New Lives (38 page)

According to our landlady's map a narrow-gauge train would take us back to the village, but no one in Liberec knew anything about a narrow-gauge train. We had no choice but to march over the ridge in the dusk. I'll never forget those minutes on the barren summit. As darkness crept up the slopes, our path was illuminated as if on a stage by the light of the setting sun. The air was clear, the horizon infinitely distant in all directions. Our footsteps were the only sound. When Nadja suddenly hugged me, I could feel the hasty beat of her heart. We held each other tight and gazed out across the highlands, like emigrants about to wander into the landscape.

Then came three days of rain, and when the fourth day also dawned gloomy, we headed back to Dresden. Frau Krátká closed the front door behind us without a word.

In order for you to understand Nadja and me, there's something I have to disclose, something that increasingly disturbed me. Although outwardly the perfect couple, we never really became one.

At first there was always the one reason: Nadja's fear of getting pregnant, and she didn't want to take the pill. Then I would forget condoms again, or we were simply too exhausted from our escapades. I won't trouble you with any of what were for me unpleasant details. For a good while now, as soon as the door was shut behind us, we would be overcome with an inexplicable shyness.

For a long time we never mentioned Vera. I had not seen my sister since the day I turned around at Vera's door to join Nadja. Which meant I could reply to Nadja's questions with just a shrug. But Nadja would not let go. I became jealous of Vera. In addition, Nadja hinted that she had knowledge of matters that Vera and I had sworn to keep secret.
²¹¹

I tried to develop clear plans for a future shared with Nadja. I would tough it out in Salzburg as a cabdriver, and write during whatever time was left me. As soon as my book was published, Nadja wouldn't have to work anymore and could concentrate entirely on her studies. And on weekends we'd find things to do—hiking, strolling the town, or traveling to Munich, Vienna, or Italy.

I immersed myself in this new chapter and was aware of how, at the end of each of my monologues, my eyes glistened. Nadja said little, a silence all the more stubborn, the more suggestions I heaped before her.

I was afraid that she was as relieved as I when it finally came time to leave for the station. But no sooner had we boarded the streetcar than I was overcome with a great sadness and a terrible dread of losing Nadja. I told her that I would give anything to repeat the past few days, even if it meant not changing one single experience. She hugged me, and we held each other tight just as we had on the mountaintop.

Until then I had had no trouble returning to correspondence after one of our meetings—on the contrary. This time I was thrown into despair. I ripped page after page out of the typewriter and finally lay down on my bed with no idea of where to go from here. When I woke up I was certain that I had lost Nadja during the night.

From now on I merely tried to keep writing letters as long as I possibly could. Instead of looking forward to her replies, I feared them. I gave up phoning her almost entirely when, in response to my question of whether she had received my letters and what she had been doing of late, Nadja replied: Plugging away, just plugging away.

“What can I do?” I replied. I would do anything I could.

We were too short of money to be able to see each other. My bank-book showed zeros. I had used up Aunt Camilla's D-mark subsidies, asking Vera for help was out of the question. Nadja didn't have time to write letters. I accepted that, and in time everything else as well. When the semester started, I once again had loads and loads of material for letters.

During my last call to Salzburg, Nadja suddenly sounded the way she used to when just her whispering my name was like an unbelievably tender caress. “I love you,” I shouted into the phone. “I love you too,” she cried, and laughed. I invoked our love one more time and could hear Nadja sending me kisses over the phone. Then the call ended because I had run out of change.

My epistolary novel was going to end with that punch line—unless at some point I could come up with a better ending.

Love,

Your Enrico T.

Dear Jo!

I'll say it just once: If you want to study the confusions and complications of provincial life, if you want work and a steady income, let's talk.
²¹²
As a columnist, you'll be paid two thousand a month after taxes—after July, two thousand D-marks—and we'll also find a decent place for you (and your family?) to live. We're going to need new people in any case. The only question is when we'll make our decisions. We could start printing in Gera tomorrow. It would be a third cheaper, on better paper, with needle-sharp photos. We can vary size by fours
²¹³
—we'd have no limit on the amount of advertising, and we wouldn't have to break up pages already set or postpone articles. Next thing to paradise! If only we could master the computer. Andy wanted eighteen thousand for everything, including software. We're to be his showcase and are to give him a couple of free ads. He'll get his money for the pasting machine and layout tables in July. (Even though I think we'll make it through July 1st quite well, I sometimes wonder what would have happened if we had exchanged our twenty thousand back then for East-marks, which very soon now could end up amounting to sixty or seventy thousand D-marks, maybe even more.)
²¹⁴

The
Leipziger Volkszeitung
is a sad bunch. Nobody there even thought it necessary to show up at the Auerhahn on Sunday, even though all the bigwigs—except from the Party of Democratic Socialism, of course—gathered there to wait for results to come in.
²¹⁵
They greeted us as kings, because they know that we know that the whole lot of them weren't exactly the spearhead of the revolution. That's one of Jörg's favorite topics. At the end of December he nominated Karmeka, who's our new mayor, to be chair of the opposition Round Table although he was still a nobody—and that marked the start of Karmeka's rise. Jörg probably expects too much to come of contacts with his “pupil” (as he calls him a bit too often), but certainly the connection doesn't work against us. It isn't clear yet who the new district councilor (the title reminds you somehow of junkers and the kaiser, doesn't it?), but he'll likewise be a Christian Democrat. If we're lucky, it'll end up being one of Fred's buddies. Even today, three days later, there's still not one line about it in the
LVZ.
We have Karmeka headlined on the front page, with interview and photo. And the Altenburgers will learn the rest of what's going on from us first too. No wonder people like the managing director think they'll have an easy time of it here.

On Sunday I had a long talk with Marion and Jörg. I told them about Barrista's city maps, bonus gifts for new subscribers, and his “acquisitions brigade.” As for a computer, he literally had to carry one up to our office himself.

After two hours I had Marion to the point where she at least agreed to contract Barrista as a consultant. I had suggested a thousand a month, and that would have been a ludicrously low fee as it is. But the five hundred they agreed to is really little more than an embarrassing gesture.

When we made our offer, he thanked us, but appeared more surprised than pleased. What was it we expected of him? Jörg wanted to run his own ideas past him, Marion talked about organizing the workload, and I said that he should help us choose and train our sales reps—and have a look at our books, because none of us here understands the first thing about accounting.

The baron listened to us for a while, then stood up quite suddenly, and stepped behind his chair, as if it were a lectern. “Would I be correct in stating,” he said, his voice languid, his eyelids heavy, “that you have evidently not yet answered, indeed not even asked the fundamental question that needs to be resolved at the start of every business endeavor.” Barrista tensed his body and took a deep breath. “Do you or don't you want to get rich?” He looked from one to the other and then added, “I admire anyone who decides he does not. That deserves my greatest respect. I merely need to know the terrain we've chosen to meet upon.” He interrupted me brusquely when I burst into laughter.

“It's a more serious matter than you think. Take your time. Don't choose too hastily! It implies far far more than you may perhaps expect.” When Barrista gets excited, you can hear his accent. He sat down again and promised that, whatever our decision, we could count on his good counsel, he merely wanted to know what course we planned for our ship. Then he aimed his glasses at me. I saw the trace of a smile at the left corner of his mouth. “And you aren't going to contradict me?” he asked. “Why don't you refute me with my own example? It's a weird thing about exceptions…” He was evidently alluding to our first meeting, when he had lectured me about exceptions. “One can and should make them, one must, however, know that they are exceptions. I allow myself but two—His Highness and you! But I would advise you for now not to make any exceptions, they are for advanced students at best, and even then I'd be very, very careful.”

Marion and Jörg didn't understand him at all. In their eyes the baron is an eccentric businessman trying to comfort himself for the loss of his idyllic family. I, however, have discovered in him a logician and philosopher. We, in turn, are for him a stroke of good luck, a kind of tabula rasa when compared to his own mind full of self-evidencies.

Everyone now has to tell him the function of his or her job, be it in sales, ad acquisition, accounting, the structure of actual newspaper production, etc. Sometimes we don't even understand his questions. What does
original
printing price mean? How many
deals
have we
struck
? How high is our
discount for direct bank transferals
? What's our discount percentage for write-offs? etc. When he looks from one of us to the other in that sad, helpless way, we know we've been throwing money away again.

It's easy to regard him as a ridiculous character—which Michaela and her theater dunderheads evidently love to do.

The longer I think it over, the more difficult it is for me to answer his questions—questions I would have never thought to ask and would have impatiently dismissed as childish. What arouses my enthusiasm most, however, is that he would support us with the same attentiveness, the same expenditure of energy, and the same dedication were we to answer each of them with a no. In that case, too, he would pose the same Socratic questions and prepare more diagrams, just with different coordinates.

Of course we can see how sales are slumping and ad income is rising, and it's no secret that either we'll have to expand the amount of space or raise our rates or—at the risk of going under—come up with some new idea. But all that assumes a different power of persuasion when you're looking at two curves: income from sales and from ads, lines that from week to week keep moving—or better, actually striving—closer and closer until you think you can predict where and when they'll cross. Adding the two curves together, on the other hand, gives you the relationship to printing and salary costs. And suddenly we're talking totally differently about how we can ensure our survival. In the weeks ahead we're going to have to increase our profits, because we need a buffer to get through the period after July 1st. What functioned well before may just be spinning wheels afterward. And at least ever since the baron's diagram, we know that our negotiations with the printer will decide our future existence. But the worst thing is that afterward you ask yourself how you could have ever seen it any other way.

Ah, Jo, forgive me. All this is going to bore you something awful. And my new knowledge isn't exactly a fount of originality. If only you could experience Barrista! In his presence even the most serious matters seem easy—it's all so playful, literally playful.

We had him at our place again last Monday (after he had been invited to Jörg and Marion's several times and even joined them on a weekend excursion to Saale—which, to be honest, annoyed me a bit). He doesn't enjoy living in a “hotel-room crypt” and eating nothing but restaurant food. If it were up to Robert and me, he'd be sitting with us at our table much more often.

Each time he visits, his flowers turn our living room into a hothouse. Even withered, the jungle bouquet attracted attention when Michaela threw it in the trash.

In contrast, Michaela was detached if not to say impassive as she took in the baron's report about how his real estate business was progressing. She remained remarkably unruffled when she learned that she would be earning considerably more than the amount guaranteed her, and had not one appreciative word for the baron's achievements.

Robert was grouchy because he wanted us to play Monopoly with him, which, true to character, his good father (and yes, there is such a person again) had sent him as a gift. The baron assured him that he would love to play, but please not Monopoly—that was the dullest game there is, and leads only to confusion. If a single day of his life as a businessman were as stupid and boring as Monopoly, he would look for another job right away. Robert's pouting lower lip would have moved a heart of stone. But, the baron went on, he would love to play something else. Evidently Robert's request suited his purposes. At one point he had let slip a few hints about his cultic research, as he called it. (In May '45 the only Altenburg reliquary, containing the hand of St. Boniface, had vanished, presumably into the baggage of an American soldier when his army withdrew from town.) Barrista doesn't believe his activities are ripe for sharing. Although he squanders half his time on the matter.
²¹⁶

His reaction was truly euphoric when Robert held out a boxed game of roulette. “Where do you get something like this?” And was what was inside really what the box claimed it was? The contents amused him. “Sweet flannel,” he giggled as he unrolled the plastic layout with its boxes and fields, smoothing it several times. “Sweet velvet!” The jetons sent him into raptures, the little bowl with its numbered wheel turned him into a downright buffoon. “For Lilliputians!”