Ingo Schulze - New Lives

In greeting the prince Frau Schorba immediately got tangled up in ceremonial phrases she had jotted down, blushed, and it took the prince himself to soothe her. He was just a frail old retiree, he said, who was happy and grateful to be allowed to return to Altenburg. His voice is as fragile as his frame. He wears no rings on his hands, which he keeps on his knees outside the thin blanket and which always tremble slightly. When he wants to speak, he first moistens his lips. Sometimes he does it quite unconsciously, which is why he then looks up with a questioning glance, wondering why we have fallen silent.

Although I talked about the Weekly and the Sunday Bulletin, which would appear this Sunday for the first time, it probably sounded as if we were still one firm. Then Georg was allowed to present him a reprint of the Dukes of Altenburg. The hereditary prince paged through it and right away found the inscribed dedication: “Presented with greatest respect and pleasure to His Highness, Hereditary Prince Franz Richard of Sachsen-Altenburg on the occasion of his visit to Altenburg on July 7 and 8, 1990.”

The prince overheard Georg’s polite remark that he had been able to publish the book solely because of Herr von Barrista’s magnanimity, bringing a scowl to Barrista’s face.

We rolled the hereditary prince into the computer room. Mother, Vera, and Michaela had a chance to see our holy of holies now as well. Everyone smiled. I remarked into a lull that we saw ourselves as rebels and insurgents. Since all the major local Party papers would soon be divvied up between conglomerates — Springer, WAZ and Co. — we would be standing alone against entire armies. There were hardly any East German newspapers still in the hands of East Germans. 366Yes, the hereditary prince said, nevertheless he wished us the all luck in the world — because one’s own voice is important.

Frau Schorba nodded and, hoping to make people forget her initial blunder, attempted to announce, in lofty phrases free of her native dialect, how important it was for her to be fully responsible for her own work. We wouldn’t have to first learn what work meant, she concluded abruptly, as if already tired of her own rhetoric.

In order to avoid an embarrassing pause, the hereditary prince inquired about our likes, our habits, our favorite foods, and the state of local agriculture. A few sparse responses inspired him to give a little lecture. He advocated that each vegetable, each fruit be served in nature’s season. Strawberries in spring, baked apples in winter. The immoderate cornucopia we were about to experience was not healthy for humankind.

That might well be, Mona replied; she didn’t know anything about that, but she would never again, not for anything in the world, want to be without the goods she had been introduced to this past week, even if she couldn’t always pay for them. The days of having to stand in endless lines to buy peaches or bell peppers for her son — she didn’t ever want to see those days return. Several people backed her up. To the extent his wheelchair allowed, the hereditary prince turned to each person speaking, smiled, and held a hand to his ear now and then. Even when he didn’t know quite what to make of what was said, it was — so he later confessed — the sound of the Altenburg dialect that intoxicated him like a fragrance. Suddenly everyone wanted to get a word in.

Pringel, his face pale within the frame of his beard, called out over Evi and Mona’s heads that he had been a Party member and written articles for a house journal — he needed to explain what that was — and he was now ashamed of them, yes, profoundly ashamed.

Pringel had gotten to his feet, as if that were the only position from which he could talk about his articles. “Nonetheless, nonetheless,” he continued breathlessly, when you took into account all that he had written, that was much more — much more than what people now pointed fingers at him for, some even tongue-lashing his wife. Hundreds of articles!

And out of the blue, without any change in his tone of voice, Pringel called it a stroke of luck by a gracious fate to be given another chance, a chance unlike any ever offered him, yes, that he had no longer believed possible. Life outside the confines of his family now had meaning for the first time, he felt needed for the first time. He lowered his head and stared at the floor. His silence seemed almost defiant.

People sighed, cleared their throats, looked at each other only to look away at once. The hereditary prince called him an honest lad and was about to say something more, when Pringel walked right up to the prince, grasped his hands, and brought his face problematically close to them. “Thank you for having taken the trouble to visit us.” He fell silent, like a man who’s spoken the wrong lines and is waiting for the prompter’s whisper.

“I was truly in love once,” Evi said, as if to help Pringel out of his jam, “but after the third miscarriage, Matthias left me.” She had thought of suicide, it was all over for her. But the day after her job interview here, she had taken up jogging daily, because she liked herself again and wanted to slim down. She was embarrassed to say it, but she was convinced that as long as she kept up her jogging, she would be immune to any kind of bad luck, would keep her job, find a husband, have children. For a lot of people that was nothing special, but it was for her. “So,” she said in conclusion.

He really didn’t have that much to say, Kurt noted. He was sitting on the table, jiggling his legs and playing with his stubbly mustache. He had never expected great things. He had tried hard, actually he had been trying hard his whole life, but without much success — what sort of success was he supposed to have? He’d always liked the saying “I’m a miner, so who’s better.” That’s why he had hired on at Wismut, and for the money. His whole family had always done the grunt work, and so had he. He’d never had any illusions. Which was why he was content. And now that the deal was fairer, that was fine with him too. He needed to be paid a fair wage, or at least halfway fair — for him that was the main thing.

Schorba talked about how it had been his dream to experience and achieve something real, something right for him. That’s why he had spent three years in the army, as a parachutist, then on to Wismut, later right down at the mine face, until his foreman convinced him he ought to study to qualify as a mining engineer, to put his nose in books for five years — no quick money in that. Although Irma, his wife, had always encouraged and supported him, yes, had even had to give up her own studies because of the kids, who suddenly came toppling into the world one after the other, making him doubt whether he’d made the right decision. Of course, there had been privileges at Wismut — the best vacation spots, a three-bedroom apartment, and the offer of a car. But they couldn’t afford the car. And they didn’t think it was right to accept it and then resell it. They had handed the registration back, people had called them crazy. 367He didn’t even know why he was telling all this, minor details really, but he had never understood the hatred that had been aroused by a decision that was in line with social norms at the time — he still had nightmares about it.

“Well, yes,” Frau Schorba said after a pause filled with a breathless hush, “well, yes, men, they like to just rattle things off and worry about stuff that we probably don’t even think is important. Well, yes, there ain’t much you can do about that, not in the future either, I don’t suppose. He’s always been my husband, my first and only husband — I wasn’t even seventeen at the time. And by the time I was eighteen, here came Tanja, and at twenty, Sebastian, and when I was pregnant with Anja, he’d already gone back to school and was screwing around with other women, even though I never turned him down — he’s got kids he’s paying for and that’s why we were always coming up short. He’s in the Party, otherwise they would have tossed him out, from school I mean, because they kept a close eye on who had a family and whether he was behaving himself. He was actually going to leave me — me, with three kids. And I told him, I’ll kill you. You do that, and I’ll kill you. I didn’t say anything more than that, and that was the end of it, and he started coming home every Friday again, and then he finished school. He’s come around to saying that I was right back then. And I tell him now — Herr Türmer thinks so highly of me — that I earn just as much as you do. I mean, he ought to be glad to earn as much as I do and that just in general he can be part of something as big as this is here.”