Ingo Schulze - New Lives

We should be glad they found something, the detective said. Upstairs they had pulled drawers out and left Jörg’s, Marion’s, and Pringel’s manuscripts strewn across the floor.

I asked about Käferchen and her husband. The detective didn’t understand my question — we already knew each other from the police page, a squat fellow with a handshake like a vice and eyes like portholes.

We groped our way up the dark stairwell. The detective kept stumbling on the uneven and badly worn stairs. I searched for the doorbell by the flame of his lighter. The door was unlocked, but could be pressed open only a crack. He held the light up to the door frame. “Crowbar,” he said. The lock itself dangled loose. I called out Käferchen’s name, two, three times. In reply came — my blood froze! — I have to put it this way: an inhuman howl. Even the detective winced.

I didn’t recognize the old man’s voice at first. I shouted my name. The old man bellowed. “Butchers! Oooh youuu fouuul butchers!” The old man cursed us as bandits too.

With the help of two more cops we managed to get the door open, shoving the wardrobe to one side. The old man came at us with an ax, the lighter went out. All the same, the two cops managed to grab hold of him. I heard the ax sliding down the stairs.

The old man gave off an awful stench. He kept rasping his gruesome “Butchers!” in an almost toneless voice and threatened to wring our necks.

Frau Schorba pushed me into the computer room and offered me one of her green tranquilizers. She had arrived at seven o’clock and had reacted perfectly as per guidelines — back in Lucka she had been given instructions on how to handle a break-in.

Through the window I could see the flashing blue light. Shortly afterward I heard the old man’s voice as he and Käferchen were brought downstairs.

We set out on a tour with the team of detectives. Each of us had to say what was missing or damaged at their workstation. At first I thought I had come off scot-free. But then I could hardly believe it: the photograph of Robert, Michaela, and me had vanished. It had been lying among my papers. The burglars had dealt with Ilona’s framed family portrait by tossing it to the floor and stomping on the glass. Then they had dumped the contents of her “opera bag” over it. Surely I knew, she sobbed, what that meant. She was talking about the mirror. Ilona is superstitious. It’s seven years of bad luck, I explained to her, only if you break the mirror yourself. She shook her head, no, no, that’s not how it is.

The burglars had got in through the hardware store’s only window to the courtyard. The cash register had been emptied and was still open. Evidently they had been looking just for money — the only other thing missing was a mixer. There were crowbar scars in our space as well. Hardly neat work, the shorter detective said disparagingly. I couldn’t keep my eyes off his hands. He had more strength in two fingers than I did in my whole arm. Although the cup was hot, he held it like a mug, but with his pinkie sticking out. He is the older of the two, but evidently ranks lower. He always lets his partner through the door first. Even when I offered him coffee, he waited for his partner to say yes. His boss seems unsure of himself, is always quick to agree with us or laugh at some remark, while not a muscle stirs in Shorty’s face. He nodded, however, when his boss suggested it didn’t take much imagination to picture what they had done to the two old folks. Käferchen, he said, had been lying there wrapped in a sheet, whimpering. “It’s a disaster uptop” Shorty said, “Everything busted to smithereens.” The grandfather clock had been knocked over, the blanket shredded. How those oldsters had managed to push that wardrobe in front of the door is still a mystery.

The two detectives were just about to take their leave when Jörg arrived. They extended their hands to him too. But instead of shaking hands, he took a step back. Shorty said something to the effect that we had set up cozy offices here in this old ramshackle place — a harmless remark, it seemed to me.

He’d do better to refrain from such comments, Jörg responded with an icy stare, then shrouded himself in silence until they had left.

He was not going to put up with such insinuations, he exploded. And why had I let somebody like that sit down at a desk? I said that I had often sat at a desk with those two and that I’d had no other choice, because otherwise I would have had to stand to fill out a report they were filing solely on our behalf.

Jörg thought the remark had insinuated something about our office furniture. He had met these same two guys during the occupation of Stasi headquarters and had assumed they were both Stasi themselves. The whole bunch had been on a first-name basis. Only gradually had he realized that he was talking with a prosecutor and police detectives, and that the ones who kept their mouths closed belonged to the Stasi. “I mean,” he corrected himself, “officially belonged.” And it was in fact ironfisted Shorty who had accused him, Jörg, of being aggressive. Jörg was not about to let himself be calmed down.

Marion leads him around by her apron strings. Last week he admitted to me that ever since the day Piatkowski visited our offices, he’s been trying to write an article about him. 266“Winners Can Be Insufferable” is to be the headline. But the moment he sees that headline in front of him, he goes totally blank. No sentence, no phrase that he doesn’t immediately strike. He feels like a fly banging against a windowpane, over and over — even though the article is a matter of self-respect for him, of self-respect and independence.

Then we shouldn’t have agreed to buy the building, I said. Yes, Jörg replied, it wasn’t appropriate, and he hadn’t actually agreed to it. What was that supposed to mean, I asked. He couldn’t say really, and it wasn’t intended as criticism of me — he’d been happy about it himself, as I could see at the time, and he wasn’t trying to offer excuses by blaming the baron. “But it isn’t right, it isn’t right.”

“The voters elected Piatkowski,” I said. “He’s justified in claiming that at any rate.”

He understood that, he rejoined. But he can’t bear it when someone like Piatkowski floats right back up to the top, that really cheapens everything else. Doesn’t it? He just wanted to pose the question — at least that, a question.

“What are we supposed to do with people like those detectives? ‘Send the Stasi to the mines’ only works in socialism,” 267I said. I helped him tidy things up.

Jörg is a man full of scruples. After we published our scandal issue he was afraid that Meurer, the school director, whom he had attacked in his article, might become suicidal. Which is why he was happy when he spotted him on the street. Meurer, however, doesn’t know what Jörg actually looks like. People here in town really are afraid of Jörg. I likewise profit from his reputation.

I had to force myself to sit down at my own desk and get back to work. I would have loved to have asked the Catholic priest — he had accompanied the baron to “entrust” us with an article about the Altenburg hand reliquary — to move from room to room with his censer, cleansing everything with the proper ritual. Ilona once again burst into tears when the priest spoke a few comforting words to her. From hour to hour she was getting more and more wrought up over something that she herself couldn’t actually say what it was. Frau Schorba was filling in for Ilona after having sent her back to the kitchen, where I could hear her sobbing. Astrid the wolf loped from room to room sniffing excitedly, as if following a trail. I drove Ilona home. We drank some more coffee in her kitchen. She couldn’t stop talking about herself — for example, about how at age eighteen, after only a few months of marriage, she had been ready to throw herself in front of a train.