Ingo Schulze - New Lives

I don’t know what I should think of the matter. Even if I overlook things that are obviously his imagination, the story is still fantastic enough.

They had gone to Denmark, the Baltic shore. From Robert’s description the hotel must have been a small castle. They had ridden in a carriage from the airport — Barrista travels only through the ether these days — no cars were allowed in the nature preserve.

On the steps leading up to the castle stood a squad of servants in livery to receive them and carry every piece of luggage, including Robert’s old camping bag, up to their rooms — which had balconies and a view to the sea. He couldn’t decide which was more wonderful: to sit out on the balcony or to lie on the beach, to ride in a carriage or in a boat, to eat breakfast in his room or in the splendid dining hall. He also had tennis lessons and played mini-golf with Barrista and Michaela. No sooner had he eaten the roll on his breakfast plate than one of the waiters would abduct it and replace it with another. He had found it unpleasant, however, that girls and boys who he guessed were hardly any older than he had to be ready to respond to the guests’ every need — even at night, when they would sit on red velvet cushions in the lobby, dozing off now and then, but bolting up pale-faced out of their sleep the moment they heard footsteps. He had made friends with a few kids his own age at the beach, and was once even asked along on a sailboat ride.

There were fireworks at midnight on Saturday, more spectacular than New Year’s Eve, as he put it. He had invited a few of his beach acquaintances to join him for them. They had drunk a little too much. Michaela had quickly sent them on their way and shooed him off to his room.

He hadn’t been tired. He had stood on the balcony “listening to the sea,” as he put it.

Suddenly the lamp on his nightstand went on. He saw a young room-service waiter standing there facing him. But his astonishment was all the greater when the fellow took off his cap and let his hair fall down over his shoulders. He, or better she, just stared at him. Her eyes had a pleading look, she smiled a weary smile. Then she had turned off the lamp, slipped out of her uniform in just a few quick moves, and climbed into his bed.

“I turned the light on again. I asked her who she was and what she wanted. But she just closed her eyes. When I took her hand, though, she opened them again.” He may not have known what he was supposed to do, but he understood completely that it would have been pointless to ask her any more questions. He lay down under the blanket with her.

He enjoyed every bit of it, but then again not really, because he kept thinking about AIDS and was afraid he might catch it. The few words that she let slip had sounded to him like Hungarian. But he couldn’t say for sure. Suddenly he thought he recognized her. But in that very same moment she vanished. He ran after her, rousing the entire startled hotel staff at five in the morning to ask about her. People were friendly, and they smiled, but they all said, no, sorry, they couldn’t be of any help. He had walked up and down the beach until breakfast, and it was there, listening to the surf, that it struck him like a lightning bolt where he had seen her before. Robert swears it was the same girl or woman who had breathed a kiss against the window of our bus as it rocked its way down the street of whores in Paris. He was certain, absolutely certain of it.

We poked at our food and afterward went for a walk around the pond. I told him he should be happy to have experienced something that lovely, and not to worry.

I haven’t been able to ask Barrista yet, but if I know him, he was behind it — although I can hardly tell Robert that. I’m absolutely certain Barrista sent that girl.

On my right, across the fields, it’s still glowing red, the whole sky shimmering and glistening a pinkish violet that turns a paler, duller hue to the east, the same sky that we saw above the pines in Waldau. Verotchka, our lives will never know trouble again as long as we’re on this balcony. Believe me, Verotchka, never again. 354

PS: Verotchka,

355

just sixteen more hours! I’m sitting on our wooden balcony and gazing at the castle, which looks like a spotlighted piece of fairy-tale scenery rising up against a lilac backdrop. I don’t want to deal with these next sixteen hours. I’m afraid you might delay your departure.

When you read this we’ll already be co-owners of it all — the name slot under the doorbell, the bank account, the pillows. And then let time stand still. It’s so strange that everything we always wanted and always, or almost always, forbade ourselves is about to come true — for us, the oddly silent siblings who didn’t know what to make of each other when we were alone. Until you, at seventeen, let a thirteen-year-old boy join you in your bed — and stay there. If I regret anything, then it’s only that it happened so seldom. And all the while I never wanted anything else, could never love anyone else. I always had to outdo your boyfriends, your men, and prove how extraordinary I was. Of all the men you knew, I wanted to be the most famous, the most desired. I wanted to lay the world at your feet — yours alone.

Why were we always trying to enrage each other? You with your love affairs, me with mine. Nadja, who loved you through me, just as I loved you through her. And then how you tried to free me of you by leaving, and how, on the night I brought you to the train station, I finally admitted that I loved you, that I had never held anyone else in my heart. It made me feel pure — pure, because that was the sole emotion stirring within me.

And then how I punished myself by remaining here and let Michaela slip into your shoes, and how history took us by surprise and you went into hiding, which almost made me lose my mind, because I didn’t know where to go from here. And then I suddenly realized that I had no money, and for the first time in my life I cared that I didn’t have a cent, no dough, no moolah, no lettuce, no hardtack, no hay, no simoleons, no wampum.

356

Otherwise I would have followed you to Beirut and hijacked you off to Rome or New York or Altenburg. Ah, Verotchka, you fled from me, all the way to the Orient, but intrepidly encouraged me to keep on writing and to love other, strange women, the way one advises a teenage boy to exercise a lot and take cold showers. And all the while I wanted nothing but you! I want to live with you, Verotchka. Only with you can I begin a new life.

There’s nothing left to tidy up here. The smell of fresh paint blends with that of my new mattress. The pictures are on the walls, there’s room for them here and they look much handsomer too. But the loveliest part is that we will be able to shop together and buy everything that we may still need and want. I’ll lie beside you while you read and caress your back and kiss the most beautiful shoulders in the world.

Verotchka, not even sixteen hours now.

Wednesday, July 4, ’90

Dear Nicoletta, 357

In the void words become superfluous. Today, now that any real sense of the state I was in has been lost to me, I regard myself as an accidental witness whose answers to questions are tentative and contradictory.

I had to defend my sickbed almost daily. At one point Irene and Ramona, my colleagues in the dramaturgy department, were suddenly standing at the door. They seemed disappointed to find everything just as Michaela had described it to them. She marched in ahead of them, flung open the window, threw a blanket over my sleeping bag, as if I would be too cold otherwise. Later she complained about the chaos in the room and how dreadful I looked. Michaela accused me of having put the two women in an embarrassing situation. That may have been true, but my discomfiture was far, far greater. I broke into a sweat when I saw that Irene was carrying the flowerpot from the dramaturgy office. It had, she said, flourished wonderfully, and I should take my example from it. I took her remark as a discreet hint, an allusion to the bullets in the pot. 358When Michaela left the room, I expected to be taken to task. Should I lie to them? Should I take them into my confidence? But nothing of the sort happened, and they soon took their leave.