Ingo Schulze - New Lives

My father was an actor — not even a mediocre actor, otherwise he would have had better roles — employed by various stages in Saxony. He had heart problems and knew that he would probably never make it to forty. Maybe that’s why he became such a tyrant. He was obsessed with the notion that my sister Vera was blessed with great talent, was an actress the likes of which appear only once in a generation. Vera was twelve when he died.

Sometimes I’m afraid that even now she still believes the only thing that kept her from a spectacular career was the lack of a father. At sixteen, seventeen, she was still blaming me for his death (he was supposed to pick me up at the afterschool club, was late as usual, and stepped out into the path of an oncoming car). Besides which, he stubbornly insisted that it was because of the long commute that he had rented a room in Radebeul, where the central office for all the state theaters was located.

In fact he lived in that room with a singer from the chorus and slept at home only when my mother had the night shift. The singer regarded him with the same awe in which my mother had once held him. He could once again tell her how he hoped to die onstage, and she could console him for having to live with a woman as hardhearted as my mother, who, according to him, once told him that, given the roles he played, no one would notice if he did die onstage, and to finally leave off harping about it.

If it weren’t for photographs I probably wouldn’t know what my father looked like — or his peculiar smile with just the left corner of his mouth raised. He thought it made him look Mephistophelian. Vera — there’s a snapshot of her — dressed like an adult for the funeral, all in black. She didn’t cry, or if she did, then only when she was alone, just as she didn’t speak to us about it, but confided things only to her diary. No one knows why Vera rejected my mother — well before the accident even, before puberty. Whereas, as long as I can remember, Vera was the favorite, which I felt was perfectly natural, since Vera gave the impression she had lost both parents and was forced to live with us — while I had my mother, after all. Our mother worked hard at fulfilling her husband’s prophecy and did all she could to turn Vera Türmer, Dresden’s admired “recitation prize winner,” into a stage diva, a Dietrich.

Although my mother was and is truly a good surgical nurse and, thank God, had no artistic ambitions, so-called normal professions were considered unimportant in our home. On our walks across the Dresden Heath the conversation was always about Mozart, who had been buried in a pauper’s grave, about Hölderlin, who went mad, about Kleist, who committed suicide, about Beethoven, whom his audience would laugh at. Had not every true genius been mocked, hadn’t they all — with the exception of Goethe — suffered horribly, and yet despite everything, hadn’t they created something for which humankind must be infinitely grateful today? To struggle out of darkness into light!

My mother’s experience with my father had changed none of that; on the contrary, she simply ratcheted up her notions of the genius and his work just that much higher. In other words, if my parents had been halfway satisfied with their life, they would have spared us, especially my sister, a lot of problems.

I’m sharing all this with you just to fill in details, they explain everything and nothing.

I’m not trying to tell you my life story, I merely want to trace the path down which I went so miserably astray, but my description of it may ultimately result in a kind of story, a painful story, which might not be without some purpose as a cautionary tale. 96

Three weeks of my summer vacation after the seventh grade — I started school a year later than other kids my own age, so I was almost fourteen — were spent with my mother in a cottage. It stood in the middle of a pine forest, near a little clear-water lake, in Waldau, southeast of Berlin.

This country place belonged to a childless couple from Jüterbog, friends of my father, who spent their summers in Bulgaria or Hungary, but whose continued loyalty to us was not entirely unselfish. My mother, who paid rent for our stay, was also the one who cleaned the gutters, washed the curtains, beat the carpets, pulled a handcart to the flea market, had the propane bottles refilled, called in the man to clean out the septic tank, and even initiated little improvements like the installment of an outdoor light — she wasn’t about to step on a toad a second time.

The cottage didn’t have a television, and even before we left I was afraid I’d be bored. Boredom defined my life in general. I was bored every day, although three times a week I took target practice — I was considered to have some talent at Olympic rapid-fire pistol.

There’s a snapshot of me in Waldau — I’m wearing shorts and sitting bent over the table, staring straight ahead and massaging my calves. I still know exactly what I was thinking at that moment: I was dreaming of the new soccer season and of Dynamo Dresden winning game after game with a perfectly balanced team, of their becoming league champions and taking the cup.

When I was in kindergarten I thought of reading as something magical, that when you reached a certain age you mastered it without even trying. But when the day came that I realized reading was all about a tedious, monotonous combination of letters and syllables, it turned into just another dreary subject in school.

So when my mother asked what books she should pack for me for our vacation, it was a question of almost unsurpassable hypocrisy.

For my sake she played badminton, chess, or battleships. I rode my bike and did the shopping at the village Konsum store, where the Sport Echo went on sale after eight in the morning. As an early riser I spent the first hours of the day on a rickety man’s bicycle, riding through the woods, listening to my music cassettes played on our landlord’s Stern tape recorder that I tied to the basket.

On my third early-morning excursion, I misjudged a puddle. My front wheel got stuck, as if an iron hand had grabbed hold of it — and I went flying. Pain, pain worse than the worst stitch in your side, knocked the air out of me. Sand burned in my eyes. But the awful part was the silence. Half blind, howling with rage and pain, and with a couple of broken ribs, or so I believed, I crawled back to the puddle and pulled the Stern tape recorder out of the muck. I ejected the cassette once, twice, three times, reinserted it again each time — all in vain. Only the radio still worked.

As I knelt there in the sand, trying to scratch the mud out of the cracks in the wooden housing, morning devotions were being broadcast on AM. God’s word falls like rain upon the soil, but it may indeed run off to no avail. To catch the rain, we must dig ditches. The pastor spoke at length about digging ditches, which was exactly the same as reading the New Testament in order to be prepared to receive God’s word. Moreover, God gave each of us a sign in due season. At the pastor’s concluding words, I turned the radio off.

I didn’t know what to do. One corner of the housing had broken off. A Stern tape recorder cost more than my mother earned in a month. When I looked up, there was a deer standing in the road about twenty yards away. It turned its head to me. After we had stared at each other for a while, it strode off, vanishing into a copse of young trees.

Had it been a unicorn, I could not have been more profoundly moved. Suddenly I was praying. I thanked God for his sign, that he had led me into the woods and spoken to me. And for the first time it was I who directed my words to the Lord God, not just some child reciting bedtime prayers. No, I was praying now. I begged for help, help amid my distress, and included my mother and the radio pastor in my request for eternal life. I promised that henceforth I would dig my ditches, deep ditches, which would collect God’s word and from which I would draw water forever and ever. Now strengthened and calmed, I in fact found the broken-off piece of housing and hoped for another miracle.