New Lives (24 page)

I replied in the affirmative.

“And Frau Schorba?”

“She's the exception,” I said.

The baron burst into terrible laughter—and swallowed the wrong way.

I can't describe the entire evening for you. But it ended strangely. For it suddenly occurred to Barrista to say that he had been able to keep his hotel room after all. This was followed by an abrupt departure.

We walked with him to his car, a red Saratoga. As he said good-bye he put on a cap, one identical to the one he had given Robert. As he drove off a taxi turned down our street, and Michaela climbed out of it.

At first she was taken aback, then she went into a tirade about how it was way past Robert's bedtime. She felt his forehead—he actually did have a slight temperature. We transplanted the jungle bouquet to our biggest stoneware pot. It's now standing on the living-room floor and the fragrance is enough to befuddle you.

I thought about the maps and a sales force, slept fitfully, and awoke as frazzled as if the night had cost me as much energy as the day before. But just the thought of Robert picked me up again.

My plan was to greet Georg warmly and ask him straight out to sell me his share. I planned to offer him ten thousand D-marks for starters.

Michaela had a headache and stayed in bed. I promised I'd be back as soon as I could.

When I entered the office, I abandoned all hope. Georg, Jörg, and Marion were sitting cozily together drinking tea. It sounds absurd, but I had come too late. I had missed my chance by about half an hour.

Their friendliness, or better, chumminess was a cruel blow. I was given a cup of tea and a large piece of Marion's cake. The fact that today of all days was her birthday seemed to seal my fate.

But then everything turned out differently.

One of Georg's boys suddenly let out a howl in the garden, and Georg went to see what was wrong.

From across the table Jörg remarked that everything had been cleared up, that I didn't have to worry about a thing. Georg wanted a nice clean break, that was all. And now it was up to me whether I wanted to take on Georg's share and from here on out put my head on the block with him, Jörg, and share full responsibility. He didn't want to place that burden on Marion, the paper shouldn't be their family enterprise. I didn't have to decide right off, but it would be a load off his mind if I could find my way to saying yes.

I drank my tea sip by sip and waited until I thought I could reply with a firm voice.

It's two in the morning, and I hope I'm tired enough now to finally get some sleep.

Your E.

Dear Nicoletta,

I have no idea whether or not my letters ever reach you, not to mention whether you read them. But as long as none is returned or you don't expressly ask me to spare you my story, I'd like to continue to write them.

I didn't hear anything from Geronimo for a long time. At the start of his junior year, he had moved to Naumberg, to a preparatory seminary there, whose three-year course was not officially recognized, so that he would de facto graduate without a diploma. Now and then he sent greetings my way in letters that he wrote to a few girls in our class.

Astoundingly enough, at the start of my junior year I was accepted into the school choir and by November—hidden among the baritones—had already taken part in a performance of Brahms's
German Requiem.
This isn't the place to describe either our music teacher or what rehearsals with him were like, although those hours as a singer—even a very mediocre one
¹⁴⁴
are the only classes I can recall without chagrin.

It was in the choir that I also first saw Franziska, a ninth grader, the daughter of ***,
¹⁴⁵
whom everyone knew, and not just in Dresden—a man able to do, yes, allowed to do anything he pleased. Her existence was known to everyone in the school.

Franziska sang soprano, wore jeans and tight-fitting sweaters, and had smooth black hair. The decal on her shoulder bag was no less exciting than she herself: “Make love, not war!” During rehearsal I always took a seat on the aisle so that I was as close as possible to the sopranos seated on a slant across from us. It was months before Franziska returned my greeting. When out of the clear blue sky she asked me if I didn't want to join her class for their dance lessons—there was a surplus of girls—I saw my dreams already fulfilled. But nothing ever came of the promised dance lessons, and she turned me down all the many times I invited her somewhere. Nonetheless I lived in the certainty that I would one day win Franziska over.

I tried my hand at writing poetry and had moderate success in contests called “Young Poets Wanted” that were part of the “Poets' Movement of Free German Youth,” a term that strikes me much funnier now than it did at the time. We were to write “friendly” poetry—that was one of the maxims I recall being inculcated with by a friendly, indeed downright jolly, older man who had, it was said, succeeded in writing a perfect poem about a Bulgarian jackass, although I never came across it.

I was not considered a great talent or a precocious wunderkind—terms that, if not used often, were not uncommon either—but was sufficiently stuck on myself that I was firmly convinced my day would come.

Vera was leading a bohemian life, or so my mother and grandfather called it. She delivered noon meals for People's Solidarity, for which she was paid two hundred marks a month, plus insurance and a meal for herself—and a person could live on that. Since Vera smoked like a chimney and was forever in need of money, she also worked as a model at the Art Academy—which soon developed into a career of sorts.

From the late '70s to the mid-'80s there were a good many paintings and sketches by Dresden artists that showed a woman with a broad catlike head and auburn hair, frequently nude and looking lost, but sometimes also as a carnival queen. Vera is not a beauty, but she didn't have a GDR face. I can't explain to you just what a GDR face is, but you recognized one at once.
¹⁴⁶
Vera soon had enough connections and money to be able to dress elegantly. Sometimes she was even taken for a visitor from the West.

She lived in Dresden Neustadt, in the garret of a rear-house that lacked a front-house. Since only her apartment had a bell and the other gates and doors were locked at eight o'clock, if you arrived in the evening or at night you had to somehow make your presence known. Vera's neighbors took revenge the next morning by ringing her bell or pounding on her door on some pretext or other. Or pilfered her underwear from the clothesline. Our conversations often took place in the dark, because one of her admirers was raising hell out on the street and, once he'd drunk enough courage, would try to scale the fence.

Two tiny rooms opened off a long hallway with a little cabinet and sideboard that served as a kitchen.

In the back room Vera would perform for me her repertoire for passing the drama school's entrance exam. “Pirate Jenny” was always included. I loved those performances in that tiny room, but feared the moment when she fell silent—should I break into tears or applause?

Of course I find it difficult to speak of Vera without already seeing premonitions of what happened later. Though we rarely met if she “had somebody,” we were inseparable in the days and weeks between such affairs. She introduced me to what was called “the scene.” I was always greeted with twofold joy: first as a brother who you were nice to in order to please her, and second because I was living proof that Vera was free game again.

I never knew when Vera would invite me in or send me on my way. I would often break off with her, but still stopped by to pick up bowls that had contained food my mother dropped off now and then.

Whenever Vera reemerged—she would usually be waiting for me outside school—she would reproach me, wanting to know why I hadn't shown my face for so long.

Vera lived a life that I wanted to live too as soon as I could—a nonstop series of exhibitions, readings, parties, performances, and night prowls. My clothes would likewise reek of ateliers, I would write whatever I wanted, until the day when I'd become too dangerous for the honchos of the GDR, and be deported, to the West, where my books had already been published and where Franziska and I would enjoy life together, making love, writing, and traveling.

But first I had to survive school. I wondered if it would be worth it to say something abrasive and so provide myself with material. An event worth writing about was sorely needed! Should I write on the blackboard, maybe a “Swords Into Plowshares!”

In January 1980, panic broke out as the result of “Karl and Rosa Live!” being painted in red on the wall beside the main entrance. All I got to see was a gray cloth draped over the inscription, as if some memorial plaque were about to be unveiled. Everyone was in the crosshairs—especially those who were thought to be truly convinced. (You do understand what I mean by “convinced”? Our “Reds,” the ones who believed in the GDR.)

The only thing that prevented me from confessing to the deed was fear that the real perpetrator might own up. But no one, male or female, hinted at being the offender. At least I heard nothing about it. The inscription was swiftly removed, although its traces now achieved the status of “the handwriting on the wall.” Some thought they could make it out at the upper left of the entrance, others believed the four words were distributed across the whole wall, and ended not in an exclamation mark, but a hammer and sickle. Just gazing at the wall was held to be an act of resistance. Small gatherings repeatedly formed as if by chance before it. I never saw anything.

I mention this wall episode because I intended to make my memory of it the embryo of a novel years later.

In hope of being provocative I tacked a poem to the bulletin board—resulting in serious consequences for one of the school's wunderkinder. Myslewski ripped off the page along with the thumbtacks and called me to account in front of the whole class. He had walked right into my trap. That same poem was scheduled to be published in a student anthology.
¹⁴⁷
Couldn't I have said what was on my mind somewhat more simply? he asked, and then to universal laughter sent the tattered paper sailing down onto my desk.

The publication of Ehrenburg's memoirs in the GDR offered the opportunity to raise questions about Stalinist work camps. The camps, I was told, were the outgrowth of the cult of personality, a phase that had long since been put behind us and was condemned by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union as early as 1956.

I searched in vain for something I could do or leave undone that would really have a payoff.

My hope was the army!

Ever since my first appearance before the draft board—after that first experience of being questioned by men in uniform—I knew where I could find what I was looking for.

Once inside District Military Headquarters I felt immediately inspired, ideas came to me all on their own. No other place possessed such poetry, such ineluctability. I think I compared the banner of the Army Athletic Club with my underpants—banners were intended to cover a vacant spot on the wall, but in fact revealed instead just how barren that wall was—it was the same with my underpants and my body. Or something like that. I jotted down a whole sequence of such comparisons right there on the spot. Uniforms made suffering plausible. This was no longer just pubescent hypersensitivity, or a shirking of duty that carried no risk à la Neustadt or Loschwitz,
¹⁴⁸
this was a cold war, this was theater on a global scale.

The high point of my appearance before the draft board was a certain interview. “Several highly placed individuals,” the officer behind the desk said, “have great plans for you. Great plans!” He recommended a three-year tour of duty, which would be of advantage to my further development.

In his eyes my exhilaration was simply arrogance, and when I turned him down, he threatened, rather clumsily, to deny me my diploma or matriculation. He was more successful at gloomy descriptions of the everyday life of soldiers who were a disappointment to a government of workers and peasants. Much to my satisfaction I noticed the spit thickening at the corners of his mouth, his rapidly fluttering eyelids, the reddish blue tinge of his complexion, most intense around the nostrils, and watched as the ballpoint pen in his right hand practiced Morse code against the desktop. Trying hard to provide a literary fullness to my ideas, I saw myself standing at attention in my underwear, shivering in the chilly room, but undaunted.

Believe me—after my first draft board appearance, I looked forward to the army.

An intermezzo at the end of my junior year might also be worth mentioning. It was about four months after the Karl and Rosa episode, when without warning, right in the middle of class, the door handle clanked and the vice principal called out my last and first names. I stood up, she waved me toward her. I knew right away: this was not about my mother's being in an accident or some other private catastrophe.

I followed her. From behind closed doors came the grumble of classes in session. Up the stairs, past a mural of the eleventh of Marx's Feuerbach theses, according to which philosophers had just had different interpretations of the world, but the main thing was to change it. I concentrated on the play of our vice principal's calf muscles. I exchanged a mute greeting with the secretary in the principal's reception room. I would later describe the odor as a blend of cigarettes, floor wax, and plywood—but I probably didn't notice a thing. I tried to gain control over my agitation by focusing on the secretary's sandals.

Geronimo had had to deal only with the principal. Two more men were waiting for me. They sat side by side at a table turned lengthwise to abut the principal's desk. They took their time putting out their cigarettes. When they looked up, I greeted them as well.

I wasn't disappointed by their appearance. The older one at least, with his rheumy eyes and black hair combed straight back, matched my expectations. The other one seemed more friendly, the jock buddy on your team. The director sat there like an umpire, his palms pressed together. He looked exhausted and perplexed. Rheumy Eyes began in a disciplinary tone of voice, saying that they were here for a very serious matter. I already had hopes that they would let me remain standing, like a prisoner, when Rheumy Eyes briefly extended his forefinger, which was his way of saying, Sit down.