New Lives (33 page)

Maybe I remained as calm as I did because that was the only role left me, maybe too because I sensed something wasn't right here. The managing director's inability to find a plausible sitting position sufficed for me as the basis for initial suspicion. His gestures looked fake.

“And why,” I asked, “do you really need us?”

“Not bad, not bad,” he said with an especially loud smack. “Okay, fine, let's show our cards.” He played something like leapfrog with his chair, which had got hung up on the carpet. “What I've told you is true, every bit of it. We're coming, one way or the other. The crucial factor, however, is as always—time. Every week that we can get the jump on the
LVZ
with five pages on Altenburg brings us subscribers that we won't get later, or at least at too high a price. We have to be quick.”

His hairy fingers played a tremolo on the tabletop. “Just put the two papers side by side, which would you automatically pick up? And what if state lines are redrawn and Altenburg is moved from Saxony to Thuringia? Which will happen, as sure as God made little green apples. Who'll want his newspaper out of Leipzig, who cares about Saxony!”

“And where are you going to have it printed?” Jörg asked in a monotone.

“I was in Gera,” he said, his voice taking on an affable, shoptalk tone. “They're equipped with photo offset, and they're licking their fingers already at the business we could bring them. But only on our conditions. Otherwise we'll just have it all flown in from Giessen. That means the paper won't be here till seven. When does it get here now?” he asked. “At eleven, twelve, two?”

“And what about us?” I asked. “How much are we worth to you?”

“Enrico!” Jörg erupted, and fell silent.

A smile enlivened the managing director's face, but one so treacherous that I didn't even notice the Matchbox car until it was touching my hand.

“One of these for each of you at the front door here,” he said. I shoved the little BMW on toward Jörg, who waved it off with his hand as if shooing a fly. “And twenty thousand up front, in cash, within a week, D-marks, twenty thousand, ten apiece.”

He could pocket his shiny glass beads, Jörg said, and then stared at me. “This really is incredible, isn't it? Utterly incredible.”

What I really wanted to do—candor demands candor—was to tell our guest from Giessen a fairy tale. About how the same arguments that he had presented so impressively had already induced us to look around for a strong partner, one with a presence throughout Thuringia and with a printing press in the region at his disposal. But Jörg's outrage didn't allow me any leeway to bluff.

A shift in the scenario was announced by someone banging on the front door, while in the same moment the vestibule door was flung open and the baron's voice rang out in English, “Anybody home?”—a question that always sets him laughing, although no one else can figure out what is so funny.

The office door handle jiggled uselessly several times before the door slowly swung open. All that was visible of the baron were legs and boots, the rest was a box.

In a radiant mood, the baron cordially greeted the managing director and then was convulsed with laughter, because Käferchen, whom he had just met on the stairs, had locked the others out. Jörg ran downstairs.

I helped the baron carry the box into the next room. He asked if he could leave some things with us for a few days, until his office was ready.

The managing director had got to his feet, magically drawn by the icon on the box, an apple with a bite taken out. Meanwhile Jörg had come back upstairs, together with two men also laden with heavy freight.

The one, Andy, an American who spoke as good as no German, the other our lawyer, Bodo von Recklewitz-Münzner.

We have von Recklewitz to thank that we can now sleep peacefully in regard to the Pipping Window affair. Recklewitz's face—with a pointy nose that juts out at an angle—actually does have something aristocratic about it. His smile resembles the baron's—he likewise tugs up just the left half of his mouth. Andy, a tall, broad-shouldered, blue-eyed, reddish blond, laughs a lot, and loud. His eyes are constantly checking out the baron, who translates things for him now and then.
“Wie geht's?”
Andy said, squeezing my hand and seeming to explore my eyes. The managing director said, “How do you do?” in English, and asked me in a low voice, “You're retooling?” I nodded.

Jörg must have said something on the stairs, because, rubbing his hands, von Recklewitz stepped over to the managing director as if asking for the time of day, “So you're planning to steal our daily bread?”

And Jörg, grateful for the opening to complain, tattle-taled, “Either with us or against us. That's what you said, isn't it?”

“It's not all that simple,” the managing director noted in his defense, and pulled out a business card. While he recounted the history of our friendship, Andy and the baron were busy in the next room removing gadgets from their boxes.

“And what becomes of our investment?” Recklewitz barked, thrusting his nose in my direction. He was magnificent.
¹⁸⁵

The baron asked us to join him. “This is the best,” he enthused, “there's no better…Are you in the business?” And after he too had received one of the Giesseners' cards, he exclaimed, “Then you'll confirm as much, won't you?” And the managing director immediately confirmed it. They themselves were considering installing a couple of Apples—it “probably made sense,” at least in a few departments. And gradually the managing director once again became the same eager visitor he had been in February when he had bent over our page proofs. He grabbed hold of the box as Andy slipped the screen out. He gathered up the Styrofoam, kept close watch on every cable connection, and eyed our plugs as worriedly as Andy did.

The baron had even remembered to bring extension cords and a junction box. Only Recklewitz wanted to move on; he was hungry. We trooped upstairs with him, where Kurt offered him something from his lunchbox. Recklewitz thanked him, but refused with some irritation. He had heard so much about the local mutz roast (he too pronounced it wrong) that he'd rather hold back for now. Kurt flipped the top slice of bread back, pointed to a thick layer of country liverwurst, and then took a bite himself.

If you should ever happen to meet Bodo von Recklewitz-Münzner, you'll see that he lives up to his name. At first he's all Herr von Recklewitz, hurling commands out across the moat surrounding his castle. Yes, you can see from his eyes and temples that it gives him a headache if someone takes a seat beside him instead of waiting at a distance of several yards to be waved closer. Once he has got used to withdrawing his gaze from the far horizon and has overcome the inner resistance that each new contact with the world provokes in him, Herr von Recklewitz gradually becomes—in every utterance, in every explanation and observation—more and more the obliging Herr Münzner, who is to be at our side with word and deed from here on out. We were to pay him six hundred marks a month and in return can engage his services at any time and in any cause—only travel expenses are extra. Such an arrangement has always worked well for him, he says, and even better for his clients. We should not, however, make the serious mistake of confusing the law with justice. His business is the law, seeing to it that the law is on our side.

And suddenly, once the contract had been signed, our old schoolchum Bodo was all left-sided smiles, and now he was going to join us for a good meal.

“And now downstairs fast as we can,” he cried, “they won't be able to get out on their own.” Bodo von Recklewitz-Münzner expected fabulous things of our local cuisine.

I invited the managing director to join us. “Believe me,” he said, clasping my right hand in both of his, “if I didn't have this meeting tomorrow morning, I would. Yes, I would, and I would invite you, all of you here, to dinner on me.”

We accompanied him to his car, a real BMW, the model of which I was carrying in my pants pocket as the corpus delicti. “Beautiful car,” I exclaimed as the managing director let the window down with a hum. He leaned back and stuck his head out as if checking to see if we were all still there. As he drove off he stretched his arm up over the roof and waved his tremolo hand, revealing, like yet another promise, a gold bracelet.

“The son of a bitch!” cried Jörg, who had lowered his arm even before Recklewitz had. “That son of a bitch!”

“Be glad,” the baron laughed, “you ended up with someone like that. And be proud. No sooner are you on the market than they're courting you. What more do you want?”

“Sits there the whole time with a toy like that in his jacket, waiting to pounce. Damn him!” Jörg shouted.

The baron said nothing, as if first making sure Jörg had in fact spoken his piece, and then he said: “Rebuild the wall, but you better hurry!”

We should be grateful to this managing director, yes, truly grateful. He had uncovered our weaknesses. “Your strengths and weaknesses,” the baron added. He blamed himself for not having been harder on us in the past. Because as was now evident it was rather unlikely that we would be granted any more time to learn without pain. “If there even is such a thing—learning without pain.”

He asked Jörg to tell him one thing the managing director had said that was incorrect. We were going to have to change, change very rapidly, otherwise we didn't have a chance. “And at the least,” he said, “rethink your page size and the quality of the printing. You need room for ads, and no one is going to pay you D-marks for such fuzzy photos.”

They were still arguing as we sat in the Ratskeller. The tone remained friendly, but implacable. “You don't want to be a daily? Then you're going to have to come up with a different concept.”

Each time I was about to jump in to help Jörg, he had already lost the argument. That was probably why Recklewitz kept jutting his nose at me. What did I think? he asked. I couldn't come up with anything. And I was annoyed at Jörg for carrying on so childishly that they must have thought we had forgotten to read the rules of the game.

“Enrico!” Jörg cried. “Don't let them knock the wind out of you like this!” And then Jörg rehearsed his sad account once more. Of course no one knows what will happen after July 1st,
¹⁸⁶
of course the East isn't the West, of course we sold close to a thousand more copies of our last issue, of course it all depends on us, on what we want and on our hard work, of course we're not just any newspaper. Plus if Jörg's people get elected, then we're more likely than the others to get things directly from the horse's mouth. But will that be enough?

After that no one could think of anything innocuous to break the silence. Fortunately the food arrived. We raised glasses and I no longer understood what was really supposed to be so terrible about the baron's vision or what made Jörg just keep shaking his head. If Jörg continued to balk, the baron had said (leaving it up to us to decide how serious he was), he himself would start up a free paper financed by ads. You couldn't leave money lying in the streets. Besides it would be fun, it was always fun to make money. And in this case if you went at it right, right from the start, it would be child's play. Hadn't the managing director said they did photo offset in Gera? Well then, bring on as many Giesseners as you wanted. But it would prove fatal for the
Weekly.
“If you don't react now,” he said, aiming his deep-sea glasses at me, “you're finished.”

“No,” Jörg said, he wasn't going to fall into that trap. He wasn't going to let us waste our energies. We were going to lay into the oars.

“Then row away,” exclaimed Recklewitz, who, because the mutz roast had run out, was busy dissecting an enormous ham hock and wanted to talk about more pleasant things, soccer for example, although he had to know the baron thinks sports are ridiculous.

This morning at nine on the dot Andy appeared in the office. He sat down at the computer and three minutes later handed me a finished ad: a full half page! In white on black, nothing more than, “Andy's Coming!” He asked for a discount, which I of course gave him. I did better with my English than I had expected, but then I didn't have a choice.

All the same I wasn't sure if I now understood him correctly, although I was sure twenty meant
zwanzig
and twenty thousand was
zwanzigtausend.
I once again tapped the computer, screen, and printer: “Altogether twenty thousand?”

“Yeees,” Andy cried, kept on saying “yeees!” I asked if that might not be something for us too. “Yeees, absolutely.”

It's all so easy. We spent seven and a half for the VW bus, fifteen hundred on the camera. Our assets include the fifteen hundred
¹⁸⁷
from the ad for videos that the baron pulled in for us, plus a few other hundred D-marks in income, comes to thirteen thousand plus a few hundred. We need another six thousand and change in D-marks.

I've already written Steen and called Gera about setting up an appointment. We're not going to go under that fast.

Your E.

PS: Michaela just told me that some woman tried to kill Lafontaine with a knife or dagger. Michaela thinks that will improve his and the Social Democrats' chances with the voters.

Dear Nicoletta,

My transfer into a company of new arrivals meant that, even though I was the youngest, I was promoted to the rank of room corporal,
¹⁸⁸
who is assigned the best bed (bottom bunk, at the window) and newest locker, who gets his meals brought to him every morning and evening, and whose word has greater weight than that of a noncom.

The commissioned letters had more or less run their course. And I didn't have much else to do. Now and then we rode cross-country in our APCs, which was a welcome change. I enjoyed the ride—but wouldn't admit it to myself. Even setting up field camp and going on short maneuvers had ceased to be frightening, plus the summer of '82 was extraordinarily warm.