Ingo Schulze - New Lives

“It can’t be!” she whispered.

“What can’t be?” was all that I managed. Then I felt dizzy. A minute later I asked from the kitchen floor how many years I had left.

“Four or five,” she said, rammed her feet into her street shoes, and called out: “But it can’t be. This just can’t be!” And pulled the apartment door closed behind her.

The cold floor felt good. I looked up at the ceiling lamp where dirt had collected in its glass bowl, at the hot-water tank with its solitary blue flame. It did good to fix my eyes on things that had never changed my whole life long. Four years! I had to turn my head to see the window. I gave the chipped corner of the windowsill a smile. Four years! There was my ineluctability for me. I had time for one book, maybe two. Wasn’t the proximity of death the prerequisite for any and all creative work? Didn’t everyone try to fake that proximity one way or the other? Four years! I pressed the sentence to me as if it were a promise, an agreement between God and me.

Almost an hour passed before my mother returned. She had ridden her bike to various phone booths, but it had been too late to reach anyone in the X-ray department. She smiled and wiped a handkerchief over her still-reddened face. The results were wrong, she said — a mistake, utter nonsense, otherwise I would barely have made it up the stairs.

“Did you hear me, Enrico? It’s our chance. There’s no army in the world that would take you with those results. The dear Lord himself wants it this way,” she cried with joy.

I had never heard her use that expression. It wasn’t just that her “dear Lord” annoyed me, all I wanted was to be left alone, alone with the things of this world that in an instant had become mine, all of them beautiful, all important.

The more euphoric her words—“You just bewail your fate a little, play the role”—the angrier I got. “Either I’m a conscientious objector, or I go like everyone else has to.”

An hour later I was walking along the Elbe, which lay under a blanket of fog. “For all flesh is as grass,” the Brahms Requiem boomed in my ear, “and all the glory of man as the flower of grass.” How should I describe the state I was in? True, I was still the Old Adam who felt superior to Geronimo, and this was an experience that would set me apart from all other people. But beyond that, I was surprised, no, I was bowled over by the startling consolation that, whether dead or alive, I would remain on this earth. To die and rot did not mean to melt into nothingness, but rather, no matter what, to continue to be here, to continue in this world. The thought, insinuating itself as if in my sleep, calmed me. I don’t mean to say that as I walked along I overcame my fear of death, and yet it felt very much like that. Every beautiful thing was suddenly beautiful, every ugly thing ugly, every good thing good. For a short while I escaped my own personal madness — and would no longer have to do anything! Every compulsion, every plan, every need to test my powers fell away from me.

On Tuesday I rode to the hospital with my mother and had a new X-ray taken. When I returned home, I wrote Geronimo. It was my last will and testament, a farewell in so many different ways. Every sentence was the main sentence. I wished him luck, I wished Franziska luck. I would have preferred to tell him all this face-to-face — I was ill, I was deathly ill, but I accepted my fate, I would bear it as the lot assigned me, move forward along my path step by step. I was impressed with myself. I made no mention of his manuscript.

I had to call my mother at noon on Wednesday, at which point I learned that the enlargement of my heart was not pathological, just the opposite, I had an athlete’s heart. And in that moment my lucidity and insight vanished. Yes, I was angry at having lost so much time with all this ruckus, and could feel the old pettiness creeping back into my pores. But for a few moments I had experienced a strange clarity. And every word I write about it here is merely a pale reflection.

Wednesday, April 18, ’90

Since I had been writing about my induction almost every day for over two months, November 4th was as intimate as a pen pal whose long-awaited visit I looked forward to with curiosity. Granted, there was hardly any time to compare my preconceptions with reality.

As expected, I slept poorly. My mother’s behavior, however, bore only a distant resemblance to my previous description. We poured a lot of milk into our coffee so that we could drink it more quickly, and were silent. I was annoyed that she wanted to push me out the door much too early, and only as we said our good-byes were her eyes a little moist.

“Tomorrow,” I quoted from my manuscript, “it won’t seem half as bad.” (In my novel the first day wasn’t supposed to be bad, only all the days that followed.) My mother hugged me and gave me a farewell kiss on the brow, which made a very strong impression on me. I decided there and then to include this gesture in my departure scene.

The route that took me to the large Mitropa Hall, where we were supposed to assemble and which was at the far rear of Neustadt Station, reminded me of the evenings spent waiting for my grandparents to return from the West.

Suddenly I was aware of the hulking presence before me of our neighbor Herr Kaspareck. Evidently he was the officer in charge here and was patrolling among the chairs. He kept kicking at all the black bags that had to be removed from his path. Despite our civvies we were already prisoners.

I was astonished to see a pistol at Kaspareck’s belt. Years before he had chased after me because we had been playing soccer outside his windows on a Sunday. Now he could take his revenge.

I assigned to Herr Kaspareck the role of the Herald of Evil. He hadn’t greeted me, he had stumbled over the stretched-out legs of an inductee who had fallen asleep, and Kaspareck’s well-placed blow to the calves had almost pitched the fellow from his chair.

Every observation here would be of use, material for improving on my first draft.

A patrol unit, whose white patent-leather belts and straps reminded me of the harness on circus horses — a comparison that came to mind by way of Animal Farm —dragged a drunk past, a man in despair, sobbing his wife’s name. Or was he calling for his mother? Like dogs returning a stick, they dropped him between two chairs. He lay there whimpering. Two members of the patrol lifted him up by the shoulders, about even with their hips — were they trying to see his face? — tugged him a little more to the right and then, counting inaudibly to three, dumped him again. Their aim was good. His front teeth were knocked out on the edge of a chair. They immediately pulled him up from the floor and inspected their work. One of them shouted that they’d evidently netted a little Dracula. The other four grinned. The silence in the Mitropa Hall was impenetrable. In the same way that by stretching out their legs after Kaspareck’s attack, the inductees had made him stalk his way through the room like a stork through underbrush, so now their silence closed in around these traitors and came close to suffocating them.

These kind of scenes formed in my mind all on their own, as if I had finally found the beanpole on which my fantasy could entwine itself and grow. But as I’m sure you know: our inventions are never brutal and nasty enough, exaggeration makes its home in reality, and somewhere — of that much I was and still am certain — this or some similar scene had occurred.

As you can see, I felt from the start that I’d come to the right place. Here was the perfect dose of callousness and inevitability that had been lacking until then.

Watched over like convicts, we climbed the stairs to the train platform, and I listened closely to the orders, which needed to be decoded according to tone, pitch, and intensity.