Ingo Schulze - New Lives

He would personally smooth the way for me.

These last words were spoken with a certain testiness, as if it annoyed him to have to say such things at all. We sat there in silence for a while, our feet still jiggling. Then he extended his small dry hand and said his good-bye.

My lungs were burning from chain-smoking. I came to a halt in front of the Haeckel Phyletic Museum. I wanted to forget his odious offer, I needed some distraction, I needed fresh air.

As I walked past the post office in the direction of West Station, however, I soon turned off to the right to avoid rush-hour traffic. My path led me up the steep hill, and I walked aimlessly through streets lined with middle-class houses and villas with gardens. From the multipaneled window of a sandstone villa hung a red and white banner that read VIVAT POLSKA! There were several of these in town. It meant that this was the home of someone who had filled out his application — who wanted out, wanted to go to the West.

I kept on walking. It was windy, but not cold. I was sweating. At one point I thought I had lost my bearings.

What can I say. I was standing halfway up the slope and suddenly knew what my army book would look like. As if guided by a magic hand, the Vivat Polska! and the graffiti on the wall of Holy Cross School merged with my army experiences. And I had the vague suspicion that I somehow owed the intellectual thread binding them to Samthoven.

An hour and a half later I was sitting in a pub, the Hauser, answering questions posed by the clique of four who were in their third year of studies.

I mimicked the elegant way Samthoven crossed his legs, observed the back of my outstretched hand with that same blatant self-infatuation, stroked my imaginary beard, perched a saucer at my chin and sipped, splaying my pinkie, repeating his comments about Tbilisi, and then tried to imitate his rhetorical periods, which were so lengthy that you could have laid wagers on whether they would end with the right verb form. If it was possible to lay Samthoven bare, then I did it.

The clique boomed with laughter. I relished the way our table had become the center of attention in the dark room. Edith, the owner, a woman somewhere on the far side of fifty and dressed in a white smock, waved her hand at newcomers looking for a seat to wait at the door, as if they were disrupting a performance.

I have never been a finer entertainer than I was that evening. Samthoven’s invitation to join the Party was its crowning pirouette.

Samthoven might have thought that I had held my tongue out of courtesy, just as these people believed I knew what I wanted. At the end of my performance I had no choice but to respond with a yes to their presumption that I would stick to my refusal to be an officer in the reserves.

A little later Edith sat down at our table and asked for a cigarette. The last round of beer was on the house. The evening had reached its climax. Time for the final curtain.

On the way home it felt like I had a plump wallet in my breast pocket — it was my book, whose fulcrum or pivoting point was to be the slogan Vivat Polska! painted in white on a dark wall somewhere in the basement furnace room of the barracks. One soldier after another would be summoned. Both the interrogation itself and the interval during which each man waited for his own name to be called would give me the opportunity for character studies and descriptions of the brutality of everyday life in the barracks. Who had put it there? No sooner do they have a suspect than the graffiti appears on another wall: Vivat Polska!

Soon there’s a third one, a fourth, and now it’s ten — even in the snow on the drill field, the inscription: Vivat Polska! And all the while — and that was to be the linchpin of the whole story — it is the Stasi that started it all as a provocation, a way to interrogate people and lure them into denouncing each other. And now this vile trick has turned on them and is out of control.

I only had to start, I could already sense the ecstasy that would bring it all together.

Your Enrico T.

Saturday, May 5, ’90

Dear Nicoletta,

In retrospect the affair with Nadja is transparent. At the time I was amazed that a woman like her would throw herself into my arms. Nadja was Vera’s first great love. Early in ’81 her mother had married a gay Swiss man, and they all left the country that same May.

Vera recovered only very slowly. Even now we avoid mentioning Nadja. Nadja’s real name was Sabine, but because of Vera’s enthusiasm for Breton it wasn’t long before everyone was calling her Nadja.

During the few visits I was permitted back then, Vera had treated me and Nadja like children, called us whelps and quickly sent me on my way every time. All I knew about Nadja was that married specimens of my gender — the word “man” never passed Vera’s lips in those days — had camped out at her door, leading to occasional brawls over a sixteen-year-old girl.

At three o’clock in the afternoon on March 23, 1985, I again ran into Nadja on the landing below Vera’s apartment. At first I didn’t recognize her, because she was wearing a hat and sobbing. She was dressed as always. But her new dialect disconcerted me.

Vera had slammed the door in her face. But Nadja was stubborn and had been trying to talk with Vera. And then I showed up. As if I had fallen out of a clear blue sky, there I suddenly stood before her…I can’t tell you how often we told each other the story in the months that followed. She had known at once: He’s the one! I want him!

I had a date with Vera, but I couldn’t bring myself to leave Nadja just standing there. Nadja asked if I would accompany her on a walk to see her old school, and told me about how often she had tried to get back to Dresden. We then walked to Rosengarten and the Elbe, which we followed until we crossed the Blue Wonder Bridge — without Nadja’s flow of words stopping for a second or her uncoupling her arm from mine. It was already dusk as we made our way back across the Elbe meadows.

My role was reduced to that of the listener, while she talked about money, work, her university studies, and her apartment in Salzburg, where she had landed the year before. She liked Austria better than Switzerland. Nadja didn’t seem to me all that content with her life, but my question of why she hadn’t changed jobs or her major was answered with a curt toss of the head and an almost irate “Why should I?”

Perhaps our meeting would have ended with that, but the sunset and the silhouette of the old city toward which we were now walking lent our silence greater meaning.

Nadja knew a waiter in the café Secundo Genitur on the Brühlsche Terrace, so we had a table all to ourselves. Nadja asked if I was still writing. I told her about my army book, but said nothing about having to report for the army base in Seeligenstädt two days later. Even after discharge, every male student in the GDR had to serve an additional five weeks.

I brought Nadja to a streetcar stop — she was staying with a girlfriend in Dresden-Laubegast. We said our farewells, precisely because we both could rely on a nose for dramatic possibilities. After all, there weren’t that many afternoon trains to Munich.

Beneath the arch of the train station roof and against the dazzling sunlight streaming in from outside, Nadja was just a silhouette with hat. When she came running toward me in her dark brown tailored suit, threw her arms around my neck, and whispered, “I knew it, I just knew it,” I was certain I loved her. How else could I explain the humiliation that I felt in saying good-bye — the humiliation of not being able to board the train with her — and that brought tears to my eyes.

My mother greeted me with a scolding. I had missed my appointment with a neighbor lady to have my hair cut. She now took scissors in hand herself, shaved the back of my neck, and plopped my packed bag at my feet.