Ingo Schulze - New Lives

Nadja pulled me on ahead. I was waiting for some reaction on her part, perhaps even a laugh. The longer she kept silent, the more uneasy I grew. When I looked at her, we both came to a halt. Nadja was a stranger, sad and proud; yes, almost haughty.

She didn’t want me to take off the yarmulke, said it looked good on me. The next day we were talking about her mother, and Nadja said there had also been Jews in her family. I don’t know if that’s true. The yarmulke is still lying here among our caps and scarves.

I had given scarcely a thought to my exams. I believed in my good luck and passed each one, if just barely. The panel obliged me by honoring my term papers.

The longest time that Nadja and I spent together was eight or nine days in August.

We had rented a room from a Slovakian woman in the Jizerské Mountains. A picture of John F. Kennedy in a silver frame hung in the stairwell.

Nadja was apparently determined to clarify our relationship. On our first hike up to the TV tower at Liberec, she asked me how I viewed our future. I said I wanted to finish my book (on which I hadn’t worked for months). Then, if that was truly her wish, I could apply for an exit visa. Those four syllables lasted forever. They crumbled in my mouth like a moldy piece of candy. Nadja asked whether that was truly what I wanted. Yes, I said. She said that she would marry me. I said that would be the simplest way.

We hiked through the dying forest, 209and it was too late before we realized we had been misled by a faded signpost, which had indicated the remaining distance to be nine instead of nineteen kilometers.

By the time we reached the restaurant at the TV tower, my throat was so dry it took me two attempts to order a pivo. 210

According to our landlady’s map a narrow-gauge train would take us back to the village, but no one in Liberec knew anything about a narrow-gauge train. We had no choice but to march over the ridge in the dusk. I’ll never forget those minutes on the barren summit. As darkness crept up the slopes, our path was illuminated as if on a stage by the light of the setting sun. The air was clear, the horizon infinitely distant in all directions. Our footsteps were the only sound. When Nadja suddenly hugged me, I could feel the hasty beat of her heart. We held each other tight and gazed out across the highlands, like emigrants about to wander into the landscape.

Then came three days of rain, and when the fourth day also dawned gloomy, we headed back to Dresden. Frau Krátká closed the front door behind us without a word.

In order for you to understand Nadja and me, there’s something I have to disclose, something that increasingly disturbed me. Although outwardly the perfect couple, we never really became one.

At first there was always the one reason: Nadja’s fear of getting pregnant, and she didn’t want to take the pill. Then I would forget condoms again, or we were simply too exhausted from our escapades. I won’t trouble you with any of what were for me unpleasant details. For a good while now, as soon as the door was shut behind us, we would be overcome with an inexplicable shyness.

For a long time we never mentioned Vera. I had not seen my sister since the day I turned around at Vera’s door to join Nadja. Which meant I could reply to Nadja’s questions with just a shrug. But Nadja would not let go. I became jealous of Vera. In addition, Nadja hinted that she had knowledge of matters that Vera and I had sworn to keep secret. 211

I tried to develop clear plans for a future shared with Nadja. I would tough it out in Salzburg as a cabdriver, and write during whatever time was left me. As soon as my book was published, Nadja wouldn’t have to work anymore and could concentrate entirely on her studies. And on weekends we’d find things to do — hiking, strolling the town, or traveling to Munich, Vienna, or Italy.

I immersed myself in this new chapter and was aware of how, at the end of each of my monologues, my eyes glistened. Nadja said little, a silence all the more stubborn, the more suggestions I heaped before her.

I was afraid that she was as relieved as I when it finally came time to leave for the station. But no sooner had we boarded the streetcar than I was overcome with a great sadness and a terrible dread of losing Nadja. I told her that I would give anything to repeat the past few days, even if it meant not changing one single experience. She hugged me, and we held each other tight just as we had on the mountaintop.

Until then I had had no trouble returning to correspondence after one of our meetings — on the contrary. This time I was thrown into despair. I ripped page after page out of the typewriter and finally lay down on my bed with no idea of where to go from here. When I woke up I was certain that I had lost Nadja during the night.

From now on I merely tried to keep writing letters as long as I possibly could. Instead of looking forward to her replies, I feared them. I gave up phoning her almost entirely when, in response to my question of whether she had received my letters and what she had been doing of late, Nadja replied: Plugging away, just plugging away.

“What can I do?” I replied. I would do anything I could.

We were too short of money to be able to see each other. My bank-book showed zeros. I had used up Aunt Camilla’s D-mark subsidies, asking Vera for help was out of the question. Nadja didn’t have time to write letters. I accepted that, and in time everything else as well. When the semester started, I once again had loads and loads of material for letters.

During my last call to Salzburg, Nadja suddenly sounded the way she used to when just her whispering my name was like an unbelievably tender caress. “I love you,” I shouted into the phone. “I love you too,” she cried, and laughed. I invoked our love one more time and could hear Nadja sending me kisses over the phone. Then the call ended because I had run out of change.

My epistolary novel was going to end with that punch line — unless at some point I could come up with a better ending.

Love,

Your Enrico T.

Monday, May 7, ’90

Dear Jo!

I’ll say it just once: If you want to study the confusions and complications of provincial life, if you want work and a steady income, let’s talk. 212As a columnist, you’ll be paid two thousand a month after taxes — after July, two thousand D-marks — and we’ll also find a decent place for you (and your family?) to live. We’re going to need new people in any case. The only question is when we’ll make our decisions. We could start printing in Gera tomorrow. It would be a third cheaper, on better paper, with needle-sharp photos. We can vary size by fours 213—we’d have no limit on the amount of advertising, and we wouldn’t have to break up pages already set or postpone articles. Next thing to paradise! If only we could master the computer. Andy wanted eighteen thousand for everything, including software. We’re to be his showcase and are to give him a couple of free ads. He’ll get his money for the pasting machine and layout tables in July. (Even though I think we’ll make it through July 1st quite well, I sometimes wonder what would have happened if we had exchanged our twenty thousand back then for East-marks, which very soon now could end up amounting to sixty or seventy thousand D-marks, maybe even more.) 214

The Leipziger Volkszeitung is a sad bunch. Nobody there even thought it necessary to show up at the Auerhahn on Sunday, even though all the bigwigs — except from the Party of Democratic Socialism, of course — gathered there to wait for results to come in. 215They greeted us as kings, because they know that we know that the whole lot of them weren’t exactly the spearhead of the revolution. That’s one of Jörg’s favorite topics. At the end of December he nominated Karmeka, who’s our new mayor, to be chair of the opposition Round Table although he was still a nobody — and that marked the start of Karmeka’s rise. Jörg probably expects too much to come of contacts with his “pupil” (as he calls him a bit too often), but certainly the connection doesn’t work against us. It isn’t clear yet who the new district councilor (the title reminds you somehow of junkers and the kaiser, doesn’t it?), but he’ll likewise be a Christian Democrat. If we’re lucky, it’ll end up being one of Fred’s buddies. Even today, three days later, there’s still not one line about it in the LVZ. We have Karmeka headlined on the front page, with interview and photo. And the Altenburgers will learn the rest of what’s going on from us first too. No wonder people like the managing director think they’ll have an easy time of it here.