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

Then the three of us waited for the elevator. Claudia gave me a good-bye peck on the cheek. Marco rode down with me and never stopped scratching for even a moment. He walked outside and then waved me out, as if I were in a hiding place some distance away. “The coast is clear,” he said. “Take care!”

I didn’t have a key and had to ring the doorbell. The front door immediately buzzed open. Ute came down the stairs to meet me. She was wearing a dress I’d never seen before. She looked as if she were going out somewhere. Candles had been lit in the living room, on the table were my roses, and two champagne glasses.

“I love you,” I said, and at that moment it felt like a greeting, the greeting of a man returning home. Ute made a face. She probably thought I was drunk. She had tried, she said, to call Claudia, but we had all apparently been too busy. Fritz had thrown up a couple of times, which was why she had stayed with him.

It wasn’t until I picked up the champagne glass that I realized my right hand hurt. It was swollen. Out of solidarity, Ute toasted with her left hand as well. She found some ice cubes in the fridge, and while I told her about the tall guy, she folded them into a dish towel that she wrapped around my hand.

In bed Ute said, “My hero.” She really meant it.

I was awakened by her caresses. She begged me not to be angry, she just ached for me so much. Still half asleep I raised my head. All the buildings outside the window were still there and still looked as they had in the previous millennium, a state of affairs I found all the more satisfactory because I believed I had played a certain role in that miracle.

“I love you,” I said, caressing her with the fingertips of my injured hand. Ute beamed like a child. By late afternoon we were on our way back to B.

In early March, Claudia made good on her promise in Erfurt, where she was attending a training course. We met in her hotel room during the noon break. Whenever an opportunity presents itself, we make good use of it. One time I traveled all the way to Warnemünde, only to turn around an hour later and race back home. Why do I do it? Why not? It’s beautiful, and it has nothing to do with Ute. It’s a game. I don’t mean the role-play scenes that Claudia comes up with, I mean the other life I live in those hours when I’m with her. Why should I forgo that happiness, the moments in which a moody, snippy, anorexic, and slightly vulgar female is transformed into a woman full of such intense tenderness and passion that I can imagine I’m the only man who knows her?

And at the same time, I’m happy with Ute. January 1, 2000, was the beginning of my love for her. We got married in 2001, and if things had turned out as we’d hoped, we would have had a second child.

Although Fritz will be turning sixteen in a few days, I don’t get the feeling he wants to move out or that he’s even rebelling. Just the opposite, we get along better and better with each passing year. And who knows, maybe someday he’ll take over the business. He already pitches in when we’re short on help, and doesn’t even mention money. My love for him and Ute hasn’t just reconciled me with my life, it has in fact made life as a whole precious and sweet for the first time.

But that indeed is my problem. I no longer have to worry about New Year’s Eve. I have other things to worry about.

In my euphoria of early 2000, I bought one hundred thousand D-marks’ worth of stocks. You know what happened then. All the same, every few days some flunky calls trying to soft-sell me into investing money with him. Normally I say: Sure, happy to, I’ve got three hundred euros in loose change that I can risk. But sometimes I simply lose it. I can show you the spot where my cell phone crashed against the wall like Luther’s inkwell up on the Wartburg.

I’d be quite content if I could recover just half of my old effortless flair, that knack for good luck that you need in business. Fear is not a good consultant. Given all my problems it’s a miracle I’ve been able to keep the same weight I had on that remarkable New Year’s Eve.

There’s nothing more to say. That’s my story. We’ve celebrated the New Year in Berlin three times now. Because Marco wanted it that way, Julia wasn’t invited back, or the tall troublemaker, of course. Ufa fired both him and Marco on the same day. Ever since Claudia separated from Marco and Dennis went off to study law at a Dutch university in Leiden — he’s interested in outer-space jurisprudence, or so he says — she visits us often. Because we’re the ones who throw the big parties now. I need them to get my mind on other things, to forget the business for at least a weekend. By now we really know how to have a good time. We don’t wait around for guests to leave, and we certainly don’t send anyone packing. But when it’s all over and it’s just us three, we dance into the dawn.

I need to preface my account of that evening, that night, by saying that Boris, who always spoke of himself as my oldest friend, is no longer alive. I don’t mention this here because Boris is dead. I would think of him no differently were he still alive, nor do I have to reproach myself for not having told him how much that evening, that night, means to me — quite apart from our confusion and embarrassment when we all finally went home.

It was truly the most extraordinary party I’ve ever been to, even if I did play only a marginal role.

“You can always get new stuff, except for an old friend,” Boris often said. And Susanne said: “Better no friends than one like him.” In her opinion Boris and I were friends purely out of habit.

What’s more, Boris never used to be my friend at all. He was one year ahead of me in school, and our morning route led us there from opposite directions. Our paths crossed during our army stint, we even spent a couple of leaves together — and immediately lost sight of each other upon discharge. It wasn’t until 1994, when Susanne and I moved in together in Berlin, that I saw Boris again. He was living on the fourth floor of the run-down building directly opposite ours on Esmarch Strasse. We had morning sun, his balcony — its balustrade, both summer and winter, topped by a tall, folded-up laundry rack — would catch a bit of evening sun from March or April on.

We ran into each other shortly after Christmas as we stood in line at the Extra supermarket waiting to use what turned out to be a defective bottle-return machine. Boris’s response was, or so I thought, a bit over-the-top, but he invited me to dinner — he’d cook. It was an odd situation when afterward we kept bumping into each other among the rows of shelving, not quite knowing what to say and mutely mustering each other’s shopping carts. At the time I thought that the bottle-return machine might well have contributed to his reaction too, since it smells just like our old neighborhood junk shop used to.

Once I had disclosed to Boris that we could see directly into his window, I sometimes saw him peering from his balcony over at us. If he spotted us, or thought he had — in winter the blinds move in the warm air coming from the radiators — he would start waving and calling across until I opened the window. Boris even claimed he and I had gone to the same kindergarten, Käthe Kollwitz kindergarten in Dresden-Klotzsche.

In flight before a plethora of construction sites and baseball caps, Susanne and I moved to the west side of the city in 1997. We made regular appearances, however, at Boris’s birthday parties. He would call months ahead and ask us to leave that special evening open for him.

There were, of course, a few things that didn’t speak in Boris’s favor. Injunctions such as: “Look me in the eye when we toast, or you’ll have seven years of bad sex!” or stupid clichés (“What I don’t know can’t hurt me”) earned Boris failing grades with Susanne. But above all it was her mistrust of a man who always has a new woman on his arm. I said that was a reason to be grateful to Boris, otherwise we’d never know that sort of life doesn’t make you any happier. But Susanne doesn’t see anything funny in things like that.