Ingo Schulze - New Lives

On Sunday I had a long talk with Marion and Jörg. I told them about Barrista’s city maps, bonus gifts for new subscribers, and his “acquisitions brigade.” As for a computer, he literally had to carry one up to our office himself.

After two hours I had Marion to the point where she at least agreed to contract Barrista as a consultant. I had suggested a thousand a month, and that would have been a ludicrously low fee as it is. But the five hundred they agreed to is really little more than an embarrassing gesture.

When we made our offer, he thanked us, but appeared more surprised than pleased. What was it we expected of him? Jörg wanted to run his own ideas past him, Marion talked about organizing the workload, and I said that he should help us choose and train our sales reps — and have a look at our books, because none of us here understands the first thing about accounting.

The baron listened to us for a while, then stood up quite suddenly, and stepped behind his chair, as if it were a lectern. “Would I be correct in stating,” he said, his voice languid, his eyelids heavy, “that you have evidently not yet answered, indeed not even asked the fundamental question that needs to be resolved at the start of every business endeavor.” Barrista tensed his body and took a deep breath. “Do you or don’t you want to get rich?” He looked from one to the other and then added, “I admire anyone who decides he does not. That deserves my greatest respect. I merely need to know the terrain we’ve chosen to meet upon.” He interrupted me brusquely when I burst into laughter.

“It’s a more serious matter than you think. Take your time. Don’t choose too hastily! It implies far far more than you may perhaps expect.” When Barrista gets excited, you can hear his accent. He sat down again and promised that, whatever our decision, we could count on his good counsel, he merely wanted to know what course we planned for our ship. Then he aimed his glasses at me. I saw the trace of a smile at the left corner of his mouth. “And you aren’t going to contradict me?” he asked. “Why don’t you refute me with my own example? It’s a weird thing about exceptions…” He was evidently alluding to our first meeting, when he had lectured me about exceptions. “One can and should make them, one must, however, know that they are exceptions. I allow myself but two — His Highness and you! But I would advise you for now not to make any exceptions, they are for advanced students at best, and even then I’d be very, very careful.”

Marion and Jörg didn’t understand him at all. In their eyes the baron is an eccentric businessman trying to comfort himself for the loss of his idyllic family. I, however, have discovered in him a logician and philosopher. We, in turn, are for him a stroke of good luck, a kind of tabula rasa when compared to his own mind full of self-evidencies.

Everyone now has to tell him the function of his or her job, be it in sales, ad acquisition, accounting, the structure of actual newspaper production, etc. Sometimes we don’t even understand his questions. What does original printing price mean? How many deals have we struck ? How high is our discount for direct bank transferals ? What’s our discount percentage for write-offs? etc. When he looks from one of us to the other in that sad, helpless way, we know we’ve been throwing money away again.

It’s easy to regard him as a ridiculous character — which Michaela and her theater dunderheads evidently love to do.

The longer I think it over, the more difficult it is for me to answer his questions — questions I would have never thought to ask and would have impatiently dismissed as childish. What arouses my enthusiasm most, however, is that he would support us with the same attentiveness, the same expenditure of energy, and the same dedication were we to answer each of them with a no. In that case, too, he would pose the same Socratic questions and prepare more diagrams, just with different coordinates.

Of course we can see how sales are slumping and ad income is rising, and it’s no secret that either we’ll have to expand the amount of space or raise our rates or — at the risk of going under — come up with some new idea. But all that assumes a different power of persuasion when you’re looking at two curves: income from sales and from ads, lines that from week to week keep moving — or better, actually striving — closer and closer until you think you can predict where and when they’ll cross. Adding the two curves together, on the other hand, gives you the relationship to printing and salary costs. And suddenly we’re talking totally differently about how we can ensure our survival. In the weeks ahead we’re going to have to increase our profits, because we need a buffer to get through the period after July 1st. What functioned well before may just be spinning wheels afterward. And at least ever since the baron’s diagram, we know that our negotiations with the printer will decide our future existence. But the worst thing is that afterward you ask yourself how you could have ever seen it any other way.

Ah, Jo, forgive me. All this is going to bore you something awful. And my new knowledge isn’t exactly a fount of originality. If only you could experience Barrista! In his presence even the most serious matters seem easy — it’s all so playful, literally playful.

We had him at our place again last Monday (after he had been invited to Jörg and Marion’s several times and even joined them on a weekend excursion to Saale — which, to be honest, annoyed me a bit). He doesn’t enjoy living in a “hotel-room crypt” and eating nothing but restaurant food. If it were up to Robert and me, he’d be sitting with us at our table much more often.

Each time he visits, his flowers turn our living room into a hothouse. Even withered, the jungle bouquet attracted attention when Michaela threw it in the trash.

In contrast, Michaela was detached if not to say impassive as she took in the baron’s report about how his real estate business was progressing. She remained remarkably unruffled when she learned that she would be earning considerably more than the amount guaranteed her, and had not one appreciative word for the baron’s achievements.

Robert was grouchy because he wanted us to play Monopoly with him, which, true to character, his good father (and yes, there is such a person again) had sent him as a gift. The baron assured him that he would love to play, but please not Monopoly — that was the dullest game there is, and leads only to confusion. If a single day of his life as a businessman were as stupid and boring as Monopoly, he would look for another job right away. Robert’s pouting lower lip would have moved a heart of stone. But, the baron went on, he would love to play something else. Evidently Robert’s request suited his purposes. At one point he had let slip a few hints about his cultic research, as he called it. (In May ’45 the only Altenburg reliquary, containing the hand of St. Boniface, had vanished, presumably into the baggage of an American soldier when his army withdrew from town.) Barrista doesn’t believe his activities are ripe for sharing. Although he squanders half his time on the matter. 216

His reaction was truly euphoric when Robert held out a boxed game of roulette. “Where do you get something like this?” And was what was inside really what the box claimed it was? The contents amused him. “Sweet flannel,” he giggled as he unrolled the plastic layout with its boxes and fields, smoothing it several times. “Sweet velvet!” The jetons sent him into raptures, the little bowl with its numbered wheel turned him into a downright buffoon. “For Lilliputians!”

In the blink of an eye he had calculated the total value of the jetons and determined how many of each sort there were. Michaela cleared the table, but didn’t even have time to change tablecloths. The baron had already arranged everything; while he distributed the jetons, he urged Michaela to finally sit down with us, all the while switching back and forth between French and German. “Come on, play, do sit down, it’s your turn!” he cried, and began by placing a ten on the right row and the first dozen — hardly a gutsy beginning, I thought. I risked twice as much on three wagers: on red, odds, and the zero. Michaela strewed half her jetons across the numbered fields, Robert placed a hundred on black. It wasn’t until the baron stretched out his arm and described an oval with the palm of his hand above the field, while whispering, “Rien ne va plus,” that we realized the ball was whirling. A moment later it took a few bounces back and forth, and the baron announced the results in French, then added (what we all could see), “Fifteen, black.” He slid the croupier’s rake across the wrinkled plastic playing field — Michaela and the baron had lost everything. Robert was given another hundred; I got a twenty, but had lost forty. Barrista smiled and doubled his bet. By the second round I was already bored, the same state I thought I could observe as well in the generous way Michaela scattered the rest of her jetons. Robert risked another hundred, this time on red; my bet was the same as before, except this time instead of the zero, I slid a twenty next to Robert’s hundred. The baron repeated the same conjuring motion with his arm, the ball jangled — eleven, red. One of the baron’s fingers touched the eleven, restoring Michaela’s capital to its original state.