New Lives (43 page)

There were several clicks, the ball bounced—I looked down, in the next moment came the announcement. I didn't understand the croupier, but I saw it, the thirteen, I looked at it again, and then again, thirteen. Which third was the thirteen in? Thirty-six divided by three, twelve, twelve, twelve. I didn't shout. On the contrary—as if I'd been standing the whole time, I felt as if I had finally sat down.

Freckles was staring at his notebook. The table was raked, no one had won—except me! Only me! I silently made fun of Freckles—go ahead and analyze, while I play. And when I've won yet again, you can mull it over and analyze what I've done some more. And on and on, to the end of our days!

My blue tower fell apart between the croupier's fingers, all six jetons, I counted along with him—and received at last, along with two more blues, my Lipizzaner!

I would never have dared to dream of that white rectangle. If there is anything I regret it is only that I possessed my Lipizzaner for no more than two minutes. That's all the time I needed to scrape up my little pile and head for the cashier without so much as a farewell.

I was too weak to wipe the sweat from my brow. Out in the lobby, somebody shouted something at me, a whole group of people burst into laughter. I was pale, my feet moved me with exaggerated precision toward my goal—I was seen as the epitome of the loser.

When I entered our room, Vera was holding her hand to her eyes, from the TV came screams. I disappeared into the bathroom, gagged and retched and fought for air—nothing.

I don't know how I'll survive the flight back. My third cup of tea is on its way. I'm still tortured by the idea that I could have failed at the crucial moment and not have bet all my winnings.
²³⁸
If I had lost my nerve, I'd no longer be able to look at myself in the mirror. As you can see, I have stopped asking questions and have begun to understand.

Vera asked me to say hello for her. She's insisting we be on our way.

Your Enrico

PS: As we walked out to get our taxi, John was sitting at the front desk again. He bowed, I extended my hand and slipped him a hundred in farewell. I saw immediately that I had not committed a faux pas.

Vera and I went our separate ways in Frankfurt am Main. She boarded a train for Berlin, I took the one for Leipzig. As soon as Vera has broken up her apartment in Berlin she's coming to Altenburg for a few weeks. I gave her my winnings, and that was a great relief in the end.

Dear Nicoletta,

It really is strange. Now that I'm coming to the point in my narrative where I first met Michaela, we're about to separate. Not one angry word has been spoken, that's all well behind us. Robert says that he and I will still be together, that of course we're a family—him, me, Michaela, and my mother—no matter what happens. “We are and always will be a family,” I promised.

Unlucky in love, lucky at cards. I did in fact win a few thousand, so there's nothing standing in the way anymore of an excursion to Bamberg or Italy.
²³⁹
So much for my present life.

         

If it hadn't been for Anton I would never have ended up in the theater or in Altenburg, would never have met Michaela and Robert, would never have become a newspaper man—and we two would probably have just walked on past each other.

Anton wanted to become a dramaturge and move to Berlin. He pursued both goals with such unqualified zeal that he was willing to sacrifice everything else. Anton explained to me what all a “dramaturge” has to do. He wasn't really looking for work as such, but for a comfortable position that would leave him plenty of time for his escapades.

In January '87, six months before Vera's departure, I sent applications to every theater in the country; there were circa forty (and if you didn't find a job yourself, you ran the risk of the university assigning you to some library, museum, or publishing house).
²⁴⁰
Four theaters invited me for an interview: Potsdam, Stendhal, Zeitz, and Altenburg. Not long thereafter I found a letter from Anton in my cubbyhole, which began very formally—so I took it for a joke. A few lines later, however, and I couldn't believe my eyes. Since he, Anton, was leaving the entire country to me, he hoped I would in turn have the good grace to waive any claims to Berlin and Potsdam.

Vera raved about Altenburg's Lindenau Museum and about how Gerhard Altenbourg lived there—and furze-faced Hilbig
²⁴¹
likewise came from Meuselwitz, a town just a few miles away. Besides which, the town had survived the war practically unscathed.

And so I traveled to Altenburg, and after only ten minutes the general manager (a long-haired man in his late thirties, who wore his shirt open halfway to his navel) informed me that I would be hired—providing I passed my internship—turning my first walk through town into a tour of the arena where my real life was to begin.

It was snowing. The approach to the castle lay in spotless white before me. I had a headache from all the excitement and because of my spare pair of glasses, which had a different prescription from my regular pair (Vera had them on her conscience). Snowflakes big as postage stamps were falling faster and faster with every step I took. When I turned around and looked down as if through a veil to the theater below me and to the town rising off to the west, I could scarcely see my own footprints.

After a circuit of the castle courtyard (this was before the fire), I walked to the park, whose paths were now discernable only because they lay between rows of benches. At the foot of the hill, but removed into the distance by the drifting snow, stood the Lindenau Museum. All I knew about it were illustrations of its vases from antiquity. I don't need to describe to you what happens when, having climbed the stairs and stridden across the octagon, you enter that suite of rooms hung with Italian paintings. I knew almost nothing about the Sienese, and very little about the Florentines,
²⁴²
and yet I felt I had arrived. Perhaps you're thinking that I'm just mouthing your words.
²⁴³
But just as some people suffer when they must do without the Elbe or the sea, I would never be able to move to a place if I knew there wasn't such a treasure somewhere nearby.

The great collections in Dresden, Prague, Lódź, Budapest, or Leningrad lack a certain serenity. Here, however, you are alone with each painting. Even the guards remain hidden and you are reminded of them at most by a distant creaking of floorboards. I was already in Italy here. It was here that I understood that the best of the Renaissance comes from the pre-Renaissance. Here I could let pass in review the two hundred years so decisive not only for Italian art, but also for the intellectual spirit of all of Europe.
²⁴⁴

To this day the same paintings that I took into my heart that afternoon have remained my favorites. Of course the three Guido da Sienas,
Man of Sorrow
by Lorenzetti, the
Madonna
by Lippo Memmi, the
Adoration
by Taddeo di Bartolo, the crucifixions by Giovanni di Paoli, everything by him really and by Lorenzo Monaco, and of course Masaccio; but I'm almost even fonder of Fra Angelico's
St. Francis' Trial by Fire,
with its skeptical sultan on his throne, but also his saints, plus the
St. Jerome
by Lippi, Botticelli's stern
St. Katherine,
Signorelli's artistic torturers, the Madonnas in his
Internment,
the
Annunciation
by Barnaba da Moden, Puccinelli's
Madonna
with its angels and saints, and the joy of the one to whom the baby Jesus has turned his face.

As I left the museum a bluish red patch of late-afternoon sky shone bright above me.

Three weeks later I passed through the theater's portals with a nod of my head, managed to catch the grated door before it closed behind a dancer in her warm-up outfit—and froze at the sound of a shrill “Halt!” The gatekeeper had jumped up and was pressing her forehead to the pane of her booth. Called to account as to who I was and where I was headed, I finally answered with “Hoffmann!
Undine
!”

“Step back! All the way back!” My shoulder bag and I were blocking the way for others. I was told to explain why I had tried to “break into” the theater. When I asked her to call the general manager, she laughed, grabbed the telephone receiver, and took her eye off me only long enough to jab a finger into the dial. With each new arrival she again asked me to give my name. I was forced to shout “Enrico Türmer” several times, and to repeat it a little louder, “if you please,” to spell the two words—so that every newcomer had learned the name of this stupid young fellow at the gate before I even got inside the theater. “Do
you
know a Türmer, Enrico maybe?”—or in her dialect: Dürmer, Ähnreegoh. That indefinite article before my name obliterated me.

I begged her to inform the chief dramaturge. The outraged gatekeeper laid the receiver down, put a finger to the cradle, and pressed hard. She was well aware of what she had to do, she didn't need instructions. Besides which, people there would have no more idea of who I was than she did.

“He don't even know where he wants to go,” she shouted into the receiver once more as two ballerinas came tripping by, “that's what got me so riled, that's the problem,” to which I could only keep on replying, “Hoffmann, Hoffmann!”

“Nobody knows you here,” she declared, and set down the receiver. Giving me another once-over, she leaned back in exhaustion and started to thumb through whatever it was that had been lying before her the whole time. It was unclear whether she was going to pursue my case or had already filed me away for good.

“Wait!” she cried out, still turning pages, but as she reached for the receiver again a woman in a white blouse emerged out of the darkness of the stairwell, bounded down the last three steps, and cast me such a friendly glance that I was afraid she had mistaken me for someone else.

“I know who you are,” she said with a smile, linked her arm under mine, and guided me in the direction of the gatekeeper.

“May I introduce you, Frau”—here she inserted the gatekeeper's name—“to Herr Türmer, our new dramaturge…” This time it took the gatekeeper two tries to get up out of her chair; she extended a hand through the oval hatch in the pane and exclaimed, “Why didn't he say so right off!” And with that we strode through the portal.

The woman in the white blouse ushered me through a labyrinth of hallways and stairs. Every few feet the odor changed. We passed the ballet room, a canteen, skirted a baroque sandstone stairwell, and stood there in the dark. I heard a key and followed her into a room where light barely seeped through the curtains. The odor was of midday meals.

On the way back we stopped in front of white french doors and listened. Suddenly my guide pressed down the door handle and shoved me inside, just as a piano struck up again.

Who was I, what did I want, who had sent me?…My good fairy had vanished, the director, hardly any older than I and with a haircut that highlighted the back of his head, had interrupted the rehearsal and was paging quickly through the piano reduction.

I gave my name, I repeated my name. I was informed by the director, who went right on paging through the score, that one did not attend a rehearsal uninvited, nor did one interrupt it. One needed to request permission in advance from at least the director, if not the entire ensemble. “In advance!” he repeated and finally stopped turning pages. Had I done that? No, I replied, I had not. It was too late for any excuses for my misconduct. A gentleman kneeling on the floor expressed in a bass voice his outrage at such a disregard for his person. How long was he supposed to keep crawling around, didn't we people have eyes in our heads. He said “people,” but he had looked only at me.

Over the next five weeks, during which I was allowed to audit Tim Hartmann's production of
Undine,
there was little I could do to improve the situation I had got myself into when making my entrance. I made it worse by using formal modes of address. Tim Hartmann took it as an insult that I did not call him Tim like everyone else. Just opening the door to the canteen was awful, leaving the counter with my tray of bockwurst and coffee was awful, taking a seat at an empty table was awful, joining other people at a table was awful. What's more, I smelled like the kitchen, which was directly under my room.

Every so often the assistant director, a tall, beautiful woman from Berlin, took pity on me. When she stood before me, I realized what might have saved me: something to do.

Although I did like sitting in on rehearsals. At first I thought I needed to say something that would prove my theatrical credentials. I amazed myself at what all occurred to me. At the end of the first week I handed Tim Hartmann a list of suggestions. I hoped in this way to commend myself as a worthy partner in the conversation. At the start of the next week of rehearsals the assistant director asked me to refrain from taking notes from now on.

When there was no evening rehearsal I attended performances, where I sat in one of the first rows with program in hand and tried to memorize the faces of the cast. As if my future depended on it, I devoted great energy, indeed passion, to learning names. Which was why the last week of
Undine
rehearsals was especially important, because I could now coordinate names and functions even for people who never appeared onstage, but whom I knew by sight. I found it easy to learn names and equally difficult to correct my mistakes. For example I thought the lighting director was the man in charge of painting sets, and took the director of the set workshop for the lighting director.

I considered my audit to have concluded on a conciliatory note when I was assigned to write the press release, which Tim Hartmann then handed out at dress rehearsal, all the while repeating
“à la bonne heure.”
At the premiere I was even allowed to spit three times over the left shoulder of Undine herself, who had ignored me longer than anyone else.