Ingo Schulze - New Lives

Had I fallen among thieves, my mother asked.

I rummaged the bookshelf above the night storage heater. Lord, I prayed, give me your New Testament. In my hand was a thick gray book without its dust jacket. I deciphered the red lettering as Martin Eden. The name Jack London meant something to me. I sat down in a chaise longue and started to read, and I would normally have given up very quickly, since it wasn’t about wolves or gold miners, but about a writer. But the fact that this book had chosen me could not be accidental. The more I read, the more the story spoke to me.

It was one o’clock, well after one, when I was called in for our midday meal — the entire morning had flown by. I had been reading for more than three hours. Then it came to me: I didn’t have to be bored anymore. Anyone who was a reader as a child cannot understand what Copernican dimensions that insight had for me.

The day was not over, and you may suspect what happened next. After all, I was reading the story of a starving but determined and undaunted writer who would make it in the end…

As I took my shower that evening I asked myself about the meaning of this substitution. I had been looking for the Bible and had found Martin Eden. What was God trying to say to me? As warm water ran down over my face, I was struck by my third insight of the day: I was meant to become a writer!

I stood there motionless under the shower for a while. I was meant to turn my experience in the woods into a story about how strange it was that my tape recorder had fallen silent, while the radio had remained intact so that I could hear the voice of God. I would write what others dared not say, that the West was better than the East, for example, that we weren’t allowed to travel to the West even though we wanted to. When everyone else went to work, I would stay home and write. When I entered a pub, everyone would turn around to look at me. Because everyone knew about my speech in which I had indicted the state. “One man at least,” they’d whisper, “one man at least who’s willing to speak out.” My family and I would have a difficult time of it, however, because I was a thorn in the government’s side.

Cold water wrenched me out of my dream world. My mother called me inconsiderate and selfish for not leaving any warm water — after all, she was the one who had heated the stove and glued the broken corner back on the tape recorder.

Her accusations were a double blow. I had to remain silent, however. But the day would come when I would write about it and my mother would read and finally understand that it had not been selfishness or even a lack of consideration, but just the opposite. She would be proud of me, would laugh and at the same time have to cry a little, because she had had no idea that a writer was being born, although it was happening right before her eyes.

When I awoke the next morning, I smiled when I spotted the gray book beside my pillow. I felt like Martin Eden was my brother. And then I had to smile for having smiled.

I rode my bike to the village bakery and waited until the Konsum opened. I hid my first notebook, a five-by-eight sketchpad, in the shed.

After breakfast I retreated to my chaise longue. But I was too excited to read. I felt compelled to record what I had experienced, was afraid I’d forget things. When my mother wasn’t watching, I laid the book aside, slipped the sketchpad under my shirt and a ballpoint into my saddlebag. I would write my first sentence at the place of my conversion. The first sentence of a great writer! For neither at that moment nor later did I ever doubt my talent.

When I finally put pen to paper, the pen didn’t work. Which is why my memoirs begin with crazy squiggles above the date and time. At ten on the dot I finally wrote: “Praise be to Jesus Christ!”

What happened then can only be explained as the work of the Holy Spirit. He guided my hand for seven pages, without my hesitating even once, without my having to correct so much as a single word. My turns of phrase thrilled even me. I was giving the world something unlike anything it had known before in this form. Even if I should never put another word to paper, these lines would endure.

When I returned home I discovered something remarkable that — though I was now acquainted with miracles — frightened me. The roof of the cottage was covered with snow. I got off my bike. What I saw, I saw — snow! A field of snow as large as our tin roof. No white anywhere else, and even after walking my bike halfway across the yard, what my eyes saw and what my reason told me were incompatible. Suddenly my mother was standing beside me. “Daydreaming?” she asked. My gaze was fixed on the tin roof. “Snow,” I said. “You’re right,” she said, “it does glisten like snow.”

Happy days followed. Mornings, between seven and eight, I would take my seat at a little table in the perfect silence, watching the sun cautiously grope on spidery legs through the pine trees, lie down on the bed of moss that my mother had raked free of needles and cones, turning it lustrous. The sketchpad lay under my opened Martin Eden, and no more than the book could hide it, was I now going to make any effort to hide my calling. That wasn’t even possible. I switched back and forth between book and sketchpad so often that reading and writing became one and the same. It was the only thing that I took any pleasure in and for which I seemed to have been born. Suddenly I found a hundred thoughts inside me, where before there had not been one.

I remember, however, hardly anything of Martin Eden and nothing of what I wrote at the time. It now seems to me as if I pursued the whole thing simply so that the world might be captured inside those pages, so that all its sounds, smells, and colors can fall into my lap whenever I remember those days. Otherwise how could I recall the Igelit 97tablecloth, a green and white checkerboard that clung to my bare knees whenever I sat down to write? How many times was I just about to shove it aside, which would have been easy as pie, but then never did it, as if afraid I would lose the source of my inspiration.

When from the chaise longue I would gaze up through the crowns of the pine trees — the sunglasses I had found in a kitchen cupboard cast a turquoise hue over everything — I felt as if I were at the bottom of the sea, looking up to the surface. When the sun slipped behind a tree trunk, pinks and reds turned purple. Sunsets were the loveliest part, when the evening light lay almost horizontal over the lake, lending trunks and branches a rusty red glow. When the light vanished at last from the treetops, it drenched the bellies of the clouds in violet — to have looked away would have been a sacrilege. Each morning when I went to fetch our breakfast rolls, the gossamer webs draped among the grasses were the same whitish gray as the morning moon — lingering phantoms and shadows of night.

Every sound was there simply to affirm the silence (a silence that I will get around to talking about later, much later).

Happy that her son had finally come to his senses, my mother thanked me by coddling me and watching as I played with the twenty-six symbols.

I sat down to my meals as a writer exhausted by his labors. And I wanted to write about that too, about what it’s like when you rest from your work. Every thought, every sensation, every observation was precious and transient. I was a collector, a discoverer on a mission to glean all things remarkable and noteworthy, to describe them, to share them with humanity. How had I possibly lived before this? How had I endured this life? How did my mother endure her existence?

Vera visited us for the last few days. She asked no questions. She just looked at the book in my hands and announced, “Oh, Enrico is reading a book with the fascinating title Father Goriot !”—or—“Ah, my brother Enrico is familiarizing himself with the works of the great humanist Charles Dickens.” I had nothing more to fear from her. Besides which I profited from my mother’s conviction that anyone sleeping or reading was never to be disturbed — a rule that until then had worked to my disadvantage.