Ingo Schulze - New Lives

How could he have imagined he would get away with it? From one moment to the next he forgot the weekend as if it were a dream. He wouldn’t be allowed to stay in school with a D in Russian on his next report card. So graduation was out of the question now. Would God give him a second chance?

It wasn’t that he just hadn’t studied, he had been wrestling with other problems, with essential questions. Had all that been meaningless?

He was convinced he had deserved this chastisement, as a reminder of what his real intentions were.

The Almighty, Titus thought, can use even someone like the toxic blonde as his instrument.

When the bell rang Titus was afraid the toxic blonde would ask to talk with him. But she paid him no attention. He walked across the courtyard to the other building. The fresh air did him good. He took up a position at the open window in the math room, his knee resting on the radiator. He waited for the warmth to find its way through the fabric.

Titus hoped Petersen would call on him now and not wait until the last class. Petersen began by repeating the story problems to be solved. “Write this down,” he said, and let his right forefinger dive headfirst into the void. “A freight train is transporting 730 tons of brown coal briquettes in 38 cars. Some cars carry a load of 15 tons, others of 20. How many of each kind of car are there? Second…” Titus heard whispers, could sense the fear that Petersen might spring a pop quiz on them. Instead Petersen let his forefinger make another dive and repeated, “Second. A tank of the National People’s Army has traveled 230 kilometers. There are now still 40 liters left in what had been a full tank of fuel. If it could limit its fuel usage to 15 liters per 100 kilometers, the tank would have a deployment radius of 270 kilometers. How large is its fuel tank? How much fuel was used per 100 kilometers? Third! A reconnaissance plane of the NPA…” Titus wrote it down. He could do these kinds of problems. Petersen had to leave the classroom for twenty minutes. Peter Ullrich was assigned to keep order.

And the quiet held even after Petersen left the room.

Joachim was done in ten minutes. Titus just in time for Petersen’s return.

“I assume,” Petersen exclaimed at the door, “that you’ve already compared solutions. Were there any difficulties?”

No one responded.

His mouth half open, Petersen looked around the room, raised his arm, and asked again, “No difficulties?” and nodded several times in approval. He looked for a good piece of chalk and wrote on the blackboard: “Equations with more than two variables.”

Titus began a new page and underlined the title twice. Petersen said he wouldn’t spend a lot of time on this, because anyone who knew how to solve equations — and they had just been able to test themselves on that — would have no problems with this. It was only a matter of expanding the framework for setting up the equation. The process was based on a step-by-step reduction of the number of variables one by one.

Five minutes later Petersen put equations on the blackboard and transformed the first one. Titus quickly caught on to how the equation was set up.

It wasn’t long before Petersen tossed the chalk onto his desk, stepped up beside the blackboard, and shoved his glasses back into place. Anyone looking skeptically at the equations was in danger of being called to the front.

[Letter of July 4, 1990]

Evidently all it took was mastering a specific principle. Everything else proceeded from that. Titus was amazed that such a long row of numbers could be no mystery.

Petersen didn’t assign any homework and ended the class before the bell. On the way to the door he stopped in his tracks. “Did you understand it all, Titus?” he asked. Petersen’s fingers wriggled like marionettes beside his pen holder. Titus raised his head, said, yes, smiled, and looked back at his notebook. Petersen’s sleeves had slipped down over the backs of his hands. His fingernails drummed on Titus’s desktop, a quick rhythm that ended with the words: “That’s fine then.”

Gym class. Titus pulled on his old uniform. Martin’s class arrived late in the basement dressing room. Mario and Peter Ullrich were warming up outside already. In his lumpy gym shorts, Joachim was leaning against the goalpost.

Kampen, their gym teacher, whose gray hair made him look like a snow-speckled Dean Read in Alaska Kid, was juggling the ball. After a three-thousand-meter run they would still have twenty minutes to play.

They were a bit late crossing to the public park. Martin and Titus were the last to run the warm-up lap. No one took the high-kick sprint and the ankle and stretching exercises as seriously as they did. Bernadette was sick, Martin said. She’d had a fever of almost 104° on Sunday.

Kampen was waiting at the bottom of the slight rise and repeated what times would earn what grades. Then the whole herd dashed off at a mad pace. Titus let Martin move ahead of him, which left him in last place for the first two hundred meters. It wasn’t until they got to the oak tree where they looped around to head back down the long straightaway that they first started passing some of the others. They overtook Joachim right at the starting line. Kampen called out to Titus to stay hot on Martin’s heels. “Chase him!” With short strides they took the slope without slowing down.

Titus thought how he could run forever behind Martin Böhme, in the wake of his fluttering hair with its fragrance of shampoo. Titus enjoyed the effortlessness with which they both passed the others. After three rounds they had only Peter Ullrich and Mario ahead of them. But Peter Ullrich would soon buckle like a limp pickle and Mario would give up because of his knees. On the fourth lap they passed them both, and by the fifth they were one lap ahead of Joachim.

“Chase him!” Kampen shouted. Titus was happy. He wasn’t going to let himself be shaken off, he’d rather be torn to shreds. He now understood better what the article had meant when it said: Dynamo could deal with Liverpool, but only if every single player tore himself to shreds in the process. Torn to shreds, but still holding on. More and more students and teachers were lining the course now. Another two laps, another eight hundred meters. He would hold on, he’d match any tempo. They kept on passing people, shot past them like arrows. Titus knew every single meter, knew how to place his stride as he took the curves and that it took more effort to round the oak in a somewhat larger arc and still hold your pace. Titus could hear cheering, saw pennants and people bending over the barricades to call out their names. He felt the pain in his lung, but what did that have to do with him? His legs were running, there was no stopping them. Martin Böhme could run as hard as he wanted, he wouldn’t get rid of Titus. As they approached Kampen for the last time, they were already heroes: Martin Böhme and him. Titus saw eyes and mouths gaping wide and almost crashed into Martin’s back at the oak. Titus didn’t need to breathe anymore, that only hampered him. There were backs ahead of him, more backs, he saw Kampen, saw Kampen’s astonished face, and heard Bernadette call out his name — it wasn’t “Martin!” that she shouted, but “Titus! Titus!”

Suddenly there were no more backs in front of him, and he flew past Kampen and kept on going because he no longer had control of his legs, because they were still running, with him, and he brought his arms down now and looked around and kept on going until finally he could walk and Kampen was beside him, holding the stopwatch under his nose, and Martin was clapping him on the back and congratulating him, Martin with his red and white face.

His breath returned, it was like being stuck with needles. Instead of a lung, he had a pipe inside him, an old water pipe, his whole mouth was rusty, he could even smell it. He wanted to stop it, stop his breathing, stop himself, but his legs kept going, now right, now left, he staggered, and Kampen shouted, “Keep walking, my lad, keep walking!” And Martin said, “Total wipeout.”