New Lives (39 page)

In the blink of an eye he had calculated the total value of the jetons and determined how many of each sort there were. Michaela cleared the table, but didn't even have time to change tablecloths. The baron had already arranged everything; while he distributed the jetons, he urged Michaela to finally sit down with us, all the while switching back and forth between French and German. “Come on, play, do sit down, it's your turn!” he cried, and began by placing a ten on the right row and the first dozen—hardly a gutsy beginning, I thought. I risked twice as much on three wagers: on red, odds, and the zero. Michaela strewed half her jetons across the numbered fields, Robert placed a hundred on black. It wasn't until the baron stretched out his arm and described an oval with the palm of his hand above the field, while whispering,
“Rien ne va plus,”
that we realized the ball was whirling. A moment later it took a few bounces back and forth, and the baron announced the results in French, then added (what we all could see), “Fifteen, black.” He slid the croupier's rake across the wrinkled plastic playing field—Michaela and the baron had lost everything. Robert was given another hundred; I got a twenty, but had lost forty. Barrista smiled and doubled his bet. By the second round I was already bored, the same state I thought I could observe as well in the generous way Michaela scattered the rest of her jetons. Robert risked another hundred, this time on red; my bet was the same as before, except this time instead of the zero, I slid a twenty next to Robert's hundred. The baron repeated the same conjuring motion with his arm, the ball jangled—eleven, red. One of the baron's fingers touched the eleven, restoring Michaela's capital to its original state.

But it wasn't long before Michaela was the first to have lost everything, which had evidently been her intention. With a run of incredible good luck, Robert followed every spin of the ball. After each loss the baron doubled his bet, risking forty, eighty, a hundred sixty—and finally won. His perseverance had paid off.

And yet joyful enthusiasm had turned into crabbed intensity. He engaged in no conversation, answered no questions, just stared at the layout, and hastily tossed the ball. He was like a machine. Whereas Robert was the real player and hero. He lost as much as he won, but he still had his winnings left from the first round. I raised my bets because I was tried of the endless, dreary up and down—and was the next one to go bankrupt. The baron kept on doubling his bet until he won. I had never before seen him so inattentive, yes almost impolite. It didn't so much as occur to him that only we men were sitting there and Michaela was washing dishes in the kitchen.

He didn't emerge from under the ice until he leaned back, presented his jetons, and said, “I'm getting out now.” “You did notice, didn't you?” he asked, finally reanimated, and then added with childlike pride, “Toward the end it was all wins for me.”

“Unlucky in love, lucky at cards,” I said. The baron gave me such a piercing look that I was on the verge of apologizing for my tactlessness.

“No,” he said with a smile. “Probability. Maximal probability. Chance is only a question of the framework, the marked-off field, and, of course, of time. The more money you have, however, the less chance can make a mess of things. Just as in real life.”

He knew every gambling den between Wiesbaden and Las Vegas. It was only superficially a question of winning and losing or of whether you were a hopeless gambler or an upright fellow. It involved more, much more than that, maybe everything. He had learned what it means to hand yourself over root and branch to fate and wait to see if it touched you. Instead of an apple Eve should have offered her husband a handful of jetons.

I admitted that I hadn't found our game all that charged with fate.

I shouldn't make myself look ridiculous, he said—this here was less than child's play, this was nothing, nothing at all—what had I expected? I was baffled, indeed frightened by the vehemence with which he thrust his hand under the plastic layout and flung it from him. It flopped to the center of the table, fell back, and ended up dangling from the edge of the table in front of him. A few jetons fell to the floor, which put him into a rage. He grabbed the plastic again between thumb and forefinger and held it up in disgust as if it were the filthy handkerchief of a foe.

That wasn't meant as a reproach, he said, already in a gentler mood, as we emerged from under the table with the jetons we'd garnered. But for him this game was something almost sacred, a ritual, yes, yes, a cleansing and sacrificial ritual—he meant that in earnest. He repeated it verbatim again to Michaela, who had returned to the room because, as she later said, she assumed there was an argument.

What I needed was to experience the real game sometime, he remarked with studied casualness. And when he said “real” he meant just that, a weekend in Monte Carlo, what did I think of that, he'd take care of all the details. “Agreed?”

“Monte Carlo is not as far away as you think,” he said. Along with other lovely lessons I could learn there, there would be the concomitant and pleasant effect of an improvement in my financial status, because since it was my first time, and especially if I followed his instructions—“there are always rules and regulations”—I would be certain, absolutely certain, to win! We ought to consider sometime why it was that casinos set betting limits. That was the key to understanding. That was worth thinking about.

The baron hinted at something like this weeks ago, but I had just taken it for small talk. Apparently with him there is no such thing as small talk.

Hugs from your Enrico

PS: Just one question: Although he fully understands our situation, Anton Larschen refuses to wait any longer in regard to his memoirs and is behaving like an ornery brat. Jörg and I have read them, and want to publish them, but it requires lots of work by an editor. May I send you the manuscript? You'll be paid, of course, can sign off as editor, and a preface and afterword would be very welcome too.

Dear Nicoletta,

It isn't just the spring weather that is making it hard for me to continue my report and tell you about December—at the end of November Nadja and I had separated for good.

Upon returning to Jena I felt paralyzed and lonely rather than relieved. I had heard scarcely anything from Vera since March, the number of letters that Johann and I had exchanged during the year could be counted on one hand. I hadn't even really congratulated him on the birth of his daughter Gesine.

On Monday I overslept, missing my Latin translation seminar, tried to no avail to prepare for my Greek class that evening—when I looked up a word, I'd already forgotten it by the time my eyes returned to the text—didn't wake until noon on Tuesday, and barely made it to the bathroom and back. At least it occurred to me to report in sick.

Our language teacher, a gifted translator of Horace,
²¹⁷
let me know that—signed medical excuse or no—he didn't believe me. The indifference with which even Samthoven had been treating me for several weeks attested to my being hardly so much as a mediocre student now.

My weariness grew from day to day. The one thing I could manage each morning was to open one of the little doors on the Advent calendar my mother had sent me—a ritual that we maintain to this day.

At the start of Christmas break I took the train to Dresden and crawled into bed. When my mother was at home I hardly left her side.

We were expecting Vera for early-afternoon dinner on the 24th. To my surprise my mother set the table for four.

Roland was at least ten years older than Vera and a good two inches shorter. His delicate nose didn't match his thick lips. The skin on his head glistened under his sparse black hair. He wore peculiar glasses, square and rimless, and spoke a pleasant dialect that I took for southern Thuringian. It was striking how interested he was in everything, even the label on the bottle of soda. As he listened he would nod and keep repeating, “Okay, okay, okay,” as if every sentence required his approval.

When Roland mentioned his comrades in “Torino,” where he had spent Christmas the previous year, several things became clear to me. All the same I asked how he had made it to Turin. “In my car,” he replied, and went on chewing contentedly. I said that I'd likewise love to have a car that you could drive all the way to Turin—Salzburg would do for me.

Roland was unimpressed, and lectured me instead on how people here have far too many illusions about the West. Travel wasn't all it was cracked up to be—and anyway you needed money for it; and after two or three weeks, the drudgery started all over again. And so on and so forth.

“But after all, a person has to see the Mediterranean!” Ah, Nicoletta, if only I had known those words back then. I stood up and went to my room. But picturing how the story of Nadja would now be bandied about, I regretted my departure.

A little later there was a knock on my door. I let Roland in. He held out his pack of Revals. Standing side by side, we smoked the Western cigarettes at the open window. I don't know if he took only deep drags or started to say something several times, but before he could get a word out, Vera appeared, ran her hand through my hair, and pulled him away. The cigarettes tasted awful.

That evening Roland was given more than his share of gifts. He himself hadn't bothered, at least not for Mother and me. Vera was wearing a pantsuit that he had brought back for her, and she thrust her chin forward for us to smell the perfume on her neck. Then Aunt Camilla's parcel was set on the table. Vera and I began at once to search for currency. As if by agreement and with a fervor worse than that of the worst customs agents, together we ripped wrapping paper from cans of pineapple and packages of coffee, tore off gold stars and ribbons, and paid no attention to what fell to the floor. When Roland turned away from us in disgust, I went at it with special gusto. I discovered the first hundred-D-mark bill in the packet of Fa soap, the second under the plastic tray in the Sprengel praline box. The third remained unaccounted for until Mother found it among the tattered wrapping paper.

The next day—granted, he did drive Mother to work at half past five in the morning—Roland made himself at home. He ran around in his underwear, smoked, ransacked the pantry, finished off the whole bowl of potato salad—standing—drank the Murfatlar
²¹⁸
straight from the bottle, and never stopped scratching his hairy chest.

A decal with a white dove of peace against a blue background adorned the rear windshield of his Renault, and he and Vera used it for jaunts to Meissen, Moritzburg, and Pillnitz, and to the theater, too, along with Roland's comrades, who were staying at Vera's.

She and I hardly spoke. Roland was her revenge for Nadja.
²¹⁹
From my mother I learned that the two of them had already decided to get married. At the dinner table I asked them where they would be living. “What a stupid question!” Vera said. Roland, however, admitted that he would prefer to settle in the East. But a move like that would be like stabbing his comrades in the back.

Roland talked constantly about the ban against leftists in the civil service, he had once been threatened with it himself. He asked me if I could give him something to read, something I had written, of course, or read it aloud, then and there, that same evening. He also asked if there was a “red-light district” in Dresden. I knew the term “infrared treatment” as a synonym for GDR propaganda and other expressions like “red cloister” for particularly hard-nosed schools, Red assholes, and a few others. I thought Roland meant some kind of governmental area.
²²⁰

Mother dubbed Roland a fine man, because his outspokenness would cause him trouble everywhere, with both sides. I, however, found him tiring and pretentious. I regarded his presence as the reason for my chronic exhaustion.

New Year's Eve was dreadful, the trip back was dismal.

I had locked the Nadja letters in a drawer.
Vivat Polska!
had become a stranger to me. If I was going to continue it, I would have to do what I had thus far avoided, that is, read what I had already written.

No, it wasn't a debacle, not even a disappointment. Of course I saw how unfinished, how in need of correction the manuscript was—with no regrets I excised whole paragraphs and pages. A few details, moreover, some of the descriptions and metaphors seemed to me so close to perfect I was afraid I had pilfered them from Babel or Mailer.

All the same, on that Sunday afternoon—cold, sunny, no snow—I was overcome with a doubt that stained everything, made it all unpalatable. I no longer believed me!

Hadn't I once considered taking the blame for the “Karl and Rosa Live!” graffiti? Why then shouldn't one of my characters come up with the idea of claiming
Vivat Polska!
as his own work? There were plenty of reasons to. And what, beg your pardon, was really so bad about the inscription itself? Couldn't anyone with some notion of the story of good soldier Schweik twist the meaning around enough to take the air out of the cheeks of Stasi interrogation specialists?

You can see, Nicoletta, that I've once again arrived at just such a point.
²²¹
It's like when an adult talks about the worries and fears of a child. Because you're probably asking why I didn't rejoice in these new ideas and use them. That's precisely what would have done the whole project good and actually and finally made it interesting.

And yet, even if my own sense of life was not all that tragic, literature at least had to be. And that meant suffering. The greater the suffering, the better the literature. Don't laugh! I didn't know any better. Our role, the East's role, was one either of suffering and resistance or of going along,
tertium non datur.
My heroic epic was tilting toward farce; and in the next instant it had become impossible.