Ingo Schulze - New Lives

He didn’t have to help out around the house. His mother would never have demanded that he peel potatoes or hang up the laundry. He himself would have regarded that as child labor. He didn’t know how hard kernels became rice, how raw meat was turned into something edible. Only last summer he had hung a teabag in a glass of cold water. But he would gladly have learned all that rather than have her drill him in declensions, conjugations, reducing equations, solving percentages, punctuating with commas…From seventh grade on he had not dared bring home a C on his report card; anything below a C was out of the question. In major subjects it had to be an A, and if he managed that, a B in some minor subject was pure laziness and thus even more unacceptable. He was not to make his abode among the dull and lazy.

Although a Sunday worthy of the name included his mother’s being at home, he was glad he wouldn’t see her again until everything had been decided. Because in her eyes all his efforts, all the drills, all the worry would have been in vain — the joy at an A pointless, not to mention the concern over a B or the despair over a C. Oh, Mother, he wanted to say, I’m not giving up anything, just the opposite, it’s a liberation, a resurrection. I truly have no choice. I had to do it because otherwise everything else would dissolve into nothingness. If truth and falsehood, right and wrong, good and evil, are to have any meaning, then I have to say “no.”

He felt as if he could really breathe easy for the first time ever. Wasn’t what he was experiencing at this moment the same freedom felt by all those who had been willing to confess the name of Jesus and take up their cross? Wasn’t his life just beginning? How could he have lived with himself as a mealy-mouthed coward? How unnecessary all that truckling and kowtowing was.

Titus heard the key turn in the door. He lit the candles and put on a recording of the Brandenburg Concertos.

“Your mother wants you to call her,” his grandfather said after taking his seat and stirring some Maggi into his soup.

“Did you talk with her?”

“She wants you to call her,” his grandfather said.

Titus tried to imagine how his life would be the following Sunday. He couldn’t say just how the living room would be any different then from what it was now, except that his mother would be sitting at the table too. But it would be a totally different room.

After the meal Titus rode his bike to the ponds in the woods. He knew every buckle in the asphalt, could have slalomed practically blindfolded around the potholes and little bumps that were like warts left behind by repair work. The thought of that phone call grew more depressing from minute to minute.

Ever since he had started school it had never occurred to him to tell his mother about punches or curses or any sort of humiliation. Because everything that happened to him hurt her twice as much. And now he was going to have to hurt her. He had always been grateful to his mother for not treating him and his sister the way children are usually treated. After his father’s death she hadn’t expected them to put up with a new husband. Men were crude and expected you to wash up stripped to the waist, like in the army.

The wind tugged at him. Titus now had Klotzsche and Hellerau behind him and, turning off to the right at the end of the village street, began the climb through open country. He stood up, but that didn’t help much. It was better to lie flat over the handlebars and pedal for all he was worth.

His mother had grounded him only once, but he found even that completely unacceptable. It had been so embarrassing, he had been ashamed for her. But she had felt much the same way. So first she had sent him shopping, then they had gone to the ice-cream parlor together, and after that he had been allowed to pick out a real man’s wallet in a leather shop.

He thought of how he had had to drink scalded milk in kindergarten, how the skin had clung to his lip, and of how in the days before they had a television he and his sister, Annie, would ring the neighbor’s doorbell every Sunday afternoon so they could watch Professor Flimmrich. In those days he could recognize stairwells and apartments just by their smell. Annie had roused the Beckers, a retired couple, from their midday nap so she could watch The Snow Queen. The Beckers had chased her off, only to call her back upstairs a few minutes later. The Beckers offered Annie and him their glittery, silvery armchair. They gave them sweetened gelatin to eat from a wooden pot. From then on he had always asked himself whether, if everything else in life went wrong, he would at least be able to sit in front of a television and eat sweetened gelatin. That idea made the world seem a much less frightening place.

There atop the low hill, with its view across miles of fields, as far as the line of the Moritzburg Forest on the horizon, Titus suddenly realized that his childhood lay behind him.

He picked up speed as he started down the slope. The trick was to take the curve to the left leading to the woodland ponds without braking. If you leaned into the turn just right, so that the asphalt along the shoulder banked in a steep curve, you could feel your body being tugged and steered by the countervailing torque and resistance. The tingle of that moment of joy lasted a long time. If you got the angle wrong, you were thrown out of the curve and dumped into the field.

(Here insert a few more daydreams about his new life and other lovely observations. And how he tries to stop thinking about Bernadette.)

Titus was startled, frightened when he heard the key quickly inserted into the apartment door, and then was startled all the more by his fright…

His mother, gray as an eraser.

She had never wept, not in his presence. But her eyes were glistening with tears now. Staring down at the toes of her shoes, she looked weary and thin. Her hands folded across her knees smelled of chloramine.

“Mother,” he said. “You’re acting as if I’m some sort of criminal.”

“You’re running straight into their knife, Titus,” she said. “So honest and upstanding. But that doesn’t change a thing, you’re only hurting yourself.”

He was glad to hear her say something, anything.

“Someday you’ll understand,” he said without looking up, and would have loved to add, “and be proud of me.” And then he did in fact say it.

“I’m proud of you just as you are, Titus. I couldn’t be more proud than I am now.”

He still didn’t look up. “What’s so awful about my getting kicked out of school? Most of the others won’t go on to university anyway.”

He heard his grandfather’s footsteps.

“You’re throwing yourself away, Titus, pearls before swine.”

Titus received his grandfather with a smile. “Where’s your mother?”

“Right here,” Titus said, and his grandfather pushed the door open wider.

“Is something wrong?”

Titus shook his head and smiled again. His mother didn’t budge, but just stared at the floor until his grandfather left again.

“What are you going to tell them?”

Titus didn’t respond. He had already told her. He couldn’t repeat it, his words were stuck in the ruts of what had already been said. He heard the radio in the kitchen and felt like he had lived through this scene before.

“Do you think you’re going to make a better person of Petersen? Or of your classmates? You’ll just embarrass them, make it more difficult for them…”

“Am I supposed to lie?” He looked at her now.

“Who said you’re supposed to lie?”

Titus sat down now.

“You’re supposed to talk about the Bundeswehr, nothing more than that.”

[Letter of June 9, 1990]