New Lives (34 page)

When I wanted to write, I retreated to Nikolai's painting studio,
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where the same banners lay draped over laundry racks for weeks on end. Each morning Nikolai would give the pots of paint a quick stir with a brush and then retreat into his studio, a small room with windows that overlooked the drill field and that he had turned into an incredibly cozy spot. He even had a record player and a scruffy leather sofa. The few guys who were allowed inside mostly served as his models.

You'll scarcely believe my naïveté,
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but in fact I couldn't figure out why all the guys who modeled for him were very boyish and often looked almost identical.

Inspired by Baudelaire's prose poems, which Nikolai read to me from an Insel edition, I wrote one or two sketches every day. These idyllic hours were interrupted only by the 7th of October parade, rehearsals for which were an idiotic, stomach-turning grind. But that's not a topic for here.

As winter once again approached—I was now a DC—I was afraid time might be running out.

There was a good chance that much of what I had assumed would happen as a matter of course and had intended to experience would never find a place on my agenda before the end of April. I had taken it for granted that sooner or later I would see the inside of the brig. I almost managed it once without its being any of my doing. When the radio in our room, for which I as corporal was responsible, was checked out by a battalion officer, the red tuning line didn't vanish beneath one of the paper strips you had to glue on to mark East-bloc stations. They threatened me with three-day arrest, but that was the end of it. Everyone, even the officers, listened to New German Wave, and the FM reception on West Berlin's RIAS, SFB, and AFN was top-notch.

I was working on a story about sentry duty, and urgently needed more observed details. When I learned that my company would be assigned double duty
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on the three days before Christmas, I did everything I could to be included. But as one of three drivers in their third six-month stint, there was little chance of that. My only help was to play Good Samaritan. In an act of hypocritical sacrifice I gave a heartbroken paterfamilias my leave pass and took over sentry duty for him. To keep the gratitude of the man, who was on the verge of tears, within limits I demanded several bottles of vodka in return, which he smuggled into the barracks at risk of life and limb.

Such intentionally arranged incidents are seldom worth the investment,
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but this time it appeared as if my hopes would be fulfilled. Just when I had been relieved of duty at the end of the snowy second night—Christmas Eve—the police patrol brought in a stinking, roaring drunk sailor. They were holding him by his arms and legs and swinging him back and forth like a sack. They had a lot to do yet, so they unloaded him in the guardhouse and went back out on the hunt.

The sailor lived in Oranienburg and had been nabbed at his front door. He could no longer stand on his own, and would choke now and then on his gurgled curses and insults. He finally managed to make it to his knees, but then lurched over on one side again and raised one arm. He wanted us to let him go. Even in his pleas you could hear some of the disdain that he as a sailor had for men in gray. He claimed he hadn't been trying to get to his girl, but to his mother, he didn't want to fuck, but just to be home for Christmas, even “grunts” ought to understand that. He fumbled at his watch, pulled it off—it was ours if we let him go.

As a noncom and I attempted to get him back on his feet, he readily assisted us in the belief that we would bring him to the gate, and went on praising his Glasshütter watch, which had never let him down.

We moved quickly to consign him to the brig and agreed with him that the MPs were mangy dogs and jack-offs. The footprints left in the snow by his street shoes looked downright ladylike in comparison to those of our boots. He looked up as if he had only now realized where we were taking him. I grabbed him tighter. Whether because of that or because he saw the corporal stripes on my shoulder strap
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—he took his rage out on me. He gave me a kick, the tip of his shoe met my shin. As if out of reflex I struck back, his nose started to bleed. He had pulled free and whaled into me now, banging at me in a fury with bloody fists. I somehow got a grip on him, clinching him from behind. He booted and kicked, until I didn't know what else to do but to pick him up and fling him into the snow. Help arrived from the guardhouse. On all fours now, the sailor spun around inside the circle of his tormentors searching for me.

Four of us got the better of him, wrenched his arms behind him, tugged his head back by the hair—after he started spitting—and shoved him forward. He went limp, which is why we had to drag him down the stairs to be booked. And so I had finally made it into one of those cells I had wanted to occupy myself. The next evening, Christmas night, I sat in Nikolai's studio, drank mulled wine, ate stollen, and listened to the “Christmas Oratorio.” Nikolai gave me Malaparte's
The Skin,
a well-thumbed Western pocketbook.

I was already living in the euphoric state of a returnee when we were sent on maneuvers in the middle of April, barely two weeks before my discharge on the 28th. We crossed the Elbe and burrowed our way into a pine forest.

The last night we were waiting for our orders to return to base, sleeping in our APCs. As soon as it got chilly inside, the driver turned on the motor. That was forbidden, but our officers evidently chose not to notice.

After the second or third time I fell asleep. A pain in my shoulder woke me up. Udo, a noncom, was literally kneeling on me in order to get at the crank that opened the louvers on the hood of the APC—the only way to cool the motor. The thermostat indicator was out of sight, well beyond the red zone. The motor was on the verge of locking at any moment. An incident like that could be punished as sabotage, and you ended in the military prison at Schwedt. Udo's chin lingered above my shoulder, we stared at the thermostat. I could smell his sleepy breath and awaited my fate. Out of stupidity, off to Schwedt—that would be unbearable!

When the indicator began to move I felt Udo's hand at the nape of my neck, he was squeezing with every ounce of his strength. Then he opened the hatch and climbed out. I waited until I could turn the motor off and followed him. I thought he was standing somewhere nearby, having a smoke. But I couldn't find him. It was still dark and perfectly still when I started my walk. From one moment to the next there was nothing to remind me of an army. No sentries, no barbed wire, no spotlights, only soft earth and silence. The vehicles were as unreal as the trees, enchanted reptiles murmuring in their sleep.

The farther I went the more excited I was. I don't know how long I walked. I stopped at the edge of a field, dropped my trousers, and squatted. What all I discharged from myself was simply stupendous. It seemed to me as if I were not simply emptying out what I had stuffed myself with over the past few days, but was also ridding myself of every oppression, fear, and torment I had ever had to swallow. With my naked butt hovering above the forest floor by the first light of dawn, I was the happiest, freest human being that I could imagine. I saw my sun rising with the dawn. It was all behind me, I was returning from hell, and the completion of my book was only a matter of time. These minutes were now the yardstick of my happiness.

That very evening I began to try to describe the experience. And despite all the later changes, all the material I threw out or rearranged, I was determined I would end my book with this unexpected moment of happiness and dawn.

Late in the afternoon of the day I was discharged, I walked away from the streetcar stop, black bag in hand, only to run directly into my mother. She set down her shopping bag of empty bottles and threw her arms around my neck and would not let go even after I begged her to.

I had returned, but I had brought a problem home with me. Nikolai had invited me to spend a weekend with him in Saxon Switzerland. I had no idea how I would survive those two days with him.
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When Nikolai came to pick me up—standing there in the stairwell of our building, leaning against the railing, in a white half-unbuttoned shirt, faded jeans, and sunglasses pushed up into his hair—I followed him like someone wading into the water although he knows he can't swim. To describe my hours with him would be a story all its own. I felt guilty for having nourished his hopes. He wasn't used to having to woo someone. As soon as he met with resistance, he turned domineering. That night we almost scuffled. We had spread out our sleeping bags on a projecting rock. The drop-off was only a few yards away. It was so dark I couldn't even make out his face. I could guess its expression only from his voice. I could deal with his arrogance, his accusations, his mockery and scorn, yes, even his disdain. What appalled me, however, was his self-hatred. I covered my ears—that's how unbearable what I had to listen to was. I couldn't console him, either. That whole night I kept my eye on him. He didn't fall asleep until it began to grow light. I didn't have to do much packing. Yes, I simply ran away. I never saw Nikolai again.

For eighteen months I had longed to return. But where and what had I returned to? To a world that didn't interest me, in which there was nothing for me, nothing worth writing about. In the army every well-used minute was an unexpected gift, every day of survival a victory.

Instead of bearing witness to having made it through hell, I felt as if I had been driven from paradise. My world was turned upside down. And one thing led to another.

Vera's boyfriend at the time was a disgusting human being. Daniel, as I learned later, was also fleecing her financially.
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I tried to figure out if he was a writer or painter or if he did anything at all. Ostensibly he was a home health attendant, but he never went to work and lived off (besides Vera) what Dutch or French renters paid him for his apartment in Berlin. Daniel found Dresden unbearably provincial. He wasn't going to stay a minute longer once Vera's Berlin embargo was lifted. Vera admired Daniel because he could throw around words like “rhizome” and “anti-Oedipal” and had books from the West that he lent to no one. When he spoke the name “Foucault” it was as if he held his breath for a moment to listen for the echo of his own fanfare. To Vera, however, Daniel was the measure of all things.

At the beginning I couldn't resist him, either. The first time you met him his smile was like bait tossed your way. And by the second meeting you had the sense you had disappointed him, because the eyes behind his nickel-rimmed glasses were purely inner directed—today, I'd just call them dull. Everything I said about what I thought was good and right he would turn into its rhetorical opposite. If you offered any opposition, you were making yourself an accomplice of those in power, but if you attempted to lend support, that was a particularly perfidious way of trying to control someone. Inside half an hour Daniel would manage to brand me—in Vera's presence—as a complete idiot. How was I supposed to write contemporary prose without having read Foucault, Deleuze, Lacan, Derrida, and all the rest of them? I didn't need to waste my time on Adorno, and as for the whole Frankfurt school, I could just forget it.

As she brought me to the door, Vera tried to comfort me. Daniel wasn't blaming me for being ignorant of his authors, it was just that I should read them before attempting to write.

The last straw was Vera's promise to show me some texts about the army that one of her admirers had written and that she judged “not bad.” I was alarmed precisely because Vera didn't take the guy seriously otherwise—she made fun of his jealousy and those puppy-dog eyes that followed her everywhere. And above all I was disconcerted because somebody was poaching in my reserve.
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Once I got my own notes back from Geronimo, who had kept them in meticulous order, they bored me. The pounds of stuff I now crammed into my desk drawer were junk. Just as I had once collected seashells at the Baltic shore and then insisted I had to take every single one home with me—where after a few weeks, with my permission, they ended up in the trash—I might just as well have tied up the bundle and taken it to the ragman.

Of course my letters—well, they weren't real letters, but notes and sketches—paraded almost every one of my 541 days in the barracks before my eyes. But to what purpose? Where were the stories I had hoped to be able to net from these pages the way fat carp are taken from the ponds of Moritzburg Castle each autumn? All my fervor seemed so childish, so vain and pointless, that there was nothing for it but to admit Daniel and Vera were right. It was my plunge into hell.

Suddenly I was just anybody. I felt abandoned, forsaken. If I couldn't write, my life was worthless.

Geronimo, who was studying theology in Naumburg, was helping Franziska study for her finals and playing in a band. Together we had argued with some Christian Democrats at the Church Congress in Dresden and had called Councilor of the Consistory Stolpe a political wet blanket. But otherwise we didn't have much to say to each other. I was jealous of him because of Franziska and because he was a welcome guest in that large hillside villa in Weisser Hirsch, where he drank tea with her parents on the terrace while he gazed out over the whole city.

To top it all off, I was told by the Army District Command
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that I had been discharged as a noncommissioned officer in the reserves, an ignominy that was too late to protest and that I had no choice but to keep to myself.

My salvation was Aunt Camilla, who for the past two years had sent me one hundred D-marks at Christmas and another fifty D-marks at Easter, so that I suddenly had three hundred D-marks, to which my mother added what was left of her own gift; she also paid for my train ticket to Budapest and for two consignments of bed linens. I stayed ten days and lived like a prince.