New Lives (63 page)

But that's not the case. Just as in a game of chess, I was merely trying to calculate a few moves in advance. I certainly didn't see reunification coming, although even then there were a few already demanding it. And as I've said, I had no concept of any future. With the fall of the wall, my personal future had dissolved into nothingness. Had I not had to climb the orator's pulpit for Michaela's sake, such pronouncements would never have passed my lips. Of course I could have said something different, too. But what? What else was there to say? There wasn't anything else to say.

Whenever Michaela took the podium to announce the next speaker and, as the
Leipziger Volkszeitung
put it, request that the crowd show “moderation and decorum,” she seemed so free and self-assured—and earned more applause for her quick wit than most of the others had for their speeches. But now that she had managed to extract herself from the cluster of people wanting to talk with her and came over to us, she seemed depressed. She didn't deign to give me a single glance. On the drive home her mood toppled into total darkness. I took it to be stage fright before a premiere.

Once we were home and I was finally able to ask her what had happened, she said, “Nothing,” and vanished into our room. She was crying.

“Is this it?” she asked when I entered. She held the envelope up. “Is this why you're the way you are?” I recognized Nadja's handwriting on the envelope. “You don't need to worry about us,” Michaela said, “we'll manage all right.” She blew her nose.

It was one of the few moments in my life in which my conscience was pure, ready for any kind of interrogation.

I asked Michaela to open the envelope. She shook her head. “Please,” I said. “No,” she said. She wouldn't subject herself to that.

I slit the envelope open with a nail file lying on her nightstand, unfolded the sheet of paper, and began to read aloud. Right at the start Nadja wrote that she was aware that I now had a family. She herself was living with Jaroslav, a Czech, and was expecting her first child at the end of February. She asked about how my manuscript was going and complained about her work.

Michaela said nothing. Even when I laid the letter down in front of her, she didn't budge. Finally she asked if she could have the stamps. Then she folded the letter back up and inserted it in its envelope.

“So then what is the reason?” She stared at me.

“For what?” I asked.

“For being the way you are.”

Before I could reply the doorbell rang for all it was worth. My mother was standing there, her chin jutted forward so she could peer out from under her cap. A cyclamen rose up threateningly from her right hand, and in her left she was holding a swaying shopping net, whose contents I recognized as the familiar springform pan.

“Justice triumphs!” she cried. She spoke very loudly, carrying on like someone hard of hearing, and each of her movements was accompanied by a rattle, rasp, or jingle.

Loyally devouring his cheesecake, Robert didn't let Mother's chatter disturb him. The fall of the wall was her personal triumph, and she made fun of us for not having been in the West yet. She definitely wanted to travel to Bavaria, because the “welcome money” was highest there,
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and together it would come to 560 D-marks, a sum that you could actually do something with.

Later, at the theater, my mother admitted how shocked she had been by the way Michaela looked. Weren't we happy because of what had happened?

Except for one woman whom nobody knew the whole first row was empty. The balcony hadn't even been opened. Of just short of sixty people in the audience, fifteen belonged to Norbert's entourage and about thirty were friends and family of the actors, just like us.

At first the audience fell into old habits and applauded every punch line. But this enthusiasm soon faded, as if they finally realized what had happened over the last few days.

After intermission several people did not return to their seats, and the play simply sickened and died. Since there was no reaction to the punch lines now, the actors rushed their lines all the more.

At the end Norbert Maria Richter barely managed to get a bow in.

Tuesday I was called to the general manager's office again.

Jonas and Frau Sluminksi were both sitting at his desk, as if they were doing homework together. They both stood up at the same time, extended a hand without saying a word, and we all sat down. Jonas looked at a letter in front of him. His hair fell down into his face. “I'm leaving,” he said. And then, raising his head and flipping his hair back, he added, “I've resigned.”

He enjoyed my surprise. Happiness glistened in Sluminski's eyes. Had it been because of
Gotham,
I asked. He shook his head, and Sluminski rocked hers slightly too.

“What's left here for me to do?” he said, gazing at me with his perennially moist eyes as if actually expecting some sort of answer.

“Yes,” I said. “I've asked myself that question.”

Instead of wishing him good luck, extending my hand, getting up from my chair, and leaving, I just sat there. I was sorry to see him go, I said. But I could well understand his decision.

He knew, he said, that people talked behind his back and how they would lambaste him now, but he had no regrets. If he could see even the slightest chance of being able to accomplish anything meaningful here, he would stay. But that was out of the question now. I nodded. And then he said that Sluminski would be running the business end of things for now—and she looked up and noted that she would welcome any and all support. I nodded again. “Or would you like to do it?” Jonas asked, grinning his old grin. “Would you?” I shook my head, and then we shook hands again.

As I entered the canteen Jonas's departure was already being celebrated as a victory. I sat off to one side like someone from the old regime, happy to be left in peace.

“Jonas is leaving,” I told Michaela, who hadn't been at the theater. And because she looked at me as if she wasn't about to have her leg pulled, I added, “He told me himself.”

I had no explanation for her as to why I of all people had been singled out for special consideration. Michaela presumed one of Jonas's tricks lay behind it, some really nasty machination. When I didn't reply she asked if I was actually so vain as to think he had done it out of personal concern. I shrugged. “No, no, my dear,” she said, “there's strategy and tactics behind it. Did someone just happen to drop by and see you two together?”

I said no, but did mention Sluminski. At the sound of her name Michaela jumped to her feet. “What was she doing there?” she exclaimed.

Even as I repeated Jonas's words, a vein swelled at Michaela's temple. “She'll be running things for now? Her? The Party secretary?”

“Only the business side,” I said.

“And you?” she shouted. “What did you say?”

I tried to recall my words. “You didn't say anything,” she shouted before I could even answer. “Nothing, not one thing.” Michaela stared at me, her head was starting to tremble, she was about to say something else, but then fell silent, as if she didn't dare say what she was thinking, and left the room.

Somehow I had lost the capacity for emotions that Michaela experienced on such a grand scale. I had become numb, mute, devoid of emotion. I no longer felt my wounds.

When at the end of the week and without an inkling that anything was up, I called Mother, the first thing she said was, “Did you know about this? Did you?”

“Know what?” I asked. And when she didn't reply, I said, “What am I supposed to have known?” Instead of answering, my mother hung up.

I called her back. I knew she would
never
be able to survive it. I had no hope at all, but she answered.

“Mother!” I exclaimed. I don't think I've probably ever sounded so pleading.

“Actor my foot! Vera works in a
fabric
shop. She's a
sales clerk
! And
you
knew that! Right?”

I was just happy to hear
that
accusation.
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“You wanted to believe it,” I shouted. “Didn't it ever bother you that Vera never sent any reviews?”

My mother said she'd always thought the Stasi had removed them from the envelope.

Finally she said, “I demand only one thing: not to be deceived by my children. That's something I cannot handle, Enrico, not in my own family. How can you even expect me to take it?” Then she hung up.

I walked home. On the way I thought about Emilie Paulini again for the first time, and how she had presumably been buried at some point over the last few days.

Your

Enrico T.

Dear Nicoletta,

Why have you remained so present to me, Nicoletta, so much so that it sometimes makes me shudder? How many times have I painted your portrait in my mind—it's so vivid in my memory. As if in a fever I evoke your presence with an unhealthy craving. I'm frighteningly good at it, but when I find myself alone again, my own company seems intolerable. And then I write you a letter.

Two weeks after the wall was opened there was no one left who hadn't been in the West except us. All the kids in Robert's class had seen
Batman.
Michaela found some excuse every time. “The West isn't going anywhere,” she said, and she had tons and tons of work to do, by which she meant the meetings she attended at least once a day, sometimes holding them at home. It was her idea to publish a newsletter in which all of New Forum's working committees would have an opportunity to place items. In Michaela's eyes that meant publicizing injustices and abuses—the Sluminski case, for instance—because no one else was going to do it.

When the chief dramaturge assigned me the task of delivering several cartons of libretti to Henschel Verlag in Berlin, I agreed mainly because I was worried about Vera. I could guess what the opening of the wall meant for her. Her lies, big and small, would blow up in her face.
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When I invited Robert to come along, he hugged me for the first time. And now Michaela wanted to go to Berlin too.

First, however, my self-control was to be tested.

In November you still needed a stamp in your papers to cross the border. Robert accompanied me to the provisional office set up by the police in the one-story building behind the Konsum Market. (Michaela had refused to appear as a supplicant before these people ever again.)

Since the place looked dead, I assumed the door was locked and was just trying to jiggle at it when it flew open in my hand. There was the odor of a noonday meal. The room we entered through folding doors was as dark as a church. Except that just above some desks that had been shoved together, a lamp had been hung, and beneath it sat the uniformed personnel, all of them hunched over as if trying to hide their faces. The counters and the door to the kitchen were barricaded with stacked tables and chairs.

Uncertain from which side I ought to approach, I chose a circuitous route. I kept at least one person's back in front of me and glanced down into a drawer full of stamps and inkpads, keys and seals. A metal lunch box shimmered beside a briefcase, there were two apple cores in the wastebasket. For a second I was afraid I'd walked into a trap. The blond didn't recognize me, or at least pretended he didn't. He raised his arm, his hand opened up, I gave him my papers.

It was like remembering a dream. In the same moment the two other uniformed men looked up from their work, and by the light of the lamp I could tell that it was the black-haired cop and the fat cop. The trio that I had joined in their squad car on November 4th was now complete.

I didn't seriously consider trying to flee. But I did glance toward the door as if I expected someone to be standing there blocking our retreat. I called Robert over to me.

“Have
you
been over yet?” I asked, looking at the blond as he inspected my accordion-fold passport to the last page,
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as if every stamp from every border crossing held great interest for him. The blond then added his stamp and folded it all back up again. Robert said later that I paid a fee, even got a receipt, but I don't recall it. With the same gesture with which he took my pass, the blond handed it back. Just as he had ignored my thank-you, he now ignored my question. I headed for the exit, Robert kept close to my side.
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The next day we made our libretti delivery in Berlin and then had our noon meal in a pub near Henschel Verlag. We had driven our old route, instead of the one I had pictured in my mind: turning off in the direction of West Berlin just after the three-lane asphalt stretch near Michendorf. Berlin, by which I mean the eastern half of the city, was nothing more than an antechamber where you waited before striding into the great hall. I was amazed that the waitress and counterman were still working here in the East, as if the wall were still there. After we had eaten, we drove down Friedrich Strasse in the direction of Checkpoint Charlie. This was Robert's wish. While we were waiting to be passed through—there were only a few cars ahead of us—I realized for the first time the meaning of the word “checkpoint.” The syllables checkpoint-charlie had been just a sound, a noise, a bubble-gum bubble that bursts just as the bells of the Spassky Tower ring
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out into the moment of greatest silence. I asked Robert if he knew what the word “checkpoint” meant. He did. Michaela said I shouldn't play high school teacher. Pass, glance, pass, thanks—and through. No thumbing to find the stamp, nothing. Michaela said the real checkpoint had to still be up ahead. I turned right. I had no idea where I was driving. We had wanted to go to West Berlin, and here we were in West Berlin. Do you understand? West Berlin meant arriving there, meant being in the West, not just driving around aimlessly.