New Lives

by Ingo Schulze

  What had he meant by that?

  “When one of the two thieves at the crucifixion suddenly converts—that doesn’t sound right to me. The other one,” Titus had said, “the one who goes on mocking, is a lot more natural, a much better character.”

  “Why?”

  “He doesn’t get anything out of continuing to play the heavy.”

  “He spits at someone who’s worse off than he is.”

  And when Titus didn’t reply, Joachim had laid into him: “The other one knows he’s done wrong, but Jesus is innocent. He knows the difference. What do you think makes him better?”

  But Titus hadn’t had a response to that question either.

  “Who told you the other one is better?”

  “Nobody,” Titus had answered, “nobody,” and then suddenly added, “I’m supposed to give a short report on the Bundeswehr as the aggressor, on Monday.”

  Joachim had looked at him as if expecting something more, but then finally said, “Well just go ahead and give it, give your nice little report.”

  The girls were sitting huddled together on Martin’s bed. The three singers appeared to be occupied with themselves and the record jacket.

  The colors had faded from the sky, all that was left was a bright streak, like a crack of light before a door closes.

  Why had he been so sure that he had seen Bernadette outside? It might have been her mother and father. Wasn’t Bernadette in the next room, eating cake? Yes, he was now convinced he hadn’t seen anything out there among the circular flower beds. That took a weight off his shoulders, left him happy.

  [Letter of May 24, 1990]

  He turned around. They were still singing the same song. “It was at the dance, just yesterday, I saw you in a trance…” Was that about him and Bernadette?

  Titus sat down with the girls on the bed. He would have loved to bounce around the way they were doing, would have bounced better than any of those three. But he couldn’t sing, although he did know the words. “My senses were reeling, it went black before my eyes, black and lilac and green, then I saw gulls, swans, and cranes fly by…”

  He had never been able to express himself as an instrument of music, whereas these three, though they had surely never spoken about it with one another, did so with self-confidence and conviction. Titus tried at least to be a good audience, and applauded the trio, who showed no signs of quitting now and were so loud that they didn’t hear the gong calling them to supper. Marcus, Bernadette’s little brother, had made place cards, and Bernadette had turned the napkins into three-tined crowns. Rudolf Böhme lit candles and distributed the candelabra about the room, a task that complemented his short steps. Once the dogs of darkness had been driven from every corner, as Rudolf Böhme put it, he greeted everyone, closed the kitchen door himself, and took up a position behind his chair. “My dear Martin…” he began.

  Titus smiled. He looked first at Martin and then at the others, one by one. But evidently no one except him thought a speech in honor of the birthday boy was overdoing things.

  Titus now fixed his gaze with earnestness on Rudolf Böhme, who spoke with chin held high, eyelids closed, and lashes quivering as if he were dreaming, while his fingers groped along the edge of the table as if finishing the job of smoothing out the tablecloth. By candlelight the siblings revealed their resemblance to one another, and to their mother even more, as if they were all wearing the same wigs. Bernadette had glanced up at the same moment her father mentioned Titus by name.

  The speech ended with laughter, because when they reached for their glasses for the toast Rudolf Böhme proposed, they found them empty, and Rudolf Böhme interrupted himself by declaring he knew something was missing.

  No sooner had they begun to eat than the ketchup bottle was empty, but for some reason it kept moving around the table, a bit of utter foolishness that reached its high point when finally Rudolf Böhme looked up and innocently asked for the ketchup—and after several futile attempts remarked that evidently they were out of ketchup.

  Bernadette sat leaning back in her chair, staring at the rest of her toast. She hadn’t joined in the ketchup prank, which was why Titus tried not to laugh too hard.

  Martin and Joachim kept on joking around with each other, bringing the rest of the table to silence. As he searched for a question he could pose to Rudolf Böhme, Titus made every effort to put down his knife and fork with as little clatter as possible. He watched Rudolf Böhme bend deep over his plate each time he removed a bite from his fork. The motions of his lips and tongue, as well as the way he gave each mouthful a long, thorough chew, suggested to Titus a kind of reverse speech, as if Rudolf Böhme were now incorporating into his body the words, sentences, and thoughts he would later write or speak.

  “What are you working on at the moment, if I may inquire?” Joachim asked.

  “He means you, Papa,” Bernadette remarked.

  “Or would you prefer not to talk about it?”

  Titus used the pause to take a deep breath, in and out.

  “I’m translating,” Rudolf Böhme said as he continued to chew. “I’m pretending I know how. I’m working on it with your Brockmann, Boris Brockmann. He’s tremendous, really tremendous, a real translator in fact. I just add the poetical touch afterward.”

  With the help of some melted cheese, Rudolf Böhme dabbed up the last toast crumbs.

  Boris Brockmann, who would be their Latin and Greek teacher from the tenth grade on, looked like Bertolt Brecht and dressed like him too. Titus never ran into him except if he used the corridor on the top floor of the main building. Seated half on the radiator and half on the windowsill, Brockmann always seemed to be waiting for someone to greet him so he could say his own “Good morning!” with such earnestness and precise articulation that Titus actually heard the original good wish contained in the stock phrase.

  “Someone should write a big book about translation,” Rudolf Böhme said, “from Humboldt to today. If you take a closer look, you soon realize that ultimately translation doesn’t exist. And suddenly you’re caught in a trap.” He meticulously wiped his lips.

  “Which is why it always sounds so funny, and quite rightly so, when you ask, ‘So what’s the author trying to tell us?’” Rudolf Böhme laughed softly to himself, while his tongue brushed across his teeth. “Here’s the original, so translate it, and everyone thinks that’s just as it should be. What’s the problem, if you can arrange them prettily together on the bookshelf? But what does original mean then, there’s an original only because someone sits down to grapple with it, otherwise there wouldn’t even be an original.”

  Subjective idealism, Titus thought.

  “But if the original isn’t the original,” Martin asked, “what is it?”

  “The original on the bookshelf is nothing more than printed paper,” Rudolf Böhme stated. “The moment you open it and start reading, things get complicated.”

  “Maybe you could give them a hint of what it is you’re translating,” Bernadette’s mother said, after having lit yet another cigarette.

  “And there’s the problem right off,” Rudolf Böhme declared. “The Bacchae by Euripides, the Bacchantes, The Possessed, or The Frenzied—or what should I call them? Do you understand?”

  “No,” Martin said.

  “If I say the Bacchantes, then I see Jordaens’s painting before me, and Bacchus reminds me of Caravaggio, of a Bacchus not feeling so well—and what does that have to do with Dionysus?”

  “Then choose a different word,” Martin said.

  “Which one?”

  “Whatever’s in the dictionary.”

  “Whatever’s in the dictionary?” Rudolf Böhme asked, closing his eyes. “In the dictionary you’ll find: ‘bacchic: frenzied, roisterous, bewitched, possessed,’ something like that.”

  “And what fits?”

  “Yes, which of them fits?” Rudolf Böhme looked at his plate. “We had a joke in school,” he began. “The ancient Greeks didn’t know the most important
thing of all: that they are the ‘ancient Greeks.’ Do you understand? Time, which turned the Greeks into the ‘ancient Greeks,’ keeps bringing to light new meanings the Greeks themselves, of course, knew nothing about, could never have known about, although the words came from them. I see in them something different than you do, and Mama sees something else entirely. And our friend Titus here, he would find some other facet to be of significance. Each person has his own experiences, and so he reads the same sentences very differently.”

  “Is that true, Titus?” Martin asked.

  “Yes, that’s true,” Titus said in a serious voice.

  “Yes, that’s true,” Martin aped him.

  “A text is not a dead thing,” Rudolf Böhme continued, “but rather it answers my questions in its own special way, or refuses to answer. There’s a voice in there, an encounter, a conversation…”

  “Wow!” Martin exclaimed. “The witching hour for the bewitched.”

  Bernadette’s mother shook her head and angrily exhaled a puff of smoke.

  “He’s right, Sophie,” Rudolf Böhme remarked before Bernadette’s mother could say anything. “Reading is always the witching hour.”

  “And so what’s this bewitched play about?” Titus asked.

  “That would just spoil our evening,” Bernadette’s mother said.

  “In any case it was Goethe’s favorite tragedy, but it’s cruel, it’s gray

  [Letter of May 25, 1990]

  “And now I’ve lost my train of thought. Well fine,” he said, and placed his forefingers at the edge of the table, flexing them outward like horns. “Dionysus takes on human form—it’s important that he’s welcomed in human form—and arrives in Thebes in order to bring his cult to the city of his mother, Semele. All Asia worships him by now, only Greece still knows nothing about him. Semele, one of Zeus’s lovers, had given in to Hera’s whispered suggestion and demanded that Zeus show himself in all his divinity. Zeus appeared as a bolt of lightning that struck and killed Semele. But her sisters, Dionysus’s aunts, claim this story was merely invented by Cadmus, Semele’s father and the founder of Thebes, in order to preserve the honor of his daughter, and thus of the royal house as well. In truth Zeus struck Semele down because she had bragged that she was pregnant by him. Dionysus doesn’t like any of this gossip. That is why, so Dionysus says, he has turned the women of Thebes into frenzied Maenads and driven them off to a nearby heavily wooded mountain, Cithaeron. Dionysus demands the Thebans believe in him…”

  “Which, as a god, he’s allowed to do,” Joachim inserted.

  “If he were to reveal himself as a god, yes,” Rudolf Böhme rejoined. “Pentheus is the ruler of Thebes and a cousin of Dionysus, since his mother Agave is one of Semele’s sisters. Cadmus is thus the grandfather of both Pentheus and Dionysus. Pentheus is a god-, or perhaps better”—here he gave Joachim a nod—“gods-fearing man. It is only to Dionysus that he fails to offer sacrifices and prayers. Although to be fair, one should add that Pentheus knows nothing whatever about him.”

  Bernadette had stood up and, while Rudolf Böhme described the first commentary of the chorus, began to clear the table. Titus stacked the plate of the girl next to him on his own and pushed his chair back.

  “No,” Bernadette whispered, laying a hand on his shoulder. She picked up the plates and vanished into the kitchen, from where, just as in the theater, a wedge of bright light first struck the table and then went out again. Rudolf Böhme told about the scene where two old men—the blind seer, Teiresias, and Cadmus, the founder of the city, declare their intention to visit the mountains to worship Dionysus. He compared them to two retirees on their way to a disco.

  Titus concentrated on his right shoulder, on the spot where Bernadette’s hand had touched it. He would rather have helped Bernadette tidy up than have to listen to Rudolf Böhme. Titus could well understand why Pentheus would make fun of Teiresias and Cadmus.

  He didn’t start paying attention again until her mother declared, “Dionysus afflicts women with mania, and Pentheus wants to lock them up behind bolted doors. We should keep that in mind.”

  “We should keep that in mind,” Rudolf Böhme agreed, and remarked on the fine differentiation that Teiresias makes between kratos, external force, and dynamis, energy and power as an inherent quality.

  As he spoke Rudolf Böhme stared at the table. When he did raise his head, his eyes were closed. It was only from close up like this that you could see all the wrinkles that started at the corners of his eyes and spread down like a delicate mesh over his cheeks.

  Just as when his mother used to tell him stories, Titus could see it all before him now too. The castle of Pentheus looked like Holy Cross School, Pentheus was a kind of principal or teacher, and Dionysus, or so Rudolf Böhme had claimed, was a hippie, a lady’s man, an artist.

  “The cult of Dionysus,” Rudolf Böhme said, “isn’t something that you can simply be told about, you have to become part of it, join in its rituals and abide by its rules—as with any religious faith.”

  Titus saw Dionysus being locked in the cellar coal bin, there is an earthquake, and the school building collapses. But Dionysus walks out into the courtyard unscathed and boasts of how he has driven Pentheus mad. In the same moment Pentheus comes running up—was it Petersen? Was it the principal? Everything has turned out just as Dionysus predicted. But Petersen doesn’t want to hear any of it. He orders the school gate closed and bolted, as if he hadn’t already learned how useless such commands are. Joachim points that out to him, but Petersen has had enough of this schoolboy who always wants to have the last word. “Sophos, sophos sy!” he shouts. “Wise, wise you are, only never where you should be wise!”

  “He’s hard of hearing, as my grandpa would put it,” Joachim said.

  “We can understand Pentheus, and yet we don’t understand him either,” Rudolf Böhme continued. “Everything he has learned in life so far, all his previous experiences, contradict what he is now going through. We shouldn’t expect that, just like that, he can put aside the spectacles through which he has seen the world all his life. On the other hand, it’s amazing how blind he is to the changed situation.”

  In that instant the wedge of light fell on the table again. Bernadette entered with two small bowls and set them on the table. Titus got up and went to the kitchen, following the fragrance of apples and vanilla, picked up two more bowls, and carried them out. Bernadette smiled, her lips moved as if she were about to say something. They passed close by each other twice more. When they were seated at the table again, Bernadette looked at him. Looks are all we need to read someone’s mind, Titus thought, and waited for Bernadette to pick up her spoon and start eating—baked apples with vanilla sauce.

  “This is marvelous,” Rudolf Böhme said, pursing his lips and waving his spoon in the air as if trying to crack an egg. Titus didn’t join in the general praise, that seemed silly somehow. Bernadette was silent as well. But it was a cheerful silence that cast even tragedy in its bright light.

  “Where’s Stefan?” Rudolf Böhme asked as he scraped at what was left in his bowl. Martin evidently hadn’t heard the question. He was very intent on his dessert, Titus noted. He had to smile and wanted to let Bernadette see his smile, but at the same moment she remarked, “I’ll go check,” and looked right past Titus, who was now at a loss where to direct his smile. He shoveled it away, shoveled it full of pieces of apple as if filling a grave with dirt and didn’t look up as Bernadette left.

  “Her friend is being inducted the day after tomorrow,” Rudolf Böhme whispered. “A little like the end of the world for both of them.”

  When Titus felt Bernadette’s mother’s hand on his shoulder, he could have broken into sobs. Without turning his head, he gave her the empty bowl, but his voice failed him for even a simple “thank you.”

  “Would anyone like a cup of tea?” Bernadette’s mother asked, setting the pewter bowl of rock sugar directly in front of Titus.

  “Let me quickly bring this to an
end,” Rudolf Böhme declared, “or are there seconds?”

  He told about a shepherd who had been spying on the women in the mountains. But what he has to report—scenes of perfect harmony between man and nature—is not to Pentheus’ liking…

  Titus could see Stefan in his mind’s eye, with his buzzed haircut and a steel helmet on his head. Titus tried to recall the loyalty oath Joachim had written out for him weeks before. He let this Stefan recite the oath, while Bernadette was forced to listen. I swear, Stefan said, faithfully and at all times to serve my fatherland, the German Democratic Republic, and when so ordered by a government of workers and peasants, to protect it against every enemy. I swear I will be prepared at any time to defend Socialism against all enemies and to lay down my life for its victorious cause. Should I ever…may I be subjected to the strict punishment of the law…and the contempt of all working people.

  “The women hurl themselves at the animals, ripping sheep and cows to pieces with their bare hands, tearing them limb from limb as blood spurts and hunks of flesh dangle among the branches, as bones and hooves fly through the air…”

  Titus enjoyed listening to this part. He didn’t wince. Rudolf Böhme didn’t have to show him any special consideration.

  Joachim said that it had been violence that evoked the women’s violence.

  “Yes, of course, Pentheus hears only what he wants to hear. Besides—and he offers this as his reason—there is nothing worse than defeat at the hands of women, a disgrace to which Greece cannot be subjected. Suddenly it’s no longer about Thebes but about Greece. One must admit that Nietzsche—and those who agree with him—is right in saying that Pentheus does not cut a very good figure here. On the other hand, his reaction is perfectly normal for a ruler. In any case, Dionysus, offended by such stubbornness, warns him yet again not to take up arms against a god.”

  “Dionysus shows patience,” Joachim said.

  Titus was disappointed the carnage was over already. Because that’s what war was like, horrible, cruel beyond words, and this Stefan would be in the thick of it—he had sworn an oath that he would. And instead of listening to Rudolf Böhme, who was now talking about the tragedy’s peripeteia, he watched as Bernadette, disgusted by such mealy-mouthed cowardice and blind submission, turned away from her uniformed boyfriend at last.