Ingo Schulze - New Lives

I see the little silver pistol in Wolf’s right hand, its barrel aimed down and away, and I’m still wondering how much lighter, more modern, and accurate it may be, when he falls full length right in front of me, his pistol skidding past the tip of my shoe and vanishing under a loudspeaker.

I use the moment to look out at the crowd, where the whistles are ebbing away. I leave the podium unmolested. I have to walk a long way before I spot the first squad car. Relieved and happy, I hand over my weapon, because I have now done what it was in my power to do.

The whole time she watched, Michaela had been jotting down notes and working on the first draft of her speech for the following Sunday. Once in bed, she fell asleep immediately.

Around half past midnight I got up, went to my room, and sat down at the foot of the couch. As if my task were to awaken a beast and release it from its cage, I was afraid to open the cupboard door.

The weapon had been well taken care of and the clip was full. All the standard procedures came back completely naturally. 333Even removing the ammunition proved to be no problem. Bracing my left hand against my hip, I took a breath, raised the weapon above the target, and slowly lowered it along the window frame until the bottom edge of the window handle was in line with the front and rear sights at the precise moment your breath rests between exhale and inhale and your finger presses the trigger. The first shot yanked my hand way off target. And on my next tries it was the especially hard action that gave me problems and drew the weapon off its ideal position. It would barely have been possible to hit a target more than twenty feet away. I practiced for a while, then stuffed the bullets into a matchbox 334and wrapped the gun in the undershirt I had tossed over the back of the chair as I had undressed. I washed my hands several times, but they still smelled of smoky gun oil, as if I had emptied the whole clip.

After a few hours’ sleep I woke up in a fright because, just as a month before in Dresden, I thought I heard the doorbell ring. I assumed a squad car would pull up in front of our building at any moment. Shortly after seven the doorbell did ring. Michaela ducked into Robert’s room. I answered.

Emilie Paulini’s daughter Ruth stared at me in a dulled daze. I asked her in. “She’s dead, Herr Türmer,” she said. “She’s dead now.”

I again invited her in. “She had waited for you to come see her, Herr Türmer, ah, she waited and waited.” Ruth took two steps into the entryway and then stopped.

Michaela greeted her with equal amounts of relief and annoyance. But Ruth ignored her outstretched hand and words of sympathy. Ruth’s gaze was fixed on me. “Why didn’t you stop by?” she whined. “Aaah, Herr Türmer! How our mommy waited for you.”

I said that there had been so much going on this autumn. We had scarcely been home at all in the last few weeks, Michaela said in my defense. “Aaah, Herr Türmer!” Ruth exclaimed. “Why didn’t you stop by just once for an hour or so? Nooo!” As if by way of punishment, my question as to when her mother had died was left unanswered.

“You will be coming to the funeral,” Ruth commanded. She gave the date, turned around, opened the door, and vanished without a good-bye.

Once Ruth had departed the scene, my fears returned. I spent the whole day interrogating myself. In the same way that we can get caught up in imagining our own funeral, I began making a detailed and water-tight inventory of what I had done over the last three days or tried to recall exactly when I had gone to bed two weeks before.

Then I again found myself being tried as Markus Wolf’s assassin. As a result of my deed, tanks had rolled across Alexander Platz, and now they were in every town, side by side with the Russians, martial law had been declared. I was to be found guilty in a show trial. Like Dimitrov 335I presented my own defense before the eyes of the world.

That evening I drove to the theater and hid the pistol in props, where no one was now in charge. I thrust the bullets into the soil of a flowerpot on the desk of one of my colleagues.

I drove with Michaela and Robert to Leipzig that Monday. It was to be my dress rehearsal. But there was no longer a single uniformed man in sight. After marching around the Ring, the demonstrators quickly dispersed. Everyone wanted to get home in time to watch themselves on the news.

On Tuesday I was called into the general manager’s office. And who was sitting there — just as I had expected? Two policeman, one blond, one black-haired. Jonas said he was merely putting his office at our disposal, nothing more.

Of course I was the obvious suspect. “Why should I want to steal a pistol?” I planned to reply with as much amusement as possible. They had put on deeply serious faces, they looked tired. Their chitchat about a “partnership for safety” for the demonstration on the 12th could only be a pretense. Although far more people had volunteered to help keep order than they could possibly use, they still couldn’t banish their reservations. They made statements like, “That’s a presumption we can’t make,” or “The comrades need to know what is going to happen.” I said nothing because I didn’t want to encourage a harmless conversation out of which would burst the surprise of the real question. Finally there we sat, helplessly staring in silence at the general manager’s empty throne.

Later that day something happened that actually did take me by surprise. Constantly revolving around death and corpses, my thoughts evidently obeyed an old reflex — suddenly an idea lay before me, the idea for a story, in the science-fiction genre. In the society I was going to describe, hardened criminals were imprisoned for life on a well-guarded island, the Island of Mortals, where they truly lacked for nothing, not even amusements. All the same — and this is their real punishment — they are doomed to die a “natural death.” As the result of gene manipulations or brain transplants, everyone else can count on living, if not for eternity, for one or two thousand years.

The rest of the story followed from the premise. A man condemned to normal mortality — his youth gene had been removed, and he was aging from day to day — escapes from the Island of Mortals and strikes terror in the heart of the capital. Because he really has nothing to lose, people consider him to be without any scruples. In the minds of those living “eternally,” it’s all the same to him whether he’s shot or dies a natural death after twenty or forty years.

Suddenly I was back at my desk. I worked on describing daily reports in the media aimed at inflaming the public to feel fanatically disgusted by mortality. Anyone who no longer enjoys eternal life — so the upshot of such stories — is a priori a ruthless man.

My hero talks about his fear of death and how creepy the thought of death is, because he’s so alien to everyone else. I kept finding new starting points from which I could circle the moment of death, the inconsolability that is part of experiencing something all alone. 336

What spurred me on was the hope of returning to the German Library. I could see myself plowing through all the relevant medical journals. Weren’t the body and death the last topics still open to me?

When she returned home late from dress rehearsal, Michaela was surprised to find me at my desk. She smiled and went straight to bed.

On Wednesday Robert woke me very early. He was standing in the middle of the room, shouting something. The first thing I saw was Michaela’s calves. Michaela was running. And then I heard it — way too loud — the radio.

Robert’s voice, the garish light of the lamp, the weather report — suddenly I felt unending shame in having yielded to the temptation to write. Now I understood what Robert was shouting.