Ingo Schulze - New Lives

Maybe there have to be meetings like these. But this one left me downright sick with boredom. 14

After about an hour a woman two tables away stood up. Her glasses were so big and her mass of hair so wiglike that it was hard to tell her age. Whatever she had to say, it was incomprehensible. When ordered to speak louder, she shouted, “I am prepared to assume leadership of the New Forum.” Asked to give her name, she cried out enthusiastically, “My name is—” but then broke off abruptly and repeated her offer to take over the leadership. Egged on by applause and catcalls, she greeted us with a raised left fist.

Out of consideration for Georg and Jörg, and especially for Ralf, I didn’t join in the applause. Even my smile appeared to offend him.

After her, the loudmouth on the steering committee grabbed the mic. He stressed every second or third word and bounced up and down, flexing his knees. He laughed as he spoke, as if every word were practical proof of just how undeniably right he was. He then pointed his pencil at who ever he decided to give the floor to. Shouted insults — he was a stewie 15and a bungler. “There’s a solution to everything,” he shouted, “once basic issues of power are resolved and democratic structures are put in place.”

Whole groups were now deserting the hall. Suddenly Ralf was speaking. With one hand on his belt, as if to keep his trousers from drooping, he held both the mike and his manuscript in the other. He was also gesticulating, making him barely comprehensible, and didn’t understand what all the shouts of “Mike! mike!” were about. Finally he stated his demands, point by point, but got out of sync with himself because he turned around to get a look at his hecklers, while his wife kept hissing, “Keep going!”

“No establishment of West German parties, partnership with other democratic forces in the East, a halt to full-scale demolition in the old city, investigation into the sale of the Council Library, punishment for Schalck-Golodkowski, 16free elections, brown coal mines to be kept open, continuation of Wismut 17for peaceful purposes, dismissal of agitators from school faculties, withdrawal from the Warsaw Pact, alternative service…”

“Keep going! Keep going!” his wife whispered.

After a good three hours, the meeting was declared adjourned. A few voices took up the German national anthem, but were drowned out by general noise. Most of the items on the agenda had to be eliminated, including the announcement of our newspaper.

Ralf fell silent. I tried to smile. His wife lowered her gaze as if in embarrassment — for herself, for me, for Ralf, for the whole assembly. As we left, Ralf asked my opinion. “And be honest, Enrico, really honest.”

Outside the coatroom I ran right into the Prophet. “No! No! Terrible!” he shouted at me, and a moment later blocked someone else’s path with his “No! No! Terrible!” He could still be heard until we were out of the building.

Georg invited me to join them at the Wenzel, 18where people were expecting us.

A hulk of a man was propped against the front desk, but he spread his arms wide once he saw us. There were sweat stains in the armpits of his gray jacket. He pressed me to his chest and greeted me by murmuring my first name in my ear. He had already been a guest at my home, he said. Then he instructed us to address Jan Staan, whom we would meet shortly, by his name, to say not just “Good evening” but “Good evening, Herr Staan” (I could have sworn he said “Staan”), and to use phrases like “A pleasure to make your acquaintance,” or “Very happy to meet you.” A waitress was just closing up the restaurant, and since Wolfgang the Hulk had fallen silent, we could hear in the intervening moments her footfall, purring lamps, and distant music. Suddenly screams, laughter, shouts, a deafening racket. A woman staggered past, bumping my shoulder, blond, plump, a wart on her chin. She dabbed at her damp décolletage, her white blouse clung to her belly and breasts, and her mascara was running. Faces in the doorway vanished again. The blonde threw her shoulders back and displayed herself as if before a mirror.

Wolfgang the Hulk brushed against her as he made his way toward the bar, she lurched as if he had given her a push. We followed him into the shadows. I stayed close behind Jörg. “Does anyone want to dance a polonaise?” a woman shouted, thrusting her hot hands against my back. Someone patted my rear end. The most I could make out as I looked around were bright articles of clothing. The spotlight above the dance floor, with bare arms writhing under the cone of its beam, was my sole orientation point.

The farther we pressed forward, the better progress we made and the brighter the light. We steered for a group of men standing in a circle. They stepped back, revealing a clutch of women who had squeezed themselves by twos and threes into the few armchairs.

We halted in front of a man sitting in the midst of these women. Groaning, he pushed himself to the edge of his armchair, but stood up with surprisingly little effort considering his massive belly. As he fumbled at the buttons of his sport coat, dots of light from the disco ball danced across his forehead. I was the last to receive a handshake and a business card: Jan Steen. His gaze slid down over me, he smiled and fell back into his chair.

“It’s time to do some business,” one of the men shouted in a commanding voice, and clapped his hands. One after the other the women reluctantly stood up, and we sat down on chair cushions still warm from their bodies.

Jörg and Georg had sat down on each side of Steen. Because they had to shout to be heard over the noise and music, it looked as if they were telling him off. Steen, however, obviously soon lost interest in my bosses, and his glance skittered about the room. But when he held out his glass to the waitress — a bleached-blond Bulgarian who, had the contest been on the up-and-up, should have been last year’s Miss Altenburg — he smiled and raised it in a toast to the women. They pretended not to notice. They were sulking. One was so insulted that she dismissed us by turning her bare pudgy back on us.

To make up for Jörg’s total abstinence and Georg’s restraint, Wolfgang and I drank every brandy Steen ordered. Wolfgang lined up his empty glasses next to the ashtray between his feet and kneaded his hands. He said he worked for Air Research Technologies, whose abbreviation was the same as the Altenburg Regional Theater — ART. I told him the story of how the staff of the Wenzel thought they had caught a swindler when Air Research Technologies refused to pay my bill. Wolfgang smiled to himself. Even those few sentences had left me hoarse. We spent our time toasting in various directions and drinking. I was soon aglow with a surge of goodwill.

A very tall woman — a good match for Wolfgang the Hulk — was now standing beside him. She pulled rimless glasses out of her purse. I was about to offer her my seat when Wolfgang gave my thigh a slap and stood up. Without so much as inviting her to stay, Jan Steen kissed the woman’s hand in farewell. Jörg and Georg now departed with the two giants. And suddenly I was alone with Jan Steen, who was tapping his knee with his right hand to some inscrutable rhythm. When I raised a glass to him he responded to my greeting with a broad wave of his arm. Slowly the women returned and gathered around him again. I shouted to him how wonderful it was to drink and at the same time watch drunks dance. And then I burst into laughter because I suddenly found it very funny that he and I expected nothing more of each other than to sit here side by side and watch these women down their drinks and teeter around the dance floor with wilder and wilder wriggling motions. If only it doesn’t stop now, I thought, if only this can go on and on.