an uninterrupted conversation, the baron explained that what awaited us would be real theater, if not to say theater as reality. He laughed, but in the next moment announced, in the voice of a master of ceremonies: A drama performed on the occasion of the return to Altenburg of the hand reliquary of St. Boniface, the apostle to the Germans, and in honor of the visit of the hereditary prince to the city of his birth.