Ingo Schulze - New Lives

Michaela said nothing. Even when I laid the letter down in front of her, she didn’t budge. Finally she asked if she could have the stamps. Then she folded the letter back up and inserted it in its envelope.

“So then what is the reason?” She stared at me.

“For what?” I asked.

“For being the way you are.”

Before I could reply the doorbell rang for all it was worth. My mother was standing there, her chin jutted forward so she could peer out from under her cap. A cyclamen rose up threateningly from her right hand, and in her left she was holding a swaying shopping net, whose contents I recognized as the familiar springform pan.

“Justice triumphs!” she cried. She spoke very loudly, carrying on like someone hard of hearing, and each of her movements was accompanied by a rattle, rasp, or jingle.

Loyally devouring his cheesecake, Robert didn’t let Mother’s chatter disturb him. The fall of the wall was her personal triumph, and she made fun of us for not having been in the West yet. She definitely wanted to travel to Bavaria, because the “welcome money” was highest there, 337and together it would come to 560 D-marks, a sum that you could actually do something with.

Later, at the theater, my mother admitted how shocked she had been by the way Michaela looked. Weren’t we happy because of what had happened?

Except for one woman whom nobody knew the whole first row was empty. The balcony hadn’t even been opened. Of just short of sixty people in the audience, fifteen belonged to Norbert’s entourage and about thirty were friends and family of the actors, just like us.

At first the audience fell into old habits and applauded every punch line. But this enthusiasm soon faded, as if they finally realized what had happened over the last few days.

After intermission several people did not return to their seats, and the play simply sickened and died. Since there was no reaction to the punch lines now, the actors rushed their lines all the more.

At the end Norbert Maria Richter barely managed to get a bow in.

Tuesday I was called to the general manager’s office again.

Jonas and Frau Sluminksi were both sitting at his desk, as if they were doing homework together. They both stood up at the same time, extended a hand without saying a word, and we all sat down. Jonas looked at a letter in front of him. His hair fell down into his face. “I’m leaving,” he said. And then, raising his head and flipping his hair back, he added, “I’ve resigned.”

He enjoyed my surprise. Happiness glistened in Sluminski’s eyes. Had it been because of Gotham, I asked. He shook his head, and Sluminski rocked hers slightly too.

“What’s left here for me to do?” he said, gazing at me with his perennially moist eyes as if actually expecting some sort of answer.

“Yes,” I said. “I’ve asked myself that question.”

Instead of wishing him good luck, extending my hand, getting up from my chair, and leaving, I just sat there. I was sorry to see him go, I said. But I could well understand his decision.

He knew, he said, that people talked behind his back and how they would lambaste him now, but he had no regrets. If he could see even the slightest chance of being able to accomplish anything meaningful here, he would stay. But that was out of the question now. I nodded. And then he said that Sluminski would be running the business end of things for now — and she looked up and noted that she would welcome any and all support. I nodded again. “Or would you like to do it?” Jonas asked, grinning his old grin. “Would you?” I shook my head, and then we shook hands again.

As I entered the canteen Jonas’s departure was already being celebrated as a victory. I sat off to one side like someone from the old regime, happy to be left in peace.

“Jonas is leaving,” I told Michaela, who hadn’t been at the theater. And because she looked at me as if she wasn’t about to have her leg pulled, I added, “He told me himself.”

I had no explanation for her as to why I of all people had been singled out for special consideration. Michaela presumed one of Jonas’s tricks lay behind it, some really nasty machination. When I didn’t reply she asked if I was actually so vain as to think he had done it out of personal concern. I shrugged. “No, no, my dear,” she said, “there’s strategy and tactics behind it. Did someone just happen to drop by and see you two together?”

I said no, but did mention Sluminski. At the sound of her name Michaela jumped to her feet. “What was she doing there?” she exclaimed.

Even as I repeated Jonas’s words, a vein swelled at Michaela’s temple. “She’ll be running things for now? Her? The Party secretary?”

“Only the business side,” I said.

“And you?” she shouted. “What did you say?”

I tried to recall my words. “You didn’t say anything,” she shouted before I could even answer. “Nothing, not one thing.” Michaela stared at me, her head was starting to tremble, she was about to say something else, but then fell silent, as if she didn’t dare say what she was thinking, and left the room.

Somehow I had lost the capacity for emotions that Michaela experienced on such a grand scale. I had become numb, mute, devoid of emotion. I no longer felt my wounds.

When at the end of the week and without an inkling that anything was up, I called Mother, the first thing she said was, “Did you know about this? Did you?”

“Know what?” I asked. And when she didn’t reply, I said, “What am I supposed to have known?” Instead of answering, my mother hung up.

I called her back. I knew she would never be able to survive it. I had no hope at all, but she answered.

“Mother!” I exclaimed. I don’t think I’ve probably ever sounded so pleading.

“Actor my foot! Vera works in a fabric shop. She’s a sales clerk ! And you knew that! Right?”

I was just happy to hear that accusation. 338

“You wanted to believe it,” I shouted. “Didn’t it ever bother you that Vera never sent any reviews?”

My mother said she’d always thought the Stasi had removed them from the envelope.

Finally she said, “I demand only one thing: not to be deceived by my children. That’s something I cannot handle, Enrico, not in my own family. How can you even expect me to take it?” Then she hung up.

I walked home. On the way I thought about Emilie Paulini again for the first time, and how she had presumably been buried at some point over the last few days.

Your

Enrico T.

Thursday, June 28, ’90

Dear Nicoletta,

Why have you remained so present to me, Nicoletta, so much so that it sometimes makes me shudder? How many times have I painted your portrait in my mind — it’s so vivid in my memory. As if in a fever I evoke your presence with an unhealthy craving. I’m frighteningly good at it, but when I find myself alone again, my own company seems intolerable. And then I write you a letter.

Two weeks after the wall was opened there was no one left who hadn’t been in the West except us. All the kids in Robert’s class had seen Batman. Michaela found some excuse every time. “The West isn’t going anywhere,” she said, and she had tons and tons of work to do, by which she meant the meetings she attended at least once a day, sometimes holding them at home. It was her idea to publish a newsletter in which all of New Forum’s working committees would have an opportunity to place items. In Michaela’s eyes that meant publicizing injustices and abuses — the Sluminski case, for instance — because no one else was going to do it.

When the chief dramaturge assigned me the task of delivering several cartons of libretti to Henschel Verlag in Berlin, I agreed mainly because I was worried about Vera. I could guess what the opening of the wall meant for her. Her lies, big and small, would blow up in her face. 339