Ingo Schulze - New Lives

I counted the seconds it took for me to take a breath in order to get some sense of what a minute, what five minutes meant. As soon as I laid my watch aside, I was convinced that I could break every diving record. Another experiment, one that I had often performed as a child in the hope of speeding up time, proved less successful: with the help of a magnifying glass (Robert has one for his stamp collection) I watched the minute hand. Yes, I saw it move, but that was no help.

At some point pain paid me a visit. I have to put it that way, the toothache seemed like a guest in my void. I was grateful. Closing my eyes, I tried to discover where it would settle in, for at first it darted about like a will-o’-the-wisp, bounding upward, plunging downward, now on the right, now on the left. But then it found its spot, lower left. To help you understand I probably have to express it this way: I clung to this pain. Or better, it has to be put like this: I was the pain. Outside it, there was nothing. And so it was only natural for me to try to nurse it. I watched it constantly, the way a child watches a hamster on that first day, and gave myself over to time beyond all measure. The greater the pain, the smaller the void. It first had to take total possession of me, and only then, as the capstone of my torment, did I want to see the dentist. I kept losing myself in the details of an agonizing session in the dentist’s chair.

Like someone who fears he has been robbed as he slept and starts hastily patting his pockets, I explored my pain each time I awoke. And was always relieved to find it in its proper spot. And not only that, it spread, creeping and pommeling 349its way along my jaw, until it slammed into the back of my head. For me it was a kind of guarantee, the only reliable unit of measurement.

I went to seed. The odor that hit me when I lifted my covers, the long fingernails, the fuzzy coating on my teeth — I perceived it all simply as a defect in my environment, like a burned-out lightbulb when you don’t have a replacement in the house. When my stubble had grown so long it stopped being prickly, I forgot my body entirely. That was, of course, in part due to my fatigue, a permanent exhaustion in which dream and reality often remained indistinguishable. I continued my survey of distant cities and ships. It didn’t matter whether I kept my eyes open or closed, I wandered aimlessly around those same cities, without ever actually making an appearance myself.

To Michaela and Robert it looked like uninterrupted sleep. When Michaela brought me my tea each morning, she put her hand to my brow. She made every effort, cooked rice pudding, and asked Aunt Trockel to make me her applesauce. I didn’t want any of it, I wanted peace and quiet, but let it all roll over me as if it were a way of thanking Michaela for having Dr. Weiss sign off on my sick leave first for one, then for a second week.

When the time was up, I dragged myself to the polyclinic. It was St. Nicholas Day, December 6th, the very same day on which Michaela and Jörg and a few others occupied the Stasi villa, after first printing and distributing a flyer at noon that called for the demonstration to assemble at the theater at six o’clock. Michaela appeared finally to have incorporated all the energy I lacked. In the half hour she spent at home that afternoon, she used my absence to toss my bed linens into the washing machine, but didn’t have time to put on fresh. When I got back with a renewal of my sick leave, this time for two weeks at a shot, I found my sickbed had been dismantled — a smack in the face that made me feel as if I had been thrown out. I did without new sheets, rummaged in the wardrobe till I found my old down sleeping bag, unrolled it on the couch, crept into it still in my underwear, and pulled the hood up over my head.

That evening Michaela was out of control. I couldn’t remember her ever having entered my room without knocking first. Suddenly there she stood before me — I had heard her key ring and her voice before I opened my eyes. It wasn’t just that she was talking too fast. Every sentence demanded three or four more sentences of explanation that drew still more sentences in their wake, so that she barely had a chance to catch her breath or swallow and so kept on talking faster and faster. But the real demand upon me was her presumption that I would get up, get dressed, and return with her to the demonstration.

Even if I had not been ill, she surely must have known how little I cared about any of it, yes, how it made no difference to me whatever whether those at the head of the demonstration chanted “Germany, united fatherland” or “We are one people” and whether some Jörg or Hans-Jürgen had or hadn’t attempted “to bring a halt to that.”

With each of her statements I realized anew how incapable I was of taking any part in this life, how pointless every effort seemed.

My response to Michaela’s question about what the doctor had said rekindled her anger. At some point she compared me to a caterpillar, a fat caterpillar — which, given the sleeping bag, was not exactly original. I understood it as an announcement that from now on she wouldn’t be taking care of me. What was annoying was the covert charge that I was faking it. The accuracy of this conjecture was revealed the next day when Robert asked me to help him with his homework. The worst thing was his nagging me to drive him here, there, and everywhere. Michaela seemed actually to be egging him on to do things she had once forbidden for pedagogical reasons. As if she had completely forgotten my condition, she in fact tormented me with wishes of her own over the next several days.

Living together with the two of them became more and more of a torture. I ruled out the idea of returning to the theater. Vera had ducked out of sight, but the mail brought rambling letters from Geronimo almost daily — which after a while I no longer bothered to open. At the time I still knew nothing of the difficulties my mother was struggling with. She offered the absolutely foolish assertion that Vera was to blame for my breakdown. Michaela, on the other hand, took the miseries of the world upon her shoulders on an hourly basis, including feeling responsible for my deterioration, until finally she would once again lose all patience with me. I stubbornly defended my sleeping bag against her onslaught, but did allow her to tuck a clean sheet on my couch.

As I’ve said, my condition at the time is alien even to me now. I’m reporting to you like someone who repeats hearsay for better or for worse.

Then it happened. It simply happened. Have you ever collected your kitchen garbage in a paper bag? And when you pick it up the next day, all the crap plops right through it. The horror of it suddenly hit me.

But what does that mean! 350I had suddenly realized what had happened to me and what a state I was in.

Ah, Nicoletta, the total disappearance of Herr Türmer is almost incomprehensible. You can, of course, also attribute it to the loss of my writing, or more accurately, the loss of the West, the loss of our Beyond, the death of the benevolent gods…And with that, if you recall, the circle of my observations has closed on itself.

On the other hand, perhaps my descriptions have, or so I hope, laid a foundation that will make what is yet to come comprehensible.

But enough for today.

Yours,

Enrico Türmer

Sunday, July 1, 1990

Dear Jo,

I can move in the day after tomorrow, that is, if the baron has no objections. I’ve ordered a new mattress — thanks to Monte Carlo, the best of the best. 351All the rest in due time.

Vera will be coming by train, with her predictable two suitcases.

The new family has flown to the Baltic, to Denmark, which makes a lot of things easier. No one knows just how the baron gets permission for his aviation stunts or how he has managed to get around the Russians. 352It wouldn’t surprise me if he’s soon flying a MiG-29. D-marks will get you anything. The baron is already making grand plans for the day the Russians have departed for good. Discount fares from Altenburg-Nobitz to London and Paris! I wouldn’t put anything past him.