Ingo Schulze - New Lives

The baron had even remembered to bring extension cords and a junction box. Only Recklewitz wanted to move on; he was hungry. We trooped upstairs with him, where Kurt offered him something from his lunchbox. Recklewitz thanked him, but refused with some irritation. He had heard so much about the local mutz roast (he too pronounced it wrong) that he’d rather hold back for now. Kurt flipped the top slice of bread back, pointed to a thick layer of country liverwurst, and then took a bite himself.

If you should ever happen to meet Bodo von Recklewitz-Münzner, you’ll see that he lives up to his name. At first he’s all Herr von Recklewitz, hurling commands out across the moat surrounding his castle. Yes, you can see from his eyes and temples that it gives him a headache if someone takes a seat beside him instead of waiting at a distance of several yards to be waved closer. Once he has got used to withdrawing his gaze from the far horizon and has overcome the inner resistance that each new contact with the world provokes in him, Herr von Recklewitz gradually becomes — in every utterance, in every explanation and observation — more and more the obliging Herr Münzner, who is to be at our side with word and deed from here on out. We were to pay him six hundred marks a month and in return can engage his services at any time and in any cause — only travel expenses are extra. Such an arrangement has always worked well for him, he says, and even better for his clients. We should not, however, make the serious mistake of confusing the law with justice. His business is the law, seeing to it that the law is on our side.

And suddenly, once the contract had been signed, our old schoolchum Bodo was all left-sided smiles, and now he was going to join us for a good meal.

“And now downstairs fast as we can,” he cried, “they won’t be able to get out on their own.” Bodo von Recklewitz-Münzner expected fabulous things of our local cuisine.

I invited the managing director to join us. “Believe me,” he said, clasping my right hand in both of his, “if I didn’t have this meeting tomorrow morning, I would. Yes, I would, and I would invite you, all of you here, to dinner on me.”

We accompanied him to his car, a real BMW, the model of which I was carrying in my pants pocket as the corpus delicti. “Beautiful car,” I exclaimed as the managing director let the window down with a hum. He leaned back and stuck his head out as if checking to see if we were all still there. As he drove off he stretched his arm up over the roof and waved his tremolo hand, revealing, like yet another promise, a gold bracelet.

“The son of a bitch!” cried Jörg, who had lowered his arm even before Recklewitz had. “That son of a bitch!”

“Be glad,” the baron laughed, “you ended up with someone like that. And be proud. No sooner are you on the market than they’re courting you. What more do you want?”

“Sits there the whole time with a toy like that in his jacket, waiting to pounce. Damn him!” Jörg shouted.

The baron said nothing, as if first making sure Jörg had in fact spoken his piece, and then he said: “Rebuild the wall, but you better hurry!”

We should be grateful to this managing director, yes, truly grateful. He had uncovered our weaknesses. “Your strengths and weaknesses,” the baron added. He blamed himself for not having been harder on us in the past. Because as was now evident it was rather unlikely that we would be granted any more time to learn without pain. “If there even is such a thing — learning without pain.”

He asked Jörg to tell him one thing the managing director had said that was incorrect. We were going to have to change, change very rapidly, otherwise we didn’t have a chance. “And at the least,” he said, “rethink your page size and the quality of the printing. You need room for ads, and no one is going to pay you D-marks for such fuzzy photos.”

They were still arguing as we sat in the Ratskeller. The tone remained friendly, but implacable. “You don’t want to be a daily? Then you’re going to have to come up with a different concept.”

Each time I was about to jump in to help Jörg, he had already lost the argument. That was probably why Recklewitz kept jutting his nose at me. What did I think? he asked. I couldn’t come up with anything. And I was annoyed at Jörg for carrying on so childishly that they must have thought we had forgotten to read the rules of the game.

“Enrico!” Jörg cried. “Don’t let them knock the wind out of you like this!” And then Jörg rehearsed his sad account once more. Of course no one knows what will happen after July 1st, 186of course the East isn’t the West, of course we sold close to a thousand more copies of our last issue, of course it all depends on us, on what we want and on our hard work, of course we’re not just any newspaper. Plus if Jörg’s people get elected, then we’re more likely than the others to get things directly from the horse’s mouth. But will that be enough?

After that no one could think of anything innocuous to break the silence. Fortunately the food arrived. We raised glasses and I no longer understood what was really supposed to be so terrible about the baron’s vision or what made Jörg just keep shaking his head. If Jörg continued to balk, the baron had said (leaving it up to us to decide how serious he was), he himself would start up a free paper financed by ads. You couldn’t leave money lying in the streets. Besides it would be fun, it was always fun to make money. And in this case if you went at it right, right from the start, it would be child’s play. Hadn’t the managing director said they did photo offset in Gera? Well then, bring on as many Giesseners as you wanted. But it would prove fatal for the Weekly. “If you don’t react now,” he said, aiming his deep-sea glasses at me, “you’re finished.”

“No,” Jörg said, he wasn’t going to fall into that trap. He wasn’t going to let us waste our energies. We were going to lay into the oars.

“Then row away,” exclaimed Recklewitz, who, because the mutz roast had run out, was busy dissecting an enormous ham hock and wanted to talk about more pleasant things, soccer for example, although he had to know the baron thinks sports are ridiculous.

This morning at nine on the dot Andy appeared in the office. He sat down at the computer and three minutes later handed me a finished ad: a full half page! In white on black, nothing more than, “Andy’s Coming!” He asked for a discount, which I of course gave him. I did better with my English than I had expected, but then I didn’t have a choice.

All the same I wasn’t sure if I now understood him correctly, although I was sure twenty meant zwanzig and twenty thousand was zwanzigtausend. I once again tapped the computer, screen, and printer: “Altogether twenty thousand?”

“Yeees,” Andy cried, kept on saying “yeees!” I asked if that might not be something for us too. “Yeees, absolutely.”

It’s all so easy. We spent seven and a half for the VW bus, fifteen hundred on the camera. Our assets include the fifteen hundred 187from the ad for videos that the baron pulled in for us, plus a few other hundred D-marks in income, comes to thirteen thousand plus a few hundred. We need another six thousand and change in D-marks.

I’ve already written Steen and called Gera about setting up an appointment. We’re not going to go under that fast.

Your E.

PS: Michaela just told me that some woman tried to kill Lafontaine with a knife or dagger. Michaela thinks that will improve his and the Social Democrats’ chances with the voters.

Saturday, April 28, ’90

Dear Nicoletta,

My transfer into a company of new arrivals meant that, even though I was the youngest, I was promoted to the rank of room corporal, 188who is assigned the best bed (bottom bunk, at the window) and newest locker, who gets his meals brought to him every morning and evening, and whose word has greater weight than that of a noncom.