Ingo Schulze - New Lives

That very evening I began to try to describe the experience. And despite all the later changes, all the material I threw out or rearranged, I was determined I would end my book with this unexpected moment of happiness and dawn.

Late in the afternoon of the day I was discharged, I walked away from the streetcar stop, black bag in hand, only to run directly into my mother. She set down her shopping bag of empty bottles and threw her arms around my neck and would not let go even after I begged her to.

Sunday, April 29, 1990

I had returned, but I had brought a problem home with me. Nikolai had invited me to spend a weekend with him in Saxon Switzerland. I had no idea how I would survive those two days with him. 194

When Nikolai came to pick me up — standing there in the stairwell of our building, leaning against the railing, in a white half-unbuttoned shirt, faded jeans, and sunglasses pushed up into his hair — I followed him like someone wading into the water although he knows he can’t swim. To describe my hours with him would be a story all its own. I felt guilty for having nourished his hopes. He wasn’t used to having to woo someone. As soon as he met with resistance, he turned domineering. That night we almost scuffled. We had spread out our sleeping bags on a projecting rock. The drop-off was only a few yards away. It was so dark I couldn’t even make out his face. I could guess its expression only from his voice. I could deal with his arrogance, his accusations, his mockery and scorn, yes, even his disdain. What appalled me, however, was his self-hatred. I covered my ears — that’s how unbearable what I had to listen to was. I couldn’t console him, either. That whole night I kept my eye on him. He didn’t fall asleep until it began to grow light. I didn’t have to do much packing. Yes, I simply ran away. I never saw Nikolai again.

For eighteen months I had longed to return. But where and what had I returned to? To a world that didn’t interest me, in which there was nothing for me, nothing worth writing about. In the army every well-used minute was an unexpected gift, every day of survival a victory.

Instead of bearing witness to having made it through hell, I felt as if I had been driven from paradise. My world was turned upside down. And one thing led to another.

Vera’s boyfriend at the time was a disgusting human being. Daniel, as I learned later, was also fleecing her financially. 195I tried to figure out if he was a writer or painter or if he did anything at all. Ostensibly he was a home health attendant, but he never went to work and lived off (besides Vera) what Dutch or French renters paid him for his apartment in Berlin. Daniel found Dresden unbearably provincial. He wasn’t going to stay a minute longer once Vera’s Berlin embargo was lifted. Vera admired Daniel because he could throw around words like “rhizome” and “anti-Oedipal” and had books from the West that he lent to no one. When he spoke the name “Foucault” it was as if he held his breath for a moment to listen for the echo of his own fanfare. To Vera, however, Daniel was the measure of all things.

At the beginning I couldn’t resist him, either. The first time you met him his smile was like bait tossed your way. And by the second meeting you had the sense you had disappointed him, because the eyes behind his nickel-rimmed glasses were purely inner directed — today, I’d just call them dull. Everything I said about what I thought was good and right he would turn into its rhetorical opposite. If you offered any opposition, you were making yourself an accomplice of those in power, but if you attempted to lend support, that was a particularly perfidious way of trying to control someone. Inside half an hour Daniel would manage to brand me — in Vera’s presence — as a complete idiot. How was I supposed to write contemporary prose without having read Foucault, Deleuze, Lacan, Derrida, and all the rest of them? I didn’t need to waste my time on Adorno, and as for the whole Frankfurt school, I could just forget it.

As she brought me to the door, Vera tried to comfort me. Daniel wasn’t blaming me for being ignorant of his authors, it was just that I should read them before attempting to write.

The last straw was Vera’s promise to show me some texts about the army that one of her admirers had written and that she judged “not bad.” I was alarmed precisely because Vera didn’t take the guy seriously otherwise — she made fun of his jealousy and those puppy-dog eyes that followed her everywhere. And above all I was disconcerted because somebody was poaching in my reserve. 196

Once I got my own notes back from Geronimo, who had kept them in meticulous order, they bored me. The pounds of stuff I now crammed into my desk drawer were junk. Just as I had once collected seashells at the Baltic shore and then insisted I had to take every single one home with me — where after a few weeks, with my permission, they ended up in the trash — I might just as well have tied up the bundle and taken it to the ragman.

Of course my letters — well, they weren’t real letters, but notes and sketches — paraded almost every one of my 541 days in the barracks before my eyes. But to what purpose? Where were the stories I had hoped to be able to net from these pages the way fat carp are taken from the ponds of Moritzburg Castle each autumn? All my fervor seemed so childish, so vain and pointless, that there was nothing for it but to admit Daniel and Vera were right. It was my plunge into hell.

Suddenly I was just anybody. I felt abandoned, forsaken. If I couldn’t write, my life was worthless.

Geronimo, who was studying theology in Naumburg, was helping Franziska study for her finals and playing in a band. Together we had argued with some Christian Democrats at the Church Congress in Dresden and had called Councilor of the Consistory Stolpe a political wet blanket. But otherwise we didn’t have much to say to each other. I was jealous of him because of Franziska and because he was a welcome guest in that large hillside villa in Weisser Hirsch, where he drank tea with her parents on the terrace while he gazed out over the whole city.

To top it all off, I was told by the Army District Command 197that I had been discharged as a noncommissioned officer in the reserves, an ignominy that was too late to protest and that I had no choice but to keep to myself.

My salvation was Aunt Camilla, who for the past two years had sent me one hundred D-marks at Christmas and another fifty D-marks at Easter, so that I suddenly had three hundred D-marks, to which my mother added what was left of her own gift; she also paid for my train ticket to Budapest and for two consignments of bed linens. I stayed ten days and lived like a prince.

If this were a biography, one long chapter would be titled “Katalin.” Katalin was the niece of Frau Nádori and was studying English and German in Szeged. She was preparing for her exams. Every morning we sat in Frau Nádori’s kitchen and smoked her cigarettes until Katalin was banished to the living room, where she had to study Heinz Mettke’s Middle High German grammar. Each afternoon we would meet somewhere at four o’clock. Katalin was engaged and held fast to that role. After an evening at the opera, however, she visited me in my room. I pulled my sleeping bag from the bed and laid it on the old hardwood floor, directly in front of a white armoire that Frau Nádori always claimed was “genuine rococo.” Katalin now opened this genuine rococo armoire and made up a bed for us from the linens hoarded in it. She just wanted to lie beside me, she said, slipped off her nightgown, and warmed my hands between her thighs. At some point we both fell briefly asleep, but when we awoke it was all quite simple and lovely and unforgettable.