Ingo Schulze - New Lives

“Especially now that we’ve reached a critical point,” he said, “you have to know what you want to do.” His voice was insistent, but so low that even Ilona, whom we’d just heard moving about in the kitchen, could not have heard him. Then Felix, Georg’s oldest boy, came back from taking the wolf for a walk, and the baron asked if I’d care to accompany him on a stroll through town. So far he’d just been rushing from appointment to appointment, but now he’d just like to be carried along with the current. I had to turn him down, but was told we can keep the car for a while yet.

Your E.

Wednesday, March 21, ’90

Dear Nicoletta,

Even more promising than the Bamberg cancellation on the envelope are the two exclamation marks in the margin and the underlining, which I take is your handwriting. 109

Barrista is back in town already. He admitted that you had had an argument. Of course he denied my questions at first and refused to admit that there was an “argument,” but then conceded that he had not understood why he should have any less right to spend time in our office than you. If we didn’t want him here, then I should tell him so. Finally he confessed that his reaction had been a bit “defiant,” but assured me twice that he had no reason to accuse you of anything, and spoke effusively of your articles in Stern magazine, of which I’m sorry to say I was quite unaware. If there needs to be a reconciliation, he’s willing to take the first step.

Barrista went on to ask whether I might not be thinking differently about some things today. I asked what he meant. In the West, he told me, considerably more people were disappointed about the results of the election than here. He — that is, Barrista — wasn’t interested in any particular political point of view, but rather in democracy. The state at any rate stood in its citizens’ way more often than it advanced their progress.

When I showed him the articles you sent me, he raised his arms and then wearily lowered them again. That was precisely what he meant when he had suggested talking things over calmly. Barrista had once expressed a wish that as time went on we ought to discuss things more, so that we could put as many ideas on the table as possible — although that surely is not quite the same thing […]

From his attaché case he pulled out a binder that was much too small for the mass of paper bulging out of it. On top was an almost undecipherable cover letter — I could barely make out my own name — in which he advised who ought to be informed of the contents of this dossier. For the most part it contains copies of newspaper articles and documents by his defense lawyer, plus the final court decision […]

While I thumbed through it — your own material is all there — he worked hard to persuade me. After all, a man doesn’t just walk in one day and say, “Hello, fellows, the prosecuting attorney showed up at my front door two years ago.”

As I would come to realize myself as soon as I assumed the responsibility of running a business, you always stand with one foot in prison. You have to make decisions that — because of unexpected developments, or somebody else’s mistake, or just plain bad luck — can end up taking a wrong turn. All too often he had had to take responsibility for what had been done against his advice, counter to his opinion, counter to his express wishes.

He offered to answer each and every question I might have, although he saw no reason why he should have to justify himself to us.

He urged me to place more stock in the court’s final decision than in the charges. The law regarded him as having no criminal record.

His glibness has made me very suspicious, at least for now. But it is only a hunch, a feeling. Will you help me ask him the right questions?

And now the continuation of my efforts, although I don’t know whether you even want to hear 110another chapter.

With warmest regards, Your Enrico

The first weeks of school saw the high-spirited and happy mood of my vacation deteriorate occasionally into one of sanctimonious self-accusation. Not a day went by that I didn’t fail in my attempt to obey God’s commandments. Keeping a diary meant answering for my conduct. Future generations were supposed to know what their famous author had felt, thought, and done as a young man and learn what high standards he had demanded of himself.

What I’m going to tell you about now isn’t in the diary. I’ll try to be as brief as possible.

After my arcadian summer I found my classmates — we were eighth graders now — to be a childish bunch. No one with whom I would have been able to talk about my incredible experiences, nothing they might talk about in discotheques, garages, and cellars held any interest for me. Hendrik must have sensed this, it must have emboldened him.

A speech defect and frightening skinniness had made Hendrik a favorite object of bullies since first grade, and I had defended him on many an occasion, although without much real sympathy. He would strut around me like a raven, holding his birdlike head at an angle and pointing an elbow at me, crooking first his left arm, then his right, as if scratching at his armpit, and then lunge closer with a hop to ask me a question. Sometimes he wanted to know if I had gone on an excursion over the weekend, sometimes whether we had a record player, things like that. Each time I would provide an answer, to which he then responded with a wicked smile and slunk away without another word, evidently convinced he had just had a great conversation.

It must have been November already — we had stopped going to the schoolyard for recess — when he whispered to me something about creatures of a higher intelligence. This was all the more surprising since his mother worked for the police and his father, a stern, tightfisted man, was the school janitor.

From then on, day after day, Hendrik muttered some new infallible proof for our having descended from extraterrestrial creatures and — while intertwining arms and hands as if trying to put himself in shackles — offered his theory about the form of energy he assumed they had used to power their extraterrestrial spaceships. Shortly before Christmas Hendrik asked me if I now believed his theory. It was the first time he had sounded angry. “No,” I said, “I believe in Jesus Christ.”

The words — I had never spoken them before — shocked even me. It was as if a voice had announced from the clouds during roll call: “Enrico, you are my beloved son, in whom I am well pleased.” It took me all weekend to capture this last scene in my diary.

On the morning of December 24th, Hendrik appeared at our door and, without waiting to be asked, stepped inside on his raven legs. He had to talk to me. As if his mother actually did dress him — as everyone claimed — almost nothing of his face was visible between cap and scarf. He admired my strong faith, he said, wanted to be able to believe the way I did, and asked me for help. He announced this in our vestibule. The pair of flat-nose pliers in my hand didn’t seem to bother him. My mother — we had been pulling tendons from the turkey’s drumsticks — told Hendrik to take off his coat and dismissed me from duty.

What I told him was that there wasn’t much I could do, that he had to do it himself, but I offered to read the Bible with him, something from the New Testament, and to pray. Obedient as a sick patient, he cracked open the Bible — and his eye fell on the passage where Jesus asks the children to come unto him. Did I think that was a miracle? he asked. I told him that everything is a sign from God. After we read the whole chapter, first I prayed in a low voice, then he did. Suddenly I opened my eyes as if to assure myself that we were actually doing what we were doing. My gaze fell on the ankle-high work shoes that Hendrik had taken to wearing now that his feet were unfortunately as large as his father’s. They hung from him like weights and turned his already stilted gait into a perfect circus act. Although he himself would sigh and try to laugh it off, there wasn’t one gym class in which those old boots weren’t sent hurtling around the dressing room.