Ingo Schulze - New Lives

That evening Roland was given more than his share of gifts. He himself hadn’t bothered, at least not for Mother and me. Vera was wearing a pantsuit that he had brought back for her, and she thrust her chin forward for us to smell the perfume on her neck. Then Aunt Camilla’s parcel was set on the table. Vera and I began at once to search for currency. As if by agreement and with a fervor worse than that of the worst customs agents, together we ripped wrapping paper from cans of pineapple and packages of coffee, tore off gold stars and ribbons, and paid no attention to what fell to the floor. When Roland turned away from us in disgust, I went at it with special gusto. I discovered the first hundred-D-mark bill in the packet of Fa soap, the second under the plastic tray in the Sprengel praline box. The third remained unaccounted for until Mother found it among the tattered wrapping paper.

The next day — granted, he did drive Mother to work at half past five in the morning — Roland made himself at home. He ran around in his underwear, smoked, ransacked the pantry, finished off the whole bowl of potato salad — standing — drank the Murfatlar 218straight from the bottle, and never stopped scratching his hairy chest.

A decal with a white dove of peace against a blue background adorned the rear windshield of his Renault, and he and Vera used it for jaunts to Meissen, Moritzburg, and Pillnitz, and to the theater, too, along with Roland’s comrades, who were staying at Vera’s.

She and I hardly spoke. Roland was her revenge for Nadja. 219From my mother I learned that the two of them had already decided to get married. At the dinner table I asked them where they would be living. “What a stupid question!” Vera said. Roland, however, admitted that he would prefer to settle in the East. But a move like that would be like stabbing his comrades in the back.

Roland talked constantly about the ban against leftists in the civil service, he had once been threatened with it himself. He asked me if I could give him something to read, something I had written, of course, or read it aloud, then and there, that same evening. He also asked if there was a “red-light district” in Dresden. I knew the term “infrared treatment” as a synonym for GDR propaganda and other expressions like “red cloister” for particularly hard-nosed schools, Red assholes, and a few others. I thought Roland meant some kind of governmental area. 220

Mother dubbed Roland a fine man, because his outspokenness would cause him trouble everywhere, with both sides. I, however, found him tiring and pretentious. I regarded his presence as the reason for my chronic exhaustion.

New Year’s Eve was dreadful, the trip back was dismal.

I had locked the Nadja letters in a drawer. Vivat Polska! had become a stranger to me. If I was going to continue it, I would have to do what I had thus far avoided, that is, read what I had already written.

No, it wasn’t a debacle, not even a disappointment. Of course I saw how unfinished, how in need of correction the manuscript was — with no regrets I excised whole paragraphs and pages. A few details, moreover, some of the descriptions and metaphors seemed to me so close to perfect I was afraid I had pilfered them from Babel or Mailer.

All the same, on that Sunday afternoon — cold, sunny, no snow — I was overcome with a doubt that stained everything, made it all unpalatable. I no longer believed me!

Hadn’t I once considered taking the blame for the “Karl and Rosa Live!” graffiti? Why then shouldn’t one of my characters come up with the idea of claiming Vivat Polska! as his own work? There were plenty of reasons to. And what, beg your pardon, was really so bad about the inscription itself? Couldn’t anyone with some notion of the story of good soldier Schweik twist the meaning around enough to take the air out of the cheeks of Stasi interrogation specialists?

You can see, Nicoletta, that I’ve once again arrived at just such a point. 221It’s like when an adult talks about the worries and fears of a child. Because you’re probably asking why I didn’t rejoice in these new ideas and use them. That’s precisely what would have done the whole project good and actually and finally made it interesting.

And yet, even if my own sense of life was not all that tragic, literature at least had to be. And that meant suffering. The greater the suffering, the better the literature. Don’t laugh! I didn’t know any better. Our role, the East’s role, was one either of suffering and resistance or of going along, tertium non datur. My heroic epic was tilting toward farce; and in the next instant it had become impossible.

My suspicion was that my own falsely led life had ruined my writing. Why didn’t I have the strength simply to brush my doodlings from the desk and set to work instead on Kaegi’s grammar? 222Why didn’t I bring this to a fitting end? Because I didn’t have the strength to live without writing, without the illusion of a calling?

Since I wasn’t going to change myself, I would have to wait for the world to change.

I looked for some way out and, logically enough, I found it: I had to go further back, back to the time before my Fall, when suffering had still been suffering and God still God.

So, of course you’ve already guessed what comes next. Almost immediately I saw before me in seductive clarity a novella about a student who is on the verge of being broken by the system of the GDR. In fact all I had to do was write about what I had experienced, and make sure I gave it an appropriate ending, some surprising twist, something different from what had happened to me, a finale presentable to a wider public.

In my mind the tone of voice hovered somewhere between Young Törless and Tonio Kröger. The plot was quickly sketched out. Suddenly I felt free and adventuresome, as if now that my work was as certain as certain can be — its completion looked to be a matter of weeks — I could participate in other people’s lives as well.

Dear Nicoletta, it’s three in the morning. I’m waking up earlier and earlier. Yesterday, on the way to the office, I thought about what I should describe to you next. Suddenly there was Anton before my eyes. And in the next moment it was clear to me that Anton and his meeting with Johann ought to be part of the letter I had with me ready to drop in the mail. 223

Of course it wouldn’t contribute much to our cause and would add confusion to my narrative if I were to report about every encounter and acquaintanceship that had some significance for me in one way or another. And yet Anton deserves a few lines, so that the picture you have of my life isn’t a frozen, one-sided view.

I don’t know whether I can call years of living alongside Anton a friendship or not. Our daily proximity to one another did, however, create an almost intimate familiarity that now and then counterbalanced all the partialities and secrets that Anton shared with others. Our seminar clique was always called “Anton’s bunch.” He was the only man I knew who placed exceptional importance on clothing and hairstyles and could talk about fashion for hours. David Bowie — whose music he considered merely average — was his idol. And from a distance at least Anton actually looked like him. On those special occasions when students were expected to wear their Free German Youth shirt, Anton would appear in a black suit, white shirt, and black tie, so that at first a good many professors thought he had just returned from a funeral and left him alone. When Anton burst into laughter, tossing back his blond locks and revealing gaps behind his eyeteeth, he always reminded me of a whinnying horse.

Anton was a man to be envied. He had a very beautiful and warm-hearted wife and a little boy. All the same Anton fell in love with a new woman every couple of weeks. He spent almost all his evenings at the Rose, the student club.