New Lives (75 page)

The lights were switched on, fluorescent tubes flickered. Voices blurred the way they do in an indoor swimming pool.

A fly crawled across the back of Michael's right hand. He raised the hand, the fly vanished, only to return to the same spot a moment later. Michael slapped at it with a loud smack.

The volunteer looked up briefly and winked at Michael. Stepping forward with him were a boy and a girl, both FGY members. They were waiting for Tina. A man with yolk yellow hair and a black leather jacket shook her hand and smiled. The woman beside him had thin bright red lips that shifted in an ashen pale face. Gold-rimmed glasses dangled from her neck.

—Take your places here, my young friends. Now pull yourselves together. So, here we go now. Lots of luck.

Approaching the long table one after the other, they gave their names, handed over their passports, and quickly received them back. Tina was the last to be given her ballot.

—Hey there, my lad, no daydreaming, report over there now.

Without glancing at the names on his ballot, Michael turned around toward the voting booths. Of those missing a door, the middle one was still unoccupied.

—Look sharp, my lad, look sharp. We have to keep to our schedule here.—The volunteer clapped his hands like a gym teacher.

From his voting booth Michael was able to watch as the yolk yellow man and the woman held tight to the table while Tina climbed up on it. She stood up carefully and, without grabbing hold of any of the many hands offered her, walked to the ballot box. She laid her ballot across the top of the box, hastily unzipped her trousers, which slid down her legs. She quickly slipped her panties down, squatted over the ballot box, and began to press. With half-open eyes she stared at the damaged tile at Michael's feet, a vein bulged above her right temple, her face took on a bronze color.

The volunteer, who had turned half away, suddenly shouted:—Face toward the election commission, Tina. Toward the election commiss—!

Tina stood up in fright. Even for a fit young woman it wasn't all that easy to move across the wiggly tables. Tina corrected the position of her ballot and squatted down over the box again. Her blue blouse hid most of her rear end.

In the meantime Michael had laid his ballot across the porcelain bowl, pulled his pants and underpants down both at once, and sat. He pressed hard too. In the booth to his left he could hear a jet of urine meet the water in the bowl, grow gradually fainter, and then abruptly end without any drops to follow. To his right Michael heard a loud fart, and a groan, and then, as something heavy fell on the ballot, a crinkling sound. Closing his eyes, the volunteer gave several nods of approval.

Michael couldn't take his eyes off Tina. Her blue blouse, beneath which he could see the outline of the broad fastener on her bra, emphasized her athletic figure.

Suddenly she raised her rear end, hiked up her blouse—and something appeared between her butt cheeks, grew longer, a thin little sausage dropped, gases escaped, a restrained—
Aaaahh
—followed, and then another, somewhat darker, shorter, sausage.

The first-timer on Michael's right had already shoved his massive vote out in front of his booth and was frantically tearing off toilet paper. And the first-timer to his left had likewise given all the candidates her vote.

Michael got up and carefully removed his work from the bowl. The ballot had gotten a little damp at the top. In the middle, however, lay his vote, round and smooth and ending in a jaunty peak.

—Like a meringue tart, just a little browner.

As he laid it on the floor, Michael couldn't entirely suppress his smile. The rustle of toilet paper could be heard on all sides. The pattern on Tina's panties wasn't red polka dots, no, those were ladybugs. Her cheeks were flush, sweat glistened on her upper lip and forehead. The election commission was already removing the bouquets from their pails of water. Michael needed to hurry up.

Suddenly someone squeezed his arm.—One casts one's vote for an entire list of candidates, not individuals.—Michael stared in bewilderment at the volunteer.

—You see, there, there, Wilfried Becker, doesn't he get your vote? Do you have something against the Society for Sport and Technology?

—Should I…—Michael raised his right forefinger.

—Yes of course, do it, do it, everyone's waiting for you.

Michael tried to smear his round sausage toward the top and bottom, but it was more solid than he had thought. He spit, he spit a second time, it just barely worked. But now it looked so untidy, unaesthetic. Michael was the last to stuff his ballot into the box and now glanced down very earnestly at the Thälmann Pioneer who handed him three carnations with lots of greenery. The handshake that followed the Pioneer salute was limp and damp. Now that everyone had a carnation bouquet, the applause began.

The four first-timers were given a rousing reception outside. All the people standing in front of the polling place had turned toward them and were clapping enthusiastically.

Michael was numb somehow.—I thought they'd be mad at us.

—But why?—Tina laughed.—Why should they be mad at us?

—I just thought…—Michael spotted Rolf clapping wildly. Michael gave him a nod and a tortured smile. Rolf, on the other hand, seemed to be in a great mood, and gestured to him by dangling his right hand below his belt, swinging it back and forth, while his thumb and fingers kept snapping open and shut like a hungry mouth.

—Is that your buddy?—Tina asked.

—Well yes, buddy, we went to school together.

—Tell him he's a little pig, tell him I said so. A real little piggy.

—Because of the four…

—He wants you to pinch me in the butt. Don't you see it?

—Oh, he's just pretending.

—What a little pig. He's jealous.

—Jealous?

—Why sure. But we deserve this.

Michael counted the number of open buttons on her blouse. There were in fact four. He had lost the bet. But on the other hand he could see her cleavage, the shadow between her breasts.

Tina smiled.

—You're a little piggy too!—Her eyes were sparkling again. People just wouldn't stop applauding.

—Wave, wave!—she whispered.

Michael began to move his right hand from side to side.

—You see, Mischa, it works!—Tina exclaimed.

Michael felt uncomfortable because his fingers were sticky. But that didn't prevent him from waving. And so he kept on swaying his right hand from side to side.

May
³⁸⁴

[Letter of April 28–29, 1990]

         

Titus Holm

A DRESDEN NOVELLA

1

Titus Holm walked across the school courtyard, his satchel in his right hand, and in his left, dangling a little lower, a gym bag that slapped against his thigh. It had turned warmer again, leaves flickered yellow and orange in the afternoon sun. He would have taken off his anorak if it hadn't been for the wind, which came at him now head on, now from the side, carrying with it the sound of choir rehearsal drifting like a defective recording through an open window. It was not until Titus passed the rusty bicycle stands and emerged through the main portal that he actually pieced together a melody.

He turned right. At the foot of the wrought-iron fence that enclosed Holy Cross School—including a boarding school for choir members—and whose tips ended in coiling flames, he could still see the traces of the wire broom he had used to rake leaves the day before. At first he had been uneasy about having to put in his hours of People's Mass Initiative here, where he could be observed from the boarding school dorm.

“Call me when it's over,” Joachim had whispered at the end of last class. Titus came to a halt in front of the dorm and glanced up at Joachim's window, where the left casement was wide open. Titus would have preferred to keep on walking. He was in fact in a hurry. What was he supposed to tell him? That he had sat in the cellar for an hour facing Petersen, or was it a half hour or maybe only twenty minutes?

When Mario, who had had to precede him in the cellar with Petersen, returned to the classroom and called out, “Next, please!,” Titus, who sat waiting amid all the other chairs stacked on their tables, had been too agitated to check the clock. He was the last of the boys from grade nine.

Mario had evaded Titus's questions until he finally more or less sulkily declared that he didn't want to see things like an egoist and claim his life only for himself, but to achieve something for society as well.

“What would that be?” Titus had asked. “I thought you wanted to become a doctor.”

“Of course I want to be a doctor, but someplace where I'm needed.” With that Mario had stuffed his gym clothes into his satchel, rolled up his right pants leg, knotted the laces of his gym shoes together, and hung them around his neck. “You really can't be…” Titus had started to say, when he noticed the white smock at the open door. Petersen, their homeroom teacher, shook Titus's hand as if presenting him an award. And then he called out to Mario, “Keep thinking along those lines!” Then, pointing to the stairs: “Titus, if you please.”

In the basement physics lab Petersen had pressed his way past him to open the door to a small chamber that was little more than a narrow passage between two tables with some oscillographs, scarcely wider than the old swivel chair under the cellar window where Petersen had taken a seat. The stool beside the door was for Titus. “We have plenty of time,” Petersen had said, carefully laying his watch to one side.

Later, when the conversation was over and Titus had already got to his feet, Petersen was suddenly holding a book in his hand. To Titus it looked like some evil magic trick.

Book in hand, Titus climbed the stairs, taking one step at a time, uncertain whether he should go on ahead or wait for Petersen, since there had been no response to his second “good-bye” either. Outside the door to the physics classroom, Titus had wedged his satchel and gym bag between his feet, as if there were no other way to push the handle. Rattling his keys, Petersen came marching up and then, after ignoring a third “good-bye” as well, vanished into the teachers' lounge.

The stale air of the physics room, its hardwood floor a dull black from too much waxing, the apple core under his seat, and the bulletin board that always hung askew—suddenly it all made him feel right at home…

Outside the boarding-school dorm Titus called out for Joachim, shouted just loud enough that he had to hear him. In lieu of a reply, a window on the ground floor opened. Titus repeated his call at short intervals. Despite a sense of being slighted because Joachim had not waited for him, he was glad he could now avoid his friend with a good conscience.

But in the very next moment Titus was startled to see that Joachim was one of two boys crossing the street from the public park. He ran toward them, but they halted in their tracks. Titus set down his satchel, rummaged around in it as if looking for something, and was suddenly holding Petersen's yellow book in his hand. The back cover was ribbed, a rolling landscape that came from too many moist fingertips. When Titus looked across to them again, Joachim was now headed toward him. The other boy, a book clasped under his arm, was loping toward the dorm. Titus stuffed Petersen's book behind his atlas, so that it wouldn't touch his notebooks and textbooks.

“There you are already,” Joachim said, groped for and produced a cigarette and, turning abruptly to his right, bent down over the match. His tight extra-long cardigan made him look even skinnier. He blew the smoke out of one corner of his mouth.

“We've been reading his first novella,” Joachim said, “want to walk a little?” Titus nodded.

“To think they printed it! It must have slipped past them somehow.” Joachim pulled a couple of folded pages out from under his cardigan—checkered, letter-size sheets written full on both sides. Titus recognized the handwriting—printed letters bouncing along the squares in tight formation, plus arrows, underlinings, and fat periods.

“‘Why do they have power?'” Joachim's forefinger traced the line. “‘Because you give it to them. And they'll have power as long as you're cowards.' What do you think?”

“Who says it?” Titus looked down at the scuffed toes of Joachim's shoes.

“Ferdinand, a painter, gets a letter, on official tan letterhead, telling him he's been drafted and has to return to Germany, World War I. He doesn't want to, his wife doesn't want to. But he feels some inner compulsion…”

“A compulsion?” Titus asked.

“They've fled Germany, but not officially. Listen to this,” Joachim said. “‘For two months he managed to go on living in the suffocating air of jingoism, but slowly the air grew too thin, and when people around him opened their mouths to speak he thought he could see the yellow of the lies staining their tongues. No matter what they said it disgusted him.'” Joachim read slowly and clearly. He kept shifting his body to protect the pages from the wind. “Great writing, isn't it?” Joachim pushed his long dark blond hair behind his ears and stuck the pages into his waistband under his cardigan.

“Yes,” Titus said. “‘The yellow of the lies staining their tongues,' really good stuff.”

It was always like this. Joachim talked and Titus listened, because he hadn't read the book, didn't know the composer or the Bible verse, or because names like Gandhi, Dubček, or Bahro meant nothing to him. Joachim had time to read. Joachim had time for everything that interested him. But even if Titus had read the novella, the words would have paled beside Joachim's retelling of them.

Joachim described the conversation between Ferdinand the painter and his wife, Paula, who hopes to talk him out of returning to Germany, to war, and how desperate she feels with a husband who actually sees through it all, is so weak—here Joachim hesitated—so tepid that he's unable to find anything to hold on to, and so is caught up in the maelstrom. He leaves for Zurich on the first train the next morning.

“For Zurich?” Titus stopped in his tracks. “Why for Zurich?”

“Because they're still in Switzerland!” Cigarette smoke rippled from Joachim's lips. “He goes to the consulate in Zurich with the idea that because he knows people there he can change their minds—and falls flat on his face. He arrives way too early—premature obedience.”

Premature obedience, Titus thought. But he was even more taken by “Zurich.” If you lived in Zurich, you didn't have any problems, at least no serious ones. It was easy to be brave in Zurich.

“We were thinking of you the whole time,” Joachim said. He flicked the butt away. Titus blushed. It was his turn. He had to say something now.

“And not just thinking,” Joachim added, and with a quick twist of his shoe tip, the butt vanished in the gutter. “So now you've gotten to know the cellar.”

“For over an hour,” Titus said.

“Among the oscillographs?”

“Yes,” Titus said. He wanted to speak with the same sort of deliberation Joachim did.

“He's most comfortable in his little lair,” Joachim said with a laugh. “When all is said and done, Petersen is a poor bastard.”

Titus wanted to ask why Petersen was a poor bastard.

“Got some money? Want to go to the Toscana?” Joachim asked.

“Yes,” Titus said, although he was supposed to meet someone and was in a hurry.

Titus knew the café only from the outside, the last building on the left before the bridge. He knew Holy Cross choirboys went to the Toscana after rehearsal when they should have been in class—for breakfast, as they put it. Titus could see himself now standing beside Joachim at the curb, directly across from the parking lot, and heard himself say, “My treat.”

They walked along Hübler Strasse. They stood awhile outside the bookstore. When they got to Schiller Platz they watched the traffic cop's pantomime and let him wave them across. Instead of waiting with the others to change sides of the street, they headed for the Blue Wonder Bridge.

The wind was blowing harder now, directly in their faces. Ever since they had known each other, Titus had tried to see the world through Joachim's eyes. Everything was straightforward and compelling, and Titus's own life seemed to gain clarity whenever Joachim talked about him, just like he could suddenly understand a math problem or a tricky bit of grammar once Joachim formulated it. At the same time, however, he found it painful that he had no advice for Joachim, couldn't give him anything. Joachim didn't need him.

Titus hung up his anorak in the Toscana's coatroom, then slipped into a seat at the round window table near the door while it was still being cleared. Joachim walked over to the pastry display and came back with his ticket. Titus followed his example. He was surprised to see so many old women in hats here.

Joachim greeted the waitress, whose lacy décolletage opened onto a view of the top of her breasts. The wrinkles at her neck looked like strings cutting into her skin. He ordered two pots of coffee and gave her the pastry tickets.

“While he's in Zurich Ferdinand gets a shave and has his good suit brushed.” Joachim simply picked up the story where he had left off, as if there had been no interruption. “Ferdinand buys gray gloves and a walking stick, he wants to make a good impression. He's ready now, every ‘i' dotted, every ‘t' crossed. But then it all turns out very differently.”

Joachim went on talking, tapping his cigarette on the tabletop as if to some secret rhythm. Titus was miffed that Joachim hadn't asked him anything else about the cellar and Petersen. Or was he trying to go easy on him? And what was so special about the Toscana, with its flock of bird-faced women? Why had he agreed to come here? Didn't he have a will of his own?

Joachim went on talking, leaning back now, his legs crossed, a cigarette in his right hand, his left hand resting on the table as if to show Titus the large half-moons of his fingernails and veins like you see on men's hands—worms wriggling toward his wrist.

Joachim had unbuttoned just the top buttons of his cardigan. He inhaled deep, his chest rose and fell. Titus stared at him and suddenly found himself inexplicably repulsed by this breathing, as if it were unseemly. He had never seen Joachim naked, not even from the waist up. During gym he always kept his undershirt on under his blue gym outfit. All he could remember was that Joachim's arms were freckled with moles.

         

[Letter of May 5, 1990]

Titus bent forward, but Joachim didn't lower his voice. Or wasn't he going to read any more of it? “‘If only people had the will,'” Johann declaimed, “‘but instead they obey. They are like schoolboys. The teacher calls on them, they stand up, trembling.'” He wasn't holding the page between his fingers, but with his whole hand, wrinkling it along the edge. Titus would have loved to interrupt him: That's my book! I ran out and bought it during recess. You borrowed it from me. I refuse to let you talk about it. I won't let you copy it out, and above all I forbid you to give it to somebody else you meet in the park, somebody I don't know.

Titus could feel things between him and Joachim coming to a head. But he had no name for it. He was powerless against it. He swallowed, and his throat hurt from his gratuitous accusations. At the same time a kind of shame left him feeling uneasy, as if they had actually had a fight. Titus barely noticed when their coffee and pastries arrived.

He wanted to pull Petersen's book from his satchel, hold it under Joachim's nose, slam it onto the plate of cheesecake he was scarfing down. He let the idea carry him away.

“He dumped this on me,” he heard himself exclaim. Titus looked down at the book in his hands,
Bundeswehr, the Aggressor,
flaming red letters against a yellow background. And when Joachim responded with just a hint of a smirk, he flung it at his chest. “He dumped this on me,” he shouted. “A little report on the Bundeswehr as the aggressor, and what conclusions we should draw from it. Get it? My conclusions.”

Joachim was just describing how Paula tried to block Ferdinand's plan—why didn't he just shut up. Angry and frightened, Titus looked around the café in search of help. Out of here! he thought. He couldn't waste any more time here. He was supposed to meet someone. He wanted to wake up, shake off this strange state he was in. He watched a redheaded woman at the next table, the way she was laughing and at the same time biting her lower lip to contain herself. Her pale knees shimmered through her black stockings. The laces of her shoes were tied in large bows.