New Lives

by Ingo Schulze

  Michaela, who had been greeted with lots of applause at the start, made the mistake of reading the Dresden Resolution with the same flair she had at the theater. I could hear Emilia Galotti. She herself was aware how from one line to the next she was losing energy and how ultimately all that was left was an artificial theatrical pose. Toward the end she spoke faster—a deadly sin for an actor.

  “I wasn’t good,” she whispered. I took her cold hand, held it tight for a while. “Doesn’t matter,” I said as the bass player gave his downbeat nod to that rotten orchestra.

  Hundreds, thousands of times I had imagined giving a revolutionary speech, as if my life had been aimed toward this moment, this wish, this dream, which I was now damned to turn into reality.

  Clutching the little note in my left hand, holding fast to the pulpit with my right,311 I fought back the urge to laugh.

  I looked up. Not a cough, not a cleared throat, not a shuffled foot. And into this perfect silence I said, “My name is Enrico Türmer. For a year and a half now I have been living with my wife and son at 104 Georg-Schumann Strasse. I work in the theater and am a member of no party.”

  I looked out over the heads of the people and down the center aisle, and began:

  “We have made mistakes, we confess we have, we indict ourselves.

  “We tied on our pioneer neckerchiefs and sang the song about the dove of peace, while tanks drove through Budapest.

  “We wept and laid our hands in our laps as we were being walled in.

  “We said nothing while Soviet tanks crushed the Prague Spring.

  “We paid our solidarity dues while workers were being shot and killed in Gdansk.”

  The breathless silence lent my words a strength that had nothing to do with me, these were no longer my words.

  “On May Day we demonstrated in honor of our unending loyalty to the Soviet Union while its troops murdered people in Afghanistan.

  “We cracked jokes about lazy Polacks while the Poles were fighting for free labor unions, and we swore an oath to our flag as the National People’s Army took up its position along the Oder and Neisse.

  “In the midst of the graveyard silence that has reigned over Tiananmen Square for months, we still hear Honecker and Krenz clapping their approval.”

  I could feel the words whirling about me, felt them rip me from the spot, felt myself being swept away with them.

  “We put on our finest clothes when we went to vote.

  “We learned to talk about our country without using the word ‘wall.’

  “We let ourselves be draped along the curb like living garlands.

  “We went to our Youth Consecration and swore loyalty to the state.

  “We practiced throwing grenades and shooting air guns while the best of our writers, actors, and musicians were forced to leave the country.

  “We congratulated one another on our brand-new apartments while the old centers of our towns were being razed.

  “We counted our Olympic gold medals, but the dentist didn’t know where he would get material to fill our teeth.

  “We hung flags from our windows, although in Prague and Budapest we were ashamed to be recognized as citizens of the GDR. We rose from our seats for the national anthem, although we would have preferred to sink into the ground.”

  I cast my eyes into the distance.

  “We do not want to burden ourselves with guilt any longer. Our patience is at an end. We will let them see us, on the streets, in the marketplaces, in churches and theaters, in the Rathaus, in front of the buildings of local government and the State Security’s villas. We have nothing to hide, we will show our faces. There is no reason for us to keep silent, we will speak our names. The time for begging is past. The wall must go, State Security must go, the Socialist Unity Party must go! Bring on free elections, a free media, bring on democracy! We need no one’s permission. We will now take to the streets! This is our country!”

  The silence burst open. The whole room was in an uproar—stomps, applause, whistles. If it doesn’t sound too absurd, I stared out into the clamor, clutching the pulpit, dizzy from my own words. People were crowding out the doors. “Super,” the woman with the scar shouted, “really super!” Michaela had crossed her arms, clutching her elbows with her hands. Later she said the pastor had pushed me aside to get to the microphone. But the organ had drowned him out.

  The closer we got to the exit the more clearly we could hear the chants.

  The demonstration moved past the police station, past the Rathaus, on across Market Square, and turned left at the far end onto Sporen Strasse. We formed the rear guard. Suddenly someone opened the police-station door, two uniformed men raced toward us, and asked where we were headed. How should we know, the long-haired fellow shouted as he started to unroll his banner (FREE ELECTIONS!). The woman with the scar described our probable route for them: past State Security and the District Council and then up the hill to District Administration. They should probably block Zeitzer Strasse and Puschkin Strasse.

  As we crossed Ebert Strasse, we heard a concert of whistles that could only be directed at the Stasi villa. “Let’s hope they don’t do anything stupid! Let’s hope, let’s hope,” Michaela whispered.

  That night around one thirty, I heard car doors slamming directly below our window, I listened for footsteps, thought I could already hear the doorbell. But then nothing more happened. And that was almost more unnerving.

  Your Enrico T.

  Pentecost Monday, June 4, ’90

  Verotchka,

  now I really must write you a letter:312 Mamus was here for two days.

  The first evening Michaela invited us over.

  Suddenly it was all just like old times, each of us sitting in his chair, and if our friend Barrista hadn’t been running around in his slippers we might have taken him for a guest. Mamus acted as if nothing had happened and ignored the new constellation. Robert is her grandchild and Michaela her daughter-in-law, and now as luck would have it the baron has been added to the mix. Mamus agreed with everything he said and praised Herr von Barrista’s objectivity several times. He kept going on about Dresden and how much he had enjoyed the tour by streetcar and her warm hospitality. That was three weeks ago.313

  It was news to Mamus that Michaela has given notice at the theater. “But why?” she exclaimed. Michaela just went on eating, as if she hadn’t heard the question. And instead her baron began to hold forth for her. First he talked about the state of the world and declared our current situation to be flat out the best this old earth has ever known—strong democracies without rivals and technological progress that increasingly relieves man of his burdens and allows him the freedom to pursue his true calling. Now that the iron curtain has fallen, what lies before us, or so the baron said, is an era of action and deeds, while contemplation and brooding belong to the past. Things change now more in one week than they used to over the course of years, which means that art, be it in the East or the West, is a losing proposition. Life’s experiences are not to be found in the theater nowadays, but in commerce, in the marketplace. The changes we see daily are not only more exciting than Shakespeare, but also can no longer be grasped through Shakespeare.

  He was basically saying nothing all that different from what I had heard him articulate last January. At times he used the very same words. But now Michaela was nodding with egregious eagerness, and Mamus seconded the baron and kept repeating that we needed to see things with businesslike objectivity now.

  After the meal our friend Barrista passed around something in a little box with a glass lid. It didn’t look at all promising, some sort of desiccated stuff in a kind of mousetrap. Have you guessed? It gave our poor Mamus such a fright that she flinched and pressed her back to her chair—a couple of Boniface’s knuckles.

  Our farewells were also “businesslike,” although each of us felt embarrassed. Robert came with us to the car. (Our friend Barrista has such a bad conscience that not only has he transferred the car’s title
to me, he’s also paying the insurance.)

  As I drove I told Mamus about the new apartment, described to her the view to the castle and the spaciousness of our rooms. I mentioned it in the hope that it would make the bleak room where she would be spending the night with me more bearable.314 Besides which, it seemed to me it was better to talk with her than to leave her wrapped in silence.

  “I’m not moving in alone,” I suddenly said—it just slipped out. Mamus didn’t react. Only when we came to a stop did she announce the results of her ruminations: “Vera!”

  “Yes,” I said, “Vera.” I asked Mamus if she wanted to take a walk with me, because besides the two air mattresses there was only one chair in the room. She shook her head. I was truly alarmed at how slowly she climbed the stairs.

  Cornelia and Massimo weren’t home. We could have sat in the kitchen, but Mamus wanted to “get ready for bed.” When I used the bathroom after her I discovered a whole hodgepodge of medications and salves in her cosmetic bag.

  Mamus had already turned out the light and instead of lying down on the air mattress with fresh linens, had stretched out on mine.

  I asked her what she needed all those medicines for. “All sorts of things,” she said. I wanted to know if “all sorts of things” also meant she was still in pain from her beating.

  “Serves me right,” she said.

  “Who says so?” I asked. “Your colleagues?”

  “No,” Mamus replied, “I say so, I do.”

  She had pulled the blanket up to her chin, the sharp profile of her nose jutting up. I would have loved to turn the light on again.

  Suddenly she said, “I’m so ashamed of myself,” and rolled over with her back to me.

  I stood up and knelt down beside her. I begged her to talk to me, I tried to pat her cheek, I bent down to look into her eyes. But nothing I did was right—I was told to lie back down, to please lie back down. No, I said, she needed to tell me what was wrong.

  She said nothing.

  “That damn camera,” she announced, after I had retreated to my air mattress. “That damn camera.”

  I barely dared take a breath, as if I were eavesdropping.

  On Friday, October 6th, Mamus had taken the streetcar from the clinic to the Central Station. She had been curious, wanted to see what was really going on. And she had her old camera with her. She had stuck it in her purse without thinking much about it. On the streetcar she ran into C., a pediatrician, whose consignment seat for the Staatskapelle was right next to hers. C. rode with her to the Central Station. At first it all seemed harmless enough. But then the demonstrators began to throw stones. Mamus held up her camera and snapped a shot. The police started going after the demonstrators, and C. shouted, “Now!” “There!” “And there!” “Now!” and pulled her along with her. Mamus told how, egged on by a megaphone, some special forces turned on the demonstrators. Suddenly everything started getting blurry. “Tear gas!” C. had shouted—she needed to close her eyes tight and put her hands to her face. They linked arms. Without being able to see where they were going they walked about a hundred or two hundred yards, until they thought they might be out of the cloud.

  After that Mamus said good-bye to C. and boarded the first streetcar that came by. The driver, however, refused to ring the bell for departure because he claimed demonstrators were attacking the streetcar. People on the car started loudly offering their two bits—you couldn’t even take a streetcar to go see a movie in the evening anymore. A couple of rowdy demonstrators climbed aboard, and one of them shouted, “Fucking pigs!” Then everything just went “lickety-cut.” Mamus had no idea what was happening to her. The rear car was emptied of its passengers. She saw people get off, fall to their knees, then stretch out, facedown, on the paving stones in front of the Central Station, while policemen with truncheons and dogs stood over them. “Just like Chile,” she said, and when she paused I could hear her breathing.

  “I was so damn stupid,” she went on, “so damn stupid, because I thought it was none of my business. A fat man in a uniform got on at the front of the car and shouted, ‘Everybody off, please, and then lie flat on the ground.’ He said it very politely, as if there had been some accident. But a wiry guy, who approached from the rear, started shouting, ‘Out! Facedown on the ground!’ And silly willy that I am, I do what he says. I go right ahead and do it. Do you understand? Your mother gets off the streetcar, gets off and lies down flat on the ground in the filthy street—do you understand?”

  In a voice choked with tears she said, “I was a failure, an utter failure…” I didn’t dare touch her. I said she had no reason to blame herself. What did any of this have to do with failure?

  “Oh, but it does, it does,” she whispered, only to suddenly bark at me, “Of course I failed.”

  Mamus asked for a handkerchief and blew her nose.

  “Next to me,” she begin again, “a woman lay whimpering and sobbing like a child throwing a tantrum. I raised my head to look at the streetcar, and there in the empty car sat an older, very well-dressed woman. She looked incredibly elegant. Twenty, thirty people were lying there on the ground, and there’s just that one person sitting there, looking out the window to the other side. Suddenly a woman tugs the sobbing creature beside me to her feet, links arms with her, and walks her right past the ‘polite’ policeman and climbs aboard. But as for me, my head is full of utter nonsense, not one rational thought. I’m thinking, Well, that’s the last of that contingent, they can’t make any more exceptions. I’m thinking that they mustn’t find my camera, if they find it they’ll arrest me. And the whole time I kept looking at the elegant lady, and then the streetcar bell rings and it pulls out with those three women in the front car.”

  Mamus gave a laugh. “If it weren’t for that elegant woman I wouldn’t blame myself now. They simply broke us, Enrico, they broke us!”

  It was pointless to try to comfort Mamus. She would permit no excuses. She had already seen how they were running people down, whaling away at them. But that really had nothing to do with it, that’s what she wanted me to understand. “I put up no defense, I just yielded to my fate, I was submissive, nothing else, just submissive.”

  Everything that happened afterward, what those younger guys had done to her, how she had been forced to kneel on her hands—all because of that damn camera—was, as she sees it now, punishment for her own failings.

  She had whispered these last words because Cornelia and Massimo had returned home. When I made some remark, Mamus hissed for me to hush. Floorboards creaked. We listened to Cornelia’s shrill giggle and Massimo’s permanently hoarse voice. I heard a bottle being uncorked and the chink of a toast. And then suddenly I heard Mamus snoring.

  She slept until eight, and declared she hadn’t slept that late in years. At breakfast she said that the pictures had all turned out jiggled.

  Robert spent all of Sunday with us. And on the drive to the train station, Mamus said she was glad to learn that the family would all be back together again soon.

  Should I try to make you jealous? Do you know who visited me on Friday? My handsome Nikolai!315 Suddenly there he stood, in the middle of the office, smiling, practically melting with smiles. But not to worry, he’s built a family around himself too—Marica, “pretty as a picture,” as Mamus would say, a Yugoslav, who, when she wasn’t ordering her two girls around, talked about what all Nikolai had told her about me. Sometimes she has the impression, she said, that she knows more about me than about him. Nikolai left for the West in ’84, to Bielefeld, where his father had settled. He took technical courses, something to do with electronics, and is making “good money,” as Marica puts it. At any rate they drive a huge Mercedes, big as an official limo, that makes my LeBaron look like a toy. We hadn’t heard anything from each other in seven years.

  Johann will be starting with us in August. Franziska has finally agreed to check in to a clinic, their apartment will be ready in September, it’s to mark a new start for both of them.

&
nbsp; With love, your Heinrich

  Friday, June 8, ’90

  Dear Jo,

  I apologize if my most recent letter left you feeling uneasy. Please believe me that your job was never in jeopardy for a moment. But I thought it best to let you know what’s what.

  You can’t imagine the incredible hysteria and acrimony. I had no choice, I had to pull the emergency brake. Even now, after all the garbage dumped on me, the separation still leaves me feeling more disheartened than gratified. Things could have gone so well for us. We would have been invincible. Toward the end Jörg himself saw he had overshot his mark, but he already lacked the strength and courage to rescind his decision. Now he’s suffering for it. No wonder, given all the missed opportunities.

  Since I wasn’t prepared to submit to his dictate I had no choice but to do precisely what Jörg proposed was my only recourse, that is, together with the baron, to launch a free paper financed by ads.316

  Do you know what happened when I informed Jörg and Marion of my decision? They demanded “their share” back. At first I didn’t even grasp what they meant. I was sitting at the computer beside Frau Schorba and could hear Marion and Co. squawking in the next office—instead of using my name, they referred to me only by pronouns. I wasn’t expecting good news when Jörg came in.

  “I have just one question,” he said. Was I prepared to repay my share, which had been given me gratis?

  “Which is to say,” I said as softly as possible, “I should pack my things and go?” No, that’s not what he meant, Jörg said, rubbing the back of his neck. I gave him plenty of time. But when he just went on massaging his neck, I asked him how he pictured the situation.

  He didn’t know himself, he said just as softly, but it couldn’t go on like this. I pleaded with him one last time to let me do a free paper.

  Jörg, however, repeated that there was no way we could expand, especially not at this critical juncture.

  “The money’s there!” I cried, and pointed to the stack of ads. “It’s there!”