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

I’m not loony, and I won’t claim I saw electron clouds or Einsteinian space. But all the same, it was something like that.

As soon as I put it into words, however, it turns to nonsense. A bat of an eye, during which I understood everything. Nothing, nothing had ever been lost. I saw it and in the next breath knew that I saw it no more, that the curtain had fallen.

Ants were scrambling on the backside of the orange peel, setting Franziska laughing again, with renewed cries of “ ‘T’s that?” and “What?” “Those are ants,” I said, “ants,” and turned away. After a few steps I looked around. “Ants,” I said and walked back, intending to take the orange out of her hand. “No, no!” she screamed. And so I left her with the orange peel and the ants, and stretched out on my blanket again.

I can’t say that I was agitated or happy or sad. I merely thought about how truly lovely it would be if in fact just before death we do see our life repeat at fast forward again, because this moment would be part of it, this moment and this afternoon.

But as I’ve said, maybe I simply had had too much to drink; it had been a really hot day. But when around ten o’clock I took a last look at the thermometer, the blue column of mercury was still showing twenty-nine degrees Celsius. Think of that — twenty-nine degrees Celsius at ten in the evening!

I used to be afraid of New Year’s Eve. But then I was leading an impossible life. Only the professional side of things was functioning. Functioning even better than I actually liked.

When I try to cast about for the beginning of this story, I instantly find myself leaning back in my office chair, my right foot on the handle of the middle desk drawer, the tip of my shoe wedged in under the desktop. I’m holding the phone receiver in my left hand, while my right hand plays the spiral cord like a violin string pressed against my knee. The smoke above the ashtray assumes shapes — a rumpled handkerchief, an upturned ice-cream cone, a castle from a cartoon fairy tale.

Startled at first by the display showing a call from Berlin, I was as always disappointed to recognize Claudia’s phone number. Claudia called me only when she couldn’t get hold of Ute at our branch in the old city. This time, however, she was in a chatty mood. She wanted to talk about New Year’s Eve, and I had no idea why she was telling me whom she would be inviting — the names meant nothing to me. But after a brief pause she added, emphasizing each word: “And your Julia too!”

This was on October 9, 1999, shortly before five o’clock.

Maybe you also have someone in your life who means the world to you, for whom you would sacrifice ten years of your life, for whom without hesitation you would leave your wife and child, give up your career. For me that was Julia, the Julia I first met at a carnival party thrown by the Arts Academy in Dresden in 1989. She was dressed as Hans in Luck, and could in fact have passed for a young lad, had it not been for the way she walked. She ordered a beer, I ordered a beer, we waited for them. I complimented her on her costume and went on to say that I had a thing for women who drink beer — a remark that leaves me blushing even now. We toasted. Julia assumed my general enthusiasm for theater — and in particular for a production of Kate from Heilbronn at the Leipziger Strasse rehearsal stage — came from my having recognized her. When the music struck up, we danced. Julia danced the whole evening just with me.

I was studying physics at the Technical University and working on my final-year paper. Julia was doing her year of practical training at the Staatsschauspiel.

The second time we met, as we sat across from each other in a milk bar near Goose Thief Fountain, Julia stretched her hands out to the middle of the table — and even a little farther — so that I couldn’t help laying my hands on hers.

Despite a lot of big promises, she hadn’t gotten hired in Dresden, and according to Julia the reason was her evaluation by the Berlin Acting School, which claimed she had problems “recognizing the leading role of the working class.”

Julia was more than happy to land a spot with a theater in A., a district capital, although I found that almost more frustrating than she did. But since I was convinced that sooner or later someone would be captivated by her, I came around to believing that A. was better for her than Dresden. For an acting student to get involved with a guy from a technical university was unusual in those days, to say the least. The best her theater bunch could come up with was Dürrenmatt’s The Physicists . They had no idea what it meant to plug away at five years of technical studies and — without becoming a party member — be granted a research slot, even if it was only at a technical school in B.

Even today I don’t find it easy to describe Julia. It’s like trying to supply reasons for why I loved her. It annoyed me when people called her a “standout,” as if she were a precocious child. The most amazing thing about her was that, especially as an actor, she was scarcely aware of the effect she had. When I told her I knew of no other woman who walked in such an easy and yet decisive way, she said it was my infatuation. For Julia the most important thing each morning was to tell me about her dreams, as if she felt some need to confess. Julia never missed a party, even if it usually looked as if she was bored once she got there. She often learned her role on the train or would set her alarm for four in the morning. I loved everything about Julia — except the way she could encapsulate herself! From one moment to the next Julia could close up for apparently no reason whatever. She would then treat me as an object she needed to evade, even while she was flirting with a salesclerk or chatting for minutes on end with some stagehand we might run into on the street.

In June of ’89 my left foot buckled under me while I was taking a run in the woods. I tore a tendon and ended up in a cast. Julia dropped everything, including her graduation party in Berlin, to take care of me and cook for me — she even called the taxi that took me to the oral defense of my paper.

That cast marked the beginning of our loveliest time together. We were almost inseparable. When I could actually walk again, we took a trip to Budapest and Szeged, returning in the middle of August, which raised smiles on some faces at the time. But Julia and I had never so much as mentioned leaving for the West, just as we never spoke about having children or moving in together.

Later I asked myself many times whether I loved Julia because she was an actor. The mere thought that the same beautiful creature everyone was staring at would, once the applause ended, follow me back to my ghastly dorm and fall asleep cuddled up against me, that that voice would be whispering words in my ear, that those hands — ah, it can only sound banal to anybody else.

But believe me: As much as I loved Kate of Heilbronn, I loved Julia far more, who wanted nothing more than to be with me. With her everything felt easy and natural and effortless.

One time on the train — we were on my way to my parents’, and Julia was sitting across from me reading — I was struck by the notion that we didn’t know each other, a vision so terrible it actually left me with ice-cold hands. Without Julia everything was sad or at least incomplete. Even in the company of my friend C. or my brother, within an hour at the latest, I would be tormented by my longing for her.

Julia’s first season in A. began that September and so did my assistantship in B. People in B. were far less uptight than at the Dresden Technical University. I could have ducked out on Thursdays. Julia said, however, that she needed more time now and more sleep, because she would have to concentrate completely on her work.