New Lives (61 page)

But for my people this meeting was a kind of special celebration. They had covered the long table with sheets of newsprint and set out candles on saucers. Each place had two plastic cups. They had bought mineral water and wine, plus loads of pretzel sticks. The room was, of course, too bright for candles.

Pringel and Schorba were wearing the same gray suit, and both had on dark shirts and both were sporting reddish blue ties. You might have thought it was the office uniform. Kurt, on the other hand, was clad in Bermuda shorts and a yellow short-sleeved shirt. Sitting silently off to one side, his elbows on his knees, he was openly and calmly ogling the women. Manuela, who has had the wart on her chin removed, was showing off one of her skirts split up one side, and her décolletage is getting more and more daring. Evi and Frau Schorba had been to the beauty parlor and their permanents made them look the same age, like those super-numerary spinsters who used to attend Youth Consecration ceremonies. Mona had merely put on some lipstick. For the first time I noticed that she's quite beautiful.

All the chairs were on one side of the table, as if it wasn't us but the baron who was to be put to the test.

When he came swooping in ten minutes late, he crossed the room in double time, chucked his attaché case on the visitor's table, grabbed the telephone receiver, and dialed.

Deathly silence reigned as he spoke his full name. He was so perfect at reporting the accident it sounded as if he were reading from a Red Cross brochure. “Yes, I'll wait,” he said, looking around at us for the first time. “Right outside your door,” he whispered.

I don't know why none of us made a move. Only after the baron had hung up did we follow him out.

The baron, who had maneuvered the crazy old man to a stable position on his side, knelt down beside him and called out, “Herr Hausmann, help is on the way!” The old man groaned, blinked, and seemed to be checking us all out, including me, but with no visible reaction that I could notice. His hands were smeared with blood. The baron kept calling out, “Herr Hausmann, Herr Hausmann!”—it was the first time I'd ever heard the old man's name—and told him to try to stay awake. After the baron had rejected a glass of water for the old man, there was nothing more we could do other than keep pushing the button for the light timer. The baron later helped heave the old man onto the stretcher, who then closed his eyes as if he didn't want to watch while he was being jockeyed down the steep staircase. Astrid the wolf barked at him as he was carried out.

As cold-blooded as it may sound, the accident had eased the tension and awkwardness. Without a trace of irony, the baron thanked us for the lovely setup of the room. Within moments he had succeeded in making himself the center of attention. And so the next few hours simply flew by.

The baron promised everyone—“and when I say ‘everyone,' I mean each and every one of you”—a thousand D-marks if our city-map project succeeds. We just have to be the first.

Evi and Mona now knew that when it came to advertising there was not a better, more modern, more efficient workplace in the world than theirs. They might well be the very first secretaries in East Germany to be already working on an Apple Macintosh.

He called Herr Schorba and Kurt the backbone of the enterprise. Distribution would grow in importance from week to week. Were they aware that their work would prove crucial for the success or failure of such a medium-size company?

He dubbed Pringel the salt in the soup, Frau Schorba the heart of the enterprise, and Manuela the diva and star of our troupe. Because without her and her colleagues, no matter how good our product, how hard we worked, we would simply have nothing whatever to do. (He didn't mention that her earnings will turn out to be a serious problem. Manuela has moved her mother in with her, and since that means she no longer has to worry about the children she's scouring the countryside day and night; I'm afraid that she'll soon be able to live solely from her contracts.)
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A time like what we all—“all of us sitting here right now”—would be experiencing over the coming months and years was not likely to come again soon. “One hundred twenty thousand copies!”—we should let those words melt in our mouths. And that was only the beginning. “Do you know what a concentration of power this is? From the Battle of the Nations Monument to the foothills of the Ore Mountains, from the fortress churches at Geithain to the pyramids at Ronneberg—that's your territory. That's you!” His gaze shifted continually from one of us to the next.

“And you need to keep in mind that you are the only ones who are going up against the big boys in the business. This newspaper, you—you who have gathered here today—are defying international conglomerates. You're sailing out in a nutshell to do battle with a whole armada. Whether you want to or not, you are defending something that makes this world worth living in.”

Like a sorcerer the baron held us spellbound in his gaze. And if a pair of eyes did wander off and lose themselves in the room, then it was only to make certain that all this was not a dream.

Our enterprise is going to have to grow in the near future. We'll need more new staff. And yet each of us has had the good luck to be in on the ground floor, and each of us will soon be in charge of a smaller or larger division. That's an enormous responsibility. Because if one of us fails, we'll all feel the consequences.
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He admonished me to be hard and uncompromising when it comes to sloppy work and to make no exceptions, always to keep a firm grip on the wheel.

It was only after we broke up that we thought about the old man again. There were a few splotches of his blood on the hardwood floor. Which was why each of us took a giant step, as if he were still lying there.

Hugs,

Your Enrico

         

Dear Jo,

I forgot to take this letter with me this morning. I can now tell you the outcome. The relationship has now been clearly defined. We set up an appointment with a notary public. I sat across from Jörg and Michaela—she represented the baron.

I can talk with Jörg. If only it weren't for Marion! Just as dirt always collects in the same corner, I find some new hatred written on her face each morning […] Besides which, she has lost weight till she's just skin and bones. Her belt is all that holds her trousers up. She looks right through me, and if I don't get out of her way, she jostles me. If I let her provoke me, we'd come to blows every day. Of late she's been claiming that the articles I write are intended to block out as much space as possible so that really essential things won't get published. My “machinations,” my “shameful behavior,” are the essential thing. Marion has even come up with the theory that journalists should be elected by the voters.

How quickly the worm has turned! So now you can go right ahead and plan your move to Altenburg.

Hugs, Your Enrico

Verotchka,

I've tried a hundred times now, but can't get through. Where are you hiding?

We have nothing to blame ourselves for.
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Not on Michaela's account. I always guessed it was the case, but now I know for sure. The affair with Barrista didn't happen just by chance. Michaela planned it all, in cold blood.

No, it's not just my imagination. I'm talking about her miscarriage. It was all so unreal, in this world, but not of this world. I've never forgotten, of course not—but how to talk about it?

I was at Michaela's today, I needed to speak with Barrista (his stupid Rolex scheme has become a curse!), I thought he would be at home. Michaela didn't hear the doorbell. I rapped on the window of my old room. It's now her “studio,” her “exercise studio.”

There she was, standing in front of me in her underwear and red sneakers, covered with sweat, and told me how she'd “lost four and a half pounds, four and a half pounds in two days.” I watched her get back on her treadmill, dumbbells in hand. “Another five hundred meters,” she panted.

I waited in the kitchen. How strange things can seem in so short a time. Mounds of zwieback, diet crackers, and low-fat milk. I didn't notice the freezer at first glance. Its gleaming whiteness made everything else look grungy.

Michaela patted her stomach and said she wasn't tucking it in, the fat was gone—I had to admit it, didn't I? She talked about willpower and how much you can accomplish just by training once a day. She kept talking about her tummy while she puttered around half naked. And then I said, “Actually it's kind of sad that your tummy's so flat.” Verotchka, don't misunderstand me, you and I, we could have taken the baby, I would have wanted it. At first I thought Michaela hadn't got what I was talking about or didn't want to. But then she looked at me and called me a dreamer and egotistical and some other things too. Suddenly she said, “You'll believe anything”—and was startled by her own words. I asked what she meant by that. She didn't reply. Even she couldn't find a way to talk herself out of it that fast. YOU'LL BELIEVE ANYTHING!

At the time I had hauled the head nurse over the coals—how could she allow it, what a brutal thing to do, to put a “miscarriage” in the same ward with the “abortions”…The hallway would have been better, I said, yes, the hallway, that would have been more humane. No one said a word, not even the nurses. YOU'LL BELIEVE ANYTHING!

I told Michaela to swear it had been a miscarriage, and she swore it. But it was a lie. A lie, perjury. I couldn't take anymore, I left, without a good-bye.

That's all, Verotchka. We would have taken it, wouldn't we?

Your Heinrich

Ah, Nicoletta,

It seems to me as if untold riches await me, await us at the end of this month. Everything will be, must be, very, very wonderful. Please don't be angry that I haven't written for so long, there's been so much to do here. What I really want to ask is: How are you? What are you up to? Would you have an hour to spare if I came to Bamberg? I would love to talk with you in the present, instead of always writing about the past. But it looks as if I have no choice.

And so back to Altenburg and the pistol under my sweater.

During the whole demonstration I was completely calm and detached. If someone had noticed I would have shown them my booty, pretended it was a joke, and handed it over at the next best opportunity. Michaela kept me at her side by linking her arm in mine and was busy the whole time responding to greetings, whether she knew the people or not. She whispered to me which of our neighbors she had spotted, and now and then called my attention to someone. Sometimes we tried to guess where we knew them from—a salesgirl, a post-office clerk, and Robert's grade-school teacher was in the crowd too. A couple of times people greeted us, and then after just a few words crowned our serendipitous camaraderie with a hug.

There was the usual barrage of whistles and chants in front of the Stasi villa. Once we arrived at Market Square, the whole thing threatened to peter out, but then a voice caught people's ears—it sounded as if it were used to bellowing. The man had climbed up on a bench and was hurling his tirades of hatred to the crowd. The adjectives he assigned to the Socialist Unity Party got nastier and nastier: rotten, prostituted, fucked-up. He thrust a fist heavenward at every stressed syllable. After six or seven sentences he couldn't come up with anything else, and so started over again, so that his brief oration began to turn into a kind of refrain. Above all his demand that all these fucked-up functionaries be sent to the coal mines was greeted each time with cheers. But then, just as I thought he would call for us to storm the Rathaus, he let it go at that, shouted, “We'll be back! We'll be back!” and climbed down from the bench. I've told you once before about this revolutionary orator. He was the guy who offered to write a letter to the editor demanding that Wieland Förster's sculpture be demolished.
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As we drove home Michaela was euphoric. But it was only when we turned on the television that the day became a real triumph. A live report of the demonstration in Berlin was on. She had never watched television with such a good conscience, Michaela said, because ultimately we too had made our contribution. And she kept on watching the entire afternoon, slowly moving ever closer to the screen, hoping to catch a glimpse of Thea.

But as for me, from one moment to the next my mood turned so wretched that I would have loved to break into sobs and confess everything in the hope that Michaela would take pity on me and remove that pistol from my life. I was convinced that at any second they would arrive to search our apartment. I gave fate its chance by going to the kitchen after first laying the pistol on the sofa and leaving the door ajar. And in fact Michaela did call my name, but only because the pretzel-cruncher from Thea's gathering was on. He gave the appearance of profound thoughtfulness and concern, all the while moving his small head from side to side as if he wanted people to remember his face from all angles. I stretched out my arm, aimed over my forefinger, and pushed down with my raised thumb—“Bang!” Michaela laughed.

I put the pistol in the cupboard with my manuscript files and sat down next to Michaela. My wooziness appeared to have passed. When the live report was over, all the news broadcasts, both East and West, included clips of the speeches. That gave me the opportunity to pursue the question that all my thoughts were whirling around: Who was it that I was supposed to shoot?

At first I thought any of the speechmakers would do. Then I chose my victims on the basis of sympathy and antipathy. In the end I realized how pointless it was to make the forces of opposition my target. That narrowed my choice down to Schabowski and Markus Wolf, and so I decided on Wolf, because that would result in the mobilization of Stasi troops. Every time Wolf lowered the hand that clutched a sheet of paper and the chorus of whistles and boos swelled louder, I pulled the trigger, sometimes from out of the crowd, sometimes from the rear. I came close to creeping into the screen, trying to find the best standpoint, and could feel the pistol fly upward, recoiling against my right wrist as I fired the shot. I realized how difficult it would be to escape without anyone recognizing me. And there might be sharpshooters posted somewhere too. Far and wide, not a policeman in sight. Suddenly it came to me: I don't want to remain unrecognized. Why shouldn't I own up to my deed?