New Lives

THE LETTERS OF Enrico Türmer

[Saturday, Jan. 6. ’90]

[To Vera]¹

…like that?” Instead of trotting along behind us as usual so that he could demand a reward for every step he took, Robert bounded ahead like a puppy. We had to cross a hollow, the snow had a bluish sparkle and came up to our calves. Suddenly Robert gave a yell and started up the opposite slope. The moldy soil beneath the snow had not frozen. Michaela and I were running now too. When we stopped there was only the white field up ahead and grayish pink sky above us. We kept climbing, crossed a dirt road, and made straight for the woods. The wind swept the snow from the winter planting. I had to work hard not to be left behind. But the two of them didn’t turn back at the edge of the woods as we had agreed, but entered it. And so I also followed the sign pointing to Silver Lake.

The pond was frozen over. Before I could say anything Robert was skidding across the ice, with Michaela right behind. Robert, who is very proud that his voice is breaking, crowed something that I didn’t understand. Michaela shouted that I was chicken. But I didn’t want to risk it and stayed onshore. The snow hid most of the trash lying around, but there was a toy horse jutting up out of it. I was just bending down when I heard my name, turned around — and something struck me in the eye. It burned like hell.

I couldn’t see anything. Michaela thought I was putting on a show. It was snow, she shouted, just snow, a snowball!

It took me a couple of seconds to pull myself together. I was happy to feel Robert take my hand and begin to lead me. Not until that moment did I finally seem to realize that your letter wasn’t a dream, but that I had actually received it and that it was in my breast pocket. Yes, it was as if I had started to breathe again only now.

Plodding along behind us, Michaela told me not to carry on so. She probably thought I was going to cry. She thinks I’m a hypochondriac, even a malingerer, and was afraid I was just looking for some new excuse for calling in sick again.

She panicked in the middle of the field when a mutt from the village came racing toward us. He was barking and jumping around like crazy, but I was able to quickly quiet him down. Then I couldn’t get rid of him. The mangy animal escorted us all the way to the road leading downhill into town. Robert waved, and right away a car stopped. The woman sat ramrod straight behind the wheel and gave me a nod in the rearview mirror. The throbbing pain in my eye felt like my heart pounding inside my head. But the pain, or so it seemed to me, was something external, not anything that could hurt me, anything that could upset me, no matter what happened with my eye — because I have you!

At the entrance to the polyclinic I ran right into Dr. Weiss, the physician who usually attests that I’m too sick to work. “You don’t lose an eye that easily,” he said, grabbing me by the shoulder. He told me that I normally wouldn’t find anyone here at this time on a Friday, and that I should hold still — a doctor’s a doctor. “Let’s have a look,” he ordered, and turned me to the light. People going in and out shoved past us, I blinked into the fluorescent fixture. “Just a little vein,” he muttered, “just a burst vein. Nothing more than that!” Weiss left me standing there on the threshold as if he regretted he had even bothered with me. And called back that there was no need to be a crybaby, handing Michaela her triumph. By then it didn’t even hurt anymore.

The snow has already thawed again. The grass under the clotheslines looks like muck garnished with spinach. I have to drive Michaela to her performance. How easy everything is when I can think of you.

Love,

Your Heinrich²

Saturday, Jan. 13, ’90

Dearest Verotchka,

I’ve been going out every day, never for less than an hour. Besides which I’m responsible for shopping and cooking and now outshine Robert’s school cafeteria food, which is no great feat. Every evening Robert is granted his wish for the next day’s noon meal. Today I gave pancakes a try. And what do you know, Michaela ate up all the leftovers. Her cookbooks are the only thing I read these days.

I’ve already had to write Mamus³ twice this week. The second letter was necessary because Michaela had phoned⁴ her to ask whether she’d heard about my decision.⁵

We are not dealing here with trivialities, this is about the betrayal of art — betrayal of it, which means of Michaela, of our friends, of life itself, so that my response to her is always that I’m not the deserter, art is. Of course, she doesn’t accept that.⁶

I was in the “editorial office” for the first time yesterday afternoon. The building, which belongs to Georg, who is one of the two founders of the paper, is on Frauen Gasse, about three hundred yards behind the post office. You think you’ve arrived at the end of the world. But once you’ve passed through the eye of the needle — the ruins of a one-story building and a tilted wall — the world turns more hospitable again. Georg’s house is in the middle of a garden, a country home en miniature. The garden gate is arched over by a rotting wooden structure, a rose lattice. The bell could wake the dead.

“You’ve actually come,” he said. The vestibule was filled with all sorts of garden tools and quite a few bicycles.

Turning left, opposite the stairs, you first enter a windowless antechamber and then a small room with a floor of wide planks and a beamed ceiling that I can touch with my outstretched arm. A table and chairs take up almost the whole room. It smelled of furniture polish and coffee. When seated I’m taller than Georg, whose short, skewed upper body squats atop endlessly long legs. The whole time he talked about plans for the newspaper he stared at his folded hands. Whenever he paused, his mouth vanished into his beard. Then he would glance up at me as if checking the effect of his words. I was uncertain how to address him — at our first meeting we had used formal pronouns with each other.

There are various postal scales on the windowsills. The glass of the panes is old, distorting the view to the garden. You only have to move your head a little and trees shrink to bushes or shoot up sky high.

Later we climbed up behind the house, the garden rises in several terraces. When I thought we would have to turn back, Georg made an opening in the thicket and began walking up a steep footpath. I had trouble following him. Then a marvelous view: the town lay at our feet under a lilac sky, the hill with its castle to our right, Barbarossa’s Red Tips to our left.⁷ There was something agreeably unfamiliar about it all, it even felt like I was looking at the theater for the first time.

I inhaled the cold air and the smell of moldy soil and felt very glad that from now on I’ll be able to enjoy the view whenever I want.

Jörg, my other boss, had arrived in the meantime and made tea. He’s that same little bit shorter than Georg is taller than I. Jörg formulates his sentences so that they’re ready to be set in print. He seems to have his doubts about me. He never let me out of his sight and responded to everything I said with a slightly mocking smile. But I won’t let that scare me.

Georg and Jörg want to pay me the same salary they make, which means I’d earn two thousand net a month, almost three times my wages as a dramaturge. They’ve given up trying to get money out of the New Forum.⁸ The main thing is that I don’t have to go to the theater anymore. I was falling apart there. There’s no place more boring!

A little before six o’clock Georg invited us to a light supper. His wife, Franka, and his three sons had already gathered round the table. As we sat down there was a sudden silence, I automatically expected someone to say grace. But it didn’t happen.

I’m now reading newspapers. On the first page of the ND⁹ is a photograph of Havel.¹⁰ He changed professions just in time. Whereas Noriega’s picture looks like a mug shot.¹¹ Some soldiers in Gleina went on strike for a few days.¹² They demanded a new military code. Even an army prosecutor was sent in. But they refused to be cowed. And now, so I read, there actually is a new military code.

I think about you all the time.

Your Heinrich

[Sunday, Jan. 14, ’90]

Verotchka,

Your letter has been lying here in the kitchen, on top of the fridge, since yesterday. Michaela brought the mail in, so the mailbox was empty when I took a look. Just now, right after breakfast, I suddenly recognized your handwriting on an envelope.

Now that the date is set and you’ve booked your flight…for the last few days I’ve been feeling stronger than I have for a long time. I was even a match for Jörg, who’s like a fox lying in ambush. But it won’t be long now and you’ll be so far away…oh my, I’m sounding like Mamus. Does she even know anything about it?

I have no idea what Beirut is like, but I can’t understand why Nicola¹³ doesn’t want to bring his mother to Berlin instead? And how much business can there be amid all that rubble and desolation?

I’m frightened for you — which is also egoistic of me. I won’t be able to help you. I’ve got two thousand marks in my account. Do you need it? How much is that? Three hundred West marks?

I’ve got plenty of time to give you, however. I’m living under some kind of spell, I’m awake at four or five at the latest. Even though I rarely go to bed before midnight. And yet I’m not the least bit tired, not even in the afternoon. When I get bored with brooding, I thumb through the dictionary. It’s amazing how many verbs and adjectives we know without ever using them.

I called Johann in the middle of the week to tell him I had quit the theater and am joining the crew of a start-up newspaper. He was extremely distant and brusque. And now I get a letter that could have been dictated by Michaela. I never used to read newspapers, so why was I trying to avoid these new artistic challenges (and he used that very phrase!). And went on like that for four pages. What a stranger he’s become.

What you wrote about this nobleman sounds really promising. If in fact he does want to come to Altenburg, you can give him my address, and our editorial office will soon have a telephone.

Verotchka, if I’m not going to be able to see you, at least write and tell me about what you’re doing, about taking care of final details, anything! There is no one else who I can count on.

Your Heinrich

Thursday, Jan. 18, ’90

Dear Jo,

I got your letter and read it, but I simply don’t have the desire or the energy to argue with you. I would just repeat myself anyway. Wait a few months, and then we won’t even need to talk about all this anymore.

I take short walks, read newspapers, and cook our noon meal. I suddenly have so much time that I don’t know what to do with myself.

Yesterday I even attended a meeting of the New Forum, I must admit not quite voluntarily. Rudolph Franck, who’s called the “Prophet” because of his gray cotton-candy beard, asked me to come along. I owe my job at the paper to him, he initiated things and put in a good word for me. It’s still a mystery to me what he thought my attendance would contribute. I probably disappointed him.

Jörg thinks there’s a rumor — no, rumor is too strong, more like a whisper — that something is not quite kosher about people (like me) who couldn’t stop spouting off last fall, but then vanished from one day to the next. I’m afraid it’s Jörg himself who’s spreading this stuff. It would be just like him.

There were a few hundred people in the hall. I was about to take a seat when I heard my name from behind me. I didn’t know the man — brown eyes, average height, dark thinning hair. He said he was glad to see me here again. His wife assured me that her Ralf had told her so much about my speech in the church that day. I ended up joining her and Ralf at one of the tables up front. Georg and Jörg were already seated with the steering committee. And then things started rolling.

First came a steady stream of votes confirming all sorts of previous actions. I’ve never had to sit through anything like it in all my life. I felt robbed of my freedom, I was suddenly a prisoner.

Ralf, on the other hand, seemed happy and excited. He rolled his shopping bag back like a sleeve to reveal a piece of cardboard backing and a letter-size notebook. His hopes, his pride, yes, his fundamental convictions were invested in the care with which he slipped in the carbon paper, lowered his head just above the page, and began to write. Whenever Jörg’s speech was interrupted by applause, he would stop and clap soundlessly, ballpoint clasped in his right hand.

Georg sat almost motionless at the front table the whole evening, staring straight ahead. Whenever there was a vote, however, his arm was usually the first thrust into the air. Jörg, as acting chairman, was all smiles as he kept greeting acquaintances he spotted in the hall. I recognized, way over on the left, the loudmouth who had saved the November 4th demonstration. His eyes were glistening.

Maybe there have to be meetings like these. But this one left me downright sick with boredom.¹⁴

After about an hour a woman two tables away stood up. Her glasses were so big and her mass of hair so wiglike that it was hard to tell her age. Whatever she had to say, it was incomprehensible. When ordered to speak louder, she shouted, “I am prepared to assume leadership of the New Forum.” Asked to give her name, she cried out enthusiastically, “My name is—” but then broke off abruptly and repeated her offer to take over the leadership. Egged on by applause and catcalls, she greeted us with a raised left fist.

Out of consideration for Georg and Jörg, and especially for Ralf, I didn’t join in the applause. Even my smile appeared to offend him.

After her, the loudmouth on the steering committee grabbed the mic. He stressed every second or third word and bounced up and down, flexing his knees. He laughed as he spoke, as if every word were practical proof of just how undeniably right he was. He then pointed his pencil at who ever he decided to give the floor to. Shouted insults — he was a stewie¹⁵ and a bungler. “There’s a solution to everything,” he shouted, “once basic issues of power are resolved and democratic structures are put in place.”

Whole groups were now deserting the hall. Suddenly Ralf was speaking. With one hand on his belt, as if to keep his trousers from drooping, he held both the mike and his manuscript in the other. He was also gesticulating, making him barely comprehensible, and didn’t understand what all the shouts of “Mike! mike!” were about. Finally he stated his demands, point by point, but got out of sync with himself because he turned around to get a look at his hecklers, while his wife kept hissing, “Keep going!”

“No establishment of West German parties, partnership with other democratic forces in the East, a halt to full-scale demolition in the old city, investigation into the sale of the Council Library, punishment for Schalck-Golodkowski,¹⁶ free elections, brown coal mines to be kept open, continuation of Wismut¹⁷ for peaceful purposes, dismissal of agitators from school faculties, withdrawal from the Warsaw Pact, alternative service…”

“Keep going! Keep going!” his wife whispered.

After a good three hours, the meeting was declared adjourned. A few voices took up the German national anthem, but were drowned out by general noise. Most of the items on the agenda had to be eliminated, including the announcement of our newspaper.

Ralf fell silent. I tried to smile. His wife lowered her gaze as if in embarrassment — for herself, for me, for Ralf, for the whole assembly. As we left, Ralf asked my opinion. “And be honest, Enrico, really honest.”

Outside the coatroom I ran right into the Prophet. “No! No! Terrible!” he shouted at me, and a moment later blocked someone else’s path with his “No! No! Terrible!” He could still be heard until we were out of the building.

Georg invited me to join them at the Wenzel,¹⁸ where people were expecting us.

A hulk of a man was propped against the front desk, but he spread his arms wide once he saw us. There were sweat stains in the armpits of his gray jacket. He pressed me to his chest and greeted me by murmuring my first name in my ear. He had already been a guest at my home, he said. Then he instructed us to address Jan Staan, whom we would meet shortly, by his name, to say not just “Good evening” but “Good evening, Herr Staan” (I could have sworn he said “Staan”), and to use phrases like “A pleasure to make your acquaintance,” or “Very happy to meet you.” A waitress was just closing up the restaurant, and since Wolfgang the Hulk had fallen silent, we could hear in the intervening moments her footfall, purring lamps, and distant music. Suddenly screams, laughter, shouts, a deafening racket. A woman staggered past, bumping my shoulder, blond, plump, a wart on her chin. She dabbed at her damp décolletage, her white blouse clung to her belly and breasts, and her mascara was running. Faces in the doorway vanished again. The blonde threw her shoulders back and displayed herself as if before a mirror.

Wolfgang the Hulk brushed against her as he made his way toward the bar, she lurched as if he had given her a push. We followed him into the shadows. I stayed close behind Jörg. “Does anyone want to dance a polonaise?” a woman shouted, thrusting her hot hands against my back. Someone patted my rear end. The most I could make out as I looked around were bright articles of clothing. The spotlight above the dance floor, with bare arms writhing under the cone of its beam, was my sole orientation point.

The farther we pressed forward, the better progress we made and the brighter the light. We steered for a group of men standing in a circle. They stepped back, revealing a clutch of women who had squeezed themselves by twos and threes into the few armchairs.

We halted in front of a man sitting in the midst of these women. Groaning, he pushed himself to the edge of his armchair, but stood up with surprisingly little effort considering his massive belly. As he fumbled at the buttons of his sport coat, dots of light from the disco ball danced across his forehead. I was the last to receive a handshake and a business card: Jan Steen. His gaze slid down over me, he smiled and fell back into his chair.

“It’s time to do some business,” one of the men shouted in a commanding voice, and clapped his hands. One after the other the women reluctantly stood up, and we sat down on chair cushions still warm from their bodies.

Jörg and Georg had sat down on each side of Steen. Because they had to shout to be heard over the noise and music, it looked as if they were telling him off. Steen, however, obviously soon lost interest in my bosses, and his glance skittered about the room. But when he held out his glass to the waitress — a bleached-blond Bulgarian who, had the contest been on the up-and-up, should have been last year’s Miss Altenburg — he smiled and raised it in a toast to the women. They pretended not to notice. They were sulking. One was so insulted that she dismissed us by turning her bare pudgy back on us.

To make up for Jörg’s total abstinence and Georg’s restraint, Wolfgang and I drank every brandy Steen ordered. Wolfgang lined up his empty glasses next to the ashtray between his feet and kneaded his hands. He said he worked for Air Research Technologies, whose abbreviation was the same as the Altenburg Regional Theater — ART. I told him the story of how the staff of the Wenzel thought they had caught a swindler when Air Research Technologies refused to pay my bill. Wolfgang smiled to himself. Even those few sentences had left me hoarse. We spent our time toasting in various directions and drinking. I was soon aglow with a surge of goodwill.

A very tall woman — a good match for Wolfgang the Hulk — was now standing beside him. She pulled rimless glasses out of her purse. I was about to offer her my seat when Wolfgang gave my thigh a slap and stood up. Without so much as inviting her to stay, Jan Steen kissed the woman’s hand in farewell. Jörg and Georg now departed with the two giants. And suddenly I was alone with Jan Steen, who was tapping his knee with his right hand to some inscrutable rhythm. When I raised a glass to him he responded to my greeting with a broad wave of his arm. Slowly the women returned and gathered around him again. I shouted to him how wonderful it was to drink and at the same time watch drunks dance. And then I burst into laughter because I suddenly found it very funny that he and I expected nothing more of each other than to sit here side by side and watch these women down their drinks and teeter around the dance floor with wilder and wilder wriggling motions. If only it doesn’t stop now, I thought, if only this can go on and on.

Beneath his narrow face Jan Steen’s double chin led a remarkable life of its own. The more I gazed at it, the more clearly I could make out a second, perfectly independent physiognomy. In every other respect Steen’s body was all of a piece and surely preordained to carry his bulk. We kept smiling and toasting each other, relishing our side-by-side existence.

The moment I spotted her face, I was instantly filled with desire and melancholy. Her dance partner’s long, lean back kept interfering with our exchanged glances. But she never stopped looking my way. Evidently she wasn’t sure just what roles Steen and I had assigned each other. I didn’t know myself what I was doing here. She was no great beauty, but I was infatuated with the earnestness of her face.

In the few seconds between songs I asked her for the next dance. Her escort shouted that I could go to hell. We began to dance. Unwilling to yield the floor, he stepped between us. One twirl was enough to leave him standing alone again. Anticipating his next move, I took her in my arms, not even thinking whether it was the right or wrong thing to do. But when she acquiesced, as good as fleeing to me, I felt nothing but pure happiness. The skinny man’s voice quavered with outrage as he stared at his beloved. With rolled-up sleeves and hands half raised, he appeared on the verge of separating us by force. She could only have sensed what was happening from my reaction, from the motions of my body. She tossed her head to one side and, as if spitting at his feet, let loose with a cascade of what I took to be Romanian curses.

I have never seen anyone capitulate so submissively just by lowering his eyes. I didn’t catch his stammered words. Finally he steered for a table at the edge of the dance floor, where he literally collapsed as he sat down.

She kissed me on the neck, and I was drunk enough to respond with lust so tempestuous that just by diving into it I could forget my own sense of forlornness. All I needed was to feel this woman next to me and everything seemed simple and clear.

I asked whether I could get her a drink. With an almost pleading look, she shook her head. A little later, however, I took her by the hand and led her to the table where Steen and the women were now waiting for us.

No sooner had we sat down, a tray of full glasses in front of us, than her friend walked over and demanded in a very serious voice that she dance with him. Without looking up, she shook her head. “Dance with me,” he said again. It was an order, but his trembling chin betrayed his fear.

“Say something,” he suddenly thundered down at her, “tell me to go! Say something, and you’ll be rid of me.”

“I beg you,” I said as I got to my feet, “please go.”

“One word from that beautiful mouth suffices,” he said in suppressed fury. “I obey orders from this woman, not from a gasbag!” As he pointed at her, a tattoo emerged on his wrist — faded letters, a D and an F.

The women began arguing with him. The men in the background had stood up at the same time I had. I was ready to hurl myself at him, I wanted to put an end to this farce.

I can’t say whether it was a cry of fear or some hasty movement that made me look at Steen. He had never taken his eye off my beautiful companion, but now he was staring at her. His smile had frozen at the corners of his mouth. A woman behind him gave a shriek. In horror, people averted their eyes from my lovely dance partner. I was the last one to whom she revealed herself. Have you ever seen a mouth filled with black stumps? She laughed, well aware of how it only increased her ugliness.

The skinny man sighed, turned, and shuffled away. Before I could say or do anything, she had jumped up to follow him. It was easy to make out her path to the exit, because the crowd parted before her and closed again only hesitantly in her wake.

That’s it for today!

Your E.

Friday, Jan. 19, ’90

Dear Jo,

This is the same manuscript paper that all articles have to be written on, thirty lines to a page, sixty strokes to the line. So I’m practicing now.¹⁹

This morning I sent off a letter telling you about my late-night adventures. Our next test was lying in wait for us at noon today. Georg, Jörg, and I had to use surprise tactics to obtain our business license. The printer in Leipzig finally demanded an official seal. No registration, no contract. Our application has been lying around in the district council office since mid-December.

The reception room was empty. We knocked on the door of the councilman for trade and commerce, and a moment later we were inside his cave. Believe me, for the first time in my life I saw light ooze away. Every ray met its end in a mesh of miasma, of cigar smoke that had hung there for decades and lay like volcanic ash on potted plants that still managed some green. The unwashed windows and the yellowed white curtains did their part too, but the murky seepage came from the man himself. It was a miracle that when he stood up from his desk we even spotted him amid the colorlessness and lack of any shading—his colorlessness, his lack of any shading. What I noticed above all — beyond big teeth, a badly trimmed yellowish beard, and stringy hair — was his laugh. By the glow of the match he used to light his cigar, scorn and fear flickered across his face.

There was no way, he said with a laugh, that he could grant us a printing license. Pause. He ponderously took his seat again. Georg bent toward him and said that he was deliberately delaying publication of our paper, yes, was trying to prevent it by exceeding the limits of his authority, making it a case for the Commission Against Corruption and Abuse of Office. Vulcan laughed and asked Georg to repeat the long title. So far as he knew, no such commission existed yet. It didn’t matter what he knew or thought, Georg shouted, his brow now dark with rage, because such decisions were no longer in his hands. His job was to stamp our application, he wasn’t being paid to do anything else.

“Hohoho!” Vulcan cried, baring his horse teeth and exhaling more smoke with each “ho!” Georg kept right on leaning forward, staring straight at him from one side as if the man belonged to some as-yet-unnamed species.

“Hoho, haha, your application, hoha, your application, ha, doesn’t even exist, it’s never been presented, hoha, your application, ho, at least not to me, hoha, you’ve come to the wrong man, really the wrong man, hoho, who can’t do a thing for you, hoho.” Then he took another puff of his cigar and blew wordless smoke. I could already see us on our way to some other department.

“Doesn’t matter!” cried Jörg, who so far had kept strangely silent and now doffed his beret as if giving some prearranged signal. “Then we’re presenting it here and now, orally. You hand us the application form and stamp it.” The councilman’s laugh first ran up the scale as if trying to melt into the thin air of mockery, then faded away in a long sigh.

Unfortunately, he was all out of application forms, he said. There were too many people wanting to apply, far too many, “can’t end well, nope, it can’t.” Vulcan hastily puffed several more clouds that dissipated into the twilight of his cave. “New regulations are required,” he added worriedly, looking from Georg to Jörg, then to me and back to Jörg, “yes indeed, new regulations. Just ask the cabdrivers…” A gesture of his free hand suggested an attempt to fan away the fumes, then he laid his cigar in the ashtray.

Neither Georg, who had taken up a position at the door, nor I budged. Vulcan thrust his spine against the back of his chair and splayed his fingers across his potbelly as if holding a pillow against it.

“I’m not even responsible for newspapers,” he said in a flat voice. Those decisions had to be made in Leipzig.

“You see!” Jörg shouted. “Just takes a little goodwill.” Vulcan had no cause whatever to worry, worries weren’t part of his job. Jörg paused, took a step back, grabbed my arm, and presented me as an artist, a master of touch-typing, all ten fingers. “Enrico Türmer!”

I sat down at the typewriter, rolled three sheets of the official district council paper into it, and typed the date and place. Not just the “a” and the “o,” but all the letters were so clogged with gunk as to be almost indecipherable. Besides which the left caps shift was missing. There was, however, plenty of carbon paper.

After a few puffs on his cigar, Vulcan grumbled again about how it was long past time for his noon break. Georg tossed me his pocketknife so I could give the letters a crude cleaning.

“So?” Vulcan asked ten minutes later. As if judging the quality of a work of graphic art, he inspected the page and then laid it down in front of him. “So? What am I supposed to do with this?”

“Number, stamp, receipt,” Jörg replied.

“Whatever you want, whatever you want,” he said, “but it won’t do you any good.” Jörg demanded both stamp and signature on the copies too, and left one of them on the blotter.

Without another word, we left Vulcan behind. Out on the street we clapped each other’s clothes, dusting off volcano ashes. Jörg took off for Leipzig right away.

I tour the countryside passing out flyers printed in red. The announcement and subscription form for the paper looks like a warning against rabies.

Michaela asked me to send her greetings too.

Enrico

Friday, Jan. 19, ’90

Verotchka,

I can’t stop thinking about you and I count the days that you’re still in Berlin, as if we’re living together and will soon be separating.

The newspaper’s telephone number is 6999. Do you think maybe you can call from Beirut? Mornings I’m almost always alone, but that will soon change. Have you heard anything more from your nobleman?

Sometimes I’m afraid of myself, no, not of myself, but of where things are headed. It’s all happening so inexorably and logically, and I suddenly see myself right in the middle of it all, as if in a dream. I’m afraid I’ll wake up one morning and not know what to do next, what to do period.

Yesterday and today I wrote Johann and told him a couple of stories. He’s always impressed by stories. He’ll envy me my job yet.

Mamus is determined to give us a bus trip to Paris. I hope I can talk her out of it. She claims it’s because of the bet, that I won the bet, and she’s going to keep her word.²⁰ Michaela and Robert are all excited. Michaela’s schedule of performances will probably prevent us from going, at least I hope so.

Michaela has started accusing me of being cold. She gets just as aggravated when I’m around as when I’m not. To keep her from getting any more upset, I even try to avoid abrupt movements and gestures when I’m around her.

The last few days we’ve fallen into a morning ritual that makes the first hour feel deceptively like our old routine. (Except we don’t eat eggs anymore, they’re unhealthy, she says.) The moment Michaela is done in the bathroom I pour coffee so that she can drink hers right away. Every peaceable minute is a godsend. On the way to the car we usually talk about Robert and school, an inexhaustible topic. As long as we keep talking, we stay clear of danger.

But as soon as we drive off, the tone of voice changes. By the time we’re even with the train station we’re not talking — that is, Michaela has fallen silent and I can’t bring myself to say another word either. As we pass the museum, our silence turns icy. Once we’re at the theater parking lot, at the latest, Michaela explodes. The eeriest part is the predictability, the way the whole thing repeats itself, as if every morning Michaela realizes for the first time that I’ll not be getting out of the car with her, that she has to go into the theater alone — and she seems all the more surprised because up to that point everything has been just like it used to be.

I turn off the engine, so she won’t feel I’m trying to push her, and listen to my lesson on how there are theaters in the West too, how there always has been, always will be theater, and how both man and society come to self-realization in the theater. Once she’s flung her words at the windshield, she sinks back into silence. But in a state of intense concentration, like right before an entrance. The worst thing now would be to remind her of the time. I sit beside her as if waiting for the rain to end and make sure I don’t touch the steering wheel, avoiding any kind of gesture that could be held against me as impatience.

Suddenly she flings the door open and runs off, without a good-bye, head thrown back, purse pressed to her chest, coat fluttering behind her.

Bent over the steering wheel, I watch her go, ready to wave in case she might turn around. After Michaela has vanished I start the car and catch myself smiling in the rearview mirror.

Three minutes later I’m in the office — add some coal, put water on, and wait with my back to the stove until the coffee’s ready. Georg comes down shortly afterward, taps the barometer, winds the grandfather clock, and checks the thermometers outside the window and next to the coatrack. Captain Nemo couldn’t keep closer watch on his instruments.

Afternoons I usually drive around the area, dropping in on town halls. At first they’re frightened when they hear “newspaper.” The secretaries generally catch on more quickly than their bosses that I’m not a threat, and are extremely friendly. Robert comes along sometimes. During the drive we talk about all sorts of things. He has a clear understanding of what my job is. How a newspaper uncovers things and tries to see justice done on all sides. I really enjoy the time with him.

Our first edition is supposed to appear on Friday, February 16th. It all sounds like a fairy tale. You come up with an idea, carry it out, and make a living from it. As if we’re returning to some long-forgotten custom, to a way of life familiar to everybody except us.

On Tuesday we’ll be driving to Offenburg for three days, but not as part of the official Altenburg delegation. A well-wisher²¹ will be paying our hotel bill. Let’s hope our Jimmy holds up.²²

Verotchka, my dearest! Hugs!

Your Heinrich

Thursday, Jan. 25, ’90

Verotchka,

Just imagine how much money that would be if we exchanged it! Maybe a hundred forty, a hundred sixty thousand? What madness! But the best part was still the telephone booths.²³ Am I asking too much to be able to hear your voice once a day?

At times I thought it really still existed, the West. A constant flood of old daydreams and reflexes. People like Gläsle — the man at the town hall, who couldn’t understand why so many Altenburgers keep sending decks of skat cards²⁴ —must have taken us all for barbarians.

Georg, who had spoken with Gläsle on the phone, got the impression that we were being invited to plunder their store of office supplies to our hearts’ delight. Gläsle led us to a stockroom in an attic not far from the town hall. We immediately pounced upon the treasures. No sooner had we stuffed shopping bags full of felt pens, Scotch tape, erasers, and colorful paper clips than we emptied them again and stuffed them with file folders and transparent covers, with ring notebooks and tubes of glue. We even laid claim to a white magnet board. We ransacked it all as if in a frenzy. Within a few minutes I didn’t even recognize myself. How could we have done this without asking even once? We had to unpack it all again, taking inventory, counting, figuring prices, and putting more and more items back. Gläsle had turned paler than we were. Thank God Georg had the envelope of money with him. It turned out that this was Gläsle’s attempt to do us a favor by giving us the same discount the town got for office supplies. He was acting against regulations. He warned us not to say a word to anyone. All the same Gläsle performed a rabbit-out-of-a-hat trick, lifting the cover from a huge electric typewriter. He called it the “green monster,” and asked if we might want it, with a bag of ribbons included. That, he said, was a gift he could give us. Gläsle looked downright relieved and wondered out loud what else he could send along with us — although the typewriter was problem enough. We finally fit it — fat and green like a giant toad — between Georg and Jörg on the backseat.

We first have to be civilized. Our blunder came not necessarily from a lack of character — no, our entire sensory system was out of whack.

With two hundred D-marks in my pocket, store windows suddenly took on real interest. Stopping or moving on no longer meant the same thing they once did. I can’t explain how it was that we ended up in a shop for pots and pans. All I had to do was lift one of those heavy lids and I was fascination’s plaything. I assumed the edge of the pot had to be magnetic, for it seemed to attract the lid and automatically provide that perfect fit.

We were still lidding our way through the shop when Wolfgang the Hulk came in. He joined in our game, while the saleswoman tried to offer the salient points of each, waxing enthusiastic about stews, soups, vegetable casseroles, Swabian spätzle, roasts, and just about every other sort of fare that had ever been prepared on a stove in her town.

We listened. Wolfgang rapped his knuckles on pots as if checking a bell for purity of tone.

At some point it became clear that our money would be left behind in this shop. We had already agreed on two unlidded pots when Wolfgang slipped us another fifty. Now we had enough for the sale item: three pots for 249 D-marks, lids included. The saleswoman — we would never regret our choice — escorted us to the door. Only then did she hand over the third plastic shopping bag to Michaela.

I was searching for my car keys when Michaela was greeted by a woman that I had to look at twice before I recognized her, and then only from her coat. The newspaper czarina had a totally different hairdo. She asked how we were doing, and all I could think of in response was to hold out our shopping bags. “What pretty pots!” she exclaimed with the kind of fervor you show little children, took out the pot, and turned it around and around. I was afraid her rings might scratch the metal.

“What a pretty pot!” she cried loudly, handing it back to me and vanishing with the regional farewell — an “Ade!” accented on the first syllable.

Ah, Verotchka! As if there were nothing more important to write about. If only your Herr von B. would finally make his appearance here. Does he have a real name? I’m off to the post office now, so your letter can be on its way today yet.

I have such a longing for you!

Your Heinrich

Friday, Jan. 26, ’90

Dear Jo,

Jan Steen has decided our fate. It was scary like a fairy tale, but in the end stupid Ivanushka²⁵ got his treasure.

Had we known prior to the trip just what was at stake, we probably wouldn’t have waited for Michaela to make up her mind, which she didn’t do until the night before and first had to ring Aunt Trockel’s doorbell the next morning and ask her to look after Robert.

We had only a little under six hours left for a seven-and-a-half-hour drive — just one more than Jan Steen needs to travel the same distance in his sports job. Michaela claimed the navigator’s position and, laying Robert’s school atlas across her knees, acted as if Jörg and Georg weren’t in the backseat and Jan Steen hadn’t given us directions. All the same I was glad she had come along.

I had to open the trunk at the border in Schleiz. The customs agent reached for the shoebox full of flyers and issues of klartext²⁶ —Michaela had insisted we bring them along. The agent held the “printed matter” between his gloved hands and read, or at least pretended to, while car after car rolled past us. What was this stuff? he asked. “What it says it is,” I replied, “a call for a demo once the State Security’s villa is taken over.”

When he went to put it back, the stack of flyers had shifted and no longer fit in the shoebox. He crammed the papers back in, gave me a wave of his hand that could have meant anything, and shuffled off — the morning sun reflected softly in the shine of his boots. I drove very slowly across the bridge so that we could see the clear-cut path through the woods.

My three passengers soon nodded off, but I was savoring it all — the pink winter morning, the odd fluttery sound of tires against pavement, the expansive curves, the speed, the music, the traffic bulletins, the semis and the cars hurtling past, the fields and villages and hills. To my eyes even the snow had a Western look that morning.

Our only stop was just after Nuremberg. The gas station and rest stop were bustling with our fellow countrymen, some of whom were picnicking on bagged sandwiches and thermos coffee behind rolled-down windows. You could have spotted them just from their restless eyes and the eager way they chewed. Once I had found a parking place and opened the trunk, Michaela rebelled. There was a restaurant here, and no way was she going to be the dog left outside the door. She offered to pay.

While Georg, Jörg, and I slowly dithered past the glass cases with their displays of food, Michaela’s tray was already stacked high with fruit salad on top of sandwiches, rote grütze and vanilla sauce on top of apple strudel. She ordered scrambled eggs for us all and told us we only needed to bother about our coffee and tea.

Even Jörg, who as I first noticed when we sat down had brought his own sandwich in, capitulated before this magic banquet, smearing butter on his D-mark kaiser roll and piling it high with scrambled eggs and ham.

Georg went back for a plate of white sausages with sweet mustard. Michaela discovered cucumber salad — cucumber salad in winter!

We filled our tank from one of our gas cans, and drove downhill in the passing lane. The names that began to pop up on signs delighted me: Heilbronn, Karlsruhe, Strasbourg, Freiburg, Basel, Milan. It wouldn’t have amazed me to find ourselves suddenly whizzing along under palm trees.

We pulled into Offenburg a little before noon, found the Ratskeller — and right on time, there we stood opposite Steen, who was sitting having a beer with Wolfgang the Hulk. Michaela was the center of attention. Steen invited her to ride with him, Georg and Jörg were packed into the backseat, and I put-putted along behind with Wolfgang.

He had greeted me with a hug and silence, but was now chatting my ear off about how important it had been for us to show up on time. We’d pulled it off with pizzazz, real pizzazz. Steen thought a great deal of us, finally somebody he could depend on, people who knew what they wanted, went for it, and didn’t expect to be handed anything on a silver platter. Steen had reassigned his entire advertising campaign for the Leipzig Fair to us, now didn’t that show pizzazz on his part too? He gave my thigh a slap. We were moving up into the Black Forest now. A few serpentine curves and we had lost Steen. Only after we started back downhill did we link up again. “Demand a thousand marks, a thousand dee ems per page,” Wolfgang said without turning his head. “A thousand D-marks per page,” I replied.

Georg and Jörg were standing in the Hotel Sonne parking lot, each off to himself, like two eavesdroppers. It was the air! It was so delicate and cold that it hurt to breathe.

Michaela, more recumbent than sitting, played with the darkened windows, sending them up and down with a hum, and didn’t get out until a hotel employee asked about our luggage. She followed him, while Steen steered us toward the restaurant. Steen was carrying on several conversations at once, and we listened with bated breath. “A thousand D-marks,” I whispered to Jörg.

The restaurant seemed to be closed; we were the only guests. Steen headed for a corner table and slid along the bench until he was seated under the stuffed head of a stag. I went to the restroom. I wasn’t sure whether Jörg had understood me or not, and so I took my time, but neither Georg nor Jörg followed me.

Jörg was talking about our planned first printing, the distribution structure, the number of pages, etc. “And you two are the owners?” Steen interrupted, nodding at Jörg and Georg. He intended to “shift his advertising” to us. About how much would that cost?

Georg and Jörg said nothing. But at least Georg knew enough to ask just what sort of advertising was involved. Steen’s double chin went back into action, but then quickly settled down. “Air Research Technologies,” he exclaimed, “what else? Full page!” Georg began one sentence, then another, then the next and one more without finishing any of them. “Twelve pages to start with, need every column, an ad no one will understand, just twelve pages, sub-tabloid format, isn’t much, and if you, and Air Research Technologies, just getting a handle on it, in the Altenburg area, a whole page, why a whole page?”

“What’s he talking about?” Steen cried, turning to Wolfgang.

“That you have to consider…” Jörg said, but then broke off midsentence and cast a glance Steen’s way, but he had vanished behind his menu — we all had one now. Wolfgang took a deep breath…

“A full page costs one thousand two hundred D-marks,” I burst out, as if I had finally calculated costs. Steen’s head reappeared and looked from one of us to another. “One thousand two hundred,” I repeated, and attempted a smile.

“Ahhh,” Steen groaned and threw himself back in his seat. He eyeballed me, which evidently he enjoyed doing.

Jörg gave me a broad wink, as if I were sitting several tables away. Georg stared at his hands. Wolfgang took another audible deep breath. And I had already begun working up my monologue of apology.

Steen said something that sounded like “whaddaya know” or maybe it was “I dunno,” braced himself against the edge of the table, and said these exact words: “I’ll advance you twenty thousand for now, and then we’ll see, agreed?” He stood up halfway and extended a hand first to Georg, then Jörg, then finally me. His tie dangled into an empty wineglass and was still draped over his plate as he sat down. “How do you want it, check or hard currency?”—the last two words in English. The waitress presented us each a glass half-filled with champagne.

“Well, which is it?” Steen asked.

“Check doesn’t work for us,” Jörg said.

“Hard currency!” Steen stated, and reached for his glass, but stopped short because no one else had budged.

“Cash,” Wolfgang cried, lifting his glass, “hard currency means cash.”

Silence. Jörg said cash was good, very good. At which point Steen’s body raised up a little, his mouth flew open and let loose with a laugh, a laugh that ricocheted off the walls, a laugh unlike any I’ve ever heard in my life. “Cash!” Steen howled when he was finally capable of getting a word out, but now catapulted into another volley of laughter, gasped for breath, swallowed wrong, coughed. “Hard currency!” His double chin shook angrily. By now the laughter had grabbed hold of Wolfgang too.

The longer the outburst lasted, the more tactless I found it. Wolfgang’s laughter began to wane now, and finally he just clamped his eyes tight, as if all the laughter was pressed out of him.

“Cash is very good!” Steen shouted. He swiped a folded handkerchief across his mouth, got up, and walked toward Michaela. She took his arm and he escorted her to the table. They were as incongruous here as a couple dressed for the opera is on a streetcar.

We noticed too late that Steen simply raised his glass to toast, whereas we all touched glasses soundlessly. I emptied my glass in one chug. My life force was gradually returning. Contrary to my initial impression, the flowers on the table were real.

The venison was served with spätzle and an incredible sauce. Steen also topped off each forkful with some kind of marmalade. The starter was broccoli soup (they showed us a raw stalk, sort of like cauliflower, but dark green). As if everything else had now been settled, Steen spent the whole time instructing us about food, but then disappeared with a hasty good-bye shortly before dessert — a dark Italian cake, soft and moist and creamy.²⁷

I don’t know when I last saw Michaela look as beautiful and at ease as she did during the meal. When we got up from the table she asked what Herr Steen had been laughing so hard about, and Georg replied that he wasn’t certain of the reason himself. But Herr Steen had every intention of handing over twenty thousand D-marks to us. Twenty thousand D-marks, Michaela responded, bought a lot of uncertainty.

We were supposed to be in Offenburg by five. We had lain down for a little nap, but when we arrived the delegation from Altenburg was just climbing off the bus. The Offenburgers were annoyed that they couldn’t spot anyone in charge of the expectant throng. Their tall, well-tanned mayor shook every hand, and despite his height kept standing on tiptoe as if afraid he had overlooked someone. Just as Steen had done, he offered Michaela his arm and led her into the town hall, where he took us on a kind of tour. He made a point of always letting Michaela precede him into each room.

We admired the cream-colored carpets, the computers, the desks, the push-button phones, and we took turns lounging in the mayor’s plush desk chair. The finale was marked by toasts with champagne, the snacks disappeared quickly.

A small elegant man in a yellow sweater sidled up to me as if just by chance, and after a while asked me whether I could explain something to him. Thanking me for my help, he described his problem. Every day ten to twenty little packages arrived for him from Altenburg, each containing a deck of skat cards with a nude female color photo on the back. These people wanted him to provide them other addresses in Offenburg. He stared at me. And what exactly was his question, I wanted to know. He hooked a finger inside his the collar of his sweater, gazed at me a moment longer, thanked me, and then departed as inconspicuously as he had arrived.

Receptions had been planned for those of us in the press to meet with the various political parties, with the exception of the Free Democrats (which has only five members, but does have a seat on the town council).

Michaela wanted to visit the Greens, Jörg was already assigned to the Socialists, and that left the Christian Democrats for Georg.

None of us had any idea what a mistake we were making.

Michaela and I proved a disappointment for the Greens in any case. After we had introduced ourselves and asked for an ashtray, they began to go around the room with their introductions. Whoever had the floor looked directly at us, while the others chatted and giggled. Michaela started off jotting down their names and various activities, but she stopped when someone asked her why she needed to do that. I asked what CI meant, because they were constantly talking about CIs (citizens’ initiatives), and about “collecting toads.” Most of them said, “I’m in the CI for airport noise and collect toads.” I asked the woman beside me what toads meant. She didn’t understand. Suddenly, however, she shrieked, “Guess what Enrico thinks toad collecting is?”

In the minor uproar that followed one very beautiful woman who spoke in the singsong cadence of her native Swabia stood out above all the rest. “They’ve blown their cover now! They’ve blown their cover now.”

Michaela bravely came to my aid. She had made the same association — toads was a common enough slang term for money. She herself had used it often.

But in fact they did collect these animals and carried them across highways. Toad tunnels were already being constructed.

The beautiful woman wanted to know why no one from the Library on the Environment or the civil rights movement had come with us, but before we could answer, she declared, “Those guys are all just the old bigwigs.” Michaela spoke about her klartext, and I could sense how much she would have liked to talk about Leipzig and all the rest, if only someone had asked her. “We’re not part of the official delegation,” she exclaimed. “We’re not part of them!” The environment would be given a lot of attention in our new newspaper, I said. It somehow sounded feeble, and hardly anyone was listening anyway. At the end we sat drinking mineral water with a married couple who told us all about their trip to Weisswasser and Karl-Marx-Stadt. We were hungry.

I got lost on the way back, and it was almost eleven before we found the Hotel Sonne. Jörg came storming toward us.

“What a screwup!” he shouted. “A total screwup!”

Dressed in suit and tie, Wolfgang sat enthroned in the lobby. Like a drunken Bacchus, he dangled limp arms over the armrests of his chair, his crown of hair stood straight up.

“And where were you?” he barked at us, and his arms took on life again, paddled at the air, found their way to the armrests. It looked as if he might stand up, his eyes bugged out — then he sank back again. As he closed his eyes I was afraid he was going to cry.

“They didn’t even offer us anything to eat,” Michaela protested. Jörg kept rubbing his eyes and forehead. Georg paced back and forth on his long legs, his upper body as lopsided as a jockey’s.

Jan Steen had spent the whole evening waiting for us in a “fancy restaurant” up in the Black Forest. Wolfgang had tried every twenty minutes to phone us. Around ten o’clock Steen had angrily tossed his napkin on his plate and driven home. Heaven only knew if we would ever see the man again.

“But how were we supposed to know that?” Michaela asked. “Nobody knew about it!” Jörg shouted. “Nobody, nobody, nobody!” Instead of responding to the question, Wolfgang spoke oracularly about the one that got away, the really big fish that got away. The phrase gave him some kind of grim pleasure, in fact he seemed to console himself with it, because we didn’t hear him utter anything but that phrase for the rest of the night.

Jörg and Georg sat on our beds. We peeled our eggs over the cloth on the nightstand. Our one luxury consisted of trading the sandwiches we had fixed the night before. Plus cold tea drunk from the cap of the thermos.

We were now the same people who had climbed into a Wartburg in Altenburg before dawn. What lay between that long-ago morning and our evening repast was merely a strange dream.

Michaela suddenly stopped chewing. “This may well be our breakfast,” she said, putting her nibbled sandwich back on the table. “And who’s going to pay for our rooms now?” Between us we had just under seventy D-marks. Georg tried to set our minds at ease. But then he was the only one who had eaten. The saddest part, as Michaela saw it, was that Steen had been waiting for us in a fancy restaurant.

The next morning we were actually awakened by the crow of a rooster.

Later on, we each double-checked to make sure that the breakfast buffet was included in the price and that two nights had been paid for in advance. We didn’t run into Wolfgang in the dining room, and he wasn’t in his room either. We were, so to speak, hanging around paradise with pink slips in hand. Michaela arm in arm with the mayor adorned the front page of the local paper.

The second day passed without fanfare and included visits to the hospital and the daily paper that has a monopoly here. We saw nothing of Burda Publishing. Jörg was interviewed on the radio. In the evening the newspaper czarina held a dinner for us. During the two hours of “exchanging views” we took turns stealing off to place a call to the Hotel Sonne, prepared to cut out on a moment’s notice.

The czarina — as far as I’m aware, the first millionaire I’ve ever seen — had, wouldn’t you know, grayish blue eyes, black hair, and skin like milk. Over dessert she offered to supply us with printers, computers, and everything else we might need for a newspaper.

“So you want to hire us?” Georg asked. The czarina unfolded her slender hands in a gesture that was intended to say: You heard me right.

Jörg explained to her that our first issue would be coming out in three weeks. The czarina’s eyes grew ever narrower, and her smile took on a dreamy look.

“We belong to us, so to speak,” Georg summarized in an apologetic voice.

“That’s a shame,” she said, “really a great shame.” For a moment I had the feeling we were making a mistake.

The next morning Wolfgang pounded on our door. “He’s downstairs waiting. He doesn’t have much time.”

Steen was in a splendid mood. His remarks kept Wolfgang in smiles the whole time. I was just launching into my speech about a big misunderstanding, when Steen cried, “Open wide!” He held a fork under my nose, expecting me to take a bite. It was just bacon, but was it ever good! Steen placed an order for me. Jörg and Georg likewise opened wide.

Michaela, who had wriggled into her old jeans, was the last to arrive. Steen obliged by following her every step, but his old enthusiasm had faded. Nevertheless he acted as if we had all spent the last two days together amusing ourselves. He waxed enthusiastic about the Black Forest, about Basel and Strasbourg, only out of the clear blue sky to urge us to buy German cars. For him anything else was out of the question. It was his way of helping the economy circulate. Anyone who wanted to do well had to make sure others did well too. I’m doing a poor job of recapping here. He said it better. Far more important was his tone of voice. Steen is full of self-confidence, confident that he has an honest relationship with the world, ready to render a full account of his deeds at any time.

Once again he kept his good-byes brief. He wished us a good trip, kissed Michaela on both cheeks, and vanished.

We shouldn’t make such long faces, Michaela hissed. Wolfgang hadn’t budged the whole time, and his good-bye to Steen had been just a nod. He wasn’t in any hurry after that either. He pulled up closer to the table, gave his lighter a click, and lit a cigarette. He noisily slurped his coffee. I already suspected he had been assigned to tell us something. No one had dared blame him for yesterday evening’s screwup. After all, we had him to thank for booking our hotel rooms. Wolfgang shoved his plate to one side, brushed crumbs from the tablecloth, pulled out a couple of sheets of paper, and laid them out in front of him. “Here,” he began without any preliminaries, “are two hundred twenty-six addresses that the newspaper should be sent to. Here are two hundred D-marks for gas and another hundred in expenses for each of you, and here’s…twenty thousand. In addition,” he continued in a monotone, “he left this for you.” He now emptied a cloth bag emblazoned with the same advertising as the lighters, ballpoint pens, notepads, and pencils that cascaded across the plates and cups. “You only have to sign here.” He shoved the gewgaws aside, laid a paper in front of me, and handed me his pen. I thought it had to do with the hundred D-marks and gas money. So I signed and passed the sheet on. Only when Michaela hesitated did I realize I had signed a receipt for the twenty thousand. “One more can’t hurt,” Jörg said, signed his own name, and passed it on to Georg. In return we received a paper with a series of flourishes that formed the name Jan Steen.

But that still wasn’t the end of it. You remember that old German proverb, don’t you, about how the devil always shits where the piles are biggest? Well, the Offenburg town hall phoned and said that, if we had time, we could stop by — they would like to put a few things together for us, office supplies and such. (Swabians say office “stores.”)

We had a splendid view out over the Rhine valley, all the way to some distant mountains in France. The hills around Offenburg roll gently, most of them unforested on top; the highest peaks of the Black Forest couldn’t be seen from here or were hidden by clouds.

Gläsle was waiting for us outside the town hall. It wasn’t long before our eyes were welling with tears. When it was all over we even hauled away an electric typewriter that we’ve baptized the “green monster.”

Gläsle drove Georg and Jörg to a used-car lot — we want to buy a VW bus — so Michaela and I strolled through town. And because we suddenly had money in our pockets we went shopping — stainless steel pots, as if for our trophy collection.

That’s it for this time. Hugs, Enrico

Monday, Jan. 29, ’90

Verotchka,

Mamus sends her greetings. All your postcards are on her kitchen counter. She’s a little peeved at us both — because your own children really shouldn’t lie to you.²⁸ I wrote down your address for her. She wants to know how long you’ll be staying and if it isn’t dangerous and if Nicola’s mother is feeling better.

We’re supposed to go to Paris this weekend. Mamus sees herself as a personal ambassador of happiness. She’s plundered her bank account and won’t admit it, but drops all kinds of coy hints.

Although we — I took Robert along — were in Dresden only yesterday, our time there is somehow a haunting memory of nowhere in particular, as if I had merely dreamed it. Mamus had baked a cheesecake. But the apartment was so cold and tidy it was almost as if it wasn’t lived in.

It’s only when you see her there inside her own four walls that you realize how much Mamus has changed. I was happy to spot any gesture I recognized — the way she lights the stove and kneels down to check the flame, the way she stands at the pantry threshold as if it might be easier to reach rather than take another step, the way she pivots on the heel of one foot when she opens the door to the fridge, the way she holds her coffee cup with both hands, elbows planted on the table. Sounding as if she were offering me some condensed milk, she asked if we would also be voting for the Alliance for Germany.²⁹ Mamus has suddenly begun to spot people toadying everywhere and sees her fellow nurses as “pure opportunists.” I asked her why she herself had never thought of leaving. I wouldn’t have wanted to, she replied, without looking directly at me.

There’s been no change in her situation at the clinic. If she has bad luck and is assigned to a shift with her “tormentors”—and that probably includes most of the nurses in surgery — she sometimes doesn’t say a word the whole day.

Robert treats Mamus like a second grandmother, which obviously does her good. And each time Robert agrees to come along, I feel like I’ve been honored too. Although I’m always afraid I’m boring him. This time I should perhaps have made the trip without him, except that it would have taken on its own special significance, as if I were pressuring her for a heart-to-heart talk. There would hardly have been a chance of that in any case, because the doorbell was constantly ringing. Maybe the change Mamus has undergone has become the rule now. All sorts of people are showing their true colors. Did you know that Herr Rothe is a longtime fan of Franz Josef Strauss? Frau Schubert explained to me what difficulties I would have had as a teacher, and the two Graupner sisters talked about Denmark, where a cousin of theirs lives, and how at last they could write to her. When I asked in amazement why they hadn’t written to their cousin before now, I was corrected by cries of “Wrong, completely wrong,” and then Tilda Graupner proudly proclaimed: “As head of accounting I didn’t dare have contacts in the West.” You’re the star of the building. Your leaving makes you the first to have made the right decision. And some of the glow from your halo illumines your brother. The Schaffners are said to leave their apartment only after dark, or at least the revolutionary (or reactionary?) residents of the building have agreed not to greet those Stasi spies.

Robert wanted to look at photographs again. I had never noticed before that the albums only go up as far as Father’s death.³⁰ The cupboard still has that same old darning-egg, sewing-kit odor.

Suddenly Mamus grabbed a photo and looked at it over the rim of her glasses — a handsome young couple — and cried, “What are they doing here!” She shredded it like a check that she had filled out wrong. “You weren’t even born yet,” Mamus informed me. “Total strangers!” She kept the scraps in her hand and went on providing commentary for the pictures that Robert held out to her. I secretly pocketed two shots of you. Sometimes I’m afraid I can’t bear our being separated any longer. If only I could figure out what your plans are.

We had supper with Johann. His epistles are getting shorter. There were still a dozen of them lying around here, and I had no choice but to read them before the trip. When I did, it occurred to me that he might be gathering materials for a novel about a parish. Ever since he confessed to Franziska about us,³¹ he’s behaved rather rudely to me, especially in her presence. He could barely bring himself to offer me his hand. He had to “finish something up,” he exclaimed, and disappeared. And so Robert and I waited in the kitchen, helping Franziska set the table and gazing out the window at the city. Franziska’s charm has entirely deserted her over the past two years. She talks quite openly about her drinking and that she really needs to quit. Listening to her you might think she simply doesn’t have time to spare for treatment at a clinic. Johann confided to me a couple of years ago that he sometimes provokes arguments because he needs the tension to be productive. I can’t help thinking of that when I see Franziska like this.

She knows about my letters, because Johann reads them to her to prove that “nothing’s going on” between him and me.

Gesine will soon be five. At first glance she seems untouched by all this unhappiness. She chose Robert as her knight, led him through the apartment, and played the piano for him. It was something new for her to learn that there are people who don’t play some instrument.

When Jo’s finished with his theology exams, there’s a pastorate with three parishes waiting for him in the Ore Mountains, not far from Annaberg-Buchholz. Franziska and he have already visited it; the parsonage is large and has a huge orchard. It would never have come to this a year ago, Franziska said, because Johann would have looked for a job that left him time for writing and his band. Franziska doesn’t want to leave Dresden come hell or high water, or at least not to go to Annaberg. And then came the bombshell! She was sure I already knew that Johann planned to be a candidate in the local elections. And three weeks ago it was he who accused me of betraying art.

When I asked him about it later, he beat around the bush. He had wanted to tell me in person and not write me. He didn’t have a chance anyway, was doing it out of sense of responsibility, people had pushed him into it, maybe he could make a little difference. He sounded like someone who had just become a “candidate of the Party.”³² I told him there was no need for a bad conscience or for him to justify himself and that I thought he had made the right decision.

He also mentioned a bit too offhandedly that he hopes to publish a book about the events in Dresden last October.³³ Jo resents his own fate, because he was denied the privilege of being arrested, interrogated, and beaten. Believe me, I know him.

Jo had no questions for me. His aloofness, if not to say coldness left me paralyzed. If it hadn’t been for Franziska, who was constantly passing me something, filling my teacup, and fussing over Robert, it would have felt like being shown the door.

But when I talked about you, he slowly thawed, and suddenly smiled at me with a heartfelt warmth that left me more helpless than his silence had. He jumped up and presented me with a book, a duplicate he had found in a rare bookstore — a first edition of Eisler’s Faustus³⁴ —and said that we definitely had to see each other more often, especially now. In the end we are all left with only a few friends anyway. He insisted, absurdly enough, on fixing sandwiches for our trip back; there might be a traffic jam. Robert and I took turns pointing to what we wanted and watched our sandwiches being prepared. Like a mason working plaster, Jo pushed the butter to the outer edge, spreading it around again several times as if to make certain everything was well greased. Then he looked up as if to say, this is something I’d do only for you.

Hugs, your Heinrich

PS: I’m sitting at the “green monster” and feel a draft at my back. I think Jörg or Georg has just come in. I turn around — and have to sneeze. “Gesundheit,” a woman’s voice says. I hear the door close. I sneeze two more times, and each time the same composed female voice blesses me. — “Who are you?” I ask, and walk toward her. She is crouched next to the stove, massaging her toes. A smile skitters across her face, briefly easing the tenseness in her features. Then she makes a hissing sound as she draws air in through her mouth and breathes it out again audibly through her nose. Her stockings have holes in the heels. “Don’t look,” she says. “I thought,” she continues, and presses her lips together for a second, “I thought you asked me to come in. I knocked.” With her back to the tile stove she slowly pushes herself to her feet. She tries to slip into her shoes. “Ouch! Ouch!” she whines. “That hurts!”

“For heaven’s sake,” I exclaim. She is looking up now, and what I had taken for a strand of hair stuck in the corner of her mouth turns out to be a scar. I realize that she’s a noblewoman.

“It no longer keeps me warm,” I say apologetically, pointing to my coat hanging beside the door. I am angry at myself because I’ve been planning for days to take it to the cleaners so they can restore its old qualities. “Would you like to come along?” I ask. “If we leave now we can make it to the cleaners by six.”

“How can I possibly do that?” she cries. Her voice is clogged with tears. Didn’t I have eyes in my head, even a blind man could that see she was in no condition to take so much as a single step.

“May I carry you?” I ask, unable to suppress the expectation in my voice. Her blouse has come open at the waist, and I see a triangle of her stomach, her navel at its center — just like the eye of God, I think. The comparison pleases me. The most wonderful opportunities often arise out of minor inconveniences, I say. She bursts into laughter. She lets her eyes wander openly over me. Evidently everything about me makes her laugh, I appear to provoke it. Finally, putting both hands over her mouth, she is overcome by a seizure of laughter she cannot control. She struggles for air, buckles over. Her hair, the tips bright red, falls down over her face, hiding it completely.

By now I was sitting on the edge of the bed and listening intently, I was that certain I had heard laughter. It was four in the morning. My day had begun.

Tuesday, Feb. 6, ’90

Verotchka,

I don’t like leaving the office here because I’m afraid I’ll miss your call. Each time I come in it’s all I can do to keep from asking about you. I get testy if Jörg or Georg stays on the telephone too long. I tried reaching you from Paris, but I was doing something wrong and couldn’t understand the recording either.

Yes, we were in Paris, at least we claim we were. We were back by nine on Sunday. “We’ve just come from Paris,” Robert announced to a neighbor in the stairwell. Instead of being amazed or asking questions, she gave Michaela and me a nasty look, as if we tolerated lying. Then what Michaela told her about the procedure with our papers made her all the more suspicious. Truth is no help when you’re trying to convince someone.

I’m glad it’s behind us. I finally let myself be talked into going along for Robert’s sake — it was a family outing. Michaela was sure we’d have a fine time even without money. The official title was “Three-Day Trip.” The first day was Friday. We were scheduled to leave Eisenach at 5 p.m.

Hundreds of people were waiting on a muddy square surrounded by buildings waiting to be demolished and a couple of murky streetlamps. If it hadn’t been for the bags and plastic sacks, it would have looked like the start of a demonstration. Mamus had been waiting for us in Eisenach since two in the afternoon. She was all on edge because we didn’t arrive until around four thirty. As the armada of buses pulled in, we were shooed from one end of the square to the other. When the bus doors opened the drivers appeared and called out their destinations, then sat down behind the wheel again.

There were two for Paris. We were afraid they were going to pull out without us, but then found seats in the third and fourth rows, far enough forward to see out the windshield. Next to us was the ferry to Amsterdam, on our left one for Venice. The procedure was the same for everyone. First we were given West German papers that — except for name and address — had all the details right, down to height and eye color. At the French border, so we were instructed, we were to hold the papers up³⁵ and look inconspicuous — whatever that meant. In the Venice bus they were busy practicing holding their documents up. They waved as they drove off.

Robert chose me to sit next to him; the seats were very comfortable and you could barely hear the motor. Not one loud word disrupted our gentle flight along the dark autobahn. As if it were a familiar routine, I left the bus at each stop with everyone else, joined the dash for the restroom, and while we waited stuffed my mouth with a hard-boiled egg from Mamus’s picnic box.

Just before midnight we reached Frankfurt Airport, the trip’s first sightseeing stop. We wandered the deserted departure halls, reading the names of airlines, and greeting the dark-skinned cleaning ladies, who responded by turning away.

The French had no interest in our bus, and we were first aware of France at our next pit stop. Mamus was snoring softly. It was dawn before I began to feel tired. I saw dark gray hanging over the Paris suburbs, and the next thing I knew we were driving through the city. It was drizzling, and the sky looked even darker. It wasn’t until the Place de Bastille that I figured out where we were. From there on my sense of orientation worked without hitch or flaw. I displayed my brilliance for Robert and Michaela, but even I was amazed to be driving along the Boulevard Henri IV and see the islands emerge on our right and, yes indeed, Notre-Dame.³⁶ I prayed the mantra of our yearnings: Quai de la Tournette, Quai de Montebello, Quai St-Michel, Quai des Grands Augustins, and gazed at the old familiar booths of the bouquinistes.

Even as I was prophesying the Louvre right on time, I felt uneasy. I was shooting off the fireworks of our knowledge of a faraway world without feeling a thing. Maybe it was simply that you weren’t there, or maybe I suspected that within an hour it would sound as profane as a taxi driver’s chatter. Ah, at that same moment it degenerated into the know-it-all lectures of a paterfamilias who has conscientiously done his vacation homework.

We drove north across the Pont de la Concorde, past the Madeleine and St-Lazare, and up the Rue d’ Amsterdam. I presumed Sacré-Cœur would be our next goal and was hoping that with the first ray of sun and some coffee things would improve somewhat, when the driver announced that we were on our way to the most famous “mousetrap” in the world. We made two turns, taking them very slowly, while our bus rocked back and forth and was lifted up as if on a wave before we were rolling again.

Then I saw the women lining the sidewalks — whores at eight in the morning. Conversation in the bus died; the driver blustered on about love for sale. In the middle of his babbling there was a thump underneath us as if we hadn’t cleared something. The driver cursed, and with a crackle the loudspeakers went silent. We drove on slowly. Everyone stared out the window in a kind of devotional silence. The monstrosity of being able to select a woman for a bit of cash! Robert turned to me with a crazy grin, hesitated as if about to ask a question, but then gazed straight ahead again, his forehead pressed to the glass.

Suddenly one of the women stepped away from the facade — her skintight pants opened from the calves down to wide bell-bottoms — and ran along beside us. Her hair was covered by a bright scarf wrapped around her head pirate-style. She approached our window, moved closer — she was very young — kissed her hand, and pressed the fingertips to the window right where Robert sat. Even though she had to run to stay even with us, she gazed earnestly inside, but the women behind her had burst into laughter, buckled over with laughter, and we could hear their catcalls and yowls — a cordon of women laughing at us. She rapped on the window three times, then the whole scene vanished.

Patches of red emerged on Robert’s neck. “She just liked you,” Michaela said, trying to put him at ease.

We set foot on Paris soil at the base of Sacré-Cœur. The air was milder than I had expected. The sea of buildings gave off a serenity that even the few cars and mopeds glistening through the streets like minnows could not disrupt. We climbed the steps. “How often, ever since we had seen fall arrive on the Boulevard St-Germain, had we come up here, our work done, chilled, looking out at the rain on the Seine,” I recited.³⁷ Robert wanted to know what the large roof off to the left was, and was surprised I didn’t know for sure which train station it might be, or if it even was a train station at all. I was amazed at how few prominent features there were — the Madeleine, the Louvre, the Eiffel Tower far to the right, all the rest was a blur, which was fine by me. What I wanted to do most was to stretch out on one of the benches and sleep. The white stone reminded me of the Fisherman’s Bastion.³⁸ The pigeons scared off by the street sweeper came from Neustadt Station.³⁹

Suddenly a man was kneeling in front of me in the middle of the sidewalk. He was like a stone that had fallen out of the sky. He was looking at the ground as if praying and offered us a view of a wreath of sweaty strands of hair. The shapeless thing in his hands turned out to be a cap that held a single coin. I didn’t have any francs and yet didn’t dare move on. Mamus came to my aid, stuffed a bill into his cap, and whispered in perfect German: “From the whole family.” A woman who we later learned was a German teacher from Erfurt said it was unacceptable for one person to grovel before another like that. As she went on speaking and a semicircle formed around her, poor Lazarus — probably thinking she was speaking to him — slowly raised his head. When the group saw his badly scraped forehead and nose and gazed into dead-tired eyes and a toothless half-opened mouth, they fell silent. We regrouped and fled.

After that time took flight. As if every spot deserved a special sniff, we were let out near the Centre Pompidou, the Arc de Triomphe, the Place de la Concorde, and Les Invalides, although with the exception of the Centre we would have had a better view from the bus.

When we stopped at the Eiffel Tower, at the far end of the field, we set off, en familie, in search of a restroom. On the way back we saw our travel group gather within a matter of seconds at the middle door of the bus and then just as quickly form a queue. Our female copilot was spooning soup into white plastic bowls with an oversize ladle. Robert and I got in line. At last it was our turn, but since neither of us could produce either bowl or spoon, we were told to be patient and wait until some fast eaters, as our copilot put it, could hand over an empty bowl that we could rinse out.

In the course of all this I missed the announcement that, having now been “fortified,” we were supposed to “climb” the tower. The first group was already on its way when I attempted to persuade Mamus and Michaela to join me in a walk. I succeeded only to the extent that Mamus slipped me a few francs — and with that we went our separate ways.

I thought of running after them, even took a few steps — suddenly I was on the verge of tears. The realization that for two hours I would now be freer than I had ever been in my whole life robbed me of my will. I went back to the café where we had made use of the restroom and decided that, protected against all eventualities, I would wait there. Probably because he recognized me, the garçon hurried over to prevent me from entering; he didn’t even make the effort to wave me off with his whole hand, but just flexed his extended fingers in disgust a few times. I pointed to the empty barstools and went for one.

I pronounced coffee with the accent on the second syllable and also ordered a mineralnaya voda, as if it were less embarrassing to speak Russian than German. I then just pointed at one of the two bottles that the woman behind the bar held up under my nose, and noticed too late that it was the other one I wanted, the carbonated one.

Oh, how I wanted to talk with somebody. I watched the waitress fiddle with a huge espresso machine, stared at the clasp of her bra shimmering through her white blouse, and felt totally superfluous.

I was served coffee with foaming milk, made good use of the large sugar shaker, and watched the sugar sink beneath the foam and cling to the rim of the cup.

I had already drunk two or three sips when my nose suddenly picked up the scent of burnt milk. I stirred in another spoonful of sugar, and went on sipping, but the second I set the cup down again, I smelled burnt milk again.

The waitress was peeling a lemon right in front of me. My first thought was that a coworker had taken her place — the hands were so alarmingly old, so wrinkled. I pulled out my wallet, stood there waiting to pay the bill, and forfeited half my francs because I didn’t want to look cheap by leaving only coins behind.

And I hadn’t even finished my coffee. The memory had been too overwhelming, the memory of plastic cups — those green, red, or brown plastic cups⁴⁰ —brimful with scalded milk, the skin floating on top, which would reappear no matter how often I fished it out and wiped it on my pants or the edge of my plate, then would stick to my lips, leaving me gasping in disgust for air. I left.

Although it was windy and cold, spring seemed to have suddenly arrived on earth. Everything was bathed in a different light. I walked on, as if I could find you in Paris, as if it were possible that at any moment you could be walking toward me. I wanted you here beside me — and with you everything that we knew, that we had seen, that belonged to us, our streets, our world. The concentration, amusement, and delight in all the things we honored and embraced, all the things we craved as brother and sister. The white décolletage of the woman selling cigarettes against the shadows of her little booth. I had to bend at the knee to see into her face. A twenty-five-year-old, who, wrapped in her scarf, turned fifty-two yesterday. I say what I want, she greets me, she repeats my request, she hands me the pack, I pay, she thanks me, I thank her, we say our good-byes.

Like a man gambling, I let my route be decided by each new stoplight. I didn’t know what I should be looking for, the only thing I knew for certain was that I would find you. My first steps of freedom, it kept going through my mind, my first steps of freedom. I wanted to forget my age, my name, my birthplace. All I wanted was to see and to set one foot in front of the other and have you beside me.

Two North Africans asked me something in voices as costly as some heavy glistening fabric. I shrugged and walked on. Awakened to bray its market wares, Paris was offering a sale on spring in early February. I touched fruit crates, metal railings, house walls, door handles. I knew you were near. I didn’t see you, that would have been too much, but I was certain that we were breathing the same air, I could hear you.

I pointed at a portal and said: “The gate for the riders, madame,” and you said, pointing to the next door: “The gate for the pedestrians, monsieur.”⁴¹ You were constantly seeing something I did not see, that I didn’t notice until you pointed it out to me: the sign DANGER DE MORT on a blue box wrapped in transparent foil, DANGER DE MORT. I am afraid of losing you. But I dare not let anyone notice. I must decide, I must board the train in two hours — back, back behind the wall, they’ve only let me out for a short time because my book has been published here, because it lies in every bookstore display, and we stroll from window to window. It is still too early, the shops are closed.

At an intersection the letters on the canopies above the Dome and Rotonde and Toscana⁴² line up in a row. No, I say, no. I don’t want to be without you. I want to see Dresden with you, when the sun has not yet risen above the roofs and the morning star is shining in the pastel pink air, the fog above the Elbe, the various reds that encircle cigarette filters before they are tossed over the curb at a bus stop, the bright lady’s glove on the sidewalk, that everyone avoids, no one picks up, no one steps on, that I take to be a lily that has fallen from your bouquet, DANGER DE MORT.

Suddenly Mamus and Robert were standing right in front of me, Michaela was listening to an older gentleman explain something to her, looked up, and gave me a wave. “Punctual to the minute,” Mamus said, praising me. On my return from the world beyond I was punctual to the minute. It was drizzling.

Michaela gave me a handkerchief, telling me to wipe the sweat off my face. Mamus made me put on her scarf. The wind had wrecked her umbrella.

We followed Robert, walked passed the nearest cafés, and quickly lost our orientation. I was shivering, and at one corner, just as we were walking by, a huge omelet was being served, and I almost died of hunger. Mamus held up her wallet and nodded. Of course we had now landed where no one wants to land. The waiter laid a garish red place mat of washable plastic in front of each of us, as if we were children. Michaela put her school French to use to order and blushed as the waiter departed with a “merci, madame.”

The waiter brought a can of beer and poured it for me while we watched in devotion. No sooner had we whispered our “merci” than Michaela said she had actually just ordered water. I drank the bitter Scandinavian import and in my weariness would have loved to lay my head on the table. I had to squeeze past barrels and sacks lining the narrow hallway to the restroom. From the depths of the building someone was coming toward me and going through the exact same motions. Just before we met we both dodged simultaneously to one side. So then, my doppel-gänger dwells here. My beer proved to be as expensive as my omelet. We wrote a few postcards, one to you.

The whole time we heard music outside, a band that must have been playing nearby. Aware of how much his curiosity pleased Mamus, Robert insisted that we had to move on. He was all the more disappointed then when there was no stage, no audience to be found anywhere, as if the Beatles, Neil Young, and Elton John were just hanging in the Paris air.

A Japanese man was sitting at a corner in the midst of some instruments, with a frame attached to his shoulders to hold his harmonica and a guitar across his knees. It took a moment for me to realize that we were standing before the answer to our riddle. This Japanese fellow was the real thing, the true Orpheus of Paris. During “Heart of Gold,” when he wasn’t playing his harmonica, a little white cloud of breath formed in the cold air as if he were literally singing his soul out.

We listened in admiration for a while. I gave him what francs I had left, which felt very satisfying. Happiness and indifference seemed interchangeable. We could stay here or leave on the bus, it was all good.

During the final “tour of Paris lights,” which was really just part of the return trip, I fell asleep. I had the feeling I kept waking up every few minutes but without ever letting go of my dream. At one point I have to get back as fast as possible, suddenly my pass reads SL instead of EL.⁴³ I can’t find my uniform anywhere in the apartment. I’m angry because I really didn’t want this leave in the first place and am now sitting without my uniform on a train that stays longer and longer at each station in order to keep to its schedule of arrivals and departures. The sunlight is so dazzling outside that the names of the stations are illegible. No one at the base gate will believe I’m a soldier. Then I remember my short-clipped haircut. I keep tugging at it, practicing how I’ll use it as proof.

Instead of my ticket I pull out currency and hold it as if I’m looking at a pocket watch. It’s a ten-franc bill. Which means I have ten minutes to get back. Although one franc after the other goes by, I’m not worried. I know that I’m dreaming and that I only have to wait a bit and I’ll be able to wake myself up and be in Paris. Once in Paris I’ll sell my watch in order to pay for my stay there. I reach into my pocket. Instead of a watch I keep pulling out ten-franc bills. I calculate how many times I’ll have to do this to be able to stay for a day, a week, a year.

Even though the travelers with whom I share the compartment are behaving more and more like schoolkids on an outing and dazzle one another’s eyes with West German passes, which they hold in the palms of their hands like pocket mirrors, I remain calm because, after all, I have my stuff. I am convinced that I can present my things at least as fast as they can show their passes, because my yo-yo hand is becoming increasingly deft now at catching and tossing brightly colored pieces of fruit as if they were tennis balls. And not just that. I give each piece of fruit a name. How easy French is, I am reading it from a little blackboard that appears with each piece of fruit — I don’t even have to learn vocabulary. Not until I catch the same piece of fruit twice in a row — it shimmers a dull orange and has five syllables — do I realize that my voice changes with each piece of fruit and that for some time now I’ve been singing a melody. To catch the attention of my fellow travelers I have to keep fruit moving in sequence at juggler’s speed, otherwise the music that accompanies my movements will go unnoticed. But in the next moment I regret this new tempo. It is impossible to pronounce polysyllabic words at anything close to full length. The merci fruit flies toward me twice, but both times all I manage is just a mers. Mers, I croak, mers. My voice is gone. No matter in what rich colors the fruit glistens, all I can croak each time is mers, mers, just mers. My fellow travelers make a joke of trying to snatch my fruit away. I am outraged by this. Mamus encourages them, in fact, because she thinks she’s doing precisely what I want. I scream at Mamus, but before I can see her face, the compartment door is flung open. In the same moment all the hand mirrors are flashed in sync at the badge on the border guard’s cap. He nods and is about to close the door again when his glance falls on me. I raise my hand, but only as if to greet him, because even I no longer believe that any fruit will be flying toward me. Everyone groans. Because of me we are being shunted to a sidetrack.

Your Heinrich

Wednesday, Feb. 7, ’90

Dear Jo,

At some point you will get a postcard proving that we were in Paris.

On Monday, the day after our return, we learned purely by chance that Aunt Trockel, the woman who looked after Robert, had died. Just three weeks ago, while we were in Offenburg, she cooked for him and looked after him. She was no longer among the living when we wrote her from Paris. Our last visit with her at New Year’s had been such fun.⁴⁴

Aunt Trockel was Michaela’s first friend in Altenburg (and maybe her only one too). Michaela claims that Aunt Trockel resembled Virginia Woolf a bit. I disagree. To me it always looked as if she had far too many long, crooked teeth in her mouth. Aunt Trockel avoided smiling or even laughing because then her ivories were bared to the gums. If she laughed anyway, she automatically put a hand to her mouth, which looked like an affectation. Her invitations always terrified me a little, for ever since she stopped working in the variety store, what we were treated to was all the stuff that had run through her mind over the last week. Michaela always showed a patience that often left me flabbergasted, or even angry. But in Michaela’s eyes Aunt Trockel enjoyed total diplomatic immunity. For without Aunt Trockel’s support she might have had to throw in the towel as an actor.

What should I tell you about Paris? It was too late. For me it was like someone who upon his arrival — having longed for the day a thousand times over — learns that the person for whom he has eaten his heart out all his life has just left town.

During the two hours that the family was romping on the Eiffel Tower and I could do whatever I wanted, the wall-demon took possession of me. I panicked, as if I had to decide whether to stay or leave, even though I was in control of my senses the whole time.

Why should articles be an agony for me? In principle they’re just stories. Concrete lead, everyday situation, focus, then pack it full of all the facts you know, maybe a couple of similar cases, finally the closing surprise pirouette that leads you back to the beginning — that at least is how Jörg the engineer describes it. He reads newspapers all day to expand his repertoire of tricks and twists. Jörg has managed to smuggle his way onto the Commission Against Corruption and Abuse of Office as the representative of the New Forum. That will supply him with our future headline stories, free delivery included.

I’m awake between four and five every morning. I’m slowly getting used to it. I listen to the radio or study grammar books. I’m a diligent élève in the office — make coffee, sort what little mail there is, deal with the telephone and the stove, edit as I type, and practice writing news articles. My concluding initials, however, betray me. If I don’t capitalize them, the alien becomes a classical et.⁴⁵

I’m afraid above all of careless mistakes and the unknown — of some miscalculation or the printer’s vagaries or what will be in the mail. I live here in an oasis. Michaela tells herself that everything’s fine at the theater, but it’s a disaster. My mother gulps down tranquilizers before going to the clinic. And what Robert has to say about school isn’t exactly amusing either. I’m amazed these kids aren’t turning into cynics. You have to love them just for that.

I spent the afternoon today with Larschen, an old farmer who has assured us several times that he’s waited to have a paper like ours to read for more than half his life. He ignored my objection that it doesn’t exist yet. The whole revolution, he claims, would be nothing without people like us, who do something with possibilities. He mumbled the first two syllables of “revolution,” turned the third into a trumpet blast, and swallowed the last. “Do something!” is his battle cry.

He wrote his memoirs for his family, for his three granddaughters, but without any hope of ever being published. When I asked him to take over the “Tips for Garden and Field” column, he just asked about length and deadlines and offered to deliver his text on our manuscript paper — he owns a typewriter.

Fred, who’s supposed to organize sales and always looks as serious as an elector prince painted by Cranach calls Larschen “Snowcap,” because of his towering mass of thick white hair.

Our family is slowly expanding. We’ll have a secretary starting in March, Ilona, who currently helps out only part-time. Her glasses are way too big for her little head, a grandmother who flirts with the line “and I ain’t even forty.” For Ilona men like Jörg and Georg have a purpose in life, the newspaper, whereas Fred and I, the born peons, should be happy just to lend a hand. Mention a name, and you can be certain Ilona knows the person and has an opinion of them, usually a poor one. No sooner has she made her disparaging remark than she takes a frightened look around and whispers, “Oh m’god, did I really say that?”

For Marion, Jörg’s wife, the pecking order is unclear. She is the only one who addresses me with the formal pronoun, and likes to talk about the sacrifice I’m making. She thinks I abandoned the theater for the sake of the general welfare, says I’ve given up what is best and most beautiful, and then gazes at me very fondly. She’s already been given notice as the librarian at some branch mine of the Brown Coal Combinat, and says she can well understand what it means to turn your back on art. Then she nods and raises her already raised eyebrows even higher as if waiting for me to agree. Ilona thinks Marion looks like Mireille Matheiu. She reminds me more of a silent-film actress whose photo I ran across in a book from Reclam, landscape format as I recall.⁴⁶ Marion will be working for us half days starting in March. Georg bestowed on her the title of editorial secretary.

Robert, who is on vacation, stops by the office around one o’clock. Then we go together to innkeeper Gallus, who recently granted us the privilege of a reserved table. Of course everyone is welcome, but they won’t find a seat. We have a table for four set aside for us at one p.m. Soup, main course, and dessert cost between two fifty and four marks. The accompanying status, however, can hardly be overestimated. Our innkeeper is in his early sixties, but smooth cheeks and observant eyes constantly darting back and forth lend his face a youthful look. He takes special delight in asking questions like: “Have you protested yet?” None of us knows what he means. “And you call yourselves a newspaper?” We look contrite. “They’re opening the market up to anyone who wants to jump in, that shouldn’t be, should it?” His usual conclusion then is the assertion that the new market economy is going to destroy old established local businesses. “They’re ruining their own people! Am I right, or not?”

By “their own people” he means in particular the illustrious circle with tables reserved for noon. The nooners can choose among three dishes; we have to take whatever’s left. The nooners are Altenburg’s senators, its noblemen of commerce and crafts. These good dozen quaint old gentlemen have apparently chosen a lady to preside over each table — all elderly ladies, who betray their nobility by their stiff posture at table.

In their eyes we’re parvenus who bear keeping an eye on. Thus far they’ve only approached us in writing, although they’ve been very frugal about it. Our innkeeper is forever handing us the torn-off margins of newspapers or receipts ripped in half, on which there’s often only a name and address, along with an added: “Knows something.”

On days when these notes are passed along, we’re treated with special attention. Instead of plying us with questions, he gives the shiny table several extra swipes. While he serves, his belly bumps against a shoulder. When we pay the bill he rummages through his change, pulls up short, fully perplexed — even after our second “That’s fine!”—and with wide eyes lets the coins drop back into his change purse. Just as we’re about to stand up, he braces one hand against the table, lowers his head conspiratorially, and slips the note out on the table. “Lend an ear,” he says, “this is quite a case, famous man, Dippel, doesn’t mean anything to you? Dippel! Ran a nursery, major operation. The Botanical Garden, that’s his work, did all the landscaping for Dietrich, sewing machine Dietrich, and around the train station, all Dippel, famous man actually, it was all taken away, had never been a Nazi, all confiscated, totally unfair, put out, tossed out of his own house, pay a visit, be worth your time, definitely.” We promise to follow the lead first thing and thank him for the tip. At which point our innkeeper’s eyes close, his lips pucker with satisfaction. “Knew I could depend on you,” he says, extending his big soft hand as if it were a gift for each of us, including Robert.

Hugs, Enrico

PS: Yesterday morning a smiling man in a dark blue dederon smock stopped in. He wanted to place an ad, asked for pen and paper, drew a square box, and began to write. At one point he had to make a call to ask the price of wooden ladders. There was joy in his every word, his every movement. I made a mental note of even his most casual gestures — like the way he shoved the page at me and then rapped it with his pudgy fingers ending in short, black-rimmed nails.

When I told him the price of the ad (one mark eighty per column millimeter), he whistled through his teeth, then angled to one side to reach under his smock and pull out his wallet, from which several hundreds spilled out over the desk. He would take care of that now, he said, and thumbed four Karl Marxes out onto the desk.

I said thank you, but he didn’t budge. I said that his ad would appear on February 16th in twenty thousand copies, at ninety pfennigs a copy. When he still showed no signs of departing, I listed our various columns: news, local politics, business, history, art, and sports, and also promised crossword puzzles, a horoscope, and caricatures. He nodded his approval. Unfortunately he didn’t have much time, was going to have to leave. I said that I didn’t want to keep him. “But now,” he said, “I need the receipt.”

A receipt. I knew nothing about receipts. I began searching and tried to make my motions look purposeful. He said he’d be satisfied with just a normal sheet of paper as long as it was “banged with a seal.” At just that moment I found our Offenburg bag of gewgaws and among them was, in fact, a receipt book, incredibly practical, including carbon paper, and cardboard backing, so that even without instructions I might have managed to fill the thing out.

Without his amiability flagging in the least, our customer apologized and said it had to be stamped, otherwise that lovely West-style receipt was of no use to him. He asked me to send him a stamped version, he trusted us. He rapped the table once more in farewell.

Monday, Feb. 12, ’90

Dear Jo,

(Maybe what life is about is finding an appropriate layout for yourself.) I never realized what layout actually means. It wasn’t until after I saw how easy it is to calculate the size of an article so that it can be transferred to the page proof that I once again believed we were going to make it. Layout is our map, our constitution, our Lord’s Prayer. Layout (Jörg accents it on the first syllable, Georg on the second) prevents you from being unfair and yielding to your own biases, there’s no showing favor or disfavor, there’s no forgetting. Layout is civilization and law, it’s courtesy and decorum, a taskmaster who grants you your freedom.

The work itself was an orgy. The fiat to complete the job was larger than our wills, than our energies, and immunized us against exhaustion. It grabbed hold of us like a demon, a three-headed, six-handed monster. A surgery team probably knows something of the same frenzy. Only now can I appreciate what a miracle a newspaper without blank spaces really is.

The days leading up to it, however, were a nightmare, as if our ship were capsizing at launching. We were drowning in material, but whole pages were still empty. The worst was Georg, who wouldn’t sign off on anything, not even his own articles. The first issue was supposed to be something special.

When Fred likewise put his two cents in — as head of sales he’d be the one that readers would first vent their anger on — Jörg threw him out of the room.

Sunday morning the only page in the folder was Jan Steen’s. The other eleven still lay ahead of us. Georg’s wife, Franka, took her boys to church so that Georg could polish his gas-station article in the living room, Jörg did yet another rewrite of his lead article, I paged through dictionaries (I now know how to spell mise en scène) and tended the stove. Fred went to Offenburg to pick up the VW bus. On the evening before he had laid linoleum in the room opposite. It’s to be our second office.

Around eleven o’clock the doorbell rang. Three men wanted to see Georg and Fred, claimed that they had an appointment, had made his acquaintance at the public market. They hung their long coats on the coatrack, three in a row. The short fellow in charge wrinkled his nose and began snooping about the room, he had to touch everything, pick up everything. His fingers set the postal scales into stormy motion. He patted the stove tiles and the table, gave the wood on the chair arms a once-over with a thumbnail, and told his adjutants to rap the ceiling beams. “Incredible,” was his diagnosis, “truly incredible.”

His outfit — brown corduroy pants, dark green sport coat, yellow westover⁴⁷ —had a refined look compared to those of his lackeys, whose taste ran to lilac and burgundy. Once their undersize boss had shaken our hands and taken a seat, he couldn’t hold back, he had to share his impressions of this “legacy of Communism.”

Jörg went right on hammering away at the “green monster,” snorting like Sviatoslav Richter. Each time their boss paused to catch his breath, the colorful guys jumped in to announce their own observations, calling us enthusiasts, men who were rolling up their sleeves at last.

When I asked their leader what his profession was, he stood up and with profuse apologies snapped business cards onto the table, as if playing a jack of trumps. Followed instantly by two aces. I was dealing with the “managing director” of the newspaper in Giessen, plus two of his editors.

While we talked and talked, I fetched our page proofs from their cubbyhole and spread them out over the table. As if decorating a table with gifts, I laid the photographs and articles on my side. To cap it off I picked up our layout design and gazed upon it with the certainty of a magician who has pulled off his trick.

The managing director bent forward, spread his arms, and exclaimed, “Hot type! You’re working with hot type?” For a moment I mistook the little tufts of hair on his fingers for flies. “You don’t even know what that is,” he barked at his lackeys, smiled at me, passed a hand over the white sheets of paper, and pointed his chin at the layout design. “That’s how it’s going to look?”

I nodded.

“Fine, fine,” the managing director said, and began asking me enigmatic questions — for instance, how many points the headlines and the subhead had — but fortunately each time provided the answer himself: twenty-two, or eighteen, and twelve for the subhead. And the text? Right, eight. And the font? We gazed out over the wide, white sea that lay placidly before us. “I haven’t even asked you,” he said, suddenly spinning around, “for your permission.”

“But of course,” I said, casting my eyes back to the horizon. Jörg hammered away incessantly at his keyboard.

The managing director, who had his jacket off by now, stretched imperious arms. His boys hurried over and eagerly undid his cuff links. He meticulously rolled up his sleeves. Suddenly his hands were hovering over the proofs, darting here and there like dragonflies above water, halting briefly, only to begin tracing their invisible pattern.

He demanded a pencil, typometer, and pocket calculator—“A slip of paper will do too”—stepped back briefly, then set to work.

What followed was an hour during which for the first time I learned something that might prove useful for earning my daily bread — that is, a craft. And for the first time since leaving school, I solved an equation with an unknown.

The managing director was not interested in getting rid of nouns and increasing the number of verbs, or in varying sentence structure, while keeping the meaning clear; the managing director asked about the number of characters and lines, about which photo belonged with which article, about what was intended for two or three columns. His hands had now become mice scurrying across the paper.

My article on Dippel the landscape gardener was six lines too long in both columns. I deleted and was terrified by how easy it was. The managing editor presented me with my next cutting job.

Life came coursing back into me. The page was finished. The managing director was already planning the next when Georg appeared and invited us all — including our guests from Giessen — to a midday meal. In their hunger the adjutants forgot the purpose of their boss’s outstretched arms. “Cuff links,” he hissed, and both began rummaging in their jacket pockets.

At first I assumed we would finish by eight that evening. All we had to do was calculate and cut. Ten o’clock came, midnight, then one, then three. Around four we slipped the pages into their folder. The best part was tidying up. Georg cleaned the stove, Jörg his electric typewriter. Finally we found ourselves sitting next to the folder lying there ready to be handed on — as if waiting for our baby to fall asleep.

Tomorrow we’ll drive over to proofread.

Hugs, E.

PS: Vera sends her greetings. She called from Beirut. Her mother-in-law (who bears the lovely name Athena) is ill and is resisting any idea of traveling to Berlin. Nicola is toying with the notion of giving up his shop in Berlin and taking over his dead father’s. The building is in ruins, not one stone left on top of another. But the more expensive fabrics were in the cellar and survived both bombing and plundering. Mother and son see this as a sign and wonder. Apparently no one has any idea what role Vera is to play in these plans, or at least she doesn’t. And since my sister is famous for taking offense if she doesn’t feel as if she’s the center of attention, I try to offer every conceivable declaration of my love. It’s questionable, however, if my letters even reach her. If you want to give it a try — Madame Vera Barakat, Beirut — Starco area — Wadi aboujmil, the building next to Alliance College—4th floor.