New Lives (3 page)

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 Wismut
¹⁷
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 double 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.

I asked whether I could get her a drink. With an almost pleading look, she shook her head. A little later, however, I took her by the hand and led her to the table where Steen and the women were now waiting for us.

No sooner had we sat down, a tray of full glasses in front of us, than her friend walked over and demanded in a very serious voice that she dance with him. Without looking up, she shook her head. “Dance with me,” he said again. It was an order, but his trembling chin betrayed his fear.

“Say something,” he suddenly thundered down at her, “tell me to go! Say something, and you'll be rid of me.”

“I beg you,” I said as I got to my feet, “please go.”

“One word from that beautiful mouth suffices,” he said in suppressed fury. “I obey orders from this woman, not from a gasbag!” As he pointed at her, a tattoo emerged on his wrist—faded letters, a D and an F.

The women began arguing with him. The men in the background had stood up at the same time I had. I was ready to hurl myself at him, I wanted to put an end to this farce.

I can't say whether it was a cry of fear or some hasty movement that made me look at Steen. He had never taken his eye off my beautiful companion, but now he was staring at her. His smile had frozen at the corners of his mouth. A woman behind him gave a shriek. In horror, people averted their eyes from my lovely dance partner. I was the last one to whom she revealed herself. Have you ever seen a mouth filled with black stumps? She laughed, well aware of how it only increased her ugliness.

The skinny man sighed, turned, and shuffled away. Before I could say or do anything, she had jumped up to follow him. It was easy to make out her path to the exit, because the crowd parted before her and closed again only hesitantly in her wake.

That's it for today!

Your E.

Dear Jo,

This is the same manuscript paper that all articles have to be written on, thirty lines to a page, sixty strokes to the line. So I'm practicing now.
¹⁹

This morning I sent off a letter telling you about my late-night adventures. Our next test was lying in wait for us at noon today. Georg, Jörg, and I had to use surprise tactics to obtain our business license. The printer in Leipzig finally demanded an official seal. No registration, no contract. Our application has been lying around in the district council office since mid-December.

The reception room was empty. We knocked on the door of the councilman for trade and commerce, and a moment later we were inside his cave. Believe me, for the first time in my life I saw light
ooze away.
Every ray met its end in a mesh of miasma, of cigar smoke that had hung there for decades and lay like volcanic ash on potted plants that still managed some green. The unwashed windows and the yellowed white curtains did their part too, but the murky seepage came from the man himself. It was a miracle that when he stood up from his desk we even spotted him amid the colorlessness and lack of any shading—
his
colorlessness,
his
lack of any shading. What I noticed above all—beyond big teeth, a badly trimmed yellowish beard, and stringy hair—was his laugh. By the glow of the match he used to light his cigar, scorn and fear flickered across his face.

There was no way, he said with a laugh, that he could grant us a printing license. Pause. He ponderously took his seat again. Georg bent toward him and said that he was deliberately delaying publication of our paper, yes, was trying to prevent it by exceeding the limits of his authority, making it a case for the Commission Against Corruption and Abuse of Office. Vulcan laughed and asked Georg to repeat the long title. So far as he knew, no such commission existed yet. It didn't matter what he knew or thought, Georg shouted, his brow now dark with rage, because such decisions were no longer in his hands. His job was to stamp our application, he wasn't being paid to do anything else.

“Hohoho!” Vulcan cried, baring his horse teeth and exhaling more smoke with each “ho!” Georg kept right on leaning forward, staring straight at him from one side as if the man belonged to some as-yet-unnamed species.

“Hoho, haha, your application, hoha, your application, ha, doesn't even exist, it's never been presented, hoha, your application, ho, at least not to me, hoha, you've come to the wrong man, really the wrong man, hoho, who can't do a thing for you, hoho.” Then he took another puff of his cigar and blew wordless smoke. I could already see us on our way to some other department.

“Doesn't matter!” cried Jörg, who so far had kept strangely silent and now doffed his beret as if giving some prearranged signal. “Then we're presenting it here and now, orally. You hand us the application form and stamp it.” The councilman's laugh first ran up the scale as if trying to melt into the thin air of mockery, then faded away in a long sigh.

Unfortunately, he was all out of application forms, he said. There were too many people wanting to apply, far too many, “can't end well, nope, it can't.” Vulcan hastily puffed several more clouds that dissipated into the twilight of his cave. “New regulations are required,” he added worriedly, looking from Georg to Jörg, then to me and back to Jörg, “yes indeed, new regulations. Just ask the cabdrivers…” A gesture of his free hand suggested an attempt to fan away the fumes, then he laid his cigar in the ashtray.

Neither Georg, who had taken up a position at the door, nor I budged. Vulcan thrust his spine against the back of his chair and splayed his fingers across his potbelly as if holding a pillow against it.