New Lives (69 page)

I took even the slightest movement in the audience as an indication that our paper was already making the rounds. Unable to bear the uncertainty any longer, I was on the verge of jumping up in the middle of the music.

Robert Schumann bowed—and then bowed again in front of Michaela and Vera.

Since I had proofread Georg's speech twice, I had a good idea how long I would be stretched on the rack. I don't want to exaggerate, but when he began his concluding quotation, all I wanted to do was close my eyes in relief. Vera and Michaela pushed the hereditary prince toward Georg so that they could exchange thanks and Georg could once again present him—officially this time—with the book about the dukes of Sachsen-Altenburg.

And then, when Michaela gave the signal, Robert Schumann's orchestra struck up again. The formal reception line moved into place.

The baron and I pushed the hereditary prince up onto a low dais with an extension at the front so that Vera and Michaela could stand directly beside him and yet remain at eye level with everyone else. Marion and Jörg had retreated to the far side of the hall. I finally succeeded in calling Pringel's attention to Marion. She had rolled the newspaper up, but the blue of its masthead was visible. Pringel got the message. He turned to Massimo, who listened with his arms still crossed, but now started bouncing on his tiptoes, thrust his Mussolini chin forward, and followed Pringel. Pringel greeted them both. From then on, Massimo's massive back blocked my view.

The reception line followed a simple choreography. Invited guests formed two lines. The one on the left led to the hereditary prince via Michaela and the baron, the one on the right by way of Vera and me. Vera and Michaela accepted the invitations, checking the number against their own handsomely bound lists. After providing the prince with a first and last name, they added a few remarks about the career of the person in question, plus any honors earned. The baron or I supplemented this with some compliment or other.

It sounds boring and humdrum. You probably consider it a hollow ritual intended to flatter the vanity of Altenburg's high society. I myself would have paid hardly any attention to those on the list either. What a mistake that would have been.

Even Karmeka, who with his family had the privilege of being at the head of the line, lost his wily self-assurance the moment he stepped before the hereditary prince. There the disconcerted family stood all by itself, suddenly nothing more than what Michaela announced them to be: “Frederick and Edelgard Karmeka, dentist and dental hygienist, and their three daughters, Klara, Beate, and Veronika.” The prince held Edelgard Karmeka's hand so firmly in his grasp that she blushed up to her hairline and wrenched her mouth until I couldn't tell whether she was smiling or fighting back tears. The baron rescued her by saying good-bye and mentioning the dinner for a select circle of people, where they were sure to see one another again.

And now it was up to Vera and me to pass along the district councilor and his wife—civil engineer and gastronome—who were grateful for what few words I offered in a hospitable tone, since they themselves couldn't stammer one syllable.

Next in our line was Anton Larschen, whose appearance was truly strange—some barber had robbed him of his splendid tower of hair. As always his right hand performed the old familiar—but now pointless—gesture of attempting to tame his unruly mop. Larschen presented your book to the hereditary prince. “It's all in there,” Larschen said. The prince thanked him and said what a pleasure it was to make the acquaintance of the man whose articles he had followed with such great interest. Before Larschen could reply, the baron was already announcing two “former civil rights advocates,” who were introduced in the same way that veterans of the antifascist resistance used to be presented to us in school. Anna invited the hereditary prince to visit the local Library on the Environment, which prompted him to invite her to the dinner that was to follow. We all smiled, although we knew what a major crisis his arbitrary decision would create for Cornelia, our
maître de plaisir.

Massimo, Pringel—now joined by Kurt—continued to guard Marion and Jörg and got in line with them on the baron's side.

Waiting next to Vera was a man in a wheelchair whose white hair hung in straggly confusion. Like a child who's been told to make a bow, he bent forward stiffly in his chair to offer his greetings. Only a random word or two of his babblings made any sense to me. It was the Prophet. Absent his beard, I recognized him only by his eyes, grotesquely magnified by his glasses. He had had a stroke and was said to still have his wits about him, but his speech and his body had abandoned him. The Prophet appeared to grow angry when the hereditary prince didn't understand him. No one understood him. I told the prince that in a certain sense I had this man, Rudolf Franck, to thank for what I was today.

Then came a couple of our major customers who have signed on to at least half a page each week—Eberhard Hassenstein, for example. The hereditary prince's hand vanished into Hassenstein's big, hairy paw. His father, who in 1934 had been a cofounder of the coal yard Benndorf & Hassenstein, had died shortly after the business was confiscated in 1971. Hassenstein sniffed several times; one tear had made it all the way to his chin.

I presented Klaus Kerbel-Offmann and his wife, Roswitha Offmann, third-generation owners of Offmann Furniture, founded in 1927.

You'll come to know them all, there's a novel behind each of these families. But all of them, whatever their story, seemed to me to be signing a contract with us in the same moment that they stepped before the hereditary prince. They had perhaps been excited beforehand, had pictured the occasion this way or that, but surely none had imagined how profoundly moved they would be by their encounter with him. As they extended a hand to him something burst inside them—and whatever that something was, it surprised them and bound them to us.

Even Pastor Bodin, who had thundered against our horoscope in the
Weekly,
licked his bluish nozzle-shaped lower lip and gazed at us in childlike expectation when his turn came. Father Mansfeld, the Catholic go-getter who will be making his grand appearance today as Boniface, could not be dissuaded from presenting the prince with a bottle of liqueur, and at the end of his audience whispered to me that he had high-proof gifts for us as well.

Piatkowski, the Christian Democrat bigwig, who indeed is on the town council again, had sent his wife. She was delighted by the reception and spoke to the hereditary prince so animatedly and warmly, yes, so charmingly, that the prince asked about her later.

The wife of innkeeper Gallus came close to creating a dire scene when her moment came. She attempted a grand curtsy, but landed, whether intentionally or not, on her knees and cried out, “It was suicide! Your Highness! It was suicide!” I hadn't known that innkeeper Gallus had taken his life only three days before. While the baron offered his condolences and I explained to the hereditary prince the important role that innkeeper Gallus had once played, she just kept on crying, “It was suicide! Your Highness! It was suicide!”

Everyone I had included on my list showed up, except for Ruth (the daughter of my landlady, Emilie Paulini), Jan Steen, and the publisher of the newspaper in Giessen, who did, however, send his regrets.

I was also pleased that Wolfgang the Hulk and his wife attended. We had tried to get together so many times. Along with Vera I'll be paying them a visit. And Blond and Black, two policemen, came too. We became acquainted last autumn.

Hors d'oeuvres, champagne, and orange juice were already being passed around when Marion and Jörg presented their invitations.

I assumed it was self-control that lay behind the cordiality with which the baron greeted them both, since it seemed unlikely that he hadn't spotted our newspaper in Marion's hand. Marion released all her subconscious aggression on the rolled-up
Sunday Bulletin,
a gesture that could best be described as “wringing someone's neck.” But then she stared at the object of her repressed hostility and attempted to smooth out its pages. Jörg brushed her cheek with his hand. To make a long story short: the baron presented the two of them. Jörg greeted the hereditary prince with “Your Highness,” and bowed deeply. Then he stepped aside and gave Marion the floor. She instantly went down on one knee like the hero in an opera and held the rolled-up newspaper out to the prince. “Take a look for yourself. I don't know why anyone would do this. But then everyone is suddenly changing their biography. No one speaks the truth anymore,” she said in a low monotone. He listened to a few more sentences of the same sort, totally absurd stuff. And of course she also informed the hereditary prince why she had forbidden “Herr Türmer” to address her by her first name, since he was a fraud and totally blinded. She however, Marion Schröder, refused to pray for me, for this shadow.

The hereditary prince extended a hand, hoping she would stand up—half the people in the room were gawking now. She misunderstood his gesture. Like a bird pecking for food, she quickly kissed his hand, stood up, and cried, “We shall meet again soon!” Jörg followed her out, catching up with her at the door, and threw an arm around her shoulder.

I was most surprised by Kurt. I had always taken him for a man in his mid-fifties, but Kurt is only in his early forties. His wife is thirty at most and so slight that I took her for his daughter. When Michaela read her profession as “butcher shop clerk,” Kurt's wife corrected her in a firm voice: “certified vendor of meats and sausages,” which were the only words that I heard her large, lovely mouth utter.

Pringel's wife, a pharmacist's assistant, handed the prince a tiny box that contained a four-leaf clover she had found in the castle courtyard. It had brought them such good luck recently, they wanted to pass it on. “Our ace reporter,” the hereditary prince said, and Pringel, who had trimmed his beard short, replied, “Every, every good wish.”

As we were entering the great Hall of Mirrors for dinner, I asked the baron when he had first noticed the newspaper in Marion's hand. She had had it with her when she arrived, he said. She had used the
Sunday Bulletin
as a fan, which he hoped hadn't wounded my vanity. The baron didn't understand a thing! He even suggested it would be good idea to place a stack of
Bulletins
outside the door to the Hall of Mirrors right now. I was such a scaredy-cat, he exclaimed, and asked what else I was afraid of at this point.

I've got to go.

Hugs,

Your E.

Dear Nicoletta,

I've been remiss in writing, but I no longer wish to muse about my past. It's not that the World Cup has gone to my head. But isn't the joy I feel at our victory the overt expression of a much greater, more all-encompassing happiness? My wish to begin a new life at your side has never been stronger than now. But since my letters appear not to have achieved that purpose, my hopes are dwindling—for these letters are motivated by nothing else.
³⁷¹

But I must bring all this to a conclusion, just as a losing team dare not leave the field before those ninety minutes are over. And so back to the start of this year.

As I looked back in chagrin on my nocturnal crossroads adventure, I would have much preferred to have regarded it as a dream. And yet it also pleased me to have risked it. What I had thought and felt there, however, had been left behind in the night.

I took a bath beneath laundry hung up to dry. When I went to dress, I couldn't find any of the things I wanted. I opened the laundry basket and began rummaging in the dirty clothes, and finally just upended it. Everything I picked up belonged to me. Two towels were the dubious exception to the rule. Only then did I notice that the items hung up to dry belonged solely to Michaela and Robert.

Okay, we're even, I thought.

Michaela was out somewhere. I dined on fried herring and potatoes with Robert. “You're eating again,” Michaela exclaimed when she returned home, and then announced there would be a meeting in the living room. Meaning, the space was taboo until evening.

Robert protested that he'd be missing one of his TV shows.

Michaela's media committee arrived on the dot. While they moved chairs around, clicked open their briefcases, and struck up their usual murmurs, I tidied up my room, gleaning underwear, dishes, shoes, records, record jackets, newspapers, and letters from the floor, until slowly but surely the square fiber mats beneath began to emerge. I worked fast, hoping to escape beneath my headphones before the meeting really began. I had already stretched out on my couch when I remembered I still had laundry in the washing machine. I was trapped. To get to the bathroom I had to go through the living room. I had an overwhelming aversion to appearing before strangers—before people I didn't want anything to do with, didn't even want to be spoken to by. I spent a good while wondering whether I should knock or not. Finally, out of habit, I knocked—and felt as if someone had pushed me onstage. The light was blinding, the discussion died. Everyone gawked at me as if I had emerged from the wallpaper. “Why, there you are,” Michaela said. She sounded embarrassed. Sitting with propped elbows at the head of the table, she took a drag on her cigarette and blinked as she stared at me. “Don't let me interrupt,” I said, closing the living-room door behind me.

Later I could recall the sudden clatter of voices. But at that moment I barely noticed, and was angry at myself for my hasty “Don't let me interrupt.” I could well imagine what was going through Michaela's head as she saw her barefoot husband whoosh through the room like a ghost.

I stuffed half a load of wet laundry into the spin-drier, pressed the lid shut, and threw myself on top so that I could hold the spout over the bucket.

I took the laundry down from the clothesline and folded it as neatly as I could. Every undershirt, ever pair of panties, every bra was familiar. I had the feeling I was saying good-bye to each piece. Then I hung up my own things.