New Lives (44 page)

Tim Hartmann's production was no thundering success, but the audience applauded until he appeared onstage in a black suit, bowed, and rocked his head back and forth in the hope that everyone would notice his brand-new stub of a ponytail.

At the cast party I was given lots of hugs. I expected a speech from the general manager, a few words about the production and the singers' fine performances. And I hoped he would also remember his promise to me.

He congratulated Tim Hartmann, shook hands all around the table, and also responded to a few bons mots with a laugh that was almost indistinguishable from a cough. But he refused to sit down and join us. His entourage, recruited mainly from stage actors, but especially from the ballet, were waiting for him two tables down.

I drank and chain-smoked and for the first time felt at home in the canteen. The assistant director introduced me to Antonio, a young Chilean from Berlin. Antonio asked what I thought of the production, which he himself termed a “yawn.” Antonio told me to sit down beside him, and pulled a chair over for me to join the “Jonas” table—he called the general manager by his first name. How easy it all was. Antonio offered me some vodka. Everybody at the table was drinking vodka.

In claiming that marriage and fidelity were unnatural, pointless, and ridiculous, Jonas managed to antagonize most of the women, which didn't prevent him from plowing right ahead. He kept brushing strands of hair from his face while shifting his gaze from one person to the next. As our eyes met I automatically nodded as if I agreed with him. I was angry at myself for doing it, and all the more so since the actress Claudia Marcks loudly contradicted him, even laughed in his face—which he took half as an offense, half as confirmation of this theory about women.

I admired Claudia Marcks. I had never been able to strike up a conversation with her, I hadn't even managed to work my way into her vicinity. Everything about her was beautiful and desirable, I especially loved her hands. They led a life of their own, which no one except me seemed to noticed. Suddenly I wanted nothing more than to feel the touch of those hands—today, tomorrow, whenever—and then to kiss them. And I was strangely convinced that that hour was no longer all that distant.

I asked Jonah whether he himself believed the stuff he was spouting.

He stared at me with reddened eyes. “Why don't you just go get laid!” he shouted. “Why don't you just…” Jonas repeated the sentence two, three times, four times, until the whole canteen had fallen silent.

Instead of laughing in his face as Claudia Marcks had done, I thought of Nadja. And now I heard myself saying, “Why should I do that?”

Everyone joined in the laughter. Even Claudia Marcks and Antonio. Antonio said he admired the people who were pure intellect, people like me. It was hell.

Sometime long after midnight the assistant director asked if she and Antonio could spend the night in my quarters, the bed in the guest room was nice and wide, after all, and they had missed their train. Neither of the two slept a single minute.

Lying at the edge of a bed and having to listen to those two beside me seemed to me the perfect metaphor of my life as an outsider. Jonas had humiliated me before everyone, and tomorrow Antonio would tell him about this night. Wasn't the reason I hadn't defended myself that I was afraid of losing my position, my job as dramaturge? How life takes its revenge on you, I thought, when you want something else from it. My life was that of a storyteller. And for telling stories a man needs distance and a cold eye. How could I have forgotten that.
²⁴⁵

In the middle of June, a few days after Vera's departure, I was back again in Altenburg. One more unpleasant experience—and what else was I supposed to expect from the theater?—and my desire to follow Vera would have been all the stronger.

The chief dramaturge handed me a small bright orange book, for which I had to give her a receipt. From bottom to top I read: Bibliothek Suhrkamp/Fräulein Julie/August Strindberg. I wouldn't be staying in the guest room this time, but in the Wenzel. Flieder, the director, had not yet arrived.

That evening in the hotel I opened Vera's imitation-leather silverware pouch, sorted the bills, laying them out in separate rows on the floor. At three thousand marks, more than my stipend for a whole year, I stopped counting.

From the bed I watched as the bills were caught up in a draft from the open window and began overlapping as if trying to couple, and finally I just closed my eyes and listened to their rustling. When I woke up the bills were strewn about the room, in one corner they had formed a little pile of leaves.

I showered, sat down at a breakfast setting in the restaurant, and, as the clock struck ten, headed off for the Lindenau Museum. After that I took a walk through town, circled the Great Pond, looked for the house of Gerhard Altenbourg, and had my noonday meal at the Ratskeller. Then I lay down in the park and read. In the evening I went to the movies. That was more or less how I spent the whole week.

My favorite pastime was to sit in the garden café beside the Great Pond and imagine I was with Vera somewhere on the Landwehr Canal in West Berlin, recovering from the interviews I had had to deal with all day.

That Friday I traveled to Dresden to see my mother. Despite my having announced my arrival, she wasn't waiting for me at the station, nor was she at home. Nothing in the apartment indicated a welcome—no note, no stew in the refrigerator, my bed hadn't even been made up.

When Mother arrived—after all, I ought to know she worked late sometimes—we spoke only about Vera. Vera should have left a lot sooner, Mother said, her path had been blocked from the start, she had been robbed of valuable years. I said that Vera had enjoyed her life and had learned more about the theater and read more books than I had at the university. How could I say that! That had all just been makeshift. Vera belonged in a drama school, they should have accepted her at the Deutsches Theater in Berlin. I hadn't any idea of just how desperate Vera had been at times.

For supper Mother placed an unwrapped camembert on the table, I opened a tin of fish, the bread was stale. I felt miserable. This shabbiness toward both herself and me was something new.

I arrived late for Monday's rehearsal discussion. It was a bad omen that Flieder likewise had a ponytail, even if it was just bound-up remnants of his wreath of hair and hung gray and scraggly over his collar. As was to be expected he didn't turn to look at me when, after first knocking, I opened the door and took a seat at the table. As was also to be expected he had me repeat my name. Imagine my terror when I saw Claudia Marcks sitting at the table. She hadn't been listed as a cast member.

“So this is our Enrico,” Flieder said, “Enrico will be helping us with everything here. At least I hope so. Good thing you're here, Enrico.” No one laughed.

The only others at the table besides Claudia Marcks were Petrescu (Kristin, cook, thirty-five years old) and Max (Jean, servant, thirty years old). I also got a wave from Flieder's young female assistant, a long drink of water with short hair, who was also the set designer and was perched on the arm of a chair off to one side, sipping at her Karo.

What followed was more like a seminar than a rehearsal. And I wasn't prepared. It was just for me, or so it seemed, that Flieder went on at length about the book that he had left at the front gate for me, along with a note inside. As he paced back and forth, giggling every now and then, he began to look more and more like a faun or a satyr. His assistant repeated and augmented his comments, talked about behavioral research, squinting each time she took a drag on her cigarette.

At the noon break, Claudia Marcks took a seat beside me. “Do you know each other?” Flieder asked.

“Yes,” I said. Claudia Marcks looked at me. “Where from?”

“
Undine,
the premier, the cast party, at this very same table.”

“Oh, please, no,” she cried. “I was so sloshed, so sloshed, oh please, I'm sorry.” And as if by way of apology she laid a hand on my forearm and asked almost anxiously if we had drunk to our friendship that night.

“Sad to say, no,” I replied, “but I would have been happy to.”

“Just call me Michaela,” she whispered. “Okay?”

“Happy to, Michaela,” I said, repeated my first name for her, and gazed at her gorgeous hand, still lying on my forearm.

Your Enrico T.

Dear Nicoletta,

Before I tell you any more about Michaela, I need to insert something that happened in the summer of 1987, but that I didn't mention to anyone, since it didn't seem worth mentioning. And how was I supposed to understand it anyway?

Maybe in fact there is something in us beyond our conscious and unconscious mind, something akin to the sixth sense animals have that lets them register an earthquake or storm, long before we do. Should I call it instinct, or the power of premonition? Or simply a heightened sensitivity?

In August I had gone to Waldau for two weeks so that I could finally do some more work on my novella. One night I awoke and thought I heard a shot reverberating through the house, through the whole woods.

If it hadn't been for the creaking of the bed I would have thought I was deaf. I snapped my fingers. Not a rustle, not a breeze, not a bird. I had broken into a sweat and knew that I wouldn't go back to sleep.

Naked as a jaybird, I stepped out the door. Everything seemed frozen in place. With each little noise I made, silence closed in all the tighter. The more intensely I listened, the more impenetrable the hush, until finally I thought I could feel it above my head like some giant black block of stone.

I tried several times to take a deep breath, but my lungs felt only half full of the air I sucked down into them, as if I were several thousand meters above sea level. It didn't help to sit down either. I felt a rippling, swirling sensation around my heart. I was amazed I didn't panic. At least I could distinguish between the deep black of the trunks of the firs and the grayish darkness between them. I was on the verge of saying a prayer or humming a tune just to escape the silence, the hush. Suddenly it seemed incredible that I should be sitting all alone at night in a stock-still woods—the only restive thing in a mute world. I thought I might be dreaming or losing my mind. My own laughter gave me a fright.

And like some stroke of grace a fly joined me. It whirled around my head, and suddenly I could see an illustration from a physics text before my eyes: an electron orbiting the nucleus of an atom.
²⁴⁶

The fly landed on my left shoulder—I flinched and then held my breath. Had I scared it away? The fly dared not abandon me, it had to stay, the only living creature standing guard with me, my sole companion. When I felt it stir, I again held my breath and relished its touch as if it were a caress. Have you ever let a fly crawl over your shoulders and back? In the midst of my fear that sooner or later the fly could forsake me, for the first time in my life the idea crossed my mind that the world, just as it is, might end up lost to me.

It was not fear of nuclear war, of the end of the world. It was the fear that everything from which I took my bearings could be lost; the structure of the world to which I had adapted the permutations of my thoughts and emotions, might vanish from one day to the next, leaving nothing more than a great emptiness behind. Just as I had feared I would be inducted into the army too late, so now I feared that before I could fire my gun all the real game would be slain and only mice and rats would be left for me.

It was an absurd thought, but no less absurd than sitting naked in the woods, happy and grateful for the companionship of a fly.

Only the fly and the pain just above my heart seemed to exist, the sole realities at my disposal, the one thing that prevented my thoughts and emotions from evaporating into weightlessness.

On those spots where my sweat hadn't dried I sensed a draft, and I felt chilled. With empty brain, with empty heart, yielding to my fate, I crept back to bed.

When I awoke, it was warm and flies, a whole swarm, were buzzing above me.

I presume that by now you think I am indeed crazy or at least more than a bit odd. But viewed from the present, that nocturnal experience is one of the few episodes that I can look back upon with sympathy for the person I was at the time.

         

But to return to Altenburg, to which I traveled in early September '88, before starting my last year of studies.

Flieder's rehearsals of
Julie
deserve a chapter of their own. Read the Strindberg play again yourself and pay attention to the breaks, to the steady flow of staying—going—staying—going. In a certain sense it was so much about me that it was eerie.

No less eerie was the realization of how closely related directing and writing are. From Flieder I learned that the purpose of dialogue is not to communicate something, but rather to clarify the relationships among the characters. That it doesn't matter what the characters are talking about as long as you know what you want to say. That there is hell to pay if you neglect even one of the relationships, that not one item, not a single step in the choreography can be ignored.