Ingo Schulze - New Lives

Wednesday, however, was to be Michaela’s big day. Mother, Robert, and I took our seats for the performance of Emilia Galotti. Michaela wasn’t at her best. At the point where Emilia starts to tell her story, she forgot her lines.

At intermission I ducked out to go to the dramaturgy office. All the lights were on in the general manager’s office. The technical director, the office manager — she was also a Party secretary, and is currently the general manager — were sitting with three or four others whose voices I didn’t recognize.

I kept hearing footsteps and the sound of a door opening and closing. All the same I was surprised at how many people had gathered. On the lowest tread of the little set of steps that led to the stage stood Jambo, lost in thought and playing with the cord of his glasses. A woman’s voice whispered, “The general manager!”

I hadn’t even noticed him. He was sitting at the table, his head resting on his crossed arms as if he were asleep, his shoulders jerking. At first I thought there had been an accident, that someone was dead.

There was a crackle in the loudspeaker, and Olaf, the stage manager, called the actor playing Odoardo onstage. He left the loudspeaker on, so that we could now follow the performance. “Is no one here? Good, I shall be colder still,” snarled the loudspeaker.

“Didn’t you hear it on the radio?” Jonas asked in the middle of the line, “He who obeys no law, is equal in power to him who knows none.” 307

Jonas’s eyes, veiled with tears, moved around the room, crawling from one person to the next in search of mercy. “Didn’t you hear it on the radio? Don’t you pay attention anymore? Can you think only in one direction?” He shook his head. “So you don’t know,” he shouted, “you don’t know about the most important change in decades. Haven’t any of you heard the politburo’s announcement this evening?”

“Hah!” Jambo exclaimed. “Is the wall gone?”

Jonas bellowed, his voice exploded into the room. Michaela claimed later that you could even hear him through the steel-plated door. His head turned such a livid red that I expected to see him collapse onto his desk, eyes staring wide, mouth hanging open.

The cord had got tangled on the bridge of Oliver Jambo’s glasses, so that it looked as if he were shaking a thermometer down. “Could you repeat that?” he asked in a low voice.

Instead of hurling himself at Jambo as I expected, Jonas began to preach. His entire statement was so silly that I don’t remember any of it except two sentences, which he repeated several times: “There won’t be any Chinese solution,” and “The politburo wants an honest face-to-face dialogue with the nation.”

The applause at the final curtain was now coming over the loudspeaker. Jonas kept on talking. He was starting in again with his “face-to-face” when, a little short of breath, Michaela’s voice could be heard from the loudspeaker: “Okay, here we go!” “Ladies!” Jambo said, holding the steel-plated door open. I was the last to follow. When I turned around once more, I saw Jonas standing there with one arm raised, pointing vacantly. 308

Michaela stepped forward and began. One couple stood up and dashed for the exit. In the dim light cast over the audience I could see Mother and Robert, both sitting up ramrod straight and listening as if Emilia Galotti had risen from the dead to take her revenge on Marinelli. Her tone of voice when she said, “We’re stepping out of our roles here,” was the same with which she had said, “But all such deeds are from times past!”

I felt uncomfortable just standing there, reduced to a physical presence. 309

The audience applauded, most of them stood up, including Mother and Robert. I saw Michaela reflexively want to bow in response to applause. She was just barely able to control herself, but now spread her arms, as if to say, All of us here agree, and then stepped back. People continued to applaud as if waiting for something, a song or a postlude. Some of those onstage followed Michaela’s example and extended their arms to applaud the audience. Instead of an orderly exit, a few of us began to wander offstage one by one. The last ones to leave, including Emilia Galotti, looked as if they were in fact fleeing. The audience, 124 purchased tickets, kept on clapping as if to force an encore.

When we arrived at the theater the following day, an emissary of the Library on the Environment was waiting for us at the door. “The whole city is talking about what you did,” he said with an earnest nod, and invited us to Martin Luther Church that evening so that we could inform others about our declaration. Since I had never heard about a Library on the Environment in Altenburg, I thought at first he had come from Berlin.

The invitation extended to us was for a “prayer service.”

At the noon break Michaela took up residence in the canteen and received her due homage, even from the orchestra and chorus. Nothing like this had ever happened to her, not even after a premiere. Michaela announced who would read the resolution that evening, since she intended to appear at the church.

Martin Luther Church, that neo-Gothic forefinger rising at the far end of Market Square, was jam-packed. I followed Michaela down the center aisle to the front, where the emissary greeted us. It had been ages since I had been inside a church!

“Ghastly, truly ghastly,” a woman with short hair and a long, thin scar across her right eyebrow kept repeating. “Truly, truly ghastly!” She was referring to Bodin, the pastor of the church, who had demanded that instead of presenting bombastic speeches they should hold a thanksgiving service. God needed to be thanked for the politburo’s declaration, which was an attempt at reconciliation. There were, moreover, strong elements of his congregation who would have no sympathy whatever for such proceedings. If she and her friends did not understand that, he had no choice but to yield to those members of the congregation and close his church’s doors to a crowd of rowdies.

Somehow I sympathized with Pastor Bodin, an elderly, totally bald man, who had seated himself in his clerical robes against one wall and now appeared to be deep in thought or prayer.

Michaela and I were greeted by several people. The founder of the Altenburg New Forum (every town had its own New Forum) fought for air as he told us how that same morning he had found the lug nuts loosened on his Trabant. A gaunt long-haired fellow with an inscrutable Chinese smile was holding a rolled-up banner in his arms like a giant doll. There was a steady flow of young women who introduced themselves as members or chairpersons of environmental and peace groups.

Women were likewise in the majority among the people thronging the aisles and balconies. “Something has got to happen today!” the woman with the scar said, and planted herself in front of us.

“What’s supposed to happen?” I asked.

“Why, a demonstration,” she exclaimed. “We’ve got to get things started here! Somebody’s got to speak up today for once.”

The long-haired fellow came over and interrupted her to say, “If someone is going to speak, it ought to be a person no one here really knows.” Strangely enough at that moment that seemed plausible to me. I realized too late that by nodding I had got myself into a precarious situation. The fellow from the New Forum returned to repeat his lug-nut story and said he was already asking far too much of his family. Michaela didn’t budge. “Can’t you do it?” the woman with the scar asked, gazing at me. I was trapped.

“And what am I supposed to say?” I asked. “Super,” she cried, “that’s really super!” The fellow with long hair bent down over me and patted my shoulder. “Fine, Enrico, very fine!” I was so discombobulated that I asked how he knew my name. 310In the same moment the church orchestra struck up. The bass player, who had given the downbeat, nodded like one of those plastic dachshunds that for a while you saw in every rear windshield.