New Lives (29 page)

“It can't be!” she whispered.

“What can't be?” was all that I managed. Then I felt dizzy. A minute later I asked from the kitchen floor how many years I had left.

“Four or five,” she said, rammed her feet into her street shoes, and called out: “But it can't be. This just can't be!” And pulled the apartment door closed behind her.

The cold floor felt good. I looked up at the ceiling lamp where dirt had collected in its glass bowl, at the hot-water tank with its solitary blue flame. It did good to fix my eyes on things that had never changed my whole life long. Four years! I had to turn my head to see the window. I gave the chipped corner of the windowsill a smile. Four years! There was my ineluctability for me. I had time for one book, maybe two. Wasn't the proximity of death the prerequisite for any and all creative work? Didn't everyone try to fake that proximity one way or the other? Four years! I pressed the sentence to me as if it were a promise, an agreement between God and me.

Almost an hour passed before my mother returned. She had ridden her bike to various phone booths, but it had been too late to reach anyone in the X-ray department. She smiled and wiped a handkerchief over her still-reddened face. The results were wrong, she said—a mistake, utter nonsense, otherwise I would barely have made it up the stairs.

“Did you hear me, Enrico? It's our chance. There's no army in the world that would take you with those results. The dear Lord himself wants it this way,” she cried with joy.

I had never heard her use that expression. It wasn't just that her “dear Lord” annoyed me, all I wanted was to be left alone, alone with the things of this world that in an instant had become mine, all of them beautiful, all important.

The more euphoric her words—“You just bewail your fate a little, play the role”—the angrier I got. “Either I'm a conscientious objector, or I go like everyone else has to.”

An hour later I was walking along the Elbe, which lay under a blanket of fog. “For all flesh is as grass,” the Brahms
Requiem
boomed in my ear, “and all the glory of man as the flower of grass.” How should I describe the state I was in? True, I was still the Old Adam who felt superior to Geronimo, and this was an experience that would set me apart from all other people. But beyond that, I was surprised, no, I was bowled over by the startling consolation that, whether dead or alive, I would remain on this earth. To die and rot did not mean to melt into nothingness, but rather, no matter what, to continue to be here, to continue in this world. The thought, insinuating itself as if in my sleep, calmed me. I don't mean to say that as I walked along I overcame my fear of death, and yet it felt very much like that. Every beautiful thing was suddenly beautiful, every ugly thing ugly, every good thing good. For a short while I escaped my own personal madness—and would no longer have to do anything! Every compulsion, every plan, every need to test my powers fell away from me.

On Tuesday I rode to the hospital with my mother and had a new X-ray taken. When I returned home, I wrote Geronimo. It was my last will and testament, a farewell in so many different ways. Every sentence was the main sentence. I wished him luck, I wished Franziska luck. I would have preferred to tell him all this face-to-face—I was ill, I was deathly ill, but I accepted my fate, I would bear it as the lot assigned me, move forward along my path step by step. I was impressed with myself. I made no mention of his manuscript.

I had to call my mother at noon on Wednesday, at which point I learned that the enlargement of my heart was not pathological, just the opposite, I had an athlete's heart. And in that moment my lucidity and insight vanished. Yes, I was angry at having lost so much time with all this ruckus, and could feel the old pettiness creeping back into my pores. But for a few moments I had experienced a strange clarity. And every word I write about it here is merely a pale reflection.

Since I had been writing about my induction almost every day for over two months, November 4th was as intimate as a pen pal whose long-awaited visit I looked forward to with curiosity. Granted, there was hardly any time to compare my preconceptions with reality.

As expected, I slept poorly. My mother's behavior, however, bore only a distant resemblance to my previous description. We poured a lot of milk into our coffee so that we could drink it more quickly, and were silent. I was annoyed that she wanted to push me out the door much too early, and only as we said our good-byes were her eyes a little moist.

“Tomorrow,” I quoted from my manuscript, “it won't seem half as bad.” (In my novel the first day wasn't supposed to be bad, only all the days that followed.) My mother hugged me and gave me a farewell kiss on the brow, which made a very strong impression on me. I decided there and then to include this gesture in my departure scene.

The route that took me to the large Mitropa Hall, where we were supposed to assemble and which was at the far rear of Neustadt Station, reminded me of the evenings spent waiting for my grandparents to return from the West.

Suddenly I was aware of the hulking presence before me of our neighbor Herr Kaspareck. Evidently he was the officer in charge here and was patrolling among the chairs. He kept kicking at all the black bags that had to be removed from his path. Despite our civvies we were already prisoners.

I was astonished to see a pistol at Kaspareck's belt. Years before he had chased after me because we had been playing soccer outside his windows on a Sunday. Now he could take his revenge.

I assigned to Herr Kaspareck the role of the Herald of Evil. He hadn't greeted me, he had stumbled over the stretched-out legs of an inductee who had fallen asleep, and Kaspareck's well-placed blow to the calves had almost pitched the fellow from his chair.

Every observation here would be of use, material for improving on my first draft.

A patrol unit, whose white patent-leather belts and straps reminded me of the harness on circus horses—a comparison that came to mind by way of
Animal Farm
—dragged a drunk past, a man in despair, sobbing his wife's name. Or was he calling for his mother? Like dogs returning a stick, they dropped him between two chairs. He lay there whimpering. Two members of the patrol lifted him up by the shoulders, about even with their hips—were they trying to see his face?—tugged him a little more to the right and then, counting inaudibly to three, dumped him again. Their aim was good. His front teeth were knocked out on the edge of a chair. They immediately pulled him up from the floor and inspected their work. One of them shouted that they'd evidently netted a little Dracula. The other four grinned. The silence in the Mitropa Hall was impenetrable. In the same way that by stretching out their legs after Kaspareck's attack, the inductees had made him stalk his way through the room like a stork through underbrush, so now their silence closed in around these traitors and came close to suffocating them.

These kind of scenes formed in my mind all on their own, as if I had finally found the beanpole on which my fantasy could entwine itself and grow. But as I'm sure you know: our inventions are never brutal and nasty enough, exaggeration makes its home in reality, and somewhere—of that much I was and still am certain—this or some similar scene had occurred.

As you can see, I felt from the start that I'd come to the right place. Here was the perfect dose of callousness and inevitability that had been lacking until then.

Watched over like convicts, we climbed the stairs to the train platform, and I listened closely to the orders, which needed to be decoded according to tone, pitch, and intensity.

Our cars were shunted several times back and forth across the Marien Bridge. The Canaletto panorama with the Hofkirche and the Brühlsche Terrace
¹⁷¹
was the last thing I wanted to see at that point.

Naturally I would have preferred an escort of uniformed men, plus a phalanx of plainclothes men barricading me as I climbed aboard a train for West Berlin—where, surrounded by photographers and cameramen, I would then begin my new life. But that triumph presumed that here and now I had to fall in, buzz cut and all. Before I could display my treasures, I would have to enter the underworld and have a look around.

When we finally pulled out and passed through Radebeul—my mother and father had wandered those vineyards together, and later Vera and I, and once Geronimo and I, had strolled there too—I was for a few moments the dissident writer who was being exiled by his government, who would never be allowed to return to his hometown, who would be consoled by a speech given in his honor by Heinrich Böll
¹⁷²
or Willy Brandt. I gazed from the window and formulated the first sentences of my acceptance speech, an indictment that would leave no comrade unaware of what a huge mistake it had been to banish me.

Now began a veritably endless circuitous trip. A farm boy from Upper Lusatia treated our compartment to home-butchered sausage, because he was afraid—thanks to some remark by a noncom—that he would soon be relieved of his provisions. He himself ate liverwurst, neat. He became a hero when he pulled underwear out of his bag and peeled it away to reveal a bottle of high-proof whiskey.

My new comrades made fun of the Brandenburg landscape, which had always been my Arcadia, called it a sand and pine desert. In late afternoon we arrived—sober and a little more familiar with one another—in Oranienburg, which lies to the north of what was then West Berlin.

On the way from the train station to our barracks I was annoyed that no one turned around to watch us pass.

As if on command, a hundred feet suddenly kicked at piles of leaves by the side of the road, scuffled around in them, sent leaves spiraling and drifting ahead, scooped them against the heels of the man in front, over the shoes of the man beside, scattered them in all directions. No command, no barked order told us to stop. The rebellion didn't end until there were no more piles of leaves. The yowls of those with six and more months already behind them were silly by comparison. They flung windows open and roared the number of days they still had left, as if in this country service in the army could ever come to an end, as if they didn't know that at any moment they could always be stuck in a uniform again and imprisoned in a barrack. With a boom the gate slammed shut behind us…

At the rear of the base, between a frame structure and the House of Culture, you could see the building that marked what had once been the entrance to Sachsenhausen concentration camp.

I later wrote a long passage about how we stood there with our bags in the drizzle while we watched one company after another march into the mess hall for supper, about how we were vaccinated, made to fill out questionnaires and to wait until we were soaked to the skin. It was almost nine o'clock, an hour before lights out, before I was sent along with some others to a building that abutted the camp watchtower.

Although we had to stand for another hour in the entry as if at a pillory, the sparkling clean red floors and freshly painted walls had a calming effect on me. I wanted to get out of my wet clothes and, yes, I was looking forward to a dry uniform! The room assigned me came equipped with just two bunk beds—but looked comfortable. Pasted on the top bunk on the right was a slip of paper with the typewritten words: Private Türmer.

My only fear was that I wouldn't be able to make a mental note of everything I saw, heard, and smelled. I couldn't let any of it be lost.

At the sound of the wake-up whistle the next morning I jumped out of bed as if about to leave on an expedition. Morning gymnastics and breakfast were canceled for us late arrivals. Instead they threw at our feet a piece of canvas that could be buttoned up into a sack. With it in hand we shuffled through supply rooms. A steel helmet, a new and an old pair of boots, three uniforms (standard, dress, field), protective gear, gas mask, gym shoes, tracksuit—I accepted it all like a miner being outfitted. I was going down into the pit to uncover hidden treasures.

At the midday meal, as I was hungrily wolfing down my Königsberger meatballs, a big stocky fellow farther down the long table stood up and shouted that the only reason he could stomach this slop was that this was the first food he'd been fed here. Tomorrow he was going to dump this slop over the head of the sergeant at the end of the table.

I pressed my last bit of potato into the gravy—and was thrilled. My first character had just revealed himself to me, a combination of Thersites and Ajax.
¹⁷³
I wasn't going to let him out of my sight.

That afternoon as we were packing up our own stuff, I inserted among the damp clothes a greeting to my mother and an envelope addressed to Geronimo. Inside it were three pages of jotted notes, with a 1 at the top, then a slash, followed by a page number. I asked him to collect and save these rough sketches. I started on 2 immediately afterward.

My mother still talks today about the moment when she opened the package and found my clothes inside—“as if you had died.”

Enough for today. As always warmest greetings from

Your Enrico T.

Verotchka,
¹⁷⁴

So that we don't waste our telephone time: Roland was here. He's on a lecture tour of the East. The Party of Democratic Socialism is allowing him to appear only in small towns. But what he loves to talk about most is you, as if you had left for the West because of him.

If I understood Roland correctly, he's soon going to have to look around for a new job. Not even universities have any use for his theories now. He of course put it differently: just when for the very first time we're going to need to give serious thought to socialism/communism, they're going to terminate his position. I asked him who he meant by
we.
The oppressed and disenfranchised, people dying of hunger and thirst, people who've been driven from their homes, who've been raped and have no roof over their heads, he replied without a hint of irony.