Ingo Schulze - New Lives

Emilie Paulini didn’t like Michaela because she was a “theater person” besides which, she was to blame for my not living at her place.

Her daughter Ruth came to visit on Wednesdays and picked her up every Sunday for dinner. Ruth spoke very fast and, rather than pausing between sentences, let out a long high-pitched “aaah” or “nooo” that fell slowly on its column of air. In the kitchen she told me (“Herr Türmer, what all I could tell you, Herr Türmer, aaah, but there’s not enough time — nooo — so much, so much”) about how, while fleeing in April ’45, they had “fallen into the hands of the Russians” in Freital near Dresden. Her mother had always sent her away and told her to sing. “Whenever the Russians came, I would be sent out to sing. Aaah! Those are stories, Herr Türmer, stories…aaah! Even though our mommy was no longer young, but that didn’t help. Stories! Aaah, Herr Türmer. She arrived here pregnant, at age forty-three, pregnant! Nooo, and with no husband, just imagine it!” 254Ruth dabbed at one corner of her eye with a lace handkerchief she always kept at the ready.

I couldn’t figure out the point of the singing, but since Emilie Paulini never left us alone for long, I didn’t get around to asking Ruth about it until some time later. “Aaah, Herr Türmer, it’s really very simple. It eased her mind. She at least knew I wasn’t being molested. Aaah, nooo, stories!”

It was Michaela who initially suggested I turn the tales of the two Paulinis into a play, a monologue. For her as an actor it would of course be better to have Ruth narrate the whole thing, but a mother-daughter piece was also a possibility. If I could get them both to tell their stories, the piece would write itself. 255

I now began spending an occasional night at Emilie Paulini’s. The idea that I could have at my disposal materials dealing with war, flight, looting, and rape — perhaps even with Jews and the SS — lent me a sense of strange superiority.

I began modestly by keeping track of Emilie Paulini’s routine: when she went to the toilet or to the kitchen, what she had Ruth buy for her, which noonday meals that People’s Solidarity brought her she liked and which stood in the kitchen until the next day. Her television habits were all too audible. I was sometimes awakened in the night by Emilie Paulini’s mumblings, which were indecipherable despite a very thin wall. I had to give up trying to slink up to her door because at the first creak of floorboards she would fall silent.

I never missed a Wednesday evening. Just as I had hoped I was always invited into her room, which I knew only by dim twilight, because Emilie Paulini skimped on electricity. The older any object that I could make out with Argus eyes, the more I expressed my admiration for it, in hopes of rousing the Paulinis to conversation. But there were no “prewar goods.” 256I was hoping for photographs, but was shown no others than the ones that stood framed on the sideboard.

I asked about Czechs, Jews, the outbreak of war. Nothing, and certainly nothing gruesome, occurred to her. By this time I was sure Emilie Paulini had realized there was some purpose behind my curiosity. She said of her husband, “They fought to the bitter end!” and burst into high laughter. I learned more in the kitchen. But Ruth’s aaah’s and nooo’s were so loud that Emilie Paulini would immediately come scurrying in from her room. Her husband had been a member of the Special Field Force, a bandog, and had been reported missing in action. Not so much as a picture of him was left. Long before her marriage and while still underage, Emilie Paulini had given birth to a son. He had grown up in an orphanage, volunteered to join the navy, been badly wounded in Norway, and in the end had died in an air raid on Bremen. Ruth had spoken about him with her mother only once. There had to be letters from him somewhere. But there was no point in asking her mother, Ruth said. The two of them couldn’t even talk about Hans, the Russian boy — but then Ruth didn’t want to talk about her half brother either.

I used index cards marked with felt pens. Black for household habits, red for Emilie Paulini’s stories, green for Ruth’s, blue for objects that arrested my interest. I hoped that at some point, by arranging themselves all on their own, so to speak, my notes would spin out my tale. Michaela read a whole stack of books about the end of World War II and swamped me with suggestions.

I had never had so much time to write as I did at the theater — we were required to be on the premises only from ten till two, and for that I got paid! And what’s more, my gross salary of nine hundred marks left me a take-home pay of seven hundred, which could only be called a princely sum.

I was in charge of the annual Christmas fairy tale, a reworking of Andersen’s Snow Queen, in which I even appeared onstage a few times as a wise raven. I waited in vain for a director the likes of Flieder.

The best productions were still those of Moritz Paulsen, who earned his living with fashion shows and who demanded extensive lighting rehearsals of two to three days. What won me over to Moritz Paulsen was his decision to turn a so-called glasnost play into a revue, the high point of which was a series of short scenes that interrupted the plot, each beginning with a shouted phrase he’d coined: “The Party flamingo!” All the actors stopped and, smiling radiantly, gazed up at an imaginary Party flamingo evidently winging its way across the stage sky. We figured we had a good chance of being closed down after the premiere. But except for an angry outburst by Jonas, the general manager — nobody was going to understand the point we were trying to make — there were only feeble protests. A teacher who had attended a performance with his class criticized us for stabbing pedagogues in the back instead of using our art to raise Party consciousness. Letters of that ilk, which we posted as trophies, remained few and far between.

You might say we were a happy family during the second Christmas we spent together. The presence of both grandmothers calmed Robert down. He spoke when spoken to and didn’t walk away when I sat down beside him to watch television.

And then, the morning of the second day of Christmas, I suddenly knew how my novella would end. I couldn’t understand why it had taken me almost three years to see it.

It must have had to do with the general mood, a mood influenced by what we were reading at the time. Michaela was busy with Eco’s Name of the Rose, and I had given Robert Tim Thaler, or Don’t Sell Your Smile as a present. Laughter was in the air, and all of a sudden Titus, the hero of my novella, could smile. Titus was no longer going to let himself be blackmailed. His suffering was replaced with irony. He had become an adult.

I was going to begin all over again, right from page one, but this time with a sure voice. Titus’s smile bathed the novella in a cheerful light and freed it from the sour tragedy of puberty. 257

As the new year began I set to work. I couldn’t write as fast as the ideas bombarded me. And because I was now spending a good deal of time in my refuge — our Herr Türmer is always friendly and in a good mood — Emilie Paulini was a happy woman as well.

These days everyone believes that with the local elections 258that spring they heard the tolling of the system’s death knell. Viewed after the fact, that seems plausible.

Whereas at the university there had been major discussions about what time a student should appear at his polling place — that is, no later than fifteen minutes after it opened — no one at the theater paid any attention to elections. After Ceauşescu was awarded the Order of Karl Marx, 259Jonas himself had threatened to quit the Party.