New Lives

Friday, July 7, ’90

My poor Jo,

You really are missing something. I had found all the talk about this “very special person” insufferable, but when we in fact met him, Vera and I were taken by him at first glance: his delicate frame, his bright eyes, his fine head, his “accomplished” hands. His manners brought to mind that long-forgotten ideal of the well-educated prince. Despite his advanced age the effect is boyish — not even the wheelchair he is forced to use most of the time can alter that.

The program is built around his own preferences; no one suspected, however, that he would be more interested in a two-bedroom apartment in one of the new complexes in Altenburg Nord than in the castle. He last saw the town in 1935. In comparison to how he treats others—“just call me ‘hereditary prince’”—he is somewhat condescending only to the baron. He responds to all of the baron’s whispers and explanations with barely a nod. He frequently interrupts him by bending forward, extending a hand, and addressing someone nearby in the most cordial fashion.

Andy, Massimo, and the baron take turns pushing his wheelchair, Olimpia (Andy’s wife), Michaela, and Vera are his ladies-in-waiting, although Mother, Cornelia, and I are part of his retinue as well — and, of course, Robert.

No one says it, but I think the hereditary prince is gay, at least he never married, has no children, and appears too gossamer for family life.

Actually, the baron had wanted to prepare him for our coup, but then agreed with me that it would be better if I took the hereditary prince into our confidence myself. Our dilemma is that our paper has to be at the printer by Friday evening if we want it back late Saturday for delivery early Sunday morning. Our report would come out a week late, and others would reap the harvest of our labors. And so we wrote about the events of Saturday — especially the grand reception in the afternoon and the enthronement of the Madonna in the museum — ahead of time.

The hereditary prince responded with an almost roguish smile and asked if he could read our article about the near future in order to do his part at turning prophecy into reality. He noticed that the phrase irritated me, and so he calmed me down with the most cordial words — he would gladly do his best to be of benefit and assistance to us, since he was, to be sure, in our debt. I could have kissed his lovely hands out of sheer gratitude.

We then drove to the castle — at the same hour of the day that the reception is to begin tomorrow — to photograph him in the middle of a crowd: Barrista’s host of attendants, including Proharsky and Recklewitz-Münzer and their families, plus the newspaper staff — without Marion and Pringel, but with Jörg, who is not looking good — and Georg’s family. (Franka in a knockout stylish dress, a gift of the newspaper czarina from Offenburg.) The photo is a four-column spread.

Next came his visit to our offices. He kept that same roguish smile as Schorba and I locked hands to make a seat so that we could carry him up the narrow stairs. He’s as light as a bird. I barely registered his arm draped over my shoulders. Andy and the baron dragged the wheelchair up, while the women stood waiting and applauding at the top. Astrid could barely be restrained. She wagged her tail like crazy and didn’t calm down until she could lay her muzzle on the hereditary prince’s knee.

In greeting the prince Frau Schorba immediately got tangled up in ceremonial phrases she had jotted down, blushed, and it took the prince himself to soothe her. He was just a frail old retiree, he said, who was happy and grateful to be allowed to return to Altenburg. His voice is as fragile as his frame. He wears no rings on his hands, which he keeps on his knees outside the thin blanket and which always tremble slightly. When he wants to speak, he first moistens his lips. Sometimes he does it quite unconsciously, which is why he then looks up with a questioning glance, wondering why we have fallen silent.

Although I talked about the Weekly and the Sunday Bulletin, which would appear this Sunday for the first time, it probably sounded as if we were still one firm. Then Georg was allowed to present him a reprint of the Dukes of Altenburg. The hereditary prince paged through it and right away found the inscribed dedication: “Presented with greatest respect and pleasure to His Highness, Hereditary Prince Franz Richard of Sachsen-Altenburg on the occasion of his visit to Altenburg on July 7 and 8, 1990.”

The prince overheard Georg’s polite remark that he had been able to publish the book solely because of Herr von Barrista’s magnanimity, bringing a scowl to Barrista’s face.

We rolled the hereditary prince into the computer room. Mother, Vera, and Michaela had a chance to see our holy of holies now as well. Everyone smiled. I remarked into a lull that we saw ourselves as rebels and insurgents. Since all the major local Party papers would soon be divvied up between conglomerates — Springer, WAZ and Co. — we would be standing alone against entire armies. There were hardly any East German newspapers still in the hands of East Germans.³⁶⁶ Yes, the hereditary prince said, nevertheless he wished us the all luck in the world — because one’s own voice is important.

Frau Schorba nodded and, hoping to make people forget her initial blunder, attempted to announce, in lofty phrases free of her native dialect, how important it was for her to be fully responsible for her own work. We wouldn’t have to first learn what work meant, she concluded abruptly, as if already tired of her own rhetoric.

In order to avoid an embarrassing pause, the hereditary prince inquired about our likes, our habits, our favorite foods, and the state of local agriculture. A few sparse responses inspired him to give a little lecture. He advocated that each vegetable, each fruit be served in nature’s season. Strawberries in spring, baked apples in winter. The immoderate cornucopia we were about to experience was not healthy for humankind.

That might well be, Mona replied; she didn’t know anything about that, but she would never again, not for anything in the world, want to be without the goods she had been introduced to this past week, even if she couldn’t always pay for them. The days of having to stand in endless lines to buy peaches or bell peppers for her son — she didn’t ever want to see those days return. Several people backed her up. To the extent his wheelchair allowed, the hereditary prince turned to each person speaking, smiled, and held a hand to his ear now and then. Even when he didn’t know quite what to make of what was said, it was — so he later confessed — the sound of the Altenburg dialect that intoxicated him like a fragrance. Suddenly everyone wanted to get a word in.

Pringel, his face pale within the frame of his beard, called out over Evi and Mona’s heads that he had been a Party member and written articles for a house journal — he needed to explain what that was — and he was now ashamed of them, yes, profoundly ashamed.

Pringel had gotten to his feet, as if that were the only position from which he could talk about his articles. “Nonetheless, nonetheless,” he continued breathlessly, when you took into account all that he had written, that was much more — much more than what people now pointed fingers at him for, some even tongue-lashing his wife. Hundreds of articles!

And out of the blue, without any change in his tone of voice, Pringel called it a stroke of luck by a gracious fate to be given another chance, a chance unlike any ever offered him, yes, that he had no longer believed possible. Life outside the confines of his family now had meaning for the first time, he felt needed for the first time. He lowered his head and stared at the floor. His silence seemed almost defiant.

People sighed, cleared their throats, looked at each other only to look away at once. The hereditary prince called him an honest lad and was about to say something more, when Pringel walked right up to the prince, grasped his hands, and brought his face problematically close to them. “Thank you for having taken the trouble to visit us.” He fell silent, like a man who’s spoken the wrong lines and is waiting for the prompter’s whisper.

“I was truly in love once,” Evi said, as if to help Pringel out of his jam, “but after the third miscarriage, Matthias left me.” She had thought of suicide, it was all over for her. But the day after her job interview here, she had taken up jogging daily, because she liked herself again and wanted to slim down. She was embarrassed to say it, but she was convinced that as long as she kept up her jogging, she would be immune to any kind of bad luck, would keep her job, find a husband, have children. For a lot of people that was nothing special, but it was for her. “So,” she said in conclusion.

He really didn’t have that much to say, Kurt noted. He was sitting on the table, jiggling his legs and playing with his stubbly mustache. He had never expected great things. He had tried hard, actually he had been trying hard his whole life, but without much success — what sort of success was he supposed to have? He’d always liked the saying “I’m a miner, so who’s better.” That’s why he had hired on at Wismut, and for the money. His whole family had always done the grunt work, and so had he. He’d never had any illusions. Which was why he was content. And now that the deal was fairer, that was fine with him too. He needed to be paid a fair wage, or at least halfway fair — for him that was the main thing.

Schorba talked about how it had been his dream to experience and achieve something real, something right for him. That’s why he had spent three years in the army, as a parachutist, then on to Wismut, later right down at the mine face, until his foreman convinced him he ought to study to qualify as a mining engineer, to put his nose in books for five years — no quick money in that. Although Irma, his wife, had always encouraged and supported him, yes, had even had to give up her own studies because of the kids, who suddenly came toppling into the world one after the other, making him doubt whether he’d made the right decision. Of course, there had been privileges at Wismut — the best vacation spots, a three-bedroom apartment, and the offer of a car. But they couldn’t afford the car. And they didn’t think it was right to accept it and then resell it. They had handed the registration back, people had called them crazy.³⁶⁷ He didn’t even know why he was telling all this, minor details really, but he had never understood the hatred that had been aroused by a decision that was in line with social norms at the time — he still had nightmares about it.

“Well, yes,” Frau Schorba said after a pause filled with a breathless hush, “well, yes, men, they like to just rattle things off and worry about stuff that we probably don’t even think is important. Well, yes, there ain’t much you can do about that, not in the future either, I don’t suppose. He’s always been my husband, my first and only husband — I wasn’t even seventeen at the time. And by the time I was eighteen, here came Tanja, and at twenty, Sebastian, and when I was pregnant with Anja, he’d already gone back to school and was screwing around with other women, even though I never turned him down — he’s got kids he’s paying for and that’s why we were always coming up short. He’s in the Party, otherwise they would have tossed him out, from school I mean, because they kept a close eye on who had a family and whether he was behaving himself. He was actually going to leave me — me, with three kids. And I told him, I’ll kill you. You do that, and I’ll kill you. I didn’t say anything more than that, and that was the end of it, and he started coming home every Friday again, and then he finished school. He’s come around to saying that I was right back then. And I tell him now — Herr Türmer thinks so highly of me — that I earn just as much as you do. I mean, he ought to be glad to earn as much as I do and that just in general he can be part of something as big as this is here.”

“Yes,” Mona said, “something as big as this, yes, it’s really great. But as for men, they’re only interested in screwing, that’s for sure. I’ve got nothing against screwing, but when that’s the only thing…And when I see how they just up and leave their wives after ten or twenty years, that’s brutal, really brutal, as if screwing was all there is. That’s why it’s so wonderful that there’s something else, something really big. And next year I plan to travel everywhere. We’re so glad you’ve come!”

I figured we now had all this behind us, when Ilona started in with her suicide attempt, a story I already knew, but she reeled the whole thing off so fast that no one actually understood her. Fred merely said that he was sorry he’d been a conscientious objector. Because now he didn’t have the luxury of starting to study again, and besides the noggin — and he gave it a rap with his fist—“ain’t used to stuff like that.” So that he and everybody like him were now just — sorry, he didn’t know any other way to put it — a pile of shit. In the GDR it hadn’t been so bad just to stoke a furnace. But now? What could he learn now? He’d lost all interest in the whole hoopla. A nice new car maybe, but what else? Now, if he were ten, fifteen years younger…

As our eyes met, Fred said, “Hey, it’s true, it’s really true.”

“I’m doing very well,” Manuela said, standing up and setting her hands to her hips as if modeling her green pantsuit. “I didn’t think it would ever happen, that it could ever be like this, but I always hoped I’d find something fun that brings in lots of money. I’m earning way more than the boss,” she cried, rotating from side to side. “Once I have the newspaper in my hand, all I’ll have to do is collect the ads.” Kurt gave a whistle through his teeth, but Manuela wasn’t about to be dissuaded from finishing her advertising dance.

Suddenly all eyes were directed at me. Even Vera and Michaela were looking my way, not demanding, but patient, willing to wait. “And now you,” Fred said.

“His Highness,” Jörg exclaimed, “His Highness has performed a miracle, the way he’s got us all to speak out. And we’re all grateful to him for that.”

I then talked about how things were a year ago and then six months ago, and that I would never have imagined it could be such fun to pursue a business life.

We toasted the hereditary prince with champagne, although he raised his glass only symbolically since he doesn’t drink alcohol. He looked tired, and I was upset with myself for not having urged that we put an end to this sooner. He wished us all the very best, with his whole heart, and very much hoped we would have the opportunity to see one another the following day.

Schorba and I carried him downstairs. A little knot of people had gathered around his car, whose license plate read TEXAS. Massimo lifted the hereditary prince onto his seat, the prince gave one more wave.

One could see the clear, glistening imprint of lipstick on the back of the hereditary prince’s hand. Vera noticed it as well. The prince smiled when he realized what we were looking at, and hid the traces of red with his other hand.

That evening a small group of us gathered in the city’s guesthouse to dine on open-faced sandwiches and sour pickles, just as the hereditary prince had requested. Everything is sure to be all right now.

Hugs from your Enrico

Sunday, July 8, ’90

My dear Jo,

It’s almost five o’clock. By the time you read this it will have long since been decided whether we’ve won the World Cup or not.³⁶⁸ Everyone here thinks we’ll win. I’m sitting on our loggia, as Cornelia calls the wooden balconies of our remodeled building, gazing out over the town. There’s a coffee cup and cream pitcher on my desk, plus a scattering of heavy spoons (mother brought her silver set along) to keep my papers from being blown away. Weather from the Baltic is driving whole herds of dark shadows down the street. If I ever write a novel, it will have to start with this view.³⁶⁹

To my left, on a round table, lie the dishes from coffee hour yesterday. There’s a scent of fruit and flowers in the air, both of which Vera brings home in abundance. (The birds are too loud for Vera, so she sleeps till noon with the windows closed.) All the chairs and wicker armchairs that Andy has lent us are draped with Vera’s clothes, as if she’s marking her territory. Michaela is jealous of Vera, and not without reason. Ever since Vera arrived, Barrista has been retreating to the “construction site,” by which, however, he means our veranda, where he smokes cigars and lets Vera serve him “drinks.” (The sound of ice cubes startles Astrid out of her deepest sleep; she’s crazy about ice.) Even in Michaela’s presence Barrista prefers to talk about long-ago adventures, but in hints that he presumes only Vera will understand.

If everything goes according to plan, our newspaper will be in my mailbox for the first time today around nine o’clock. At nine thirty, then, a big breakfast spread in the garden, where we’re expecting the hereditary prince. He can drink his tea here with a view to the same windows behind which he used to awaken at one time. Robert will sit next to him. The prince calls him his “young friend,” and sometimes he addresses our mother as his “dear, esteemed friend.” She refused the money the baron offered her in compensation for feeding the prince. By the way, he isn’t nearly as fragile as he occasionally appears. Otherwise he would never have survived yesterday’s strenuous program.

And we’ve been talking about you and Franziska too. On Friday they removed all the nonsupporting walls in your apartment. It’ll take less courage to begin anew than you think. Gotthard Pringel will be a helping hand for everything. (I’ve done away with his pseudonym.) And Robert can hardly wait to play something on the piano for Gesine.

My dear Jo, I can’t describe it all for you, at least not at the moment. The morning at the museum and the enthronement of the Madonna is a story all by itself, especially because Nicoletta suddenly appeared.³⁷⁰ She wanted to surprise me. The museum has hired her as its photographer until further notice, as partial reimbursement for her expenses in researching the altar project. And so there they suddenly stood, all three: Nicoletta, Vera, and Michaela. And what did I do? I had an argument with the museum director, because the mysterious Madonna from the parsonage was not at the entrance to the “Italian Collection,” where it had been agreed it would be hung — and as our article reports it is — but at the end of the gallery. I didn’t want to hear the reasons the director offered. And she refused to yield on any account. Even when the baron — who took the matter rather lightly — sent a man from the district council to my aid, a fellow who has some executive power over the museum, she couldn’t be budged. She would rather resign her position than obey instructions of this sort. The baron played arbitrator to the extent that was possible. We’ll have to admit “our error” in our next issue — or then again, maybe not. Let them all ask why the Madonna isn’t at the entrance.

A young woman played the cello, then speeches, speeches, speeches, each ending with special thanks to Barrista and the newspaper, followed by rejoicing and cheers for the hereditary prince. More cello. People chattered away the whole time. Nicoletta shot roll after roll of film. She whispered to me to stop pulling such a face, otherwise she wouldn’t have any pictures she could use.

When the hereditary prince, with madame director in the lead, began his tour of the collection, Massimo made a snap decision, grabbed the two museum guards posted at the first archway by the sleeves of their powder blue uniforms, and then, with the corners of his mouth tucked in deep resolve, took up a position directly behind this living shield.

As cries of “Highness” rang out louder and louder and people told stony-faced Massimo what they wanted to show or present to “Herr Hereditary Prince,” I myself was witness to a small miracle.

When he arrived at the panels of Guido da Siena, the hereditary prince threw back his cover, braced himself on his wheelchair’s arms, raised himself up all on his own, and took a step in the direction of the panel. “And so we meet again,” he said.

Each panel was a reunion. There wasn’t one before which he did not stop to spend some time, not one about which he didn’t offer some comment. As a young man he had spent entire weeks here.

On madame director’s arm, the hereditary prince spent an hour strolling past the paintings, until he arrived at Massimo, whom he called “our brave warrior of Thermopylae.”

Those who had waited for the hereditary prince stepped back as if before an apparition.

Massimo presented the pleas of several “unhappy souls” who wanted to add their signatures to the hereditary prince’s copy of Georg’s reprint and refused to be put off until Sunday.

I’ll not write about the little drive Nicoletta and I took, or about the arrival of our first issue from Gera, or about all the preparations that proved necessary right up to the last minute, yes, right up to the very start of the grand reception.

Ah, Madame Türmer has awakened…Yesterday, before the reception, she spent an hour or more rubbing herself down with a so-called moisturizing lotion, from brow to toe, applying it as meticulously as if she had staked her life on not missing a single pore. The West makes women more beautiful, I can see that with Vera, can already notice it with Michaela and even my mother. The little wrinkles that once nestled at the corner of her mouth, threatening to draw it closed like a sack, seem to have vanished.

But now on to the reception:

At ten minutes before six Andy and I carried the hereditary prince up the stairs. We had the main staircase all to ourselves, the invited guests had already been seated five minutes earlier. Olimpia stood guard at the door to the Bach Room.

While I was trying to figure out whether the prince’s fragrance was from his own perfume or came from the lingering scents of others, the baron advised us not to drink any alcohol, even during the dinner to come, so that we could maintain full concentration until the end. Cornelia, who acted as maître de plaisir, had prepared for us bottles of champagne filled with a mixture of mineral water and apple juice.

“Don’t let anything take you aback or frighten you,” the baron admonished Vera, Michaela, and me. “No matter what happens, what’s said, what you hear, no matter, whether you like these people or not, you have to be pleasant to them all, without exception. You have to believe they have your best interests at heart. These people have no greater desire than to stand in your good favor. They truly hunger for your glances, your smiles, your nods. Just ask Cornelia.”

“Clemens, Clemens, what sort of tales are you telling now,” the hereditary prince sighed, and suggested the two ladies could brace themselves on his wheelchair at any time.

Michaela fought back her stage fright with breathing exercises. Her nervousness — and, even more, the baron’s agitation — had an almost calming effect on me.

Then the clock began to strike six. The baron and I stepped up to the pair of small folding doors. The murmurs in the hall died away, all I could hear now were rustling sounds. Vera and Michaela stood up straight — and then I saw it: both were wearing transparent, or better, translucent dresses. From up close the fabric looked substantial — but the moment you stepped back just a few steps, the drapery revealed breasts, ribs, and the pubic region with a clarity beyond anything pure nudity could have accomplished.

“Türmer,” Barrista hissed. I hadn’t been counting the chimes of the clock.

It was so utterly still it was as if we were alone in the castle. One after the other, at close intervals, various other church bells struck the hour. I thought about how I ought to learn in what sequence they actually came, and that a description of it would likewise make a good beginning for a novel, since it would give rise to an effortless topography of the town.

On the baron’s nod I unlocked the door with a quarter turn of the handle as we had rehearsed. Each pulled at his panel at the same time and the music began. Vera and Michaela smiled and pushed the hereditary prince past us and into the hall, where the guests applauded as they rose to their feet.

With a practiced set of movements we closed the door behind us. Michaela swung her rear end as if she were playing the whore in a vast open-air theater. Their faces almost contorted with enthusiasm, Mother and Robert clapped frenetically. All I could see of the hereditary prince now were his hands clasped in gratitude.

The applause wouldn’t stop. The audience finally took their seats only after the baron and the mayor signaled them to. At the back to the right, just in front of the orchestra, I saw our newspaper staff and Georg’s family; to the left, toward the door, I spotted Olimpia and Andy, Cornelia and Massimo, Recklewitz and family, Proharsky and his wife.

I wouldn’t have even noticed Marion without Jörg at her side. Her face was pale and seemed altered somehow. She was probably under the influence of medication.

“Thank you,” the hereditary prince called out, “thank you so much for your welcome.” Mayor Karmeka, who was stroking the back of his left hand as if rubbing it with lotion, took a deep breath and began his greetings with an excurses on the proverb: “Better late than never.” I hadn’t said anything about the contents of his speech in my article, so it was of no concern to me what he said, except — he just wouldn’t quit. The program read: “2. Brief Welcome by the Mayor, 3. Music (The Hereditary Prince’s Favorite Piece, Mozart’s Eine Kleine Nachtmusik), 4. Address by the Mayor.”

Was this the welcome or the address? The conductor — the poor man is actually named Robert Schumann — was watching us with a craned neck, ready to hit the downbeat at any moment. Whenever I thought Karmeka was winding down, he would toss his head upward for a new assault. Fifteen minutes later he began his final approach with words of thanks extended to all, to the municipal administration, to the castle staff for their untiring work, and especially to his own aide-de-camp, Herr Fliegner. He devoted not one syllable to Barrista and me — an offense, no matter how you twisted it around. Why didn’t he say the visit hadn’t cost the city a penny? They hadn’t done a thing, not one thing!

Let him talk, I consoled myself. We’ll make sure that the truth isn’t sold short. The baron, however, pulled off a masterstroke. He applauded with such sincerity that the mayor felt obliged to grasp hold of his hand and express his thanks. A photograph of the gesture would have required no caption.

Robert Schumann gave the downbeat. Eine Kleine Nachtmusik came to an end with applause. And then came the hereditary prince. You can read the speech in our paper.

As he was describing how lost he sometimes feels — but how nonetheless he had been met with such warm cordiality in Altenburg — Marion leapt to her feet. She said not a word, as if she were simply trying to get a better view. Nor did she offer any resistance when Jörg made her take her seat again. But what was that she was holding in her hands? I held my breath. Our Sunday issue with its article about the reception going on here and now. Jörg had congratulated us on our new paper and expressed his admiration at how we had managed to start with twenty-four pages in full format. Should we have hidden it from him?

Yes, it was our duty to hide it from him. And this was what our carelessness had got us. All Marion needed to do was to pass the Sunday Bulletin from hand to hand down the rows and we would be a disreputable laughingstock for good and all. I broke into a sweat.

Instead of worrying about security, Massimo sat leaning back in his chair — arms crossed, a froglike grin on his face — smacking his lips in evident complacency. Had no one noticed except me? Should I sound the fire alarm? But that wouldn’t have been in the article either. We would have to declare the issue simply a test run. Better to lose ten or fifteen thousand D-marks than our reputation. That would have been my decision had I had to make it at that particular moment. The baron later alluded to the disconcerted look on my face when he remarked that his admonishments had not been superfluous after all, as I had evidently believed, but unfortunately also not quite as efficacious as he had hoped.

I took even the slightest movement in the audience as an indication that our paper was already making the rounds. Unable to bear the uncertainty any longer, I was on the verge of jumping up in the middle of the music.

Robert Schumann bowed — and then bowed again in front of Michaela and Vera.

Since I had proofread Georg’s speech twice, I had a good idea how long I would be stretched on the rack. I don’t want to exaggerate, but when he began his concluding quotation, all I wanted to do was close my eyes in relief. Vera and Michaela pushed the hereditary prince toward Georg so that they could exchange thanks and Georg could once again present him — officially this time — with the book about the dukes of Sachsen-Altenburg.

And then, when Michaela gave the signal, Robert Schumann’s orchestra struck up again. The formal reception line moved into place.

The baron and I pushed the hereditary prince up onto a low dais with an extension at the front so that Vera and Michaela could stand directly beside him and yet remain at eye level with everyone else. Marion and Jörg had retreated to the far side of the hall. I finally succeeded in calling Pringel’s attention to Marion. She had rolled the newspaper up, but the blue of its masthead was visible. Pringel got the message. He turned to Massimo, who listened with his arms still crossed, but now started bouncing on his tiptoes, thrust his Mussolini chin forward, and followed Pringel. Pringel greeted them both. From then on, Massimo’s massive back blocked my view.

The reception line followed a simple choreography. Invited guests formed two lines. The one on the left led to the hereditary prince via Michaela and the baron, the one on the right by way of Vera and me. Vera and Michaela accepted the invitations, checking the number against their own handsomely bound lists. After providing the prince with a first and last name, they added a few remarks about the career of the person in question, plus any honors earned. The baron or I supplemented this with some compliment or other.

It sounds boring and humdrum. You probably consider it a hollow ritual intended to flatter the vanity of Altenburg’s high society. I myself would have paid hardly any attention to those on the list either. What a mistake that would have been.

Even Karmeka, who with his family had the privilege of being at the head of the line, lost his wily self-assurance the moment he stepped before the hereditary prince. There the disconcerted family stood all by itself, suddenly nothing more than what Michaela announced them to be: “Frederick and Edelgard Karmeka, dentist and dental hygienist, and their three daughters, Klara, Beate, and Veronika.” The prince held Edelgard Karmeka’s hand so firmly in his grasp that she blushed up to her hairline and wrenched her mouth until I couldn’t tell whether she was smiling or fighting back tears. The baron rescued her by saying good-bye and mentioning the dinner for a select circle of people, where they were sure to see one another again.

And now it was up to Vera and me to pass along the district councilor and his wife — civil engineer and gastronome — who were grateful for what few words I offered in a hospitable tone, since they themselves couldn’t stammer one syllable.

Next in our line was Anton Larschen, whose appearance was truly strange — some barber had robbed him of his splendid tower of hair. As always his right hand performed the old familiar — but now pointless — gesture of attempting to tame his unruly mop. Larschen presented your book to the hereditary prince. “It’s all in there,” Larschen said. The prince thanked him and said what a pleasure it was to make the acquaintance of the man whose articles he had followed with such great interest. Before Larschen could reply, the baron was already announcing two “former civil rights advocates,” who were introduced in the same way that veterans of the antifascist resistance used to be presented to us in school. Anna invited the hereditary prince to visit the local Library on the Environment, which prompted him to invite her to the dinner that was to follow. We all smiled, although we knew what a major crisis his arbitrary decision would create for Cornelia, our maître de plaisir.

Massimo, Pringel — now joined by Kurt — continued to guard Marion and Jörg and got in line with them on the baron’s side.

Waiting next to Vera was a man in a wheelchair whose white hair hung in straggly confusion. Like a child who’s been told to make a bow, he bent forward stiffly in his chair to offer his greetings. Only a random word or two of his babblings made any sense to me. It was the Prophet. Absent his beard, I recognized him only by his eyes, grotesquely magnified by his glasses. He had had a stroke and was said to still have his wits about him, but his speech and his body had abandoned him. The Prophet appeared to grow angry when the hereditary prince didn’t understand him. No one understood him. I told the prince that in a certain sense I had this man, Rudolf Franck, to thank for what I was today.

Then came a couple of our major customers who have signed on to at least half a page each week — Eberhard Hassenstein, for example. The hereditary prince’s hand vanished into Hassenstein’s big, hairy paw. His father, who in 1934 had been a cofounder of the coal yard Benndorf & Hassenstein, had died shortly after the business was confiscated in 1971. Hassenstein sniffed several times; one tear had made it all the way to his chin.

I presented Klaus Kerbel-Offmann and his wife, Roswitha Offmann, third-generation owners of Offmann Furniture, founded in 1927.

You’ll come to know them all, there’s a novel behind each of these families. But all of them, whatever their story, seemed to me to be signing a contract with us in the same moment that they stepped before the hereditary prince. They had perhaps been excited beforehand, had pictured the occasion this way or that, but surely none had imagined how profoundly moved they would be by their encounter with him. As they extended a hand to him something burst inside them — and whatever that something was, it surprised them and bound them to us.

Even Pastor Bodin, who had thundered against our horoscope in the Weekly, licked his bluish nozzle-shaped lower lip and gazed at us in childlike expectation when his turn came. Father Mansfeld, the Catholic go-getter who will be making his grand appearance today as Boniface, could not be dissuaded from presenting the prince with a bottle of liqueur, and at the end of his audience whispered to me that he had high-proof gifts for us as well.

Piatkowski, the Christian Democrat bigwig, who indeed is on the town council again, had sent his wife. She was delighted by the reception and spoke to the hereditary prince so animatedly and warmly, yes, so charmingly, that the prince asked about her later.

The wife of innkeeper Gallus came close to creating a dire scene when her moment came. She attempted a grand curtsy, but landed, whether intentionally or not, on her knees and cried out, “It was suicide! Your Highness! It was suicide!” I hadn’t known that innkeeper Gallus had taken his life only three days before. While the baron offered his condolences and I explained to the hereditary prince the important role that innkeeper Gallus had once played, she just kept on crying, “It was suicide! Your Highness! It was suicide!”

Everyone I had included on my list showed up, except for Ruth (the daughter of my landlady, Emilie Paulini), Jan Steen, and the publisher of the newspaper in Giessen, who did, however, send his regrets.

I was also pleased that Wolfgang the Hulk and his wife attended. We had tried to get together so many times. Along with Vera I’ll be paying them a visit. And Blond and Black, two policemen, came too. We became acquainted last autumn.

Hors d’oeuvres, champagne, and orange juice were already being passed around when Marion and Jörg presented their invitations.

I assumed it was self-control that lay behind the cordiality with which the baron greeted them both, since it seemed unlikely that he hadn’t spotted our newspaper in Marion’s hand. Marion released all her subconscious aggression on the rolled-up Sunday Bulletin, a gesture that could best be described as “wringing someone’s neck.” But then she stared at the object of her repressed hostility and attempted to smooth out its pages. Jörg brushed her cheek with his hand. To make a long story short: the baron presented the two of them. Jörg greeted the hereditary prince with “Your Highness,” and bowed deeply. Then he stepped aside and gave Marion the floor. She instantly went down on one knee like the hero in an opera and held the rolled-up newspaper out to the prince. “Take a look for yourself. I don’t know why anyone would do this. But then everyone is suddenly changing their biography. No one speaks the truth anymore,” she said in a low monotone. He listened to a few more sentences of the same sort, totally absurd stuff. And of course she also informed the hereditary prince why she had forbidden “Herr Türmer” to address her by her first name, since he was a fraud and totally blinded. She however, Marion Schröder, refused to pray for me, for this shadow.

The hereditary prince extended a hand, hoping she would stand up — half the people in the room were gawking now. She misunderstood his gesture. Like a bird pecking for food, she quickly kissed his hand, stood up, and cried, “We shall meet again soon!” Jörg followed her out, catching up with her at the door, and threw an arm around her shoulder.

I was most surprised by Kurt. I had always taken him for a man in his mid-fifties, but Kurt is only in his early forties. His wife is thirty at most and so slight that I took her for his daughter. When Michaela read her profession as “butcher shop clerk,” Kurt’s wife corrected her in a firm voice: “certified vendor of meats and sausages,” which were the only words that I heard her large, lovely mouth utter.

Pringel’s wife, a pharmacist’s assistant, handed the prince a tiny box that contained a four-leaf clover she had found in the castle courtyard. It had brought them such good luck recently, they wanted to pass it on. “Our ace reporter,” the hereditary prince said, and Pringel, who had trimmed his beard short, replied, “Every, every good wish.”

As we were entering the great Hall of Mirrors for dinner, I asked the baron when he had first noticed the newspaper in Marion’s hand. She had had it with her when she arrived, he said. She had used the Sunday Bulletin as a fan, which he hoped hadn’t wounded my vanity. The baron didn’t understand a thing! He even suggested it would be good idea to place a stack of Bulletins outside the door to the Hall of Mirrors right now. I was such a scaredy-cat, he exclaimed, and asked what else I was afraid of at this point.

I’ve got to go.

Hugs,

Your E.

Monday, July 9, ’90

Dear Nicoletta,

I’ve been remiss in writing, but I no longer wish to muse about my past. It’s not that the World Cup has gone to my head. But isn’t the joy I feel at our victory the overt expression of a much greater, more all-encompassing happiness? My wish to begin a new life at your side has never been stronger than now. But since my letters appear not to have achieved that purpose, my hopes are dwindling — for these letters are motivated by nothing else.³⁷¹

But I must bring all this to a conclusion, just as a losing team dare not leave the field before those ninety minutes are over. And so back to the start of this year.

As I looked back in chagrin on my nocturnal crossroads adventure, I would have much preferred to have regarded it as a dream. And yet it also pleased me to have risked it. What I had thought and felt there, however, had been left behind in the night.

I took a bath beneath laundry hung up to dry. When I went to dress, I couldn’t find any of the things I wanted. I opened the laundry basket and began rummaging in the dirty clothes, and finally just upended it. Everything I picked up belonged to me. Two towels were the dubious exception to the rule. Only then did I notice that the items hung up to dry belonged solely to Michaela and Robert.

Okay, we’re even, I thought.

Michaela was out somewhere. I dined on fried herring and potatoes with Robert. “You’re eating again,” Michaela exclaimed when she returned home, and then announced there would be a meeting in the living room. Meaning, the space was taboo until evening.

Robert protested that he’d be missing one of his TV shows.

Michaela’s media committee arrived on the dot. While they moved chairs around, clicked open their briefcases, and struck up their usual murmurs, I tidied up my room, gleaning underwear, dishes, shoes, records, record jackets, newspapers, and letters from the floor, until slowly but surely the square fiber mats beneath began to emerge. I worked fast, hoping to escape beneath my headphones before the meeting really began. I had already stretched out on my couch when I remembered I still had laundry in the washing machine. I was trapped. To get to the bathroom I had to go through the living room. I had an overwhelming aversion to appearing before strangers — before people I didn’t want anything to do with, didn’t even want to be spoken to by. I spent a good while wondering whether I should knock or not. Finally, out of habit, I knocked — and felt as if someone had pushed me onstage. The light was blinding, the discussion died. Everyone gawked at me as if I had emerged from the wallpaper. “Why, there you are,” Michaela said. She sounded embarrassed. Sitting with propped elbows at the head of the table, she took a drag on her cigarette and blinked as she stared at me. “Don’t let me interrupt,” I said, closing the living-room door behind me.

Later I could recall the sudden clatter of voices. But at that moment I barely noticed, and was angry at myself for my hasty “Don’t let me interrupt.” I could well imagine what was going through Michaela’s head as she saw her barefoot husband whoosh through the room like a ghost.

I stuffed half a load of wet laundry into the spin-drier, pressed the lid shut, and threw myself on top so that I could hold the spout over the bucket.

I took the laundry down from the clothesline and folded it as neatly as I could. Every undershirt, ever pair of panties, every bra was familiar. I had the feeling I was saying good-bye to each piece. Then I hung up my own things.

No sooner had I opened the living-room door than two bearded men got to their feet.

“Herr Türmer,” said the fellow with long legs and a short, skewed torso, “we would like to know…” and the other one, whom I recognized as the Prophet from his cotton-candy beard and thick glasses, broke in with his variation on the question: “We really have no idea…why you don’t want to work with us.” Silence. The third fellow, Jörg, whose beret was lying on the table, leaned back and nodded encouragement like a teacher at an oral exam. The dainty woman with a pageboy hairdo seated across from him gazed at me as if she were infatuated. Only Michaela went on reading the text in front of her.

“There’s no reason, actually,” I said, just to say something.

What was I waiting for? Why didn’t I simply vanish into my room?

Rudolph, “the Prophet,” took a step toward me, extended both hands, and clasped my right hand between them. What great good luck, he said, to have this unexpected opportunity to thank me. He had wanted to do it ever since the first time he had heard me at the church.³⁷² He always told his wife she should never forget what Herr Türmer had done for us. I had been months ahead of events, I had truly spoken the same clear text that they wanted klartext to speak, and if there was anybody in this town whom he trusted, it was me.

Although he was still grasping my hand tightly, his gaze met mine only occasionally.

I should be writing for them, he said. With my name on the masthead he would no longer worry about putting out a newspaper, my name was a “guarantee of success.”

“So grab a chair and sit down here with us,” Michaela said, interrupting my eulogist.

It was like a rehearsal with a cast change — everybody knows what’s going on except the actor at the center of things. But soon the discussion turned to things like cost projections, printers, distribution possibilities, copies per issue, number of pages, departmental assignments — which strangely enough relieved some of my anxiety since I had nothing to contribute and yet listening caused me no distress. It was all both as interesting and as boring as if they were explaining the rules of a parlor game.

Michaela was the only one who opposed the others’ plans. “But that won’t work!” she kept exclaiming.

I finally asked why they were discussing all this instead of proceeding just as before.

“Precisely,” Michaela said, tossing her pencil aside, “that’s what I keep asking myself. Precisely that!”

Jörg burst into laughter. And then for the first time I heard the words: Altenburg Weekly. Jörg didn’t let anyone get a word in edgewise now. When someone tried to speak, his radio moderator’s voice grew louder in anticipation of the objection or comment.

“But it won’t work,” Michaela shouted once more, to which he responded with another laugh and said, “But we’re going to do it anyway!”

After that no one said anything, they all just stared straight ahead. Suddenly the woman with the pageboy turned her head to me with a birdlike jerk and said, “And what about you? Do you want to work with us? We’d consider it an honor.”

It was our job, she continued, to win over public opinion, in fact, to actually create public opinion so that we could help sustain the transition to democracy, to steer and direct it, yes, even to provide a little control — and self-control — when necessary. “Independence is the crucial thing! And we’ll see to it that the New Forum gives us that in writing.” We didn’t need to go into the fact that in a provincial town an effort like this would take a different form than in Berlin or Leipzig. “The wheel of history,” Rudolph the Prophet interjected, “dare not be turned back.” Then Georg said, “We, that is the New Forum, which will be financing us, are planning a weekly, starting in February. In seven weeks we’ll be holding our first issue in our hands.”

I liked the idea.

“And what you do think?” I asked Michaela. She had stubbed out her cigarette and was shifting her puffed-up cheeks back and forth as if rinsing with mouthwash.

She had joined the New Forum out of a sense of responsibility, she had helped found klartext out of a sense of responsibility, she had taken on the role of publisher out of a sense of responsibility. A newspaper, journalism, political activism — those were important things in a time of crisis, but interested her only in a time of crisis. What was essential for real life, however, happened in literature, in art, in the theater. Where, if not in the theater, did society’s problems get bundled up together and take the shape of action? Then she turned to phrases like “the swamps of local politics” and “everyday picayune stuff.”

At first they all listened, but the longer she gushed on about art, the stage, and “real life,” the more restless they grew. Only the pageboy woman was still giving her her full attention. Michaela closed her sermon with the statement, “Only in art do our lives experience justice, only in art is there a language appropriate to justice.”

After that all eyes refocused on me. “It would mean a great sacrifice,” the woman with the pageboy said, “would truly be a sacrifice on your part.”

“Marion,” Jörg said a little testily, “it’s a leap for us all.”³⁷³

“That’s absurd!” Michaela cried. It should be clear to me that it would mean my giving notice at the theater, it wasn’t something you could do on the side.

I promised to think it over.

Michaela flared up: “You can’t be serious!”

I repeated that I would think it over.

Michaela disappeared into our room.

This turn of events was a stroke of good luck for Robert. He didn’t even complain about the cigarette smoke, because everyone had departed from the living room just in time for his show to start. I said good-bye to Michaela’s media committee at the door.

Once Robert had gone to bed, Michaela elbowed my door open and turned around to reveal the drawer from her desk suspended like a vendor’s box at her stomach. “Here, you can practice,” she said, as she dumped the contents on the floor and was gone again.

A pile of papers scribbled full, the klartext files, as it turned out — plus bobby pins, Band-Aids, and a nail clipper.

I immediately set about sorting it all: printing costs, income from vendors, income from mailed copies, bills (paid and outstanding), printed texts, unprinted manuscripts, correspondence.

Standing up again at last, I surveyed my little ordered world — and then I removed my manuscript files from the cupboard, emptied the first, erased the title Barracks Heart/Final Version, and wrote “Printing Cost Estimates” in its place. On the pastel blue one that had read Titus Holm, I now wrote “Vendors’ Accounts.” And so on, until only one file was left without a title. I extracted my most recent attempt at prose from it and added it to the others on my desk. It was now the capstone of my collected works. And on the file itself I wrote: “Rejected Manuscripts”—and at that moment I realized how appropriate the title would have been all along. If we’d had a stove, my “Collected Works” would have gone up in flames that same evening.

But after I had turned the pile over with the written side down, it looked like any stack of blank paper. The pages were usable on one side — a metaphoric fact that both frightened and delighted me. The other half ought not to be wasted.³⁷⁴

My dear Nicoletta, I’m not quite finished yet, but that’s enough for today.

This comes with greetings as warm as they are disheartened, from

Your Enrico Türmer

Tuesday, July 10, 1990

Dear Jo,

Referees’ Retreat was our stadium. We celebrated on into the morning. Mother and the hereditary prince held out until just after midnight. They didn’t want to miss a single moment of our Sunday, either. Everyone was there, except for the baron. He was in consultation with Jörg. I don’t know what came of it. I don’t want to know, either. It was unpleasant enough when Fred and Ilona interviewed with us yesterday. We don’t need anyone new at this point. It’s a bitter pill for them, because I was unable to recommend them to anyone in the family³⁷⁵ with a clear conscience — I know them too well for that.

You and Franziska really missed something on Sunday. It will be a while before I’ll see another spectacle like it. Besides which, I would have been interested in your impression — last but not least, from the theologian’s point of view.³⁷⁶ It was truly an extraordinary, yes, a strangely preter-natural event.

After breakfast in our orchard the baron invited us to board a small bus. Except for him I don’t think anyone had the vaguest idea what awaited us. Michaela climbed up front into the driver’s cab. Seated in the back were the hereditary prince, Robert, Mother, Vera, Astrid, and I — each in his own seat upholstered with the same velvety fabric that lined the entire vehicle. The television up front flickered — and the baron and Michaela appeared on the screen. They waved to us, then the screen went blank again. Music was coming from somewhere, Mozart, I think — we were already on our way. The vehicle smelled new and strange, filtered light came through the windows, the cool draft from the air conditioning was pleasant. We could see people halt in their tracks to stare at us. But I knew that all they could make out would be their own reflections in the black windowpanes. We roared out of town in the direction of Schmölln, past the baron’s scaffolded villa, where workers scrambled about like ants. No sooner were the last buildings behind us than I drifted into a kind of half sleep. But at the same time I noticed every detail — each tree and field, each ear of grain and leaf, revealed itself with painful clarity. Even the faces of people working in the fields or waiting at a bus stop seemed to glow as they looked up and waved.

In Grosstöbnitz we turned off the highway. We picked up speed. The houses, gardens, and fields flew past, we started uphill, a steep climb that it seemed would never end. I closed my eyes again — and sank into another world, a world of sounds and melodies. I lost myself in the music, unable to tell whether it came from inside me or from outside. I felt as if I had exchanged my human existence for a different mode of being, and for the first time ever I had the premonition of a redeemed world in the midst of our own. Yes, go ahead and laugh, but there are dreams that the instant they brush our consciousness burst like a fish from the depths of the sea when it’s forced to the surface.

As the door opened, I could feel how the outside temperature corresponded exactly to that in the bus.

In a tone of voice that sounded as if we had been carrying on an uninterrupted conversation, the baron explained that what awaited us would be real theater, if not to say theater as reality. He laughed, but in the next moment announced, in the voice of a master of ceremonies: A drama performed on the occasion of the return to Altenburg of the hand reliquary of St. Boniface, the apostle to the Germans, and in honor of the visit of the hereditary prince to the city of his birth.

I pushed the wheelchair forward, and Massimo, who along with all the others had been following us, lifted him into it. Vera laid the prince’s blanket across his knees, Mother handed him binoculars, and Robert raised a parasol to prevent the hereditary prince from being blinded by the sun. Astrid never left the side of the wheelchair — the right side, let it be noted, so that she could always train her good eye on him.

And here came the district councilor and mayor. Together with their retinue, these “first freely elected officials” formed a guard of honor along both sides of the steep bumpy path, up which Massimo labored to push the wheelchair. The top of the hill was crowned with a little chapel. I had no idea where we were.

A white tent had been pitched in front of the chapel. Perhaps it would be better to call it a baldachin, because except for the four corner struts clad in triangular strips of fabric leading down to a point, there was only a roof and no walls. The sun stood at its zenith, the view was overwhelming, a downright shock. To the north of this hill fit for a commanding general — as the baron termed our nameless elevation — lay Altenburg and the flats of the brown coal mines, with Leipzig’s Battle of the Nations Monument far in the distance. To the south rose the expanses of Vogtland and the Ore Mountains. To the west, the pyramids of Ronneburg were so close you felt you could reach out and touch them, and behind them the Thuringian Forest. To the east you were offered a view of lovely rolling hills.

“For the fields lay sere and not yet freshened with heavenly dew!” a stentorian voice proclaimed. To our left, not fifty yards down the slope, stood several hundred strangely garbed people. Divided into two large equal clusters, they were staring at a man in a broad-brimmed hat. Hitching up his long robe, he descended from a mound of sand that, according to a sign, was FRIESLAND and climbed another, where a sign that read ENGLAND had been planted. Basic theater for the masses. And we were the audience.

A tree was now raised with the help of a hand-driven winch.

The hereditary prince asked to be pushed as close as possible to the edge of the slope. Once the tree was standing — its equilibrium maintained by several men holding the ropes — a man stepped out in front of the troupe of players and called out: “The oak of Thor!” At that same moment a sign appeared above some heads that designated this new scene of action as GEISMAR/HESSIA. The man in the hat quickly stepped forward — it was Mansfeld, the Catholic priest — followed by three companions who had evidently learned their nervous gestures from studying bodyguards. When he pulled out an ax from under his robe, they lifted their voices in wails of lamentation. Their efforts were amateurish, but the effect was tremendous.³⁷⁷

The baron pointed toward the man in the hat. “That’s Boniface,” he offered in superfluous explanation, and smiled at Robert. Boniface had fallen to his knees, and as he prayed his brow touched the ax handle he held in both hands. As he rose to his feet, above the more general cries of “Woe! Woe!” I could hear howls so desperate, so shrill they gave me goose bumps.

Step by step the throng retreated before Boniface and his ax. A few seconds later, what I had taken to be splendidly simulated apprehension turned into genuine fear on the part of the actors. As Boniface struck the tree with his ax — amid utter silence — the trunk split into four pieces that, as each was tugged by a rope, fell away to the ground. The Germanic heathens burst into a wild outcry prompted less by the spectacle itself than by their fear for one of their fellow actors posted farther down the slope, who had barely missed being hit by one quarter of the tree. But since evidently no harm had come to him and he like all the others knelt down to gaze up at the cross that Boniface now held in his hands in lieu of the ax, none of us regarded it as a serious matter either.

Besides which, a chorale had been taken up. I would have sworn I also heard an orchestra. More and more heathens sank to their knees and raised pleading hands to their new God.

Before the chords of their song had died away, the narrator announced in his powerful bass voice that a church would now be built.

That was the starting gun for a race. Four teams lifted the four pieces of trunk that formed a cross on the ground and now rushed uphill as if to take a city gate. Their goal could only be the chapel behind us, which, although it had a fresh coat of paint, had not been newly plastered. The painters had left obvious traces of their work in the grass and the gravel.

Without so much as a glance our way, the converted Germanic men, women, and children panted past us. Viewed from close up, their makeup was good enough for a movie take — disheveled hair, bruised arms, feet and legs mud-caked halfway to their knees. We considered ourselves lucky not to have been overrun by this mob in their thespian frenzy. They set to work on the chapel, attaching the pieces of trunk beside the entrance and at the apse with chains that had been previously bolted there.

A searing sun blazed in the sky, but it was still pleasantly cool where we stood. The hereditary prince, who had been intently following the proceedings, dismissed with a smile any questions about how he was holding up.

Meanwhile the performers had returned to their previous positions. But whether to heighten the dramatic effect or to underscore the significance of these events, they all moved toward us now, and one woman who held a sign reading DOKKUM — PENTECOST 754 propped against her shoulder took up a position not forty feet away from us.

As Boniface approached her with several of his adherents — he was moving more slowly now and was bent low to indicate his advanced age — he was presented with a book so large that he almost lost his balance. His three disciples lovingly supported him and cast pleading glances in the direction of the narrator, who then announced, “They await the newly baptized.”

The throng had split in two. On the right side, with women in the majority, a bright doxology was struck up, while on the left one could hear the supernumeraries murmuring “broccoli broccoli,” a sound intended to suggest that they were the “barbarians.” Boniface, who stood with his profile to us, was just straightening up in expectation of greeting the women, when gruesomely shaggy figures came storming up from the rear and with a few heavy blows slew the apostle’s companions. Doxology turned into lamentation.

All eyes were directed toward Boniface, who now stood at full stature. He held up the large book to counter his attackers, who had at first shrunk back before his presence. But then the most savage of these savage fellows stepped forward — piercing the book, his sword was thrust directly into the saint’s heart. In the breathless silence that followed, I heard only the wind in the grass and Astrid’s whimpers. Along with the actors, we all stood frozen in place. A few white strands of the prince’s hair danced in the breeze.

Boniface staggered, but still held himself erect. Slowly he sank to his knees, his eyes directed heavenward. Finally he fell forward, burying beneath him the sword-pierced book that had been unable to save him. A bleak, dissonant cry of woe rose up, with the barbarians, now transformed back into Christians, joining in.

Father Mansfeld, easily recognized under his broad-rimmed hat, was suddenly holding high the silver, jewel-bedizened hand reliquary. Whether by chance or calculation — it seemed to catch fire in the sunlight, its radiance so blinding that I had to put a hand before my eyes and turn away. And then I saw that almost everyone who had watched the spectacle with us was now kneeling. The few still standing were for the most part elderly. Her tail wagging wildly, Astrid was bounding back and forth among the faithful, probably hoping someone would pet her.

“Play along,” the baron hissed at me from below. After a brief hesitation I yielded and knelt down, which to my surprise I found quite relaxing and pleasant.

The throng had now taken up a hymn and formed a procession, with the reliquary carried solemnly before it. Again and again it refracted the sun’s rays, sending us its signals even after the hymn was no longer audible and we had given ourselves over to the pervading silence and gazed down on the procession as it moved across the countryside below. The book — now that I had time to think about it — had not saved Boniface’s life, but in the end it had indeed proved a token of victory.³⁷⁸

Surely everything will turn out well now. We are waiting for you.

Hugs from your

Enrico

Wednesday, July 11, ’90

Dear Nicoletta,

As you can see I have a new address and am living in a three-bedroom apartment, whose smallest room is larger than my old living room. If you were to stop by over the next few days or weeks, you would find me out on my veranda with its new greenery and dreamlike view of the city and town. You would see Altenburg and yet not believe that it is Altenburg. Our building also has a large orchard enclosed by an entwining hedge right out of Sleeping Beauty.

So much for the present — to whose beginnings I hope to bring you with today’s chapter.

Unfortunately there has been no real opportunity before now to tell you about Aunt Trockel,³⁷⁹ who used to take care of Robert. She would always prepare her annual “New Year’s dinner” for us. Sometimes she also played something for us on her piano.

Michaela had promised me we wouldn’t stay long, and so I gave in and accompanied her on a visit to Aunt Trockel. Robert had been invited to his friend Falk’s birthday party.

As we got off the bus we saw Aunt Trockel vanish behind her balcony door. Michaela picked up the pace, and now the familiar race began. At the same moment that Aunt Trockel opened her door, Michaela pushed the doorbell.

It wasn’t easy to recognize Aunt Trockel’s smile in her crumpled face. Over the last few months she had literally shriveled up — except for her belly, whose vault pressed against her tight-fitting dress, so that in both shape and size it looked deceptively like the last stages of pregnancy, an impression enhanced by her otherwise girlish figure. Climbing the stairs behind Aunt Trockel, I once again had a chance to admire her slender calves.

Aunt Trockel handed us hangers, folded her hands across her belly, and, as if she owed us some explanation, said she had eaten too much chocolate and this was the result. Almost all of her Bavarian “welcome money” had been spent on chocolate. Not that she didn’t have anything left, but whenever her neighbors drove to Hof she would ask them to buy twenty bars for her at the Aldi supermarket and would then repay them upon being presented the sales receipt. Once those bars of chocolate were in her cupboard she could think of nothing else. Aunt Trockel’s voice had reached an uncomfortably high pitch. I was troubled by the vehemence of the words tumbling from her.

I simply can’t bring myself, Aunt Trockel continued, to wait until evening to open the first bar. On the contrary it took all her strength to save one or two squares until the evening news. Yesterday she hadn’t even managed that, and had devoured two bars in one day. But she certainly couldn’t say it was too much of a good thing yet.

She served the first course: fennel with shaved almonds and oranges, along with an aperitif in tiny glasses, their rims wreathed with a dusting of sugar.

As always Aunt Trockel had used up almost every ounce of her energy preparing this feast. She herself sipped at her water glass now and then, and kept up a flow of words even when she was busy in the kitchen. She never stopped long enough to give us a chance to pay her culinary arts their due until she presented the saddle of venison on a heavy tray.

And then — my plate had just been heaped with a second helping — Aunt Trockel told us about how a classmate of hers had once given her a piece of tinfoil to smell, so that she could have some idea of what chocolate was. And she, only eight years old at the time, had been grateful. “Imagine that!” Aunt Trockel exclaimed, and looked at me. Her voice growing louder and louder, she told her tale as if it concerned only me. I tried to return her gaze as often as I could, but then grew unsure of myself — as if I had overheard whatever reason it was she had given for her exclusive attention to me — and proceeded to eat more hastily. Only then did I notice that Michaela had leaned back in her chair and closed her eyes. Aunt Trockel was sitting bolt upright at the edge of her chair.

So now it was my turn, and in a low voice I listed all the things Michaela had accomplished over the last few weeks.

“You don’t have to whisper,” Michaela said, “but with my eyes closed I have a better picture of little Annemarie Trockel sniffing at that tinfoil.”

Aunt Trockel bounced once on the edge of her chair and rewarded Michaela’s hasty excuse with praise for klartext. Which also gave her an opportunity to tell about her sister-in-law, who had decided not to buy klartext because it called itself a newsletter for Thuringia, and according to her Altenburg was a Saxon town, belonged to Saxony — which she, Aunt Trockel, did of course agree with, but that could be changed, the newsletter’s masthead, that is.

Michaela finally asked what she thought of the articles themselves. “Very good,” Aunt Trockel replied, “really very good, critical I’d say, very critical.” She took a sip of water and kept the glass in her hand.

So she liked the criticism, did she?

Yes, she did, why shouldn’t she, that’s how it was everywhere now. The truth was coming to light.

Both women, it seemed to me, were waiting for the saddle of venison to finally disappear from my plate.

“No!” Michaela screeched when Aunt Trockel brought in two plates with an eighth of a Black Forest cake on each. This launched Aunt Trockel into her story about the whipping cream she had ordered, which despite several assurances to the contrary had not been set aside for her, so that she had gone all the way to the manager, who finally got on the phone and found two bottles for her at the store on Stein Weg. “Two bottles!” Michaela cried. Two bottles of whipping cream was asking too much, she mustn’t do it, she mustn’t fatten us up like that, or herself. When Aunt Trockel set the plate down and then turned right back around again, even Michaela was taken aback by her own outburst. On each piece of cake, a maraschino cherry crowned the highest peak of whipped cream, with syruplike liqueur forming a mountain lake at its base. I was picturing Aunt Trockel leaning her head against the kitchen window, tears streaming down her face, when she appeared with an even larger piece of cake and set it down for herself. Suddenly there was a bottle of fruit brandy in front of me, and three glasses. “Oh, Aunt Trockel!” Michaela exclaimed. I poured the brandy, and we clinked glasses in a toast.

At the first stab of the fork, a purple brook burst from the dammed maraschino mountain lake and spilled through the spotless white. We ate in devout silence.

Then I did something I never failed to do when visiting Aunt Trockel; I went to the bathroom: sparkling fixtures without one water-drop stain to mar their beauty, a toilet bowl whose depths and rim were both a perfect white, a battery of combs without a single hair left behind. With childlike curiosity I always opened her mirrored medicine cabinet, which gave off the decorous odor of venom and liniment. In that bathroom it would never have occurred to me to piss standing up.

Suddenly a remarkable event from my childhood popped into my mind. But at that same moment Aunt Trockel was pounding on the door and calling out my name in an imploring voice. Eyes wide with horror, she ripped two pairs of panties from the clothesline, pressed them to her chest, and fled with her booty.

When I returned, Aunt Trockel was leaning back in her chair, hands at her sides, gazing down over her belly. Michaela already had her purse in her lap. “Have I ever told you about the most important event in my life?” I asked, and, paying no attention to Michaela’s reaction, began to tell them what I had just now recalled.

I was ten or eleven years old when a neighbor boy persuaded me to spend the night with him at his grandmother’s. We would be allowed to watch the Hit Parade and then a movie after that. Besides which we’d have as many banana gumdrops as we could eat. Although to my mind nothing was more horrible than spending a night with strangers without my mother and Vera, I agreed, out of cowardice and for the lack of any good excuse. After the Hit Parade and the movie were over, the banana gumdrops devoured, and I was lying there in the dark in a strange bed, surrounded by strange things and strange odors, I started weeping bitterly into my pillow. Yes, because I was homesick and full of longing and because that’s what I always did in such situations, I sobbed away. After a while I was amazed to realize my crying had stopped. I immediately tried to start blubbering again, but couldn’t.

“Do you know what had happened?” I asked Michaela and Aunt Trockel. Both were looking at me as if I were speaking in Chinese.

“Okay, what happened?” Michaela asked out of boredom.

“I no longer knew why I had been crying,” I exclaimed. “I didn’t understand myself what was supposed to be so awful about my situation.”

“And that occurred to you just now?” Aunt Trockel asked.

“Yes,” I said, “that came to me while I was in the bathroom.”

“Well, fine,” Michaela said, gave Aunt Trockel a nod, and started to get up. But then I asked for a second piece of Black Forest cake. Aunt Trockel bustled off to the kitchen, Michaela fell back into the sofa; resting her head against it, she stared at the ceiling. I refilled our glasses. Aunt Trockel came back from the kitchen giggling and in her excitement got our plates mixed up — I could tell from the traces of maraschino cherry I had left behind on mine. Aunt Trockel kept right up with me. We toasted. I was trying to do Aunt Trockel in, Michaela remarked in outrage. “How’s that?” I asked. “How’s that?” Aunt Trockel echoed with a giggle. “That’s lethal!” Michaela cried, pointing at Aunt Trockel’s plate.

“As far as I know,” I said, “it presents no danger to pregnant women.” Michaela went rigid. Aunt Trockel threw her head back and started laughing for all she was worth, releasing a spray of whipped cream and crumbs.

“You’re both crazy,” Michaela said, picking up her purse and getting to her feet.

But I didn’t want to leave! At least I could see no reason whatever why leaving was any better than staying. On the contrary: I had all the time in the world! I didn’t need to write anymore, or read anymore.

“Shall we finish it off?” I asked once our plates were empty. Aunt Trockel nodded. “It always tastes best fresh anyway.” She picked up our plates and toddled into the kitchen.

Michaela stared at me. “You’re going to stop right now, if you please!” she cried. “You’ve got to stop, you’re going to kill her!”³⁸⁰

Instead of our plates Aunt Trockel brought in the whole cake under its transparent plastic cover with a red knob in the middle for a handle.

“Just one more drink,” I said.

“Have a great time,” Michaela called out as she opened the apartment door and closed it behind her before either of us could say a word.

Aunt Trockel and I ate the rest of the cake right from the platter, without plates. We tried to work at the same speed, both of us attacking our pieces from the center out.

I don’t know whether you can comprehend it, but as I dived into the remains of the cake along with this potbellied, shriveled-up old woman, I felt liberated in some strange, unexpected way — liberated from all pressure, all stress, all claims on me. A peculiar calm took hold, a peace of mind that I attributed to the influence of alcohol.

I awoke a little before four o’clock out of a deep, dreamless sleep that had left me completely refreshed, taking the last trace of my previous exhaustion with it.

My “good mood” irritated Michaela. I evidently enjoyed tormenting her, she claimed. Whatever I did or said was cause for some rebuke or criticism.

And then it began to snow. It snowed all evening and through the night and on into the next morning. From my window I could see children with sleds. Our neighbor was shoveling snow.

Over the last weeks I had paid no attention at all to the weather, but I was as delighted as a child by this white splendor. I wanted to go out in it, and so I got dressed. Robert yelled that he wanted to come along.

When Michaela, who was lying on the bed memorizing lines, saw we were ready to go, she put on her winter things too.

We were a curious trio. Robert ran on ahead, I chased after him, with Michaela at my heels. As soon as Robert was out of hearing range, she began to lay into me — why was I suddenly so interested in Robert and was I trying to estrange the boy from her. “Why are you like this? What have I ever done to you? Why are you like this?” she kept shouting.

We walked straight across the fields. The ground under the snow had not frozen everywhere, and sometimes we had to run just to keep from sinking into the muck beneath. Michaela’s sermon exhausted me more than the physical exertion. I would have gladly turned back. But Robert wanted to make it to “Silver Lake.”

The pond was frozen over and smooth as glass. Robert and Michaela broke into a skidding competition. Several times I thought I heard the ice breaking. I turned to go, so the two of them could be together. But when I looked around once more, a snowball struck my right eye. It wasn’t just snow, as Michaela claimed, at least it hurt like hell, as if a pebble or splinter had wounded my eye. I couldn’t see a thing and feared the worst.

Robert took my hand as if I needed to be led. He never let go of my hand as we crossed the field, while Michaela kept telling me to stop carrying on.

Will you believe me if I tell you that as I crossed that snow-covered field I felt utterly happy? But that’s exactly how it was. Yes, I wept because my right eye hurt so bad, but I wept even more for happiness.

How can I explain it?

The pain had awakened me. I finally comprehended what I had known since that night at the crossroads and my visit with Aunt Trockel: my old life lay behind me. Or better: I could now really begin to live.

Ever since my original sin I had played the miser with time — not a moment in which I had not been a driven man who lived solely to grind more writing, more literature — my works, my fame — out of each day, each hour.³⁸¹

I had finally freed myself from art, from literature, and thus from time as well. Suddenly I was simply just here, to live, to enjoy — I no longer had to create anything.³⁸²

Robert and Michaela, the snow and the air, barking dogs in the distance and sounds from the road — I took it all in as if I had just set foot on this earth, as if I found myself in the midst of the world for the very first time. Ah, Nicoletta, will you understand me?³⁸³

Liberated, at ease, and happy, I walked behind Robert. And when a big dog came running toward us from the village of Oberlödla and Robert and Michaela tried to hide behind me, I soon quieted the yelping mutt by scratching his neck and head until he pressed against my knee and closed his eyes.

The mangy animal escorted us all the way to the road. Robert waved a car down, and it took us to the polyclinic. Outside the entrance I ran right into my physician, Dr. Weiss. He probably assumed I had found some pretext for him to attest that I was still too ill too work. Which is why he treated me a bit condescendingly. But when I told him that, no matter what happened with my eye, I didn’t want any more sick leave and he then practically forced my right eye open, it was Dr. Weiss’s friendly face that I first viewed with both eyes again.

And with that I am at the end of my story. You yourself know what happened then. And now it should actually be your turn. As for me, there’s nothing to stop me from a trip to Rome.

Your

Enrico Türmer