New Lives (28 page)

As if to spare us further reproach, Jörg began to talk about Nietzsche's father, who had been a teacher at the castle. Jörg didn't get very far, however, before the baron interrupted him. Out of the blue he offered to write an article for our local pages. From the attaché case so familiar to us all he extracted a couple of photographs that he first showed to Michaela and Marion. He wouldn't have had to say another word. Marion tried to shy away, Michaela stared at me, as if comparing the picture with me. The baron explained in a chatty voice that they were taken in February '41. On Altenburg's Market Square—the savings bank and the steam-driven Winkler Wurst Factory could be made out in the background—a woman's hair was being lopped off before an assembled horde. Another photo showed her seated on a horse-drawn wagon, surrounded by a crowd of about two to three hundred spectators, maybe more. In the second picture she still had a headscarf on, and her chin was resting on a sign:
I HAVE BEEN EXPELLED FROM THE PEOPLE'S COMMUNITY.
A third photo showed her and an older man, with a hat and glasses, who was cutting her hair, after having first bound a traditional white cloth around her shoulders. The fourth also showed him “hard at work.” In the fifth her head had been shaved bare. The sixth picture was of her walking through the town. She was accused of having had intimate relations with a Pole; her husband was a soldier.

What he'd like to find out, the baron said, was where she had lived, whether there were still relatives. Photo in hand, he had visited the spot today where it had taken place.

It shouldn't be difficult to find out the name of the barber or the circumstantial details of these—yes, you only had to look at the happy faces—these revels. What did we think? Shouldn't we search for witnesses and question the townsfolk? If the photograph were enlarged, people could be recognized more easily. Promising to write an article, he gathered up his pictures again and carefully stowed them away.

“Local news with a twist,” Michaela said, raising her glass to the baron. She drank a lot, in fact.

Suddenly the baron leaned across the table. “Look there,” he whispered, pointing his head in the direction of the entrance. I didn't know who he meant, since there were several parties standing there looking around for a table. A tall gaunt woman with an angular face and black hair made a beeline for our table. The man preceding her barely came up to her breasts. “Caesar and Cleopatra,” the baron said sotto voce. There really was something Egyptian about the woman's hairdo. In the next moment the short man grabbed the back of one of the empty chairs at our table and was about to launch his question with a smile, when Marion and Michaela erupted into laughter. I couldn't contain myself, either.

“I'm sorry,” the baron exclaimed. “We're still expecting more guests.” The mismatched pair stood there as if searching for some explanation for our bad manners. Jörg, who had held out the longest, was now leaning forward, bracing himself against the table with one hand and covering his eyes with the other. His shoulders were bobbing. Marion and Michaela took turns chortling. I pressed the back of my hand to my mouth.

“I'm so very sorry,” the baron repeated.

“Well, enjoy your evening,” the short man replied, less angry than confused, which set Michaela into a new round of laughter, and the rest of us with her. My laughter was so out of control that the harder I struggled against it the more violently I shook. I have no idea what had got hold of us. There was absolutely no reason for us to carry on like that.

The baron tried several times to make some remark, but was so helpless against the demon that had seized us that he testily excused himself and left the table. As soon as he was just a few steps away, we fell silent. We stared at one another, each waiting for the other—and nothing happened.

I felt wretched, compromised. We just sat there speechless—excruciating doesn't come close to describing it. It was as if the baron had annulled all words, gathering them up like playing cards from the table. And we had no choice but to wait for his return, for him to deal them again.

In those few minutes we seemed to destroy everything that held us together. The silence devoured everything we had ever felt for one another, it wolfed down respect, dignity, trust, affection, love. Had someone compelled us to disband at that moment, it would have been forever.

All of a sudden the baron reappeared. As he was about to resume his seat, Michaela said, “We've calmed down, do forgive us.” He took her hand and kissed it.

But now, just when the opportunity presented itself for us to forget the matter, the next catastrophe followed immediately on its heels.

Michaela suddenly raised her arm as if to signal a waiter, which was an instant alarm for the baron. “Something you need?”

I turned around. Standing in the path of the advancing phalanx of waiters were Wolfgang the Hulk, his wife, and Jan Steen. The three stepped aside, but as their eyes followed the waiters, they discovered us.

Wolfgang and his wife came over to greet us. The baron, to whom Michaela was about to introduce the pair, did not even put down his knife and fork, and turned away from her to speak to the waiter.

In order to salvage whatever could be salvaged, I joined Wolfgang as he walked back to Steen. In that same moment a new dish was solemnly unveiled. Steen asked who the silly ass was that we were sitting with, and insisted we join him at his table. There were several things he wanted to talk over.

I begged his pardon, asking him to understand our situation—whereupon in midsentence Steen lost all interest in me, sat down, and picked up a menu. The baron, on the other hand, chided us, muttering something about the quality of the cuisine losing every bit of subtlety once it had turned cold.

Whether by chance or on purpose, the courses now followed one another without the least pause—until the lights were doused again. For Steen that was the last straw. He, along with Wolfgang and his wife, departed then and there, without so much as a glance our way.

Although we all made every effort and, much to the baron's delight, ordered seconds of the crème brûlée, the incident spoiled the mood until the very end.

The next morning, however, I awoke fully refreshed and without a trace of cobwebs in my head.

Hugs, Your E.
¹⁶⁶

Dear Nicoletta,

With each new day I still hope to hear news of you. From the start I suspected that I would have to wait a good while for letters from you. But as long as you allow me to write you, I shall not complain and will proceed with my confession.
¹⁶⁷

During the four months between graduation and reporting for duty I didn't look for a job the way everyone else did. I had a job. My mother or Vera gave me what little money I needed for books, theater tickets, and train trips to Naumburg or Berlin.

As if Vera knew that she would soon have her passport taken away and be placed under a so-called Berlin embargo,
¹⁶⁸
she was constantly underway—to the Baltic, to the Harz Mountains, to Mecklenburg—and sent me postcards and letters so that I could follow her journeys on a map. While in Berlin she scribbled a few walls full with her friends' poetry, learned how to throw pottery, and, allegedly, smoked marijuana.

Vera's absence brought a certain calm into my life. I set it as my goal to write five or six hours a day. But, unlike other precocious wunderkinder, I did not write poetry that apostrophized the Elbe, Dresden, women with long hair, or the copper hammers above the roofs of Budapest.
¹⁶⁹
That was the last thing on my mind. I wrote about the army!

Constrained by orders, licked into shape by drill and maneuver, I would acquire an instantly recognizable style. And wasn't the West waiting for smuggled messages and coded rappings from behind the barracks walls of the East, just as they had waited for the tales of Solzhenitsyn's gulag?

The scene I was able to work on was the morning of my induction—those minutes between waking up and getting out of bed, to be followed by the descent into hell.

Most likely you'll think I'm exaggerating when I claim that my thoughts had always revolved around this farewell. The army was the epitome of leaving home. Kindergarten, school, afterschool clubs, and vacation camps had been unpleasant, but nothing in comparison to the horrible farewell to which they were mere precursors.

We had grown up, after all, in the shadow of the endless Russian barracks that ran from Klotzsche all the way into the heart of the city. Soldiers marching in columns to their training area at Heller and the songs they sung by night behind barracks walls formed the background for grisly fairy tales. Those eighteen months in the National People's Army had always seemed to me a black crossbar bolted across the entrance to real life.

My plan was to write about a sensitive young man's despair on being inducted, illustrated with memories of a dread of the army that went as far back as early childhood. There was no evading, no escaping the totalitarian force that would soon watch his every step. It would all conclude with my hero sitting, despondent and pale, in the kitchen over a cup of coffee, while his mother—yet another German mother forced to surrender her son—silently waited on him, her face turned aside so that he wouldn't see her tears.

To refresh your memory let me add: In the autumn of '81, Poland was on the verge of being placed under martial law. I had learned from a neighbor drafted a year before that his regiment had been armed with live ammunition since summer. Even the regimental commander, a colonel, had taken to wearing his field uniform, and the officers had adopted a previously unknown cordiality. He himself had been assigned to putting up additional information signs for reservists who were to be moved up into place.

This was grist for my mill, it lent wings to my imagination. I was afraid I would arrive too late, but all the same would gladly have put off induction day, because I was enjoying my life just as it was.

At the end of October, about ten days before my induction, something totally unexpected happened.

Geronimo wanted to see me one last time before I was consigned to barracks, as he put it. We had been seeing each other once a month. We had taken long hikes and bike tours to Schulpforta and Röcken.
¹⁷⁰

The tension that I had felt at our first reunion still existed, however. I both longed for Geronimo and feared our meetings. I felt really at ease only when writing him letters.

He had asked that I not meet him at the train station this time, I was to wait for him at home. When the doorbell finally rang, it wasn't him who was standing there—but Franziska. I believed it was a miracle! Franziska had found out my address and had come to see me. Thank God I floundered so long for something to say, because Geronimo now stepped forward.

Although this suddenly explained everything, I was less dismayed than I was incredulous. I had never regarded Geronimo as a being who would be of any interest to women. And now, who but Franziska!

Despite all the displays of affection between them, I initially thought it was a joke. Was she using Geronimo? Didn't she belong to me instead, especially now that she could compare the two of us? Her presence in my room, her unhoped-for existence in the midst of the same world where I had dreamed of her, left no place for Geronimo.

At first, as they say, I only had eyes for her. And yet however unwilling I was to accept Geronimo as the vanishing point toward which her every move, her every word was directed, I ultimately couldn't avoid looking at him. And that changed everything!

Geronimo's smile was so full of bliss, his face so totally enraptured, that he reminded me of a sheep.

Have you ever felt the degrading desire to hurl yourself like the devil between two lovers?

“Johann!” I said like a doctor speaking to an unconscious man. “Johann!”

I wanted to slap him, rip his glasses off and smash them, pound my fist into his face, and he would just go on smiling his stupid smile, making sloppy kissing noises, and letting himself be smothered with hugs. Make love not war! “Johann!” He didn't even hear me now! I sat crouched there beside them, the forlorn outsider in my own room.

When he asked whether he and Franziska could spend the night here with us, it didn't bother me at all to refuse, and without offering them any reason, either. I proposed he sleep on an air mattress, just for him alone, beside my bed.

They stayed for supper and held hands even while they were eating. My mother insisted on hearing every detail of how they first met. And the two of them, caught up in an insufferable need to tell their story, didn't want to talk about anything else either.

Why was no one bothered by my silence, by the way I stared at my plate, a man turned to stone? They had already banned me from their society. It wasn't just the brutal egoism of lovers—no, they were all rehearsing life without me.

At least I could tell myself how lucky I was that my mother didn't invite them to stay the night. I can't remember a word of what was said as they left.

Johann had lured me into a trap, he had betrayed me. And I lay there whimpering his name into my pillow.

The next morning I found an envelope on the breakfast table. “Is it a novel?” my mother asked later. That was Johann's second betrayal. He hadn't said one word about the fact that he had begun writing too. Was Johann secretly at war with me?

That was on Sunday. If this were a soccer match, the announcer would say: The following is being shown uncut.

Monday had more bad news for me in its pocket.

In compliance with the induction committee's instructions, I had had a chest X-ray taken—not by an army doctor, but in the Friedrichstadt Hospital, where my mother worked. The results arrived in Monday's mail. I didn't even want to think of trying to decipher all that Latin and laid the envelope on my mother's kitchen chair, so she didn't discover it until we sat down for supper. Have you ever seen a familiar face reveal, from one moment to the next, the skull beneath it?