New Lives (18 page)

A speech defect and frightening skinniness had made Hendrik a favorite object of bullies since first grade, and I had defended him on many an occasion, although without much real sympathy. He would strut around me like a raven, holding his birdlike head at an angle and pointing an elbow at me, crooking first his left arm, then his right, as if scratching at his armpit, and then lunge closer with a hop to ask me a question. Sometimes he wanted to know if I had gone on an excursion over the weekend, sometimes whether we had a record player, things like that. Each time I would provide an answer, to which he then responded with a wicked smile and slunk away without another word, evidently convinced he had just had a great conversation.

It must have been November already—we had stopped going to the schoolyard for recess—when he whispered to me something about creatures of a higher intelligence. This was all the more surprising since his mother worked for the police and his father, a stern, tightfisted man, was the school janitor.

From then on, day after day, Hendrik muttered some new infallible proof for our having descended from extraterrestrial creatures and—while intertwining arms and hands as if trying to put himself in shackles—offered his theory about the form of energy he assumed they had used to power their extraterrestrial spaceships. Shortly before Christmas Hendrik asked me if I now believed his theory. It was the first time he had sounded angry. “No,” I said, “I believe in Jesus Christ.”

The words—I had never spoken them before—shocked even me. It was as if a voice had announced from the clouds during roll call: “Enrico, you are my beloved son, in whom I am well pleased.” It took me all weekend to capture this last scene in my diary.

On the morning of December 24th, Hendrik appeared at our door and, without waiting to be asked, stepped inside on his raven legs. He had to talk to me. As if his mother actually did dress him—as everyone claimed—almost nothing of his face was visible between cap and scarf. He admired my strong faith, he said, wanted to be able to believe the way I did, and asked me for help. He announced this in our vestibule. The pair of flat-nose pliers in my hand didn't seem to bother him. My mother—we had been pulling tendons from the turkey's drumsticks—told Hendrik to take off his coat and dismissed me from duty.

What I told him was that there wasn't much I could do, that he had to do it himself, but I offered to read the Bible with him, something from the New Testament, and to pray. Obedient as a sick patient, he cracked open the Bible—and his eye fell on the passage where Jesus asks the children to come unto him. Did I think that was a miracle? he asked. I told him that everything is a sign from God. After we read the whole chapter, first I prayed in a low voice, then he did. Suddenly I opened my eyes as if to assure myself that we were actually doing what we were doing. My gaze fell on the ankle-high work shoes that Hendrik had taken to wearing now that his feet were unfortunately as large as his father's. They hung from him like weights and turned his already stilted gait into a perfect circus act. Although he himself would sigh and try to laugh it off, there wasn't one gym class in which those old boots weren't sent hurtling around the dressing room.

I had credited it to my own influence that after the last gym class before summer vacation his shoes of tribulation had stayed in one spot. Hendrik sat down to put one on, but as he picked it up water gushed out, drenching his stockinged feet—and I likewise found myself standing in the middle of the puddle, which added to the hilarity. And those same shoes had now crept into our house, had made their way to my room, where their heels were scuffing my bed frame.

“Amen,” Hendrik said. His hands still lay folded on the open Bible. His head hanging askew, he eyed me as if it were now my turn. “Amen,” I said, and stared again at his shoes.

Since I didn't know what else to do and could hardly ask him to repeat his prayer, I suggested we take a walk. He instantly agreed. But first I had to take the pliers back to the kitchen. Have you ever roasted a turkey? My job was to set the pliers to the tendons my mother had cut free and tug them out while my mothers held on to the headless bird. The meat on the drumstick would slip up the bone to form ridiculous knickerbockers. Each drumstick has several such tendons, and although I would pull my mother almost across the table, while she let out little screeches, we never managed to rip them all out. Already repacked like a Christmas
Räuchermännchen,
Hendrik watched us, and then smiled vacantly as he took leave of my mother with a low bow.

Hendrik didn't leave me in peace for a single moment of our walk. He wanted to know how often I prayed, what I did when I felt I couldn't love certain people and instead really detested them, and if the desire for eternal life wasn't selfish. Hendrik elaborated on his own understandings and suggestions, and where before he had talked about “Christians,” he now said
we,
which at first I misheard as
ye,
until it became absolutely clear that it was
we
who no longer had to fear death and
we
who were called to conduct ourselves differently from other people. His conversion was obvious, but because I wanted to be totally convinced of it—yet found a direct question inappropriate—I kept extending our walk. It was only as we passed the parish hall on our way back that I was granted certainty. There was a poster pasted in a street-level window: “God's word lives. Through you!” The poster was about a special donation, but it seemed to me that Jesus himself had written this with me in mind. I smiled in some embarrassment and lowered my eyes, expecting Hendrik to break into cries of astonishment, if not admiration. Wasn't it a miracle—this poster, right here, right now? But Hendrik didn't notice the poster or didn't apply it to us, though that did nothing to alter my certainty that I had saved a soul and become a true fisher of men. I said good-bye to Hendrik. His visit, I told him, was my finest Christmas present. We shook hands—his mother had taught him to grip with exaggerated firmness. I was about to turn away, when Hendrik's upper body tipped forward. I assumed he was going to bow—instead his forehead touched my shoulder. And at that moment my entire euphoria vanished. I realized that from now on I'd have Hendrik on my back.

I've described this to you not for its own sake—there are so many other things I could tell you—but because I planned to make the experience the stuff of my first short story.

The broad rib of the fountain pen that had miraculously found its way into Aunt Camilla's package along with the candy gave my handwriting a certain evenness. Writing itself—the motions of my hand, the look of each loop—provided me an unfamiliar satisfaction.

My new pen accelerated my thoughts; after only three pages I had arrived at our joint prayers. When suddenly—and at that moment I was still certain that the flow of my words would lift me imperceptibly across this dangerous reef—my memory was paralyzed by my mind's digression, by the sin of having thought of Hendrik's shoes and my schoolmates' high jinks instead of praying for his conversion. If I couldn't manage to lend assistance to someone struggling toward salvation…I screwed the cap back on my pen, holding it in my left hand and turning the pen three times, then laid it, the tool of my trade, across the top edge of my diary. It was as if I had ended each workday with this same gesture for years.

Suddenly I understood: The fact that I had failed as a person, as a creature of God, was precisely what would enable me to be a literary figure. And that was the crucial realization: I was not to keep a diary, but to write a work unlike any other, a work that glorified the deeds of God.

I slipped into the living room, where the fragrance of Western coffee and Fa soap contended against local odors, and pulled my mother's stationery pad from its drawer. I flipped it open, set the lined paper to rights, took out my pen, placed the cap on the other end, and without hesitation wrote the word “Birth,” centering it at the top of the page. And beneath it: A Story by—new line—Enrico Türmer. And as content as if I had just completed my opus, I went to bed.

In the light of dawn and with a sweater pulled over my pajamas, I was once again at my desk. I longed to describe my failure in expansive loops that swung above and below the lines, forming as if all on their own great, long sentences. But since this was to be a story, I first needed to describe the terrain and the persons moving across it, so that after my first sentence—“The doorbell rang.”—the plot came to a halt for a long while.

My plan for completing my work over the first two days of Christmas, then at least before year's end, and finally before the end of the holiday break, proved illusory.

I was deeply aware of the ambiguity of the situation—meeting Hendrik in the morning and then writing about him in the afternoon. As expected, he had lost all inhibitions and made a beeline straight for me. He would even be sitting in my seat every morning, as if to say: I've been waiting for you. It was almost impossible to talk to anyone else without him at my side. If he tripped over an outstretched leg, or couldn't find his shoes, or saw drawings on the blackboard—the teachers called them smut—bearing his name, he would simply draw himself up, set his head at an angle, and smile, which was his way of saying: I shall turn the other cheek to you. At least I was able to convince him to unbutton the top button of his shirt. I also put up with Hendrik's babblings about positive and negative energies in the cosmos, for who besides Hendrik could tell me what it felt like to be seized by the Holy Spirit—the greater the detail, the better.

One day during winter break as Hendrik and I made our way to Youth Fellowship, I interrupted him in the middle of his theorizing about the creation of the world. Hendrik didn't understand what I meant. I turned angry—so did I need to ask him outright whether he had heard a voice and what it had said to him?

The Christian faith, Hendrik replied at last, brings order into life. And besides—and here came his “turn-the-other-cheek” smile—it certainly couldn't hurt to be a believer. If it isn't true, Hendrik concluded, we'll never be aware it of anyway.

I flinched. I wanted to smack his ugly face, call him a goddamned fraud, hand him over to every torture that the hell of a schoolroom is capable of. “The devil is a logician!”—I later read somewhere in Heine.

“Hendrik slapped the pen from my hand”—for months that remained the last entry in my diary.

I was still wallowing in my suffering in August when we returned to Waldau, where I did nothing but read eight volumes bound in marbled gray and bearing a gold-on-blue mantra on their spines—the name Hermann Hesse. They were a present from Aunt Camilla, which had simply arrived without notice. Hidden in their pages was a fragrance richer and finer than any Intershop
¹¹¹
perfume. The fragrance filled my hours of reading, it was my incense and blended only very slowly with the scent of the Waldau woods and cottage. But I didn't realize that until I was back home.

Yours, yours entirely, Enrico

Dear Jo,

Yesterday the baron and I made good on our stroll through town, the weather was just right. Leaving the Red Tips behind, we went on to the Great Pond and then down along the hat factory. I suggested he take a walk with Georg, who could tell him all about Barbarossa and the abduction of the princes, about Melanchthon, Bach, Lindenau, Pierer, Brock-haus, Nietzsche's father, and so much more. The island zoo was closed. I wanted to take a little detour past Altenbourg's
¹¹²
house, but since the name meant nothing to him, we walked back by way of the movie theater and then up Teich Strasse, which is no more than ruins, with hardly one building occupied. We made slow progress because Barrista was constantly taking photographs. Both his steps and gestures were as cautious as those of an archaeologist or spelunker. We couldn't even get into a good many courtyards; the walls had buckled to create organic shapes, protruding potbellies, sagging rows of windows. Young birches sprouting from the roofs looked like feathers on a hat. I told him what everyone says: Even after the war a man could hardly have drunk a beer in every pub along Teich Strasse—reportedly there were over twenty of them, now just one is left.

Every so often Barrista would run his hand along the plaster. It was his show of sympathy—it opened my eyes and shamed me. As we walked along it came to me: the utter coarseness of it all, a coarseness inside me, inside us, a coarseness that meant letting a town like this fall into ruin, yet without going crazy. I had always regarded this deterioration as the natural order of things.

I thought of the frog experiment that the baron mentions on most every occasion—if you raise the temperature one degree per hour, so he claims, the frog ends up boiled, even though it could jump out if it wanted to. And maybe all those who jumped out of this country did the right thing. That's what I was thinking as I watched the baron take shots of the faded lettering and signs above walled-up windows or capture the murky twilight of shops through broken panes.

(Georg is sitting just behind me at the table. I can hear him groan and sigh as I write this. He wanted to know if I could tell him what to say when he's asked why we founded the newspaper. I repeated his own words from those days: Create transparency, accompany the course of democratization, provide the people a forum, tell the bigwigs…Yes, he knew all that, Georg interrupted, but could we still write those same words today? His scruples won't let him finish a single article, and instead he constantly nitpicks at ours.)

When Barrista and I finally reached St. Nicholas cemetery, he asked a man of indeterminable age who was leaning against one jamb of the bell-tower doorway whether we were very late. The man shook his broad head, grinned as if he recognized me, set two fingers by way of greeting to the bill of his cap (Robert calls it a “basecap”), and pulled out a cord with a large key, then a safety key, and finally a sturdy wooden weight. I was amazed that it all came from one pants pocket. He gave another salute and sauntered off whistling like a street urchin. He was the same man who had been talking with Barrista on the steps of the Catholic church the day we took our little excursion to visit Larschen.