New Lives (84 page)

Petersen didn't assign any homework and ended the class before the bell. On the way to the door he stopped in his tracks. “Did you understand it all, Titus?” he asked. Petersen's fingers wriggled like marionettes beside his pen holder. Titus raised his head, said, yes, smiled, and looked back at his notebook. Petersen's sleeves had slipped down over the backs of his hands. His fingernails drummed on Titus's desktop, a quick rhythm that ended with the words: “That's fine then.”

Gym class. Titus pulled on his old uniform. Martin's class arrived late in the basement dressing room. Mario and Peter Ullrich were warming up outside already. In his lumpy gym shorts, Joachim was leaning against the goalpost.

Kampen, their gym teacher, whose gray hair made him look like a snow-speckled Dean Read in
Alaska Kid,
was juggling the ball. After a three-thousand-meter run they would still have twenty minutes to play.

They were a bit late crossing to the public park. Martin and Titus were the last to run the warm-up lap. No one took the high-kick sprint and the ankle and stretching exercises as seriously as they did. Bernadette was sick, Martin said. She'd had a fever of almost 104° on Sunday.

Kampen was waiting at the bottom of the slight rise and repeated what times would earn what grades. Then the whole herd dashed off at a mad pace. Titus let Martin move ahead of him, which left him in last place for the first two hundred meters. It wasn't until they got to the oak tree where they looped around to head back down the long straightaway that they first started passing some of the others. They overtook Joachim right at the starting line. Kampen called out to Titus to stay hot on Martin's heels. “Chase him!” With short strides they took the slope without slowing down.

Titus thought how he could run forever behind Martin Böhme, in the wake of his fluttering hair with its fragrance of shampoo. Titus enjoyed the effortlessness with which they both passed the others. After three rounds they had only Peter Ullrich and Mario ahead of them. But Peter Ullrich would soon buckle like a limp pickle and Mario would give up because of his knees. On the fourth lap they passed them both, and by the fifth they were one lap ahead of Joachim.

“Chase him!” Kampen shouted. Titus was happy. He wasn't going to let himself be shaken off, he'd rather be torn to shreds. He now understood better what the article had meant when it said: Dynamo could deal with Liverpool, but only if every single player tore himself to shreds in the process. Torn to shreds, but still holding on. More and more students and teachers were lining the course now. Another two laps, another eight hundred meters. He would hold on, he'd match any tempo. They kept on passing people, shot past them like arrows. Titus knew every single meter, knew how to place his stride as he took the curves and that it took more effort to round the oak in a somewhat larger arc and still hold your pace. Titus could hear cheering, saw pennants and people bending over the barricades to call out their names. He felt the pain in his lung, but what did that have to do with him? His legs were running, there was no stopping them. Martin Böhme could run as hard as he wanted, he wouldn't get rid of Titus. As they approached Kampen for the last time, they were already heroes: Martin Böhme and him. Titus saw eyes and mouths gaping wide and almost crashed into Martin's back at the oak. Titus didn't need to breathe anymore, that only hampered him. There were backs ahead of him, more backs, he saw Kampen, saw Kampen's astonished face, and heard Bernadette call out his name—it wasn't “Martin!” that she shouted, but “Titus! Titus!”

Suddenly there were no more backs in front of him, and he flew past Kampen and kept on going because he no longer had control of his legs, because they were still running, with him, and he brought his arms down now and looked around and kept on going until finally he could walk and Kampen was beside him, holding the stopwatch under his nose, and Martin was clapping him on the back and congratulating him, Martin with his red and white face.

His breath returned, it was like being stuck with needles. Instead of a lung, he had a pipe inside him, an old water pipe, his whole mouth was rusty, he could even smell it. He wanted to stop it, stop his breathing, stop himself, but his legs kept going, now right, now left, he staggered, and Kampen shouted, “Keep walking, my lad, keep walking!” And Martin said, “Total wipeout.”

Titus saw the girls heading toward him, bounding splotches of color, they crossed the street, those same voices he had heard lining the course. They stared at him. But it wasn't admiration in their eyes, it was more like dread, horror, pity, or maybe just incomprehension. Suddenly she was standing in front of him, short, pale, with restive eyes. She stuck her chin out over the collar of her training jacket, which seemed to be in her way. “Here,” she said, and unfolded something, a tissue. And since he hesitated, she pressed the tissue to his brow and eyes, a touch that did him infinite good. The tissue stuck to him. He wiped the tatters off and turned around to her, but couldn't spot her among the others. He was holding the soggy clump in his hand.

Joachim made his agonized way up the slope, his elbows pressed against his ribs, his knees glued together. As he shambled along, he turned his heels out, which Titus thought looked effeminate.

Later Titus and Martin were told to choose teams. Titus started. After each had selected seven names, Titus chose Joachim. That left Peter Ullrich among the last few. Martin likewise despised Peter Ullrich, and Titus pointed to a boy with huge nostrils and eyebrows grown together. Peter Ullrich was the last, he went with Martin.

Joachim volunteered to play goalie. “Time for revenge, Martin,” Kampen said, and blew his whistle.

It was a poor game. No one wanted to run any more. Joachim had sped ahead of a backward pass, which meant a corner kick, and somehow it ended up a goal. There were too many players for the size of the field and the goals were too narrow. Shortly before the final whistle the ball bounced out into the middle of the field, with no one in control of it for a few moments. Titus was the first to arrive and landed such a lucky kick with the side of his foot that the ball flew into the net. No one cheered. “A shot like a beeline,” Kampen said, and whistled the end of the game.

Titus entered the room just as the bell rang, the girls were missing. Petersen called out, “Friends, one and all.” On the blackboard he wrote, “Isaac Newton 1643–1727,” tossed the chalk on his desk, stuck his hands in his smock pockets, rolled back and forth on his tiptoes, and repeated what was in the textbook about the founder of classical mechanics. To Titus it seemed as if he knew nothing more than what Petersen was telling them at that moment, as if Newton were the first human being that he had ever bothered to take note of. He was still dazed from his goal. How often Titus had dreamt of a shot like that—like a beeline.

When the door opened the first time and a couple of very red-faced girls entered, Petersen didn't react at all. Petersen stared in grim silence at the second bunch, watched them take their seats. The third time he erupted—he wasn't going to take this anymore, the same thing every Monday.

Martina Bachmann, who was the last to slink in, was about to offer an apology. Petersen waved her impatiently to the front of the room, “Come on, come on, come up front!” and presented her with a piece of chalk as if it were a flower. “So you may now proceed, please, proceed.” Petersen sat down on an unoccupied desk up front on the left, let his legs dangle. More and more girls offered their excuses. Martina Bachmann was allowed to return to her seat.

When Titus looked up again, Petersen was writing “F = m · g” and then “G = m · g” on the blackboard. Titus tried to fix in his mind that mass and gravity are different values for a given body and that gravity can't be measured in the same units as mass. “The gravity of a body,” Joachim said, “is the force with which it presses vertically on what lies beneath it or pulls at what it is dangling from—that is, mass times acceleration. Which means, G equals mass times nine point eighty-one meters per second per second and is measured either in Newtons or kilo-ponds.” After first making certain that Joachim's book was closed in front of him, Petersen nodded, and then said that they would now move on to the law of inertia. He wrote a couple of equations on the board. Titus was amazed at how calm he was, as if this hour were like any other, where the worst thing that could happen before the bell rang would be a bad grade. Maybe Petersen had forgotten the whole thing by now.

“Unless force is exerted on a body, it will stay in motion,” Petersen wrote on the blackboard, and drew a box around it. While Titus was wondering what that meant in his case, Petersen drew a ship, with waves and four arrows, up and down, right and left. Those were the exerted forces: weight and buoyancy, propulsion and the resistance of the water.

The greater the mass of a body, the greater its inertia. Someone giggled. Petersen called out to Peter Ullrich that he would have the chance to apply his newly acquired knowledge.

Titus didn't know if he was sick to his stomach because he was hungry or because he had eaten his sandwich too quickly just now. Or because there was something wrong with his sense of orientation, or because he was experiencing a kind of weightlessness, an emptiness in which you could depend solely on science and its laws, where opinions didn't count. His time in the three thousand meters was an objective reality, and his soccer goal; Newton was real, equations were real.

“Every body,” Petersen said, tossing the chalk on the desk, “tends to keep moving ahead in a straight line as long as the sum of all forces exerted on it is zero. Come up here, there's the chalk.”

Peter Ullrich kept on writing as if he hadn't noticed Petersen's pointing forefinger, but then suddenly stood up and staggered forward.

“According to the law of inertia,” Peterson said, raising his voice, “the ship will move forward in a straight line. Why isn't it at rest?” And with that he left Peter Ullrich all to himself and sat back down on the unoccupied desk on the left. It was so quiet Titus could hear the others breathing.

He imagined himself standing there instead of Peter Ullrich, saw his own glance skitter across the class and fix on Petersen.

“I can't do this report.” And corrected himself. “I don't want to do this report.”

“Why?” Petersen barked at him.

“Because I'm a conscientious objector,” Titus replied.

“What?” Petersen asked. “What does the one have to do with the other?”

“I don't know,” Titus said, “I really don't know anymore, I've forgotten.”

“Hot air, pure hot air!” Petersen called out to Peter Ullrich. “You've understood nothing, nothing whatever. Why isn't the ship at rest?” Petersen turned to the class. Joachim was the first to raise his hand, then Martina Bachmann.

Titus saw the vacant expression on Peter Ullrich's face as he passed Martina Bachmann and returned to his seat.

I can't go ahead with this, I can't, Titus thought, it's so pointless. And what did a lot of words like that mean anyway? Never before had he been so deeply aware of the nothingness and senselessness of such opinions and claims. It seemed to him he no longer knew what was up or down, and once he was up front, at the teacher's desk, he would be far less certain.

Petersen praised Martina Bachmann for her ability to think concretely about a world of real things. With a laugh that looked more like she was crying and with odd gestures of her shoulders she returned to her seat.

Petersen looked at his watch. “Don't worry, Titus, I haven't forgotten you,” he said, and told them that they had used a general law, the basic Newtonian law to derive a special law, the law of inertia. He called this deductive reasoning. “There is, however, a fundamental difference between mathematical statements and physical laws.”

         

[Letter of July 9, 1990]

Was Petersen alluding to him, to the conflict between statements and the law? With every word Petersen spoke, the emptiness inside Titus expanded. It was close to a miracle that the three typed pages lay within reach at the same moment Titus heard his name called. As he stood up he fumbled to check if his shirt tail was hanging out.

He still had time to make a decision. As he took his place at the front of the class he was suddenly aware of his knees. They were trembling, shaking—he had always thought that was just a turn of phrase. He paid it no further attention, because he was visible only from the waist up. Titus was amazed to discover how totally unprepared he was for this ordeal. No one would believe him. All his torments had been pointless, utterly pointless. Each moment erased the previous one. Titus sorted the three pages, he hadn't even managed that—and laid them down in front of him for fear his hands might begin to tremble.

He groped through the first sentence word by word. He exerted all his energies, but just sounds burbled up, sounds outside the human realm, gibberish that provoked giggles, laughter, and snorts. Titus was terrified, they were laughing at him. Except for Joachim and Petersen—they were glowering at him. He choked on each syllable, his tongue performed wondrous feats, but his vocal cords remained out of control. More laughter. Only now did the first sentence start to form.

Petersen bellowed. Titus didn't understand why. It wasn't him, it was the class that was laughing. What fault was that of his?

The class fell silent, went rigid, Joachim tipped his chair back. Petersen was standing in front of Titus, and Titus watched as words distorted Petersen's mouth.

From somewhere far away, like the bell now ringing in the distance, Titus felt an inkling of something that, as it grew clearer and clearer, erased all the tension from his face, revealing the trace of a smile, a very delicate smile. Gradually Titus realized why Petersen was raging like that. And with this realization came another that he had no name for, but that was bright and buoyant and drove the black shadows from his soul.