Ingo Schulze - New Lives

“Horny old goat,” Martin exclaimed.

“Yes, Pentheus is a voyeur,” Rudolf Böhme said. “But now we also understand why when others speak of consecration and worship, he sees nothing but lewdness and prurience. Believing he knows himself very well, he also believes he knows what other people are like. And his playing the old goat, as you put it, is really the first and only time he escapes his own obstinacy. Suddenly he reveals qualities he has always fought against and repressed, both within himself and in the state. The horrible thing is that this is precisely what destroys him.”

Even as Rudolf Böhme told about how Pentheus disguises himself in women’s clothes and slinks off to Cithaeron, afflicted now by Dionysus with lyssa, madness, which lacks any of the ambiguity that defines mania, Titus realized he had to act, that only in action could he save Bernadette and himself.

“‘Were Pentheus possessed by reason, he would not don the garb of women,’ Dionysus says,” Rudolf Böhme continued. “And the question is whether in saying this Dionysus hasn’t become absurd himself. For from now on every step is a step toward annihilation. Dionysus isn’t content to slay his adversary, Pentheus must die at the hand of his own mother.”

Titus felt hot, his head was burning. He tried to force himself to listen and not think of everything all at one time. But he couldn’t manage it. There were too many worlds, too many dreams, too many lives. He had to make a decision.

Rudolf Böhme spoke as if he had watched with his own eyes as Dionysus bends a pine tree down and sets Pentheus in the crown, then carefully lets the trunk swing back upright. The women see him before he sees them and grab hold of the pine tree and uproot it. Pentheus rips off his women’s clothes, pleads with his mother — it is I, your Pentheus, the son whom you bore, have mercy, Mother, do not slay me because of my wrongdoing, for I am your child! His mother, Agave, however, grabs him by his right hand, braces her feet against his body, and rips his shoulder out…After the butchery, Pentheus’s head ends up in his mother’s hands. She fixes it on her thyrsus in place of a pinecone and bears it in triumph into the city. Agave boasts that she was the first to strike this wild beast and to have slain it, and demands that the chorus share in the meal. The chorus refuses in revulsion. Agave pets the calf she believes she has in her hands, scratches the fuzz on its chin. Her son Pentheus, she brags, will praise her for this hunt, for this prey. “And whoever sheds no tears at this,” Rudolf Böhme said, “has no tears left to shed.”

When a few minutes later they got up from the table, Titus had come to his decision. He stepped over to the large living room window and gazed out at the city. The spell of arms and voices: the white arms of roads lie before him. And the voices say with them: We are your kinsmen. And the air is thick with their company as they call to me, their kinsman, making ready to go, shaking the wings of their exultant and terrible youth. He had once memorized it, not perfectly but almost.

Titus wanted to talk with Joachim, just with him. Titus was afraid that they wouldn’t be undisturbed on the walk home either. But Joachim never left Rudolf Böhme’s side.

They all gathered at the entry for their coats, and Titus was the first to say good-bye and step out the front door. He was trembling with impatience. Every second he stood there alone while Joachim kept him waiting threatened to undo his decision. But once he had shared his decision with Joachim, there would be no turning back. Titus wanted at last to be different, to be honest, good. He shuddered, as if the decisive moment would not be the day after tomorrow, at the end of their last class, but now, right now.

The wind had picked up, the sky was black. In among the trees, streetlights came on, the only light near or far. He heard Rudolf Böhme’s voice, and Martin’s. The girls were looking for something. Bernadette’s mother offered to let them stay the night. The girls turned her down. Rudolf Böhme repeated the invitation. “Come on, come on,” Titus whispered. He banged his hands in the pockets of his anorak against his hips, spun around, and bumped his shoulder harder than he had intended against the door, which swung open. In amazement they looked at him, like at some new arrival. Titus smiled. There it was again, the odor of the house, that fragrance, more befuddling than ever. And as if obeying a request, Titus stepped back inside.

4

When Titus awoke, his room, flooded with daylight, seemed strange to him. Next to his alarm clock lay an open book of fairy tales, which he had read to calm himself down.

In the same way that he sometimes raised his head from the pillow to check whether his headache was still there, he now began searching for the decision he had made yesterday. But his “no” to the army had crossed the no-man’s-land of sleep unscathed, it was already a part of him. Titus felt so strong and certain that he would have loved simply to skip Sunday.

He started doing his push-ups, increasing his goal by two, and at forty-four got to his feet again, panting and wide awake.

He greeted his grandfather, who was sitting at the radio and winced when Titus kissed his cheek. A place had been set for him at the kitchen table. Only some bread crumbs and the tea egg in the sink indicated that he was late. As he ate a weird feeling came over him, because every object he looked at reminded him of something. And so to his mind the white tiles above the stove — which had had to be set in the middle of the other cloud gray tiles when the position of the stovepipe was shifted — once again looked like a dog dancing on its back legs. His sister used to carry on long conversations with it. The coffee can with its Dutch win-terscape, the towel calendar from three years ago with its Black Forest girls, the amoebalike spot on the ceiling — Titus saw them all that morning as if for the first time. He felt like a guest. He enjoyed the sense that things were so remote.

The sections for music, civics, Russian, and gym in his homework notebook were empty, but he figured he would need two hours for math and physics.

Titus was a bit unsettled by his rapid progress. Equations with two unknowns.

[Letter of May 31, 1990]

since it was no longer a matter of grades — as a conscientious objector he would be tossed out after tenth grade in any case — he was slowly getting his footing again. Before he went to work on the physics homework, he made his bed and picked up what was lying on the floor around it: a dictionary of foreign words and phrases, the fairy tales, his alarm clock, two postcards from Greifswald and Stralsund that his sister had sent him, the TV program from the previous week, and the Sächsische Zeitung —his grandfather had of late taken to passing it on to him when he was finished reading it. Titus packed his satchel, without touching Petersen’s book, and took in the view of an empty desk, except for his physics book and notebook. He opened to page 144. Assignment 62 read: Summarize the life and influence of Isaac Newton. Base this on pp. 33–35 in your textbook. Further recommended reading: Vavilov, S. L., Isaac Newton (Berlin, 1951). Assignment 63: Explain the difference between the mass of an object and the gravity of an object.

Titus was feeling strong and clever. He would complete these tasks in nothing flat, just like Joachim. Ten minutes later he stuffed the physics book into his satchel. If he could have, he would have made a sandwich for Monday break then and there — that way he wouldn’t have to open his satchel again until he was at school.

Although it was still early, Titus prepared the noonday meal, sliced the sausage into the potato soup and, just as if his mother were home, set the table in the living room, including the bottle of Maggi seasoning, which he placed on a saucer. He didn’t want his grandfather to have to do anything when he returned from his walk.