Ingo Schulze - New Lives

— Is that your buddy? — Tina asked.

— Well yes, buddy, we went to school together.

— Tell him he’s a little pig, tell him I said so. A real little piggy.

— Because of the four…

— He wants you to pinch me in the butt. Don’t you see it?

— Oh, he’s just pretending.

— What a little pig. He’s jealous.

— Jealous?

— Why sure. But we deserve this.

Michael counted the number of open buttons on her blouse. There were in fact four. He had lost the bet. But on the other hand he could see her cleavage, the shadow between her breasts.

Tina smiled.

— You’re a little piggy too! — Her eyes were sparkling again. People just wouldn’t stop applauding.

— Wave, wave! — she whispered.

Michael began to move his right hand from side to side.

— You see, Mischa, it works! — Tina exclaimed.

Michael felt uncomfortable because his fingers were sticky. But that didn’t prevent him from waving. And so he kept on swaying his right hand from side to side.

Titus Holm

A DRESDEN NOVELLA

1

Titus Holm walked across the school courtyard, his satchel in his right hand, and in his left, dangling a little lower, a gym bag that slapped against his thigh. It had turned warmer again, leaves flickered yellow and orange in the afternoon sun. He would have taken off his anorak if it hadn’t been for the wind, which came at him now head on, now from the side, carrying with it the sound of choir rehearsal drifting like a defective recording through an open window. It was not until Titus passed the rusty bicycle stands and emerged through the main portal that he actually pieced together a melody.

He turned right. At the foot of the wrought-iron fence that enclosed Holy Cross School — including a boarding school for choir members — and whose tips ended in coiling flames, he could still see the traces of the wire broom he had used to rake leaves the day before. At first he had been uneasy about having to put in his hours of People’s Mass Initiative here, where he could be observed from the boarding school dorm.

“Call me when it’s over,” Joachim had whispered at the end of last class. Titus came to a halt in front of the dorm and glanced up at Joachim’s window, where the left casement was wide open. Titus would have preferred to keep on walking. He was in fact in a hurry. What was he supposed to tell him? That he had sat in the cellar for an hour facing Petersen, or was it a half hour or maybe only twenty minutes?

When Mario, who had had to precede him in the cellar with Petersen, returned to the classroom and called out, “Next, please!” Titus, who sat waiting amid all the other chairs stacked on their tables, had been too agitated to check the clock. He was the last of the boys from grade nine.

Mario had evaded Titus’s questions until he finally more or less sulkily declared that he didn’t want to see things like an egoist and claim his life only for himself, but to achieve something for society as well.

“What would that be?” Titus had asked. “I thought you wanted to become a doctor.”

“Of course I want to be a doctor, but someplace where I’m needed.” With that Mario had stuffed his gym clothes into his satchel, rolled up his right pants leg, knotted the laces of his gym shoes together, and hung them around his neck. “You really can’t be…” Titus had started to say, when he noticed the white smock at the open door. Petersen, their homeroom teacher, shook Titus’s hand as if presenting him an award. And then he called out to Mario, “Keep thinking along those lines!” Then, pointing to the stairs: “Titus, if you please.”

In the basement physics lab Petersen had pressed his way past him to open the door to a small chamber that was little more than a narrow passage between two tables with some oscillographs, scarcely wider than the old swivel chair under the cellar window where Petersen had taken a seat. The stool beside the door was for Titus. “We have plenty of time,” Petersen had said, carefully laying his watch to one side.

Later, when the conversation was over and Titus had already got to his feet, Petersen was suddenly holding a book in his hand. To Titus it looked like some evil magic trick.

Book in hand, Titus climbed the stairs, taking one step at a time, uncertain whether he should go on ahead or wait for Petersen, since there had been no response to his second “good-bye” either. Outside the door to the physics classroom, Titus had wedged his satchel and gym bag between his feet, as if there were no other way to push the handle. Rattling his keys, Petersen came marching up and then, after ignoring a third “good-bye” as well, vanished into the teachers’ lounge.

The stale air of the physics room, its hardwood floor a dull black from too much waxing, the apple core under his seat, and the bulletin board that always hung askew — suddenly it all made him feel right at home…

Outside the boarding-school dorm Titus called out for Joachim, shouted just loud enough that he had to hear him. In lieu of a reply, a window on the ground floor opened. Titus repeated his call at short intervals. Despite a sense of being slighted because Joachim had not waited for him, he was glad he could now avoid his friend with a good conscience.

But in the very next moment Titus was startled to see that Joachim was one of two boys crossing the street from the public park. He ran toward them, but they halted in their tracks. Titus set down his satchel, rummaged around in it as if looking for something, and was suddenly holding Petersen’s yellow book in his hand. The back cover was ribbed, a rolling landscape that came from too many moist fingertips. When Titus looked across to them again, Joachim was now headed toward him. The other boy, a book clasped under his arm, was loping toward the dorm. Titus stuffed Petersen’s book behind his atlas, so that it wouldn’t touch his notebooks and textbooks.

“There you are already,” Joachim said, groped for and produced a cigarette and, turning abruptly to his right, bent down over the match. His tight extra-long cardigan made him look even skinnier. He blew the smoke out of one corner of his mouth.

“We’ve been reading his first novella,” Joachim said, “want to walk a little?” Titus nodded.

“To think they printed it! It must have slipped past them somehow.” Joachim pulled a couple of folded pages out from under his cardigan — checkered, letter-size sheets written full on both sides. Titus recognized the handwriting — printed letters bouncing along the squares in tight formation, plus arrows, underlinings, and fat periods.

“‘Why do they have power?’” Joachim’s forefinger traced the line. “‘Because you give it to them. And they’ll have power as long as you’re cowards.’ What do you think?”

“Who says it?” Titus looked down at the scuffed toes of Joachim’s shoes.

“Ferdinand, a painter, gets a letter, on official tan letterhead, telling him he’s been drafted and has to return to Germany, World War I. He doesn’t want to, his wife doesn’t want to. But he feels some inner compulsion…”

“A compulsion?” Titus asked.

“They’ve fled Germany, but not officially. Listen to this,” Joachim said. “‘For two months he managed to go on living in the suffocating air of jingoism, but slowly the air grew too thin, and when people around him opened their mouths to speak he thought he could see the yellow of the lies staining their tongues. No matter what they said it disgusted him.’” Joachim read slowly and clearly. He kept shifting his body to protect the pages from the wind. “Great writing, isn’t it?” Joachim pushed his long dark blond hair behind his ears and stuck the pages into his waistband under his cardigan.