New Lives (31 page)

As night came on it turned bitter cold. Our APC was a cave of ice. We tried to keep warm by passing around hot tea—of which there was plenty—and doing knee bends. A few men sparred with each other. The hands on my watch had evidently frozen. At one point we tried lying down, packed man to man, on the ground in the woods, but that didn't last long. I kept fingering my pants leg pocket, checking for my notebook—my amulet.

The order to remount, which came shortly after midnight, was a life-saver. The main thing was that the engines actually started. We'd been underway for about ten minutes when our lieutenant ordered me to get out and threw two flags down to me, which I was to use to guide our APC. I ran along a wall ahead of the APC. My feet were like stumps; I could hear their plunk, plunk, plunk against the concrete slabs. Amazingly enough I kept my balance. We passed a large gate—and it was only then that I recognized our barracks.

The strangest thing about this alert was the silence after our return. I didn't hear any noise coming from the companies in the floors above us either. Men just set a stool down out in the hall and cleaned their weapon, noncoms did the same, and officers vanished without a sound. People made tea in their quarters, shuffled along in their underwear and down-at-the-heel gym shoes, and took their Kalashnikovs back to the weapons store, sort of like returning a spade to its shed.

That night I heard a cricket chirp. At first I thought I was hallucinating or that it was radio static. Maybe silence had lured the cricket from its lair by the furnace in the cellar and it had now taken up residence under our locker.

I've never read a single one of the over two hundred army letters I wrote to Geronimo. Whether they could help me describe those days for you better than I've been able to do so far is neither here nor there. It seems more important for me to observe that my memories of those weeks are wrapped in vagueness.

Just as martial law in Poland provided a
post festum
reason—beyond just personal irritability—for my restlessness before the wake-up whistle, I consider what happened to me at Christmas to be further proof that my frame of mind over the previous week and a half had been more than a mere mood.

On December 14th, the day after the big alert, my idyllic world fell apart. I slept above Knut, our driver and room corporal, a conspicuously short, but powerful, man, a weightlifter in one of the lightweight categories. His girlfriend had jilted him shortly after his induction, which did not, however, prevent him from constantly raving about her. Knut neither wrote nor received letters; once a month there was a package from his mother.

It was ten thirty, and so the beginning of quiet time. Gunter and Matthias, a bowlegged amiable fish-head,
¹⁸¹
were talking about what you could eat, or just in general, what you would have to do to get ill very quickly and land in the infirmary. Not that I would have made any use of their knowledge, but their conversation sounded very helpful. Dialogue was, as I've said, my weak point. I kept notes. The light was still on and Knut wasn't in the room. Writing in bed meant that the next morning, in the same three minutes we had to get dressed and go to the john, I would have to cram the pages in an envelope, address and stamp it, and then hope we would pass by a mailbox during our morning run, so that I could dash to one side, slip the secret message out of my workout jacket, and send it on its way.

Knut loved to slap at door handles and give doors a kick so that they would fly open and bang against the wall. It was annoying, but who was going to stop him. Knut played the major again this time, looked at me over the top of his glasses, and switched the light out. I hadn't expected anything else, finished my sentence blind, and caught a whiff of Knut's beery breath as he undressed. He tossed back and forth, the bunk frame shook and squeaked, followed by quiet, as if he had found his sleeping position. I was just signing off when I was bounced in the air, once, twice. If somebody kicks a mattress from below with both feet, the guy on top is as helpless as a beetle on its back. I held tight to the frame.

When things had quieted down, I leaned down out of bed and offered some curse or other—and he kicked again. This time I lost my balance. I wasn't hurt, it was almost like a landing off the parallel bars, softened as well by my blanket, which had slipped off first. I aimed an angry kick at Knut.

We stood there screaming at each other in the dark. He landed a couple of his blows. When the light went on, he was holding his side too. I had committed sacrilege. I knew I had.

As I went to fold up my letter the next morning, a page was missing. Even though I soon ceased to attribute any importance to the loss, I found myself feeling odd somehow. Everything about me, the sweat in my armpits and between my legs, the odor of my socks or the stain on my uniform, all of it suddenly seemed precious because it was part of me. I wanted to hide myself in my body, I was about to wrap myself in my cocoon.

In the last letter from my mother that had got through—a stop had been put on mail before Christmas—she seemed transformed. Even though I had written nothing to her about the alert, she felt guilty and was tormented by self-accusations. If she hadn't interfered I would, she felt sure, have filed as a conscientious objector, and in the light of December 13th, that could no longer be regarded as a stupid move or a matter of false heroics, but maybe the only way to save oneself. She had read all of Arnold Zweig's novels, and yet she no longer understood herself. She had evidently forgotten our argument about the X-ray.

And now I will attempt to describe an event that I've kept absolutely silent about until now. Not even Vera knows about it.

On Christmas Eve, of all days—we had had to spend the whole day cleaning—I was feeling better again. Half of those with more than six months' service were on leave, Knut had stayed in hope of spending New Year's at home. He claimed his mattress kicks were meant to toughen me up, or just for fun. It was my own fault if I didn't get the joke. I had decided I wanted to rework chapter one and planned to read Steinbeck's
Grapes of Wrath,
which I had bought in the regimental bookstore.

After supper a couple soldiers sang Christmas carols out in the hall. I stayed in my room and wrote Geronimo about how strange it felt to be all alone, if only for a few minutes. I felt as if I were playing hooky somehow, that's how odd solitude had come to seem.

A few minutes later the door was flung open, and I had to shake off a sense of being caught red-handed. It looked as if half the company had come for a visit. My first impulse was to stand up, but I thought better of it. A kick to my stool brought me to my feet. Knut demanded I report in, he ordered me to get dressed in regulation uniform and report in to Pit, the only DC left in our company. (DC means discharge candidate—that is, the only man left who was in the last six months of his eighteen-month stint.) I could see men out in the hall rubbernecking and jumping up and down. I asked what he wanted.

Then someone grabbed me from behind, pressing my arms against my body. I was totally helpless. I thought that by not defending myself I might maintain what little dignity is left in such a situation. I was hoisted up several times, but remained on my feet. My locker was open wide. Knut flung my boots at my knees. He bellowed. I was let go of.

I put on my strap and belt and saluted, saluted slowly, with a smile. Knut demanded a confession, that I plead guilty. The guy who had grabbed hold of me—my Ajax-Thersites—pushed me from behind. When I turned around he yelled at me to look straight ahead. But all that quickly proved irrelevant once I saw a page of my handwriting in Knut's hand. Even before Gunther and Matthias stepped forward, it was clear to me what was going on here.

Cursing me and my lousy penmanship, Knut haltingly read aloud what I had jotted down that evening. After each sentence he asked: “Did you say that?”—“Yes, I said that,” either Gunter or Matthias would reply. “Yes, I said that.” The jabs in the side, the knuckles to the head, the shoves—I could have endured it all, if each of them had not been accompanied by that one word: Spy! Everyone said it, “Spy! A spy!” Knut didn't leave out a single sentence. The whole production was working only too well. “Yes, I said that!” Knut had become a magician. He pulled the strings. Even those with whom I was on good terms, with whom I had even made fun of Knut, were yelling, “Spy! Spy!” And they waited for something to finally happen.

Did they really think that's what a spy's report looked like? Only I could answer that question, Knut shouted. All he wanted to hear was why and for whom I had written all this. Someone else slapped my head.

Because I'm a writer, because I'm working on a book about the army. Why didn't I admit it?

“Louder!” Knut shouted. “I wanted to give my friend a true impression of army life,” I repeated—every word a thrust of the knife. I had given up, I played along, I wasn't even going to try to convince them. In a certain sense I even admired Knut. Raking a spy over the coals—a scene I would love to have invented myself.

Pit, who showered with a hose in the washroom every day and then came prancing down the hall with wet hair slicked back, a ruddy face, the hose over his shoulder—this same Pit crowed: What was the point of discussion, it was clear as day—a spy!

But Knut wasn't finished. What sort of friend was that who I was writing to, the same sort of friend maybe as the girlfriend I had tried to palm off on them?

Someone grabbed hold of me again. Gunther and Matthias should be the first to “give it to him.” My Ajax-Thersites helped them out of their quandary by throwing me to the floor. I fell on my back. “Get his balls!” somebody shouted. I felt nothing.

I'll spare you what happened next. You and me. The whole time I was amazed at how they did it just right, that they instinctively knew how to utterly humiliate someone. Maybe their aim was also so good because they were acting in good conscience, because nobody could have anything against punishing a spy. That is, there was one person, but I didn't learn about that until later.

Knut's one mistake was that he went too far. My chastisement lasted too long. And along with a renewed awareness of pain, my rage returned as well—and a euphoric sense of freedom. I had nothing left to lose!

Shortly thereafter I was ordered to potato-peeling duty. There I sat on an upturned crate in the tiled storeroom of the kitchen complex, peeling away and listening to what my fellow ostracized soldiers had to say. At that point I would have instantly agreed to spend the next sixteen months peeling potatoes twelve hours a day. I was assigned one penalty duty after the other. All the same, I was happy not to have to spend my free time with my company.

Since I had almost no time left to write, I jotted my notes sitting on the toilet—hurried catchwords, punctuation reduced to dashes. It was Geronimo who congratulated me for starting the new year with a unique, unmistakable style. Strangely enough, I no longer woke up before the wake-up whistle.

My silence precluded any attempt to approach me. I ignored apologies. I didn't even deign a word of reply to the noncom who confided to me that certain people hadn't notified me in the kitchen when my mother had come for a visit—he named the guilty parties and offered to be a witness on my behalf. The only part of the cake my mother left behind that found its way to me was a shopping net and an empty springform pan.

In a certain sense it was a comfortable role for me: I no longer had to show consideration for anyone. I ignored Knut's orders. On the same day that he tossed all my underwear out of my locker, his blanket ended up on the floor. I was prepared for anything, including a long guerilla war.

It was at the end of March, on a Sunday, that Nikolai entered our room, and my life. Nikolai had the most striking physiognomy in our entire company. The tip of his long narrow nose pointed straight down, so that his face was reminiscent of a ram's. His father was an Armenian; his mother, a Berliner, who later married a German. Nikolai was a very good runner, was one of the fastest on the obstacle course, and wanted to stay on in our company as a driving instructor. His uniform fit as if tailor-made. You always thought he was on duty because even in the evening and on weekends he ran around dressed as per regulation. When he halted in front of me, removed his cap, and asked if he could sit down, I assumed he was about to announce that he was an emissary on an important mission.

His request, he admitted, was a little unusual, but he would pay well: two packs of Club cigarettes. In return I was to write a birthday letter, three or four pages, not for him, but for Ulf Salwitzky. His wife's birthday was coming up, but Salwitzky hadn't been able to put a single word to paper. I could probably ask for more, but he, Nikolai, figured two packs was about right for starters.

I was pleased by the businesslike nature of the proposal, although I really didn't need the reimbursement. Vera was modeling again and making enough money to supplement my army pay (110 marks) whenever necessary.
¹⁸²

“All you need is your pen,” Nikolai said, and got up. A “junior”—that is, in his second six-month stint—Ulf Salwitzky was waiting for me in the club room with a writing tablet and some photos lying in front of him.

Nikolai sat down two tables away, pulled a bundle of colored pencils from his pants leg pocket, and began to sketch. Frau Salwitzky had a strikingly small upper lip. Her dimples showed when she smiled.

As if I had been doing this all my life, I sat down across from him and asked him to tell me about her. Salwitzky sniffed and shrugged. “We've been married,” he said, “for two years now.”

What did she like best, I asked, ready to take notes.

“First from behind, panties pulled down, in the kitchen or in the bathroom, the bed's not her thing,” Salwitzky said, sitting as still as if he were getting a haircut. I was to start in, he wanted to see if I was any good. He didn't think it was right to have to talk to me about it. What was there to understand, he snapped, he wanted me to describe a fuck, from behind, no fancy stuff.