Ingo Schulze - New Lives

One of them kept asking what it would cost — and it was immediately clear to her what he meant, but I had played dumb. In the end she ventured to step across into the office. At first she had seen only backs — two charcoal gray overcoats bent over the table. And then, yes then, she saw Herr von Barrista in the swivel chair, his sticky hands folded across his stomach. Barrista had spoken in my voice, even grinned at her, and gone right on talking in — yes, she would swear to it — in my voice.

I gave her time to have a good cry, and then tried to get back to basic facts as quickly as possible.

I asked Ilona what was so horrible about all this. She had simply confused the voices coming from the room on her left with those coming from the right — they were both about the same distance from the kitchen. An acoustical illusion, that was all. Why would the baron imitate me?

But Ilona just shook her head. What was that supposed to mean? I asked. She shook her head again; to everything I said she just kept on shaking her head.

Suddenly Pohlmann was standing at the door. He offered to leave his folder here with me for a few days. I thanked him.

“The money,” Ilona suddenly exclaimed. “Where’s the money?” It was still lying there fanned out on the table. But instead of calming down now, Ilona pointed at the platter and whispered, “He ate every one, all by himself!”

I sent Ilona to the bakery. The fresh air did her good. She kept mum too, since I could hardly tell Georg that it was Barrista who had accepted the ad for us. We got into enough of a squabble as it was, because Steen’s full-pager also had to appear in our next issue. Georg says we’re digging our own grave for the sake of short-term financial benefits. And I’m offering all the wrong arguments in claiming that the article is yet to be written that would increase sales by twelve hundred D-marks. 122Jörg said not a word until I offered to return both the money and the ad. Because actually none of it is really any of my business.

Hugs,

Your E.

Friday, March 30, ’90

Dear Nicoletta,

I’m not sure whether all the things I’m allowed to experience these days should be called compensation for those I’ve missed out on until now. Believe me, I love to wake up and to fall asleep, brushing my teeth is as much a joy as shopping or vacuuming. I love to calculate the price for a half-page ad at 20 percent discount as a standing order plus a 50 percent surcharge for being on the last page. No matter what I do I am suffused with a quiet sense of passion, a contentment that is very difficult to describe. It’s not a sense of being lost to the world, like a child at play, although it’s probably more that than anything else. It’s as if I can now take up in my hand every object that I could only look at before, as if it’s only now that I’m able to experience the world as space and myself as a body. As if I’ve finally been granted permission to participate in life. Each memory, precisely because it brings such misery with it, allows me to judge how wonderful the present is.

I’ve been trying to describe my fall, my original sin, to you, just the way I remembered it before I began to write my novella. Because now there’s hardly a memory left — at least in regard to those days in October — that I can trust. I’ve toyed with these images too often.

Picture the hiking map outside a country inn and the red dot that says, “You are here,” until it’s erased by countless fingertips tapping at it day in and day out. Over the years that white spot gobbles up its environs, the local tourist sights and outlook points vanish, then a village, a city — it’s all merely a question of scale.

Of course this is no special inadequacy peculiar to me, but rather the standard practice of every writer. Not an experience that isn’t trimmed away at and twisted, that doesn’t undergo amputation and then get fitted with a more efficient prosthesis. It’s really quite simple, but until you realize it, your most important memories have already been bungled. There’s truly no lack of examples.

Which is why, for example, I always imagined the autumn of my second summer in Arcadia to have been cradled in the sounds of Schütz motets. Their spiritual tones seemed to have flung open the school windows, they filled late Saturday afternoons in the Church of the Holy Cross, 123and resounded every day from my record player. Like some comforting prophecy, they accompanied me, enveloped me.

Ten years later, as I was working on my novella (I always called it a novella, although its oversize torso had grown to several hundred pages), 124I only needed to put on The Seven Last Words and I would react like one of Pavlov’s dogs. In a flash those days of September and October would reappear: the chestnut trees in front of the school, the rusty bicycle stands, the wind — at times a wild ocean gale that would scoop up the wet leaves still lying shimmering yellow on the asphalt, at other times a warm breeze that seemed to hold within it the last days of summer as it swept down across the Elbe from the slopes of Loschwitz with its Italianate villas. My characters emerged out of those voices, and I could see the muted light of trams, see clouds angled against the wind in the bluish pink late-afternoon sky; but I could also hear the rattling key chain of Herr Myslewksi, our homeroom teacher, whenever he led us down to the cellar for one of his “private talks,” as he called his interrogations.

After I had given up on my novella — so that The Seven Last Words reminded me more of my attempt at writing than of that autumn — I noticed the dedication on the back of the album cover: For Enrico, Christmas ’79, from Vera. Which meant I had been given the motets two years afterward. And to this very day I own no other Schütz recording.

In writing to you about all this, I have to pull my memories out from under the opulent scenes of my novella the way a medic pulls bodies out from under a wreck, not knowing whether they are alive or dead.

Holy Cross School, 125with its looming dark walls, was my Maulbronn. 126Enmeshed in my Budapest dreams and the freedom of my vacation reading, I could regard this building, which I would enter and leave for the next four years, only as the setting for a novel. At the same time I wanted to take seriously the inscription written above its main portal: “To the glory of God, in honor of its founders, and for the benefit and piety of the young.” 127From the first day after my return from Budapest, when I inquired about the shortest route to school, that motto fit nicely into my Hermann Hesse world. As did Schiller Platz with its Café Toscana, the Elbe with its ferries and meadows, the Blue Wonder Bridge, the Elbe Hotel, the Wilhelminien villas and palaces in Blasewitz — they all enlivened my dream world. Farther up the Elbe one could trace the rocky plateaus of Saxon Switzerland, beyond which — after a hike of several days — lay Prague. Just as in Montagnola, 128a pilgrim in search of the good and the beautiful could stop to sojourn in all these places. Reread Narcissus and Goldmund or Beneath the Wheel and you’ll understand what I saw.

The drama of the weeks that followed, however, was not because of Myslewski, who called us boys, one by one, to the cellar, where in a locked chamber full of oscillographs he began my interrogation with the question of why I thought world peace was unimportant. Nor was the drama a matter of my suddenly getting Cs and Ds instead of As and Bs, plus an F in spelling. I might even have been able to cope with the loss of my free time had it not been for HIM. HE left me in a despair unlike any I had known until then — and would not experience again until last autumn.