Ingo Schulze - New Lives

Titus saw the girls heading toward him, bounding splotches of color, they crossed the street, those same voices he had heard lining the course. They stared at him. But it wasn’t admiration in their eyes, it was more like dread, horror, pity, or maybe just incomprehension. Suddenly she was standing in front of him, short, pale, with restive eyes. She stuck her chin out over the collar of her training jacket, which seemed to be in her way. “Here,” she said, and unfolded something, a tissue. And since he hesitated, she pressed the tissue to his brow and eyes, a touch that did him infinite good. The tissue stuck to him. He wiped the tatters off and turned around to her, but couldn’t spot her among the others. He was holding the soggy clump in his hand.

Joachim made his agonized way up the slope, his elbows pressed against his ribs, his knees glued together. As he shambled along, he turned his heels out, which Titus thought looked effeminate.

Later Titus and Martin were told to choose teams. Titus started. After each had selected seven names, Titus chose Joachim. That left Peter Ullrich among the last few. Martin likewise despised Peter Ullrich, and Titus pointed to a boy with huge nostrils and eyebrows grown together. Peter Ullrich was the last, he went with Martin.

Joachim volunteered to play goalie. “Time for revenge, Martin,” Kampen said, and blew his whistle.

It was a poor game. No one wanted to run any more. Joachim had sped ahead of a backward pass, which meant a corner kick, and somehow it ended up a goal. There were too many players for the size of the field and the goals were too narrow. Shortly before the final whistle the ball bounced out into the middle of the field, with no one in control of it for a few moments. Titus was the first to arrive and landed such a lucky kick with the side of his foot that the ball flew into the net. No one cheered. “A shot like a beeline,” Kampen said, and whistled the end of the game.

Titus entered the room just as the bell rang, the girls were missing. Petersen called out, “Friends, one and all.” On the blackboard he wrote, “Isaac Newton 1643–1727,” tossed the chalk on his desk, stuck his hands in his smock pockets, rolled back and forth on his tiptoes, and repeated what was in the textbook about the founder of classical mechanics. To Titus it seemed as if he knew nothing more than what Petersen was telling them at that moment, as if Newton were the first human being that he had ever bothered to take note of. He was still dazed from his goal. How often Titus had dreamt of a shot like that — like a beeline.

When the door opened the first time and a couple of very red-faced girls entered, Petersen didn’t react at all. Petersen stared in grim silence at the second bunch, watched them take their seats. The third time he erupted — he wasn’t going to take this anymore, the same thing every Monday.

Martina Bachmann, who was the last to slink in, was about to offer an apology. Petersen waved her impatiently to the front of the room, “Come on, come on, come up front!” and presented her with a piece of chalk as if it were a flower. “So you may now proceed, please, proceed.” Petersen sat down on an unoccupied desk up front on the left, let his legs dangle. More and more girls offered their excuses. Martina Bachmann was allowed to return to her seat.

When Titus looked up again, Petersen was writing “F = m · g” and then “G = m · g” on the blackboard. Titus tried to fix in his mind that mass and gravity are different values for a given body and that gravity can’t be measured in the same units as mass. “The gravity of a body,” Joachim said, “is the force with which it presses vertically on what lies beneath it or pulls at what it is dangling from — that is, mass times acceleration. Which means, G equals mass times nine point eighty-one meters per second per second and is measured either in Newtons or kilo-ponds.” After first making certain that Joachim’s book was closed in front of him, Petersen nodded, and then said that they would now move on to the law of inertia. He wrote a couple of equations on the board. Titus was amazed at how calm he was, as if this hour were like any other, where the worst thing that could happen before the bell rang would be a bad grade. Maybe Petersen had forgotten the whole thing by now.

“Unless force is exerted on a body, it will stay in motion,” Petersen wrote on the blackboard, and drew a box around it. While Titus was wondering what that meant in his case, Petersen drew a ship, with waves and four arrows, up and down, right and left. Those were the exerted forces: weight and buoyancy, propulsion and the resistance of the water.

The greater the mass of a body, the greater its inertia. Someone giggled. Petersen called out to Peter Ullrich that he would have the chance to apply his newly acquired knowledge.

Titus didn’t know if he was sick to his stomach because he was hungry or because he had eaten his sandwich too quickly just now. Or because there was something wrong with his sense of orientation, or because he was experiencing a kind of weightlessness, an emptiness in which you could depend solely on science and its laws, where opinions didn’t count. His time in the three thousand meters was an objective reality, and his soccer goal; Newton was real, equations were real.

“Every body,” Petersen said, tossing the chalk on the desk, “tends to keep moving ahead in a straight line as long as the sum of all forces exerted on it is zero. Come up here, there’s the chalk.”

Peter Ullrich kept on writing as if he hadn’t noticed Petersen’s pointing forefinger, but then suddenly stood up and staggered forward.

“According to the law of inertia,” Peterson said, raising his voice, “the ship will move forward in a straight line. Why isn’t it at rest?” And with that he left Peter Ullrich all to himself and sat back down on the unoccupied desk on the left. It was so quiet Titus could hear the others breathing.

He imagined himself standing there instead of Peter Ullrich, saw his own glance skitter across the class and fix on Petersen.

“I can’t do this report.” And corrected himself. “I don’t want to do this report.”

“Why?” Petersen barked at him.

“Because I’m a conscientious objector,” Titus replied.

“What?” Petersen asked. “What does the one have to do with the other?”

“I don’t know,” Titus said, “I really don’t know anymore, I’ve forgotten.”

“Hot air, pure hot air!” Petersen called out to Peter Ullrich. “You’ve understood nothing, nothing whatever. Why isn’t the ship at rest?” Petersen turned to the class. Joachim was the first to raise his hand, then Martina Bachmann.

Titus saw the vacant expression on Peter Ullrich’s face as he passed Martina Bachmann and returned to his seat.

I can’t go ahead with this, I can’t, Titus thought, it’s so pointless. And what did a lot of words like that mean anyway? Never before had he been so deeply aware of the nothingness and senselessness of such opinions and claims. It seemed to him he no longer knew what was up or down, and once he was up front, at the teacher’s desk, he would be far less certain.

Petersen praised Martina Bachmann for her ability to think concretely about a world of real things. With a laugh that looked more like she was crying and with odd gestures of her shoulders she returned to her seat.

Petersen looked at his watch. “Don’t worry, Titus, I haven’t forgotten you,” he said, and told them that they had used a general law, the basic Newtonian law to derive a special law, the law of inertia. He called this deductive reasoning. “There is, however, a fundamental difference between mathematical statements and physical laws.”

[Letter of July 9, 1990]