New Lives Page 2
I’ve already had to write Mamus3 twice this week. The second letter was necessary because Michaela had phoned4 her to ask whether she’d heard about my decision.5
We are not dealing here with trivialities, this is about the betrayal of art—betrayal of it, which means of Michaela, of our friends, of life itself, so that my response to her is always that I’m not the deserter, art is. Of course, she doesn’t accept that.6
I was in the “editorial office” for the first time yesterday afternoon. The building, which belongs to Georg, who is one of the two founders of the paper, is on Frauen Gasse, about three hundred yards behind the post office. You think you’ve arrived at the end of the world. But once you’ve passed through the eye of the needle—the ruins of a one-story building and a tilted wall—the world turns more hospitable again. Georg’s house is in the middle of a garden, a country home en miniature. The garden gate is arched over by a rotting wooden structure, a rose lattice. The bell could wake the dead.
“You’ve actually come,” he said. The vestibule was filled with all sorts of garden tools and quite a few bicycles.
Turning left, opposite the stairs, you first enter a windowless antechamber and then a small room with a floor of wide planks and a beamed ceiling that I can touch with my outstretched arm. A table and chairs take up almost the whole room. It smelled of furniture polish and coffee. When seated I’m taller than Georg, whose short, skewed upper body squats atop endlessly long legs. The whole time he talked about plans for the newspaper he stared at his folded hands. Whenever he paused, his mouth vanished into his beard. Then he would glance up at me as if checking the effect of his words. I was uncertain how to address him—at our first meeting we had used formal pronouns with each other.
There are various postal scales on the windowsills. The glass of the panes is old, distorting the view to the garden. You only have to move your head a little and trees shrink to bushes or shoot up sky high.
Later we climbed up behind the house, the garden rises in several terraces. When I thought we would have to turn back, Georg made an opening in the thicket and began walking up a steep footpath. I had trouble following him. Then a marvelous view: the town lay at our feet under a lilac sky, the hill with its castle to our right, Barbarossa’s Red Tips to our left.7 There was something agreeably unfamiliar about it all, it even felt like I was looking at the theater for the first time.
I inhaled the cold air and the smell of moldy soil and felt very glad that from now on I’ll be able to enjoy the view whenever I want.
Jörg, my other boss, had arrived in the meantime and made tea. He’s that same little bit shorter than Georg is taller than I. Jörg formulates his sentences so that they’re ready to be set in print. He seems to have his doubts about me. He never let me out of his sight and responded to everything I said with a slightly mocking smile. But I won’t let that scare me.
Georg and Jörg want to pay me the same salary they make, which means I’d earn two thousand net a month, almost three times my wages as a dramaturge. They’ve given up trying to get money out of the New Forum.8 The main thing is that I don’t have to go to the theater anymore. I was falling apart there. There’s no place more boring!
A little before six o’clock Georg invited us to a light supper. His wife, Franka, and his three sons had already gathered round the table. As we sat down there was a sudden silence, I automatically expected someone to say grace. But it didn’t happen.
I’m now reading newspapers. On the first page of the ND9 is a photograph of Havel.10 He changed professions just in time. Whereas Noriega’s picture looks like a mug shot.11 Some soldiers in Gleina went on strike for a few days.12 They demanded a new military code. Even an army prosecutor was sent in. But they refused to be cowed. And now, so I read, there actually is a new military code.
I think about you all the time.
Your Heinrich
[Sunday, Jan. 14, ’90]
Verotchka,
Your letter has been lying here in the kitchen, on top of the fridge, since yesterday. Michaela brought the mail in, so the mailbox was empty when I took a look. Just now, right after breakfast, I suddenly recognized your handwriting on an envelope.
Now that the date is set and you’ve booked your flight…for the last few days I’ve been feeling stronger than I have for a long time. I was even a match for Jörg, who’s like a fox lying in ambush. But it won’t be long now and you’ll be so far away…oh my, I’m sounding like Mamus. Does she even know anything about it?
I have no idea what Beirut is like, but I can’t understand why Nicola13 doesn’t want to bring his mother to Berlin instead? And how much business can there be amid all that rubble and desolation?
I’m frightened for you—which is also egoistic of me. I won’t be able to help you. I’ve got two thousand marks in my account. Do you need it? How much is that? Three hundred West marks?
I’ve got plenty of time to give you, however. I’m living under some kind of spell, I’m awake at four or five at the latest. Even though I rarely go to bed before midnight. And yet I’m not the least bit tired, not even in the afternoon. When I get bored with brooding, I thumb through the dictionary. It’s amazing how many verbs and adjectives we know without ever using them.
I called Johann in the middle of the week to tell him I had quit the theater and am joining the crew of a start-up newspaper. He was extremely distant and brusque. And now I get a letter that could have been dictated by Michaela. I never used to read newspapers, so why was I trying to avoid these new artistic challenges (and he used that very phrase!). And went on like that for four pages. What a stranger he’s become.
What you wrote about this nobleman sounds really promising. If in fact he does want to come to Altenburg, you can give him my address, and our editorial office will soon have a telephone.
Verotchka, if I’m not going to be able to see you, at least write and tell me about what you’re doing, about taking care of final details, anything! There is no one else who I can count on.
Your Heinrich
Thursday, Jan. 18, ’90
Dear Jo,
I got your letter and read it, but I simply don’t have the desire or the energy to argue with you. I would just repeat myself anyway. Wait a few months, and then we won’t even need to talk about all this anymore.
I take short walks, read newspapers, and cook our noon meal. I suddenly have so much time that I don’t know what to do with myself.
Yesterday I even attended a meeting of the New Forum, I must admit not quite voluntarily. Rudolph Franck, who’s called the “Prophet” because of his gray cotton-candy beard, asked me to come along. I owe my job at the paper to him, he initiated things and put in a good word for me. It’s still a mystery to me what he thought my attendance would contribute. I probably disappointed him.
Jörg thinks there’s a rumor—no, rumor is too strong, more like a whisper—that something is not quite kosher about people (like me) who couldn’t stop spouting off last fall, but then vanished from one day to the next. I’m afraid it’s Jörg himself who’s spreading this stuff. It would be just like him.
There were a few hundred people in the hall. I was about to take a seat when I heard my name from behind me. I didn’t know the man—brown eyes, average height, dark thinning hair. He said he was glad to see me here again. His wife assured me that her Ralf had told her so much about my speech in the church that day. I ended up joining her and Ralf at one of the tables up front. Georg and Jörg were already seated with the steering committee. And then things started rolling.
First came a steady stream of votes confirming all sorts of previous actions. I’ve never had to sit through anything like it in all my life. I felt robbed of my freedom, I was suddenly a prisoner.
Ralf, on the other hand, seemed happy and excited. He rolled his shopping bag back like a sleeve to reveal a piece of cardboard backing and a letter-size notebook. His hopes, his pride, yes, his fundamental convictions were invested in the care wit
h which he slipped in the carbon paper, lowered his head just above the page, and began to write. Whenever Jörg’s speech was interrupted by applause, he would stop and clap soundlessly, ballpoint clasped in his right hand.
Georg sat almost motionless at the front table the whole evening, staring straight ahead. Whenever there was a vote, however, his arm was usually the first thrust into the air. Jörg, as acting chairman, was all smiles as he kept greeting acquaintances he spotted in the hall. I recognized, way over on the left, the loudmouth who had saved the November 4th demonstration. His eyes were glistening.
Maybe there have to be meetings like these. But this one left me downright sick with boredom.14
After about an hour a woman two tables away stood up. Her glasses were so big and her mass of hair so wiglike that it was hard to tell her age. Whatever she had to say, it was incomprehensible. When ordered to speak louder, she shouted, “I am prepared to assume leadership of the New Forum.” Asked to give her name, she cried out enthusiastically, “My name is—” but then broke off abruptly and repeated her offer to take over the leadership. Egged on by applause and catcalls, she greeted us with a raised left fist.
Out of consideration for Georg and Jörg, and especially for Ralf, I didn’t join in the applause. Even my smile appeared to offend him.
After her, the loudmouth on the steering committee grabbed the mic. He stressed every second or third word and bounced up and down, flexing his knees. He laughed as he spoke, as if every word were practical proof of just how undeniably right he was. He then pointed his pencil at who ever he decided to give the floor to. Shouted insults—he was a stewie15 and a bungler. “There’s a solution to everything,” he shouted, “once basic issues of power are resolved and democratic structures are put in place.”
Whole groups were now deserting the hall. Suddenly Ralf was speaking. With one hand on his belt, as if to keep his trousers from drooping, he held both the mike and his manuscript in the other. He was also gesticulating, making him barely comprehensible, and didn’t understand what all the shouts of “Mike! mike!” were about. Finally he stated his demands, point by point, but got out of sync with himself because he turned around to get a look at his hecklers, while his wife kept hissing, “Keep going!”
“No establishment of West German parties, partnership with other democratic forces in the East, a halt to full-scale demolition in the old city, investigation into the sale of the Council Library, punishment for Schalck-Golodkowski,16 free elections, brown coal mines to be kept open, continuation of Wismut17 for peaceful purposes, dismissal of agitators from school faculties, withdrawal from the Warsaw Pact, alternative service…”
“Keep going! Keep going!” his wife whispered.
After a good three hours, the meeting was declared adjourned. A few voices took up the German national anthem, but were drowned out by general noise. Most of the items on the agenda had to be eliminated, including the announcement of our newspaper.
Ralf fell silent. I tried to smile. His wife lowered her gaze as if in embarrassment—for herself, for me, for Ralf, for the whole assembly. As we left, Ralf asked my opinion. “And be honest, Enrico, really honest.”
Outside the coatroom I ran right into the Prophet. “No! No! Terrible!” he shouted at me, and a moment later blocked someone else’s path with his “No! No! Terrible!” He could still be heard until we were out of the building.
Georg invited me to join them at the Wenzel,18 where people were expecting us.
A hulk of a man was propped against the front desk, but he spread his arms wide once he saw us. There were sweat stains in the armpits of his gray jacket. He pressed me to his chest and greeted me by murmuring my first name in my ear. He had already been a guest at my home, he said. Then he instructed us to address Jan Staan, whom we would meet shortly, by his name, to say not just “Good evening” but “Good evening, Herr Staan” (I could have sworn he said “Staan”), and to use phrases like “A pleasure to make your acquaintance,” or “Very happy to meet you.” A waitress was just closing up the restaurant, and since Wolfgang the Hulk had fallen silent, we could hear in the intervening moments her footfall, purring lamps, and distant music. Suddenly screams, laughter, shouts, a deafening racket. A woman staggered past, bumping my shoulder, blond, plump, a wart on her chin. She dabbed at her damp décolletage, her white blouse clung to her belly and breasts, and her mascara was running. Faces in the doorway vanished again. The blonde threw her shoulders back and displayed herself as if before a mirror.
Wolfgang the Hulk brushed against her as he made his way toward the bar, she lurched as if he had given her a push. We followed him into the shadows. I stayed close behind Jörg. “Does anyone want to dance a polonaise?” a woman shouted, thrusting her hot hands against my back. Someone patted my rear end. The most I could make out as I looked around were bright articles of clothing. The spotlight above the dance floor, with bare arms writhing under the cone of its beam, was my sole orientation point.
The farther we pressed forward, the better progress we made and the brighter the light. We steered for a group of men standing in a circle. They stepped back, revealing a clutch of women who had squeezed themselves by twos and threes into the few armchairs.
We halted in front of a man sitting in the midst of these women. Groaning, he pushed himself to the edge of his armchair, but stood up with surprisingly little effort considering his massive belly. As he fumbled at the buttons of his sport coat, dots of light from the disco ball danced across his forehead. I was the last to receive a handshake and a business card: Jan Steen. His gaze slid down over me, he smiled and fell back into his chair.
“It’s time to do some business,” one of the men shouted in a commanding voice, and clapped his hands. One after the other the women reluctantly stood up, and we sat down on chair cushions still warm from their bodies.
Jörg and Georg had sat down on each side of Steen. Because they had to shout to be heard over the noise and music, it looked as if they were telling him off. Steen, however, obviously soon lost interest in my bosses, and his glance skittered about the room. But when he held out his glass to the waitress—a bleached-blond Bulgarian who, had the contest been on the up-and-up, should have been last year’s Miss Altenburg—he smiled and raised it in a toast to the women. They pretended not to notice. They were sulking. One was so insulted that she dismissed us by turning her bare pudgy back on us.
To make up for Jörg’s total abstinence and Georg’s restraint, Wolfgang and I drank every brandy Steen ordered. Wolfgang lined up his empty glasses next to the ashtray between his feet and kneaded his hands. He said he worked for Air Research Technologies, whose abbreviation was the same as the Altenburg Regional Theater—ART. I told him the story of how the staff of the Wenzel thought they had caught a swindler when Air Research Technologies refused to pay my bill. Wolfgang smiled to himself. Even those few sentences had left me hoarse. We spent our time toasting in various directions and drinking. I was soon aglow with a surge of goodwill.
A very tall woman—a good match for Wolfgang the Hulk—was now standing beside him. She pulled rimless glasses out of her purse. I was about to offer her my seat when Wolfgang gave my thigh a slap and stood up. Without so much as inviting her to stay, Jan Steen kissed the woman’s hand in farewell. Jörg and Georg now departed with the two giants. And suddenly I was alone with Jan Steen, who was tapping his knee with his right hand to some inscrutable rhythm. When I raised a glass to him he responded to my greeting with a broad wave of his arm. Slowly the women returned and gathered around him again. I shouted to him how wonderful it was to drink and at the same time watch drunks dance. And then I burst into laughter because I suddenly found it very funny that he and I expected nothing more of each other than to sit here side by side and watch these women down their drinks and teeter around the dance floor with wilder and wilder wriggling motions. If only it doesn’t stop now, I thought, if only this can go on and on.
Beneath his narrow face Jan Steen’s doub
le chin led a remarkable life of its own. The more I gazed at it, the more clearly I could make out a second, perfectly independent physiognomy. In every other respect Steen’s body was all of a piece and surely preordained to carry his bulk. We kept smiling and toasting each other, relishing our side-by-side existence.
The moment I spotted her face, I was instantly filled with desire and melancholy. Her dance partner’s long, lean back kept interfering with our exchanged glances. But she never stopped looking my way. Evidently she wasn’t sure just what roles Steen and I had assigned each other. I didn’t know myself what I was doing here. She was no great beauty, but I was infatuated with the earnestness of her face.
In the few seconds between songs I asked her for the next dance. Her escort shouted that I could go to hell. We began to dance. Unwilling to yield the floor, he stepped between us. One twirl was enough to leave him standing alone again. Anticipating his next move, I took her in my arms, not even thinking whether it was the right or wrong thing to do. But when she acquiesced, as good as fleeing to me, I felt nothing but pure happiness. The skinny man’s voice quavered with outrage as he stared at his beloved. With rolled-up sleeves and hands half raised, he appeared on the verge of separating us by force. She could only have sensed what was happening from my reaction, from the motions of my body. She tossed her head to one side and, as if spitting at his feet, let loose with a cascade of what I took to be Romanian curses.
I have never seen anyone capitulate so submissively just by lowering his eyes. I didn’t catch his stammered words. Finally he steered for a table at the edge of the dance floor, where he literally collapsed as he sat down.
She kissed me on the neck, and I was drunk enough to respond with lust so tempestuous that just by diving into it I could forget my own sense of forlornness. All I needed was to feel this woman next to me and everything seemed simple and clear.