New Lives (66 page)

I don't know what I should think of the matter. Even if I overlook things that are obviously his imagination, the story is still fantastic enough.

They had gone to Denmark, the Baltic shore. From Robert's description the hotel must have been a small castle. They had ridden in a carriage from the airport—Barrista travels only through the ether these days—no cars were allowed in the nature preserve.

On the steps leading up to the castle stood a squad of servants in livery to receive them and carry every piece of luggage, including Robert's old camping bag, up to their rooms—which had balconies and a view to the sea. He couldn't decide which was more wonderful: to sit out on the balcony or to lie on the beach, to ride in a carriage or in a boat, to eat breakfast in his room or in the splendid dining hall. He also had tennis lessons and played mini-golf with Barrista and Michaela. No sooner had he eaten the roll on his breakfast plate than one of the waiters would abduct it and replace it with another. He had found it unpleasant, however, that girls and boys who he guessed were hardly any older than he had to be ready to respond to the guests' every need—even at night, when they would sit on red velvet cushions in the lobby, dozing off now and then, but bolting up pale-faced out of their sleep the moment they heard footsteps. He had made friends with a few kids his own age at the beach, and was once even asked along on a sailboat ride.

There were fireworks at midnight on Saturday, more spectacular than New Year's Eve, as he put it. He had invited a few of his beach acquaintances to join him for them. They had drunk a little too much. Michaela had quickly sent them on their way and shooed him off to his room.

He hadn't been tired. He had stood on the balcony “listening to the sea,” as he put it.

Suddenly the lamp on his nightstand went on. He saw a young room-service waiter standing there facing him. But his astonishment was all the greater when the fellow took off his cap and let his hair fall down over his shoulders. He, or better she, just stared at him. Her eyes had a pleading look, she smiled a weary smile. Then she had turned off the lamp, slipped out of her uniform in just a few quick moves, and climbed into his bed.

“I turned the light on again. I asked her who she was and what she wanted. But she just closed her eyes. When I took her hand, though, she opened them again.” He may not have known what he was supposed to do, but he understood completely that it would have been pointless to ask her any more questions. He lay down under the blanket with her.

He enjoyed every bit of it, but then again not really, because he kept thinking about AIDS and was afraid he might catch it. The few words that she let slip had sounded to him like Hungarian. But he couldn't say for sure. Suddenly he thought he recognized her. But in that very same moment she vanished. He ran after her, rousing the entire startled hotel staff at five in the morning to ask about her. People were friendly, and they smiled, but they all said, no, sorry, they couldn't be of any help. He had walked up and down the beach until breakfast, and it was there, listening to the surf, that it struck him like a lightning bolt where he had seen her before. Robert swears it was the same girl or woman who had breathed a kiss against the window of our bus as it rocked its way down the street of whores in Paris. He was certain, absolutely certain of it.

We poked at our food and afterward went for a walk around the pond. I told him he should be happy to have experienced something that lovely, and not to worry.

I haven't been able to ask Barrista yet, but if I know him, he was behind it—although I can hardly tell Robert that. I'm absolutely certain Barrista sent that girl.

On my right, across the fields, it's still glowing red, the whole sky shimmering and glistening a pinkish violet that turns a paler, duller hue to the east, the same sky that we saw above the pines in Waldau. Verotchka, our lives will never know trouble again as long as we're on this balcony. Believe me, Verotchka, never again.
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PS: Verotchka,
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just sixteen more hours! I'm sitting on our wooden balcony and gazing at the castle, which looks like a spotlighted piece of fairy-tale scenery rising up against a lilac backdrop. I don't want to deal with these next sixteen hours. I'm afraid you might delay your departure.

When you read this we'll already be co-owners of it all—the name slot under the doorbell, the bank account, the pillows. And then let time stand still. It's so strange that everything we always wanted and always, or almost always, forbade ourselves is about to come true—for us, the oddly silent siblings who didn't know what to make of each other when we were alone. Until you, at seventeen, let a thirteen-year-old boy join you in your bed—and stay there. If I regret anything, then it's only that it happened so seldom. And all the while I never wanted anything else, could never love anyone else. I always had to outdo your boyfriends, your men, and prove how extraordinary I was. Of all the men you knew, I wanted to be the most famous, the most desired. I wanted to lay the world at your feet—yours alone.

Why were we always trying to enrage each other? You with your love affairs, me with mine. Nadja, who loved you through me, just as I loved you through her. And then how you tried to free me of you by leaving, and how, on the night I brought you to the train station, I finally admitted that I loved you, that I had never held anyone else in my heart. It made me feel pure—pure, because that was the sole emotion stirring within me.

And then how I punished myself by remaining here and let Michaela slip into your shoes, and how history took us by surprise and you went into hiding, which almost made me lose my mind, because I didn't know where to go from here. And then I suddenly realized that I had no money, and for the first time in my life I cared that I didn't have a cent, no dough, no moolah, no lettuce, no hardtack, no hay, no simoleons, no wampum.
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Otherwise I would have followed you to Beirut and hijacked you off to Rome or New York or Altenburg. Ah, Verotchka, you fled from me, all the way to the Orient, but intrepidly encouraged me to keep on writing and to love other, strange women, the way one advises a teenage boy to exercise a lot and take cold showers. And all the while I wanted nothing but you! I want to live with you, Verotchka. Only with you can I begin a new life.

There's nothing left to tidy up here. The smell of fresh paint blends with that of my new mattress. The pictures are on the walls, there's room for them here and they look much handsomer too. But the loveliest part is that we will be able to shop together and buy everything that we may still need and want. I'll lie beside you while you read and caress your back and kiss the most beautiful shoulders in the world.

Verotchka, not even sixteen hours now.

Dear Nicoletta,
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In the void words become superfluous. Today, now that any real sense of the state I was in has been lost to me, I regard myself as an accidental witness whose answers to questions are tentative and contradictory.

I had to defend my sickbed almost daily. At one point Irene and Ramona, my colleagues in the dramaturgy department, were suddenly standing at the door. They seemed disappointed to find everything just as Michaela had described it to them. She marched in ahead of them, flung open the window, threw a blanket over my sleeping bag, as if I would be too cold otherwise. Later she complained about the chaos in the room and how dreadful I looked. Michaela accused me of having put the two women in an embarrassing situation. That may have been true, but my discomfiture was far, far greater. I broke into a sweat when I saw that Irene was carrying the flowerpot from the dramaturgy office. It had, she said, flourished wonderfully, and I should take my example from it. I took her remark as a discreet hint, an allusion to the bullets in the pot.
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When Michaela left the room, I expected to be taken to task. Should I lie to them? Should I take them into my confidence? But nothing of the sort happened, and they soon took their leave.

Just as I was about to investigate the soil in the pot, Ramona returned. Didn't I want to confide in her, about something that was tormenting me, weighing down on my soul? As she asked she looked at me as if she were offering to pray with me. I said nothing and stared directly into her nostrils, the left one narrow and shaped like a boomerang, the other a circular crater. Ramona sniffed and left.

All the bullets were in the pot, and nothing indicated they had been discovered.

Shortly before Christmas I managed to finagle another two weeks of sick leave. I had to promise that in the new year, if I showed no improvement, I would see a psychiatrist or neurologist. Dr. Weiss recommended long walks, exercise in general, and fresh air. He had no idea how dismayed I was by his observation that the days would be getting longer now. I've always enjoyed rainy days more than a blue sky. But the prospect of bright, warm evenings, of birds chirping and children screeching at a swimming pool, the mere thought of Easter and summer vacation, was unbearable.

Then came Christmas. Of course I had bought no gifts. What was more, I refused to sleep in the same room with Michaela so that she or my mother could have my room.

Mother, who had not missed a single demonstration in Dresden, who had even responded to an appeal over the radio and shown up at Bautzner Strasse to take part in the occupation of the State Security offices, was in awe of Michaela. Michaela had actually become an actor. Michaela played leading roles. Michaela had raised her boy all by herself—Michaela was extraordinary, period. As proof, my mother handed me the first two issues of
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which had come into being under Michaela's tutelage and about which I had been completely oblivious, even though meetings of the “media committee” had been held, as it were, right outside my door. Within hours two thousand copies had been handed out. Mother insisted on reading to me at least the article about how Schalck-Golodkowki's people had sold off the Council Library to the West for a pittance. Whereas I had not even managed to open the little doors of my mother's Advent calendar.

Robert was the only one who had reconciled himself to my condition. He no longer asked what was wrong with me, and instead enjoyed being my superior at every level.

On New Year's Eve I watched and clapped as Robert and Michaela shot off their three rockets, but then retreated to my sleeping bag shortly after midnight, where I'm told I then mimicked hissing and popping sounds. Later I threw up. Dawn found me sitting on the toilet and staring out the window. The gray morning corresponded exactly to my view of the future. An entire year with all its days awaited me, a man who didn't have sufficient energy for even its first few hours.

I was vaguely aware that it would take some deed to save me from going under. More than once now I had placed my right hand on my forehead as if to cross myself.

What kept me from doing it? Defiance? Self-regard? Pride? Wasn't in fact my problem God and His eternity? Is there anything more hostile to life than immortality, whether that of saints or artists? Both artists and saints are egomaniacs. Someone who would truly sacrifice himself, descend into hell in someone else's stead, that would be a saint. Judas is the only person whose legend perhaps allows for such a supposition.

Should I have confessed? I no longer wanted words, chatter, promises. I had had enough of my devotion to words. Their overweening arrogance in the midst of the most submissive gesture disgusted me. Please, no more prayers, no confessions.
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No, it had to be something entirely different, something as unexpected as it was close at hand, something that I had never done, had never thought of—simply something different.

In the night between January 1st and 2nd I had turned off my light early as always, but awoke shortly after ten. I opened the window, no snow, no rain. I expected to do nothing more than to pull the blanket around my shoulders and go back to sleep. But a moment later I found myself standing beside my bed, pulling on my trousers. I smiled to myself, something inside me was laughing at me. But all the same I went on dressing, grubbed the bullets out of the soil, loaded the clip, and stuck the pistol in my belt.
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I took two sweaters and a pair of old hiking boots from my wardrobe. I pulled one sweater on over the other, I laced the boots to the top eyelet. I climbed up onto the windowsill. My eyes were used to the dark, I could see the lawn below, jumped—and landed square on both feet. No pain, no stiffness, the jump was behind me.

I marched through Altenburg North, climbed Lerchenberg hill, and then walked down into town without meeting anyone. A couple of figures scurried along at some distance, but otherwise only cars. After passing the Great Pond, I made a slanting turn uphill to the left at an auto repair shop, and soon there were no buildings at all.
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A few snow islands shimmered against the black of the fields. Once the road started downhill I could see only a very few distant lights. Either there were no more streetlamps here, or they had been turned off by now. Once in a while a car passed, splashing mud on my trousers. A car that avoided me only at the last moment came to a halt, backed up. “You trying to commit suicide?” the driver bellowed. Was I? If I had wanted to, I could have put a bullet through my head—a luxury that terrified me.

Once in the valley, I turned onto a country lane that led uphill.
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Suddenly, fifty or a hundred yards ahead, I saw a blinking red eye. The cross-arms lowered in the reddish haze. I forced myself to keep walking, on and on, right up to the barrier. The train was approaching quickly, a freight with empty coal cars rumbled past, and now the cross-arms were being raised again, the signal light went out. Night descended around me. I stared into the blackness, to the spot where a moment before the tracks had taken on a reddish glow. My eyes refused to get used to the darkness now.