Ingo Schulze - New Lives

That’s it for this time. Hugs, Enrico

Monday, Jan. 29, ’90

Verotchka,

Mamus sends her greetings. All your postcards are on her kitchen counter. She’s a little peeved at us both — because your own children really shouldn’t lie to you. 28I wrote down your address for her. She wants to know how long you’ll be staying and if it isn’t dangerous and if Nicola’s mother is feeling better.

We’re supposed to go to Paris this weekend. Mamus sees herself as a personal ambassador of happiness. She’s plundered her bank account and won’t admit it, but drops all kinds of coy hints.

Although we — I took Robert along — were in Dresden only yesterday, our time there is somehow a haunting memory of nowhere in particular, as if I had merely dreamed it. Mamus had baked a cheesecake. But the apartment was so cold and tidy it was almost as if it wasn’t lived in.

It’s only when you see her there inside her own four walls that you realize how much Mamus has changed. I was happy to spot any gesture I recognized — the way she lights the stove and kneels down to check the flame, the way she stands at the pantry threshold as if it might be easier to reach rather than take another step, the way she pivots on the heel of one foot when she opens the door to the fridge, the way she holds her coffee cup with both hands, elbows planted on the table. Sounding as if she were offering me some condensed milk, she asked if we would also be voting for the Alliance for Germany. 29Mamus has suddenly begun to spot people toadying everywhere and sees her fellow nurses as “pure opportunists.” I asked her why she herself had never thought of leaving. I wouldn’t have wanted to, she replied, without looking directly at me.

There’s been no change in her situation at the clinic. If she has bad luck and is assigned to a shift with her “tormentors”—and that probably includes most of the nurses in surgery — she sometimes doesn’t say a word the whole day.

Robert treats Mamus like a second grandmother, which obviously does her good. And each time Robert agrees to come along, I feel like I’ve been honored too. Although I’m always afraid I’m boring him. This time I should perhaps have made the trip without him, except that it would have taken on its own special significance, as if I were pressuring her for a heart-to-heart talk. There would hardly have been a chance of that in any case, because the doorbell was constantly ringing. Maybe the change Mamus has undergone has become the rule now. All sorts of people are showing their true colors. Did you know that Herr Rothe is a longtime fan of Franz Josef Strauss? Frau Schubert explained to me what difficulties I would have had as a teacher, and the two Graupner sisters talked about Denmark, where a cousin of theirs lives, and how at last they could write to her. When I asked in amazement why they hadn’t written to their cousin before now, I was corrected by cries of “Wrong, completely wrong,” and then Tilda Graupner proudly proclaimed: “As head of accounting I didn’t dare have contacts in the West.” You’re the star of the building. Your leaving makes you the first to have made the right decision. And some of the glow from your halo illumines your brother. The Schaffners are said to leave their apartment only after dark, or at least the revolutionary (or reactionary?) residents of the building have agreed not to greet those Stasi spies.

Robert wanted to look at photographs again. I had never noticed before that the albums only go up as far as Father’s death. 30The cupboard still has that same old darning-egg, sewing-kit odor.

Suddenly Mamus grabbed a photo and looked at it over the rim of her glasses — a handsome young couple — and cried, “What are they doing here!” She shredded it like a check that she had filled out wrong. “You weren’t even born yet,” Mamus informed me. “Total strangers!” She kept the scraps in her hand and went on providing commentary for the pictures that Robert held out to her. I secretly pocketed two shots of you. Sometimes I’m afraid I can’t bear our being separated any longer. If only I could figure out what your plans are.

We had supper with Johann. His epistles are getting shorter. There were still a dozen of them lying around here, and I had no choice but to read them before the trip. When I did, it occurred to me that he might be gathering materials for a novel about a parish. Ever since he confessed to Franziska about us, 31he’s behaved rather rudely to me, especially in her presence. He could barely bring himself to offer me his hand. He had to “finish something up,” he exclaimed, and disappeared. And so Robert and I waited in the kitchen, helping Franziska set the table and gazing out the window at the city. Franziska’s charm has entirely deserted her over the past two years. She talks quite openly about her drinking and that she really needs to quit. Listening to her you might think she simply doesn’t have time to spare for treatment at a clinic. Johann confided to me a couple of years ago that he sometimes provokes arguments because he needs the tension to be productive. I can’t help thinking of that when I see Franziska like this.

She knows about my letters, because Johann reads them to her to prove that “nothing’s going on” between him and me.

Gesine will soon be five. At first glance she seems untouched by all this unhappiness. She chose Robert as her knight, led him through the apartment, and played the piano for him. It was something new for her to learn that there are people who don’t play some instrument.

When Jo’s finished with his theology exams, there’s a pastorate with three parishes waiting for him in the Ore Mountains, not far from Annaberg-Buchholz. Franziska and he have already visited it; the parsonage is large and has a huge orchard. It would never have come to this a year ago, Franziska said, because Johann would have looked for a job that left him time for writing and his band. Franziska doesn’t want to leave Dresden come hell or high water, or at least not to go to Annaberg. And then came the bombshell! She was sure I already knew that Johann planned to be a candidate in the local elections. And three weeks ago it was he who accused me of betraying art.

When I asked him about it later, he beat around the bush. He had wanted to tell me in person and not write me. He didn’t have a chance anyway, was doing it out of sense of responsibility, people had pushed him into it, maybe he could make a little difference. He sounded like someone who had just become a “candidate of the Party.” 32I told him there was no need for a bad conscience or for him to justify himself and that I thought he had made the right decision.

He also mentioned a bit too offhandedly that he hopes to publish a book about the events in Dresden last October. 33Jo resents his own fate, because he was denied the privilege of being arrested, interrogated, and beaten. Believe me, I know him.

Jo had no questions for me. His aloofness, if not to say coldness left me paralyzed. If it hadn’t been for Franziska, who was constantly passing me something, filling my teacup, and fussing over Robert, it would have felt like being shown the door.

But when I talked about you, he slowly thawed, and suddenly smiled at me with a heartfelt warmth that left me more helpless than his silence had. He jumped up and presented me with a book, a duplicate he had found in a rare bookstore — a first edition of Eisler’s Faustus 34 —and said that we definitely had to see each other more often, especially now. In the end we are all left with only a few friends anyway. He insisted, absurdly enough, on fixing sandwiches for our trip back; there might be a traffic jam. Robert and I took turns pointing to what we wanted and watched our sandwiches being prepared. Like a mason working plaster, Jo pushed the butter to the outer edge, spreading it around again several times as if to make certain everything was well greased. Then he looked up as if to say, this is something I’d do only for you.