Ingo Schulze - New Lives

Wednesday, March 28, ’90

Dear Jo,

And now Böhme too! It just keeps getting more and more absurd. State Security was the de facto founder of our opposition groups. 118The local CDU candidate withdrew when it came out that all members of parliament would be subject to a check. 119

Our most recent issue sold better. There were a few responses to my election editorial. 120One letter said that the people of the GDR had shamed themselves before the whole world. It ended with the sardonic wish that we wouldn’t go bankrupt all too quickly in the capitalist marketplace we so admired. The Prophet reappeared as well. There he suddenly stood in the office, looking from one of us to the other, but without responding to our greetings. He thrust his chin out in triumph, his cotton-candy beard protruding into the room, and then ripped to shreds a sheet of paper — our subscription form, as it turned out. He tossed the confetti into the air. “That was that,” he said, and departed posthaste. The scene proved all the more grotesque, because Fred has assured us that the Prophet’s name was nowhere on our subscription list.

We now have four extra pages. We’re lucky if we’re done before one in the morning.

This morning the baron stopped by to tell us about his latest discoveries. Astrid the wolf always trots straight for her water bowl.

He had more to tell us about the Madonna. Evidently no one knows how it ended up in the parsonage. He has already invited an expert from Hildesheim who is supposed to offer some clarifications. “Shall we pilfer her from the clerics?” Barrista asked. From his attaché case he pulled an illustrated volume, 121wrapped in the same washable protective jacket as Robert’s textbook atlas. He read to us from it — the purport being that in its Sienese and Florentine panels Altenburg possesses a collection in which can be traced the birth of postclassical art in the West. He asked if I could guess his intentions.

“Just picture it — the hereditary prince arrives, and the Madonna enters the museum in triumphal procession.”

To be honest I don’t understand why that should be so important.

As he spoke Barrista ogled the plate of pancakes Ilona had set dead center in the table. I told him to dig in. Which he did, and with gusto, and forgot all about his Madonna. He pursed his lips, licked at the sugar, and opened wide. Ilona’s eyes grew bigger with each new pancake Barrista gobbled down. She was still chewing on her first. Once his plate was empty, Barrista sighed. Lost in thought, he patted his potbelly, slipped down deeper into his chair, and licked the fingers of his right hand, one after the other. He left it to the wolf to clean up his left hand dangling at his side. Ilona chewed and chewed some more.

An older gentleman burst into this idyllic scene. He asked for Georg — they had an appointment, and he was right on time. Georg and Jörg had left for Leipzig to read proofs. I hoped that would take care of the matter. “No-o-o,” he bleated, this time he was going to insist on speaking with someone in charge, even if evidently only people who pulled up in black limos could get a hearing here. He meant the LeBaron. But a yawn from Astrid the wolf and one glance at its blind eye were enough to disconcert him.

“Pohlmann — from Meuselwitz, Thuringia,” the man said, introducing himself, greeting first me, then the baron, with a handshake. Still chewing, Ilona jumped up and ran into the kitchen.

The man was not, as I had feared, a local folklorist, at least not one with the usual photographs of the kaiser. Once we were alone in the next room he seemed calmer, more friendly.

“You should know,” he said, and addressed me by name, “that I have waited forty years for this moment.” An enlarged passport photo lay on top. “Siegfried Flack,” he said, “my ninth-grade German teacher, was arrested on March 27, 1950.” Pohlmann listed the names of teachers and students, most of them from Karl Marx High School, who had passed out flyers and painted a large F (for freedom) on building walls — which had cost all of them their lives, except for the few who managed to flee to the West. One of the leaders of the group, a pastor’s son, had smuggled flyers in from West Berlin on several occasions. At some point they nabbed him. It wasn’t until 1959 that his parents were informed by the Red Cross that he had “passed away” in Moscow’s Lubyanka prison in 1951. Pohlmann spoke with deliberate calm, and sometimes his sentences sounded rehearsed. As he handed me the folder, he stood up. “We must break the silence. Truth must see the light of day at last.” I assumed these were his parting words and thanked him. But Pohlmann sat down again and gazed at me. I paged through his folder. I flinched each time he thrust his hand between the pages. Again and again I was forced to leaf back and submit to yet another explanation, even if the previous one was far from finished. And all the while I could hear the baron’s singsong coming from the editorial office.

Pohlmann had entrusted me with letters and minutes of conversations, all meticulously dated and footnoted. I asked what he wanted done with them, and just as he shouted, “Publish them!” Ilona burst into the room. Ashen pale she stood on the threshold, staring at me as if I were a ghost. “Oh, here you are,” she said lamely, and retreated.

Ilona had frequently rescued me from annoying visitors. But this time something really must have happened. Pohlmann had likewise been disconcerted by the sight of her.

I asked him to wait and walked across to the editorial office. The baron was leaning against the table, waving a fan of hundred-D-mark bills. “All you need to know is right here,” he said, spreading the money on the table as if showing a winning hand. The wolf shook itself, its collar rattled. “They didn’t ask for a receipt,” the baron said, tugging at his right lower eyelid with one finger, and was gone.

There were twelve, twelve D-mark hundreds. All I could read was GRAND OPENING, and to each side a rather deftly sketched hand extending an index finger.

Hoping to learn more about what had occurred, I entered the little kitchenette. Ilona cringed. I touched her shoulder; she collapsed onto the low stool.

I crouched down beside her. I was hit with the scent of Ilona, a mixture of perfume and sweat that doesn’t usually pervade the office until noon.

“I’m so embarrassed,” she whispered. “I’m so embarrassed!” Steering clear of any questions, I took her cold hands between mine, and only then did Ilona start to talk, although it was all so muddled that I constantly had to interrupt.

She had thought she was alone in the office, except for me and Pohlmann, of course. She had cleared the table, but also stacked the platter with more pancakes, and started to wash up. There was a knock and she was about to go to the door, when to her surprise she heard my voice — at least, she thought it was mine. She had felt sorry for me, because once again it was me who had to play receptionist.

But then — and she swore she never eavesdrops — it had been such fun listening to me deal with the two Westerners. They finally came around to admitting that they were interested in getting in on the ground floor of the video business “in a big way.”

She had had to chuckle at how good I was at describing the local appetite for videos, particularly special videos — I knew what she meant, right?

I had claimed we couldn’t possibly take any more ads for next week, that we already had more than we could use — actually, I had said “overcommitted”—and deeply regretted, given present circumstances, that we were in no position to increase the number of pages from one day to the next. She had especially admired this last assertion.