Ingo Schulze - New Lives

At an intersection the letters on the canopies above the Dome and Rotonde and Toscana 42line up in a row. No, I say, no. I don’t want to be without you. I want to see Dresden with you, when the sun has not yet risen above the roofs and the morning star is shining in the pastel pink air, the fog above the Elbe, the various reds that encircle cigarette filters before they are tossed over the curb at a bus stop, the bright lady’s glove on the sidewalk, that everyone avoids, no one picks up, no one steps on, that I take to be a lily that has fallen from your bouquet, DANGER DE MORT.

Suddenly Mamus and Robert were standing right in front of me, Michaela was listening to an older gentleman explain something to her, looked up, and gave me a wave. “Punctual to the minute,” Mamus said, praising me. On my return from the world beyond I was punctual to the minute. It was drizzling.

Michaela gave me a handkerchief, telling me to wipe the sweat off my face. Mamus made me put on her scarf. The wind had wrecked her umbrella.

We followed Robert, walked passed the nearest cafés, and quickly lost our orientation. I was shivering, and at one corner, just as we were walking by, a huge omelet was being served, and I almost died of hunger. Mamus held up her wallet and nodded. Of course we had now landed where no one wants to land. The waiter laid a garish red place mat of washable plastic in front of each of us, as if we were children. Michaela put her school French to use to order and blushed as the waiter departed with a “merci, madame.”

The waiter brought a can of beer and poured it for me while we watched in devotion. No sooner had we whispered our “merci” than Michaela said she had actually just ordered water. I drank the bitter Scandinavian import and in my weariness would have loved to lay my head on the table. I had to squeeze past barrels and sacks lining the narrow hallway to the restroom. From the depths of the building someone was coming toward me and going through the exact same motions. Just before we met we both dodged simultaneously to one side. So then, my doppel-gänger dwells here. My beer proved to be as expensive as my omelet. We wrote a few postcards, one to you.

The whole time we heard music outside, a band that must have been playing nearby. Aware of how much his curiosity pleased Mamus, Robert insisted that we had to move on. He was all the more disappointed then when there was no stage, no audience to be found anywhere, as if the Beatles, Neil Young, and Elton John were just hanging in the Paris air.

A Japanese man was sitting at a corner in the midst of some instruments, with a frame attached to his shoulders to hold his harmonica and a guitar across his knees. It took a moment for me to realize that we were standing before the answer to our riddle. This Japanese fellow was the real thing, the true Orpheus of Paris. During “Heart of Gold,” when he wasn’t playing his harmonica, a little white cloud of breath formed in the cold air as if he were literally singing his soul out.

We listened in admiration for a while. I gave him what francs I had left, which felt very satisfying. Happiness and indifference seemed interchangeable. We could stay here or leave on the bus, it was all good.

During the final “tour of Paris lights,” which was really just part of the return trip, I fell asleep. I had the feeling I kept waking up every few minutes but without ever letting go of my dream. At one point I have to get back as fast as possible, suddenly my pass reads SL instead of EL. 43I can’t find my uniform anywhere in the apartment. I’m angry because I really didn’t want this leave in the first place and am now sitting without my uniform on a train that stays longer and longer at each station in order to keep to its schedule of arrivals and departures. The sunlight is so dazzling outside that the names of the stations are illegible. No one at the base gate will believe I’m a soldier. Then I remember my short-clipped haircut. I keep tugging at it, practicing how I’ll use it as proof.

Instead of my ticket I pull out currency and hold it as if I’m looking at a pocket watch. It’s a ten-franc bill. Which means I have ten minutes to get back. Although one franc after the other goes by, I’m not worried. I know that I’m dreaming and that I only have to wait a bit and I’ll be able to wake myself up and be in Paris. Once in Paris I’ll sell my watch in order to pay for my stay there. I reach into my pocket. Instead of a watch I keep pulling out ten-franc bills. I calculate how many times I’ll have to do this to be able to stay for a day, a week, a year.

Even though the travelers with whom I share the compartment are behaving more and more like schoolkids on an outing and dazzle one another’s eyes with West German passes, which they hold in the palms of their hands like pocket mirrors, I remain calm because, after all, I have my stuff. I am convinced that I can present my things at least as fast as they can show their passes, because my yo-yo hand is becoming increasingly deft now at catching and tossing brightly colored pieces of fruit as if they were tennis balls. And not just that. I give each piece of fruit a name. How easy French is, I am reading it from a little blackboard that appears with each piece of fruit — I don’t even have to learn vocabulary. Not until I catch the same piece of fruit twice in a row — it shimmers a dull orange and has five syllables — do I realize that my voice changes with each piece of fruit and that for some time now I’ve been singing a melody. To catch the attention of my fellow travelers I have to keep fruit moving in sequence at juggler’s speed, otherwise the music that accompanies my movements will go unnoticed. But in the next moment I regret this new tempo. It is impossible to pronounce polysyllabic words at anything close to full length. The merci fruit flies toward me twice, but both times all I manage is just a mers. Mers, I croak, mers. My voice is gone. No matter in what rich colors the fruit glistens, all I can croak each time is mers, mers, just mers. My fellow travelers make a joke of trying to snatch my fruit away. I am outraged by this. Mamus encourages them, in fact, because she thinks she’s doing precisely what I want. I scream at Mamus, but before I can see her face, the compartment door is flung open. In the same moment all the hand mirrors are flashed in sync at the badge on the border guard’s cap. He nods and is about to close the door again when his glance falls on me. I raise my hand, but only as if to greet him, because even I no longer believe that any fruit will be flying toward me. Everyone groans. Because of me we are being shunted to a sidetrack.

Your Heinrich

Wednesday, Feb. 7, ’90

Dear Jo,

At some point you will get a postcard proving that we were in Paris.

On Monday, the day after our return, we learned purely by chance that Aunt Trockel, the woman who looked after Robert, had died. Just three weeks ago, while we were in Offenburg, she cooked for him and looked after him. She was no longer among the living when we wrote her from Paris. Our last visit with her at New Year’s had been such fun. 44

Aunt Trockel was Michaela’s first friend in Altenburg (and maybe her only one too). Michaela claims that Aunt Trockel resembled Virginia Woolf a bit. I disagree. To me it always looked as if she had far too many long, crooked teeth in her mouth. Aunt Trockel avoided smiling or even laughing because then her ivories were bared to the gums. If she laughed anyway, she automatically put a hand to her mouth, which looked like an affectation. Her invitations always terrified me a little, for ever since she stopped working in the variety store, what we were treated to was all the stuff that had run through her mind over the last week. Michaela always showed a patience that often left me flabbergasted, or even angry. But in Michaela’s eyes Aunt Trockel enjoyed total diplomatic immunity. For without Aunt Trockel’s support she might have had to throw in the towel as an actor.