Ingo Schulze - New Lives

“The eleven,” he said.

“You’ll see,” she said.

Even in the open air Titus could smell the chloramine on her hands.

“Was it a slow night?” he asked.

“It was okay,” she said. “You’ve made me a promise.” She lifted his chin, he turned his head away. But when he looked at her, he couldn’t suppress his smile any longer.

“You promise me you’ll read it?”

“Yes,” Titus said.

Because their routes took them in opposite directions, they stood opposite each other at the stop like total strangers — until two streetcars crossed in front of them almost simultaneously.

Sanddorn, their music teacher, slammed the door behind him, loped in great bounding strides to the piano, put down the grade book, and shouted, “Friends one and all, take your seats!”

Sanddorn raised the lid, plopped down onto the piano bench, and played a couple of bars, a variation on, “Hark, What Comes Now to Us from Afar,” the same song they each had had to sing for him solo a few weeks before.

“We need men,” Sanddorn cried, “more men!” And the melody wandered off into the bass voices. Sanddorn opened his grade book, thumbed through a few pages, and propped his forearms on it, so that all the class could see was his large head.

Titus liked Sanddorn, although when he had had to sing solo for him, he sent him back to his seat after the first stanza and to everyone’s delight played Titus’s warped version of the melody on the piano. But Sanddorn never gave anything lower than a B when you sang for him. Titus was glad the week began with a stress-free hour.

“Mario Gädtke.” Sanddorn had read the name from his grade book. He only knew the names of those who sang in the school chorus by heart. Mario had stood up.

“An A in singing, and you’re not in the choir?” Mario listed all the things he was involved in and why he couldn’t join the choir. Titus wished Sanddorn would ask him something like that — and meantime Mario talked about the chemistry club, the brass ensemble, and judo. What Titus wouldn’t have given to be in the choir. They sang the Christmas Oratorio, Brahms’s Requiem, Verdi, Mozart. And they only wore their blue FGY shirts at start-of-the-year ceremonies. When Peter Ullrich was asked to come forward to sing a second time, Titus began to worry that this least dangerous of classes might turn dangerous today. But Sanddorn would never ask him, not him, to come forward again. He would be the last person Sanddorn would test a second time. And in fact Sanddorn now closed the grade book.

“Haydn Variations!” he cried, and quoted what Brahms had said about the symphony — that writing a symphony is a matter of life and death — and that Haydn (“How many symphonies did Haydn compose?”) was a master at it, Haydn and Mozart, Haydn and Esterházy, Brahms and Haydn.

The record crackled. The music began. Titus leaned back. The motif was obvious.

While he listened to the music, he watched Sanddorn pace back and forth between the piano and the window, his eyes fixed on the floor, his right hand marking each entrance.

Sanddorn’s corpulence struck Titus as a provocation — it rendered Sanddorn unacceptable for military service. On the other hand, Sanddorn knew how to carry his weight with such grace that you suspected he would make a good dancer. During breaks between classes it looked like he was promenading up and down in the hallway outside the music room — you couldn’t possibly picture Sanddorn in the teachers’ lounge — all the while humming some melody, which the moment he stopped he would write out with his finger on a radiator, a windowsill, or the window itself. He returned every greeting very amiably, bowing with his entire large upper body to faculty and students alike.

Sanddorn, who had stopped by the window, raised a finger to underscore the original motif. Titus would have loved to ask Sanddorn whether he had been in the army and what advice he had to give him.

[Letter of June 21, 1990]

Titus walked to the front. He didn’t want to sing, he couldn’t sing, Sanddorn had to know how impossible it was for him to be put through this torture a second time. He would have accepted any black mark against him.

Sanddorn first ran the piano through an eerie rumbling prelude, only to follow it with a very spare version of the lines: “And ’cause a man is just a man he needs his grub to eat, dig in!”

“Just sing along,” Sanddorn cried, “just join in!” Sanddorn started all over again, nodding to him in encouragement, and Titus sang along. He didn’t even hear his classmates laughing, Sanddorn was singing so loud.

But when it came to the “So left, two three, so left, two three,” Titus thought he might have to start marching around with Sanddorn, while he and Sanddorn sang, “Find your place, good comrades! Join with us in the Workers Front, ’cause you’re working men too!”

The second stanza began and they marched forward together. Titus could hear himself now, he leaned on Sanddorn’s voice — or it embraced his own. He knew the words, had memorized them. And Titus instantly cheered up when the “So left, two three” came round again. He sang loudly — and when Sanddorn and the piano fell silent, he sang on alone. But a moment later Sanddorn reentered, and they marched in step to stanza three.

“Wednesday, one thirty p.m., choir!” Sanddorn shouted as Titus returned to his seat. The burst of laughter was worse than ever before. Titus turned to stone, Sanddorn was toying with his most sacred feelings. Titus hated Sanddorn now, that fat reptile at the piano. It was not until Sanddorn exclaimed, “We’ll make a real tenor out of him yet,” that Titus began to realize what had just happened. Sanddorn entered an A in the grade book.

Titus had to hurry, the bell for the end of class had rung in the middle of the second stanza. But he took his time, because he knew he still had Joachim ahead of him. There he was waiting on the stairs beneath the mural with the eleventh Feuerbach thesis.

“My mother wants me to read it,” Titus said quickly.

“What?” Joachim smile.

“About the Bundeswehr, she wrote it.”

“Your mother? Your mother wrote it?”

Titus shrugged.

“Your mother is actually a very wise woman,” Joachim said, sucked his lips in, and then opened them with a soft pop. “Why isn’t she helping you? Why is she making it more difficult for you?” Titus greeted Frau Berlin, who was glancing back and forth between Joachim and him as if she had been eavesdropping.

“Why is she doing this?”

“For my sake,” Titus said defiantly, and with two quick steps slipped in front of Joachim to avoid opposing traffic. He couldn’t spot Bernadette anywhere. Only when they had reached the broad middle flight did Joachim appear again at his side.

“You don’t have it easy.”

“She’s just afraid,” Titus said without turning his head. He had always believed God was gentle and kind, but now he sensed that God could also be stern and demanding.

“There’ll be others to help you,” Joachim said. “Everyone I’ve told about your decision is in awe of you.”

Titus nodded to Dr. Bartmann, who was leaning at the windowsill directly opposite the classroom door and just as they were leaving the dark middle flight had looked up from his newspaper as if expecting them. Dr. Bartmann was always smiling, except when he talked about the future of socialism — then he turned serious. Dr. Bartmann always wore only light-colored clothes, even the stripes on his shirts were somehow pallid.

“Well, sports fans,” he cried. Then the bell rang, and Dr. Bartmann folded up his newspaper.

There was something nonchalant about Dr. Bartmann’s “friendship.” If someone offered too feeble an answer, he would content himself with mimicking it while drooping his shoulders and bending slightly at the knee, as if on the verge of collapse.