New Lives (16 page)

When I was in kindergarten I thought of reading as something magical, that when you reached a certain age you mastered it without even trying. But when the day came that I realized reading was all about a tedious, monotonous combination of letters and syllables, it turned into just another dreary subject in school.

So when my mother asked what books she should pack for me for our vacation, it was a question of almost unsurpassable hypocrisy.

For my sake she played badminton, chess, or battleships. I rode my bike and did the shopping at the village Konsum store, where the
Sport Echo
went on sale after eight in the morning. As an early riser I spent the first hours of the day on a rickety man's bicycle, riding through the woods, listening to my music cassettes played on our landlord's Stern tape recorder that I tied to the basket.

On my third early-morning excursion, I misjudged a puddle. My front wheel got stuck, as if an iron hand had grabbed hold of it—and I went flying. Pain, pain worse than the worst stitch in your side, knocked the air out of me. Sand burned in my eyes. But the awful part was the silence. Half blind, howling with rage and pain, and with a couple of broken ribs, or so I believed, I crawled back to the puddle and pulled the Stern tape recorder out of the muck. I ejected the cassette once, twice, three times, reinserted it again each time—all in vain. Only the radio still worked.

As I knelt there in the sand, trying to scratch the mud out of the cracks in the wooden housing, morning devotions were being broadcast on AM. God's word falls like rain upon the soil, but it may indeed run off to no avail. To catch the rain, we must dig ditches. The pastor spoke at length about digging ditches, which was exactly the same as reading the New Testament in order to be prepared to receive God's word. Moreover, God gave each of us a sign in due season. At the pastor's concluding words, I turned the radio off.

I didn't know what to do. One corner of the housing had broken off. A Stern tape recorder cost more than my mother earned in a month. When I looked up, there was a deer standing in the road about twenty yards away. It turned its head to me. After we had stared at each other for a while, it strode off, vanishing into a copse of young trees.

Had it been a unicorn, I could not have been more profoundly moved. Suddenly I was praying. I thanked God for his sign, that he had led me into the woods and spoken to me. And for the first time it was I who directed my words to the Lord God, not just some child reciting bedtime prayers. No,
I
was praying now. I begged for help, help amid my distress, and included my mother and the radio pastor in my request for eternal life. I promised that henceforth I would dig my ditches, deep ditches, which would collect God's word and from which I would draw water forever and ever. Now strengthened and calmed, I in fact found the broken-off piece of housing and hoped for another miracle.

Had I fallen among thieves, my mother asked.

I rummaged the bookshelf above the night storage heater. Lord, I prayed, give me your New Testament. In my hand was a thick gray book without its dust jacket. I deciphered the red lettering as
Martin Eden.
The name Jack London meant something to me. I sat down in a chaise longue and started to read, and I would normally have given up very quickly, since it wasn't about wolves or gold miners, but about a writer. But the fact that this book had chosen me could not be accidental. The more I read, the more the story spoke to me.

It was one o'clock, well after one, when I was called in for our midday meal—the entire morning had flown by. I had been reading for more than three hours. Then it came to me: I didn't have to be bored anymore. Anyone who was a reader as a child cannot understand what Copernican dimensions that insight had for me.

The day was not over, and you may suspect what happened next. After all, I was reading the story of a starving but determined and undaunted writer who would make it in the end…

As I took my shower that evening I asked myself about the meaning of this substitution. I had been looking for the Bible and had found
Martin Eden.
What was God trying to say to me? As warm water ran down over my face, I was struck by my third insight of the day: I was meant to become a writer!

I stood there motionless under the shower for a while. I was meant to turn my experience in the woods into a story about how strange it was that my tape recorder had fallen silent, while the radio had remained intact so that I could hear the voice of God. I would write what others dared not say, that the West was better than the East, for example, that we weren't allowed to travel to the West even though we wanted to. When everyone else went to work, I would stay home and write. When I entered a pub, everyone would turn around to look at me. Because everyone knew about my speech in which I had indicted the state. “One man at least,” they'd whisper, “one man at least who's willing to speak out.” My family and I would have a difficult time of it, however, because I was a thorn in the government's side.

Cold water wrenched me out of my dream world. My mother called me inconsiderate and selfish for not leaving any warm water—after all, she was the one who had heated the stove and glued the broken corner back on the tape recorder.

Her accusations were a double blow. I had to remain silent, however. But the day would come when I would write about it and my mother would read and finally understand that it had not been selfishness or even a lack of consideration, but just the opposite. She would be proud of me, would laugh and at the same time have to cry a little, because she had had no idea that a writer was being born, although it was happening right before her eyes.

When I awoke the next morning, I smiled when I spotted the gray book beside my pillow. I felt like Martin Eden was my brother. And then I had to smile for having smiled.

I rode my bike to the village bakery and waited until the Konsum opened. I hid my first notebook, a five-by-eight sketchpad, in the shed.

After breakfast I retreated to my chaise longue. But I was too excited to read. I felt compelled to record what I had experienced, was afraid I'd forget things. When my mother wasn't watching, I laid the book aside, slipped the sketchpad under my shirt and a ballpoint into my saddlebag. I would write my first sentence at the place of my conversion. The first sentence of a great writer! For neither at that moment nor later did I ever doubt my talent.

When I finally put pen to paper, the pen didn't work. Which is why my memoirs begin with crazy squiggles above the date and time. At ten on the dot I finally wrote: “Praise be to Jesus Christ!”

What happened then can only be explained as the work of the Holy Spirit. He guided my hand for seven pages, without my hesitating even once, without my having to correct so much as a single word. My turns of phrase thrilled even me. I was giving the world something unlike anything it had known before in this form. Even if I should never put another word to paper, these lines would endure.

When I returned home I discovered something remarkable that—though I was now acquainted with miracles—frightened me. The roof of the cottage was covered with snow. I got off my bike. What I saw, I saw—snow! A field of snow as large as our tin roof. No white anywhere else, and even after walking my bike halfway across the yard, what my eyes saw and what my reason told me were incompatible. Suddenly my mother was standing beside me. “Daydreaming?” she asked. My gaze was fixed on the tin roof. “Snow,” I said. “You're right,” she said, “it does glisten like snow.”

Happy days followed. Mornings, between seven and eight, I would take my seat at a little table in the perfect silence, watching the sun cautiously grope on spidery legs through the pine trees, lie down on the bed of moss that my mother had raked free of needles and cones, turning it lustrous. The sketchpad lay under my opened
Martin Eden,
and no more than the book could hide it, was I now going to make any effort to hide my calling. That wasn't even possible. I switched back and forth between book and sketchpad so often that reading and writing became one and the same. It was the only thing that I took any pleasure in and for which I seemed to have been born. Suddenly I found a hundred thoughts inside me, where before there had not been one.

I remember, however, hardly anything of
Martin Eden
and nothing of what I wrote at the time. It now seems to me as if I pursued the whole thing simply so that the world might be captured inside those pages, so that all its sounds, smells, and colors can fall into my lap whenever I remember those days. Otherwise how could I recall the Igelit
⁹⁷
tablecloth, a green and white checkerboard that clung to my bare knees whenever I sat down to write? How many times was I just about to shove it aside, which would have been easy as pie, but then never did it, as if afraid I would lose the source of my inspiration.

When from the chaise longue I would gaze up through the crowns of the pine trees—the sunglasses I had found in a kitchen cupboard cast a turquoise hue over everything—I felt as if I were at the bottom of the sea, looking up to the surface. When the sun slipped behind a tree trunk, pinks and reds turned purple. Sunsets were the loveliest part, when the evening light lay almost horizontal over the lake, lending trunks and branches a rusty red glow. When the light vanished at last from the treetops, it drenched the bellies of the clouds in violet—to have looked away would have been a sacrilege. Each morning when I went to fetch our breakfast rolls, the gossamer webs draped among the grasses were the same whitish gray as the morning moon—lingering phantoms and shadows of night.

Every sound was there simply to affirm the silence (a silence that I will get around to talking about later, much later).

Happy that her son had finally come to his senses, my mother thanked me by coddling me and watching as I played with the twenty-six symbols.

I sat down to my meals as a writer exhausted by his labors. And I wanted to write about that too, about what it's like when you rest from your work. Every thought, every sensation, every observation was precious and transient. I was a collector, a discoverer on a mission to glean all things remarkable and noteworthy, to describe them, to share them with humanity. How had I possibly lived before this? How had I endured this life? How did my mother endure her existence?

Vera visited us for the last few days. She asked no questions. She just looked at the book in my hands and announced, “Oh, Enrico is reading a book with the fascinating title
Father Goriot
!”—or—“Ah, my brother Enrico is familiarizing himself with the works of the great humanist Charles Dickens.” I had nothing more to fear from her. Besides which I profited from my mother's conviction that anyone sleeping or reading was never to be disturbed—a rule that until then had worked to my disadvantage.

With almost half a sketchbook filled with the adventures of my soul, I experienced our arrival in Dresden as a triumph. Only three weeks before I had left the city as a foolish boy who had known nothing about himself and the world or his calling in it. I returned as a young writer who would soon be famous.

You will take this for childishness, Nicoletta. For me it was the beginning of the path that led me astray. I shall probably hear what you have to say about all this.

Thinking only of you, Your Enrico T.

Dear Jo,

I had a car accident, and a madman who as good as forced us off the road was at fault. I have a slight concussion and pulled a couple of muscles in my neck, but that's really all. We
⁹⁸
were lucky. Suddenly we came to a halt—with a shattered windshield—midway between two trees.

Without a car I feel like an amputee, everything's a mess at the moment, and it's downright depressing too. There was a time when I just had to look at Jimmy
⁹⁹
and I felt better. The cost of repairs will probably be so high that it's not worth it. It was Michaela's late father's car, that he fussed over and took such good care of—and for her mother it was the chief reminder of better days. Worse still, she's now going to find out that we never took out collision coverage.

I'll be back at the office starting tomorrow and will try to call you from there. I'm glad I'll be back among people. Just lying around here is not living.

I've had plenty of visitors. Old Larschen walked all the way here, his backpack full of homegrown apples—each wrapped individually in rustling tissue paper—that he now placed one by one on the table like precious jewels. The apple, he informed Michaela and me, belonged to the rose family, to which Michaela replied that it had been a long time since she'd received such lovely roses. The two were instant friends. She's even allowed to read his memoirs manuscript. We invited him to share supper with us. When we sat down at the table, Larschen broke off his excurses on the juniper, lowered his chin to his chest, and prayed silently. Robert witnessed this for probably the first time in his life. We looked at each other, but didn't dare smile. Larschen raised his head, saying, “The juniper can grow to be five hundred years old, the broad-leafed linden can reach a thousand.” And we were in motion again now too, as if the film had just stuttered briefly. After Larschen left, something of his odor lingered in the apartment. But there was also the fragrance of apples.

Jörg thought he would need to console me, since we're selling only seventeen thousand copies or fewer. The election will help us, and Jörg is still following leads for a couple of stories from his Commission Against Corruption and Abuse of Office. He's the only untainted person on it, and so has an easy time of it.

Today Wolfgang the Hulk appeared at the door, along with his equally hulking wife. He hadn't heard about the accident and they had come to invite us to dinner. When we bought our pots in Offenburg, he had promised to cook for us. (So far we haven't dared use our pots.) He's working for Jan Steen now, drives a company car, and is evidently earning such a pile of D-marks that he's embarrassed to talk about it. Jan Steen, Wolfgang says, reads every word in our paper. He's interested in everything. When I asked what he himself thinks of it, he gave a tentative laugh. A little more pepper wouldn't hurt, he said. I reacted somewhat angrily, after all you can't have a scandal like the Council Library
¹⁰⁰
every week (and even there everything is said to have been on the up-and-up) or some incident in the schools.
¹⁰¹
He responded to my question about his old job as if I were giving tit for tat, though I had asked it more out of discomfiture. From his wife's hints, I concluded the decision still bothered him. But as for Jan Steen, he didn't want to hear
¹⁰²
—“a word said against him,” was what I was about to write. It's almost midnight. Barrista was suddenly standing at the door. He's incredible. The bouquet was so big that I couldn't tell who was standing there in front of me. There's no one I'd have been more surprised to see. He, on the other hand, seemed astonished to find me in “such fine fettle.”

Robert was greeted with the same bow that I received. Barrista spoke to him as if to an adult and expressed his “appreciation”—he knew what it meant to stand all on your own in the marketplace, and told him how very lucky he was to be so young in these times, to be able to learn everything, to begin everything anew. Barrista's sermon had thwarted Robert's attempt at flight. Without being asked Robert looked after Astrid the wolf while I laid out napkins for our light supper, adding a bottle of cabernet and a serving fork for the cold cuts, which Robert accepted as concessions made for a guest. (Michaela was onstage, she's still having to work as the backup in
Rusalka.
)
¹⁰³

Barrista buttered his bread with a meticulousness that I've never seen anyone except you apply and positioned his slices of cold cuts with such precision that the curves of bread and sausage were nearly congruent.

As I was about to pour him some wine, he declined it and stared at me through bulletproof glass. Would I be willing and able to drive him to the train station in half an hour? The situation was as follows—and then he explained in great detail and at great length why it was better for him to take the train, in a sleeping car of course, to Stuttgart (or was it Frankfurt am Main?), and ended by asking if he could leave his LeBaron in my care.

Of course I should drive it, he would very much like that, indeed he took joy in the idea. Laying his hand imploringly to his heart, he repeated how happy it made him to think of me driving his car and that he wished in this fashion to be of some assistance to me in the wake of my accident. Of course he had, as always, selfish motives. He couldn't leave his car here parked in the same spot for several days. “Please don't misunderstand me, my dear Herr Türmer,” it wasn't that he'd had any bad experiences here with such things, but one need not provoke an incident, either. If he absolutely could not persuade me, I should at least obey his maxim that one ought never present the state an unnecessary gift—after all the taxes and insurance were paid in full, the car was parked out front with a full tank.

There was just enough time left to make him some coffee. While Barrista excused himself to wash his hands, we slathered a few sandwiches, piling them high with what cold cuts were left, and Robert came up with the idea of sending him off with a thermos of hot coffee. The baron was touched.

I was the one who drove the car to the station. I was afraid that in return we'd be required to take care of the wolf, which sat beside Robert in the backseat. The baron and Robert talked about music, or what Robert calls music. The baron knew most of the bands and even some gossip about Milli Vanilli and their ilk. The source of his knowledge was in the trunk, a stack of
Bravo
magazines that he bequeathed to Robert. He had already read them himself—it's required reading, a way of getting some idea of what young people are up to. Which brought him around to his own two children, whom he's allowed to see far too infrequently. There wasn't time for more questions. At his urging I tested putting the top up and down—since spring is on its way, after all—and was handed the registration. A can of dog food, a big plastic ashtray (a Stuyvesant cigarette promotion) for a bowl, and his attaché case was all the baggage he had.

He lifted the wolf onto the train, said a quick good-bye, and pulled the door closed behind him. Robert and I followed him down the platform, moving from window to window, watched as he took a seat, opened his attaché case, and extracted a pile of papers. As he read he rested his head against the windowpane, as if dozing. In that moment I think I gained some understanding of why he always has the wolf at his side.

Do you know the series with David Hasselhoff and his talking car?
¹⁰⁴
This LeBaron looks a lot like it. You steer more from a prone position than sitting upright. And that was how I watched people streaming out of the theater as we drove by. I felt like a reptile gliding quietly through the water. Almost in shock, people turned to watch us pass.

Michaela got in without so much as a comment, that's how despondent she was. She didn't even say anything about Robert, who should have been in bed by eight. “Just get us away from here,” she said, which I took as a request for a little jaunt.

All the same she enjoyed the ride and smiled when we hit a hundred and sixty on the long straight stretch on the other side of Rositz. When we got home I thought Michaela and Robert had fallen asleep, but actually they just didn't want to get out of the car.

Once in the living room we pounced on Barrista's box of candy—chocolates that melted on your tongue. Michaela took one of each sort and, sitting down where Barrista had just sat, laid them on his plate, assuming it was clean. I managed three, Robert two, Michaela ate them like cherries, and took the rest with her when she sat down in front of the television—where she still is, listening to oracles about the upcoming election.

Dear Jo, I find it hard to say anything about your latest work.
¹⁰⁵
All that seems so far away now. Invented stories no longer interest me. That's no argument, of course, and certainly no criterion for measuring quality. The new literature, if it does come about, will be literature about work, about business deals, about money. Just look around you! People in the West don't do anything but work. It will be no different with us.

Say hello to your wife and daughter for me, hugs, E.

Nicoletta, what happened?
¹⁰⁶
I'm practically numb. I heard about it just in passing from Jörg. But don't know anything else about it. Why should you care about Barrista? When I think about how I was lying in bed at precisely the same moment, counting the minutes until your departure—and now I know. I suspected something of the sort, something disastrous. But Barrista? What does he have to do with us? When it comes to us, he doesn't exist. What are you accusing him of? Or me? Why is he important at all? Isn't he a person who ought to arouse our sympathy, or forbearance? As a man who has to compensate for so much? But none of that matters. Why are you making me atone for what he did? How else am I supposed to understand your silence? At first glance B. seems an odd duck. I have no idea where he gets his strange manners and attitudes. Do they have any purpose other than to draw attention away from his looks? People here make fun of his pointy boots with their out-of-whack heels. Ultimately I can't tell you anything about B., other than that he approached the newspaper with his unusual request. The explanations he gave for it are flattering. Is there any reason why we shouldn't cooperate with him?

Where do you know him from? Or was he—I don't dare put it in words—impolite or otherwise crude? Believe me, it would take no more than a hint of something of the sort—and he can go to wherever!

B. has left, no one knows when he'll be back.

Please drop me just a couple of lines, I beg you.

With all my heart,

Your Enrico

Dear Nicoletta,

Up until the very last minute I was certain you'd appear at the office, as if there were some natural rhythm that would necessarily bring you back to Altenburg. Sometimes I'm seized with the fear that you might be ill, that something's wrong, maybe in aftermath of the accident. Have you had X-rays taken?

My desire to see you was so strong that I believed it might conjure up your presence. That's also why I came to the office early—and thought I had been rewarded. I ran into Georg in the vestibule, and he promised me a visitor, in fact someone was waiting for me. Georg's smile was so broad I had no doubts whatever.

But I played the innocent—yes, I blame myself for that now, as if my foolishness had driven you away—shrugged, as if I couldn't imagine who it might be, and asked Georg what needed to be done, hoping you would hear my voice. Of course I had nothing against his going right back upstairs. Ah, Nicoletta, those few moments of promise!

Three men from the newspaper in Giessen sat sipping coffee, happy to have new playmates. I recognized one of them from his lilac-colored jacket.

My responses were mechanical. My thoughts were racing here and there, but at some point I calmed myself with the realization that there was lots of time left, that the day had just begun, so everything still lay ahead of me, a day with lots of hours with lots of minutes—and you might arrive at any one of them. With astounding speed the familiar happiness that comes with such an expectation reasserted itself. The soft light of a spring day too warm for this early in the year could only be your harbinger.

The men from Giessen had been out watching polling stations open and had retreated to our office as if to a pub. They didn't believe me when I told them I'd been up for only an hour instead of doing research since the crack of dawn. But after I asked them to pass on their article on the general mood, they set their misgivings aside. I laid out the page proofs and started in. I wanted to earn your appearance, Nicoletta, and be finished early.

Each time the door opened it seemed more and more likely that you would appear.

The fellows from Giessen deployed their forces one by one, but were never gone for long. Their favorite story was about how Hans Schönemann, the former “district secretary for ideology and propaganda,” was now a candidate of the German Social Union. Although I told them right off that there were two people who went by that name, the guy with the hedgehog haircut kept telling the story over and over, and left it to me to correct him. Then he would smile as if to say: Are you sure of that?

Around two I stuffed myself with pastries and was afraid you'd catch me with my mouth full. I expected you by five, or five thirty at the latest, at any rate before the polls closed. I was as convinced of that as if you had just told me so over the phone.

Around four I had finished up with everything and would have been done even earlier if I hadn't had to play host the whole time, as well as putting off calculating the last article. I wanted you to find me hard at work.

Franka had some folding chairs that were usually set out halfway up the back garden—the white paint was flaking and stuck to your trouser seat. We had put the newspaper to bed and had shoved the table's extensions back in. There hadn't been that many people in our parlor the day of our first issue. I hadn't seen many of them since last October or November. Georg announced that he had figured out that anyone born after 1912 had never taken part in a genuine election.