New Lives

by Ingo Schulze

  Jörg must have said something on the stairs, because, rubbing his hands, von Recklewitz stepped over to the managing director as if asking for the time of day, “So you’re planning to steal our daily bread?”

  And Jörg, grateful for the opening to complain, tattle-taled, “Either with us or against us. That’s what you said, isn’t it?”

  “It’s not all that simple,” the managing director noted in his defense, and pulled out a business card. While he recounted the history of our friendship, Andy and the baron were busy in the next room removing gadgets from their boxes.

  “And what becomes of our investment?” Recklewitz barked, thrusting his nose in my direction. He was magnificent.185

  The baron asked us to join him. “This is the best,” he enthused, “there’s no better…Are you in the business?” And after he too had received one of the Giesseners’ cards, he exclaimed, “Then you’ll confirm as much, won’t you?” And the managing director immediately confirmed it. They themselves were considering installing a couple of Apples—it “probably made sense,” at least in a few departments. And gradually the managing director once again became the same eager visitor he had been in February when he had bent over our page proofs. He grabbed hold of the box as Andy slipped the screen out. He gathered up the Styrofoam, kept close watch on every cable connection, and eyed our plugs as worriedly as Andy did.

  The baron had even remembered to bring extension cords and a junction box. Only Recklewitz wanted to move on; he was hungry. We trooped upstairs with him, where Kurt offered him something from his lunchbox. Recklewitz thanked him, but refused with some irritation. He had heard so much about the local mutz roast (he too pronounced it wrong) that he’d rather hold back for now. Kurt flipped the top slice of bread back, pointed to a thick layer of country liverwurst, and then took a bite himself.

  If you should ever happen to meet Bodo von Recklewitz-Münzner, you’ll see that he lives up to his name. At first he’s all Herr von Recklewitz, hurling commands out across the moat surrounding his castle. Yes, you can see from his eyes and temples that it gives him a headache if someone takes a seat beside him instead of waiting at a distance of several yards to be waved closer. Once he has got used to withdrawing his gaze from the far horizon and has overcome the inner resistance that each new contact with the world provokes in him, Herr von Recklewitz gradually becomes—in every utterance, in every explanation and observation—more and more the obliging Herr Münzner, who is to be at our side with word and deed from here on out. We were to pay him six hundred marks a month and in return can engage his services at any time and in any cause—only travel expenses are extra. Such an arrangement has always worked well for him, he says, and even better for his clients. We should not, however, make the serious mistake of confusing the law with justice. His business is the law, seeing to it that the law is on our side.

  And suddenly, once the contract had been signed, our old schoolchum Bodo was all left-sided smiles, and now he was going to join us for a good meal.

  “And now downstairs fast as we can,” he cried, “they won’t be able to get out on their own.” Bodo von Recklewitz-Münzner expected fabulous things of our local cuisine.

  I invited the managing director to join us. “Believe me,” he said, clasping my right hand in both of his, “if I didn’t have this meeting tomorrow morning, I would. Yes, I would, and I would invite you, all of you here, to dinner on me.”

  We accompanied him to his car, a real BMW, the model of which I was carrying in my pants pocket as the corpus delicti. “Beautiful car,” I exclaimed as the managing director let the window down with a hum. He leaned back and stuck his head out as if checking to see if we were all still there. As he drove off he stretched his arm up over the roof and waved his tremolo hand, revealing, like yet another promise, a gold bracelet.

  “The son of a bitch!” cried Jörg, who had lowered his arm even before Recklewitz had. “That son of a bitch!”

  “Be glad,” the baron laughed, “you ended up with someone like that. And be proud. No sooner are you on the market than they’re courting you. What more do you want?”

  “Sits there the whole time with a toy like that in his jacket, waiting to pounce. Damn him!” Jörg shouted.

  The baron said nothing, as if first making sure Jörg had in fact spoken his piece, and then he said: “Rebuild the wall, but you better hurry!”

  We should be grateful to this managing director, yes, truly grateful. He had uncovered our weaknesses. “Your strengths and weaknesses,” the baron added. He blamed himself for not having been harder on us in the past. Because as was now evident it was rather unlikely that we would be granted any more time to learn without pain. “If there even is such a thing—learning without pain.”

  He asked Jörg to tell him one thing the managing director had said that was incorrect. We were going to have to change, change very rapidly, otherwise we didn’t have a chance. “And at the least,” he said, “rethink your page size and the quality of the printing. You need room for ads, and no one is going to pay you D-marks for such fuzzy photos.”

  They were still arguing as we sat in the Ratskeller. The tone remained friendly, but implacable. “You don’t want to be a daily? Then you’re going to have to come up with a different concept.”

  Each time I was about to jump in to help Jörg, he had already lost the argument. That was probably why Recklewitz kept jutting his nose at me. What did I think? he asked. I couldn’t come up with anything. And I was annoyed at Jörg for carrying on so childishly that they must have thought we had forgotten to read the rules of the game.

  “Enrico!” Jörg cried. “Don’t let them knock the wind out of you like this!” And then Jörg rehearsed his sad account once more. Of course no one knows what will happen after July 1st,186 of course the East isn’t the West, of course we sold close to a thousand more copies of our last issue, of course it all depends on us, on what we want and on our hard work, of course we’re not just any newspaper. Plus if Jörg’s people get elected, then we’re more likely than the others to get things directly from the horse’s mouth. But will that be enough?

  After that no one could think of anything innocuous to break the silence. Fortunately the food arrived. We raised glasses and I no longer understood what was really supposed to be so terrible about the baron’s vision or what made Jörg just keep shaking his head. If Jörg continued to balk, the baron had said (leaving it up to us to decide how serious he was), he himself would start up a free paper financed by ads. You couldn’t leave money lying in the streets. Besides it would be fun, it was always fun to make money. And in this case if you went at it right, right from the start, it would be child’s play. Hadn’t the managing director said they did photo offset in Gera? Well then, bring on as many Giesseners as you wanted. But it would prove fatal for the Weekly. “If you don’t react now,” he said, aiming his deep-sea glasses at me, “you’re finished.”

  “No,” Jörg said, he wasn’t going to fall into that trap. He wasn’t going to let us waste our energies. We were going to lay into the oars.

  “Then row away,” exclaimed Recklewitz, who, because the mutz roast had run out, was busy dissecting an enormous ham hock and wanted to talk about more pleasant things, soccer for example, although he had to know the baron thinks sports are ridiculous.

  This morning at nine on the dot Andy appeared in the office. He sat down at the computer and three minutes later handed me a finished ad: a full half page! In white on black, nothing more than, “Andy’s Coming!” He asked for a discount, which I of course gave him. I did better with my English than I had expected, but then I didn’t have a choice.

  All the same I wasn’t sure if I now understood him correctly, although I was sure twenty meant zwanzig and twenty thousand was zwanzigtausend. I once again tapped the computer, screen, and printer: “Altogether twenty thousand?”

  “Yeees,” Andy cried, kept on saying “yeees!” I asked if that might not be something for us too. “Yeees,
absolutely.”

  It’s all so easy. We spent seven and a half for the VW bus, fifteen hundred on the camera. Our assets include the fifteen hundred187 from the ad for videos that the baron pulled in for us, plus a few other hundred D-marks in income, comes to thirteen thousand plus a few hundred. We need another six thousand and change in D-marks.

  I’ve already written Steen and called Gera about setting up an appointment. We’re not going to go under that fast.

  Your E.

  PS: Michaela just told me that some woman tried to kill Lafontaine with a knife or dagger. Michaela thinks that will improve his and the Social Democrats’ chances with the voters.

  Saturday, April 28, ’90

  Dear Nicoletta,

  My transfer into a company of new arrivals meant that, even though I was the youngest, I was promoted to the rank of room corporal,188 who is assigned the best bed (bottom bunk, at the window) and newest locker, who gets his meals brought to him every morning and evening, and whose word has greater weight than that of a noncom.

  The commissioned letters had more or less run their course. And I didn’t have much else to do. Now and then we rode cross-country in our APCs, which was a welcome change. I enjoyed the ride—but wouldn’t admit it to myself. Even setting up field camp and going on short maneuvers had ceased to be frightening, plus the summer of ’82 was extraordinarily warm.

  When I wanted to write, I retreated to Nikolai’s painting studio,189 where the same banners lay draped over laundry racks for weeks on end. Each morning Nikolai would give the pots of paint a quick stir with a brush and then retreat into his studio, a small room with windows that overlooked the drill field and that he had turned into an incredibly cozy spot. He even had a record player and a scruffy leather sofa. The few guys who were allowed inside mostly served as his models.

  You’ll scarcely believe my naïveté,190 but in fact I couldn’t figure out why all the guys who modeled for him were very boyish and often looked almost identical.

  Inspired by Baudelaire’s prose poems, which Nikolai read to me from an Insel edition, I wrote one or two sketches every day. These idyllic hours were interrupted only by the 7th of October parade, rehearsals for which were an idiotic, stomach-turning grind. But that’s not a topic for here.

  As winter once again approached—I was now a DC—I was afraid time might be running out.

  There was a good chance that much of what I had assumed would happen as a matter of course and had intended to experience would never find a place on my agenda before the end of April. I had taken it for granted that sooner or later I would see the inside of the brig. I almost managed it once without its being any of my doing. When the radio in our room, for which I as corporal was responsible, was checked out by a battalion officer, the red tuning line didn’t vanish beneath one of the paper strips you had to glue on to mark East-bloc stations. They threatened me with three-day arrest, but that was the end of it. Everyone, even the officers, listened to New German Wave, and the FM reception on West Berlin’s RIAS, SFB, and AFN was top-notch.

  I was working on a story about sentry duty, and urgently needed more observed details. When I learned that my company would be assigned double duty191 on the three days before Christmas, I did everything I could to be included. But as one of three drivers in their third six-month stint, there was little chance of that. My only help was to play Good Samaritan. In an act of hypocritical sacrifice I gave a heartbroken paterfamilias my leave pass and took over sentry duty for him. To keep the gratitude of the man, who was on the verge of tears, within limits I demanded several bottles of vodka in return, which he smuggled into the barracks at risk of life and limb.

  Such intentionally arranged incidents are seldom worth the investment,192 but this time it appeared as if my hopes would be fulfilled. Just when I had been relieved of duty at the end of the snowy second night—Christmas Eve—the police patrol brought in a stinking, roaring drunk sailor. They were holding him by his arms and legs and swinging him back and forth like a sack. They had a lot to do yet, so they unloaded him in the guardhouse and went back out on the hunt.

  The sailor lived in Oranienburg and had been nabbed at his front door. He could no longer stand on his own, and would choke now and then on his gurgled curses and insults. He finally managed to make it to his knees, but then lurched over on one side again and raised one arm. He wanted us to let him go. Even in his pleas you could hear some of the disdain that he as a sailor had for men in gray. He claimed he hadn’t been trying to get to his girl, but to his mother, he didn’t want to fuck, but just to be home for Christmas, even “grunts” ought to understand that. He fumbled at his watch, pulled it off—it was ours if we let him go.

  As a noncom and I attempted to get him back on his feet, he readily assisted us in the belief that we would bring him to the gate, and went on praising his Glasshütter watch, which had never let him down.

  We moved quickly to consign him to the brig and agreed with him that the MPs were mangy dogs and jack-offs. The footprints left in the snow by his street shoes looked downright ladylike in comparison to those of our boots. He looked up as if he had only now realized where we were taking him. I grabbed him tighter. Whether because of that or because he saw the corporal stripes on my shoulder strap193 —he took his rage out on me. He gave me a kick, the tip of his shoe met my shin. As if out of reflex I struck back, his nose started to bleed. He had pulled free and whaled into me now, banging at me in a fury with bloody fists. I somehow got a grip on him, clinching him from behind. He booted and kicked, until I didn’t know what else to do but to pick him up and fling him into the snow. Help arrived from the guardhouse. On all fours now, the sailor spun around inside the circle of his tormentors searching for me.

  Four of us got the better of him, wrenched his arms behind him, tugged his head back by the hair—after he started spitting—and shoved him forward. He went limp, which is why we had to drag him down the stairs to be booked. And so I had finally made it into one of those cells I had wanted to occupy myself. The next evening, Christmas night, I sat in Nikolai’s studio, drank mulled wine, ate stollen, and listened to the “Christmas Oratorio.” Nikolai gave me Malaparte’s The Skin, a well-thumbed Western pocketbook.

  I was already living in the euphoric state of a returnee when we were sent on maneuvers in the middle of April, barely two weeks before my discharge on the 28th. We crossed the Elbe and burrowed our way into a pine forest.

  The last night we were waiting for our orders to return to base, sleeping in our APCs. As soon as it got chilly inside, the driver turned on the motor. That was forbidden, but our officers evidently chose not to notice.

  After the second or third time I fell asleep. A pain in my shoulder woke me up. Udo, a noncom, was literally kneeling on me in order to get at the crank that opened the louvers on the hood of the APC—the only way to cool the motor. The thermostat indicator was out of sight, well beyond the red zone. The motor was on the verge of locking at any moment. An incident like that could be punished as sabotage, and you ended in the military prison at Schwedt. Udo’s chin lingered above my shoulder, we stared at the thermostat. I could smell his sleepy breath and awaited my fate. Out of stupidity, off to Schwedt—that would be unbearable!

  When the indicator began to move I felt Udo’s hand at the nape of my neck, he was squeezing with every ounce of his strength. Then he opened the hatch and climbed out. I waited until I could turn the motor off and followed him. I thought he was standing somewhere nearby, having a smoke. But I couldn’t find him. It was still dark and perfectly still when I started my walk. From one moment to the next there was nothing to remind me of an army. No sentries, no barbed wire, no spotlights, only soft earth and silence. The vehicles were as unreal as the trees, enchanted reptiles murmuring in their sleep.

  The farther I went the more excited I was. I don’t know how long I walked. I stopped at the edge of a field, dropped my trousers, and squatted. What all I discharged from myself was simply stupendous. I
t seemed to me as if I were not simply emptying out what I had stuffed myself with over the past few days, but was also ridding myself of every oppression, fear, and torment I had ever had to swallow. With my naked butt hovering above the forest floor by the first light of dawn, I was the happiest, freest human being that I could imagine. I saw my sun rising with the dawn. It was all behind me, I was returning from hell, and the completion of my book was only a matter of time. These minutes were now the yardstick of my happiness.

  That very evening I began to try to describe the experience. And despite all the later changes, all the material I threw out or rearranged, I was determined I would end my book with this unexpected moment of happiness and dawn.

  Late in the afternoon of the day I was discharged, I walked away from the streetcar stop, black bag in hand, only to run directly into my mother. She set down her shopping bag of empty bottles and threw her arms around my neck and would not let go even after I begged her to.

  Sunday, April 29, 1990

  I had returned, but I had brought a problem home with me. Nikolai had invited me to spend a weekend with him in Saxon Switzerland. I had no idea how I would survive those two days with him.194

  When Nikolai came to pick me up—standing there in the stairwell of our building, leaning against the railing, in a white half-unbuttoned shirt, faded jeans, and sunglasses pushed up into his hair—I followed him like someone wading into the water although he knows he can’t swim. To describe my hours with him would be a story all its own. I felt guilty for having nourished his hopes. He wasn’t used to having to woo someone. As soon as he met with resistance, he turned domineering. That night we almost scuffled. We had spread out our sleeping bags on a projecting rock. The drop-off was only a few yards away. It was so dark I couldn’t even make out his face. I could guess its expression only from his voice. I could deal with his arrogance, his accusations, his mockery and scorn, yes, even his disdain. What appalled me, however, was his self-hatred. I covered my ears—that’s how unbearable what I had to listen to was. I couldn’t console him, either. That whole night I kept my eye on him. He didn’t fall asleep until it began to grow light. I didn’t have to do much packing. Yes, I simply ran away. I never saw Nikolai again.