Ingo Schulze - New Lives

“Well everybody doesn’t have to see it!” she cried angrily.

You’re probably asking yourself why I’m telling you all this? What does our love story have to do with my confession? 247Just be patient.

Robert fought me all the way. Plus he hated everything that had to do with the theater. And I had to admit Robert annoyed me. I wasn’t used to taking anyone else into consideration. I wanted to read, write, attend the theater and exhibitions, see movies. And that’s what Michaela wanted too. But I’m getting ahead of myself. In those first weeks the very idea of my spending the night at Michaela’s was out of the question. And in case I tried, Robert threatened to run away from home. The first time I paid an official visit, he locked himself in his room and wailed so loud that after ten minutes Michaela asked me to leave. There were times when I traveled to Altenburg to see Michaela for just half an hour. And even then Robert was the center of attention.

My first overnight came at the end of November, and that was because Robert had thrown my shoes out the window and they had to be dried on the radiator.

And it wasn’t just that Robert was a mischief-maker, he was a blemish on Michaela. I was in no way on Robert’s side, but at times I wished he would win out. Because I had had a different idea of a love affair. 248What was more, I didn’t want to stay here, here in Altenburg, here in this country. At least that’s what I wrote to Vera.

When Michaela glowingly announced that Robert had agreed to travel with her and me to Dresden — he wanted to meet my mother too — I couldn’t have been more conflicted.

My mother had baked and cooked, our beds — Robert had my room all to himself — were decorated with chocolate animals and licorice sticks, the kind I hadn’t seen for years. The towels were new and soft, and each of us was given a pair of slippers. Robert had apparently expected nothing less. While we sat drinking coffee he roamed the apartment, knocked over a vase, and peeked in every cupboard and drawer. Mother wasn’t upset and helped calm Michaela down. They competed at chain-smoking, and Mother gave her the pair of shoes she had bought six months before, on the day Vera left. Every few minutes Robert presented us with another one of his discoveries. He found not only my old teddy bear and children’s books, but also my first cartridge pen, the cap of which revealed distinct teeth marks and that had been such a trusty friend that it was as if I had laid it aside only a moment before. Finally Robert dragged over my grandfather’s compass set — the compasses resting in shimmering blue velvet. Robert asked if he could keep it. To my horror my mother said yes. But Michaela’s “No!” was so determined that I didn’t have to intervene. Then it was time for photo albums, and that evening Robert cracked every egg we had in a skillet and called the result an omelet.

Shortly before we left the next day Robert insisted on playing badminton with me in the courtyard. Yes, only with me. On the way back he fell asleep, so that Michaela could snuggle up against me. It was then that it first struck me: I have a family — a family. And I didn’t know if it was a dream come true or if I was caught in a trap. 249

Saturday, May 19, ’90

Dear Nicoletta,

It may perhaps amaze you when I say that the next eighteen months — from the day of our weekend together in Dresden until May ’89—was a happy time. The internal conflict that I described still existed, but it wasn’t hard to live with. I kept postponing applying for an exit visa — no, I was saving it as a kind of reward that I would first have to earn. The longer I stuck it out in the GDR, the more I would ultimately have to show for myself in the West. Besides which I regarded family life as a new experience. It was a marvelous feeling to watch Michaela shave her legs, and it felt like the proof of intimacy to hang our laundry on the clothesline or to take it down.

The strain between Robert and me remained. I met with Robert’s approval only sporadically, for instance when I succeeded in holding the spout from our laundry spin-drier directly over the bucket. To do that I had to throw myself on top of the machine. My mother on the other hand was accepted without qualification, which was why we made frequent trips to Dresden.

My studies came to a lusterless end. A few months before my oral exams I came very close to being dismissed from the university without my intending it, because I had tacked a page of “concrete poetry” on the bulletin board. 250As liberal as it sometimes seemed, the university had never really become so.

After defending my thesis, my last task as a student, we — Michaela, Anton, and I — went to District Military Headquarters. I had to cancel — or to put it more correctly, change — my address. Michaela listened while I was told that as a driver I had a good chance of being called up again after two years. (Which would be now.)

That threat charged both my school novella and my army book with new energy.

The premiere of Miss Julie that September 251was a flop. When Michaela led Flieder onstage there were a few bravos, but three quarters of the audience was already waiting for their coats. We coerced four curtain calls. Smiling up into the empty balconies, Michaela curtsied each time like an opera diva. In Berlin this Julie would have been as celebrated as Danton’s Death or Macbeth had been. 252

It was not until we were driving home after the cast party that Michaela burst into rage. She had been stuck in Altenburg way too long, and all the talk about how the theater here was a stepping-stone had never been true. “I can’t take this Podunk any longer!” she shouted. Her despair reached the point that she declared she was ready to join the Party if that was what it took to get a role in Berlin. Half her friends at the Gorki or the Berliner Ensemble were comrades — none of them someone you would ever have guessed was.

“And what about West Berlin,” I asked as we turned down our street. “In an instant!” Michaela cried, and stared at me with eyes open wide. “In an instant,” she repeated.

When we got home she handed me a package — her premiere gift. It contained several smaller packages, which I had to open one after the other until I got to the last one wrapped in gold paper — a pack of Club cigarettes, but filled with peppermints. A note slipped inside read, “Smoking is dangerous for expectant mothers and fathers.” We hadn’t yet managed it, but we were trying to give up smoking.

Miss Julie had five or six performances. In Michaela’s eyes the fact that her Julie wasn’t on the season’s consignment list 253was pure censorship. There were a few scattered reviews, the local paper’s was scathing.

When I began working full-time as a dramaturge I was assigned a one-and-a-half room apartment in the home of eighty-eight-year-old Emilie Paulini.

We two shared a chemical toilet, halfway up the stairs, and a kitchen whose sink was my ersatz bathtub. The cellar, however, was filled with briquettes. I needed this refuge because Robert’s television habits, plus a cassette recorder that never stopped playing, literally drove me off. I had moved in with just a table and a chair — deeply disappointing Emilie Paulini. She was afraid, you see, of being alone “when it comes time to die.” To fall asleep some night and never wake up, that’s what she hoped for. But there should be someone close by. In my honor she wore a wig, usually perched like a lopsided beret. At regular intervals she would wave me into her parlor, invite me to have a seat, and then hand me a framed, brown-foxed photograph of a beautiful young woman. Did I have any idea who that was? She would then giggle, thrust her bewigged head forward like a turtle, and ask very loudly, “Well?” I would glance back and forth between her and the photo and finally say, “But of course, Frau Paulini, that’s you!” Emilie Paulini would screech, fling her arms into the air, and jump up to fetch me a piece of pastry from the kitchen.