Ingo Schulze - New Lives

I didn’t need to worry about our employees, Jörg said. None of them wanted to work for a free paper. I could ask them myself. And then he made a comment about Frau Schorba, my best friend, “my bosom buddy,” with an exaggerated accent on the second word. She had chased the new mayor away on her very first day here — which, by the way, was a generally known fact, but something that I had kept from him for whatever deeply regrettable and inexplicable reason. And one could only be thankful she was here strictly on probation.

I asked him to think it over one more time, because I planned to bring the topic up again at our next editorial meeting on Wednesday.

He hoped I wouldn’t do that, he said, turning his back on me. Maybe it was simple cowardice that prevented me from demanding a decision then and there. At any rate, yesterday morning (what a long time ago that was!) memories of the conversation seemed more like a bad dream that would be forgotten the next day — that’s how much I trusted my arguments.

They, however, had read my amiability as weakness. Ilona, whom I treated to a new “opera bag” a few days ago, was too busy to look up and return my greeting. Jörg muttered something in passing, Marion ignored me entirely, Fred was leaning against the doorframe and talking about something with Ilona (suddenly they get along, suddenly she had time), which so preoccupied him that he just gave me the kind of nod he would give any customer. Even Kurt scurried quickly by and ducked into his office. Pringel was always on his way somewhere. Only Astrid the wolf came bounding happily toward me the way she does every morning. But ever since Ilona sprained her ankle stepping on Astrid’s ball, she mistrusts even that greeting. Frau Schorba presented me the booty collected by our sales reps, but without devoting so much as a syllable to the whole brouhaha. She smiled, business was going incredibly well.

To think that I would seek refuge with Georg, my old boss, of all people! I met him on Market Square, at the fish-sandwich stand. Although we had moved out of his place only two months before, I would scarcely have recognized him; his gait, his body language is so different. Not a trace of the old stiff knight on his steed. He moves downright supplely on those long legs now. The deep creases between his eyebrows and across his forehead have likewise vanished. In greeting me he almost gave me a hug. Did I want to have a cup of coffee or tea at his place? Yes I did, if only just to keep from having to go straight back to the office.

The garden gate is now overgrown with roses. But imagine my amazement when I entered our old editorial office and recognized the same screen we use, and the same Apple next to it too. His printer is a little smaller than ours.

The baron had proposed two books, and paid for a thousand copies of each in advance. The book about the hereditary prince will be the first, then a book about the Jews in Altenburg and environs and their deportation. Just on his own, Georg said, he had enough ideas to last for years. Although the barometer and the clock and the postal scales — everything really — were still in their same old places, I felt as if I were in a totally different room. It was the same out in the garden, which is green now and bursting with flowers and almost impenetrable along the edges.

Franka embraced me as if I had just returned from a long journey. When I saw the big table set for coffee and the three boys waiting for us along with their grandparents, Georg admitted it was his birthday.

And so I spent a cheerful hour in the company of his family. Georg told about an extraordinary encounter. Late one evening recently — it was raining cats and dogs — their doorbell had rung. Before him stood a short woman drenched to the bone, her hair plastered to her head. She stepped inside and asked if she might spend the night — her car had broken down and there wasn’t a room to be had at the Wenzel for all the money in the world. Just as he was about to ask why she had chosen to ring their doorbell, he recognized her: the newspaper czarina from Offenburg. Franka and Georg spent the night on air mattresses so that their guest could have a real bed to sleep in. The next morning, however, the czarina sat at the kitchen breakfast table pale and with circles under her eyes, claiming she hadn’t slept a wink — the bed was a disaster.

Wearing some of Franka’s clothes, which were too large for her, she was soon on her way. A trace of her fragrance still hung in the bathroom, or so he claimed. “A real millionaire,” Franka said in conclusion.

Later I climbed the slope with Georg. As we shielded our eyes from the sun with our hands to gaze out over the city — all the way to the pyramids — I told him my troubles.

“You guys have got to do it, just as you’ve said, it’s the only way, otherwise you don’t stand a chance,” Georg concurred. I had expected reticence and scruples, if not outright opposition. But now I spoke like a man set free.

If only Jörg had been there! Up there on the hill I could have persuaded him. Never before had even I myself so clearly understood the necessity for a free paper.

According to Georg it’s already a done deal that the major presses will be divvying up the Party newspapers among themselves — but dividing them up according to the old state boundaries. Since Altenburg would now be assigned to Thuringia, we’d be the only one to straddle the old lines; and in no time we’d be making deliveries from Ronneburg to Rochlitz, from Meerane to the gates of Leipzig. We wouldn’t just be holding the region together, we would be a little empire with Altenburg at its center.

We indulged ourselves in predictions about the size of the printing — I figured 100 to 120,000—and it came to me that the baron had been wrong. It’s of no importance whatever whether you want to be rich or not. No matter how many possibilities you think you’re choosing from, the crucial point is to make one single decision — the one that guarantees your survival. Yes, in the end there is always just the right decision, and the wrong one. And ultimately it’s far better to do something yourself than to write about what others have done. 306

On the way back I applied for the official seal of our Sunday Bulletin.

Back in the office, Frau Schorba greeted me with bad news. Käferchen has died, the old man is plotting revenge. When he gets back, there’ll be no one to protect me from him, because the police can’t take him into preventive custody, and he can’t be locked up in a psychiatric ward either, not unless he has caused harm of some sort. At least Marion will have something to be happy about.

The one hour each morning when Frau Schorba coaches me on the computer makes me feel like I’m inhaling air for the whole day. If I make no progress, she says, “Yes, just like this,” as if in the next moment I would have stumbled on the solution myself. Only her upper lip betrays her impatience by creeping back and forth like a pink caterpillar over the firm line of her lower lip. The first ad I laid out by myself was Cornelia’s “Italian Weeks for Soccer Fans.” We cut the World Cup logo out of the Leipziger Volkszeitung, and simply pasted it in.

While I waited for Fred, my mind went limp at the thought of the afternoon’s upcoming argument. Fred’s reports of his country rounds lay before me. I compared numbers for the last two weeks listed on page one. Here one copy fewer, there three. In the best case, stagnation. But his totals showed an increase of thirty newspapers sold.

Of the ten reports that I had checked by the time Fred arrived late for our meeting, two were correct. I underscored the mistakes in his math with a red marker and exclamation points. Oddly enough, however, the errors more or less balanced out.