Ingo Schulze - New Lives

“What did he say?” Rudolf Böhme asked, and now the two women repeated his “Ah,” but without either striking the right tone, so that they both chided and corrected each other, then broke into laughter and measured Titus with glances he didn’t know how to interpret. All the same, he tried to hold his own when Bernadette linked her arm in his as if she wanted to claim him for herself, and assuming that the waves of life would simply carry him along, he deserted half a petit four and his bowl of tea.

They were the last couple to arrive at the ball in the Elbe Hotel, to which no one raised an objection — on the contrary. Bernadette’s girlfriends had kept two chairs free, so they could take their seats like a bridal couple. They danced with each other — and one of them always knew the right steps.

Later he made the rounds with Bernadette and introduced her to his mother and grandfather. And everyone realized who she was when he said, “Bernadette Böhme.” And finally, just as his dance card required, he asked Bernadette’s mother to cha-cha with him, but had no success in correcting the way she held her arm.

Bernadette and he came in third in the dance contest — the best of the beginners. But that wasn’t the half of it. There was something “magnetic” about them. He meant that literally. They were the pole by which people oriented themselves. Not a word, not a gesture, not a glance that failed to provoke some sort of response from the others. Even Martin, her brother, came over to him. Titus realized by the way Martin corrected the sit of his tie that he was not younger, but quite possibly older than he. “You’ll be going to Holy Cross School in September?” Martin asked. “To our school, I mean.” The three of them toasted.

Sitting at his desk, Titus recalled how uneasy he had felt when Gunda Lapin pressed him to go on with his story. He had merely remarked that Martin was a Holy Cross boy — in the same grade, but in a different class — and that they had sports in common.

“And Bernadette?”

Titus had looked at Gunda Lapin as if it surprised him to hear that name on her lips.

“Bernadette is in tenth grade.”

“Do you run into each other often?”

“No.”

“And tomorrow?”

Had he mentioned the invitation? But how else could Gunda Lapin have known about it?

After the ball he and Bernadette said good-bye without arranging another meeting, because it was clear they would see each other over the next few days in any case. While he and his mother and grandfather waited for the streetcar, the Böhmes and their relatives drove past in their cars on their way up to Weisser Hirsch. Summer vacation began that weekend.

Since there was no Rudolf Böhme, Schröder Strasse 15, in the telephone book, he took a streetcar to see her three days later. The place was as deserted as a theater during summer break. Once or twice a week he took the same number 11 to Weisser Hirsch. He stormed the mailbox every day, but not even photographs from the ball ever arrived.

In early August the gate was at last unlocked, and he could once again breathe in the odor of the house. Martin seemed happy to see him. Titus assumed Martin would lead him to Bernadette, and once he was left alone, he expected Martin to knock on Bernadette’s door. But Martin returned with nothing more than a pot of lukewarm coffee — Titus, it turned out, was Martin’s guest.

Bernadette was in Hungary, with or staying with friends — he didn’t quite catch which. He would have loved to see the living room and her parents. Titus drank too much coffee. He emptied one cup after the other, as did Martin, without asking for cream or sugar, without really tasting what he was drinking.

That night he couldn’t sleep and had a fever. Maybe Bernadette’s letter had got lost in the mail. Did she even have his address?

A couple of days before school began he was received once more by her mother.

[Letter of May 19, 1990]

“How nice to see you, Titus,” she cried, and led him into the house, where he had to let her take a good look at him. Did he perhaps have time for afternoon tea ? She sent him out to the veranda and returned with a table setting. “Bernadette will be so sorry. The girls have gone to Potsdam. Didn’t she write you?”

A no would have been impolite, a betrayal of Bernadette, in fact. Besides, it eased his mind to hear her speak of “girls.”

“What an attractive woman your mother is,” Frau Böhme said. Titus had been on the verge of replying that his mother was almost forty, but then maybe Frau Böhme was even older — and was definitely someone his mother would have called an attractive woman.

“At thirteen, fourteen, children are on their own, it’s the end of parental influence — on the contrary, the more you preach the more quickly you lose them.” Frau Böhme slid her wicker chair closer to his and poured him tea. There were the same large circular beds of red flowers on this side of the house too.

“Friends are what’s important, and so you see, Titus, that’s why I’d like you to use your influence on Bernadette. She’s doesn’t exactly have it easy. But don’t say a word of this to my husband, if you please. Rudolf is a problem all to himself.”

Titus was dazed. Wasn’t she confiding to him something that not even Rudolf Böhme was allowed to know?

Before Rudolf Böhme could step out onto the terrace, Titus stood up and walked toward him, grabbed the hand dangling like a little flag at his side, and looked into eyes closed in deep concentration.

Titus followed the Böhmes’ example and scraped butter over his toast and then added dollops of jam from glasses that bore no labels. He tried all of them, without ever taking his eye off Rudolf Böhme, who, so it appeared, had never once really looked at him, although his thick lips had never stopped speaking at him the whole time.

Titus marshaled all his powers of attention, every ounce of them, so that he could respond to Rudolf Böhme’s words, and now marched bravely ahead, like a soldier in a war of liberation who refuses to be disconcerted by explosions all around him. But at the same time Titus was completely elsewhere. He drank one cup of tea with milk after the other and praised each serving of jam, although to him it tasted bitter, not sweet at all. And was once again amazed how little was accomplished by will and reason, while pure chance, or whatever you wanted to call this twist of fate, opened doors for him like in a fairy tale.

Finally Rudolf Böhme led him through the house and showed him his collection of paintings. And Titus remarked that this was the real collection of “New Masters,” not the one in the Albertinum — a statement that Rudolf Böhme repeated to his wife when the three of them sat down in the kitchen for Hawaii toast. Titus stayed until ten and as he rode home at last, he was carrying three books Rudolf Böhme had lent him. That night he threw up. It was his oversensitive stomach, his mother said. He evidently couldn’t go see the Böhmes without getting sick.

He didn’t see Bernadette again until school started. He avoided her as long as he could, since he felt like a freshman in her presence. He could spot her from afar by the way she tossed her head back and forth. She greeted him then in the cafeteria line, introduced him to a girlfriend as her partner at the Graduation Ball, and asked them both to step in line in front of her.

Each time they crossed paths at school, Bernadette seemed surprised to see him.

To Titus it was as if ever since the ball time had been running in reverse, that he was getting younger, not more mature. And everything he had dreamed of suddenly lay behind him in the fairy-tale world of the past.