Ingo Schulze - New Lives

Hugs, your Heinrich

PS: I’m sitting at the “green monster” and feel a draft at my back. I think Jörg or Georg has just come in. I turn around — and have to sneeze. “Gesundheit,” a woman’s voice says. I hear the door close. I sneeze two more times, and each time the same composed female voice blesses me. — “Who are you?” I ask, and walk toward her. She is crouched next to the stove, massaging her toes. A smile skitters across her face, briefly easing the tenseness in her features. Then she makes a hissing sound as she draws air in through her mouth and breathes it out again audibly through her nose. Her stockings have holes in the heels. “Don’t look,” she says. “I thought,” she continues, and presses her lips together for a second, “I thought you asked me to come in. I knocked.” With her back to the tile stove she slowly pushes herself to her feet. She tries to slip into her shoes. “Ouch! Ouch!” she whines. “That hurts!”

“For heaven’s sake,” I exclaim. She is looking up now, and what I had taken for a strand of hair stuck in the corner of her mouth turns out to be a scar. I realize that she’s a noblewoman.

“It no longer keeps me warm,” I say apologetically, pointing to my coat hanging beside the door. I am angry at myself because I’ve been planning for days to take it to the cleaners so they can restore its old qualities. “Would you like to come along?” I ask. “If we leave now we can make it to the cleaners by six.”

“How can I possibly do that?” she cries. Her voice is clogged with tears. Didn’t I have eyes in my head, even a blind man could that see she was in no condition to take so much as a single step.

“May I carry you?” I ask, unable to suppress the expectation in my voice. Her blouse has come open at the waist, and I see a triangle of her stomach, her navel at its center — just like the eye of God, I think. The comparison pleases me. The most wonderful opportunities often arise out of minor inconveniences, I say. She bursts into laughter. She lets her eyes wander openly over me. Evidently everything about me makes her laugh, I appear to provoke it. Finally, putting both hands over her mouth, she is overcome by a seizure of laughter she cannot control. She struggles for air, buckles over. Her hair, the tips bright red, falls down over her face, hiding it completely.

By now I was sitting on the edge of the bed and listening intently, I was that certain I had heard laughter. It was four in the morning. My day had begun.

Tuesday, Feb. 6, ’90

Verotchka,

I don’t like leaving the office here because I’m afraid I’ll miss your call. Each time I come in it’s all I can do to keep from asking about you. I get testy if Jörg or Georg stays on the telephone too long. I tried reaching you from Paris, but I was doing something wrong and couldn’t understand the recording either.

Yes, we were in Paris, at least we claim we were. We were back by nine on Sunday. “We’ve just come from Paris,” Robert announced to a neighbor in the stairwell. Instead of being amazed or asking questions, she gave Michaela and me a nasty look, as if we tolerated lying. Then what Michaela told her about the procedure with our papers made her all the more suspicious. Truth is no help when you’re trying to convince someone.

I’m glad it’s behind us. I finally let myself be talked into going along for Robert’s sake — it was a family outing. Michaela was sure we’d have a fine time even without money. The official title was “Three-Day Trip.” The first day was Friday. We were scheduled to leave Eisenach at 5 p.m.

Hundreds of people were waiting on a muddy square surrounded by buildings waiting to be demolished and a couple of murky streetlamps. If it hadn’t been for the bags and plastic sacks, it would have looked like the start of a demonstration. Mamus had been waiting for us in Eisenach since two in the afternoon. She was all on edge because we didn’t arrive until around four thirty. As the armada of buses pulled in, we were shooed from one end of the square to the other. When the bus doors opened the drivers appeared and called out their destinations, then sat down behind the wheel again.

There were two for Paris. We were afraid they were going to pull out without us, but then found seats in the third and fourth rows, far enough forward to see out the windshield. Next to us was the ferry to Amsterdam, on our left one for Venice. The procedure was the same for everyone. First we were given West German papers that — except for name and address — had all the details right, down to height and eye color. At the French border, so we were instructed, we were to hold the papers up 35and look inconspicuous — whatever that meant. In the Venice bus they were busy practicing holding their documents up. They waved as they drove off.

Robert chose me to sit next to him; the seats were very comfortable and you could barely hear the motor. Not one loud word disrupted our gentle flight along the dark autobahn. As if it were a familiar routine, I left the bus at each stop with everyone else, joined the dash for the restroom, and while we waited stuffed my mouth with a hard-boiled egg from Mamus’s picnic box.

Just before midnight we reached Frankfurt Airport, the trip’s first sightseeing stop. We wandered the deserted departure halls, reading the names of airlines, and greeting the dark-skinned cleaning ladies, who responded by turning away.

The French had no interest in our bus, and we were first aware of France at our next pit stop. Mamus was snoring softly. It was dawn before I began to feel tired. I saw dark gray hanging over the Paris suburbs, and the next thing I knew we were driving through the city. It was drizzling, and the sky looked even darker. It wasn’t until the Place de Bastille that I figured out where we were. From there on my sense of orientation worked without hitch or flaw. I displayed my brilliance for Robert and Michaela, but even I was amazed to be driving along the Boulevard Henri IV and see the islands emerge on our right and, yes indeed, Notre-Dame. 36I prayed the mantra of our yearnings: Quai de la Tournette, Quai de Montebello, Quai St-Michel, Quai des Grands Augustins, and gazed at the old familiar booths of the bouquinistes.

Even as I was prophesying the Louvre right on time, I felt uneasy. I was shooting off the fireworks of our knowledge of a faraway world without feeling a thing. Maybe it was simply that you weren’t there, or maybe I suspected that within an hour it would sound as profane as a taxi driver’s chatter. Ah, at that same moment it degenerated into the know-it-all lectures of a paterfamilias who has conscientiously done his vacation homework.

We drove north across the Pont de la Concorde, past the Madeleine and St-Lazare, and up the Rue d’ Amsterdam. I presumed Sacré-Cœur would be our next goal and was hoping that with the first ray of sun and some coffee things would improve somewhat, when the driver announced that we were on our way to the most famous “mousetrap” in the world. We made two turns, taking them very slowly, while our bus rocked back and forth and was lifted up as if on a wave before we were rolling again.

Then I saw the women lining the sidewalks — whores at eight in the morning. Conversation in the bus died; the driver blustered on about love for sale. In the middle of his babbling there was a thump underneath us as if we hadn’t cleared something. The driver cursed, and with a crackle the loudspeakers went silent. We drove on slowly. Everyone stared out the window in a kind of devotional silence. The monstrosity of being able to select a woman for a bit of cash! Robert turned to me with a crazy grin, hesitated as if about to ask a question, but then gazed straight ahead again, his forehead pressed to the glass.