New Lives (21 page)

I asked Ilona what was so horrible about all this. She had simply confused the voices coming from the room on her left with those coming from the right—they were both about the same distance from the kitchen. An acoustical illusion, that was all. Why would the baron imitate me?

But Ilona just shook her head. What was that supposed to mean? I asked. She shook her head again; to everything I said she just kept on shaking her head.

Suddenly Pohlmann was standing at the door. He offered to leave his folder here with me for a few days. I thanked him.

“The money,” Ilona suddenly exclaimed. “Where's the money?” It was still lying there fanned out on the table. But instead of calming down now, Ilona pointed at the platter and whispered, “He ate every one, all by himself!”

I sent Ilona to the bakery. The fresh air did her good. She kept mum too, since I could hardly tell Georg that it was Barrista who had accepted the ad for us. We got into enough of a squabble as it was, because Steen's full-pager also had to appear in our next issue. Georg says we're digging our own grave for the sake of short-term financial benefits. And I'm offering all the wrong arguments in claiming that the article is yet to be written that would increase sales by twelve hundred D-marks.
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Jörg said not a word until I offered to return both the money and the ad. Because actually none of it is really any of my business.

Hugs,

Your E.

Dear Nicoletta,

I'm not sure whether all the things I'm allowed to experience these days should be called compensation for those I've missed out on until now. Believe me, I love to wake up and to fall asleep, brushing my teeth is as much a joy as shopping or vacuuming. I love to calculate the price for a half-page ad at 20 percent discount as a standing order plus a 50 percent surcharge for being on the last page. No matter what I do I am suffused with a quiet sense of passion, a contentment that is very difficult to describe. It's not a sense of being lost to the world, like a child at play, although it's probably more that than anything else. It's as if I can now take up in my hand every object that I could only look at before, as if it's only now that I'm able to experience the world as space and myself as a body. As if I've finally been granted permission to participate in life. Each memory, precisely because it brings such misery with it, allows me to judge how wonderful the present is.

I've been trying to describe my fall, my original sin, to you, just the way I remembered it before I began to write my novella. Because now there's hardly a memory left—at least in regard to those days in October—that I can trust. I've toyed with these images too often.

Picture the hiking map outside a country inn and the red dot that says, “You are here,” until it's erased by countless fingertips tapping at it day in and day out. Over the years that white spot gobbles up its environs, the local tourist sights and outlook points vanish, then a village, a city—it's all merely a question of scale.

Of course this is no special inadequacy peculiar to me, but rather the standard practice of every writer. Not an experience that isn't trimmed away at and twisted, that doesn't undergo amputation and then get fitted with a more efficient prosthesis. It's really quite simple, but until you realize it, your most important memories have already been bungled. There's truly no lack of examples.

Which is why, for example, I always imagined the autumn of my second summer in Arcadia to have been cradled in the sounds of Schütz motets. Their spiritual tones seemed to have flung open the school windows, they filled late Saturday afternoons in the Church of the Holy Cross,
¹²³
and resounded every day from my record player. Like some comforting prophecy, they accompanied me, enveloped me.

Ten years later, as I was working on my novella (I always called it a novella, although its oversize torso had grown to several hundred pages),
¹²⁴
I only needed to put on
The Seven Last Words
and I would react like one of Pavlov's dogs. In a flash those days of September and October would reappear: the chestnut trees in front of the school, the rusty bicycle stands, the wind—at times a wild ocean gale that would scoop up the wet leaves still lying shimmering yellow on the asphalt, at other times a warm breeze that seemed to hold within it the last days of summer as it swept down across the Elbe from the slopes of Loschwitz with its Italianate villas. My characters emerged out of those voices, and I could see the muted light of trams, see clouds angled against the wind in the bluish pink late-afternoon sky; but I could also hear the rattling key chain of Herr Myslewksi, our homeroom teacher, whenever he led us down to the cellar for one of his “private talks,” as he called his interrogations.

After I had given up on my novella—so that
The Seven Last Words
reminded me more of my attempt at writing than of that autumn—I noticed the dedication on the back of the album cover: For Enrico, Christmas '79, from Vera. Which meant I had been given the motets two years afterward. And to this very day I own no other Schütz recording.

In writing to you about all this, I have to pull my memories out from under the opulent scenes of my novella the way a medic pulls bodies out from under a wreck, not knowing whether they are alive or dead.

Holy Cross School,
¹²⁵
with its looming dark walls, was my Maulbronn.
¹²⁶
Enmeshed in my Budapest dreams and the freedom of my vacation reading, I could regard this building, which I would enter and leave for the next four years, only as the setting for a novel. At the same time I wanted to take seriously the inscription written above its main portal: “To the glory of God, in honor of its founders, and for the benefit and piety of the young.”
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From the first day after my return from Budapest, when I inquired about the shortest route to school, that motto fit nicely into my Hermann Hesse world. As did Schiller Platz with its Café Toscana, the Elbe with its ferries and meadows, the Blue Wonder Bridge, the Elbe Hotel, the Wilhelminien villas and palaces in Blasewitz—they all enlivened my dream world. Farther up the Elbe one could trace the rocky plateaus of Saxon Switzerland, beyond which—after a hike of several days—lay Prague. Just as in Montagnola,
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a pilgrim in search of the good and the beautiful could stop to sojourn in all these places. Reread
Narcissus and Goldmund
or
Beneath the Wheel
and you'll understand what I saw.

The drama of the weeks that followed, however, was not because of Myslewski, who called us boys, one by one, to the cellar, where in a locked chamber full of oscillographs he began my interrogation with the question of why I thought world peace was unimportant. Nor was the drama a matter of my suddenly getting Cs and Ds instead of As and Bs, plus an F in spelling. I might even have been able to cope with the loss of my free time had it not been for HIM. HE left me in a despair unlike any I had known until then—and would not experience again until last autumn.

Geronimo
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was a choirboy whose voice was cracking and who sat beside me at our desk. He was the only one who didn't wear a blue shirt, having declared himself a conscientious objector at age fourteen—even though the lenses of his glasses could have been made from the bottom of soda bottles. All the things I had imagined in my boldest summer daydreams, he managed almost offhandedly—like finishing his homework on the walk home, while I brooded over my textbooks on into the evening. He was playing the role that I wanted to claim for myself later. And he played it magnificently. He was not only the head of the class, who spoke only in sentences ready to be set in print and used a slightly old-fashioned vocabulary that coming from anyone else would have made people laugh, but he was also loved by his schoolmates and teachers alike. And those who didn't love Geronimo at least respected him in a way that I had never before seen among boys my age. In Geronimo's case, the “private talks” were conducted not by Myslewski, but by the principal.

Geronimo was my nightmare—even though I ought to have been grateful to him. He never contradicted me in German class, never inundated me with English or Russian vocabulary words I couldn't possibly know. He slipped me his homework for problems that to me seemed beyond solution. In music class, however, he did cover his ears whenever I finished one of my attempts at singing, amid the laughter of the whole class. He was a total failure only at sports.

Geronimo had chosen me to be his pal, or better perhaps, his attendant. Every week he demanded I supply him a new Hesse. In return I received dog-eared tomes by Franz Werfel jacketed in newspaper. I never touched them, if only because their stained and yellowed pages disgusted me. He, on the other hand, took potshots at Hesse, although he also quoted him often enough. No one suspected that I had read the books too, let alone that I had supplied them to him. I would have accepted that as the price I paid for his forbearance in other matters, but likewise not a week went by that he didn't ask me: Why do you do it? Do what? I would ask in return each time, blushing and breaking into a sweat. He would eye me through his deep-sea glasses and his lips would form a pained smile. What he meant was: If you're a Christian, why aren't you a conscientious objector too, why do you agree with the proposition that existence conditions awareness, why don't you say grace before meals, why does your voice sound high and thin when Myslewski says something to you, why do you waste so much time on this school crap? Geronimo didn't have to ask any more questions. I knew them all by heart.

Every day began with the prospect of my being subjected to a painful examination. I began my walk home each day either relieved that for once I had escaped him, or suffering the torments of hell. For I never had an answer for him, and hoped the school bell would soon end our strange dialogue, which often concluded with his offering me a Bible quote: “Fear not, for I am with you always even unto the end of the world.” Once he said, “It's my guess that you'd make a very good catechumen.” It was left to me to be content that Geronimo, who planned to study theology, at least found me good for something.

I was no better at keeping up my diary or praying—apart from a fervent Lord's Prayer or two—than I was at providing Geronimo with answers. What was I supposed to write, or pray for? I really did know right from wrong. There were lies, and there was the truth—you could be either a traitor or a man of God. I didn't have to put my self-indictment in writing. I knew as well as anyone that there was not a single argument I could offer that would not have been an admission of my guilt. Cowardice, duplicity, doubt, weakness—why couldn't I act like Geronimo? Why was I living my life like everyone else?

The conflict once again grew more intense at the end of October, in the week after fall break, during which the flu had preserved me from worse torments.

That Monday Myslewski ordered me to join him in yet another cellar conversation. I felt honored, was surprised that I was the only boy to be summoned for a second round. Geronimo made sure everyone heard that he would be waiting for me at the school door—to lend me his aid, to stand by me.

Myslewski was apparently unprepared for my refusal to become an officer in the National People's Army or at least to serve for three years as a noncom with weapon in hand defending the homeland against all enemies. He stammered with outrage, struggling to deal with this from my first “no” on. Suddenly he shoved a book at me, in which he said I would find all the information necessary to deliver a ten-minute report about the aggressor, the West German Bundeswehr, during Friday's physics class. He smiled and patted me twice on the arm, so paternally that I felt a need to thank him, to cheer him up, to tell him that I would reconsider serving in the NPA for three years. Yes, I would not have minded staying there with him a while longer. I left school through the side entrance and, making a wide detour, ran to the bus stop.

I was disgusted with myself, because I had to admit that I would have much preferred to hug Myslewski and win his friendship, and had now run away from Geronimo. And although a greater disgrace was hardly imaginable, my real humiliation still awaited me. The ugliness of what I had just experienced and the ugliness of what lay ahead were so overwhelming that I finally started to take pleasure in my misery—a pleasure that found pubescent release as I ran to catch the streetcar. I swear to you that it took an act of will just to stay on my feet and not sink to my knees, whimpering with delight and shame at the moist spot in my underwear.

My novella, however, revolves solely around the days between my second cellar conversation and the ten minutes of my report. The situation had everything the genre requires, from exposition—by way of a bit of suspense—to a surprising twist at the end.

Although my feelings at the time have long since been exhausted literarily, I still have a sense of reeling back and forth for hours between those two end points, as if bouncing from one wall to another and never finding my footing. How could I, in the presence of my classmates, in the presence of Geronimo, present arguments against him and against myself?

I shall spare you the further agonies of a ninth grader's soul. What I find touching now is my mother's fear and helplessness. In the end it was she who wrote my report and persuaded herself to forbid me from even mentioning conscientious objection—there would be time enough for that later. But her words had no influence over me. On the contrary. It didn't take a Geronimo to remind me of Jesus' words about forsaking father and mother to follow HIM.

In presenting the finale in my novella I oriented myself roughly on the stations of the cross. In fact I was totally at the end of my tether when my name was called ten minutes before the bell marking the end of class. I got up, pushed back my chair, and stepped into the aisle, without any idea of what I would now do.