New Lives (5 page)

We filled our tank from one of our gas cans, and drove downhill in the passing lane. The names that began to pop up on signs delighted me: Heilbronn, Karlsruhe, Strasbourg, Freiburg, Basel, Milan. It wouldn't have amazed me to find ourselves suddenly whizzing along under palm trees.

We pulled into Offenburg a little before noon, found the Ratskeller—and right on time, there we stood opposite Steen, who was sitting having a beer with Wolfgang the Hulk. Michaela was the center of attention. Steen invited her to ride with him, Georg and Jörg were packed into the backseat, and I put-putted along behind with Wolfgang.

He had greeted me with a hug and silence, but was now chatting my ear off about how important it had been for us to show up on time. We'd pulled it off with pizzazz, real pizzazz. Steen thought a great deal of us, finally somebody he could depend on, people who knew what they wanted, went for it, and didn't expect to be handed anything on a silver platter. Steen had reassigned his entire advertising campaign for the Leipzig Fair to us, now didn't that show pizzazz on his part too? He gave my thigh a slap. We were moving up into the Black Forest now. A few serpentine curves and we had lost Steen. Only after we started back downhill did we link up again. “Demand a thousand marks, a thousand dee ems per page,” Wolfgang said without turning his head. “A thousand D-marks per page,” I replied.

Georg and Jörg were standing in the Hotel Sonne parking lot, each off to himself, like two eavesdroppers. It was the air! It was so delicate and cold that it hurt to breathe.

Michaela, more recumbent than sitting, played with the darkened windows, sending them up and down with a hum, and didn't get out until a hotel employee asked about our luggage. She followed him, while Steen steered us toward the restaurant. Steen was carrying on several conversations at once, and we listened with bated breath. “A thousand D-marks,” I whispered to Jörg.

The restaurant seemed to be closed; we were the only guests. Steen headed for a corner table and slid along the bench until he was seated under the stuffed head of a stag. I went to the restroom. I wasn't sure whether Jörg had understood me or not, and so I took my time, but neither Georg nor Jörg followed me.

Jörg was talking about our planned first printing, the distribution structure, the number of pages, etc. “And you two are the owners?” Steen interrupted, nodding at Jörg and Georg. He intended to “shift his advertising” to us. About how much would that cost?

Georg and Jörg said nothing. But at least Georg knew enough to ask just what sort of advertising was involved. Steen's double chin went back into action, but then quickly settled down. “Air Research Technologies,” he exclaimed, “what else? Full page!” Georg began one sentence, then another, then the next and one more without finishing any of them. “Twelve pages to start with, need every column, an ad no one will understand, just twelve pages, sub-tabloid format, isn't much, and if you, and Air Research Technologies, just getting a handle on it, in the Altenburg area, a whole page, why a whole page?”

“What's he talking about?” Steen cried, turning to Wolfgang.

“That you have to consider…” Jörg said, but then broke off midsentence and cast a glance Steen's way, but he had vanished behind his menu—we all had one now. Wolfgang took a deep breath…

“A full page costs one thousand two hundred D-marks,” I burst out, as if I had finally calculated costs. Steen's head reappeared and looked from one of us to another. “One thousand two hundred,” I repeated, and attempted a smile.

“Ahhh,” Steen groaned and threw himself back in his seat. He eyeballed me, which evidently he enjoyed doing.

Jörg gave me a broad wink, as if I were sitting several tables away. Georg stared at his hands. Wolfgang took another audible deep breath. And I had already begun working up my monologue of apology.

Steen said something that sounded like “whaddaya know” or maybe it was “I dunno,” braced himself against the edge of the table, and said these exact words: “I'll advance you
twenty
thousand for now, and then we'll see, agreed?” He stood up halfway and extended a hand first to Georg, then Jörg, then finally me. His tie dangled into an empty wineglass and was still draped over his plate as he sat down. “How do you want it, check or
hard currency
?”—the last two words in English. The waitress presented us each a glass half-filled with champagne.

“Well, which is it?” Steen asked.

“Check doesn't work for us,” Jörg said.

“Hard currency!”
Steen stated, and reached for his glass, but stopped short because no one else had budged.

“Cash,” Wolfgang cried, lifting his glass, “hard currency means cash.”

Silence. Jörg said cash was good, very good. At which point Steen's body raised up a little, his mouth flew open and let loose with a laugh, a laugh that ricocheted off the walls, a laugh unlike any I've ever heard in my life. “Cash!” Steen howled when he was finally capable of getting a word out, but now catapulted into another volley of laughter, gasped for breath, swallowed wrong, coughed.
“Hard currency!”
His double chin shook angrily. By now the laughter had grabbed hold of Wolfgang too.

The longer the outburst lasted, the more tactless I found it. Wolfgang's laughter began to wane now, and finally he just clamped his eyes tight, as if all the laughter was pressed out of him.

“Cash is very good!” Steen shouted. He swiped a folded handkerchief across his mouth, got up, and walked toward Michaela. She took his arm and he escorted her to the table. They were as incongruous here as a couple dressed for the opera is on a streetcar.

We noticed too late that Steen simply raised his glass to toast, whereas we all touched glasses soundlessly. I emptied my glass in one chug. My life force was gradually returning. Contrary to my initial impression, the flowers on the table were real.

The venison was served with spätzle and an incredible sauce. Steen also topped off each forkful with some kind of marmalade. The starter was broccoli soup (they showed us a raw stalk, sort of like cauliflower, but dark green). As if everything else had now been settled, Steen spent the whole time instructing us about food, but then disappeared with a hasty good-bye shortly before dessert—a dark Italian cake, soft and moist and creamy.
²⁷

I don't know when I last saw Michaela look as beautiful and at ease as she did during the meal. When we got up from the table she asked what Herr Steen had been laughing so hard about, and Georg replied that he wasn't certain of the reason himself. But Herr Steen had every intention of handing over twenty thousand D-marks to us. Twenty thousand D-marks, Michaela responded, bought a lot of uncertainty.

We were supposed to be in Offenburg by five. We had lain down for a little nap, but when we arrived the delegation from Altenburg was just climbing off the bus. The Offenburgers were annoyed that they couldn't spot anyone in charge of the expectant throng. Their tall, well-tanned mayor shook every hand, and despite his height kept standing on tiptoe as if afraid he had overlooked someone. Just as Steen had done, he offered Michaela his arm and led her into the town hall, where he took us on a kind of tour. He made a point of always letting Michaela precede him into each room.

We admired the cream-colored carpets, the computers, the desks, the push-button phones, and we took turns lounging in the mayor's plush desk chair. The finale was marked by toasts with champagne, the snacks disappeared quickly.

A small elegant man in a yellow sweater sidled up to me as if just by chance, and after a while asked me whether
I
could explain something to him. Thanking me for my help, he described his problem. Every day ten to twenty little packages arrived for him from Altenburg, each containing a deck of skat cards with a nude female color photo on the back. These people wanted him to provide them other addresses in Offenburg. He stared at me. And what exactly was his question, I wanted to know. He hooked a finger inside his the collar of his sweater, gazed at me a moment longer, thanked me, and then departed as inconspicuously as he had arrived.

Receptions had been planned for those of us in the press to meet with the various political parties, with the exception of the Free Democrats (which has only five members, but does have a seat on the town council).

Michaela wanted to visit the Greens, Jörg was already assigned to the Socialists, and that left the Christian Democrats for Georg.

None of us had any idea what a mistake we were making.

Michaela and I proved a disappointment for the Greens in any case. After we had introduced ourselves and asked for an ashtray, they began to go around the room with their introductions. Whoever had the floor looked directly at us, while the others chatted and giggled. Michaela started off jotting down their names and various activities, but she stopped when someone asked her why she needed to do that. I asked what CI meant, because they were constantly talking about CIs (citizens' initiatives), and about “collecting toads.” Most of them said, “I'm in the CI for airport noise and collect toads.” I asked the woman beside me what toads meant. She didn't understand. Suddenly, however, she shrieked, “Guess what Enrico thinks toad collecting is?”

In the minor uproar that followed one very beautiful woman who spoke in the singsong cadence of her native Swabia stood out above all the rest. “They've blown their cover now! They've blown their cover now.”

Michaela bravely came to my aid. She had made the same association—toads was a common enough slang term for money. She herself had used it often.

But in fact they did collect these animals and carried them across highways. Toad tunnels were already being constructed.

The beautiful woman wanted to know why no one from the Library on the Environment or the civil rights movement had come with us, but before we could answer, she declared, “Those guys are all just the old bigwigs.” Michaela spoke about her
klartext,
and I could sense how much she would have liked to talk about Leipzig and all the rest, if only someone had asked her. “We're not part of the official delegation,” she exclaimed. “We're not part of them!” The environment would be given a lot of attention in our new newspaper, I said. It somehow sounded feeble, and hardly anyone was listening anyway. At the end we sat drinking mineral water with a married couple who told us all about their trip to Weisswasser and Karl-Marx-Stadt. We were hungry.

I got lost on the way back, and it was almost eleven before we found the Hotel Sonne. Jörg came storming toward us.

“What a screwup!” he shouted. “A total screwup!”

Dressed in suit and tie, Wolfgang sat enthroned in the lobby. Like a drunken Bacchus, he dangled limp arms over the armrests of his chair, his crown of hair stood straight up.

“And where were you?” he barked at us, and his arms took on life again, paddled at the air, found their way to the armrests. It looked as if he might stand up, his eyes bugged out—then he sank back again. As he closed his eyes I was afraid he was going to cry.

“They didn't even offer us anything to eat,” Michaela protested. Jörg kept rubbing his eyes and forehead. Georg paced back and forth on his long legs, his upper body as lopsided as a jockey's.

Jan Steen had spent the whole evening waiting for us in a “fancy restaurant” up in the Black Forest. Wolfgang had tried every twenty minutes to phone us. Around ten o'clock Steen had angrily tossed his napkin on his plate and driven home. Heaven only knew if we would ever see the man again.

“But how were we supposed to know that?” Michaela asked. “Nobody knew about it!” Jörg shouted. “Nobody, nobody, nobody!” Instead of responding to the question, Wolfgang spoke oracularly about the one that got away, the really big fish that got away. The phrase gave him some kind of grim pleasure, in fact he seemed to console himself with it, because we didn't hear him utter anything but that phrase for the rest of the night.

Jörg and Georg sat on our beds. We peeled our eggs over the cloth on the nightstand. Our one luxury consisted of trading the sandwiches we had fixed the night before. Plus cold tea drunk from the cap of the thermos.

We were now the same people who had climbed into a Wartburg in Altenburg before dawn. What lay between that long-ago morning and our evening repast was merely a strange dream.

Michaela suddenly stopped chewing. “This may well be our breakfast,” she said, putting her nibbled sandwich back on the table. “And who's going to pay for our rooms now?” Between us we had just under seventy D-marks. Georg tried to set our minds at ease. But then he was the only one who had eaten. The saddest part, as Michaela saw it, was that Steen had been waiting for us in a
fancy
restaurant.

The next morning we were actually awakened by the crow of a rooster.

Later on, we each double-checked to make sure that the breakfast buffet was included in the price and that two nights had been paid for in advance. We didn't run into Wolfgang in the dining room, and he wasn't in his room either. We were, so to speak, hanging around paradise with pink slips in hand. Michaela arm in arm with the mayor adorned the front page of the local paper.

The second day passed without fanfare and included visits to the hospital and the daily paper that has a monopoly here. We saw nothing of Burda Publishing. Jörg was interviewed on the radio. In the evening the newspaper czarina held a dinner for us. During the two hours of “exchanging views” we took turns stealing off to place a call to the Hotel Sonne, prepared to cut out on a moment's notice.

The czarina—as far as I'm aware, the first millionaire I've ever seen—had, wouldn't you know, grayish blue eyes, black hair, and skin like milk. Over dessert she offered to supply us with printers, computers, and everything else we might need for a newspaper.

“So you want to hire us?” Georg asked. The czarina unfolded her slender hands in a gesture that was intended to say: You heard me right.