New Lives (48 page)

The last Monday in September, the day on which we were supposed to drive to Halle, I couldn't find the applications in my pocket. I ransacked my desk at the theater—but didn't dare let my colleagues notice what I was up to. The idea that in my negligence I might have put Michaela and the others in jeopardy was unbearable.

I drove home, I could barely speak. “Gone,” I panted, “the applications are gone.”

Michaela had taken them out of my pocket to write down the addresses of the others.

As we drove along we saw several police cars, but even the highly unlikely possibility that we—Robert was with us—could have been waved out of the car and searched had lost all its terror.

Michaela was glad to make the acquaintance of someone named Bohley, evidently a relative of Bärbel Bohley.
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Except for a functioning doorbell and a nameplate on the mailbox, nothing suggested that the house was still occupied. The whole block looked as if it had been designated for demolition. Michaela was disappointed. We decided to come back later and drove to the center of town. We ran up and down the market square and ordered the most expensive ice-cream concoctions at a milk bar. We tried to describe for Robert what Feininger's painting of the cathedral looks like; we extended our walk to the Moritzburg and then down to the Saale River. Michaela didn't want to visit the Albert Ebert
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house or buy shoes, although she saw some she liked. She didn't want to appear on the Bohley doorstep with a shopping parcel.
²⁷⁶

We had no luck this time either. Application forms in hand, Michaela hesitated, looking first at me, then at Robert, and back to me, as if wanting to give us a final chance to stop her from doing something stupid. Or was her point to consecrate the moment in some way, because from now on nothing would be as it had been before? The slips of paper vanished soundlessly into the mailbox.

We hardly talked to one another in the car. On the highway from Leipzig to Borna I felt as if I had finally put something behind me for good. I hadn't weaseled out, I had signed—and I wouldn't deny it or take it back—and had sacrificed half a day doing it. I felt as if this justified me to go ahead calmly with my work. Even in the midst of that lunar landscape, even in Espenhain, the gentleness of that autumn was palpable. I thought of the smoke of burning potato plants after the harvest, of hiking the Saubach Valley near Dresden, all the way to the mill with its giant waterwheel, of country roads littered with windfall fruit, leaving you drunk on the scent of overripe apples and plums, on air quivering with wasps. I thought of the first home games at Dynamo Stadium, of the Königstein Fortress and the taste of bockwurst and herbed cider. My Dresden novella reminded me of some favorite book I hadn't read for a long, long time.

The next day it was Jonas, our general manager, who told me—as if he had just accidentally happened to have been there—about Leipzig. There had been ten thousand people, ten thousand demonstrators! I would gladly have believed his fairy tale that they were all applicants
²⁷⁷
—but ten thousand was too many, far too many.

Michaela told me that cameras had been set up on the roof of the Leipzig post office. She repeated everything Max had told her as if to say, “And what were
you
doing while this was going on? Where were
you
?”
²⁷⁸

What I found so ridiculous about the demonstration was its “workaday” quality. One conscientiously does one's job, then it's off to demonstrate, but not for too long, because one wishes to report punctually and with renewed energy for work the next morning.

On Wednesday Michaela bought a new radio.

Norbert Maria Richter had scheduled an evening rehearsal for the next Monday. Michaela took this to be an alibi, a pro forma announcement. To judge from Norbert Maria Richter's behavior and the way he had reacted to Max's descriptions, the crew could only assume he would be the first to take off for Leipzig. Norbert Maria Richter, however, had no such intention whatever. Michaela called him a shifty bastard. Anything anyone wished to say, Norbert Maria Richter remarked, could best be said onstage. The latitude of the stage was a privilege to be used for the benefit of the audience—a responsibility that must be respected and not cavalierly misused.

Those who would play at rebellion, Petrescu allegedly interposed in best Stanislavsky tradition, could and ought not shirk from studying it. It would be a betrayal of one's duty as an honest actor not to make full use of this opportunity. Otherwise some lovely day
we,
the people of the theater, would find ourselves being instructed by the
audience
as to what rebellion and revolution look like. Norbert Maria Richter spoke of being considerate of those who thought differently about the matter and of how necessary it was at precisely this juncture to maintain discipline and, by good work, demonstrate one's irreproachability.

Michaela declared she would report in sick. As we listened to the news about the refugees in the Prague embassy, we fell silent, and Michaela made a gesture whose message was: There, you can hear for yourself, we have to go to Leipzig!

Monday noon Michaela appeared in the dramaturgy office. She just wanted to tell us that no one was going to Leipzig. There she stood, Miss Eberhard Ultra, our revolutionary in chief, in her leg and ankle warmers, a scarf flung over her shoulder. “It's all so absurd,” she said, “I'm so ashamed.”

“Then I'll go alone,” I said, as if that were the only possible reply.

Of course I had no real desire to. But to have missed the whole thing would have been reprehensible. If there was ever going to be a second demonstration, then it would be on that Monday, the last one before October 7th.
²⁷⁹

No sooner had I said it than Michaela decided she didn't want me to go. She kept going on about Krenz, about how he had just got back from China—and everybody knew what that meant.
²⁸⁰

They couldn't just take aim and mow down ten thousand people, I replied, at least not in Leipzig, and they couldn't arrest them all either. I concluded by telling her I'd leave the car somewhere near Bavaria Station—and handed her the second set of keys.

We said good-bye, and Michaela actually appeared then on the balcony and waved as I drove off.

The sunlight was dazzling, late-summer warmth lay like a heavenly blessing over the day. The landscape in the rearview mirror was the paradise to which—after this final ordeal, filled with countless observations and sensations—I would be returning.

By four o'clock I was in the German Library, where I ordered up a couple of books on Nestroy and found an empty desk in the reading room. The lamp didn't work, but that didn't bother me; on the contrary. I was content just to be able to sit here in this asylum, aboard this ark.

Before me lay the script of
Freedom in Gotham.
When I pushed my sleeve up past my watch, my cold fingers felt like the touch of a stranger.

I figured I would be revealing my intentions if I were to leave at five on the dot. So I had hung on for a few more minutes, asked about the books I'd ordered, and then went to the restroom. Who knew when I'd have another opportunity.

After parking the car near Bavaria Station and stashing my Polish leather briefcase in the trunk, I slung an empty bag around my wrist as if I were going shopping.

At a pedestrian stoplight I ran into Patrick, Norbert Maria Richter's assistant director. “Playing hooky?” The question just slipped out. He replied like a student caught in the act and avoided my gaze. He introduced the woman beside him as his fiancée, Ellen.

We were walking past the Gewandhaus when I heard the first chanted slogans. I couldn't make them out.
“Stasi raus!”
Patrick repeated like someone forced to quote something embarrassing. He couldn't have said it more softly.

Ellen was free only until seven o'clock. She had a piano lesson in Connewitz
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at eight. The two of them discussed whether—and if so, when—streetcars would be running again. Even if she had to go on foot, Patrick said, a quarter till eight would work, otherwise she'd miss the best part. I figured it was inappropriate to ask what he thought the “best part” was.

I checked out everyone close by, from head to toe. Like an overeager dog, I let my eyes wander from one to the next, because now—it was a little before six, in the vicinity of St. Nicholas Church—there could be no one who was actually here to shop or simply on his way home from work.

Although close to the Krochhaus now, I saw no indication of anything overwhelming, although the chanting of slogans never stopped.

On the square in front of St. Nicholas people were standing shoulder to shoulder. Unable to move ahead, we craned our necks. That was quite enough for me. Ellen, however, was able to twist and wriggle her way through the crowd. People yielded to her as if she were a waitress. She would have made it even farther if Patrick hadn't run into an acquaintance. Without exchanging names, we shook hands.

I stood on my tiptoes. I don't even know anymore how I came to recognize the group shouting those outrageous words. Was there more light there? Were their arms raised? I can no longer match the image I still have today with what I saw that day on the square in front of St. Nicholas. All of it—the people, the twilight, the warm air, the underground current that flowed from that group—seems like a dream or a vision to me now.

Instead of registering each detail, each vibration, I felt less and less. All the same I was convinced I was experiencing a historical moment. Even if the partylike mood were to vanish in the next moment—the square would be easy to block off—this nevertheless would have been the biggest protest since 1953. People would soon recall October 2nd in much the same way they remembered June 17th.

As the crowd pressed tighter together in the twilight, the chants spread more quickly.

I was prepared to acknowledge and admire as our alpha animals those at the epicenter who invented and struck up chants. But did they truly believe they could change things?

The call of “Sanction New Forum” was a little work of metrical art, whose last three syllables pounded like a fist against a door. It touched me in some unique way, as if those squawkers were fighting for me, for legalizing my membership. The chorus's chants bounced off the facades. It took people on the periphery a while to notice that those at the center had fallen silent or struck up a new slogan. “Sanction New Forum!” Patrick's friend bellowed directly beside us. I admit—I felt embarrassed. Although
he
had done his part, I could not bring myself to utter something like that.

In the same moment they shouted their first “Let's move out!” I thought I heard the trample of boots—it was just a flock of pigeons taking off from a roof. I would have loved to move out—the people nearest me had already taken up the chant—but we were stuck in the middle of it all. And in the next moment Ellen and Patrick had vanished without a trace.

Inside the pedestrian zone there was almost no way to tell where the demonstration ended and everyday life began. It was equally unclear in what direction the demonstration was going to move.

Hoping to find Patrick and Ellen again, I pressed up against a display window. And only then did it finally hit me: this is a demonstration, people are demonstrating here. I only needed to take a couple of steps forward and then keep putting one foot in front of the other. So it's that easy to take part in an illegal demonstration, I thought.

I can no longer say how we made it to the train station, whether we had veered off before we got to the opera or not until Ring Strasse itself. Later images are superimposed on earlier ones. I can still see us with buildings on either side, in front of display windows, making us look like a second demonstration waiting to merge with the main column. A banner that when folded up was no bigger than a switchyard flag was passed along over our heads. “Travel Visa to Pisa.” I saw this as a clever way to smudge the fingerprints left on the sticks. Just as it was my turn to reach out my arm and grab one end of it, the cry of “Gorby, Gorby” swept over us in chorus. I looked at my feet and hoped that that one would soon be over.

I had to talk myself into walking out onto the streetcar tracks. All trams had been halted. One driver had crossed his arms and with a blank expression was staring directly down at me. “Join with us!”
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was the next chant. People in the lighted car pressed their foreheads to the windowpanes, watching us as if we were characters in some boring movie. “Join with us!” It's hardly likely you would recognize the song—we'd had to sing it in music class—and the refrain goes, “So left, two, three, so left, two three / Find your place, good comrades / Join with us in the Workers' Front / Cause you're a working man too!” That's where it had come from, this “Join with us!” of theirs. Banal, isn't it?
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Then came the cordon of special-alert police. I showed you the spot where they blocked the street. I instinctively moved toward the side. To me it looked like an all-too-obvious “step-into-our-trap.” The crowd marched straight ahead, pushing its front rows practically into the arms of the cordon. And all of a sudden—just like in the square in front of St. Nicholas Church, which they never should have let us leave—the whole scene could be taken in with one sweeping glance. They were sure to correct their mistake now.

On a high curb to my left stood a frail elderly woman with arms crooked at the elbows, half ballerina, half supplicant. The reason for her pose became clear to me only after I noticed she was holding leashes, at the ends of which two poodles were leaping about excitedly.

Written in lights above a new building that worked like an extension of the blockade was the announcement:
“Bienvenue,”
“Welcome,”
“Dobro poshalovat”
—greetings from another time when there were more pleasant things to do than stand in the street with thousands of others, shouting slogans until you were hoarse and waiting for backup units of the special alert police. There were hardly any lights in the windows. Were the people inside standing behind drawn curtains, sitting at their evening meal, or in front of a television? I envied them. The Astoria, the train station—their lighted billboards worked like the backdrop to some familiar play against which a new sketch was being rehearsed between performances.