Ingo Schulze - New Lives

I’ve ordered myself to stay away from the office. I definitely prefer the hope that greetings from you, however cursory, may be waiting for me there to the disappointment of that not being the case.

Maybe I’m lying here in bed so that I can think of you without disruption. How many letters I’ve already written you — eyes closed, hands folded across my belly. If only we could take up our conversation again where it got broken off! I was so angry and disappointed at the day being ruined and at your having to depart early that I was no longer in any condition to even notice what a stroke of luck your visit has been or, for that matter, how lucky we both are to be alive.

Where did you get the notion that the accident was an intentional attack? The first thing you cried out was: “That was on purpose!”

And so immediately I imagined that I knew the two men in the classy white Lada. I do everything I can to dismiss this as a chimera, but even as a figment of the imagination I don’t like the idea. And now, as I write this, it seems totally absurd. And yet those two figures loom up ever more clearly in my mind. It’s like in a fairy tale, when the devil demands his tribute at the very instant he’s been forgotten. 85

Dear Nicoletta, it’s evening now — and still no letter from you. 86I know, I shouldn’t have said that.

I’ve been in a strange mood all day. I smell unusual odors, suddenly imagine myself being in another room, and need a couple of seconds to come to myself, as if I were just waking up. On days like this you only have to be inattentive, and you stumble and fall and fall. Is it only our imagination that we feel someone’s actual grasp, even though they have long since let go? Should I say that the past is grasping me or, better yet, that I’ve never been young? Do you think someone like me is capable of stealing a weapon? Forgive me my susurrations. It all sounds so preposterous. I’m merely afraid I’ll fall back into the same state I was in at the end of last year. I was ill and lay here in my room just like now. And that — and I’m not exaggerating — was the worst time of my life.

For several weeks now I’ve been toying with a question. At first I didn’t take it seriously; it seemed too commonplace. But over time I’ve come to think it’s justified. The question is: What were the ways and means by which the West got inside my brain? And what did it do in there? 87

Of course I might also ask how God got inside my brain. It amounts to the same question, though it’s less concerned with the matter of my own particular original sin.

Needless to say, I can’t offer any precise answer. I can only try to grope for one.

One of the few rituals observed in our family occurred whenever I tried to revive my earliest memories. I had achieved my goal whenever my mother would exclaim, “Impossible! You were barely two!”—or, “At eighteen months, out of the question!” She would successfully manage a good five such exclamations of astonishment. It gave me deep satisfaction to find my memories confirmed. Each incredulous shake of my mother’s head made me feel like some sort of wunderkind. (My sister Vera never failed to offer some corrections; I had no chance against her four-year head start and always had to hear how happy everyone had been before I arrived.)

Here’s one of my showpieces. I wake up, the room is still dark, but in the next room there’s light and voices. My mother carries me out, my grandmother says, “Sweetie pie.” A hat lies on an armchair, two coats with fur collars are draped over its back — strangers! There are strangers in our apartment. I start to cry. The strangers are hiding. Someone gives me a Duplo candy bar that sticks out of its wrapper like a half-peeled banana. My sister has a Duplo too. I can’t understand why she’s so unconcerned. The Duplo is meant to help me get over these strangers, who are going to move in. I’m given a little red car. A bright rod sticks out between the front wheel and the door on the driver’s side. That’s for steering it. The headlights are glass beads. “Diamonds,” my mother says, “from the West.”

Present after present is lifted out of suitcases and shown to my mother. My grandpa tickles my palm with an electric razor. It all comes from the golden West. I can see most of the room, but the strangers are hiding. They’re whispering with my grandpa.

Back in my bed, I ask whether the strangers are going to stay for a long time. I’m certain they’re going to move in with us. I don’t believe my mother.

I’m afraid, I’m impressed — toys with diamonds, and they come from a world made of gold. That’s also the reason why we’re not allowed to go to the West. Of course we’d all rather live in the West. I’m not allowed to play with my car outside, in fact no other kids are supposed to know about my car. Otherwise they’d be jealous because they don’t have a red car. The red car is irreplaceable, you can’t just buy one. Only a few kids here have Matchbox cars and Lego blocks and tins of Kaba powder. I also had shirts and pants from the West, and in time I would look just as handsome as the boy on that chocolate drink for kids. Actually I was a child of the West myself.

Are you still listening to me? Or do you think by now I’m utterly mad? Let me finish my story. With each passing year I understood better: We had things other families didn’t have and couldn’t have, no matter how much they longed to have them, even if they earned more than my mother and had more money in the bank than my grandpa. Items from the West were like moonstones, either they were given to you or they remained out of reach. Our relatives in the West were just like God and the Lord Jesus — they loved you, although you didn’t know them and never ever saw them face-to-face. And anyone who laughed at me because I believed in God was at least envious of my red car.

There were five special days in the year. St. Nicholas, Easter, my birthday, Christmas — Christmas was the high point, but Christmas was out-shone by the day when my grandparents returned from their visit to the West. The evening of their arrival at the Neustadt train station in Dresden was the real, unsurpassable Christmas Eve.

Every year my mother took off work for the day, and we were allowed to come home for our noon meal. After doing our homework, we helped her with chores, which gave us the feeling that by dusting thoroughly and polishing lots of shoes we were adding to the number of presents.

In our best clothes we walked to the streetcar after darkness fell.

What was so splendid, if not to say colossal, about it all was that it was we who had been chosen. How could other people live a life in which there would never be a day, an evening like this? I felt sorry for my schoolmates. I pitied them as I pitied Africans who had no Sport Aktuell, no coverage of four ski-jump tournaments to watch on Saturdays.

Once on the streetcar, where all the vacant seats only increased the thrill, we gazed rather haughtily at the other passengers. We were unrecognized royal children, and I was happy to be no one but me.

Then it began — the back-and-forth of deciding which platform the train would arrive on. We listened expectantly to the crackling loudspeakers, trying to sort out the syllables “Be-bra” from the rest of the cacophony. And what would the waiting have been without the train running late, or the autumn air without the steam of the locomotives.

There were no disappointments, there couldn’t be any, for every present from the West was a priceless treasure all by itself. The stories our grandparents told went beyond our powers of imagination — for example, escalators, escalators in a department store. You stepped on a carpet, held fast to a richly ornamented railing, and were borne soundlessly upward, floating like an angel on the ladder to heaven.