New Lives (76 page)

Titus saw her putting on those shoes that same morning, tying those large bows. Did she sometimes ask herself what all would happen before she took off her shoes again that evening? Every morning when he leaned over the bathtub to wash his neck and armpits, Titus asked himself whether he would have the courage to declare as Joachim had: I will not join the army.

Titus knew how Petersen's words would spread inside him the moment he was alone. The way a wound first begins to hurt at night, the way a fever needs a couple of hours before it takes hold, that's how those capsules of memory would open up inside him and release Petersen's words, so that like poison they would course through him and paralyze him. He would be lying in his bed again—rigid, stiff with nothing but memory and anticipation.

The woman jiggled her feet as if they had fallen asleep. The pendant on her necklace, a silver square, rested in the hollow beneath her throat. Her hair was brushed back and up at the earlobes, turning her mother-of-pearl earrings into drops dangling from her hair. Her pallor made her look seriously ill.

“‘The great truth of emotion leapt up mightily within him,'” Joachim cried, “‘and burst open the engine within his breast. Freedom towered up in blessed grandeur and shattered his obedience. Never! Never! came the shout within him, an unfamiliar voice of primal strength.'”

How could he say that he thought what Joachim was doing was right and then do the opposite himself? How could he admire Joachim's integrity and then cower and lie? Titus felt that Joachim wanted something from him, that something significant might soon become reality.

Suddenly he saw it all as his fate, as something to which he merely had to give himself over, let it carry and direct him. It lay beyond words, it was a melody deep within all other sounds, one of those moments in which a fragrance is bound forever to a particular place and season.

Joachim fell silent. Titus couldn't think of a single question. “Do you have even the vaguest notion what I'm talking about?” Joachim would respond any second now. Titus stared out the window.

“Aren't you going to eat that?” Joachim held out his empty plate, and Titus shoved his custard torte onto it.

“I have to go,” Titus said.

Without looking up, Joachim set to work on the pastry. Titus wanted to turn away again, but he now realized he could watch without feeling a thing. He even tried counting the bites, and was at five when the waitress came up to them.

“For both,” he said. She laid her narrow pad on the table. Titus gazed down into her décolletage, where the skin wasn't wrinkled but smooth and white and quivered just a little. Without shifting his glance he groped for his wallet. He opened it—he blushed when he saw what he should have known. The twenty-mark bill was gone. The two volumes of Stefan Zweig had cost him fourteen marks.

“Joachim,” Titus queried softly. Joachim went on chewing.

“Help me, God!” Titus whispered. He first fumbled for one-mark coins, then the two half marks. Finally he just dumped his change on the table, including three twenty-pfennig pieces. The waitress bent down again. But this time she was so close to him that he could easily have kissed the tops of her breasts. She set her forefinger to each coin and shoved them one by one over the edge of the table, letting them drop into her open purse. And each time Titus saw that little quiver.

Suddenly it was too late. All he could do was spread his thighs. The waitress smiled, thanked him, and thrust her purse under her apron. Titus wanted more than anything to reach for her hand. It was happening—even though he was looking out the window at traffic thundering over the bridge. He thought his legs and feet would start jerking and that weird noises would rise up in his throat. But in fact he just sat there frozen in place, his breath inaudible. And for a moment he closed his eyes in total bliss.

2

His grandfather turned to check the wall clock. “Five till eleven!” he repeated in the same voice cracking with outrage. Titus knelt down at the mirror by the coatrack because a double bow was now a knot. “I was at Frau Lapin's,” he called out. “I told you that.”

His grandfather pulled his watch from his pocket and held it out, “Five till eleven!”

Titus stepped on the heel of one shoe to free a foot from the other. In slippers now, he followed his grandfather to the kitchen, where a teacup was set at his place. As always when his mother was on night shift, the tablecloth hung over the back of the third chair.

“She was painting my portrait,” Titus said.

“Oh, that Lapin. All she does is chatter. Eleven o'clock. Does your mother know about this?”

“Yes,” Titus said. His plans hadn't included an argument with his grandfather. While still out in the stairwell he had decided he wanted to set out again and wander through the night. He longed for something totally new, something he had never thought of before. His clothes were damp from the rain and he had sweated, but he just had to hold his sleeve up to his nose to take in the smell of oil paints and cigarette smoke lodged there—and for some reason that left him incredibly awake.

“Did you eat?” his grandfather asked.

Titus nodded. The windowpane rattled softly with each gust of wind. And if he couldn't wander the night, then at least he wanted to write in his diary until morning.

After his grandfather had poured tea for them both and taken four cubes of sugar for his, he sat there waiting for his tea to cool. Five, at most ten minutes was all Titus intended to sit with him—that was to be his final concession. After that no power in this world could keep him from pursuing his plans.

His grandfather's liver-spotted hands lay motionless to the right and left of his cup. When he was in a good mood, he would drum his brittle, slightly bluish fingernails to some melody running through his head, usually a march he had heard on Sunday during the one o'clock broadcast of
Merry Musicians
on Deutschlandfunk. Except for a small, shiny mole on his left nostril, his face bore hardly any irregularities. The fan of wrinkles at the outside corners of his eyes was more noticeable on the left. When he came home from the barber it took two weeks before his white brush cut grew back. Since he went for a long walk every day, his face never lost its tan, all year round.

“Anything new?” Titus asked. They both stirred their cups at the same time.

“It was suicide.”

“The terrorists?”

“Yes,” his grandfather said, and spooned tea into half a lemon that had already been pressed dry, squeezed it again, and rubbed it several times along the rim of his cup. Then his hands returned to the edge of the table.

“And what about you?”

“It was lovely,” Titus said, “wonderful!” He was already talking like Gunda Lapin, who had exclaimed each syllable as if propelling a fly-wheel: “Won-der-ful!”

His grandfather didn't like Gunda Lapin or any other visitors, because they merely wasted his daughter's time and drank her coffee. And late one night he had surprised Gunda Lapin at the fridge, stuffing her mouth with ham and drinking beer straight out of a bottle.

Titus wanted to provide his grandfather with five minutes of company. He always had to provide his grandfather company, because he was alone all day, because he ate more slowly and liked to enjoy his tea.

“Well, shall we,” said his grandfather, pushing his chair back and wincing as he stood up. “Good night, Titus, my boy.”

Titus jumped to his feet. But, teacup in hand, his grandfather had already taken his first steps, so Titus followed him only as far as the kitchen door. “Good night,” he said, and could hear the second syllable echoing in the bare entryway. His grandfather didn't like Titus to give him a peck on the cheek. At least, he always squinted one eye and pretended he didn't.

What Titus wanted most was to run after him. How could his grandfather desert him so suddenly? He was close to tears—yes, he would have loved to break into sobs.

Titus no longer understood himself. He wasn't sure if he had remembered the yellow book in his satchel a moment before, or whether it had come to him just as his grandfather stood up.

Titus took the tea egg out of the sink, screwed it open over the garbage pail, banged the two halves together, rinsed them out, and laid them on the dish rack to dry. At the same instant he turned off the light in the kitchen, the lamp in his grandfather's room went out—he always undressed in the dark—leaving Titus to grope for his satchel, which he had left beside the front door. He already had it in hand when he switched the light on again

         

[Letter of May 10, 1990]

his desk and opened the drawer where he kept his grandmother's fountain pen, unscrewed the cap, and wrote, “Friday, October 31, 1977, 11:34 p.m. till…”

As if counting his words, he moved the pen cautiously. Titus wanted to go on writing, pursuing his thoughts, which, if they came too quickly, would have to be jotted down in catchwords on scrap paper. He was delighted by the idea of filling these pages with his even, looping hand, until he had said all he had to say and the blue ink was used up.

Ever since he had boarded the streetcar in Laubegast and lost sight of Gunda Lapin in the dazzle of headlights, he had longed for this moment, when he would merely have to unscrew the cap of the pen and start writing—and in writing learn what had happened to him.

This evening he had understood that he must finally stop running around blind, lacking all feeling, unable to act on his own—someone merely living the life he was served up, an utterly impossible sort of life.

As he sat bent over under the light of the desk lamp, he looked up at his reflection in the windowpanes, where the room seemed as large as some great hall in a villa. The posters behind him shimmered. The only thing outside that found its way into the picture were the red lights outlining the water tower. Titus ducked so he could bring an uneven spot in the windowpane into line with one red light—which unfolded like a blossom.

His pen moved slowly. “Gunda Lapin,” he wrote. He set pen to paper again. He had to fight the urge to keep from repeating the same two words, filling a whole line, an entire page with “Gunda Lapin Gunda Lapin.”

He wished that everything he wanted to write was already there on the page, so that he could read what he had experienced, beginning with the walk from the streetcar down to the Elbe. With sketched map in hand, he had followed the street, Laubgaster Ufer, with its long row of old suburban homes and garden sheds. From here one could barely make out the opposite low-lying shore, which was hardly built up at all until where the first vault of the steep slope itself began. The rounded crowns of trees were barely higher than the grass, as if their trunks lay inundated and their shadows were reflections in the water. With each step he had come closer to the bend in the river and been able to gaze upriver to the ridge of the Elbe's sandstone mountains, to Lilienstein and Königstein, between which the Elbe meandered under pale blue clouds outlined against the yellowish white light.

The last house before the dockyards—indicated on his sketched map by a woman dancing on its roof and a balloon that read
HERE I AM!
—lay hidden behind trees and shrubs. He rang and heard a sound, halfway between a squeak and a creak, like planks once nailed together now being pried apart, and then a voice.

From the moment Gunda Lapin had opened the garden gate, she never let him out of her sight. There she stood before him—in her fleece vest, a sweater that was too long for her and that rolled up at the hem all on its own, wide trousers splattered with paint and tapering down to felt shoes—half clown, half ragman.

The path to the house meandered between acacias. It was as if light were scudding before the wind through the foliage. Gunda Lapin had proceeded him with long strides, her key ring dangling like a pail from her hand.

A shiny, well-scrubbed, wooden stairway that spiraled in a hundred-eighty-degree turn led them to the second floor, where they took another set of steep stairs. The kitchen lay to the right, not much bigger than their pantry at home. The sink lay under a dormer window, and the sunlight fell directly on a mountain of plates and cups, guarded by a kind of palisade of forks and spoons. There was nothing remarkable here, and yet he took note of the hodgepodge atop the water heater—a collection that included a Fit bottle, egg shampoo, lipstick, a green deodorant from the West, toothbrush and mug—with a precision and clarity as if he were looking for clues, though he couldn't say to what. Gunda Lapin had been the first adult he had ever visited unaccompanied by his mother. Her quarters consisted of two rooms. It was only because half the dividing wall was missing that they were able to sit across from each other, he on a footstool pulled from under a dainty desk and she on the sofa.

He had been afraid his pants might reveal traces of his accident, although before leaving the Toscana he had stuffed his underpants with toilet paper—a scrap of which he had suddenly discovered lying between his feet on the streetcar.

At the moment she was deep into Kurt Tucholsky, Gunda Lapin had said, and Franz Fühmann. He couldn't understand how anyone would voluntarily bother with textbook authors. His German teacher had said Tucholsky could have been another Heine, and Gunda Lapin had, much to his bewilderment, agreed.

Sitting here at her desk, the disappointment he had felt on entering her studio seemed absurd now—as if a house like this could ever have contained a grand hall flooded with light.

Instead he found himself in a low room with heavily draped windows and a pervasive odor that still clung to him. A carpet of splattered paint had led all the way to the paintings and frames that took up the left half of the space.

He had stepped up onto a little dais to the right of the door and sat down on a dark red settee, its back and arms threadbare, and although it had been the obvious and appropriate thing to do, it had likewise seemed both an honor and an act of presumption on his part. Gunda Lapin had spread a sheet over his legs, placed a bowl of fruit and chocolate on a low stool beside his feet, and taken up her position at an easel ten feet away—any greater distance was an impossibility.