New Lives (70 page)

No sooner had I opened the living-room door than two bearded men got to their feet.

“Herr Türmer,” said the fellow with long legs and a short, skewed torso, “we would like to know…” and the other one, whom I recognized as the Prophet from his cotton-candy beard and thick glasses, broke in with his variation on the question: “We really have no idea…why you don't want to work with us.” Silence. The third fellow, Jörg, whose beret was lying on the table, leaned back and nodded encouragement like a teacher at an oral exam. The dainty woman with a pageboy hairdo seated across from him gazed at me as if she were infatuated. Only Michaela went on reading the text in front of her.

“There's no reason, actually,” I said, just to say something.

What was I waiting for? Why didn't I simply vanish into my room?

Rudolph, “the Prophet,” took a step toward me, extended both hands, and clasped my right hand between them. What great good luck, he said, to have this unexpected opportunity to thank me. He had wanted to do it ever since the first time he had heard me at the church.
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He always told his wife she should never forget what Herr Türmer had done for us. I had been months ahead of events, I had truly spoken the same clear text that they wanted
klartext
to speak, and if there was anybody in this town whom he trusted, it was me.

Although he was still grasping my hand tightly, his gaze met mine only occasionally.

I should be writing for them, he said. With my name on the masthead he would no longer worry about putting out a newspaper, my name was a “guarantee of success.”

“So grab a chair and sit down here with us,” Michaela said, interrupting my eulogist.

It was like a rehearsal with a cast change—everybody knows what's going on except the actor at the center of things. But soon the discussion turned to things like cost projections, printers, distribution possibilities, copies per issue, number of pages, departmental assignments—which strangely enough relieved some of my anxiety since I had nothing to contribute and yet listening caused me no distress. It was all both as interesting and as boring as if they were explaining the rules of a parlor game.

Michaela was the only one who opposed the others' plans. “But that won't work!” she kept exclaiming.

I finally asked why they were discussing all this instead of proceeding just as before.

“Precisely,” Michaela said, tossing her pencil aside, “that's what I keep asking myself. Precisely that!”

Jörg burst into laughter. And then for the first time I heard the words:
Altenburg Weekly
. Jörg didn't let anyone get a word in edgewise now. When someone tried to speak, his radio moderator's voice grew louder in anticipation of the objection or comment.

“But it won't work,” Michaela shouted once more, to which he responded with another laugh and said, “But we're going to do it anyway!”

After that no one said anything, they all just stared straight ahead. Suddenly the woman with the pageboy turned her head to me with a birdlike jerk and said, “And what about you? Do you want to work with us? We'd consider it an honor.”

It was our job, she continued, to win over public opinion, in fact, to actually create public opinion so that we could help sustain the transition to democracy, to steer and direct it, yes, even to provide a little control—and self-control—when necessary. “Independence is the crucial thing! And we'll see to it that the New Forum gives us that in writing.” We didn't need to go into the fact that in a provincial town an effort like this would take a different form than in Berlin or Leipzig. “The wheel of history,” Rudolph the Prophet interjected, “dare not be turned back.” Then Georg said, “We, that is the New Forum, which will be financing us, are planning a weekly, starting in February. In seven weeks we'll be holding our first issue in our hands.”

I liked the idea.

“And what you do think?” I asked Michaela. She had stubbed out her cigarette and was shifting her puffed-up cheeks back and forth as if rinsing with mouthwash.

She had joined the New Forum out of a sense of responsibility, she had helped found
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out of a sense of responsibility, she had taken on the role of publisher out of a sense of responsibility. A newspaper, journalism, political activism—those were important things in a time of crisis, but interested her only in a time of crisis. What was essential for real life, however, happened in literature, in art, in the theater. Where, if not in the theater, did society's problems get bundled up together and take the shape of action? Then she turned to phrases like “the swamps of local politics” and “everyday picayune stuff.”

At first they all listened, but the longer she gushed on about art, the stage, and “real life,” the more restless they grew. Only the pageboy woman was still giving her her full attention. Michaela closed her sermon with the statement, “Only in art do our lives experience justice, only in art is there a language appropriate to justice.”

After that all eyes refocused on me. “It would mean a great sacrifice,” the woman with the pageboy said, “would truly be a sacrifice on your part.”

“Marion,” Jörg said a little testily, “it's a leap for us all.”
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“That's absurd!” Michaela cried. It should be clear to me that it would mean my giving notice at the theater, it wasn't something you could do on the side.

I promised to think it over.

Michaela flared up: “You can't be serious!”

I repeated that I would think it over.

Michaela disappeared into our room.

This turn of events was a stroke of good luck for Robert. He didn't even complain about the cigarette smoke, because everyone had departed from the living room just in time for his show to start. I said good-bye to Michaela's media committee at the door.

Once Robert had gone to bed, Michaela elbowed my door open and turned around to reveal the drawer from her desk suspended like a vendor's box at her stomach. “Here, you can practice,” she said, as she dumped the contents on the floor and was gone again.

A pile of papers scribbled full, the
klartext
files, as it turned out—plus bobby pins, Band-Aids, and a nail clipper.

I immediately set about sorting it all: printing costs, income from vendors, income from mailed copies, bills (paid and outstanding), printed texts, unprinted manuscripts, correspondence.

Standing up again at last, I surveyed my little ordered world—and then I removed my manuscript files from the cupboard, emptied the first, erased the title
Barracks Heart/Final Version,
and wrote “Printing Cost Estimates” in its place. On the pastel blue one that had read
Titus Holm,
I now wrote “Vendors' Accounts.” And so on, until only one file was left without a title. I extracted my most recent attempt at prose from it and added it to the others on my desk. It was now the capstone of my collected works. And on the file itself I wrote: “Rejected Manuscripts”—and at that moment I realized how appropriate the title would have been all along. If we'd had a stove, my “Collected Works” would have gone up in flames that same evening.

But after I had turned the pile over with the written side down, it looked like any stack of blank paper. The pages were usable on
one
side—a metaphoric fact that both frightened and delighted me. The
other half
ought not to be wasted.
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My dear Nicoletta, I'm not quite finished yet, but that's enough for today.

This comes with greetings as warm as they are disheartened, from

Your Enrico Türmer

Dear Jo,

Referees' Retreat was our stadium. We celebrated on into the morning. Mother and the hereditary prince held out until just after midnight. They didn't want to miss a single moment of our Sunday, either. Everyone was there, except for the baron. He was in consultation with Jörg. I don't know what came of it. I don't want to know, either. It was unpleasant enough when Fred and Ilona interviewed with us yesterday. We don't need anyone new at this point. It's a bitter pill for them, because I was unable to recommend them to anyone in the family
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with a clear conscience—I know them too well for that.

You and Franziska really missed something on Sunday. It will be a while before I'll see another spectacle like it. Besides which, I would have been interested in your impression—last but not least, from the theologian's point of view.
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It was truly an extraordinary, yes, a strangely preter-natural event.

After breakfast in our orchard the baron invited us to board a small bus. Except for him I don't think anyone had the vaguest idea what awaited us. Michaela climbed up front into the driver's cab. Seated in the back were the hereditary prince, Robert, Mother, Vera, Astrid, and I—each in his own seat upholstered with the same velvety fabric that lined the entire vehicle. The television up front flickered—and the baron and Michaela appeared on the screen. They waved to us, then the screen went blank again. Music was coming from somewhere, Mozart, I think—we were already on our way. The vehicle smelled new and strange, filtered light came through the windows, the cool draft from the air conditioning was pleasant. We could see people halt in their tracks to stare at us. But I knew that all they could make out would be their own reflections in the black windowpanes. We roared out of town in the direction of Schmölln, past the baron's scaffolded villa, where workers scrambled about like ants. No sooner were the last buildings behind us than I drifted into a kind of half sleep. But at the same time I noticed every detail—each tree and field, each ear of grain and leaf, revealed itself with painful clarity. Even the faces of people working in the fields or waiting at a bus stop seemed to glow as they looked up and waved.

In Grosstöbnitz we turned off the highway. We picked up speed. The houses, gardens, and fields flew past, we started uphill, a steep climb that it seemed would never end. I closed my eyes again—and sank into another world, a world of sounds and melodies. I lost myself in the music, unable to tell whether it came from inside me or from outside. I felt as if I had exchanged my human existence for a different mode of being, and for the first time ever I had the premonition of a redeemed world in the midst of our own. Yes, go ahead and laugh, but there are dreams that the instant they brush our consciousness burst like a fish from the depths of the sea when it's forced to the surface.

As the door opened, I could feel how the outside temperature corresponded exactly to that in the bus.

In a tone of voice that sounded as if we had been carrying on an uninterrupted conversation, the baron explained that what awaited us would be real theater, if not to say theater as reality. He laughed, but in the next moment announced, in the voice of a master of ceremonies: A drama performed on the occasion of the return to Altenburg of the hand reliquary of St. Boniface, the apostle to the Germans, and in honor of the visit of the hereditary prince to the city of his birth.

I pushed the wheelchair forward, and Massimo, who along with all the others had been following us, lifted him into it. Vera laid the prince's blanket across his knees, Mother handed him binoculars, and Robert raised a parasol to prevent the hereditary prince from being blinded by the sun. Astrid never left the side of the wheelchair—the right side, let it be noted, so that she could always train her good eye on him.

And here came the district councilor and mayor. Together with their retinue, these “first freely elected officials” formed a guard of honor along both sides of the steep bumpy path, up which Massimo labored to push the wheelchair. The top of the hill was crowned with a little chapel. I had no idea where we were.

A white tent had been pitched in front of the chapel. Perhaps it would be better to call it a baldachin, because except for the four corner struts clad in triangular strips of fabric leading down to a point, there was only a roof and no walls. The sun stood at its zenith, the view was overwhelming, a downright shock. To the north of this hill fit for a commanding general—as the baron termed our nameless elevation—lay Altenburg and the flats of the brown coal mines, with Leipzig's Battle of the Nations Monument far in the distance. To the south rose the expanses of Vogtland and the Ore Mountains. To the west, the pyramids of Ronneburg were so close you felt you could reach out and touch them, and behind them the Thuringian Forest. To the east you were offered a view of lovely rolling hills.

“For the fields lay sere and not yet freshened with heavenly dew!” a stentorian voice proclaimed. To our left, not fifty yards down the slope, stood several hundred strangely garbed people. Divided into two large equal clusters, they were staring at a man in a broad-brimmed hat. Hitching up his long robe, he descended from a mound of sand that, according to a sign, was
FRIESLAND
and climbed another, where a sign that read
ENGLAND
had been planted. Basic theater for the masses. And we were the audience.

A tree was now raised with the help of a hand-driven winch.

The hereditary prince asked to be pushed as close as possible to the edge of the slope. Once the tree was standing—its equilibrium maintained by several men holding the ropes—a man stepped out in front of the troupe of players and called out: “The oak of Thor!” At that same moment a sign appeared above some heads that designated this new scene of action as
GEISMAR/HESSIA
. The man in the hat quickly stepped forward—it was Mansfeld, the Catholic priest—followed by three companions who had evidently learned their nervous gestures from studying bodyguards. When he pulled out an ax from under his robe, they lifted their voices in wails of lamentation. Their efforts were amateurish, but the effect was tremendous.
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