New Lives

by Ingo Schulze

  I was disgusted with myself, because I had to admit that I would have much preferred to hug Myslewski and win his friendship, and had now run away from Geronimo. And although a greater disgrace was hardly imaginable, my real humiliation still awaited me. The ugliness of what I had just experienced and the ugliness of what lay ahead were so overwhelming that I finally started to take pleasure in my misery—a pleasure that found pubescent release as I ran to catch the streetcar. I swear to you that it took an act of will just to stay on my feet and not sink to my knees, whimpering with delight and shame at the moist spot in my underwear.

  My novella, however, revolves solely around the days between my second cellar conversation and the ten minutes of my report. The situation had everything the genre requires, from exposition—by way of a bit of suspense—to a surprising twist at the end.

  Although my feelings at the time have long since been exhausted literarily, I still have a sense of reeling back and forth for hours between those two end points, as if bouncing from one wall to another and never finding my footing. How could I, in the presence of my classmates, in the presence of Geronimo, present arguments against him and against myself?

  I shall spare you the further agonies of a ninth grader’s soul. What I find touching now is my mother’s fear and helplessness. In the end it was she who wrote my report and persuaded herself to forbid me from even mentioning conscientious objection—there would be time enough for that later. But her words had no influence over me. On the contrary. It didn’t take a Geronimo to remind me of Jesus’ words about forsaking father and mother to follow HIM.

  In presenting the finale in my novella I oriented myself roughly on the stations of the cross. In fact I was totally at the end of my tether when my name was called ten minutes before the bell marking the end of class. I got up, pushed back my chair, and stepped into the aisle, without any idea of what I would now do.

  My knees were shaking—a phenomenon that I registered with both amazement and interest. My upper body remained unaffected, my hands were calm, although moist as always. Out of some sense of tact in regard to my body, I stepped behind the teacher’s desk, where I did an about-face like a soldier. Here my knees could shake as much as they wanted. I raised the two letter-size pages a little higher and was ready to begin to read. All the rest would take care of itself.

  I kept to my mother’s text, word for word—my tongue worked hard at it, but what burbled up were sounds, sounds outside the human realm, gibberish that evidently provoked laughter. Was in fact everyone laughing—except a couple of scaredy-cats—but that Geronimo and Myslewski were glowering at me? Or am I just quoting myself again?

  My second attempt failed as well. I gagged on each syllable, my tongue performed wondrous feats—while my vocal cords remained out of control.

  The chair at the teacher’s desk had been pushed away. I fell back onto it, shoving the teacher’s grade book aside. From a seated position, I could manage words for the first time, the first sentence formed slowly. And with that Myslewski’s barrage of words drowned out everything else.

  The class was hushed. I knew that numbness only too well.

  The next moment I watched myself stand up and lean against the desk, bracing myself on one fist, the thumb of my other hand hooked into a belt loop, the report dangling between forefinger and middle finger. Everything about this boy expressed contentment, like the lethargic pleasure you feel while you dress yourself still half-asleep or when you stretch your legs.

  But was that boy at the teacher’s desk me? Wasn’t I floating above everything, out of everyone’s reach and surveying the whole scene in a way I had never done before? I gazed down, observing what was happening below me, a diorama of school life, nothing unusual. That fellow Enrico Türmer interested me no more or no less than the other students. Enrico Türmer differed from the others only because I could give him instructions. I said: Smile—and he smiled. I said: Don’t fight back, just stay on your feet and ask to deliver your short report. I said: Ignore the demand to sit down—and he ignored the demand to sit down. I fell silent. I wanted to see what he would do without me. Enrico Türmer likewise fell silent. A few quick breaths later and he repeated: “I would now like to deliver my short report, I worked very hard on it.” After he had paid no attention to yet another demand to sit down, I knew enough. Another brief breathless hesitation—I gave my permission, and Enrico Türmer returned to his seat.

  He heard Geronimo clear his throat, heard Myslewski’s squeaky shoes scrape the floor. He looked around—no one returned his glance. When the bell rang Enrico Türmer got up from his seat like everyone else and smiled as he watched Myslewski depart. It looked to him as if Geronimo, who scurried out the door next, was following like an attendant, as if he hoped to carry the grade book back to the teachers’ lounge.

  For the next few minutes I was completely happy—you must believe me. What a grand reversal of affairs it was! Do you have any idea of what had happened? Can you imagine what I suddenly realized, how the experience hit me like a thunderbolt?

  I was invincible, I had become a writer!

  Although this realization came not as a revelation, but more like something I had always known, but that for various reasons had slipped my mind only just recently.

  “It’s my guess,” I said, mimicking Geronimo as I walked home, “that you’d make a very good catechumen.” If it weren’t too pathos laden, I’d have to say: I gave an infernal laugh. A fourteen-year-old130 can manage that better than people generally like to believe.

  And do I also need to say that it was only several days later that I first noticed that I had lost God, that He had been expunged without my having even been aware of it? Not a single Lord’s Prayer has ever passed my lips since.

  I was hovering in the same place from which God had been looking down on humankind. But now it was I who was gazing down on them, at myself as well as at Geronimo or Myslewski, and I could observe what they were doing. I knew that it was of little significance whether they were brave or cowardly, strong or weak, honest or deceitful. The only important thing was that I was observing them.

  Geronimo could do or not do whatever he pleased. It would vanish in the universal mishmash. I would determine whatever picture of him was to remain. Yes, no one would even care about Geronimo unless I wrote about him today, tomorrow, or whenever.131 I was the keeper of the keys to Dante’s hell.

  My disaster of a report had no repercussions. I didn’t speak to anyone about it. The explanation I fed to my mother was that I had been saved by the bell.

  I had every reason to keep my experience to myself. For a while I even concealed it from myself and tried to assign some other origin to my carefree state. Needless to say, my novella also took a different and surprising turn.

  At the time I had no idea of the price I would pay for being so carefree.

  Within a few days my pattern of speech, my voice had changed. I smiled as I spoke. Everything I said had a shade of ambiguity, isolating me from my classmates. What was meant in earnest? What was just a game? For the first time I was living the life of the outsider. Other people no longer interested me. Time spent with other people, at least those my own age, was time wasted. Could the intensity of a conversation ever match that of reading a book? I needed what little free time I had for reading and writing. Those hours were too precious to piddle132 them away in the company of others.

  Geronimo avoided me, but without attacking me. He was praying for me, he whispered to me at one point when he caught me observing the sharp line of his clenched jaw and the nervous twitching of his lips.

  I took delight not just in my triumph but also in my having escaped both him and Myslewski—small revenge.

  Whenever there was a game during gym class, usually soccer or volleyball, and Geronimo and I were chosen to be on the same team—he was almost always the last choice—I never missed a chance to pass him the ball and thus include him in the team, just the way our gym teacher demanded.

&nb
sp; Nothing frightened Geronimo more than a ball. His body would instinctively flinch. He first had to overcome his urge to flee—but then when he did confront his foe, as he always did, it was too late. I was successful right off. Soon a victory by any team Geronimo was on was considered a sensation. Scorn, mockery, and rage were directed solely at him. The altruism of my playing the ball to him was evidently never questioned.133

  On the day grades were handed out at the end of our sophomore year, a “farewell” was extended to five of our classmates. Four had to leave because of their unsatisfactory performance (I had found refuge somewhere in the middle), plus Geronimo for still insisting on being a conscientious objector. With the approach of our last day in school together, old anxieties returned. I had the sense that accounts were due to be settled, that for months now Geronimo had been planning some spectacular action that would imprint itself for good on our memories. But I wasn’t afraid of that. My insecurity came from feeling so secure, because I couldn’t imagine an attack that could really touch me. My carefree state was suddenly full of care.

  My memories of that day are bathed in the garish light of July. Geronimo’s long, never really dirt-free fingers trembled above the surface of his desk.

  “I must likewise say my farewell to you today,” Myslewski remarked, drawing himself up beside our desk. Once Geronimo was standing fully erect—a good head taller than Myslewski—he started shivering, as if suddenly chilled. Glancing at the grade card, Myslewski announced the grade average: a perfect four point, disregarding a two in gym. Somehow Myslewski managed to grab hold of Geronimo’s hand and held it for a while.

  As he sat down Geronimo bent forward as if he were going to throw up, and then began to weep. He wept as if he had been saving up his tears his whole life long and were trying to shed them all in the space of thirty minutes. To the sound of his weeping, with here a sob and there a whimper, we were all handed our grades.

  I laid my hand on his shoulder, on his head. I ran my hand over his hair, which was greasy. Geronimo never looked up until the bell rang.

  With that, I left the classroom to wash my hands.

  When I returned Geronimo was encircled by our classmates. They stood so close to one another that I couldn’t even see him. And so we parted without saying good-bye.

  Suddenly I shuddered at the thought of transforming this scene into literature, either immediately or in the future—of turning my greasy hand into a metaphor. Because I have never succeeded in doing so, my recollections of that day are still very clear.134

  Saturday, March 31, ’90

  Dear Jo,

  Events have come tumbling one after the other over the last few days, and I’d give a pretty penny to know how we come off once you’ve read this.

  Friday we were all sitting together in the office—Georg, Jörg, Marion, and I. We needed to decide whether to publish an article submitted by the local Library on the Environment. It’s not about Altenburg, but about Neustadt an der Orla, a town in the loveliest part of the Thuringian Forest, where a farm factory for fattening two hundred thousand hogs was built in the midseventies. Children in the area were having asthma attacks, pollution of well water was ten times above allowable limits, villages were getting water only from tank trucks, and so on. Pipping Windows, which places ads with us, wants to buy into property there. The crucial issue is that they also want to take over management of the hog farm. But the farm belongs to Schalck-Golodkowski. Eighty percent of the hogs were for export. All of which prompted an environmentalist to write an open letter to Herr Pipping, whereupon several of the comrades she mentions in it filed suit against her. You’ll get to read about the whole thing.

  Georg, who usually keeps meticulous minutes, sat there propped on his elbows, deep creases between his eyebrows, hands covering nose and mouth, while he listened to Jörg read the article. If we publish it we’ll lose the account of the Altenburg subsidiary of Pipping Windows—and at two columns/sixty, on a weekly basis (one-year contract), with 50 percent surcharge for the last page, that loss comes to 10,870 marks, more than half of it paid in D-marks. And what’s more, we can’t check the accuracy of the article, nor can we know the legal ramifications of publishing it. It’s a head-on attack, based solely on our confidence in the environmentalists. On the other hand there’s no one we trust more than Anna, the Jeanne d’Arc of last fall. Other papers had squirmed out of it. Pro and contra cancel each other out. But there came a point when there was no ignoring Georg’s silence.

  “I’d like to propose to you,” Georg said with a smile, tucking his head between his shoulders, “that we shut down the paper.” As he went on talking his forehead shifted swiftly back and forth between a smooth surface and deep furrows. We should hold out until local elections,135 and with that our job would be done.

  There suddenly came a moment when I could no longer endure his smile. I despised him. There was nothing left to mull over. He wanted to rob us of our daily bread and drive us out of the same office into which he had lured us with his promises in the first place. I despised him for his arrogance—an arrogance at odds with the world because it is what it is—for running off in pursuit of this idea or that, of essential, philosophical ideas, instead of holding one’s own in the everyday world. All his qualities, some of which I admired, others merely respected—his deliberate meticulousness, his honesty, his doubts and self-inflicted agony at being unable to write even a few normal sentences—all that suddenly seemed childish and despicable because he let himself defeat himself, because he was not willing to do battle with himself, because, to put it succinctly, he acted irresponsibly.

  “And what are we supposed to do?” Jörg asked as calmly and amiably as a radio moderator.

  Georg—I don’t know what else he expected—seemed to be in torment at having to say anything more than the remarks he had evidently prepared.

  “We’ve failed,” he repeated, “we didn’t take our job seriously enough.”

  Jörg wanted to know what job it was he meant. Flaring up and gazing at me for the first time, Georg replied that that was surely clear to each of us.

  I told him to answer Jörg’s question, after all we’d all burned our bridges behind us.136

  “The world lies open before us,” Georg said. “Let’s not forget that!”

  Jörg had leaned back and kept pressing his pencil with the tip of one finger, as if playing Pik-Up Stiks. Marion followed Georg’s lead and said that, yes, she was in full agreement with him, but chose to draw another conclusion—that from now on we should do everything different and better.

  At which we all fell silent.

  There was the sound of footsteps outside, but Jörg and Georg didn’t stir. I heard a resigned laugh from Ilona, who had been told that we were not to be disturbed. Then the baron entered, our most recent issue in hand. Had we been waiting long for him? He apologized and took off his coat. Ilona brought some fresh water for the wolf.

  Georg virtually turned to stone. Jörg requested that Barrista leave us alone—the future of the paper was on the line here. Then the only sound to be heard was the wolf lapping water, and then, as if the animal were bothered by the silence, even that stopped.

  “Most regrettable,” was Barrista’s initial remark. He should have been informed before now. Scheduled for today was the first discussion of preparations for His Highness’s visit, a summary of which lay in triplicate before us. He had the welcoming statement with him and a letter for us written in the hereditary prince’s own hand. Most regrettable, but under such circumstances he had no choice but to arm himself with patience, most regrettable as well because the number of letters in reply to his ad had far exceeded all expectation, which meant nothing less than that our little newspaper was indeed being read by, was of uncommon interest to, businesspeople.

  Her face drained of blood, Ilona was standing beside the stove. “But you’re not really going to do that, right?” Her pleading eyes wandered from one of us to the other. “I don’t even have a contract
yet…” She sobbed.

  It would be helpful to be immediately informed of our decision, the baron continued coolly, since the prince’s visit dared not in any way be put in jeopardy. He led Ilona out, the wolf trotting behind them. The door was left ajar, so that Barrista’s attempts to console her were still audible—and sounded like the same English singsong I had heard on the first evening we met.

  “We’re going ahead,” Jörg said, turning to Marion. And then to me: “Right, Enrico, we’re going ahead? No matter what, we’re going to keep going!”

  Then Jörg turned to Georg and asked him—warily, as if inquiring of a patient—how long he was willing to grant us the right to stay in his home, whether Georg was agreeable to providing us asylum until early or mid-May, presuming we couldn’t find a space before then, whether Georg—Jörg kept addressing him by name more often than was necessary—could keep the rent at its current level, and whether Georg had any suggestions of how we should deal with the telephone bill. “But of course, but of course”—it came from Georg in a stream. Jörg proposed we keep Georg on salary until the end of July, paid in D-marks, and asked if that would cover the transitional period.

  But of course, that was very generous, Georg said, but it wasn’t necessary. Jörg thought it was, and asked if we could count on Georg until the end of the month. But of course, but of course! Jörg proposed that we publish the hog farm article.