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

Two mornings I drove home to put things in order there too. Along with my passport and insurance policies I found a little red book published by Heyne: HOW TO SATISFY A WOMAN EVERY TIME … and have her beg for more! “It Really Works!” On the back was a picture of Naura Hayden — beautiful eyes, perfect teeth. “Vitamin C is ascorbic acid, and Nobel Prize winner Linus Pauling recommended a minimum daily dose of 3,000 mg. I take at least 15,000 mg per day, and have for many years,” Naura Hayden writes on page 74. Ute would probably have been puzzled that I owned such a book, but in fact it had nothing whatever to do with her.

I shoved documents into transparent files, packed it all into a Lidl shopping bag, and headed for the door. Like someone who dared not leave any traces, I looked all around. What in this apartment belonged to me, actually? There was nothing I hung my heart on, nothing I’d miss, with the exception of a handmade four-tiered Christmas pyramid from the town of Seiffen. It had been a present on my tenth birthday.

Ever since deciding on the Berlin option, as Ute called it, she had been eating nothing but veggies and fruit for supper — because Claudia had invited her to come along for a swim and the sauna. I reduced my supper to small sandwiches, gave up pastries, and when I ate out ordered steamed or boiled dishes with lots of rice. If the meal was fried herring, I removed the skin. Ute even went to a fitness studio for courses like “Fat Burners” and “Power Yoga” and took an adult education seminar in makeup — and ended up being talked into spending oodles of money for a mountain of cosmetics.

We gave away two big bags of pants, jackets, skirts, and sweaters to charity, and I finally tossed out all the old socks and underwear I had been in the habit of saving for polishing shoes. The weather was as fickle as in April. There was an early snow and a couple of gusty storms, and then it was back to springlike weather.

Those were crazy weeks. And meanwhile business was hopping as never before. It felt like life were casting off its waste products, losing fat, and building muscle instead.

The whole time Ute talked about Claudia and her new boyfriend Marco. Marco was in the film business and got along well with Dennis, Claudia’s son. Ute likewise knew that Claudia couldn’t sleep without earplugs, that she stuck big clumps of Ohropax in her ears every evening. And that Marco was a very jealous type but a good lover, and that he had a short, fat cock.

I asked Ute whether she gave out information of that sort about me. “No,” she said, but it sounded pretty flimsy. And not until I asked her a second time did she erupt with: “What do you take me for?”

Claudia thought of Marco as robust. Ute said she hoped I would never get that fat. Marco must have been making very good money at the time, otherwise they couldn’t have afforded their two-story penthouse plus terrace with a view across to Friedrichshain Park.

On TV they were constantly talking about the countdown. And at one point I almost gave myself away. Someone mentioned a cute numerical landmark, it was 666 , I think. “Just 666 hours left here,” I said. But Ute didn’t pick up on it.

It wasn’t until Christmas that it dawned on me what sort of betrayal Claudia was planning. Or was she just toying with me? You’re sure to object that someone like me shouldn’t be pointing fingers. But I never made any false promises to Ute. She knew that she was not my great love. Whenever she tried to force me to express myself more clearly — sometimes it was about marriage, sometimes about another child — I would answer no every time.

Except for Julia there was nothing about Claudia that might have interested me. Yes, I found it difficult to put up with Claudia, who I assumed was anorexic. Not a word passed her lips that wasn’t too loud or accompanied by a gesture that would somehow set her black shoulder-length hair swaying. Her gestures seemed in fact to demand words be put to them. Above all, when she laughed you sensed something vulgar about her — not to mention the way she ran through men.

“That’s just how she is,” Ute said, adding how she actually admired Claudia even though that wouldn’t be a life for her.

“‘With candles five, a flame we’ve kept, now Father Christmas has overslept,’” Claudia recited the last time she called. And Christmas that year did in fact seem like a fifth Advent Sunday. I gave Ute a suitcase, and had bought one for myself as well. Our contribution to the festivities was to be the champagne, and I’d had the Aldi market reserve four cases for me.

On the morning of December 30 we both got on the scales. I had lost eleven pounds, and Ute a little under nine. It wasn’t even light yet when we drove off. That made my farewell easier.

No, I hadn’t given a thought to where and how I would find another job, and of course I realized what I was giving up. But that’s exactly what it was supposed to be: a sacrifice! A huge sacrifice, do you understand? I wanted to just say yes to Julia, no matter what might happen.

On the way we ate slices of apple and bell pepper, and only just before Berlin did we stop for a lavish breakfast at a Mövenpick. We drove up the Avus autobahn, then exited at Kaiserdamm and headed eastward — the best route to make you feel like you’ve arrived in Berlin.

Claudia welcomed us in a loud yellow sleeveless dress — as if it were the height of summer. After the greetings she shot me a look that seemed to say: We’re partners in crime. When she bent down to pull on her boots I saw that evidently the dress was the only thing touching her skin. Marco helped me load the Aldi champagne onto the elevator and stow it upstairs in an empty man-size refrigerator.

The rear courtyard apartment on Käthe-Niederkirchner Strasse where we were to spend the night was not even two hundred meters away. There was a break in the facades opposite, so that from the living room you could see across the vacant lot, where a bulldozer was at work, to Hufeland Strasse and a flower shop, above which Claudia and Dennis had once lived. While Claudia — after first sort of shaking off her coat rather than slipping out of it — strode from room to room turning up the radiators, I watched as the bulldozer below our window suddenly lowered its jaws and set to work.

The apartment belonged to one of Marco’s friends, who had fled to the Maldives. “Spotless,” Ute said when Claudia showed her the kitchen and bath. The bedclothes — which I first thought were silk — turned the bedroom into an Oriental chamber.

Fritz had stayed behind with Dennis. Ute and Claudia wanted to head off right away for a spa near Zoo Station. I escorted them to the bus stop in front of a movie house, where, when Ute stopped to look at posters, Claudia took advantage of the opportunity to whisper to me: “Take a little walk in the park. You just might hit it lucky.”

Then the bus pulled up, and Ute called out as if by way of farewell: “Those posters don’t tell you one damn thing!”

Instead of crossing to the park I walked back up the street we’d just come down, and stopped at a drugstore where an effusively friendly man talked me into a powder for my sweaty feet, a product that dated back to GDR days. On the next corner was a Vietnamese grocery, where I bought coffee, milk, bananas, and rolls, and in the Italian delicatessen next door I found some pastry, red wine, and mortadella. Finally I purchased some roses that were so sinfully expensive that they earned me the admiration of the salesclerk. While she was wrapping up the bouquet, I watched through the store window as the bulldozer piled its small mountain higher still. As I walked along the street with my shopping bags and roses, I experienced a kind of happiness when it struck me that I might be taken for a local — just as if Julia were waiting for me in the apartment on Käthe-Niederkirchner Strasse.