New Lives (6 page)

Jörg explained to her that our first issue would be coming out in three weeks. The czarina's eyes grew ever narrower, and her smile took on a dreamy look.

“We belong to us, so to speak,” Georg summarized in an apologetic voice.

“That's a shame,” she said, “really a great shame.” For a moment I had the feeling we were making a mistake.

The next morning Wolfgang pounded on our door. “He's downstairs waiting. He doesn't have much time.”

Steen was in a splendid mood. His remarks kept Wolfgang in smiles the whole time. I was just launching into my speech about a big misunderstanding, when Steen cried, “Open wide!” He held a fork under my nose, expecting me to take a bite. It was just bacon, but was it ever good! Steen placed an order for me. Jörg and Georg likewise opened wide.

Michaela, who had wriggled into her old jeans, was the last to arrive. Steen obliged by following her every step, but his old enthusiasm had faded. Nevertheless he acted as if we had all spent the last two days together amusing ourselves. He waxed enthusiastic about the Black Forest, about Basel and Strasbourg, only out of the clear blue sky to urge us to buy German cars. For him anything else was out of the question. It was his way of helping the economy circulate. Anyone who wanted to do well had to make sure others did well too. I'm doing a poor job of recapping here. He said it better. Far more important was his tone of voice. Steen is full of self-confidence, confident that he has an honest relationship with the world, ready to render a full account of his deeds at any time.

Once again he kept his good-byes brief. He wished us a good trip, kissed Michaela on both cheeks, and vanished.

We shouldn't make such long faces, Michaela hissed. Wolfgang hadn't budged the whole time, and his good-bye to Steen had been just a nod. He wasn't in any hurry after that either. He pulled up closer to the table, gave his lighter a click, and lit a cigarette. He noisily slurped his coffee. I already suspected he had been assigned to tell us something. No one had dared blame him for yesterday evening's screwup. After all, we had him to thank for booking our hotel rooms. Wolfgang shoved his plate to one side, brushed crumbs from the tablecloth, pulled out a couple of sheets of paper, and laid them out in front of him. “Here,” he began without any preliminaries, “are two hundred twenty-six addresses that the newspaper should be sent to. Here are two hundred D-marks for gas and another hundred in expenses for each of you, and here's…twenty thousand. In addition,” he continued in a monotone, “he left this for you.” He now emptied a cloth bag emblazoned with the same advertising as the lighters, ballpoint pens, notepads, and pencils that cascaded across the plates and cups. “You only have to sign
here.
” He shoved the gewgaws aside, laid a paper in front of me, and handed me his pen. I thought it had to do with the hundred D-marks and gas money. So I signed and passed the sheet on. Only when Michaela hesitated did I realize I had signed a receipt for the twenty thousand. “One more can't hurt,” Jörg said, signed his own name, and passed it on to Georg. In return we received a paper with a series of flourishes that formed the name Jan Steen.

But that still wasn't the end of it. You remember that old German proverb, don't you, about how the devil always shits where the piles are biggest? Well, the Offenburg town hall phoned and said that, if we had time, we could stop by—they would like to put a few things together for us, office supplies and such. (Swabians say office “stores.”)

We had a splendid view out over the Rhine valley, all the way to some distant mountains in France. The hills around Offenburg roll gently, most of them unforested on top; the highest peaks of the Black Forest couldn't be seen from here or were hidden by clouds.

Gläsle was waiting for us outside the town hall. It wasn't long before our eyes were welling with tears. When it was all over we even hauled away an electric typewriter that we've baptized the “green monster.”

Gläsle drove Georg and Jörg to a used-car lot—we want to buy a VW bus—so Michaela and I strolled through town. And because we suddenly had money in our pockets we went shopping—stainless steel pots, as if for our trophy collection.

That's it for this time. Hugs, Enrico

Verotchka,

Mamus sends her greetings. All your postcards are on her kitchen counter. She's a little peeved at us both—because your own children really shouldn't lie to you.
²⁸
I wrote down your address for her. She wants to know how long you'll be staying and if it isn't dangerous and if Nicola's mother is feeling better.

We're supposed to go to Paris this weekend. Mamus sees herself as a personal ambassador of happiness. She's plundered her bank account and won't admit it, but drops all kinds of coy hints.

Although we—I took Robert along—were in Dresden only yesterday, our time there is somehow a haunting memory of nowhere in particular, as if I had merely dreamed it. Mamus had baked a cheesecake. But the apartment was so cold and tidy it was almost as if it wasn't lived in.

It's only when you see her there inside her own four walls that you realize how much Mamus has changed. I was happy to spot any gesture I recognized—the way she lights the stove and kneels down to check the flame, the way she stands at the pantry threshold as if it might be easier to reach rather than take another step, the way she pivots on the heel of one foot when she opens the door to the fridge, the way she holds her coffee cup with both hands, elbows planted on the table. Sounding as if she were offering me some condensed milk, she asked if we would also be voting for the Alliance for Germany.
²⁹
Mamus has suddenly begun to spot people toadying everywhere and sees her fellow nurses as “pure opportunists.” I asked her why she herself had never thought of leaving. I wouldn't have wanted to, she replied, without looking directly at me.

There's been no change in her situation at the clinic. If she has bad luck and is assigned to a shift with her “tormentors”—and that probably includes most of the nurses in surgery—she sometimes doesn't say a word the whole day.

Robert treats Mamus like a second grandmother, which obviously does her good. And each time Robert agrees to come along, I feel like I've been honored too. Although I'm always afraid I'm boring him. This time I should perhaps have made the trip without him, except that it would have taken on its own special significance, as if I were pressuring her for a heart-to-heart talk. There would hardly have been a chance of that in any case, because the doorbell was constantly ringing. Maybe the change Mamus has undergone has become the rule now. All sorts of people are showing their true colors. Did you know that Herr Rothe is a longtime fan of Franz Josef Strauss? Frau Schubert explained to me what difficulties I would have had as a teacher, and the two Graupner sisters talked about Denmark, where a cousin of theirs lives, and how at last they could write to her. When I asked in amazement why they hadn't written to their cousin before now, I was corrected by cries of “Wrong, completely wrong,” and then Tilda Graupner proudly proclaimed: “As head of accounting I didn't dare have contacts in the West.” You're the star of the building. Your leaving makes you the first to have made the right decision. And some of the glow from your halo illumines your brother. The Schaffners are said to leave their apartment only after dark, or at least the revolutionary (or reactionary?) residents of the building have agreed not to greet those Stasi spies.

Robert wanted to look at photographs again. I had never noticed before that the albums only go up as far as Father's death.
³⁰
The cupboard still has that same old darning-egg, sewing-kit odor.

Suddenly Mamus grabbed a photo and looked at it over the rim of her glasses—a handsome young couple—and cried, “What are they doing here!” She shredded it like a check that she had filled out wrong. “You weren't even born yet,” Mamus informed me. “Total strangers!” She kept the scraps in her hand and went on providing commentary for the pictures that Robert held out to her. I secretly pocketed two shots of you. Sometimes I'm afraid I can't bear our being separated any longer. If only I could figure out what your plans are.

We had supper with Johann. His epistles are getting shorter. There were still a dozen of them lying around here, and I had no choice but to read them before the trip. When I did, it occurred to me that he might be gathering materials for a novel about a parish. Ever since he confessed to Franziska about us,
³¹
he's behaved rather rudely to me, especially in her presence. He could barely bring himself to offer me his hand. He had to “finish something up,” he exclaimed, and disappeared. And so Robert and I waited in the kitchen, helping Franziska set the table and gazing out the window at the city. Franziska's charm has entirely deserted her over the past two years. She talks quite openly about her drinking and that she really needs to quit. Listening to her you might think she simply doesn't have time to spare for treatment at a clinic. Johann confided to me a couple of years ago that he sometimes provokes arguments because he needs the tension to be productive. I can't help thinking of that when I see Franziska like this.

She knows about my letters, because Johann reads them to her to prove that “nothing's going on” between him and me.

Gesine will soon be five. At first glance she seems untouched by all this unhappiness. She chose Robert as her knight, led him through the apartment, and played the piano for him. It was something new for her to learn that there are people who don't play some instrument.

When Jo's finished with his theology exams, there's a pastorate with three parishes waiting for him in the Ore Mountains, not far from Annaberg-Buchholz. Franziska and he have already visited it; the parsonage is large and has a huge orchard. It would never have come to this a year ago, Franziska said, because Johann would have looked for a job that left him time for writing and his band. Franziska doesn't want to leave Dresden come hell or high water, or at least not to go to Annaberg. And then came the bombshell! She was sure I already knew that Johann planned to be a candidate in the local elections. And three weeks ago it was he who accused me of betraying art.

When I asked him about it later, he beat around the bush. He had wanted to tell me in person and not write me. He didn't have a chance anyway, was doing it out of sense of responsibility, people had pushed him into it, maybe he could make a little difference. He sounded like someone who had just become a “candidate of the Party.”
³²
I told him there was no need for a bad conscience or for him to justify himself and that I thought he had made the right decision.

He also mentioned a bit too offhandedly that he hopes to publish a book about the events in Dresden last October.
³³
Jo resents his own fate, because he was denied the privilege of being arrested, interrogated, and beaten. Believe me, I know him.

Jo had no questions for me. His aloofness, if not to say coldness left me paralyzed. If it hadn't been for Franziska, who was constantly passing me something, filling my teacup, and fussing over Robert, it would have felt like being shown the door.

But when I talked about you, he slowly thawed, and suddenly smiled at me with a heartfelt warmth that left me more helpless than his silence had. He jumped up and presented me with a book, a duplicate he had found in a rare bookstore—a first edition of Eisler's
Faustus
³⁴
—and said that we definitely had to see each other more often, especially now. In the end we are all left with only a few friends anyway. He insisted, absurdly enough, on fixing sandwiches for our trip back; there might be a traffic jam. Robert and I took turns pointing to what we wanted and watched our sandwiches being prepared. Like a mason working plaster, Jo pushed the butter to the outer edge, spreading it around again several times as if to make certain everything was well greased. Then he looked up as if to say, this is something I'd do only for you.

Hugs, your Heinrich

PS: I'm sitting at the “green monster” and feel a draft at my back. I think Jörg or Georg has just come in. I turn around—and have to sneeze. “Gesundheit,” a woman's voice says. I hear the door close. I sneeze two more times, and each time the same composed female voice blesses me.—“Who are you?” I ask, and walk toward her. She is crouched next to the stove, massaging her toes. A smile skitters across her face, briefly easing the tenseness in her features. Then she makes a hissing sound as she draws air in through her mouth and breathes it out again audibly through her nose. Her stockings have holes in the heels. “Don't look,” she says. “I thought,” she continues, and presses her lips together for a second, “I thought you asked me to come in. I knocked.” With her back to the tile stove she slowly pushes herself to her feet. She tries to slip into her shoes. “Ouch! Ouch!” she whines. “That hurts!”

“For heaven's sake,” I exclaim. She is looking up now, and what I had taken for a strand of hair stuck in the corner of her mouth turns out to be a scar. I realize that she's a noblewoman.

“It no longer keeps me warm,” I say apologetically, pointing to my coat hanging beside the door. I am angry at myself because I've been planning for days to take it to the cleaners so they can restore its old qualities. “Would you like to come along?” I ask. “If we leave now we can make it to the cleaners by six.”

“How can I possibly do that?” she cries. Her voice is clogged with tears. Didn't I have eyes in my head, even a blind man could that see she was in no condition to take so much as a single step.

“May I carry you?” I ask, unable to suppress the expectation in my voice. Her blouse has come open at the waist, and I see a triangle of her stomach, her navel at its center—just like the eye of God, I think. The comparison pleases me. The most wonderful opportunities often arise out of minor inconveniences, I say. She bursts into laughter. She lets her eyes wander openly over me. Evidently everything about me makes her laugh, I appear to provoke it. Finally, putting both hands over her mouth, she is overcome by a seizure of laughter she cannot control. She struggles for air, buckles over. Her hair, the tips bright red, falls down over her face, hiding it completely.