Ingo Schulze - New Lives

Scored against six times in one half. That was the most improbable and the worst possible turn of affairs. At the same time those goals seemed to have an inevitability about them, as if it were perfectly natural for the ball to bounce into the net every seven minutes.

I was surely not the only person who recognized that game as the handwriting on the wall.

On Monday, the 23rd, a letter from my mother arrived. After Michaela and Robert drove off to Leipzig — Robert needed to see history in the making — I read the closely written pages. It was all about the clinic and the reaction to her having taken sick leave. They had in fact checked up on her to see if she was actually resting in bed — and she hadn’t been at home. Her sick leave was rescinded, and she was to be docked one week’s vacation. The remarks of her colleagues, which she provided in minute detail, were likewise unpleasant—“When you stick your nose into everything, you shouldn’t be surprised to get it punched at some point.” What worried me, however, was her tone of voice and her obsession with having to quote all of it for me. Of course it was clear to me that her arrest and torture (what else could you call it?) couldn’t help having its aftereffects. And of course she had already seemed changed to me during her visit. But there was something ominous about this letter.

Instead of replying to her, I sent Mother’s report on to Vera. Until the wall came down I received mail from Vera on a regular basis. From week to week Geronimo’s diarylike epistles grew more and more expansive, as if he felt he had to prove something to me. Evidently only I no longer knew what I should write. In Berlin I hadn’t even risked giving Vera a call, 322that’s how unsure of myself I’d become.

I could have written about Michaela, about her practically boundless energy. In an era when sorcery and exorcism were part of daily life, someone might have presumed that I had transferred all my energy to her. After our argument about Schmidtbauer we had less to say to each other. I tried to chauffeur Michaela as often as possible, and then wait for her in the car. As long as no one from the theater rapped on the wind-shield, waiting for her was a cozy way to pass the time.

Once I was back home, I no longer left our four walls. I was happiest when I was alone. Even Robert was too much for me. I was usually startled by the sound of his arrival.

There were little things I liked to do. I remember having been downright proud to have come up with the notion of cleaning the refrigerator. The mere idea of being able to spend a whole hour or more tidying things up lifted my spirits. I plunged into the farthest corners, tracked down moldy half-empty jars of marmalade, removed a dried-out mustard container from its permanent position, and emptied a vodka bottle that had been saved for months for the sake of one tiny sip.

The next day I went to work on the spice rack, then the silverware drawer. Later I rearranged the dishes and separated our plates from those that came from our mothers’ households, which, since they were smaller, were always on top and had to be lifted up whenever we wanted to eat from our own.

Between bouts of cleaning up, sorting out, and throwing away, I went shopping. In the afternoon I would finish off a bottle of beer that had already been opened so that I could get rid of it along with the other empty bottles, but made sure each time that I bought more bottles than I took back.

It wasn’t until I was cleaning the toaster with the vacuum — a method I still think makes good sense — that I noticed Robert eyeing me with some suspicion.

Sensing I was being watched, I sought shelter in my room. I played records. I wanted them to hear me listening to music. But since the records I owned confronted me with memories I preferred not to be subjected to, I bought new ones. I grabbed them up almost at random, especially jazz, because I’d never listened to jazz before.

But after Michaela’s snide remark about how once again the German spirit was uplifting itself with music, it was clear there was nothing I might do that she wouldn’t find fault with.

At the theater people interpreted my silence and reticence as a kind of radicalism. Michaela was prepared to allow me a certain amount of time, to tolerate me for a few weeks, simply by holding out and living life as usual with no questions asked. She told others it was a matter of distribution of labor.

Climbing into bed at night, I was glad when she fell asleep quickly. Sometimes she would first press her back against me, pull my arm over her shoulder, and say, “This is nice,” as if all I needed was a sense of security, a little reassurance, and I would soon be my old self again. But there were other nights too.

The people who rang our doorbell all through October wanting to join the media committee were almost exclusively men, who seldom showed up a second time. Michaela and I received anonymous letters, threatening to rip the masks from our faces and accusing us of demagogy and addling people’s brains.

Each day brought with it some unprecedented event, and perhaps I ought to list those that I can recall to give you some approximate sense of the situation in which we found ourselves.

But I need to finally bring this to a conclusion, which is why I’ll now set my sights on November 4th.

Our request for a demonstration was refused — we hadn’t given long enough notice. Instead we were granted permission for a demonstration on Sunday, November 12th. The hitch was that Michaela and I were required to sign a statement in which we guaranteed that no demonstration would be “initiated” by us on November 4th. No one could possibly have predicted Michaela’s reaction. She had no problem signing that, she said. But the authorities wouldn’t be doing themselves any favor. Everyone in the room froze and watched as Michaela stepped up to the desk, unscrewed the cap of her fountain pen, bent down over the sheet of paper, signed her name, and passed the pen to me — thus giving the whole affair the look of some diplomatic ceremony.

Two days later, she reported in triumph, there had been boos and nasty catcalls when she described in church what she had done. But then she had said, “I’m sorry, but evidently some of you didn’t hear correctly. I said I would not initiate a demonstration starting from the theater at one o’clock on November 4th. You don’t agree with that?”

On Saturday the 4th we drove to the theater at around half past twelve. “Good God, what have we started,” Michaela exclaimed when we saw the huge crowd. It was the largest demonstration Altenburg had seen until then. Anyone who had been in Leipzig wouldn’t have been particularly impressed by twenty thousand people. But Altenburg was home territory, and in so small a city the throngs looked all the larger. Although Michaela said that she and I were the only ones who weren’t allowed to do anything today, she cleared a path for us to the steps of the theater. At the very top, Schmidtbauer, plus the Prophet with his long beard and big eyes and Jörg had taken up their posts like three field commanders.

And once again I sensed how much of an anomaly I had become amid all this glee and excitement and expectation.

People were enjoying the beautiful weather that the good Lord had granted them yet again. As church bells rang the hour the crowd grew restless, people looked up at us and then all round, waiting for a signal of some sort. The chanting began on our right, and that set the crowd into motion. Those at the head were marching beneath a wide banner, but instead of taking Moskauer Strasse, they turned left down the Street of Worker Unity. I burrowed through the crowd — I had to get away from Schmidtbauer! — to a police car blocking the way to the Old Stables. The blond and black-haired cops were joined by a fat one. From their standpoint they had only just now noticed the shift down Worker Unity.