Ingo Schulze - New Lives

I had credited it to my own influence that after the last gym class before summer vacation his shoes of tribulation had stayed in one spot. Hendrik sat down to put one on, but as he picked it up water gushed out, drenching his stockinged feet — and I likewise found myself standing in the middle of the puddle, which added to the hilarity. And those same shoes had now crept into our house, had made their way to my room, where their heels were scuffing my bed frame.

“Amen,” Hendrik said. His hands still lay folded on the open Bible. His head hanging askew, he eyed me as if it were now my turn. “Amen,” I said, and stared again at his shoes.

Since I didn’t know what else to do and could hardly ask him to repeat his prayer, I suggested we take a walk. He instantly agreed. But first I had to take the pliers back to the kitchen. Have you ever roasted a turkey? My job was to set the pliers to the tendons my mother had cut free and tug them out while my mothers held on to the headless bird. The meat on the drumstick would slip up the bone to form ridiculous knickerbockers. Each drumstick has several such tendons, and although I would pull my mother almost across the table, while she let out little screeches, we never managed to rip them all out. Already repacked like a Christmas Räuchermännchen, Hendrik watched us, and then smiled vacantly as he took leave of my mother with a low bow.

Hendrik didn’t leave me in peace for a single moment of our walk. He wanted to know how often I prayed, what I did when I felt I couldn’t love certain people and instead really detested them, and if the desire for eternal life wasn’t selfish. Hendrik elaborated on his own understandings and suggestions, and where before he had talked about “Christians,” he now said we, which at first I misheard as ye, until it became absolutely clear that it was we who no longer had to fear death and we who were called to conduct ourselves differently from other people. His conversion was obvious, but because I wanted to be totally convinced of it — yet found a direct question inappropriate — I kept extending our walk. It was only as we passed the parish hall on our way back that I was granted certainty. There was a poster pasted in a street-level window: “God’s word lives. Through you!” The poster was about a special donation, but it seemed to me that Jesus himself had written this with me in mind. I smiled in some embarrassment and lowered my eyes, expecting Hendrik to break into cries of astonishment, if not admiration. Wasn’t it a miracle — this poster, right here, right now? But Hendrik didn’t notice the poster or didn’t apply it to us, though that did nothing to alter my certainty that I had saved a soul and become a true fisher of men. I said good-bye to Hendrik. His visit, I told him, was my finest Christmas present. We shook hands — his mother had taught him to grip with exaggerated firmness. I was about to turn away, when Hendrik’s upper body tipped forward. I assumed he was going to bow — instead his forehead touched my shoulder. And at that moment my entire euphoria vanished. I realized that from now on I’d have Hendrik on my back.

I’ve described this to you not for its own sake — there are so many other things I could tell you — but because I planned to make the experience the stuff of my first short story.

The broad rib of the fountain pen that had miraculously found its way into Aunt Camilla’s package along with the candy gave my handwriting a certain evenness. Writing itself — the motions of my hand, the look of each loop — provided me an unfamiliar satisfaction.

My new pen accelerated my thoughts; after only three pages I had arrived at our joint prayers. When suddenly — and at that moment I was still certain that the flow of my words would lift me imperceptibly across this dangerous reef — my memory was paralyzed by my mind’s digression, by the sin of having thought of Hendrik’s shoes and my schoolmates’ high jinks instead of praying for his conversion. If I couldn’t manage to lend assistance to someone struggling toward salvation…I screwed the cap back on my pen, holding it in my left hand and turning the pen three times, then laid it, the tool of my trade, across the top edge of my diary. It was as if I had ended each workday with this same gesture for years.

Suddenly I understood: The fact that I had failed as a person, as a creature of God, was precisely what would enable me to be a literary figure. And that was the crucial realization: I was not to keep a diary, but to write a work unlike any other, a work that glorified the deeds of God.

I slipped into the living room, where the fragrance of Western coffee and Fa soap contended against local odors, and pulled my mother’s stationery pad from its drawer. I flipped it open, set the lined paper to rights, took out my pen, placed the cap on the other end, and without hesitation wrote the word “Birth,” centering it at the top of the page. And beneath it: A Story by — new line — Enrico Türmer. And as content as if I had just completed my opus, I went to bed.

In the light of dawn and with a sweater pulled over my pajamas, I was once again at my desk. I longed to describe my failure in expansive loops that swung above and below the lines, forming as if all on their own great, long sentences. But since this was to be a story, I first needed to describe the terrain and the persons moving across it, so that after my first sentence—“The doorbell rang.”—the plot came to a halt for a long while.

My plan for completing my work over the first two days of Christmas, then at least before year’s end, and finally before the end of the holiday break, proved illusory.

I was deeply aware of the ambiguity of the situation — meeting Hendrik in the morning and then writing about him in the afternoon. As expected, he had lost all inhibitions and made a beeline straight for me. He would even be sitting in my seat every morning, as if to say: I’ve been waiting for you. It was almost impossible to talk to anyone else without him at my side. If he tripped over an outstretched leg, or couldn’t find his shoes, or saw drawings on the blackboard — the teachers called them smut — bearing his name, he would simply draw himself up, set his head at an angle, and smile, which was his way of saying: I shall turn the other cheek to you. At least I was able to convince him to unbutton the top button of his shirt. I also put up with Hendrik’s babblings about positive and negative energies in the cosmos, for who besides Hendrik could tell me what it felt like to be seized by the Holy Spirit — the greater the detail, the better.

One day during winter break as Hendrik and I made our way to Youth Fellowship, I interrupted him in the middle of his theorizing about the creation of the world. Hendrik didn’t understand what I meant. I turned angry — so did I need to ask him outright whether he had heard a voice and what it had said to him?

The Christian faith, Hendrik replied at last, brings order into life. And besides — and here came his “turn-the-other-cheek” smile — it certainly couldn’t hurt to be a believer. If it isn’t true, Hendrik concluded, we’ll never be aware it of anyway.

I flinched. I wanted to smack his ugly face, call him a goddamned fraud, hand him over to every torture that the hell of a schoolroom is capable of. “The devil is a logician!”—I later read somewhere in Heine.

“Hendrik slapped the pen from my hand”—for months that remained the last entry in my diary.

I was still wallowing in my suffering in August when we returned to Waldau, where I did nothing but read eight volumes bound in marbled gray and bearing a gold-on-blue mantra on their spines — the name Hermann Hesse. They were a present from Aunt Camilla, which had simply arrived without notice. Hidden in their pages was a fragrance richer and finer than any Intershop 111perfume. The fragrance filled my hours of reading, it was my incense and blended only very slowly with the scent of the Waldau woods and cottage. But I didn’t realize that until I was back home.