Ingo Schulze - One More Story - Thirteen Stories in the Time-Honored Mode

After landing in Berlin, as we waited for our luggage I listened to my mailbox. Maybe it was a mistake, maybe the Sheila beside me had nothing to do with the Sheila I heard on the mailbox. But I didn’t have the strength to separate one from the other.

As I said, I’ve told the story often, very often, and have even written it all down now, but despite my expectations, it has lost none of its dreadfulness — on the contrary, sometimes I think it’s worse. Nothing happened, I tell myself, nothing happened, I was lucky, everybody says so. But I live in the fear that I missed the one chance I had of breaking out of that moment, and that I am caught up in it now, for as long — oh, I don’t know — for as long perhaps as it takes for a miracle to happen and, without a moment’s hesitation, for me to shout “Stop, stop, stop!”

Maybe I had had a little too much to drink. That would be the simplest explanation, of course, but any other explanation … well, what can I say.…

I can only provide you with bits and pieces of the context, but as for the heart of the matter — you’re going to think I’m loony. Either you recognize it, or …

From the outside looking in things often seem so simple.

It’s been several weeks now, anyway. It was on a Sunday. To escape the heat for one day at least, we had driven out to our dacha near Prieros. It’s always three or four degrees cooler under the pines than in Berlin. Clara and Franziska can run around naked, we can wear shorts, everybody doing their own thing, and it’s just a stone’s throw to the lake.

Around noon my mother arrived, with a big bowl of potato salad in the trunk — I’ve known that ivory-colored bowl ever since I can remember. That bowl has, so to speak, always been there. And shortly after my mother’s arrival, M. and E. showed up — two girlfriends who weren’t supposed to arrive till later in the afternoon. It was a little embarrassing to have them catch me raking up pinecones and needles between the terrace and the shed. But believe me, it’s very pleasant to walk over the moss barefoot. Besides, it would be pretty obvious if there were twigs, cones, and needles only at our place. Raking is just part of the routine for a rental property like this.

The heat meant that the electric grill was the only possible solution. The sausages and shashlik were from the supermarket, but they have very good meats. I seldom drink beer in the middle of the day, I’m a person who generally doesn’t drink much at all. But what’s grilling without beer? It was hot and I was thirsty, and the beer, left in the cellar from the time before, was cooled just right. I drank one or two bottles while I worked the grill and then one or two at the table. Everyone was drinking beer, except for the kids of course. The case was empty in no time. M. and E., agreeing as a couple, made fun of our diet potato salad, as well as the crumbly shortcake, the glaze was the only thing holding the strawberries together. But they polished off the potato salad all the same, and the sausages too. Natalia and I enjoyed the shortcake just as it was.

In the hope that the children would nap, Natalia and I set out on a tour with the double stroller, but the neighbors’ dogs started barking, and Franziska kept going “Bowwow! Bowwow!” and Clara copied her. We gave up trying to get them to nap, packed up our swim things, and headed for the lake. Natalia and I swam to the far shore, while M. and E. sunbathed and my mother sat in a tied-up boat with Clara and Franziska and sailed off to America, back and forth, back and forth. In America, said E., whose son lives in California, we wouldn’t be allowed to let the kids run around naked like this. Perfectly possible it would soon be like America here too, I thought. First the States, then here.

Before M. and E. took off we drank the prosecco they had brought — prosecco is their favorite drink — because it was finally chilled enough, and ate the rest of the shortcake along with what whipped cream was left. Then M. and E. drove off. We stood in the wooded lane and waved good-bye, and they waved from both sides of the car. The sun was shining through the pines and the dust they kicked up, and Natalia said we should stay the night — it would work if we drove back to Berlin early the next morning.

“We should have thought about that earlier,” I said, as if we hadn’t had a real Sunday. “Come on, kids,” my mother said. “It’s time for us to settle in nice and cozy now.”

No one wanted to clear the table or do dishes. My mother just set the milk in the fridge. “Ah, there’s still another bottle of prosecco,” she called from inside.

“We’ll drink it as our reward,” I said. I have no idea what sort of reward I had in mind, but it was hot and it was really good prosecco.

I can well imagine how all this sounds to strangers’ ears — pigging out and boozing.

Clara and Franziska strewed the old plastic containers they’d found in the shed across their sandbox. My mother was lying in the hammock and brooding over tricky solutions for the sudoku in the Tagesspiegel that, after a long discussion as a couple, M. and E. had left behind for her. Leaning back, legs crossed, Natalia was sitting at the table and attempting to read the rest of the paper in her lap. But Clara kept asking: “What does the Wicked Queen say when no kids will play with her? Is she sad because Sleeping Beauty is prettier than she is?” This can go on for hours.

Instead of getting into the car and turning on the radio, I called our friend S. to ask her how the game between England and Ecuador had turned out, and who would be playing that evening. She wanted me to tell her why so many writers think using the German genitive is pretentious and so no longer use it. I had no explanation for her but decided to make a note of her turn of phrase, “jeopardizing good taste.”

With a still unread volume of stories by Ayala in one hand and a bottle with what was left of the now almost tepid prosecco in the other, I lay down on a blanket that had been hung out to air.

Suddenly I decided I wanted to be lying in a porch swing. I actually gave some thought as to where you could buy a porch swing and what one might go for, and figured that having it delivered out here would probably cost as much as the swing itself.

My sunglasses turned the sky as blue as in Italy, and our local pines had become stone pines. Now and then there was a sough of wind. To me it always sounds like a train moving through the forest, the way trains crossing the Dresden Heath used to. Then I tried picturing the sky as water and the pines as underwater plants. I must have nodded off for a few seconds — and woke up when Franziska came running by close to my head. She was laughing, almost hooting. She ran so fast I thought she’d go sprawling any moment, and since I hadn’t swept the woods she was barreling toward, I was afraid she might hurt herself. I immediately thought of how last year a fox had risked getting as close as our garbage pit to watch us — a rabid fox.

Franziska pulled up short, bent her torso forward, held out one arm, and cried, “’T’s that, ’T’s that?”

It was in fact very beautiful — a large perfectly unblemished piece of orange peel that someone had tossed over our fence. “An orange peel,” I said. “What?” she asked. “An orange peel,” I repeated. “What?” “An orange peel,” I shouted. “ ’T’s that?” An orange peel, and one more time, an orange peel. And suddenly I got it. An orange peel! Franziska understood me at once. By the tone of my voice or whatever, she realized I had finally given her the right answer. We both gazed at the orange peel and, along with it, the miracle that there are orange peels and us and everyone and everything, the whole miracle of it. There’s nothing more for me to say. We understood the miracle that we exist. Period. Should I say I saw us in the womb of the universe? But I saw not just us, but everyone and everything. Each man, each woman, each child, each thing, but not as some sort of panorama, but each man, each woman, each child, each thing up close. We were all at the mercy of horrors and of all things human, of every ugliness and every beauty. I wasn’t standing apart from it, there was nothing in between — between me, us, and everything else.