New Lives (35 page)

If this were a biography, one long chapter would be titled “Katalin.” Katalin was the niece of Frau Nádori and was studying English and German in Szeged. She was preparing for her exams. Every morning we sat in Frau Nádori's kitchen and smoked her cigarettes until Katalin was banished to the living room, where she had to study Heinz Mettke's Middle High German grammar. Each afternoon we would meet somewhere at four o'clock. Katalin was engaged and held fast to that role. After an evening at the opera, however, she visited me in my room. I pulled my sleeping bag from the bed and laid it on the old hardwood floor, directly in front of a white armoire that Frau Nádori always claimed was “genuine rococo.” Katalin now opened this genuine rococo armoire and made up a bed for us from the linens hoarded in it. She just wanted to lie beside me, she said, slipped off her nightgown, and warmed my hands between her thighs. At some point we both fell briefly asleep, but when we awoke it was all quite simple and lovely and unforgettable.

I owe something else to those days in June—a book, one that I could just as easily have found in our own living room. But that copy was wrapped in such a dreadful jacket that I had never laid a hand on it.
¹⁹⁸

In Budapest I received it from the hands of the same antiquarian book dealer who had wrapped several small blue volumes of Nietzsche in plain brown paper for me.

I read the first story while I was still in the shop—and suddenly knew what I wanted. Stories exactly like this, except for today—in the here and now—a new
Red Cavalry.
I had found a new god. “Isaac Babel,” the lady had whispered, staring at the ceiling and elegantly spiraling her small liver-spotted hand in tiny ascending circles. Vera and David might be right a hundred times over, I was right about Babel.

Katalin noticed that something extraordinary had happened to me. And I could sense that she liked how I spoke, how I couldn't help reading her passages aloud, and how my enthusiasm was evidently blind to the fact that she wanted to kiss me, in broad daylight, even though the silvery head of her aunt might appear in the door at any moment.

Your Enrico T.

Dear Nicoletta,

At the end of August my existence as a full-time writer was salvaged. I was off to Jena to study.

I'm almost ashamed to follow such a precise chronology. But each entry would be impossible to understand without the previous one. I promise you, however, I'll move on now more quickly.

Had it not been for my scribbling, for my wretched calling, I might have made a good student. But instead I was continually driven by the question: How far am I still from completing my army book so that I can publish it in the West at the magical age of twenty-five?

I won't write about my studies as such, although they defined my days and I was even afraid I might be asked to leave the university. There were nine of us students, five archaeologists and four philologists. I told you that day that the only faculty for classical studies was in Jena, and students were accepted only every two years. Of course that leads to arrogance, although God knows there was no reason for it.

Do you still recall the peace marches and decisions to expand the arms race in 1983? There were demonstrations in Jena—illegal and official ones, sometimes both at the same time. The unofficial signs and banners were carried by workers—and quickly smashed by Stasi agents. I watched demonstrators hold up what was left of their signs, until they were either arrested or vanished into the forest of GDR flags being waved by schoolchildren.

Together with a few other students I joined the contingent of theologians, who weren't attacked despite the fact that their slogans weren't welcome either.

Presumably all I would have had to do was bend down and pick up the remains of a sign and that would have been the end of my university studies.

That I didn't do it was not due solely to the promise of continued studies. I was also afraid. Not everyone survived his arrest.
¹⁹⁹
Every Sunday morning a vehicle fully manned by uniformed personnel would park near Cosmonaut Square. Their lurking just around the corner had its effect on the mood of the town. Anyone entering Thomas Mann Bookstore or simply strolling across the square might be instantly transformed into a demonstrator or a Stasi catchpole.

The “personal conversations” I had known in high school (there were attempts at something similar even in the army) had their continuation at the university level. It was presumed that every male student would declare in writing that he was willing to become an officer in the reserves. After my initial refusal—my reasons for which were not all that easy to explain—I was invited to a conversation with the eminence grise of the faculty, Professor Samthoven (it was said that the “v” had once been an “f”),
²⁰⁰
an archaeologist—a meticulously well-groomed man, if not a downright dandy. He was as proud of his thick, perfectly trimmed beard as he was of his little feet and slender, well-manicured hands. During seminars he smoked cigarillos (we were allowed to smoke as well) and used a riding crop as his pointer. He had the reputation of being a Casanova. At any rate he had no inhibitions about showing preference for the prettier female students, especially if they had long hair. Ever since I had outlined the pattern of a sonnet on the blackboard (he placed “utmost value” on general knowledge) and, as a novice, had had modest success describing early geometric vases, he overrated me far too much.

He asked me to take a seat and treated me almost paternally—made tea and shoved an ashtray my way. We had both crossed our legs and were now gazing down at very different-size shoes, both jiggling gently and almost touching toes. He stroked the corners of his mouth with thumb and middle finger, pressed his lips tight, and began to speak. It should come as no surprise that I had been invited to this conversation. But before those paid to do so talked with me—by that he didn't mean Stasi agents, but colleagues who owed their positions only secondarily to any expert knowledge—he himself wanted to have the pleasure of chatting with me, simply to make certain that I had also thought the entire matter through before making my final decision. He poured me some tea.

Except for him, he noted, probably no one else here knew I was a noncommissioned officer…I was about to contradict him, to explain—he knew very well what I intended to say, but begged to be allowed to finish. He himself saw that there could be some small shame connected with being a noncom. But not perhaps in the way I might think, quite the contrary. All states, whether East or West, recruited their officers from the elite. That was the case everywhere, except with us. Poles, Russians, Czechs—they weren't even asked.

It would sadden him to see me ruin my professional chances, my life, by such a refusal—particularly, and here I surely would agree with him, since I had come up with no cogent reason for it, nor in all probability would I—only to end up being psychologically humiliated by these people. “For why, my dear Herr Türmer, should a noncom be frightened of becoming a full-fledged officer? If you argue the issue on principle, then you will also have to recant the very oath you swore. Or am I overlooking some other possibility?” He raised the shallow white cup to his lips and sipped.

All that was demanded of us, he continued, was a profession of allegiance, a symbolic yes. He again put the cup to his lips and gazed out over the rim. “Georgian tea, brought it back from Tbilisi. You'll be traveling there soon, I presume.”

He would be quite satisfied if I merely ran the matter over in my mind one more time. There was no need for us to discuss the imperfections of socialism as it existed in reality, our two standpoints were probably not as far apart as some might imagine. He, however, always asked himself one question: What other society had in so short a time managed to conquer hunger, whether in Russia or China or Cuba? As long as tens of thousands died daily of starvation and curable diseases one must put the question just that way. “What was Allende's first decree? A half liter of milk for every child. Allende was a physician, he knew what needs to be done.”

Samthoven struck a match and took a drag on his cigarillo.

Ultimately—and this was the only reason for him to tell me this, for him to take this time from his schedule—it was a matter of providing our state with its elite. “Don't be so stupid as to forfeit your education!” he exclaimed, holding up the fingers between which his cigarillo glowed. I shouldn't let myself be trapped in the net of the very people who had done our country greater harm than the class enemy. If I understood that, then we were both on the same side. He couldn't say more, nor did he wish to. Instead of continuing to play the hero I would do better to join the Party. “The necessary reforms can come only from within the Party. You'll live to see it.”

He would personally smooth the way for me.

These last words were spoken with a certain testiness, as if it annoyed him to have to say such things at all. We sat there in silence for a while, our feet still jiggling. Then he extended his small dry hand and said his good-bye.

My lungs were burning from chain-smoking. I came to a halt in front of the Haeckel Phyletic Museum. I wanted to forget his odious offer, I needed some distraction, I needed fresh air.

As I walked past the post office in the direction of West Station, however, I soon turned off to the right to avoid rush-hour traffic. My path led me up the steep hill, and I walked aimlessly through streets lined with middle-class houses and villas with gardens. From the multipaneled window of a sandstone villa hung a red and white banner that read
VIVAT POLSKA!
There were several of these in town. It meant that this was the home of someone who had filled out his application—who wanted out, wanted to go to the West.

I kept on walking. It was windy, but not cold. I was sweating. At one point I thought I had lost my bearings.

What can I say. I was standing halfway up the slope and suddenly knew what my army book would look like. As if guided by a magic hand, the
Vivat Polska!
and the graffiti on the wall of Holy Cross School merged with my army experiences. And I had the vague suspicion that I somehow owed the intellectual thread binding them to Samthoven.

An hour and a half later I was sitting in a pub, the Hauser, answering questions posed by the clique of four who were in their third year of studies.

I mimicked the elegant way Samthoven crossed his legs, observed the back of my outstretched hand with that same blatant self-infatuation, stroked my imaginary beard, perched a saucer at my chin and sipped, splaying my pinkie, repeating his comments about Tbilisi, and then tried to imitate his rhetorical periods, which were so lengthy that you could have laid wagers on whether they would end with the right verb form. If it was possible to lay Samthoven bare, then I did it.

The clique boomed with laughter. I relished the way our table had become the center of attention in the dark room. Edith, the owner, a woman somewhere on the far side of fifty and dressed in a white smock, waved her hand at newcomers looking for a seat to wait at the door, as if they were disrupting a performance.

I have never been a finer entertainer than I was that evening. Samthoven's invitation to join the Party was its crowning pirouette.

Samthoven might have thought that I had held my tongue out of courtesy, just as these people believed I knew what I wanted. At the end of my performance I had no choice but to respond with a yes to their presumption that I would stick to my refusal to be an officer in the reserves.

A little later Edith sat down at our table and asked for a cigarette. The last round of beer was on the house. The evening had reached its climax. Time for the final curtain.

On the way home it felt like I had a plump wallet in my breast pocket—it was my book, whose fulcrum or pivoting point was to be the slogan
Vivat Polska!
painted in white on a dark wall somewhere in the basement furnace room of the barracks. One soldier after another would be summoned. Both the interrogation itself and the interval during which each man waited for his own name to be called would give me the opportunity for character studies and descriptions of the brutality of everyday life in the barracks. Who had put it there? No sooner do they have a suspect than the graffiti appears on another wall:
Vivat Polska!

Soon there's a third one, a fourth, and now it's ten—even in the snow on the drill field, the inscription:
Vivat Polska!
And all the while—and that was to be the linchpin of the whole story—it is the Stasi that started it all as a provocation, a way to interrogate people and lure them into denouncing each other. And now this vile trick has turned on them and is out of control.

I only had to start, I could already sense the ecstasy that would bring it all together.

Your Enrico T.

Dear Nicoletta,

In retrospect the affair with Nadja is transparent. At the time I was amazed that a woman like her would throw herself into my arms. Nadja was Vera's first great love. Early in '81 her mother had married a gay Swiss man, and they all left the country that same May.

Vera recovered only very slowly. Even now we avoid mentioning Nadja. Nadja's real name was Sabine, but because of Vera's enthusiasm for Breton it wasn't long before everyone was calling her Nadja.

During the few visits I was permitted back then, Vera had treated me and Nadja like children, called us whelps and quickly sent me on my way every time. All I knew about Nadja was that married specimens of my gender—the word “man” never passed Vera's lips in those days—had camped out at her door, leading to occasional brawls over a sixteen-year-old girl.

At three o'clock in the afternoon on March 23, 1985, I again ran into Nadja on the landing below Vera's apartment. At first I didn't recognize her, because she was wearing a hat and sobbing. She was dressed as always. But her new dialect disconcerted me.