New Lives

by Ingo Schulze

  “Pentheus translates everything he hears into his own language. And because he believes he never receives the right answer to his questions—never realizing he is asking the wrong questions—he will perish. Or to put it succinctly: because he is not willing or able to question himself, he will meet a gruesome end,” Rudolf Böhme said. And Titus would have loved to shout: Because he’s a coward! Because he doesn’t understand what he’s doing! Because he doesn’t deserve Bernadette!

  “Horny old goat,” Martin exclaimed.

  “Yes, Pentheus is a voyeur,” Rudolf Böhme said. “But now we also understand why when others speak of consecration and worship, he sees nothing but lewdness and prurience. Believing he knows himself very well, he also believes he knows what other people are like. And his playing the old goat, as you put it, is really the first and only time he escapes his own obstinacy. Suddenly he reveals qualities he has always fought against and repressed, both within himself and in the state. The horrible thing is that this is precisely what destroys him.”

  Even as Rudolf Böhme told about how Pentheus disguises himself in women’s clothes and slinks off to Cithaeron, afflicted now by Dionysus with lyssa, madness, which lacks any of the ambiguity that defines mania, Titus realized he had to act, that only in action could he save Bernadette and himself.

  “‘Were Pentheus possessed by reason, he would not don the garb of women,’ Dionysus says,” Rudolf Böhme continued. “And the question is whether in saying this Dionysus hasn’t become absurd himself. For from now on every step is a step toward annihilation. Dionysus isn’t content to slay his adversary, Pentheus must die at the hand of his own mother.”

  Titus felt hot, his head was burning. He tried to force himself to listen and not think of everything all at one time. But he couldn’t manage it. There were too many worlds, too many dreams, too many lives. He had to make a decision.

  Rudolf Böhme spoke as if he had watched with his own eyes as Dionysus bends a pine tree down and sets Pentheus in the crown, then carefully lets the trunk swing back upright. The women see him before he sees them and grab hold of the pine tree and uproot it. Pentheus rips off his women’s clothes, pleads with his mother—it is I, your Pentheus, the son whom you bore, have mercy, Mother, do not slay me because of my wrongdoing, for I am your child! His mother, Agave, however, grabs him by his right hand, braces her feet against his body, and rips his shoulder out…After the butchery, Pentheus’s head ends up in his mother’s hands. She fixes it on her thyrsus in place of a pinecone and bears it in triumph into the city. Agave boasts that she was the first to strike this wild beast and to have slain it, and demands that the chorus share in the meal. The chorus refuses in revulsion. Agave pets the calf she believes she has in her hands, scratches the fuzz on its chin. Her son Pentheus, she brags, will praise her for this hunt, for this prey. “And whoever sheds no tears at this,” Rudolf Böhme said, “has no tears left to shed.”

  When a few minutes later they got up from the table, Titus had come to his decision. He stepped over to the large living room window and gazed out at the city. The spell of arms and voices: the white arms of roads lie before him. And the voices say with them: We are your kinsmen. And the air is thick with their company as they call to me, their kinsman, making ready to go, shaking the wings of their exultant and terrible youth. He had once memorized it, not perfectly but almost.

  Titus wanted to talk with Joachim, just with him. Titus was afraid that they wouldn’t be undisturbed on the walk home either. But Joachim never left Rudolf Böhme’s side.

  They all gathered at the entry for their coats, and Titus was the first to say good-bye and step out the front door. He was trembling with impatience. Every second he stood there alone while Joachim kept him waiting threatened to undo his decision. But once he had shared his decision with Joachim, there would be no turning back. Titus wanted at last to be different, to be honest, good. He shuddered, as if the decisive moment would not be the day after tomorrow, at the end of their last class, but now, right now.

  The wind had picked up, the sky was black. In among the trees, streetlights came on, the only light near or far. He heard Rudolf Böhme’s voice, and Martin’s. The girls were looking for something. Bernadette’s mother offered to let them stay the night. The girls turned her down. Rudolf Böhme repeated the invitation. “Come on, come on,” Titus whispered. He banged his hands in the pockets of his anorak against his hips, spun around, and bumped his shoulder harder than he had intended against the door, which swung open. In amazement they looked at him, like at some new arrival. Titus smiled. There it was again, the odor of the house, that fragrance, more befuddling than ever. And as if obeying a request, Titus stepped back inside.

  4

  When Titus awoke, his room, flooded with daylight, seemed strange to him. Next to his alarm clock lay an open book of fairy tales, which he had read to calm himself down.

  In the same way that he sometimes raised his head from the pillow to check whether his headache was still there, he now began searching for the decision he had made yesterday. But his “no” to the army had crossed the no-man’s-land of sleep unscathed, it was already a part of him. Titus felt so strong and certain that he would have loved simply to skip Sunday.

  He started doing his push-ups, increasing his goal by two, and at forty-four got to his feet again, panting and wide awake.

  He greeted his grandfather, who was sitting at the radio and winced when Titus kissed his cheek. A place had been set for him at the kitchen table. Only some bread crumbs and the tea egg in the sink indicated that he was late. As he ate a weird feeling came over him, because every object he looked at reminded him of something. And so to his mind the white tiles above the stove—which had had to be set in the middle of the other cloud gray tiles when the position of the stovepipe was shifted—once again looked like a dog dancing on its back legs. His sister used to carry on long conversations with it. The coffee can with its Dutch win-terscape, the towel calendar from three years ago with its Black Forest girls, the amoebalike spot on the ceiling—Titus saw them all that morning as if for the first time. He felt like a guest. He enjoyed the sense that things were so remote.

  The sections for music, civics, Russian, and gym in his homework notebook were empty, but he figured he would need two hours for math and physics.

  Titus was a bit unsettled by his rapid progress. Equations with two unknowns.

  [Letter of May 31, 1990]

  since it was no longer a matter of grades—as a conscientious objector he would be tossed out after tenth grade in any case—he was slowly getting his footing again. Before he went to work on the physics homework, he made his bed and picked up what was lying on the floor around it: a dictionary of foreign words and phrases, the fairy tales, his alarm clock, two postcards from Greifswald and Stralsund that his sister had sent him, the TV program from the previous week, and the Sächsische Zeitung—his grandfather had of late taken to passing it on to him when he was finished reading it. Titus packed his satchel, without touching Petersen’s book, and took in the view of an empty desk, except for his physics book and notebook. He opened to page 144. Assignment 62 read: Summarize the life and influence of Isaac Newton. Base this on pp. 33–35 in your textbook. Further recommended reading: Vavilov, S. L., Isaac Newton (Berlin, 1951). Assignment 63: Explain the difference between the mass of an object and the gravity of an object.

  Titus was feeling strong and clever. He would complete these tasks in nothing flat, just like Joachim. Ten minutes later he stuffed the physics book into his satchel. If he could have, he would have made a sandwich for Monday break then and there—that way he wouldn’t have to open his satchel again until he was at school.

  Although it was still early, Titus prepared the noonday meal, sliced the sausage into the potato soup and, just as if his mother were home, set the table in the living room, including the bottle of Maggi seasoning, which he placed on a saucer. He didn’t want his grandfather to have to do anything when he returned fro
m his walk.

  He didn’t have to help out around the house. His mother would never have demanded that he peel potatoes or hang up the laundry. He himself would have regarded that as child labor. He didn’t know how hard kernels became rice, how raw meat was turned into something edible. Only last summer he had hung a teabag in a glass of cold water. But he would gladly have learned all that rather than have her drill him in declensions, conjugations, reducing equations, solving percentages, punctuating with commas…From seventh grade on he had not dared bring home a C on his report card; anything below a C was out of the question. In major subjects it had to be an A, and if he managed that, a B in some minor subject was pure laziness and thus even more unacceptable. He was not to make his abode among the dull and lazy.

  Although a Sunday worthy of the name included his mother’s being at home, he was glad he wouldn’t see her again until everything had been decided. Because in her eyes all his efforts, all the drills, all the worry would have been in vain—the joy at an A pointless, not to mention the concern over a B or the despair over a C. Oh, Mother, he wanted to say, I’m not giving up anything, just the opposite, it’s a liberation, a resurrection. I truly have no choice. I had to do it because otherwise everything else would dissolve into nothingness. If truth and falsehood, right and wrong, good and evil, are to have any meaning, then I have to say “no.”

  He felt as if he could really breathe easy for the first time ever. Wasn’t what he was experiencing at this moment the same freedom felt by all those who had been willing to confess the name of Jesus and take up their cross? Wasn’t his life just beginning? How could he have lived with himself as a mealy-mouthed coward? How unnecessary all that truckling and kowtowing was.

  Titus heard the key turn in the door. He lit the candles and put on a recording of the Brandenburg Concertos.

  “Your mother wants you to call her,” his grandfather said after taking his seat and stirring some Maggi into his soup.

  “Did you talk with her?”

  “She wants you to call her,” his grandfather said.

  Titus tried to imagine how his life would be the following Sunday. He couldn’t say just how the living room would be any different then from what it was now, except that his mother would be sitting at the table too. But it would be a totally different room.

  After the meal Titus rode his bike to the ponds in the woods. He knew every buckle in the asphalt, could have slalomed practically blindfolded around the potholes and little bumps that were like warts left behind by repair work. The thought of that phone call grew more depressing from minute to minute.

  Ever since he had started school it had never occurred to him to tell his mother about punches or curses or any sort of humiliation. Because everything that happened to him hurt her twice as much. And now he was going to have to hurt her. He had always been grateful to his mother for not treating him and his sister the way children are usually treated. After his father’s death she hadn’t expected them to put up with a new husband. Men were crude and expected you to wash up stripped to the waist, like in the army.

  The wind tugged at him. Titus now had Klotzsche and Hellerau behind him and, turning off to the right at the end of the village street, began the climb through open country. He stood up, but that didn’t help much. It was better to lie flat over the handlebars and pedal for all he was worth.

  His mother had grounded him only once, but he found even that completely unacceptable. It had been so embarrassing, he had been ashamed for her. But she had felt much the same way. So first she had sent him shopping, then they had gone to the ice-cream parlor together, and after that he had been allowed to pick out a real man’s wallet in a leather shop.

  He thought of how he had had to drink scalded milk in kindergarten, how the skin had clung to his lip, and of how in the days before they had a television he and his sister, Annie, would ring the neighbor’s doorbell every Sunday afternoon so they could watch Professor Flimmrich. In those days he could recognize stairwells and apartments just by their smell. Annie had roused the Beckers, a retired couple, from their midday nap so she could watch The Snow Queen. The Beckers had chased her off, only to call her back upstairs a few minutes later. The Beckers offered Annie and him their glittery, silvery armchair. They gave them sweetened gelatin to eat from a wooden pot. From then on he had always asked himself whether, if everything else in life went wrong, he would at least be able to sit in front of a television and eat sweetened gelatin. That idea made the world seem a much less frightening place.

  There atop the low hill, with its view across miles of fields, as far as the line of the Moritzburg Forest on the horizon, Titus suddenly realized that his childhood lay behind him.

  He picked up speed as he started down the slope. The trick was to take the curve to the left leading to the woodland ponds without braking. If you leaned into the turn just right, so that the asphalt along the shoulder banked in a steep curve, you could feel your body being tugged and steered by the countervailing torque and resistance. The tingle of that moment of joy lasted a long time. If you got the angle wrong, you were thrown out of the curve and dumped into the field.

  (Here insert a few more daydreams about his new life and other lovely observations. And how he tries to stop thinking about Bernadette.)

  Titus was startled, frightened when he heard the key quickly inserted into the apartment door, and then was startled all the more by his fright…

  His mother, gray as an eraser.

  She had never wept, not in his presence. But her eyes were glistening with tears now. Staring down at the toes of her shoes, she looked weary and thin. Her hands folded across her knees smelled of chloramine.

  “Mother,” he said. “You’re acting as if I’m some sort of criminal.”

  “You’re running straight into their knife, Titus,” she said. “So honest and upstanding. But that doesn’t change a thing, you’re only hurting yourself.”

  He was glad to hear her say something, anything.

  “Someday you’ll understand,” he said without looking up, and would have loved to add, “and be proud of me.” And then he did in fact say it.

  “I’m proud of you just as you are, Titus. I couldn’t be more proud than I am now.”

  He still didn’t look up. “What’s so awful about my getting kicked out of school? Most of the others won’t go on to university anyway.”

  He heard his grandfather’s footsteps.

  “You’re throwing yourself away, Titus, pearls before swine.”

  Titus received his grandfather with a smile. “Where’s your mother?”

  “Right here,” Titus said, and his grandfather pushed the door open wider.

  “Is something wrong?”

  Titus shook his head and smiled again. His mother didn’t budge, but just stared at the floor until his grandfather left again.

  “What are you going to tell them?”

  Titus didn’t respond. He had already told her. He couldn’t repeat it, his words were stuck in the ruts of what had already been said. He heard the radio in the kitchen and felt like he had lived through this scene before.

  “Do you think you’re going to make a better person of Petersen? Or of your classmates? You’ll just embarrass them, make it more difficult for them…”

  “Am I supposed to lie?” He looked at her now.

  “Who said you’re supposed to lie?”

  Titus sat down now.

  “You’re supposed to talk about the Bundeswehr, nothing more than that.”

  [Letter of June 9, 1990]

  “But they’ve got it all wrong.”

  “What have they got wrong?”

  “Aggressor and all the rest of the crap.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “They would never attack us.”

  “If the Russians didn’t have an army, didn’t have any rockets…do you think the West would nobly refrain from attacking? They didn’t even allow an Allende. Think about Vietnam. Just because they
drive better cars and have better pantyhose doesn’t automatically make them more humane.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “They’d cash in the whole kit and caboodle.”

  “I think that the West…”

  “Would help themselves…”

  It was as if someone had erased the despair from her face. It was like when they played chess and she let him take back a stupid move. But he didn’t want to take anything back.

  “You can’t be the judge of that,” Titus said.

  “Imagine we’re talking about lightbulbs or cars or anything of that sort.”

  “Why should I?”

  “You don’t know any more about those things than I do, do you?”

  “He wants me to draw conclusions…”

  “Everyone has to draw their own conclusions.”

  “Mama…”

  What had become of his ideas, of the arguments he wanted to present her with. Why couldn’t he convince her? Was it so easy to put him in checkmate? Joachim was right, Gunda Lapin was right, his mother was right, they were all right each in their own way—only he was wrong.

  (Or better, set in a telephone booth.)

  “He asked if I had settled in okay, how I was doing meeting the challenges of a new class, and then he said that this wasn’t some attempt to talk me into enlisting, into hiring me as a mercenary, those days were over, thank God. That wasn’t how we did things. But a government of workers and peasants that made it possible for us to get such an education surely ought to be able to demand something in return from those to whom it gave special assistance.”

  “He was very calm, but stern, calm and stern. He asked why I didn’t want peace. I told him that of course I wanted peace. Was I prepared then to defend my homeland with a weapon in hand, or would I just stand aside and watch my family slaughtered before my eyes.”