New Lives

[Letter of April 28–29, 1990]

Titus Holm

A DRESDEN NOVELLA

1

Titus Holm walked across the school courtyard, his satchel in his right hand, and in his left, dangling a little lower, a gym bag that slapped against his thigh. It had turned warmer again, leaves flickered yellow and orange in the afternoon sun. He would have taken off his anorak if it hadn’t been for the wind, which came at him now head on, now from the side, carrying with it the sound of choir rehearsal drifting like a defective recording through an open window. It was not until Titus passed the rusty bicycle stands and emerged through the main portal that he actually pieced together a melody.

He turned right. At the foot of the wrought-iron fence that enclosed Holy Cross School — including a boarding school for choir members — and whose tips ended in coiling flames, he could still see the traces of the wire broom he had used to rake leaves the day before. At first he had been uneasy about having to put in his hours of People’s Mass Initiative here, where he could be observed from the boarding school dorm.

“Call me when it’s over,” Joachim had whispered at the end of last class. Titus came to a halt in front of the dorm and glanced up at Joachim’s window, where the left casement was wide open. Titus would have preferred to keep on walking. He was in fact in a hurry. What was he supposed to tell him? That he had sat in the cellar for an hour facing Petersen, or was it a half hour or maybe only twenty minutes?

When Mario, who had had to precede him in the cellar with Petersen, returned to the classroom and called out, “Next, please!” Titus, who sat waiting amid all the other chairs stacked on their tables, had been too agitated to check the clock. He was the last of the boys from grade nine.

Mario had evaded Titus’s questions until he finally more or less sulkily declared that he didn’t want to see things like an egoist and claim his life only for himself, but to achieve something for society as well.

“What would that be?” Titus had asked. “I thought you wanted to become a doctor.”

“Of course I want to be a doctor, but someplace where I’m needed.” With that Mario had stuffed his gym clothes into his satchel, rolled up his right pants leg, knotted the laces of his gym shoes together, and hung them around his neck. “You really can’t be…” Titus had started to say, when he noticed the white smock at the open door. Petersen, their homeroom teacher, shook Titus’s hand as if presenting him an award. And then he called out to Mario, “Keep thinking along those lines!” Then, pointing to the stairs: “Titus, if you please.”

In the basement physics lab Petersen had pressed his way past him to open the door to a small chamber that was little more than a narrow passage between two tables with some oscillographs, scarcely wider than the old swivel chair under the cellar window where Petersen had taken a seat. The stool beside the door was for Titus. “We have plenty of time,” Petersen had said, carefully laying his watch to one side.

Later, when the conversation was over and Titus had already got to his feet, Petersen was suddenly holding a book in his hand. To Titus it looked like some evil magic trick.

Book in hand, Titus climbed the stairs, taking one step at a time, uncertain whether he should go on ahead or wait for Petersen, since there had been no response to his second “good-bye” either. Outside the door to the physics classroom, Titus had wedged his satchel and gym bag between his feet, as if there were no other way to push the handle. Rattling his keys, Petersen came marching up and then, after ignoring a third “good-bye” as well, vanished into the teachers’ lounge.

The stale air of the physics room, its hardwood floor a dull black from too much waxing, the apple core under his seat, and the bulletin board that always hung askew — suddenly it all made him feel right at home…

Outside the boarding-school dorm Titus called out for Joachim, shouted just loud enough that he had to hear him. In lieu of a reply, a window on the ground floor opened. Titus repeated his call at short intervals. Despite a sense of being slighted because Joachim had not waited for him, he was glad he could now avoid his friend with a good conscience.

But in the very next moment Titus was startled to see that Joachim was one of two boys crossing the street from the public park. He ran toward them, but they halted in their tracks. Titus set down his satchel, rummaged around in it as if looking for something, and was suddenly holding Petersen’s yellow book in his hand. The back cover was ribbed, a rolling landscape that came from too many moist fingertips. When Titus looked across to them again, Joachim was now headed toward him. The other boy, a book clasped under his arm, was loping toward the dorm. Titus stuffed Petersen’s book behind his atlas, so that it wouldn’t touch his notebooks and textbooks.

“There you are already,” Joachim said, groped for and produced a cigarette and, turning abruptly to his right, bent down over the match. His tight extra-long cardigan made him look even skinnier. He blew the smoke out of one corner of his mouth.

“We’ve been reading his first novella,” Joachim said, “want to walk a little?” Titus nodded.

“To think they printed it! It must have slipped past them somehow.” Joachim pulled a couple of folded pages out from under his cardigan — checkered, letter-size sheets written full on both sides. Titus recognized the handwriting — printed letters bouncing along the squares in tight formation, plus arrows, underlinings, and fat periods.

“‘Why do they have power?’” Joachim’s forefinger traced the line. “‘Because you give it to them. And they’ll have power as long as you’re cowards.’ What do you think?”

“Who says it?” Titus looked down at the scuffed toes of Joachim’s shoes.

“Ferdinand, a painter, gets a letter, on official tan letterhead, telling him he’s been drafted and has to return to Germany, World War I. He doesn’t want to, his wife doesn’t want to. But he feels some inner compulsion…”

“A compulsion?” Titus asked.

“They’ve fled Germany, but not officially. Listen to this,” Joachim said. “‘For two months he managed to go on living in the suffocating air of jingoism, but slowly the air grew too thin, and when people around him opened their mouths to speak he thought he could see the yellow of the lies staining their tongues. No matter what they said it disgusted him.’” Joachim read slowly and clearly. He kept shifting his body to protect the pages from the wind. “Great writing, isn’t it?” Joachim pushed his long dark blond hair behind his ears and stuck the pages into his waistband under his cardigan.

“Yes,” Titus said. “‘The yellow of the lies staining their tongues,’ really good stuff.”

It was always like this. Joachim talked and Titus listened, because he hadn’t read the book, didn’t know the composer or the Bible verse, or because names like Gandhi, Dubček, or Bahro meant nothing to him. Joachim had time to read. Joachim had time for everything that interested him. But even if Titus had read the novella, the words would have paled beside Joachim’s retelling of them.

Joachim described the conversation between Ferdinand the painter and his wife, Paula, who hopes to talk him out of returning to Germany, to war, and how desperate she feels with a husband who actually sees through it all, is so weak — here Joachim hesitated — so tepid that he’s unable to find anything to hold on to, and so is caught up in the maelstrom. He leaves for Zurich on the first train the next morning.

“For Zurich?” Titus stopped in his tracks. “Why for Zurich?”

“Because they’re still in Switzerland!” Cigarette smoke rippled from Joachim’s lips. “He goes to the consulate in Zurich with the idea that because he knows people there he can change their minds — and falls flat on his face. He arrives way too early — premature obedience.”

Premature obedience, Titus thought. But he was even more taken by “Zurich.” If you lived in Zurich, you didn’t have any problems, at least no serious ones. It was easy to be brave in Zurich.

“We were thinking of you the whole time,” Joachim said. He flicked the butt away. Titus blushed. It was his turn. He had to say something now.

“And not just thinking,” Joachim added, and with a quick twist of his shoe tip, the butt vanished in the gutter. “So now you’ve gotten to know the cellar.”

“For over an hour,” Titus said.

“Among the oscillographs?”

“Yes,” Titus said. He wanted to speak with the same sort of deliberation Joachim did.

“He’s most comfortable in his little lair,” Joachim said with a laugh. “When all is said and done, Petersen is a poor bastard.”

Titus wanted to ask why Petersen was a poor bastard.

“Got some money? Want to go to the Toscana?” Joachim asked.

“Yes,” Titus said, although he was supposed to meet someone and was in a hurry.

Titus knew the café only from the outside, the last building on the left before the bridge. He knew Holy Cross choirboys went to the Toscana after rehearsal when they should have been in class — for breakfast, as they put it. Titus could see himself now standing beside Joachim at the curb, directly across from the parking lot, and heard himself say, “My treat.”

They walked along Hübler Strasse. They stood awhile outside the bookstore. When they got to Schiller Platz they watched the traffic cop’s pantomime and let him wave them across. Instead of waiting with the others to change sides of the street, they headed for the Blue Wonder Bridge.

The wind was blowing harder now, directly in their faces. Ever since they had known each other, Titus had tried to see the world through Joachim’s eyes. Everything was straightforward and compelling, and Titus’s own life seemed to gain clarity whenever Joachim talked about him, just like he could suddenly understand a math problem or a tricky bit of grammar once Joachim formulated it. At the same time, however, he found it painful that he had no advice for Joachim, couldn’t give him anything. Joachim didn’t need him.

Titus hung up his anorak in the Toscana’s coatroom, then slipped into a seat at the round window table near the door while it was still being cleared. Joachim walked over to the pastry display and came back with his ticket. Titus followed his example. He was surprised to see so many old women in hats here.

Joachim greeted the waitress, whose lacy décolletage opened onto a view of the top of her breasts. The wrinkles at her neck looked like strings cutting into her skin. He ordered two pots of coffee and gave her the pastry tickets.

“While he’s in Zurich Ferdinand gets a shave and has his good suit brushed.” Joachim simply picked up the story where he had left off, as if there had been no interruption. “Ferdinand buys gray gloves and a walking stick, he wants to make a good impression. He’s ready now, every ‘i’ dotted, every ‘t’ crossed. But then it all turns out very differently.”

Joachim went on talking, tapping his cigarette on the tabletop as if to some secret rhythm. Titus was miffed that Joachim hadn’t asked him anything else about the cellar and Petersen. Or was he trying to go easy on him? And what was so special about the Toscana, with its flock of bird-faced women? Why had he agreed to come here? Didn’t he have a will of his own?

Joachim went on talking, leaning back now, his legs crossed, a cigarette in his right hand, his left hand resting on the table as if to show Titus the large half-moons of his fingernails and veins like you see on men’s hands — worms wriggling toward his wrist.

Joachim had unbuttoned just the top buttons of his cardigan. He inhaled deep, his chest rose and fell. Titus stared at him and suddenly found himself inexplicably repulsed by this breathing, as if it were unseemly. He had never seen Joachim naked, not even from the waist up. During gym he always kept his undershirt on under his blue gym outfit. All he could remember was that Joachim’s arms were freckled with moles.

[Letter of May 5, 1990]

Titus bent forward, but Joachim didn’t lower his voice. Or wasn’t he going to read any more of it? “‘If only people had the will,’” Johann declaimed, “‘but instead they obey. They are like schoolboys. The teacher calls on them, they stand up, trembling.’” He wasn’t holding the page between his fingers, but with his whole hand, wrinkling it along the edge. Titus would have loved to interrupt him: That’s my book! I ran out and bought it during recess. You borrowed it from me. I refuse to let you talk about it. I won’t let you copy it out, and above all I forbid you to give it to somebody else you meet in the park, somebody I don’t know.

Titus could feel things between him and Joachim coming to a head. But he had no name for it. He was powerless against it. He swallowed, and his throat hurt from his gratuitous accusations. At the same time a kind of shame left him feeling uneasy, as if they had actually had a fight. Titus barely noticed when their coffee and pastries arrived.

He wanted to pull Petersen’s book from his satchel, hold it under Joachim’s nose, slam it onto the plate of cheesecake he was scarfing down. He let the idea carry him away.

“He dumped this on me,” he heard himself exclaim. Titus looked down at the book in his hands, Bundeswehr, the Aggressor, flaming red letters against a yellow background. And when Joachim responded with just a hint of a smirk, he flung it at his chest. “He dumped this on me,” he shouted. “A little report on the Bundeswehr as the aggressor, and what conclusions we should draw from it. Get it? My conclusions.”

Joachim was just describing how Paula tried to block Ferdinand’s plan — why didn’t he just shut up. Angry and frightened, Titus looked around the café in search of help. Out of here! he thought. He couldn’t waste any more time here. He was supposed to meet someone. He wanted to wake up, shake off this strange state he was in. He watched a redheaded woman at the next table, the way she was laughing and at the same time biting her lower lip to contain herself. Her pale knees shimmered through her black stockings. The laces of her shoes were tied in large bows.

Titus saw her putting on those shoes that same morning, tying those large bows. Did she sometimes ask herself what all would happen before she took off her shoes again that evening? Every morning when he leaned over the bathtub to wash his neck and armpits, Titus asked himself whether he would have the courage to declare as Joachim had: I will not join the army.

Titus knew how Petersen’s words would spread inside him the moment he was alone. The way a wound first begins to hurt at night, the way a fever needs a couple of hours before it takes hold, that’s how those capsules of memory would open up inside him and release Petersen’s words, so that like poison they would course through him and paralyze him. He would be lying in his bed again — rigid, stiff with nothing but memory and anticipation.

The woman jiggled her feet as if they had fallen asleep. The pendant on her necklace, a silver square, rested in the hollow beneath her throat. Her hair was brushed back and up at the earlobes, turning her mother-of-pearl earrings into drops dangling from her hair. Her pallor made her look seriously ill.

“‘The great truth of emotion leapt up mightily within him,’” Joachim cried, “‘and burst open the engine within his breast. Freedom towered up in blessed grandeur and shattered his obedience. Never! Never! came the shout within him, an unfamiliar voice of primal strength.’”

How could he say that he thought what Joachim was doing was right and then do the opposite himself? How could he admire Joachim’s integrity and then cower and lie? Titus felt that Joachim wanted something from him, that something significant might soon become reality.

Suddenly he saw it all as his fate, as something to which he merely had to give himself over, let it carry and direct him. It lay beyond words, it was a melody deep within all other sounds, one of those moments in which a fragrance is bound forever to a particular place and season.

Joachim fell silent. Titus couldn’t think of a single question. “Do you have even the vaguest notion what I’m talking about?” Joachim would respond any second now. Titus stared out the window.

“Aren’t you going to eat that?” Joachim held out his empty plate, and Titus shoved his custard torte onto it.

“I have to go,” Titus said.

Without looking up, Joachim set to work on the pastry. Titus wanted to turn away again, but he now realized he could watch without feeling a thing. He even tried counting the bites, and was at five when the waitress came up to them.

“For both,” he said. She laid her narrow pad on the table. Titus gazed down into her décolletage, where the skin wasn’t wrinkled but smooth and white and quivered just a little. Without shifting his glance he groped for his wallet. He opened it — he blushed when he saw what he should have known. The twenty-mark bill was gone. The two volumes of Stefan Zweig had cost him fourteen marks.

“Joachim,” Titus queried softly. Joachim went on chewing.

“Help me, God!” Titus whispered. He first fumbled for one-mark coins, then the two half marks. Finally he just dumped his change on the table, including three twenty-pfennig pieces. The waitress bent down again. But this time she was so close to him that he could easily have kissed the tops of her breasts. She set her forefinger to each coin and shoved them one by one over the edge of the table, letting them drop into her open purse. And each time Titus saw that little quiver.

Suddenly it was too late. All he could do was spread his thighs. The waitress smiled, thanked him, and thrust her purse under her apron. Titus wanted more than anything to reach for her hand. It was happening — even though he was looking out the window at traffic thundering over the bridge. He thought his legs and feet would start jerking and that weird noises would rise up in his throat. But in fact he just sat there frozen in place, his breath inaudible. And for a moment he closed his eyes in total bliss.

2

His grandfather turned to check the wall clock. “Five till eleven!” he repeated in the same voice cracking with outrage. Titus knelt down at the mirror by the coatrack because a double bow was now a knot. “I was at Frau Lapin’s,” he called out. “I told you that.”

His grandfather pulled his watch from his pocket and held it out, “Five till eleven!”

Titus stepped on the heel of one shoe to free a foot from the other. In slippers now, he followed his grandfather to the kitchen, where a teacup was set at his place. As always when his mother was on night shift, the tablecloth hung over the back of the third chair.

“She was painting my portrait,” Titus said.

“Oh, that Lapin. All she does is chatter. Eleven o’clock. Does your mother know about this?”

“Yes,” Titus said. His plans hadn’t included an argument with his grandfather. While still out in the stairwell he had decided he wanted to set out again and wander through the night. He longed for something totally new, something he had never thought of before. His clothes were damp from the rain and he had sweated, but he just had to hold his sleeve up to his nose to take in the smell of oil paints and cigarette smoke lodged there — and for some reason that left him incredibly awake.

“Did you eat?” his grandfather asked.

Titus nodded. The windowpane rattled softly with each gust of wind. And if he couldn’t wander the night, then at least he wanted to write in his diary until morning.

After his grandfather had poured tea for them both and taken four cubes of sugar for his, he sat there waiting for his tea to cool. Five, at most ten minutes was all Titus intended to sit with him — that was to be his final concession. After that no power in this world could keep him from pursuing his plans.

His grandfather’s liver-spotted hands lay motionless to the right and left of his cup. When he was in a good mood, he would drum his brittle, slightly bluish fingernails to some melody running through his head, usually a march he had heard on Sunday during the one o’clock broadcast of Merry Musicians on Deutschlandfunk. Except for a small, shiny mole on his left nostril, his face bore hardly any irregularities. The fan of wrinkles at the outside corners of his eyes was more noticeable on the left. When he came home from the barber it took two weeks before his white brush cut grew back. Since he went for a long walk every day, his face never lost its tan, all year round.

“Anything new?” Titus asked. They both stirred their cups at the same time.

“It was suicide.”

“The terrorists?”

“Yes,” his grandfather said, and spooned tea into half a lemon that had already been pressed dry, squeezed it again, and rubbed it several times along the rim of his cup. Then his hands returned to the edge of the table.

“And what about you?”

“It was lovely,” Titus said, “wonderful!” He was already talking like Gunda Lapin, who had exclaimed each syllable as if propelling a fly-wheel: “Won-der-ful!”

His grandfather didn’t like Gunda Lapin or any other visitors, because they merely wasted his daughter’s time and drank her coffee. And late one night he had surprised Gunda Lapin at the fridge, stuffing her mouth with ham and drinking beer straight out of a bottle.

Titus wanted to provide his grandfather with five minutes of company. He always had to provide his grandfather company, because he was alone all day, because he ate more slowly and liked to enjoy his tea.

“Well, shall we,” said his grandfather, pushing his chair back and wincing as he stood up. “Good night, Titus, my boy.”

Titus jumped to his feet. But, teacup in hand, his grandfather had already taken his first steps, so Titus followed him only as far as the kitchen door. “Good night,” he said, and could hear the second syllable echoing in the bare entryway. His grandfather didn’t like Titus to give him a peck on the cheek. At least, he always squinted one eye and pretended he didn’t.

What Titus wanted most was to run after him. How could his grandfather desert him so suddenly? He was close to tears — yes, he would have loved to break into sobs.

Titus no longer understood himself. He wasn’t sure if he had remembered the yellow book in his satchel a moment before, or whether it had come to him just as his grandfather stood up.

Titus took the tea egg out of the sink, screwed it open over the garbage pail, banged the two halves together, rinsed them out, and laid them on the dish rack to dry. At the same instant he turned off the light in the kitchen, the lamp in his grandfather’s room went out — he always undressed in the dark — leaving Titus to grope for his satchel, which he had left beside the front door. He already had it in hand when he switched the light on again

[Letter of May 10, 1990]

his desk and opened the drawer where he kept his grandmother’s fountain pen, unscrewed the cap, and wrote, “Friday, October 31, 1977, 11:34 p.m. till…”

As if counting his words, he moved the pen cautiously. Titus wanted to go on writing, pursuing his thoughts, which, if they came too quickly, would have to be jotted down in catchwords on scrap paper. He was delighted by the idea of filling these pages with his even, looping hand, until he had said all he had to say and the blue ink was used up.

Ever since he had boarded the streetcar in Laubegast and lost sight of Gunda Lapin in the dazzle of headlights, he had longed for this moment, when he would merely have to unscrew the cap of the pen and start writing — and in writing learn what had happened to him.

This evening he had understood that he must finally stop running around blind, lacking all feeling, unable to act on his own — someone merely living the life he was served up, an utterly impossible sort of life.

As he sat bent over under the light of the desk lamp, he looked up at his reflection in the windowpanes, where the room seemed as large as some great hall in a villa. The posters behind him shimmered. The only thing outside that found its way into the picture were the red lights outlining the water tower. Titus ducked so he could bring an uneven spot in the windowpane into line with one red light — which unfolded like a blossom.

His pen moved slowly. “Gunda Lapin,” he wrote. He set pen to paper again. He had to fight the urge to keep from repeating the same two words, filling a whole line, an entire page with “Gunda Lapin Gunda Lapin.”

He wished that everything he wanted to write was already there on the page, so that he could read what he had experienced, beginning with the walk from the streetcar down to the Elbe. With sketched map in hand, he had followed the street, Laubgaster Ufer, with its long row of old suburban homes and garden sheds. From here one could barely make out the opposite low-lying shore, which was hardly built up at all until where the first vault of the steep slope itself began. The rounded crowns of trees were barely higher than the grass, as if their trunks lay inundated and their shadows were reflections in the water. With each step he had come closer to the bend in the river and been able to gaze upriver to the ridge of the Elbe’s sandstone mountains, to Lilienstein and Königstein, between which the Elbe meandered under pale blue clouds outlined against the yellowish white light.

The last house before the dockyards — indicated on his sketched map by a woman dancing on its roof and a balloon that read HERE I AM! — lay hidden behind trees and shrubs. He rang and heard a sound, halfway between a squeak and a creak, like planks once nailed together now being pried apart, and then a voice.

From the moment Gunda Lapin had opened the garden gate, she never let him out of her sight. There she stood before him — in her fleece vest, a sweater that was too long for her and that rolled up at the hem all on its own, wide trousers splattered with paint and tapering down to felt shoes — half clown, half ragman.

The path to the house meandered between acacias. It was as if light were scudding before the wind through the foliage. Gunda Lapin had proceeded him with long strides, her key ring dangling like a pail from her hand.

A shiny, well-scrubbed, wooden stairway that spiraled in a hundred-eighty-degree turn led them to the second floor, where they took another set of steep stairs. The kitchen lay to the right, not much bigger than their pantry at home. The sink lay under a dormer window, and the sunlight fell directly on a mountain of plates and cups, guarded by a kind of palisade of forks and spoons. There was nothing remarkable here, and yet he took note of the hodgepodge atop the water heater — a collection that included a Fit bottle, egg shampoo, lipstick, a green deodorant from the West, toothbrush and mug — with a precision and clarity as if he were looking for clues, though he couldn’t say to what. Gunda Lapin had been the first adult he had ever visited unaccompanied by his mother. Her quarters consisted of two rooms. It was only because half the dividing wall was missing that they were able to sit across from each other, he on a footstool pulled from under a dainty desk and she on the sofa.

He had been afraid his pants might reveal traces of his accident, although before leaving the Toscana he had stuffed his underpants with toilet paper — a scrap of which he had suddenly discovered lying between his feet on the streetcar.

At the moment she was deep into Kurt Tucholsky, Gunda Lapin had said, and Franz Fühmann. He couldn’t understand how anyone would voluntarily bother with textbook authors. His German teacher had said Tucholsky could have been another Heine, and Gunda Lapin had, much to his bewilderment, agreed.

Sitting here at her desk, the disappointment he had felt on entering her studio seemed absurd now — as if a house like this could ever have contained a grand hall flooded with light.

Instead he found himself in a low room with heavily draped windows and a pervasive odor that still clung to him. A carpet of splattered paint had led all the way to the paintings and frames that took up the left half of the space.

He had stepped up onto a little dais to the right of the door and sat down on a dark red settee, its back and arms threadbare, and although it had been the obvious and appropriate thing to do, it had likewise seemed both an honor and an act of presumption on his part. Gunda Lapin had spread a sheet over his legs, placed a bowl of fruit and chocolate on a low stool beside his feet, and taken up her position at an easel ten feet away — any greater distance was an impossibility.

Up to that point it had all been quite clear, with nothing more to his visit worth describing. The garden, the house, the apartment, the studio — all of it a little peculiar and alien and seductive.

And then? Gunda Lapin had stared at him squinting, as if she had discovered something unique about him. He had held up under her gaze, but hadn’t dared to reach for the chocolate or take a sip of his coffee.

The easel was positioned almost horizontal before her. Which was why her brushes had been bound to small rods that she held in her hands like magic wands. Instead of a palette she used bowls in which she hastily stirred her paints. This meant, however, that she had to hold the bowl in an outstretched arm so she could dip her brush in it.

Titus saw his reflection in the windowpane, outlined by the triangle of the water tower’s red lights. All these superficialities, however, were merely holding him back now, they were irrelevant, a stage set. He wanted to concentrate on the essentials. Besides, he would never forget that studio, every detail remained fixed in his mind’s eye.

But why didn’t he write about what actually happened? The more precisely he tried to recall it, the more blurred and inexplicable the events seemed.

“Talk to me,” Gunda Lapin had said, applying the first brushstrokes to the grayish white canvas. Her lips had grown thin.

“What about?”

“What you’re up to, what you’re reading, what you’ve experienced over the last few days, what encounters were important to you.”

Should he tell her about school, about Petersen, Joachim? Why did all that send him into a panic?

Gunda Lapin had let out a little groan, as if she could read his mind. The features of her face seemed as sharply defined as in a sketch. Sometimes she squinted, sometimes she peered at him wide-eyed.

“So, that’s good,” she had declared, “stay…stay just like that, very good, very, wonderful, really wonderful.”

He hadn’t any idea what he was doing right, what had got Gunda Lapin so excited. The more hectic her movements, the more sure of himself he had felt.

And then?

He had told her about Joachim and about Petersen. Of course Petersen had it in for him. Yesterday Petersen had asked him what PMI meant, and, incapable of collecting his own thoughts, he had grabbed on to what a schoolmate had whispered and answered with: “People’s Mass Endeavor.” And Petersen had said that he was no longer amazed that Titus had got an F in spelling, which he had at first found incredible, a big fat F like that, but which he now understood only too well and which left him highly dubious whether Titus should really be pursuing an academic degree, especially since he wanted to become a German teacher. But of course he was glad to hear that people were “indeavoring” to do good things in their Mass Initiative and they would all now assume that he, Titus, would be their model of an “indeavoring” citizen.

He had had to explain to Gunda Lapin what had been so dreadful about it: less the threat that he would be tossed out of high school at the end of tenth grade than how he had felt so naked and exposed. Of course he didn’t want to become a German or history teacher. But he had once said it, back at the start of eighth grade, in order to increase his chances for the academic track, because boys who weren’t prepared to become officers could at least become teachers.

But Gunda Lapin didn’t react with real outrage until he told her about his cellar conversation, and then she called his teacher a sadist. She had struggled with her brushes as if wrestling with Petersen himself. And later she had said that a person has to build his own separate world. And you either do that as a young person or not at all. And that only the kind of thinking that determines existence is worth anything, and that you need first to find out for yourself what is prohibited and what is allowed.

Like two craftsmen they had sat down to an evening meal of deviled eggs and bread with cottage cheese and marmalade. He had been afraid she would send him home, and so had instantly agreed in relief to sit for her “nude.”

[Letter of May 16, 1990]

While he had undressed she had crouched in front of the stove and fed it more briquettes, and then placed her canvas behind him and traced his outline in pencil — and later asked whether he was in love, and wouldn’t let him get away with his answer. Maybe meant yes.

“Is it a girl or a boy? Or a woman?”

“Why a boy?”

“Why not?”

“Her name’s Bernadette.”

The first Sunday in July. He was hurrying up Schröder Strasse where it grew steeper and steeper, with each house set in a little park. He was sweating, and the paper wrapping the roses had long ago gone soggy where he held them. He at least wanted to be on time.

He had met Bernadette at Graf Dancing Academy — Bernadette, who, if she had had a choice, would never have picked him as her partner for the Graduation Ball. But just as he had, she had missed the class where students were asked to chose partners. She hadn’t been allowed to turn him down with a flat no, but she had known how to nod without smiling, how to not say a single word while they danced, how to stare blankly out over his shoulder. He had had to ask her for her address twice. Bernadette Böhme, Schröder Strasse 15.

Half the yellow stones on the path leading to the house were cracked, to the left and right were large circular beds of red flowers. The view to the Elbe was blocked by fruit trees. A loud jumble of voices was coming from the open windows.

He recognized her mother right away. She had the same hair, black and smooth and parted in the middle, and wore it just like Bernadette did, falling in a last little curl at her neck without touching her shoulders. And he had first taken her brothers for girls too as they descended the stairs to greet him in the entryway, because their faces were framed by the same black hair and because they all had that same way of abruptly raising their heads to get a better look.

Her mother’s friendly manner calmed him down, and having to wait helped as well. She brought him a glass of water and set it on a green coaster in the living room. When she smiled all you saw of her eyes were her lashes. He found it pleasant to sit there alone, he saw it as a vote of confidence. Of all the valuable items placed openly about the room, he was especially attracted to the dark wooden bas-reliefs of nude or seminude women. Gazing out the large window to the city in the distance was like looking out of an aquarium. Chaise longues were strewn about the yard, plus sun umbrellas and a grill.

Just when he started to think he was being put to some kind of test — he hadn’t touched or picked up anything — her mother stepped into the room again. As if completely transfixed by the inscrutable smile of a Chinese figurine, he didn’t turn to look at her. But that made the fragrance of her perfume seem all the more intense.

“Do you like him? He’s made of soapstone,” she said as she placed the vase of his roses on a long table. The way she opened her old-fashioned lighter and placed the cigarette dead center between her glistening lips reminded him of the way some men drink schnapps from the bottle. She cocked her head to one side to reattach an earring. Her lilac dress left her tanned shoulders bare. The skin was sprinkled deep into her décolletage with freckles. As she tilted her head in the other direction, she asked him to hold her cigarette with its red-smudged filter. At that same moment Bernadette’s aunt came in. “Am I interrupting?” she asked, approaching Titus with her hand extended. And one after the other they entered the room to greet him. Even Bernadette’s brothers came in to say their hellos. Martin and Marcus kept off to one side, while the adults formed a circle around him.

“Bernadette had her hair done just for you,” his mother whispered to him. “Don’t say anything to her about it. We rescued what there was to rescue.” Out loud, however, she declared it was probably time for a few petits fours. Rising above a flat porcelain serving plate were pale pink, marzipan white, and yellow towers, which you put on your own plate along with a little paper coaster and then divided vertically with your fork. Even the children were masters of the technique. Her mother poured tea. You could choose between red and white china cups as thin as paper or larger shallow bowls decorated with women with pointy breasts and shaved heads.

Bernadette’s permanent made her look like she had a bird’s nest atop her head. Only her mother continued talking. The boys giggled. Without blushing, he got up and walked toward Bernadette. They shook hands, and the first thing Bernadette said as she turned slightly to one side was, “My father.” He entered, taking hurried, short steps.

Titus did not recognize him. At first he looked like Bernadette’s father, nothing more, and only when the great Böhme simply introduced himself as “Böhme” was Titus aware of who was standing before him—“Ah,” he responded, it just slipped out of him, “Ah.” And they all knew what he meant. He almost added that given the address he should have realized, or something of that sort. But he held his tongue, because nothing could have a greater effect that his “Ah.”

“What did he say?” Rudolf Böhme asked, and now the two women repeated his “Ah,” but without either striking the right tone, so that they both chided and corrected each other, then broke into laughter and measured Titus with glances he didn’t know how to interpret. All the same, he tried to hold his own when Bernadette linked her arm in his as if she wanted to claim him for herself, and assuming that the waves of life would simply carry him along, he deserted half a petit four and his bowl of tea.

They were the last couple to arrive at the ball in the Elbe Hotel, to which no one raised an objection — on the contrary. Bernadette’s girlfriends had kept two chairs free, so they could take their seats like a bridal couple. They danced with each other — and one of them always knew the right steps.

Later he made the rounds with Bernadette and introduced her to his mother and grandfather. And everyone realized who she was when he said, “Bernadette Böhme.” And finally, just as his dance card required, he asked Bernadette’s mother to cha-cha with him, but had no success in correcting the way she held her arm.

Bernadette and he came in third in the dance contest — the best of the beginners. But that wasn’t the half of it. There was something “magnetic” about them. He meant that literally. They were the pole by which people oriented themselves. Not a word, not a gesture, not a glance that failed to provoke some sort of response from the others. Even Martin, her brother, came over to him. Titus realized by the way Martin corrected the sit of his tie that he was not younger, but quite possibly older than he. “You’ll be going to Holy Cross School in September?” Martin asked. “To our school, I mean.” The three of them toasted.

Sitting at his desk, Titus recalled how uneasy he had felt when Gunda Lapin pressed him to go on with his story. He had merely remarked that Martin was a Holy Cross boy — in the same grade, but in a different class — and that they had sports in common.

“And Bernadette?”

Titus had looked at Gunda Lapin as if it surprised him to hear that name on her lips.

“Bernadette is in tenth grade.”

“Do you run into each other often?”

“No.”

“And tomorrow?”

Had he mentioned the invitation? But how else could Gunda Lapin have known about it?

After the ball he and Bernadette said good-bye without arranging another meeting, because it was clear they would see each other over the next few days in any case. While he and his mother and grandfather waited for the streetcar, the Böhmes and their relatives drove past in their cars on their way up to Weisser Hirsch. Summer vacation began that weekend.

Since there was no Rudolf Böhme, Schröder Strasse 15, in the telephone book, he took a streetcar to see her three days later. The place was as deserted as a theater during summer break. Once or twice a week he took the same number 11 to Weisser Hirsch. He stormed the mailbox every day, but not even photographs from the ball ever arrived.

In early August the gate was at last unlocked, and he could once again breathe in the odor of the house. Martin seemed happy to see him. Titus assumed Martin would lead him to Bernadette, and once he was left alone, he expected Martin to knock on Bernadette’s door. But Martin returned with nothing more than a pot of lukewarm coffee — Titus, it turned out, was Martin’s guest.

Bernadette was in Hungary, with or staying with friends — he didn’t quite catch which. He would have loved to see the living room and her parents. Titus drank too much coffee. He emptied one cup after the other, as did Martin, without asking for cream or sugar, without really tasting what he was drinking.

That night he couldn’t sleep and had a fever. Maybe Bernadette’s letter had got lost in the mail. Did she even have his address?

A couple of days before school began he was received once more by her mother.

[Letter of May 19, 1990]

“How nice to see you, Titus,” she cried, and led him into the house, where he had to let her take a good look at him. Did he perhaps have time for afternoon tea? She sent him out to the veranda and returned with a table setting. “Bernadette will be so sorry. The girls have gone to Potsdam. Didn’t she write you?”

A no would have been impolite, a betrayal of Bernadette, in fact. Besides, it eased his mind to hear her speak of “girls.”

“What an attractive woman your mother is,” Frau Böhme said. Titus had been on the verge of replying that his mother was almost forty, but then maybe Frau Böhme was even older — and was definitely someone his mother would have called an attractive woman.

“At thirteen, fourteen, children are on their own, it’s the end of parental influence — on the contrary, the more you preach the more quickly you lose them.” Frau Böhme slid her wicker chair closer to his and poured him tea. There were the same large circular beds of red flowers on this side of the house too.

“Friends are what’s important, and so you see, Titus, that’s why I’d like you to use your influence on Bernadette. She’s doesn’t exactly have it easy. But don’t say a word of this to my husband, if you please. Rudolf is a problem all to himself.”

Titus was dazed. Wasn’t she confiding to him something that not even Rudolf Böhme was allowed to know?

Before Rudolf Böhme could step out onto the terrace, Titus stood up and walked toward him, grabbed the hand dangling like a little flag at his side, and looked into eyes closed in deep concentration.

Titus followed the Böhmes’ example and scraped butter over his toast and then added dollops of jam from glasses that bore no labels. He tried all of them, without ever taking his eye off Rudolf Böhme, who, so it appeared, had never once really looked at him, although his thick lips had never stopped speaking at him the whole time.

Titus marshaled all his powers of attention, every ounce of them, so that he could respond to Rudolf Böhme’s words, and now marched bravely ahead, like a soldier in a war of liberation who refuses to be disconcerted by explosions all around him. But at the same time Titus was completely elsewhere. He drank one cup of tea with milk after the other and praised each serving of jam, although to him it tasted bitter, not sweet at all. And was once again amazed how little was accomplished by will and reason, while pure chance, or whatever you wanted to call this twist of fate, opened doors for him like in a fairy tale.

Finally Rudolf Böhme led him through the house and showed him his collection of paintings. And Titus remarked that this was the real collection of “New Masters,” not the one in the Albertinum — a statement that Rudolf Böhme repeated to his wife when the three of them sat down in the kitchen for Hawaii toast. Titus stayed until ten and as he rode home at last, he was carrying three books Rudolf Böhme had lent him. That night he threw up. It was his oversensitive stomach, his mother said. He evidently couldn’t go see the Böhmes without getting sick.

He didn’t see Bernadette again until school started. He avoided her as long as he could, since he felt like a freshman in her presence. He could spot her from afar by the way she tossed her head back and forth. She greeted him then in the cafeteria line, introduced him to a girlfriend as her partner at the Graduation Ball, and asked them both to step in line in front of her.

Each time they crossed paths at school, Bernadette seemed surprised to see him.

To Titus it was as if ever since the ball time had been running in reverse, that he was getting younger, not more mature. And everything he had dreamed of suddenly lay behind him in the fairy-tale world of the past.

He had told Gunda Lapin all about it. He talked on and on without interruption. Why had he suddenly felt certain that everything would change now? How had the change he wanted to describe come about?

“My, you’re thirsty,” Gunda Lapin had said. No sooner would she fill his glass than he would empty it again. But this time it was only water.

Titus stared at the open page of his diary. He read the day, the date, the time, and the name Gunda Lapin. He finished the sentence he had begun with the words “wasn’t wearing a bra.” He also completed the top-line entry by noting: “1:16 a.m.” Then Titus closed his diary.

3

Titus had wanted to be a half hour or forty-five minutes late — that way people would ask about him as they sat around the table at Martin’s birthday party and someone would hold a spot open for him. He couldn’t say himself how it had turned into an hour and a half. He was sorry for wasting so much of the time he could have spent at the Böhmes’ villa. And now, instead of assuming the role of the mysterious latecomer, he was kicking himself.

He still had the path’s cracked yellow stones ahead of him, when Bernadette opened the front door and came out to meet him. She was wearing a sleeveless blouse. Her arms were crossed. They shook hands without saying a word. Her arm had goose bumps all the way to her shoulder.

Titus took in the smell of the house. When he tried to describe it to himself — nuts, fresh laundry, furniture polish, cigarettes, perfume, browned crust, pineapple — there were too many things to keep track of all at once.

“They’re all crowded in the kitchen,” Bernadette said, and handed him a hanger. A plate of cake in hand, she started up the stairs.

“No big deal,” Martin said, laying Titus’s present on the windowsill. “No big deal at all.” They had just sat down to eat. Bernadette’s mother’s handshake lasted a long time. Joachim was there, and also the Holy Cross boy he had emerged from the park with the day before. Titus didn’t know the three girls. There was coffee and tea with milk, petits fours and a homemade plum cake with whipped cream. Joachim’s presence disconcerted him, as if his friend prevented him from being the person he had been here before.

Bernadette’s mother soon found a spot beside Titus and inquired about his mother and grandfather, whether he had made it nicely through the first weeks in his new school. What he would have liked best was to stay in the kitchen with her.

In Martin’s room they were talking about a teacher Titus didn’t know, and Joachim then held a lecture on sentimentality in the music of Heinrich Schutz.

The sun was so low that its light struck the clouds from beneath and alongside, lending them a sharp, dark outline. When he finally noticed the two figures out on the lawn, they were too far away.

He recognized Bernadette only from the way she tossed her head. They were holding hands. He almost groaned aloud from the pain the sight of the couple caused him. They had walked across the lawn and were now close to the bushes lining the property on the left. Titus pressed his brow to the windowpane, but they had vanished.

He heard his name. “Like spilled syrup,” he said calmly. The light was switched off, the others came to the window. Titus didn’t turn around or make room for them either. To the south the sky was green, but blurred then toward the edges, where it turned lilac and then flowed into pastel and then darker blue.

“My senses were reeling,” Martin sang, “it went black before my eyes, black and lilac and green.” Martin turned the light on and put the Manfred Krug record on. Titus kept a lookout from the corner of one eye, but all he saw was his reflection. Martin, Joachim, and the other guy sang along, even though their voices didn’t fit this kind of music. But they had found something to help pass the time until supper. Even Joachim, who normally couldn’t do anything but whisper “tonic, dominant, subdominant,” until a cut of the Stones or T. Rex was over, growled along in his change-of-voice tenor.

In today’s German class, the second class of the day, they had discussed Gorky’s Mother and literary heroes in general. Their German teacher had called David and Goliath literary heroes too. “As long as she doesn’t mess around with the New Testament,” Joachim had said during the next break, “she can collect all the literary heroes she wants.” To which Titus had responded that people with character were pretty rare in the New Testament.

What had he meant by that?

“When one of the two thieves at the crucifixion suddenly converts — that doesn’t sound right to me. The other one,” Titus had said, “the one who goes on mocking, is a lot more natural, a much better character.”

“Why?”

“He doesn’t get anything out of continuing to play the heavy.”

“He spits at someone who’s worse off than he is.”

And when Titus didn’t reply, Joachim had laid into him: “The other one knows he’s done wrong, but Jesus is innocent. He knows the difference. What do you think makes him better?”

But Titus hadn’t had a response to that question either.

“Who told you the other one is better?”

“Nobody,” Titus had answered, “nobody,” and then suddenly added, “I’m supposed to give a short report on the Bundeswehr as the aggressor, on Monday.”

Joachim had looked at him as if expecting something more, but then finally said, “Well just go ahead and give it, give your nice little report.”

The girls were sitting huddled together on Martin’s bed. The three singers appeared to be occupied with themselves and the record jacket.

The colors had faded from the sky, all that was left was a bright streak, like a crack of light before a door closes.

Why had he been so sure that he had seen Bernadette outside? It might have been her mother and father. Wasn’t Bernadette in the next room, eating cake? Yes, he was now convinced he hadn’t seen anything out there among the circular flower beds. That took a weight off his shoulders, left him happy.

[Letter of May 24, 1990]

He turned around. They were still singing the same song. “It was at the dance, just yesterday, I saw you in a trance…” Was that about him and Bernadette?

Titus sat down with the girls on the bed. He would have loved to bounce around the way they were doing, would have bounced better than any of those three. But he couldn’t sing, although he did know the words. “My senses were reeling, it went black before my eyes, black and lilac and green, then I saw gulls, swans, and cranes fly by…”

He had never been able to express himself as an instrument of music, whereas these three, though they had surely never spoken about it with one another, did so with self-confidence and conviction. Titus tried at least to be a good audience, and applauded the trio, who showed no signs of quitting now and were so loud that they didn’t hear the gong calling them to supper. Marcus, Bernadette’s little brother, had made place cards, and Bernadette had turned the napkins into three-tined crowns. Rudolf Böhme lit candles and distributed the candelabra about the room, a task that complemented his short steps. Once the dogs of darkness had been driven from every corner, as Rudolf Böhme put it, he greeted everyone, closed the kitchen door himself, and took up a position behind his chair. “My dear Martin…” he began.

Titus smiled. He looked first at Martin and then at the others, one by one. But evidently no one except him thought a speech in honor of the birthday boy was overdoing things.

Titus now fixed his gaze with earnestness on Rudolf Böhme, who spoke with chin held high, eyelids closed, and lashes quivering as if he were dreaming, while his fingers groped along the edge of the table as if finishing the job of smoothing out the tablecloth. By candlelight the siblings revealed their resemblance to one another, and to their mother even more, as if they were all wearing the same wigs. Bernadette had glanced up at the same moment her father mentioned Titus by name.

The speech ended with laughter, because when they reached for their glasses for the toast Rudolf Böhme proposed, they found them empty, and Rudolf Böhme interrupted himself by declaring he knew something was missing.

No sooner had they begun to eat than the ketchup bottle was empty, but for some reason it kept moving around the table, a bit of utter foolishness that reached its high point when finally Rudolf Böhme looked up and innocently asked for the ketchup — and after several futile attempts remarked that evidently they were out of ketchup.

Bernadette sat leaning back in her chair, staring at the rest of her toast. She hadn’t joined in the ketchup prank, which was why Titus tried not to laugh too hard.

Martin and Joachim kept on joking around with each other, bringing the rest of the table to silence. As he searched for a question he could pose to Rudolf Böhme, Titus made every effort to put down his knife and fork with as little clatter as possible. He watched Rudolf Böhme bend deep over his plate each time he removed a bite from his fork. The motions of his lips and tongue, as well as the way he gave each mouthful a long, thorough chew, suggested to Titus a kind of reverse speech, as if Rudolf Böhme were now incorporating into his body the words, sentences, and thoughts he would later write or speak.

“What are you working on at the moment, if I may inquire?” Joachim asked.

“He means you, Papa,” Bernadette remarked.

“Or would you prefer not to talk about it?”

Titus used the pause to take a deep breath, in and out.

“I’m translating,” Rudolf Böhme said as he continued to chew. “I’m pretending I know how. I’m working on it with your Brockmann, Boris Brockmann. He’s tremendous, really tremendous, a real translator in fact. I just add the poetical touch afterward.”

With the help of some melted cheese, Rudolf Böhme dabbed up the last toast crumbs.

Boris Brockmann, who would be their Latin and Greek teacher from the tenth grade on, looked like Bertolt Brecht and dressed like him too. Titus never ran into him except if he used the corridor on the top floor of the main building. Seated half on the radiator and half on the windowsill, Brockmann always seemed to be waiting for someone to greet him so he could say his own “Good morning!” with such earnestness and precise articulation that Titus actually heard the original good wish contained in the stock phrase.

“Someone should write a big book about translation,” Rudolf Böhme said, “from Humboldt to today. If you take a closer look, you soon realize that ultimately translation doesn’t exist. And suddenly you’re caught in a trap.” He meticulously wiped his lips.

“Which is why it always sounds so funny, and quite rightly so, when you ask, ‘So what’s the author trying to tell us?’” Rudolf Böhme laughed softly to himself, while his tongue brushed across his teeth. “Here’s the original, so translate it, and everyone thinks that’s just as it should be. What’s the problem, if you can arrange them prettily together on the bookshelf? But what does original mean then, there’s an original only because someone sits down to grapple with it, otherwise there wouldn’t even be an original.”

Subjective idealism, Titus thought.

“But if the original isn’t the original,” Martin asked, “what is it?”

“The original on the bookshelf is nothing more than printed paper,” Rudolf Böhme stated. “The moment you open it and start reading, things get complicated.”

“Maybe you could give them a hint of what it is you’re translating,” Bernadette’s mother said, after having lit yet another cigarette.

“And there’s the problem right off,” Rudolf Böhme declared. “The Bacchae by Euripides, the Bacchantes, The Possessed, or The Frenzied—or what should I call them? Do you understand?”

“No,” Martin said.

“If I say the Bacchantes, then I see Jordaens’s painting before me, and Bacchus reminds me of Caravaggio, of a Bacchus not feeling so well — and what does that have to do with Dionysus?”

“Then choose a different word,” Martin said.

“Which one?”

“Whatever’s in the dictionary.”

“Whatever’s in the dictionary?” Rudolf Böhme asked, closing his eyes. “In the dictionary you’ll find: ‘bacchic: frenzied, roisterous, bewitched, possessed,’ something like that.”

“And what fits?”

“Yes, which of them fits?” Rudolf Böhme looked at his plate. “We had a joke in school,” he began. “The ancient Greeks didn’t know the most important thing of all: that they are the ‘ancient Greeks.’ Do you understand? Time, which turned the Greeks into the ‘ancient Greeks,’ keeps bringing to light new meanings the Greeks themselves, of course, knew nothing about, could never have known about, although the words came from them. I see in them something different than you do, and Mama sees something else entirely. And our friend Titus here, he would find some other facet to be of significance. Each person has his own experiences, and so he reads the same sentences very differently.”

“Is that true, Titus?” Martin asked.

“Yes, that’s true,” Titus said in a serious voice.

“Yes, that’s true,” Martin aped him.

“A text is not a dead thing,” Rudolf Böhme continued, “but rather it answers my questions in its own special way, or refuses to answer. There’s a voice in there, an encounter, a conversation…”

“Wow!” Martin exclaimed. “The witching hour for the bewitched.”

Bernadette’s mother shook her head and angrily exhaled a puff of smoke.

“He’s right, Sophie,” Rudolf Böhme remarked before Bernadette’s mother could say anything. “Reading is always the witching hour.”

“And so what’s this bewitched play about?” Titus asked.

“That would just spoil our evening,” Bernadette’s mother said.

“In any case it was Goethe’s favorite tragedy, but it’s cruel, it’s gray

[Letter of May 25, 1990]

“And now I’ve lost my train of thought. Well fine,” he said, and placed his forefingers at the edge of the table, flexing them outward like horns. “Dionysus takes on human form — it’s important that he’s welcomed in human form — and arrives in Thebes in order to bring his cult to the city of his mother, Semele. All Asia worships him by now, only Greece still knows nothing about him. Semele, one of Zeus’s lovers, had given in to Hera’s whispered suggestion and demanded that Zeus show himself in all his divinity. Zeus appeared as a bolt of lightning that struck and killed Semele. But her sisters, Dionysus’s aunts, claim this story was merely invented by Cadmus, Semele’s father and the founder of Thebes, in order to preserve the honor of his daughter, and thus of the royal house as well. In truth Zeus struck Semele down because she had bragged that she was pregnant by him. Dionysus doesn’t like any of this gossip. That is why, so Dionysus says, he has turned the women of Thebes into frenzied Maenads and driven them off to a nearby heavily wooded mountain, Cithaeron. Dionysus demands the Thebans believe in him…”

“Which, as a god, he’s allowed to do,” Joachim inserted.

“If he were to reveal himself as a god, yes,” Rudolf Böhme rejoined. “Pentheus is the ruler of Thebes and a cousin of Dionysus, since his mother Agave is one of Semele’s sisters. Cadmus is thus the grandfather of both Pentheus and Dionysus. Pentheus is a god-, or perhaps better”—here he gave Joachim a nod—“gods-fearing man. It is only to Dionysus that he fails to offer sacrifices and prayers. Although to be fair, one should add that Pentheus knows nothing whatever about him.”

Bernadette had stood up and, while Rudolf Böhme described the first commentary of the chorus, began to clear the table. Titus stacked the plate of the girl next to him on his own and pushed his chair back.

“No,” Bernadette whispered, laying a hand on his shoulder. She picked up the plates and vanished into the kitchen, from where, just as in the theater, a wedge of bright light first struck the table and then went out again. Rudolf Böhme told about the scene where two old men — the blind seer, Teiresias, and Cadmus, the founder of the city, declare their intention to visit the mountains to worship Dionysus. He compared them to two retirees on their way to a disco.

Titus concentrated on his right shoulder, on the spot where Bernadette’s hand had touched it. He would rather have helped Bernadette tidy up than have to listen to Rudolf Böhme. Titus could well understand why Pentheus would make fun of Teiresias and Cadmus.

He didn’t start paying attention again until her mother declared, “Dionysus afflicts women with mania, and Pentheus wants to lock them up behind bolted doors. We should keep that in mind.”

“We should keep that in mind,” Rudolf Böhme agreed, and remarked on the fine differentiation that Teiresias makes between kratos, external force, and dynamis, energy and power as an inherent quality.

As he spoke Rudolf Böhme stared at the table. When he did raise his head, his eyes were closed. It was only from close up like this that you could see all the wrinkles that started at the corners of his eyes and spread down like a delicate mesh over his cheeks.

Just as when his mother used to tell him stories, Titus could see it all before him now too. The castle of Pentheus looked like Holy Cross School, Pentheus was a kind of principal or teacher, and Dionysus, or so Rudolf Böhme had claimed, was a hippie, a lady’s man, an artist.

“The cult of Dionysus,” Rudolf Böhme said, “isn’t something that you can simply be told about, you have to become part of it, join in its rituals and abide by its rules — as with any religious faith.”

Titus saw Dionysus being locked in the cellar coal bin, there is an earthquake, and the school building collapses. But Dionysus walks out into the courtyard unscathed and boasts of how he has driven Pentheus mad. In the same moment Pentheus comes running up — was it Petersen? Was it the principal? Everything has turned out just as Dionysus predicted. But Petersen doesn’t want to hear any of it. He orders the school gate closed and bolted, as if he hadn’t already learned how useless such commands are. Joachim points that out to him, but Petersen has had enough of this schoolboy who always wants to have the last word. “Sophos, sophos sy!” he shouts. “Wise, wise you are, only never where you should be wise!”

“He’s hard of hearing, as my grandpa would put it,” Joachim said.

“We can understand Pentheus, and yet we don’t understand him either,” Rudolf Böhme continued. “Everything he has learned in life so far, all his previous experiences, contradict what he is now going through. We shouldn’t expect that, just like that, he can put aside the spectacles through which he has seen the world all his life. On the other hand, it’s amazing how blind he is to the changed situation.”

In that instant the wedge of light fell on the table again. Bernadette entered with two small bowls and set them on the table. Titus got up and went to the kitchen, following the fragrance of apples and vanilla, picked up two more bowls, and carried them out. Bernadette smiled, her lips moved as if she were about to say something. They passed close by each other twice more. When they were seated at the table again, Bernadette looked at him. Looks are all we need to read someone’s mind, Titus thought, and waited for Bernadette to pick up her spoon and start eating — baked apples with vanilla sauce.

“This is marvelous,” Rudolf Böhme said, pursing his lips and waving his spoon in the air as if trying to crack an egg. Titus didn’t join in the general praise, that seemed silly somehow. Bernadette was silent as well. But it was a cheerful silence that cast even tragedy in its bright light.

“Where’s Stefan?” Rudolf Böhme asked as he scraped at what was left in his bowl. Martin evidently hadn’t heard the question. He was very intent on his dessert, Titus noted. He had to smile and wanted to let Bernadette see his smile, but at the same moment she remarked, “I’ll go check,” and looked right past Titus, who was now at a loss where to direct his smile. He shoveled it away, shoveled it full of pieces of apple as if filling a grave with dirt and didn’t look up as Bernadette left.

“Her friend is being inducted the day after tomorrow,” Rudolf Böhme whispered. “A little like the end of the world for both of them.”

When Titus felt Bernadette’s mother’s hand on his shoulder, he could have broken into sobs. Without turning his head, he gave her the empty bowl, but his voice failed him for even a simple “thank you.”

“Would anyone like a cup of tea?” Bernadette’s mother asked, setting the pewter bowl of rock sugar directly in front of Titus.

“Let me quickly bring this to an end,” Rudolf Böhme declared, “or are there seconds?”

He told about a shepherd who had been spying on the women in the mountains. But what he has to report — scenes of perfect harmony between man and nature — is not to Pentheus’ liking…

Titus could see Stefan in his mind’s eye, with his buzzed haircut and a steel helmet on his head. Titus tried to recall the loyalty oath Joachim had written out for him weeks before. He let this Stefan recite the oath, while Bernadette was forced to listen. I swear, Stefan said, faithfully and at all times to serve my fatherland, the German Democratic Republic, and when so ordered by a government of workers and peasants, to protect it against every enemy. I swear I will be prepared at any time to defend Socialism against all enemies and to lay down my life for its victorious cause. Should I ever…may I be subjected to the strict punishment of the law…and the contempt of all working people.

“The women hurl themselves at the animals, ripping sheep and cows to pieces with their bare hands, tearing them limb from limb as blood spurts and hunks of flesh dangle among the branches, as bones and hooves fly through the air…”

Titus enjoyed listening to this part. He didn’t wince. Rudolf Böhme didn’t have to show him any special consideration.

Joachim said that it had been violence that evoked the women’s violence.

“Yes, of course, Pentheus hears only what he wants to hear. Besides — and he offers this as his reason — there is nothing worse than defeat at the hands of women, a disgrace to which Greece cannot be subjected. Suddenly it’s no longer about Thebes but about Greece. One must admit that Nietzsche — and those who agree with him — is right in saying that Pentheus does not cut a very good figure here. On the other hand, his reaction is perfectly normal for a ruler. In any case, Dionysus, offended by such stubbornness, warns him yet again not to take up arms against a god.”

“Dionysus shows patience,” Joachim said.

Titus was disappointed the carnage was over already. Because that’s what war was like, horrible, cruel beyond words, and this Stefan would be in the thick of it — he had sworn an oath that he would. And instead of listening to Rudolf Böhme, who was now talking about the tragedy’s peripeteia, he watched as Bernadette, disgusted by such mealy-mouthed cowardice and blind submission, turned away from her uniformed boyfriend at last.

“Pentheus translates everything he hears into his own language. And because he believes he never receives the right answer to his questions — never realizing he is asking the wrong questions — he will perish. Or to put it succinctly: because he is not willing or able to question himself, he will meet a gruesome end,” Rudolf Böhme said. And Titus would have loved to shout: Because he’s a coward! Because he doesn’t understand what he’s doing! Because he doesn’t deserve Bernadette!

“Horny old goat,” Martin exclaimed.

“Yes, Pentheus is a voyeur,” Rudolf Böhme said. “But now we also understand why when others speak of consecration and worship, he sees nothing but lewdness and prurience. Believing he knows himself very well, he also believes he knows what other people are like. And his playing the old goat, as you put it, is really the first and only time he escapes his own obstinacy. Suddenly he reveals qualities he has always fought against and repressed, both within himself and in the state. The horrible thing is that this is precisely what destroys him.”

Even as Rudolf Böhme told about how Pentheus disguises himself in women’s clothes and slinks off to Cithaeron, afflicted now by Dionysus with lyssa, madness, which lacks any of the ambiguity that defines mania, Titus realized he had to act, that only in action could he save Bernadette and himself.

“‘Were Pentheus possessed by reason, he would not don the garb of women,’ Dionysus says,” Rudolf Böhme continued. “And the question is whether in saying this Dionysus hasn’t become absurd himself. For from now on every step is a step toward annihilation. Dionysus isn’t content to slay his adversary, Pentheus must die at the hand of his own mother.”

Titus felt hot, his head was burning. He tried to force himself to listen and not think of everything all at one time. But he couldn’t manage it. There were too many worlds, too many dreams, too many lives. He had to make a decision.

Rudolf Böhme spoke as if he had watched with his own eyes as Dionysus bends a pine tree down and sets Pentheus in the crown, then carefully lets the trunk swing back upright. The women see him before he sees them and grab hold of the pine tree and uproot it. Pentheus rips off his women’s clothes, pleads with his mother — it is I, your Pentheus, the son whom you bore, have mercy, Mother, do not slay me because of my wrongdoing, for I am your child! His mother, Agave, however, grabs him by his right hand, braces her feet against his body, and rips his shoulder out…After the butchery, Pentheus’s head ends up in his mother’s hands. She fixes it on her thyrsus in place of a pinecone and bears it in triumph into the city. Agave boasts that she was the first to strike this wild beast and to have slain it, and demands that the chorus share in the meal. The chorus refuses in revulsion. Agave pets the calf she believes she has in her hands, scratches the fuzz on its chin. Her son Pentheus, she brags, will praise her for this hunt, for this prey. “And whoever sheds no tears at this,” Rudolf Böhme said, “has no tears left to shed.”

When a few minutes later they got up from the table, Titus had come to his decision. He stepped over to the large living room window and gazed out at the city. The spell of arms and voices: the white arms of roads lie before him. And the voices say with them: We are your kinsmen. And the air is thick with their company as they call to me, their kinsman, making ready to go, shaking the wings of their exultant and terrible youth. He had once memorized it, not perfectly but almost.

Titus wanted to talk with Joachim, just with him. Titus was afraid that they wouldn’t be undisturbed on the walk home either. But Joachim never left Rudolf Böhme’s side.

They all gathered at the entry for their coats, and Titus was the first to say good-bye and step out the front door. He was trembling with impatience. Every second he stood there alone while Joachim kept him waiting threatened to undo his decision. But once he had shared his decision with Joachim, there would be no turning back. Titus wanted at last to be different, to be honest, good. He shuddered, as if the decisive moment would not be the day after tomorrow, at the end of their last class, but now, right now.

The wind had picked up, the sky was black. In among the trees, streetlights came on, the only light near or far. He heard Rudolf Böhme’s voice, and Martin’s. The girls were looking for something. Bernadette’s mother offered to let them stay the night. The girls turned her down. Rudolf Böhme repeated the invitation. “Come on, come on,” Titus whispered. He banged his hands in the pockets of his anorak against his hips, spun around, and bumped his shoulder harder than he had intended against the door, which swung open. In amazement they looked at him, like at some new arrival. Titus smiled. There it was again, the odor of the house, that fragrance, more befuddling than ever. And as if obeying a request, Titus stepped back inside.

4

When Titus awoke, his room, flooded with daylight, seemed strange to him. Next to his alarm clock lay an open book of fairy tales, which he had read to calm himself down.

In the same way that he sometimes raised his head from the pillow to check whether his headache was still there, he now began searching for the decision he had made yesterday. But his “no” to the army had crossed the no-man’s-land of sleep unscathed, it was already a part of him. Titus felt so strong and certain that he would have loved simply to skip Sunday.

He started doing his push-ups, increasing his goal by two, and at forty-four got to his feet again, panting and wide awake.

He greeted his grandfather, who was sitting at the radio and winced when Titus kissed his cheek. A place had been set for him at the kitchen table. Only some bread crumbs and the tea egg in the sink indicated that he was late. As he ate a weird feeling came over him, because every object he looked at reminded him of something. And so to his mind the white tiles above the stove — which had had to be set in the middle of the other cloud gray tiles when the position of the stovepipe was shifted — once again looked like a dog dancing on its back legs. His sister used to carry on long conversations with it. The coffee can with its Dutch win-terscape, the towel calendar from three years ago with its Black Forest girls, the amoebalike spot on the ceiling — Titus saw them all that morning as if for the first time. He felt like a guest. He enjoyed the sense that things were so remote.

The sections for music, civics, Russian, and gym in his homework notebook were empty, but he figured he would need two hours for math and physics.

Titus was a bit unsettled by his rapid progress. Equations with two unknowns.

[Letter of May 31, 1990]

since it was no longer a matter of grades — as a conscientious objector he would be tossed out after tenth grade in any case — he was slowly getting his footing again. Before he went to work on the physics homework, he made his bed and picked up what was lying on the floor around it: a dictionary of foreign words and phrases, the fairy tales, his alarm clock, two postcards from Greifswald and Stralsund that his sister had sent him, the TV program from the previous week, and the Sächsische Zeitung—his grandfather had of late taken to passing it on to him when he was finished reading it. Titus packed his satchel, without touching Petersen’s book, and took in the view of an empty desk, except for his physics book and notebook. He opened to page 144. Assignment 62 read: Summarize the life and influence of Isaac Newton. Base this on pp. 33–35 in your textbook. Further recommended reading: Vavilov, S. L., Isaac Newton (Berlin, 1951). Assignment 63: Explain the difference between the mass of an object and the gravity of an object.

Titus was feeling strong and clever. He would complete these tasks in nothing flat, just like Joachim. Ten minutes later he stuffed the physics book into his satchel. If he could have, he would have made a sandwich for Monday break then and there — that way he wouldn’t have to open his satchel again until he was at school.

Although it was still early, Titus prepared the noonday meal, sliced the sausage into the potato soup and, just as if his mother were home, set the table in the living room, including the bottle of Maggi seasoning, which he placed on a saucer. He didn’t want his grandfather to have to do anything when he returned from his walk.

He didn’t have to help out around the house. His mother would never have demanded that he peel potatoes or hang up the laundry. He himself would have regarded that as child labor. He didn’t know how hard kernels became rice, how raw meat was turned into something edible. Only last summer he had hung a teabag in a glass of cold water. But he would gladly have learned all that rather than have her drill him in declensions, conjugations, reducing equations, solving percentages, punctuating with commas…From seventh grade on he had not dared bring home a C on his report card; anything below a C was out of the question. In major subjects it had to be an A, and if he managed that, a B in some minor subject was pure laziness and thus even more unacceptable. He was not to make his abode among the dull and lazy.

Although a Sunday worthy of the name included his mother’s being at home, he was glad he wouldn’t see her again until everything had been decided. Because in her eyes all his efforts, all the drills, all the worry would have been in vain — the joy at an A pointless, not to mention the concern over a B or the despair over a C. Oh, Mother, he wanted to say, I’m not giving up anything, just the opposite, it’s a liberation, a resurrection. I truly have no choice. I had to do it because otherwise everything else would dissolve into nothingness. If truth and falsehood, right and wrong, good and evil, are to have any meaning, then I have to say “no.”

He felt as if he could really breathe easy for the first time ever. Wasn’t what he was experiencing at this moment the same freedom felt by all those who had been willing to confess the name of Jesus and take up their cross? Wasn’t his life just beginning? How could he have lived with himself as a mealy-mouthed coward? How unnecessary all that truckling and kowtowing was.

Titus heard the key turn in the door. He lit the candles and put on a recording of the Brandenburg Concertos.

“Your mother wants you to call her,” his grandfather said after taking his seat and stirring some Maggi into his soup.

“Did you talk with her?”

“She wants you to call her,” his grandfather said.

Titus tried to imagine how his life would be the following Sunday. He couldn’t say just how the living room would be any different then from what it was now, except that his mother would be sitting at the table too. But it would be a totally different room.

After the meal Titus rode his bike to the ponds in the woods. He knew every buckle in the asphalt, could have slalomed practically blindfolded around the potholes and little bumps that were like warts left behind by repair work. The thought of that phone call grew more depressing from minute to minute.

Ever since he had started school it had never occurred to him to tell his mother about punches or curses or any sort of humiliation. Because everything that happened to him hurt her twice as much. And now he was going to have to hurt her. He had always been grateful to his mother for not treating him and his sister the way children are usually treated. After his father’s death she hadn’t expected them to put up with a new husband. Men were crude and expected you to wash up stripped to the waist, like in the army.

The wind tugged at him. Titus now had Klotzsche and Hellerau behind him and, turning off to the right at the end of the village street, began the climb through open country. He stood up, but that didn’t help much. It was better to lie flat over the handlebars and pedal for all he was worth.

His mother had grounded him only once, but he found even that completely unacceptable. It had been so embarrassing, he had been ashamed for her. But she had felt much the same way. So first she had sent him shopping, then they had gone to the ice-cream parlor together, and after that he had been allowed to pick out a real man’s wallet in a leather shop.

He thought of how he had had to drink scalded milk in kindergarten, how the skin had clung to his lip, and of how in the days before they had a television he and his sister, Annie, would ring the neighbor’s doorbell every Sunday afternoon so they could watch Professor Flimmrich. In those days he could recognize stairwells and apartments just by their smell. Annie had roused the Beckers, a retired couple, from their midday nap so she could watch The Snow Queen. The Beckers had chased her off, only to call her back upstairs a few minutes later. The Beckers offered Annie and him their glittery, silvery armchair. They gave them sweetened gelatin to eat from a wooden pot. From then on he had always asked himself whether, if everything else in life went wrong, he would at least be able to sit in front of a television and eat sweetened gelatin. That idea made the world seem a much less frightening place.

There atop the low hill, with its view across miles of fields, as far as the line of the Moritzburg Forest on the horizon, Titus suddenly realized that his childhood lay behind him.

He picked up speed as he started down the slope. The trick was to take the curve to the left leading to the woodland ponds without braking. If you leaned into the turn just right, so that the asphalt along the shoulder banked in a steep curve, you could feel your body being tugged and steered by the countervailing torque and resistance. The tingle of that moment of joy lasted a long time. If you got the angle wrong, you were thrown out of the curve and dumped into the field.

(Here insert a few more daydreams about his new life and other lovely observations. And how he tries to stop thinking about Bernadette.)

Titus was startled, frightened when he heard the key quickly inserted into the apartment door, and then was startled all the more by his fright…

His mother, gray as an eraser.

She had never wept, not in his presence. But her eyes were glistening with tears now. Staring down at the toes of her shoes, she looked weary and thin. Her hands folded across her knees smelled of chloramine.

“Mother,” he said. “You’re acting as if I’m some sort of criminal.”

“You’re running straight into their knife, Titus,” she said. “So honest and upstanding. But that doesn’t change a thing, you’re only hurting yourself.”

He was glad to hear her say something, anything.

“Someday you’ll understand,” he said without looking up, and would have loved to add, “and be proud of me.” And then he did in fact say it.

“I’m proud of you just as you are, Titus. I couldn’t be more proud than I am now.”

He still didn’t look up. “What’s so awful about my getting kicked out of school? Most of the others won’t go on to university anyway.”

He heard his grandfather’s footsteps.

“You’re throwing yourself away, Titus, pearls before swine.”

Titus received his grandfather with a smile. “Where’s your mother?”

“Right here,” Titus said, and his grandfather pushed the door open wider.

“Is something wrong?”

Titus shook his head and smiled again. His mother didn’t budge, but just stared at the floor until his grandfather left again.

“What are you going to tell them?”

Titus didn’t respond. He had already told her. He couldn’t repeat it, his words were stuck in the ruts of what had already been said. He heard the radio in the kitchen and felt like he had lived through this scene before.

“Do you think you’re going to make a better person of Petersen? Or of your classmates? You’ll just embarrass them, make it more difficult for them…”

“Am I supposed to lie?” He looked at her now.

“Who said you’re supposed to lie?”

Titus sat down now.

“You’re supposed to talk about the Bundeswehr, nothing more than that.”

[Letter of June 9, 1990]

“But they’ve got it all wrong.”

“What have they got wrong?”

“Aggressor and all the rest of the crap.”

“How do you know that?”

“They would never attack us.”

“If the Russians didn’t have an army, didn’t have any rockets…do you think the West would nobly refrain from attacking? They didn’t even allow an Allende. Think about Vietnam. Just because they drive better cars and have better pantyhose doesn’t automatically make them more humane.”

“What are you talking about?”

“They’d cash in the whole kit and caboodle.”

“I think that the West…”

“Would help themselves…”

It was as if someone had erased the despair from her face. It was like when they played chess and she let him take back a stupid move. But he didn’t want to take anything back.

“You can’t be the judge of that,” Titus said.

“Imagine we’re talking about lightbulbs or cars or anything of that sort.”

“Why should I?”

“You don’t know any more about those things than I do, do you?”

“He wants me to draw conclusions…”

“Everyone has to draw their own conclusions.”

“Mama…”

What had become of his ideas, of the arguments he wanted to present her with. Why couldn’t he convince her? Was it so easy to put him in checkmate? Joachim was right, Gunda Lapin was right, his mother was right, they were all right each in their own way — only he was wrong.

(Or better, set in a telephone booth.)

“He asked if I had settled in okay, how I was doing meeting the challenges of a new class, and then he said that this wasn’t some attempt to talk me into enlisting, into hiring me as a mercenary, those days were over, thank God. That wasn’t how we did things. But a government of workers and peasants that made it possible for us to get such an education surely ought to be able to demand something in return from those to whom it gave special assistance.”

“He was very calm, but stern, calm and stern. He asked why I didn’t want peace. I told him that of course I wanted peace. Was I prepared then to defend my homeland with a weapon in hand, or would I just stand aside and watch my family slaughtered before my eyes.”

“Then I’ll just become a garbage collector. I don’t think I’ll starve.”

“‘Here on our side no one is left to make his decisions all alone,’ he said.”

“A short report, by Monday.”

“I don’t know, I really don’t. He gave me a book to read…”

Then Titus didn’t say anything for a long time. It was almost dark now.

“It will just go on like this,” he said finally. “Over and over and over.” “Yes,” he said then, “yes.”

5

Five thirty. Titus saw the drops on the windowpane. He rolled over on his back and listened. Something had awakened him, sort of like when the cat used to jump up on his bed. Everything sounded very close — tires on asphalt, the streetcar, buses on their way up to the airport, trains out on the heath.

Titus squeezed his eyes tight. His heart was making progress, beating fasting, closer to his skin.

Six thirty, seven thirty…he counted on his fingers, twelve thirty…in seven hours it would be time, in eight hours his life would be different.

He rolled onto his side, doubled the pillow, and pressed his face into it as if he were crying. The front door clicked into its lock. Footsteps on the sidewalk. He wanted to enjoy the next seven minutes, as if it were the middle of the night, kept cutting the remaining time in half so there was always one half left. He tucked up his legs and pulled the covers higher.

Seconds before it rang, Titus reached for the alarm clock and got up. He closed the window, knelt down, and started his push-ups. He shouted the count to himself. As if an officer were standing beside him, each shout was a blow across his back. He didn’t stop until forty, he was out of breath, but forced himself to keep going to the point of exhaustion. He could see his distorted face and hear himself gasping for air. At forty-seven he no longer felt the riding crop on his back, forty-eight, forty-nine…even after his stomach touched the floor, his arms were still supporting his shoulders. Then he lay there, awaiting his sentence.

Titus was awake now, wonderfully awake. He leapt to his feet like a sprinter from the starting block. He put water on, got the butter from the fridge, and washed at the sink. Seven hours. All he had to do was stick to his opinion. The worst part, yesterday afternoon with his mother, was behind him now. Maybe Petersen would take him to see the principal. Titus smiled while he dried himself.

At seven thirty-five he left the apartment, gym bag in hand, sprinted when he heard the streetcar coming, and leapt onto the last car just as the final bell rang.

The man beside him smelled of cigarettes, shaving lotion, alcohol, and peppermint. Titus pushed his way to the middle of the car, found an opening on the handrail to hang on to. He positioned his satchel and gym bag between his legs.

Hadn’t the people around him already agreed to live out their lives with the least expenditure of energy possible, as if saving all their strength for the beyond? Had not one of these people ever received the call of God?

At the Platz der Einheit he had to get off the 7 and cross to catch the 6. At the stoplight his mother was standing directly opposite him. He didn’t spot her and was startled when he heard his name spoken so close to his ear.

“Good morning, Titus,” she said. They hugged.

“All you have to do is read it to them,” she said, and held out the book and some sheets of paper. “Ten minutes, if you read it slowly.”

He looked at the pages. The book was in a plastic bag decorated with pictures of coins.

“This is not your decision, Titus,” she said. “This is how I want it, and you have to behave accordingly.”

Titus looked to one side. It was as if she were grounding him.

“You’re fifteen. When you’re eighteen, after you’ve graduated, you can be as much of a conscientious objector as you want.”

“Not so loud,” Titus whispered. What was she thinking, ambushing him here like this?

“Promise me that!” Titus looked across to the Red Army Monument; the soldier carrying the flag had his other arm drawn back to toss a hand grenade. He was aiming directly at his mother and him.

“You have to promise me!”

“I’ll try,” Titus said.

“Not just try!” she cried sternly. “This has nothing to do with ‘trying.’ You will do what I tell you to do. Do you understand, Titus?”

“Mama,” he said with a smile. He didn’t understand what was happening inside him. Everything was tumbling, it was as if something had broken loose inside him — something pleasant. She had forbidden him. Just like that. Suddenly everything had returned to square one. He tried to suppress his smile, he wanted to gaze at his mother with a suffering look. He couldn’t admit defeat without any resistance. He had to challenge her.

“I’ve made my decision,” Titus said. “I’m not going to serve in the army.”

“I don’t object to that,” she said. “Just don’t say it now, but when the time comes, before you’re drafted.”

“Petersen wants to know now. I don’t want to lie anymore.”

“It isn’t your decision, Titus. I want you to read this report. And that’s why you’re going to read it too. And if he asks you, then you say what you’ve said all along, eighteen months and not a day longer.”

“I’m not going to read lies.”

“What do you mean, lies? I’ve cut out all the foolishness. You tell them about the Nazi generals that they’ve had and still have, about the names of the bases, the old songs they still bellow, the organizations looking for revenge, and above all about the money. The big companies that profit from it. And if you want to make money selling arms, you need fear and war. Your conscience will be clear, which is true in any case, and as for this…” She turned around because a streetcar was pulling in.

“The eleven,” he said.

“You’ll see,” she said.

Even in the open air Titus could smell the chloramine on her hands.

“Was it a slow night?” he asked.

“It was okay,” she said. “You’ve made me a promise.” She lifted his chin, he turned his head away. But when he looked at her, he couldn’t suppress his smile any longer.

“You promise me you’ll read it?”

“Yes,” Titus said.

Because their routes took them in opposite directions, they stood opposite each other at the stop like total strangers — until two streetcars crossed in front of them almost simultaneously.

Sanddorn, their music teacher, slammed the door behind him, loped in great bounding strides to the piano, put down the grade book, and shouted, “Friends one and all, take your seats!”

Sanddorn raised the lid, plopped down onto the piano bench, and played a couple of bars, a variation on, “Hark, What Comes Now to Us from Afar,” the same song they each had had to sing for him solo a few weeks before.

“We need men,” Sanddorn cried, “more men!” And the melody wandered off into the bass voices. Sanddorn opened his grade book, thumbed through a few pages, and propped his forearms on it, so that all the class could see was his large head.

Titus liked Sanddorn, although when he had had to sing solo for him, he sent him back to his seat after the first stanza and to everyone’s delight played Titus’s warped version of the melody on the piano. But Sanddorn never gave anything lower than a B when you sang for him. Titus was glad the week began with a stress-free hour.

“Mario Gädtke.” Sanddorn had read the name from his grade book. He only knew the names of those who sang in the school chorus by heart. Mario had stood up.

“An A in singing, and you’re not in the choir?” Mario listed all the things he was involved in and why he couldn’t join the choir. Titus wished Sanddorn would ask him something like that — and meantime Mario talked about the chemistry club, the brass ensemble, and judo. What Titus wouldn’t have given to be in the choir. They sang the Christmas Oratorio, Brahms’s Requiem, Verdi, Mozart. And they only wore their blue FGY shirts at start-of-the-year ceremonies. When Peter Ullrich was asked to come forward to sing a second time, Titus began to worry that this least dangerous of classes might turn dangerous today. But Sanddorn would never ask him, not him, to come forward again. He would be the last person Sanddorn would test a second time. And in fact Sanddorn now closed the grade book.

“Haydn Variations!” he cried, and quoted what Brahms had said about the symphony — that writing a symphony is a matter of life and death — and that Haydn (“How many symphonies did Haydn compose?”) was a master at it, Haydn and Mozart, Haydn and Esterházy, Brahms and Haydn.

The record crackled. The music began. Titus leaned back. The motif was obvious.

While he listened to the music, he watched Sanddorn pace back and forth between the piano and the window, his eyes fixed on the floor, his right hand marking each entrance.

Sanddorn’s corpulence struck Titus as a provocation — it rendered Sanddorn unacceptable for military service. On the other hand, Sanddorn knew how to carry his weight with such grace that you suspected he would make a good dancer. During breaks between classes it looked like he was promenading up and down in the hallway outside the music room — you couldn’t possibly picture Sanddorn in the teachers’ lounge — all the while humming some melody, which the moment he stopped he would write out with his finger on a radiator, a windowsill, or the window itself. He returned every greeting very amiably, bowing with his entire large upper body to faculty and students alike.

Sanddorn, who had stopped by the window, raised a finger to underscore the original motif. Titus would have loved to ask Sanddorn whether he had been in the army and what advice he had to give him.

[Letter of June 21, 1990]

Titus walked to the front. He didn’t want to sing, he couldn’t sing, Sanddorn had to know how impossible it was for him to be put through this torture a second time. He would have accepted any black mark against him.

Sanddorn first ran the piano through an eerie rumbling prelude, only to follow it with a very spare version of the lines: “And ’cause a man is just a man he needs his grub to eat, dig in!”

“Just sing along,” Sanddorn cried, “just join in!” Sanddorn started all over again, nodding to him in encouragement, and Titus sang along. He didn’t even hear his classmates laughing, Sanddorn was singing so loud.

But when it came to the “So left, two three, so left, two three,” Titus thought he might have to start marching around with Sanddorn, while he and Sanddorn sang, “Find your place, good comrades! Join with us in the Workers Front, ’cause you’re working men too!”

The second stanza began and they marched forward together. Titus could hear himself now, he leaned on Sanddorn’s voice — or it embraced his own. He knew the words, had memorized them. And Titus instantly cheered up when the “So left, two three” came round again. He sang loudly — and when Sanddorn and the piano fell silent, he sang on alone. But a moment later Sanddorn reentered, and they marched in step to stanza three.

“Wednesday, one thirty p.m., choir!” Sanddorn shouted as Titus returned to his seat. The burst of laughter was worse than ever before. Titus turned to stone, Sanddorn was toying with his most sacred feelings. Titus hated Sanddorn now, that fat reptile at the piano. It was not until Sanddorn exclaimed, “We’ll make a real tenor out of him yet,” that Titus began to realize what had just happened. Sanddorn entered an A in the grade book.

Titus had to hurry, the bell for the end of class had rung in the middle of the second stanza. But he took his time, because he knew he still had Joachim ahead of him. There he was waiting on the stairs beneath the mural with the eleventh Feuerbach thesis.

“My mother wants me to read it,” Titus said quickly.

“What?” Joachim smile.

“About the Bundeswehr, she wrote it.”

“Your mother? Your mother wrote it?”

Titus shrugged.

“Your mother is actually a very wise woman,” Joachim said, sucked his lips in, and then opened them with a soft pop. “Why isn’t she helping you? Why is she making it more difficult for you?” Titus greeted Frau Berlin, who was glancing back and forth between Joachim and him as if she had been eavesdropping.

“Why is she doing this?”

“For my sake,” Titus said defiantly, and with two quick steps slipped in front of Joachim to avoid opposing traffic. He couldn’t spot Bernadette anywhere. Only when they had reached the broad middle flight did Joachim appear again at his side.

“You don’t have it easy.”

“She’s just afraid,” Titus said without turning his head. He had always believed God was gentle and kind, but now he sensed that God could also be stern and demanding.

“There’ll be others to help you,” Joachim said. “Everyone I’ve told about your decision is in awe of you.”

Titus nodded to Dr. Bartmann, who was leaning at the windowsill directly opposite the classroom door and just as they were leaving the dark middle flight had looked up from his newspaper as if expecting them. Dr. Bartmann was always smiling, except when he talked about the future of socialism — then he turned serious. Dr. Bartmann always wore only light-colored clothes, even the stripes on his shirts were somehow pallid.

“Well, sports fans,” he cried. Then the bell rang, and Dr. Bartmann folded up his newspaper.

There was something nonchalant about Dr. Bartmann’s “friendship.” If someone offered too feeble an answer, he would content himself with mimicking it while drooping his shoulders and bending slightly at the knee, as if on the verge of collapse.

“Is there anything new in the epoch of the transition between capitalism and socialism?” Dr. Bartmann hiked up his trousers, until his belt buckle reached the point where his belly stuck out farthest. “The score, nine to nothing, a whole long day of hoping, and out of the running all the same. And what does our local paper have to say?” Just then the door opened, and Martina Bachmann entered carrying the grade book.

“‘I love discipline,’” Dr. Bartmann declared, “‘though I’m famous for not loving it.’ Well, Mademoiselle Bachmann, who said that?”

She laid the grade book on the teacher’s desk and without pushing her chair back squeezed into her seat.

“Yevgeny Yevtushenko!” Dr. Bartmann declared. “Haven’t read it? ‘Soviet Writers on Literature’?” He pulled a narrow newspaper column from his open briefcase and held it up: “Communism cannot be complete without Pushkin, without the murdered poet and without his successor who perhaps has not been born yet. Great poetry is an inalienable part of Communism. Andrei Platonov — and those to whom that name means nothing, should now take note of him.”

With the flat of his hand Dr. Bartmann smoothed the column on the open grade book as if it were proof of something and reached again for the newspaper. “‘…which hurled the Turks (including those in the stands) into the abyss of being resigned to their fate.’” And then: “‘The GDR soccer fan staring at the TV screen found himself in the extraordinary, uncomfortable situation of crossing his fingers for the Turks…’”

“Show me,” Joachim whispered again. Titus stacked his civics book, report notebook, homework notebook, and pen holder on the desk.

“‘…the same team that in November 1976 had robbed us in Dresden of that single point that many a fan still mourns, as if it were the cause of all the soccer woes that became a constant companion in the months following and that are the reason why we aren’t in Argentina now. Even though on October 29, 1977, things didn’t look so awfully bad after our team had pulled it off in Babelsberg, beating the underdog Malta by the same score of 9 to 0, which, when the Austrians managed it, had practically landed them in the realm of unique achievement. I admit…’”

Titus slid the notebook with his three-page report across the desk.

“‘…and tip our caps to our teams for having masterfully passed this test of nerves. But great exceptions are in fact exceptions…Over the long haul, the ball doesn’t roll along unpredictable paths leading to good or bad fortune. And so he who does not succeed has the duty of asking himself where he has failed or done the right thing. This question will certainly preoccupy the public and those in positions of responsibility in the days and weeks ahead. And one hopes that this will mean that as they stand before the portals of new, great, complex…’”

“Balance of terror,” Joachim hissed through the left corner of his mouth.

“‘…cannot yet expect this of our top teams as the second half of the season leading to the Europe Cup begins the day after tomorrow. But let us arm ourselves…’”

“…It’s just pure claptrap!”

“‘…to revitalize ourselves! There’s hardly much else left for us at this point.’”

Dr. Bartmann lowered the newspaper. On Wednesday Dynamo would have to defeat Liverpool by at least 4 to 0 to make up for its 5-to-1 defeat earlier in the season. “I wish,” Bartmann said, turning the page, “all our problems would be discussed the way Jens Peter writes about soccer. Starting with what he has to say about the Turks…” Dr. Bartmann gave a laugh, “…the abyss of resigning themselves and such — I tipped my cap right then and, then, my ballpoint started twitching. And then he goes on to call a spade a spade.”

Titus watched Joachim fill the margins with questions and exclamation points.

Dr. Bartmann often wrote to Neues Deutschland or the Sächsische Zeitung. Before the autumn break he had read them aloud a letter in which he had asked how the editors of Neues Deutschland could use nicknames when writing about a president of the United States. If they had to use first names — although “Carter” or “President Carter” would be quite sufficient — the correct form was James Earl, not Jimmy. For what could be the reason for using the name Jimmy for a man who represents the most aggressive circles of imperialism and threatens humanity with the most perfidious weapon ever developed, who himself calls the neutron bomb a “fair” bomb? Dr. Bartmann also explained to them why they should use the term German Democratic Republic and not simply GDR. In his class from now on he wanted to hear only the terms German Democratic Republic and FRG.

Titus saw Joachim write “nonsense” in the margin of his report.

Then it was time for the chronicle of the day.

Titus tugged at his notebook, dragging it back along with Joachim’s elbow. But Titus had to write now, ten catchwords needed to be added to his notebook.

“Disclosure in New York — with the help of Western countries Israel began developing nuclear weapons over twenty years ago. A crucial role was played by Israeli agents who had acquired fissionable materials from nuclear facilities in the USA. Others involved in these transfers besides the USA included the FRG and France.”

“Right,” Dr. Bartmann said, “but too long.”

“Greed knows no morality. More than 350 corporations in the USA, along with 500 British companies and 400 from the FRG have established offices in South Africa. A quarter of the moneys invested in South Africa comes from abroad.”

“Very good. But let’s have some new news.”

“In Italy mass protests are steadily increasing against the plans of the USA to produce a neutron bomb. On Tuesday thousands of Rome’s residents marched in the capital to protest this planned aggressive move, which in terms of world peace would…”

“And so on and so forth,” Dr. Bartmann exclaimed.

“New wave of rent increases in the FRG. Because of rising construction costs of up to 20 percent rents had to be…”

“Something else, something else!”

“More bank robberies in the FRG.”

“No!”

“An 8,000-ton freighter has been named in honor of Vasili Shukshin…”

“Nyet, nyet, nyet.” Dr. Bartmann accepted the impressive strikes in Italy, but rejected torture in Belfast, a new phase of rocket construction in the FRG, the temporary weapons embargo against South Africa, and the poison bomb developed by the U.S. Navy.

It wasn’t until the world reaction to the Panama Canal Treaty that Dr. Bartmann nodded and turned around briefly as if checking how many seats were left until Joachim, who the last time had suggested “Record number of visitors for Stolpen Castle”—for which Dr. Bartmann had demanded he supply his reasons. And Joachim had given a brief excursus on historical consciousness and how it shouldn’t always be limited to the most recent past, but requires experiences from all epochs, and Dr. Bartmann had let the visitors’ record be included.

It wasn’t clear who Dr. Bartmann had pointed to; at any rate Joachim said, “Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin, and Jan-Carl Raspe were buried on Thursday, October 27th, in Stuttgart’s Dornhalder Cemetery.”

Dr. Bartmann smiled. “We covered that topic last week. Is this really so important?” Dr. Bartmann recalled that Lenin had said that the radical Left was the children’s disease of communism and did great damage to the cause of the proletariat.

Instead of calling on Titus, Dr. Bartmann was now nodding at Peter Ullrich, who sat at the desk in front of them. Tears welled up in Titus’s eyes. He would have loved to have broken into sobs.

Peter Ullrich talked about the underground explosions in Nevada and Great Britain’s antitank rockets. It was absurd to break into tears just because Bartmann had passed him over. How could he ever make a decision if he was a wimpy crybaby?

He was afraid of what would happen during the next break, the five minutes until Russian class began. He had said what he wanted to say. If Joachim didn’t understand, if he still believed he would listen to him instead of his mother…

“First,” Dr. Bartmann dictated, “an electronic computer of the EC 1040 series was presented to Havana by Robotron Kombinat. KOSMOS 962 was launched. Second, recruitment of Egyptian scientists by the USA and the states of Western Europe has reached dangerous levels. Seventy percent of such students don’t return home.”

There were twenty minutes left for regular instruction.

[Letter of June 28, 1990]

Titus opened his notebook at the front and jotted down the date for the second time: Oct. 31, 1977.

Dr. Bartmann wrote 9.1.2. on the blackboard. The nature of cap. society. 9.1.2.1. The nature of cap. exploitation. Followed by two columns, capitalists on the left, the working class on the right.

From there on it was all a matter of who held up his hand. If no one did, Dr. Bartmann provided the answer himself. Joachim’s shorthand was so good that he not only kept pace with Bartmann, but even got ahead of him at the end of every passage.

“The goal of capitalist production is the achievement of the highest possible surplus value, that is, profit, by intensified exploitation.” A box with the words “appropriated profit,” from which two arrows extended right and left. Left: personal use/luxuries; to the right: capital for buying new machinery to constantly generate more surplus value.

“At the risk of his own ruin,” Dr. Bartmann declared, “every capitalist is forced to modernize production and do battle with other capitalists. This competitive struggle results in constantly intensified exploitation.”

Dr. Bartmann dictated quickly, but as soon as a hand was raised, he would repeat the second half of the sentence. “…constantly intensified exploitation. That is the brutal law of capitalism. That brutality results in a) the continued expansion and contraction of the powers of production, b) increased exploitation and destruction of large segments of the peasantry and capitalist entrepreneurs themselves, c) a battle for markets and raw materials, open parenthesis, wars, neocolonialism, close parenthesis.”

Dr. Bartmann erased the box of appropriated profit. “That leads to 9.1.2.3. The fundamental contradiction of capitalism, new line, quotation marks: The bourgeoisie has, dot, dot, dot, created more massive and colossal productive forces than all preceding generations, period, end quotation, open parenthesis, Marx, Engels, Manifesto, close parenthesis. And now don’t write this because it’s from our next class and merely for you to mull over.” And then Dr. Bartmann wrote on the blackboard without comment: “The contradiction between the soc. nature of production and the priv. appropriation of cap. is the fundamental contradiction of capitalism.”

He stepped to one side of the blackboard, pointed with an open hand at what he had written, and said, “This is the source of the antagonistic class dichotomy between the working class and the bourgeoisie.” He shouted over the sound of the bell, “The upshot of which is the abolition of capitalist conditions of production — friends, one and all!”

The first students to look up returned the greeting mutedly, as if talking to themselves.

Dr. Bartmann jotted something in the grade book, buried the newspaper clipping in his briefcase, closing it with a click.

“I have a funny feeling,” Joachim said, standing beside their desk, waiting, “a very funny feeling.”

Titus packed up his things. But when he looked at Joachim he realized that their friendship had only a few hours left. Joachim would say that you can’t wash your hands in innocence and that one must be prepared to leave Father and Mother.

Joachim talked as they descended the stairs, went on talking even after they had taken their seats in Russian class, so that Titus had not yet unpacked his stuff when the toxic blonde, as Joachim called Frau Berlin, appeared at the door.

The toxic blonde took her time. The longer the “hullabaloo” and “ruckus” lasted, the more relentless she would be in the hour ahead.

“Zdrastvuitye!” the toxic blonde announced, and the class responded in chorus: Zdrastvuitye! They stood there immobilized, no one resumed their seat. The toxic blonde gave them a wink. “Khorosho, zadityes, poshaluista, and who was it said you can teach a young dog new tricks. Vot!” And after a brief pause while she opened the grade book, she addressed them desk by desk. “Vy gotovy? Vy gotovy? Vy gotovy?” Each time she let her chin drop for a second, wagging her head and blinking like a simpleton. Titus had nodded as her gaze shifted in his direction. He thought she had asked him if he was ready for the lesson. But when she followed up with, “Kto khotchet?” he felt flushed.

“Uh-oh,” Titus whispered, “we forgot about the dialogue.”

Peter Ullrich and his benchmate began to reel off the memorized exchange. Joachim shrugged. Of course it was beneath his dignity to have prepared for this. A dialogue was something for students who, like Titus, had already been given a D.

The class laughed. Peter Ullrich was good in Russian; he had spent a few months in Leningrad and liked to show off his cooing pronunciation.

“I’ll start it,” Joachim whispered. And even if he started a hundred times, it wouldn’t help him, Titus, one bit. Excuses didn’t count unless you offered them up front.

The toxic blonde asked questions and Titus tried to take note of Peter Ullrich’s answers. Peter Ullrich was awarded a “yedinitsa,” his third, as the toxic blonde herself remarked in surprise, but that was only befitting an officer’s candidate. His benchmate likewise received a yedinitsa—it was her way of honoring spontaneity, the toxic blonde remarked.

Martina Bachmann at the desk in front of them raised her hand, and the toxic blonde cried, “Behold, a miracle!” Titus was grateful, because there was now a only slim chance they would be called on. Martina Bachmann wanted to explain why she hadn’t been able to prepare the lesson. “Am I supposed to swallow that?” the toxic blonde interrupted.

Titus was hoping she wouldn’t allow the excuse and test Martina Bachmann anyway. But the toxic blonde turned away when two students in the second row raised their hands, to which she responded with a “You too?” But they wanted to take their turn and kept up the dialogue so long that the toxic blonde sat down on her desk, crossing her arms, smiling with satisfaction. And when they were finished, she didn’t ask them any questions, gave them both an A in the grade book.

That left only his row. Titus didn’t know where he should look, and felt how little the last class of the day and his report mattered, if only he could survive this hour in one piece. Then he heard a name, not his and not Joachim’s. The toxic blonde had called on Mario, because she thought she would be doing her Mario a favor. Mario shook his head. “I’d rather wait till next time,” he said. The toxic blonde smiled. “What a shame,” she said. “It’s still very easy at this point, I’ll expect more the next time.” She called on Sabine, and Sabine immediately began, and the Sabine sitting beside her responded, and so it went back and forth between the two Sabines. Each row had now had its victims, and Titus thought he knew what the toxic blonde would say in conclusion: Close the mouths and open the books. Of course she’d say it in Russian.

“Chto?” the toxic blonde squealed. “Chto?” Peter Ullrich and a few others laughed. After the next sentence by Sabine number one, Joachim laughed too. Sabine number two replied. The toxic blonde had jumped to her feet. Sabine number one was blushing and attempted a smile. “Chto?” the toxic blonde squealed after the next sentence as well.

By the time Titus finally realized that Sabine and Sabine had skipped a line in their memorized text and been exchanging nonsense, Sabine number two was crying. The toxic blonde damned them both to a D, but with the possibility of improving their grades the next time. Now Sabine number one likewise broke into tears.

“Let’s go,” the toxic blonde said, giving Joachim a nod.

Titus saw Joachim shrug and heard him say, “Khorosho.” And then he pretended to lift something up onto his desk, reached for an invisible telephone receiver, and moved his finger in circles. He dialed, and when he was finished, leaned back. Titus felt sick to his stomach. Joachim went, “Ring ring.” Titus pretended to pick up a receiver too, someone laughed. Titus waited a moment, then he said, “Allo?” It was in God’s hands now.

“Zdes’ govorit, Joachim, zdrastvuitye!”

“Zdes’ govorit, Titus, zdrastvuitye.” With his right hand to his ear, Titus propped his elbows on the desk and stared down at the surface.

“Fsyo khorosho?”

“Fsyo khorosho,” Titus repeated.

“Ya khotchu priglasit tebya…” The rest was unintelligible.

“Oh, spasibo,” Titus said, and then a word came to mind that he had never spoken before. “Otlitchno!” he boomed into the receiver. It came to his lips so perfectly naturally that he repeated it. “Otlitchno!”

The toxic blonde erupted in a sharp squeak.

Titus didn’t understand Joachim’s answer, but he hadn’t heard a time of day, and so he simply asked: “A kogda?”

Joachim made several suggestions and ended with the question: “Eto udobno?”

Titus repeated the words without knowing what they meant: “Da, eto udobno.”

Joachim went on talking. When it was Titus’s turn again he simply said: “Ponimayu. A chto ty khotchesh?” That always worked.

“Chto ty khotchu?” Joachim asked.

“Da,” Titus quickly replied.

Joachim talked about books, records, theater, and said something about soccer too, which once again evoked laughter.

“Muy idyom f teatr,” Titus replied, as if it were up to him to straighten things out.

Joachim followed with another long sentence Titus didn’t understand. Titus stuck to his guns: “Muy idyom f teatr.” Joachim pretended to be upset. Evidently he didn’t want to go to the theater. Titus could sense people around him getting ready to laugh.

“Kak ty khotchesh. A ja khotchu kushat tort.”

Joachim had to wait a moment for the class to settle down. “Do zvidaniya,” Joachim said.

“Fso khorosho?”

“Fso khorosho,” Joachim declared.

“Spasibo,” Titus said. “Do zvidaniya.”

They both put their imaginary receivers down at the same time. The toxic blonde said, “Otlitchno” and “spasibo” and sat back down on her desk. She pointed out two mistakes Joachim had made, praised him for the liveliness of the conversation, and said, giving Titus a wink, that with a little effort one can achieve one’s ends even with somewhat limited means. She even said something about acting talent and noted Titus’s poker face. As she entered the grades in the grade book her hand made the same motion twice.

What a wretched little creature he was, looking for salvation in a grade, a good grade in Russian. He had pleaded with God for that? And Joachim, to whom he had lied, to whom he had not yet admitted that he would read the report — that same Joachim had just rescued him. Wasn’t that a sign? An unexpected turn of events that he wouldn’t have dreamt of in his wildest dreams? Wouldn’t God, if He were on his side, have led him just as He had now? Wasn’t Joachim his best model? Didn’t he want to be like him?

Titus stared at the new vocabulary words they were drilling in chorus. He joined in, but they were meaningless sounds and syllables.

For a moment he dared the thought that, as a reward for his own honesty, God would favor him with abilities like Joachim’s. Couldn’t he decide all on his own to do what needed to be done?

“Poker face,” Joachim whispered when the bell rang. Titus liked hearing the words “poker face” coming from Joachim.

and went “Ring ring.” In that same moment Titus felt something icy brush up against him, curdling his blood.

“Ring ring,” Joachim went for the second time. Why was he dragging him into this? Titus pretended to pick up a receiver too. “Allo?” He didn’t know whether the class was laughing at their act or because his voice sounded so pitiful. “Zdes’ govorit Titus, zdrastvuitye.” Titus propped his elbow on the desk, pressed his knuckles to his right cheekbone. He stared at Martina Bachmann’s back, at the spot where her hair almost touched the back of her chair.

“Fso khorosho?”

“Fso khorosho,” Titus repeated.

“Ya khotchu priglasit tebya…” Titus hoped it would all be over soon.

“Spasibo,” Titus replied.

Joachim strung sentence after sentence together. Pirouettes, Titus thought. The last of them a question. Titus nodded. He wanted to show: I know, it’s my turn now. He had even understood the question. But he couldn’t make it work that fast. He wanted to say that of course he accepted the invitation and wanted quickly to finish his homework so he could help Joachim get things ready for the party. He wanted to ask who else was invited besides him and if he should bring anything and whether Joachim had any definite wishes as to his birthday present.

Joachim said: “Nu?” and started over again. There was a few laughs. Titus said, “Da.”

Joachim went on chitchatting. Titus managed one more “Spasibo.” It made no difference whether he spoke or not. Titus could feel his own hand on his cheek, he could even see himself. Joachim whispered something, but since no one else was speaking they all heard it too. He wasn’t going to repeat it. His pride wouldn’t let him. Titus heard his shoe tapping the floor.

Joachim talked about books, records, theater, and even mentioned something about soccer. Titus didn’t want to say anything more. She should just give him his F and leave him in peace. Her nickname shouldn’t be Toxic Blonde, but Band Saw, she had a voice like a band saw. Joachim fell silent.

When the toxic blonde demanded he look her in the eye — those little eyes — he raised his head. He didn’t care what was coming from her blurry mouth. “I forgot,” he said, only making things worse. Compared to him Martina Bachmann was a hero.

He had had better things to do than memorize this bilge, which he would never use anyway.

Titus saw himself in the bright world where he had lingered yesterday, a world with no place for a toxic blonde.

All the same Titus was surprised when she did in fact give him an F. Why was she still picking on him? You don’t kick someone when they’re down, he thought. But of course she wouldn’t know that. What was he supposed to apologize for? He had forgotten, and for that he’d got his F. He said not a word. The toxic blonde flung her silver ballpoint across the desk, sending it bouncing off somewhere. Someone picked the pen up and brought it forward to her. She didn’t say thanks. They opened their books.

How could he have imagined he would get away with it? From one moment to the next he forgot the weekend as if it were a dream. He wouldn’t be allowed to stay in school with a D in Russian on his next report card. So graduation was out of the question now. Would God give him a second chance?

It wasn’t that he just hadn’t studied, he had been wrestling with other problems, with essential questions. Had all that been meaningless?

He was convinced he had deserved this chastisement, as a reminder of what his real intentions were.

The Almighty, Titus thought, can use even someone like the toxic blonde as his instrument.

When the bell rang Titus was afraid the toxic blonde would ask to talk with him. But she paid him no attention. He walked across the courtyard to the other building. The fresh air did him good. He took up a position at the open window in the math room, his knee resting on the radiator. He waited for the warmth to find its way through the fabric.

Titus hoped Petersen would call on him now and not wait until the last class. Petersen began by repeating the story problems to be solved. “Write this down,” he said, and let his right forefinger dive headfirst into the void. “A freight train is transporting 730 tons of brown coal briquettes in 38 cars. Some cars carry a load of 15 tons, others of 20. How many of each kind of car are there? Second…” Titus heard whispers, could sense the fear that Petersen might spring a pop quiz on them. Instead Petersen let his forefinger make another dive and repeated, “Second. A tank of the National People’s Army has traveled 230 kilometers. There are now still 40 liters left in what had been a full tank of fuel. If it could limit its fuel usage to 15 liters per 100 kilometers, the tank would have a deployment radius of 270 kilometers. How large is its fuel tank? How much fuel was used per 100 kilometers? Third! A reconnaissance plane of the NPA…” Titus wrote it down. He could do these kinds of problems. Petersen had to leave the classroom for twenty minutes. Peter Ullrich was assigned to keep order.

And the quiet held even after Petersen left the room.

Joachim was done in ten minutes. Titus just in time for Petersen’s return.

“I assume,” Petersen exclaimed at the door, “that you’ve already compared solutions. Were there any difficulties?”

No one responded.

His mouth half open, Petersen looked around the room, raised his arm, and asked again, “No difficulties?” and nodded several times in approval. He looked for a good piece of chalk and wrote on the blackboard: “Equations with more than two variables.”

Titus began a new page and underlined the title twice. Petersen said he wouldn’t spend a lot of time on this, because anyone who knew how to solve equations — and they had just been able to test themselves on that — would have no problems with this. It was only a matter of expanding the framework for setting up the equation. The process was based on a step-by-step reduction of the number of variables one by one.

Five minutes later Petersen put equations on the blackboard and transformed the first one. Titus quickly caught on to how the equation was set up.

It wasn’t long before Petersen tossed the chalk onto his desk, stepped up beside the blackboard, and shoved his glasses back into place. Anyone looking skeptically at the equations was in danger of being called to the front.

[Letter of July 4, 1990]

Evidently all it took was mastering a specific principle. Everything else proceeded from that. Titus was amazed that such a long row of numbers could be no mystery.

Petersen didn’t assign any homework and ended the class before the bell. On the way to the door he stopped in his tracks. “Did you understand it all, Titus?” he asked. Petersen’s fingers wriggled like marionettes beside his pen holder. Titus raised his head, said, yes, smiled, and looked back at his notebook. Petersen’s sleeves had slipped down over the backs of his hands. His fingernails drummed on Titus’s desktop, a quick rhythm that ended with the words: “That’s fine then.”

Gym class. Titus pulled on his old uniform. Martin’s class arrived late in the basement dressing room. Mario and Peter Ullrich were warming up outside already. In his lumpy gym shorts, Joachim was leaning against the goalpost.

Kampen, their gym teacher, whose gray hair made him look like a snow-speckled Dean Read in Alaska Kid, was juggling the ball. After a three-thousand-meter run they would still have twenty minutes to play.

They were a bit late crossing to the public park. Martin and Titus were the last to run the warm-up lap. No one took the high-kick sprint and the ankle and stretching exercises as seriously as they did. Bernadette was sick, Martin said. She’d had a fever of almost 104° on Sunday.

Kampen was waiting at the bottom of the slight rise and repeated what times would earn what grades. Then the whole herd dashed off at a mad pace. Titus let Martin move ahead of him, which left him in last place for the first two hundred meters. It wasn’t until they got to the oak tree where they looped around to head back down the long straightaway that they first started passing some of the others. They overtook Joachim right at the starting line. Kampen called out to Titus to stay hot on Martin’s heels. “Chase him!” With short strides they took the slope without slowing down.

Titus thought how he could run forever behind Martin Böhme, in the wake of his fluttering hair with its fragrance of shampoo. Titus enjoyed the effortlessness with which they both passed the others. After three rounds they had only Peter Ullrich and Mario ahead of them. But Peter Ullrich would soon buckle like a limp pickle and Mario would give up because of his knees. On the fourth lap they passed them both, and by the fifth they were one lap ahead of Joachim.

“Chase him!” Kampen shouted. Titus was happy. He wasn’t going to let himself be shaken off, he’d rather be torn to shreds. He now understood better what the article had meant when it said: Dynamo could deal with Liverpool, but only if every single player tore himself to shreds in the process. Torn to shreds, but still holding on. More and more students and teachers were lining the course now. Another two laps, another eight hundred meters. He would hold on, he’d match any tempo. They kept on passing people, shot past them like arrows. Titus knew every single meter, knew how to place his stride as he took the curves and that it took more effort to round the oak in a somewhat larger arc and still hold your pace. Titus could hear cheering, saw pennants and people bending over the barricades to call out their names. He felt the pain in his lung, but what did that have to do with him? His legs were running, there was no stopping them. Martin Böhme could run as hard as he wanted, he wouldn’t get rid of Titus. As they approached Kampen for the last time, they were already heroes: Martin Böhme and him. Titus saw eyes and mouths gaping wide and almost crashed into Martin’s back at the oak. Titus didn’t need to breathe anymore, that only hampered him. There were backs ahead of him, more backs, he saw Kampen, saw Kampen’s astonished face, and heard Bernadette call out his name — it wasn’t “Martin!” that she shouted, but “Titus! Titus!”

Suddenly there were no more backs in front of him, and he flew past Kampen and kept on going because he no longer had control of his legs, because they were still running, with him, and he brought his arms down now and looked around and kept on going until finally he could walk and Kampen was beside him, holding the stopwatch under his nose, and Martin was clapping him on the back and congratulating him, Martin with his red and white face.

His breath returned, it was like being stuck with needles. Instead of a lung, he had a pipe inside him, an old water pipe, his whole mouth was rusty, he could even smell it. He wanted to stop it, stop his breathing, stop himself, but his legs kept going, now right, now left, he staggered, and Kampen shouted, “Keep walking, my lad, keep walking!” And Martin said, “Total wipeout.”

Titus saw the girls heading toward him, bounding splotches of color, they crossed the street, those same voices he had heard lining the course. They stared at him. But it wasn’t admiration in their eyes, it was more like dread, horror, pity, or maybe just incomprehension. Suddenly she was standing in front of him, short, pale, with restive eyes. She stuck her chin out over the collar of her training jacket, which seemed to be in her way. “Here,” she said, and unfolded something, a tissue. And since he hesitated, she pressed the tissue to his brow and eyes, a touch that did him infinite good. The tissue stuck to him. He wiped the tatters off and turned around to her, but couldn’t spot her among the others. He was holding the soggy clump in his hand.

Joachim made his agonized way up the slope, his elbows pressed against his ribs, his knees glued together. As he shambled along, he turned his heels out, which Titus thought looked effeminate.

Later Titus and Martin were told to choose teams. Titus started. After each had selected seven names, Titus chose Joachim. That left Peter Ullrich among the last few. Martin likewise despised Peter Ullrich, and Titus pointed to a boy with huge nostrils and eyebrows grown together. Peter Ullrich was the last, he went with Martin.

Joachim volunteered to play goalie. “Time for revenge, Martin,” Kampen said, and blew his whistle.

It was a poor game. No one wanted to run any more. Joachim had sped ahead of a backward pass, which meant a corner kick, and somehow it ended up a goal. There were too many players for the size of the field and the goals were too narrow. Shortly before the final whistle the ball bounced out into the middle of the field, with no one in control of it for a few moments. Titus was the first to arrive and landed such a lucky kick with the side of his foot that the ball flew into the net. No one cheered. “A shot like a beeline,” Kampen said, and whistled the end of the game.

Titus entered the room just as the bell rang, the girls were missing. Petersen called out, “Friends, one and all.” On the blackboard he wrote, “Isaac Newton 1643–1727,” tossed the chalk on his desk, stuck his hands in his smock pockets, rolled back and forth on his tiptoes, and repeated what was in the textbook about the founder of classical mechanics. To Titus it seemed as if he knew nothing more than what Petersen was telling them at that moment, as if Newton were the first human being that he had ever bothered to take note of. He was still dazed from his goal. How often Titus had dreamt of a shot like that — like a beeline.

When the door opened the first time and a couple of very red-faced girls entered, Petersen didn’t react at all. Petersen stared in grim silence at the second bunch, watched them take their seats. The third time he erupted — he wasn’t going to take this anymore, the same thing every Monday.

Martina Bachmann, who was the last to slink in, was about to offer an apology. Petersen waved her impatiently to the front of the room, “Come on, come on, come up front!” and presented her with a piece of chalk as if it were a flower. “So you may now proceed, please, proceed.” Petersen sat down on an unoccupied desk up front on the left, let his legs dangle. More and more girls offered their excuses. Martina Bachmann was allowed to return to her seat.

When Titus looked up again, Petersen was writing “F = m · g” and then “G = m · g” on the blackboard. Titus tried to fix in his mind that mass and gravity are different values for a given body and that gravity can’t be measured in the same units as mass. “The gravity of a body,” Joachim said, “is the force with which it presses vertically on what lies beneath it or pulls at what it is dangling from — that is, mass times acceleration. Which means, G equals mass times nine point eighty-one meters per second per second and is measured either in Newtons or kilo-ponds.” After first making certain that Joachim’s book was closed in front of him, Petersen nodded, and then said that they would now move on to the law of inertia. He wrote a couple of equations on the board. Titus was amazed at how calm he was, as if this hour were like any other, where the worst thing that could happen before the bell rang would be a bad grade. Maybe Petersen had forgotten the whole thing by now.

“Unless force is exerted on a body, it will stay in motion,” Petersen wrote on the blackboard, and drew a box around it. While Titus was wondering what that meant in his case, Petersen drew a ship, with waves and four arrows, up and down, right and left. Those were the exerted forces: weight and buoyancy, propulsion and the resistance of the water.

The greater the mass of a body, the greater its inertia. Someone giggled. Petersen called out to Peter Ullrich that he would have the chance to apply his newly acquired knowledge.

Titus didn’t know if he was sick to his stomach because he was hungry or because he had eaten his sandwich too quickly just now. Or because there was something wrong with his sense of orientation, or because he was experiencing a kind of weightlessness, an emptiness in which you could depend solely on science and its laws, where opinions didn’t count. His time in the three thousand meters was an objective reality, and his soccer goal; Newton was real, equations were real.

“Every body,” Petersen said, tossing the chalk on the desk, “tends to keep moving ahead in a straight line as long as the sum of all forces exerted on it is zero. Come up here, there’s the chalk.”

Peter Ullrich kept on writing as if he hadn’t noticed Petersen’s pointing forefinger, but then suddenly stood up and staggered forward.

“According to the law of inertia,” Peterson said, raising his voice, “the ship will move forward in a straight line. Why isn’t it at rest?” And with that he left Peter Ullrich all to himself and sat back down on the unoccupied desk on the left. It was so quiet Titus could hear the others breathing.

He imagined himself standing there instead of Peter Ullrich, saw his own glance skitter across the class and fix on Petersen.

“I can’t do this report.” And corrected himself. “I don’t want to do this report.”

“Why?” Petersen barked at him.

“Because I’m a conscientious objector,” Titus replied.

“What?” Petersen asked. “What does the one have to do with the other?”

“I don’t know,” Titus said, “I really don’t know anymore, I’ve forgotten.”

“Hot air, pure hot air!” Petersen called out to Peter Ullrich. “You’ve understood nothing, nothing whatever. Why isn’t the ship at rest?” Petersen turned to the class. Joachim was the first to raise his hand, then Martina Bachmann.

Titus saw the vacant expression on Peter Ullrich’s face as he passed Martina Bachmann and returned to his seat.

I can’t go ahead with this, I can’t, Titus thought, it’s so pointless. And what did a lot of words like that mean anyway? Never before had he been so deeply aware of the nothingness and senselessness of such opinions and claims. It seemed to him he no longer knew what was up or down, and once he was up front, at the teacher’s desk, he would be far less certain.

Petersen praised Martina Bachmann for her ability to think concretely about a world of real things. With a laugh that looked more like she was crying and with odd gestures of her shoulders she returned to her seat.

Petersen looked at his watch. “Don’t worry, Titus, I haven’t forgotten you,” he said, and told them that they had used a general law, the basic Newtonian law to derive a special law, the law of inertia. He called this deductive reasoning. “There is, however, a fundamental difference between mathematical statements and physical laws.”

[Letter of July 9, 1990]

Was Petersen alluding to him, to the conflict between statements and the law? With every word Petersen spoke, the emptiness inside Titus expanded. It was close to a miracle that the three typed pages lay within reach at the same moment Titus heard his name called. As he stood up he fumbled to check if his shirt tail was hanging out.

He still had time to make a decision. As he took his place at the front of the class he was suddenly aware of his knees. They were trembling, shaking — he had always thought that was just a turn of phrase. He paid it no further attention, because he was visible only from the waist up. Titus was amazed to discover how totally unprepared he was for this ordeal. No one would believe him. All his torments had been pointless, utterly pointless. Each moment erased the previous one. Titus sorted the three pages, he hadn’t even managed that — and laid them down in front of him for fear his hands might begin to tremble.

He groped through the first sentence word by word. He exerted all his energies, but just sounds burbled up, sounds outside the human realm, gibberish that provoked giggles, laughter, and snorts. Titus was terrified, they were laughing at him. Except for Joachim and Petersen — they were glowering at him. He choked on each syllable, his tongue performed wondrous feats, but his vocal cords remained out of control. More laughter. Only now did the first sentence start to form.

Petersen bellowed. Titus didn’t understand why. It wasn’t him, it was the class that was laughing. What fault was that of his?

The class fell silent, went rigid, Joachim tipped his chair back. Petersen was standing in front of Titus, and Titus watched as words distorted Petersen’s mouth.

From somewhere far away, like the bell now ringing in the distance, Titus felt an inkling of something that, as it grew clearer and clearer, erased all the tension from his face, revealing the trace of a smile, a very delicate smile. Gradually Titus realized why Petersen was raging like that. And with this realization came another that he had no name for, but that was bright and buoyant and drove the black shadows from his soul.

Petersen was still talking. A dribble of spit reached his chin. Titus put his arms behind his back. His body felt light and relaxed, no effort could exhaust him now. He would sing, he would sing a duet with Maestro Sanddorn. And he would model for Gunda Lapin, listen to her talk, tell her things.

Titus saw the clouds, lopsided in the wind, whitish yellow and a dark blue gray. When he recalled how his knees had shaken, he laughed out loud. He would tell Bernadette about his shaking knees, that would cheer her up. And from the way he would talk about himself and laugh, she would understand what he had come to understand just now.

Titus laid the three pages together, carefully folded them, and, as Petersen now demanded, returned to his seat.