Ingo Schulze - New Lives

He was basically saying nothing all that different from what I had heard him articulate last January. At times he used the very same words. But now Michaela was nodding with egregious eagerness, and Mamus seconded the baron and kept repeating that we needed to see things with businesslike objectivity now.

After the meal our friend Barrista passed around something in a little box with a glass lid. It didn’t look at all promising, some sort of desiccated stuff in a kind of mousetrap. Have you guessed? It gave our poor Mamus such a fright that she flinched and pressed her back to her chair — a couple of Boniface’s knuckles.

Our farewells were also “businesslike,” although each of us felt embarrassed. Robert came with us to the car. (Our friend Barrista has such a bad conscience that not only has he transferred the car’s title to me, he’s also paying the insurance.)

As I drove I told Mamus about the new apartment, described to her the view to the castle and the spaciousness of our rooms. I mentioned it in the hope that it would make the bleak room where she would be spending the night with me more bearable. 314Besides which, it seemed to me it was better to talk with her than to leave her wrapped in silence.

“I’m not moving in alone,” I suddenly said — it just slipped out. Mamus didn’t react. Only when we came to a stop did she announce the results of her ruminations: “Vera!”

“Yes,” I said, “Vera.” I asked Mamus if she wanted to take a walk with me, because besides the two air mattresses there was only one chair in the room. She shook her head. I was truly alarmed at how slowly she climbed the stairs.

Cornelia and Massimo weren’t home. We could have sat in the kitchen, but Mamus wanted to “get ready for bed.” When I used the bathroom after her I discovered a whole hodgepodge of medications and salves in her cosmetic bag.

Mamus had already turned out the light and instead of lying down on the air mattress with fresh linens, had stretched out on mine.

I asked her what she needed all those medicines for. “All sorts of things,” she said. I wanted to know if “all sorts of things” also meant she was still in pain from her beating.

“Serves me right,” she said.

“Who says so?” I asked. “Your colleagues?”

“No,” Mamus replied, “I say so, I do.”

She had pulled the blanket up to her chin, the sharp profile of her nose jutting up. I would have loved to turn the light on again.

Suddenly she said, “I’m so ashamed of myself,” and rolled over with her back to me.

I stood up and knelt down beside her. I begged her to talk to me, I tried to pat her cheek, I bent down to look into her eyes. But nothing I did was right — I was told to lie back down, to please lie back down. No, I said, she needed to tell me what was wrong.

She said nothing.

“That damn camera,” she announced, after I had retreated to my air mattress. “That damn camera.”

I barely dared take a breath, as if I were eavesdropping.

On Friday, October 6th, Mamus had taken the streetcar from the clinic to the Central Station. She had been curious, wanted to see what was really going on. And she had her old camera with her. She had stuck it in her purse without thinking much about it. On the streetcar she ran into C., a pediatrician, whose consignment seat for the Staatskapelle was right next to hers. C. rode with her to the Central Station. At first it all seemed harmless enough. But then the demonstrators began to throw stones. Mamus held up her camera and snapped a shot. The police started going after the demonstrators, and C. shouted, “Now!” “There!” “And there!” “Now!” and pulled her along with her. Mamus told how, egged on by a megaphone, some special forces turned on the demonstrators. Suddenly everything started getting blurry. “Tear gas!” C. had shouted — she needed to close her eyes tight and put her hands to her face. They linked arms. Without being able to see where they were going they walked about a hundred or two hundred yards, until they thought they might be out of the cloud.

After that Mamus said good-bye to C. and boarded the first streetcar that came by. The driver, however, refused to ring the bell for departure because he claimed demonstrators were attacking the streetcar. People on the car started loudly offering their two bits — you couldn’t even take a streetcar to go see a movie in the evening anymore. A couple of rowdy demonstrators climbed aboard, and one of them shouted, “Fucking pigs!” Then everything just went “lickety-cut.” Mamus had no idea what was happening to her. The rear car was emptied of its passengers. She saw people get off, fall to their knees, then stretch out, facedown, on the paving stones in front of the Central Station, while policemen with truncheons and dogs stood over them. “Just like Chile,” she said, and when she paused I could hear her breathing.

“I was so damn stupid,” she went on, “so damn stupid, because I thought it was none of my business. A fat man in a uniform got on at the front of the car and shouted, ‘Everybody off, please, and then lie flat on the ground.’ He said it very politely, as if there had been some accident. But a wiry guy, who approached from the rear, started shouting, ‘Out! Facedown on the ground!’ And silly willy that I am, I do what he says. I go right ahead and do it. Do you understand? Your mother gets off the streetcar, gets off and lies down flat on the ground in the filthy street — do you understand?”

In a voice choked with tears she said, “I was a failure, an utter failure…” I didn’t dare touch her. I said she had no reason to blame herself. What did any of this have to do with failure?

“Oh, but it does, it does,” she whispered, only to suddenly bark at me, “Of course I failed.”

Mamus asked for a handkerchief and blew her nose.

“Next to me,” she begin again, “a woman lay whimpering and sobbing like a child throwing a tantrum. I raised my head to look at the streetcar, and there in the empty car sat an older, very well-dressed woman. She looked incredibly elegant. Twenty, thirty people were lying there on the ground, and there’s just that one person sitting there, looking out the window to the other side. Suddenly a woman tugs the sobbing creature beside me to her feet, links arms with her, and walks her right past the ‘polite’ policeman and climbs aboard. But as for me, my head is full of utter nonsense, not one rational thought. I’m thinking, Well, that’s the last of that contingent, they can’t make any more exceptions. I’m thinking that they mustn’t find my camera, if they find it they’ll arrest me. And the whole time I kept looking at the elegant lady, and then the streetcar bell rings and it pulls out with those three women in the front car.”

Mamus gave a laugh. “If it weren’t for that elegant woman I wouldn’t blame myself now. They simply broke us, Enrico, they broke us!”

It was pointless to try to comfort Mamus. She would permit no excuses. She had already seen how they were running people down, whaling away at them. But that really had nothing to do with it, that’s what she wanted me to understand. “I put up no defense, I just yielded to my fate, I was submissive, nothing else, just submissive.”

Everything that happened afterward, what those younger guys had done to her, how she had been forced to kneel on her hands — all because of that damn camera — was, as she sees it now, punishment for her own failings.

She had whispered these last words because Cornelia and Massimo had returned home. When I made some remark, Mamus hissed for me to hush. Floorboards creaked. We listened to Cornelia’s shrill giggle and Massimo’s permanently hoarse voice. I heard a bottle being uncorked and the chink of a toast. And then suddenly I heard Mamus snoring.