Ingo Schulze - New Lives

Titus no longer understood himself. He wasn’t sure if he had remembered the yellow book in his satchel a moment before, or whether it had come to him just as his grandfather stood up.

Titus took the tea egg out of the sink, screwed it open over the garbage pail, banged the two halves together, rinsed them out, and laid them on the dish rack to dry. At the same instant he turned off the light in the kitchen, the lamp in his grandfather’s room went out — he always undressed in the dark — leaving Titus to grope for his satchel, which he had left beside the front door. He already had it in hand when he switched the light on again

[Letter of May 10, 1990]

his desk and opened the drawer where he kept his grandmother’s fountain pen, unscrewed the cap, and wrote, “Friday, October 31, 1977, 11:34 p.m. till…”

As if counting his words, he moved the pen cautiously. Titus wanted to go on writing, pursuing his thoughts, which, if they came too quickly, would have to be jotted down in catchwords on scrap paper. He was delighted by the idea of filling these pages with his even, looping hand, until he had said all he had to say and the blue ink was used up.

Ever since he had boarded the streetcar in Laubegast and lost sight of Gunda Lapin in the dazzle of headlights, he had longed for this moment, when he would merely have to unscrew the cap of the pen and start writing — and in writing learn what had happened to him.

This evening he had understood that he must finally stop running around blind, lacking all feeling, unable to act on his own — someone merely living the life he was served up, an utterly impossible sort of life.

As he sat bent over under the light of the desk lamp, he looked up at his reflection in the windowpanes, where the room seemed as large as some great hall in a villa. The posters behind him shimmered. The only thing outside that found its way into the picture were the red lights outlining the water tower. Titus ducked so he could bring an uneven spot in the windowpane into line with one red light — which unfolded like a blossom.

His pen moved slowly. “Gunda Lapin,” he wrote. He set pen to paper again. He had to fight the urge to keep from repeating the same two words, filling a whole line, an entire page with “Gunda Lapin Gunda Lapin.”

He wished that everything he wanted to write was already there on the page, so that he could read what he had experienced, beginning with the walk from the streetcar down to the Elbe. With sketched map in hand, he had followed the street, Laubgaster Ufer, with its long row of old suburban homes and garden sheds. From here one could barely make out the opposite low-lying shore, which was hardly built up at all until where the first vault of the steep slope itself began. The rounded crowns of trees were barely higher than the grass, as if their trunks lay inundated and their shadows were reflections in the water. With each step he had come closer to the bend in the river and been able to gaze upriver to the ridge of the Elbe’s sandstone mountains, to Lilienstein and Königstein, between which the Elbe meandered under pale blue clouds outlined against the yellowish white light.

The last house before the dockyards — indicated on his sketched map by a woman dancing on its roof and a balloon that read HERE I AM! — lay hidden behind trees and shrubs. He rang and heard a sound, halfway between a squeak and a creak, like planks once nailed together now being pried apart, and then a voice.

From the moment Gunda Lapin had opened the garden gate, she never let him out of her sight. There she stood before him — in her fleece vest, a sweater that was too long for her and that rolled up at the hem all on its own, wide trousers splattered with paint and tapering down to felt shoes — half clown, half ragman.

The path to the house meandered between acacias. It was as if light were scudding before the wind through the foliage. Gunda Lapin had proceeded him with long strides, her key ring dangling like a pail from her hand.

A shiny, well-scrubbed, wooden stairway that spiraled in a hundred-eighty-degree turn led them to the second floor, where they took another set of steep stairs. The kitchen lay to the right, not much bigger than their pantry at home. The sink lay under a dormer window, and the sunlight fell directly on a mountain of plates and cups, guarded by a kind of palisade of forks and spoons. There was nothing remarkable here, and yet he took note of the hodgepodge atop the water heater — a collection that included a Fit bottle, egg shampoo, lipstick, a green deodorant from the West, toothbrush and mug — with a precision and clarity as if he were looking for clues, though he couldn’t say to what. Gunda Lapin had been the first adult he had ever visited unaccompanied by his mother. Her quarters consisted of two rooms. It was only because half the dividing wall was missing that they were able to sit across from each other, he on a footstool pulled from under a dainty desk and she on the sofa.

He had been afraid his pants might reveal traces of his accident, although before leaving the Toscana he had stuffed his underpants with toilet paper — a scrap of which he had suddenly discovered lying between his feet on the streetcar.

At the moment she was deep into Kurt Tucholsky, Gunda Lapin had said, and Franz Fühmann. He couldn’t understand how anyone would voluntarily bother with textbook authors. His German teacher had said Tucholsky could have been another Heine, and Gunda Lapin had, much to his bewilderment, agreed.

Sitting here at her desk, the disappointment he had felt on entering her studio seemed absurd now — as if a house like this could ever have contained a grand hall flooded with light.

Instead he found himself in a low room with heavily draped windows and a pervasive odor that still clung to him. A carpet of splattered paint had led all the way to the paintings and frames that took up the left half of the space.

He had stepped up onto a little dais to the right of the door and sat down on a dark red settee, its back and arms threadbare, and although it had been the obvious and appropriate thing to do, it had likewise seemed both an honor and an act of presumption on his part. Gunda Lapin had spread a sheet over his legs, placed a bowl of fruit and chocolate on a low stool beside his feet, and taken up her position at an easel ten feet away — any greater distance was an impossibility.

Up to that point it had all been quite clear, with nothing more to his visit worth describing. The garden, the house, the apartment, the studio — all of it a little peculiar and alien and seductive.

And then? Gunda Lapin had stared at him squinting, as if she had discovered something unique about him. He had held up under her gaze, but hadn’t dared to reach for the chocolate or take a sip of his coffee.

The easel was positioned almost horizontal before her. Which was why her brushes had been bound to small rods that she held in her hands like magic wands. Instead of a palette she used bowls in which she hastily stirred her paints. This meant, however, that she had to hold the bowl in an outstretched arm so she could dip her brush in it.

Titus saw his reflection in the windowpane, outlined by the triangle of the water tower’s red lights. All these superficialities, however, were merely holding him back now, they were irrelevant, a stage set. He wanted to concentrate on the essentials. Besides, he would never forget that studio, every detail remained fixed in his mind’s eye.

But why didn’t he write about what actually happened? The more precisely he tried to recall it, the more blurred and inexplicable the events seemed.

“Talk to me,” Gunda Lapin had said, applying the first brushstrokes to the grayish white canvas. Her lips had grown thin.