New Lives (20 page)

I had no idea what my mother was thinking as we waited for our coffee and orange juice. I had always found her occasional social cigarette something of an embarrassment, because she preferred to squint and cough rather than give up her imitation of whoever it was she was imitating. But here and now it seemed right.

I was so charmed by my new role that I despised these Westerners—children, all of them, young and old. How naive they were! What did they know of the rigors of a divided world—they could reach out and grab anything in their world, not to mention ours.

Gazing through the windows on the other side of the counter, I could see the columns, arches, and fragmented walls of a former grandeur. And above them now rose this tower. From up here the city lay like a gift at your feet, and here I celebrated my triumph. Even Westerners fell silent when they recognized me.

While I had been dreaming, my mother had ordered a fruit pastry. No, that was for her! The pastry was hers to enjoy, I could have it anytime. But of course to her—and I had booked her into the most expensive room—all this had to seem outrageously new and incomprehensible. She didn't dare let all this splendor touch her too closely if she wanted to continue to set one foot in front of the other. And so I ate the pastry.

To show just how at home I felt here, I went to the restroom and sat myself down on the shiny toilet seat—something I normally did only at home. And I have never—ah, Nicoletta, forgive me for such intimate indiscretions—never since taken such a glorious dump. In that same moment, I decided to learn Hungarian.

I luxuriated in washing my hands with warm water and liquid soap, examined myself in the huge mirror—and liked what I saw.

My mother was waiting for me. She took my hands in hers and smelled. “How fragrant,” she whispered. And with that we stepped out onto the street.

At least
two
roles were available to me over the next few days. I vacillated between that of the banished writer and that of the precocious, observant poet. Only a couple of years lay between the two.

The next day we made our pilgrimage to Váci utca. Whereas on previous visits I had been on the lookout for devotional trinkets like printed T-shirts, Formula One posters, or records, this time I was drawn to book displays. As if to mock me, the jackets offered the names of authors—Böll, Salinger, Camus—but all the rest was hidden behind an unpronounceable barrage of letters.

I found myself standing before yet another bookstore, and at first didn't even notice that I was reading and understanding. Once inside the shop I couldn't believe what I actually saw. Even when the clerk, protected by a counter from his numerous customers, took the book down from the shelf and presented it to me, I was slow to grasp the reality. It was in German, had been printed in Frankfurt am Main, bore the logo of three stick-figure fish, and no matter how many times I read the title and the first and last name of the author, they remained the same. Impossible as it was, what I held clenched in my hands was Sigmund Freud's
Interpretation of Dreams.

The moments stretched out endlessly until I found a chance to ask the price. Slowly seeping into my mind was the certainty that I would never have to let go of this book again.

If this particular work by Freud was what I wanted, my mother said, then she'd gladly buy it for me. More out of a sense of duty than curiosity, I had the clerk hand me one volume of Freud after the other. Although he was evidently supposed to put each book back on the shelf before he could hand over another, one quick glance over the rim of his glasses and he capitulated, stacking the collected works in front of me. It was a hopeless situation. Even if we had stayed out of the bar in the Hilton and had headed home right then, we still would not have had enough for all the volumes. Can you understand what it was like? Suddenly, as if by a miracle, here was a chance to buy something you couldn't buy, and now there wasn't enough money.

I decided in fact on
The Interpretation of Dreams,
because it was the thickest and hardly any more expensive than the others. I watched as it was passed on to the cashier, who wrapped it; but no sooner was I out on the street than I ripped open the brick-shaped package to seize
The Interpretation of Dreams
as my inalienable possession.

It didn't matter to me where my mother went now. All I wanted to do was read.

I began reading on a bench beside the Danube. I read and read and loved my mother for doing nothing but sunning herself and smoking. “Don't gloat too soon,” she warned me that evening, “it's not across the border yet.” Never, under any circumstances, was I to admit that the Freud belonged to me—that could, if worse came to worst, cost me high school, my diploma, university, my entire future existence.

Whenever after that Frau Nádori provided me a room for a week, for the first two days I would rummage through secondhand bookstores and visit the shop on Váci utca. Moderation was pure torment. Every book shortened my rations. I had to decide what I could afford to eat and in what quantity—a strange, bewildering feeling, which I mistook for hunger. By the same token, each book left behind unbought in a bookstore was agony. How could I be justified to write anything as long as I had not read all of Freud—or everything else, for that matter?

On the flight back the sky turned red in the dusk of sunset. But it was still bright enough that I spotted our building shortly before we landed. I regarded the fact that I had been able to locate it from such a height as an honor bestowed on the place to which we were returning. And for a moment I thought: This is how God looks down on us.

Enough for now. I have to be on my way. Once again in the hope of receiving a letter today,

Your Enrico

Dear Jo,

And now Böhme too! It just keeps getting more and more absurd. State Security was the de facto founder of our opposition groups.
¹¹⁸
The local CDU candidate withdrew when it came out that all members of parliament would be subject to a check.
¹¹⁹

Our most recent issue sold better. There were a few responses to my election editorial.
¹²⁰
One letter said that the people of the GDR had shamed themselves before the whole world. It ended with the sardonic wish that we wouldn't go bankrupt all too quickly in the capitalist marketplace we so admired. The Prophet reappeared as well. There he suddenly stood in the office, looking from one of us to the other, but without responding to our greetings. He thrust his chin out in triumph, his cotton-candy beard protruding into the room, and then ripped to shreds a sheet of paper—our subscription form, as it turned out. He tossed the confetti into the air. “That was that,” he said, and departed posthaste. The scene proved all the more grotesque, because Fred has assured us that the Prophet's name was nowhere on our subscription list.

We now have four extra pages. We're lucky if we're done before one in the morning.

This morning the baron stopped by to tell us about his latest discoveries. Astrid the wolf always trots straight for her water bowl.

He had more to tell us about the Madonna. Evidently no one knows how it ended up in the parsonage. He has already invited an expert from Hildesheim who is supposed to offer some clarifications. “Shall we pilfer her from the clerics?” Barrista asked. From his attaché case he pulled an illustrated volume,
¹²¹
wrapped in the same washable protective jacket as Robert's textbook atlas. He read to us from it—the purport being that in its Sienese and Florentine panels Altenburg possesses a collection in which can be traced the birth of postclassical art in the West. He asked if I could guess his intentions.

“Just picture it—the hereditary prince arrives, and the Madonna enters the museum in triumphal procession.”

To be honest I don't understand why that should be so important.

As he spoke Barrista ogled the plate of pancakes Ilona had set dead center in the table. I told him to dig in. Which he did, and with gusto, and forgot all about his Madonna. He pursed his lips, licked at the sugar, and opened wide. Ilona's eyes grew bigger with each new pancake Barrista gobbled down. She was still chewing on her first. Once his plate was empty, Barrista sighed. Lost in thought, he patted his potbelly, slipped down deeper into his chair, and licked the fingers of his right hand, one after the other. He left it to the wolf to clean up his left hand dangling at his side. Ilona chewed and chewed some more.

An older gentleman burst into this idyllic scene. He asked for Georg—they had an appointment, and he was right on time. Georg and Jörg had left for Leipzig to read proofs. I hoped that would take care of the matter. “No-o-o,” he bleated, this time he was going to insist on speaking with someone in charge, even if evidently only people who pulled up in black limos could get a hearing here. He meant the LeBaron. But a yawn from Astrid the wolf and one glance at its blind eye were enough to disconcert him.

“Pohlmann—from Meuselwitz, Thuringia,” the man said, introducing himself, greeting first me, then the baron, with a handshake. Still chewing, Ilona jumped up and ran into the kitchen.

The man was not, as I had feared, a local folklorist, at least not one with the usual photographs of the kaiser. Once we were alone in the next room he seemed calmer, more friendly.

“You should know,” he said, and addressed me by name, “that I have waited forty years for this moment.” An enlarged passport photo lay on top. “Siegfried Flack,” he said, “my ninth-grade German teacher, was arrested on March 27, 1950.” Pohlmann listed the names of teachers and students, most of them from Karl Marx High School, who had passed out flyers and painted a large F (for freedom) on building walls—which had cost all of them their lives, except for the few who managed to flee to the West. One of the leaders of the group, a pastor's son, had smuggled flyers in from West Berlin on several occasions. At some point they nabbed him. It wasn't until 1959 that his parents were informed by the Red Cross that he had “passed away” in Moscow's Lubyanka prison in 1951. Pohlmann spoke with deliberate calm, and sometimes his sentences sounded rehearsed. As he handed me the folder, he stood up. “We must break the silence. Truth must see the light of day at last.” I assumed these were his parting words and thanked him. But Pohlmann sat down again and gazed at me. I paged through his folder. I flinched each time he thrust his hand between the pages. Again and again I was forced to leaf back and submit to yet another explanation, even if the previous one was far from finished. And all the while I could hear the baron's singsong coming from the editorial office.

Pohlmann had entrusted me with letters and minutes of conversations, all meticulously dated and footnoted. I asked what he wanted done with them, and just as he shouted, “Publish them!” Ilona burst into the room. Ashen pale she stood on the threshold, staring at me as if I were a ghost. “Oh, here you are,” she said lamely, and retreated.

Ilona had frequently rescued me from annoying visitors. But this time something really must have happened. Pohlmann had likewise been disconcerted by the sight of her.

I asked him to wait and walked across to the editorial office. The baron was leaning against the table, waving a fan of hundred-D-mark bills. “All you need to know is right here,” he said, spreading the money on the table as if showing a winning hand. The wolf shook itself, its collar rattled. “They didn't ask for a receipt,” the baron said, tugging at his right lower eyelid with one finger, and was gone.

There were twelve, twelve D-mark hundreds. All I could read was
GRAND OPENING
, and to each side a rather deftly sketched hand extending an index finger.

Hoping to learn more about what had occurred, I entered the little kitchenette. Ilona cringed. I touched her shoulder; she collapsed onto the low stool.

I crouched down beside her. I was hit with the scent of Ilona, a mixture of perfume and sweat that doesn't usually pervade the office until noon.

“I'm so embarrassed,” she whispered. “I'm so embarrassed!” Steering clear of any questions, I took her cold hands between mine, and only then did Ilona start to talk, although it was all so muddled that I constantly had to interrupt.

She had thought she was alone in the office, except for me and Pohlmann, of course. She had cleared the table, but also stacked the platter with more pancakes, and started to wash up. There was a knock and she was about to go to the door, when to her surprise she heard my voice—at least, she thought it was mine. She had felt sorry for me, because once again it was me who had to play receptionist.

But then—and she swore she never eavesdrops—it had been such fun listening to me deal with the two Westerners. They finally came around to admitting that they were interested in getting in on the ground floor of the video business “in a big way.”

She had had to chuckle at how good I was at describing the local appetite for videos, particularly special videos—I knew what she meant, right?

I had claimed we couldn't possibly take any more ads for next week, that we already had more than we could use—actually, I had said “overcommitted”—and deeply regretted, given present circumstances, that we were in no position to increase the number of pages from one day to the next. She had especially admired this last assertion.

One of them kept asking what it would cost—and it was immediately clear to her what he meant, but I had played dumb. In the end she ventured to step across into the office. At first she had seen only backs—two charcoal gray overcoats bent over the table. And then, yes then, she saw Herr von Barrista in the swivel chair, his sticky hands folded across his stomach. Barrista had spoken in my voice, even grinned at her, and gone right on talking in—yes, she would swear to it—in my voice.

I gave her time to have a good cry, and then tried to get back to basic facts as quickly as possible.