Ingo Schulze - New Lives

Yes, it was our duty to hide it from him. And this was what our carelessness had got us. All Marion needed to do was to pass the Sunday Bulletin from hand to hand down the rows and we would be a disreputable laughingstock for good and all. I broke into a sweat.

Instead of worrying about security, Massimo sat leaning back in his chair — arms crossed, a froglike grin on his face — smacking his lips in evident complacency. Had no one noticed except me? Should I sound the fire alarm? But that wouldn’t have been in the article either. We would have to declare the issue simply a test run. Better to lose ten or fifteen thousand D-marks than our reputation. That would have been my decision had I had to make it at that particular moment. The baron later alluded to the disconcerted look on my face when he remarked that his admonishments had not been superfluous after all, as I had evidently believed, but unfortunately also not quite as efficacious as he had hoped.

I took even the slightest movement in the audience as an indication that our paper was already making the rounds. Unable to bear the uncertainty any longer, I was on the verge of jumping up in the middle of the music.

Robert Schumann bowed — and then bowed again in front of Michaela and Vera.

Since I had proofread Georg’s speech twice, I had a good idea how long I would be stretched on the rack. I don’t want to exaggerate, but when he began his concluding quotation, all I wanted to do was close my eyes in relief. Vera and Michaela pushed the hereditary prince toward Georg so that they could exchange thanks and Georg could once again present him — officially this time — with the book about the dukes of Sachsen-Altenburg.

And then, when Michaela gave the signal, Robert Schumann’s orchestra struck up again. The formal reception line moved into place.

The baron and I pushed the hereditary prince up onto a low dais with an extension at the front so that Vera and Michaela could stand directly beside him and yet remain at eye level with everyone else. Marion and Jörg had retreated to the far side of the hall. I finally succeeded in calling Pringel’s attention to Marion. She had rolled the newspaper up, but the blue of its masthead was visible. Pringel got the message. He turned to Massimo, who listened with his arms still crossed, but now started bouncing on his tiptoes, thrust his Mussolini chin forward, and followed Pringel. Pringel greeted them both. From then on, Massimo’s massive back blocked my view.

The reception line followed a simple choreography. Invited guests formed two lines. The one on the left led to the hereditary prince via Michaela and the baron, the one on the right by way of Vera and me. Vera and Michaela accepted the invitations, checking the number against their own handsomely bound lists. After providing the prince with a first and last name, they added a few remarks about the career of the person in question, plus any honors earned. The baron or I supplemented this with some compliment or other.

It sounds boring and humdrum. You probably consider it a hollow ritual intended to flatter the vanity of Altenburg’s high society. I myself would have paid hardly any attention to those on the list either. What a mistake that would have been.

Even Karmeka, who with his family had the privilege of being at the head of the line, lost his wily self-assurance the moment he stepped before the hereditary prince. There the disconcerted family stood all by itself, suddenly nothing more than what Michaela announced them to be: “Frederick and Edelgard Karmeka, dentist and dental hygienist, and their three daughters, Klara, Beate, and Veronika.” The prince held Edelgard Karmeka’s hand so firmly in his grasp that she blushed up to her hairline and wrenched her mouth until I couldn’t tell whether she was smiling or fighting back tears. The baron rescued her by saying good-bye and mentioning the dinner for a select circle of people, where they were sure to see one another again.

And now it was up to Vera and me to pass along the district councilor and his wife — civil engineer and gastronome — who were grateful for what few words I offered in a hospitable tone, since they themselves couldn’t stammer one syllable.

Next in our line was Anton Larschen, whose appearance was truly strange — some barber had robbed him of his splendid tower of hair. As always his right hand performed the old familiar — but now pointless — gesture of attempting to tame his unruly mop. Larschen presented your book to the hereditary prince. “It’s all in there,” Larschen said. The prince thanked him and said what a pleasure it was to make the acquaintance of the man whose articles he had followed with such great interest. Before Larschen could reply, the baron was already announcing two “former civil rights advocates,” who were introduced in the same way that veterans of the antifascist resistance used to be presented to us in school. Anna invited the hereditary prince to visit the local Library on the Environment, which prompted him to invite her to the dinner that was to follow. We all smiled, although we knew what a major crisis his arbitrary decision would create for Cornelia, our maître de plaisir.

Massimo, Pringel — now joined by Kurt — continued to guard Marion and Jörg and got in line with them on the baron’s side.

Waiting next to Vera was a man in a wheelchair whose white hair hung in straggly confusion. Like a child who’s been told to make a bow, he bent forward stiffly in his chair to offer his greetings. Only a random word or two of his babblings made any sense to me. It was the Prophet. Absent his beard, I recognized him only by his eyes, grotesquely magnified by his glasses. He had had a stroke and was said to still have his wits about him, but his speech and his body had abandoned him. The Prophet appeared to grow angry when the hereditary prince didn’t understand him. No one understood him. I told the prince that in a certain sense I had this man, Rudolf Franck, to thank for what I was today.

Then came a couple of our major customers who have signed on to at least half a page each week — Eberhard Hassenstein, for example. The hereditary prince’s hand vanished into Hassenstein’s big, hairy paw. His father, who in 1934 had been a cofounder of the coal yard Benndorf & Hassenstein, had died shortly after the business was confiscated in 1971. Hassenstein sniffed several times; one tear had made it all the way to his chin.

I presented Klaus Kerbel-Offmann and his wife, Roswitha Offmann, third-generation owners of Offmann Furniture, founded in 1927.

You’ll come to know them all, there’s a novel behind each of these families. But all of them, whatever their story, seemed to me to be signing a contract with us in the same moment that they stepped before the hereditary prince. They had perhaps been excited beforehand, had pictured the occasion this way or that, but surely none had imagined how profoundly moved they would be by their encounter with him. As they extended a hand to him something burst inside them — and whatever that something was, it surprised them and bound them to us.

Even Pastor Bodin, who had thundered against our horoscope in the Weekly, licked his bluish nozzle-shaped lower lip and gazed at us in childlike expectation when his turn came. Father Mansfeld, the Catholic go-getter who will be making his grand appearance today as Boniface, could not be dissuaded from presenting the prince with a bottle of liqueur, and at the end of his audience whispered to me that he had high-proof gifts for us as well.

Piatkowski, the Christian Democrat bigwig, who indeed is on the town council again, had sent his wife. She was delighted by the reception and spoke to the hereditary prince so animatedly and warmly, yes, so charmingly, that the prince asked about her later.