New Lives

Tuesday, Feb. 13, ’90

Dear Jo,

This past week I have had more new, and strange, encounters than ever I used to in a year. The day before yesterday⁴⁸ I was working over a couple of lines about the new animal shelter (it has yet to become an animal shelter, more like a wild zoo, previously the dog division of the VP).⁴⁹ I had enough material, and the headline too, but was getting nowhere writing it. Either it sounded too sentimental or too aloof. I needed a thousand five hundred characters, but no more. An hour into it and I still hadn’t put together one reasonable sentence. It was as if I had been bewitched. When I went to add coal to the stove, it had gone out. And I couldn’t get rid of the odor of “wet dog.” I washed my hands, sniffed at the wastepaper basket, checked behind the typewriter, cursed. The moment I put my fingers to the keyboard, there was the “wet dog” again.

I dreamed the whole night through and felt befuddled all morning. I had appointments the next day in Meuselwitz and Lucka, and in between I collected news in nearby villages and had the secretary in Wintersdorf make me some chamomile tea.

Back at the office I found some photos in my cubbyhole, including the ones I had made at the animal shelter. There were still hot embers in the stove. This time I stuffed it with briquettes, as if planning to work the night, and sat myself down at the typewriter.

My eyes hurt. From time to time a shiver went up my back. The cold is leaving my bones, I told myself. The idea comforted me. But then — it sounds more mysterious than it was — I had the vague sense that someone behind me had just carefully set a hat on my head.

A man was seated at the table — if we haven’t locked the door, no one pays much attention to our hours in any case — someone whom I knew from somewhere, someone I associated with good news of some sort, not some local folklorist.

“Don’t let me disturb you,” he said very amiably, and by way of greeting offered a hint of a bow. “I shall wait with all due respect, it is solely my fault that we have failed to meet, please, do continue.” That’s more or less how he put it, as if it would be perfectly all right if I ignored him and went on typing. His whole demeanor matched what one imagines a proper older gentleman should be — though he’s forty at most. His choice of words and pronunciation reminded me of Hungarian students studying at Jena, who have learned their German from Rilke and Hoffmannsthal — his rolled “r” fit nicely as well.

“We had an appointment at twelve,” he said, trying to jog my memory. “I hope that my failure to keep it has not given rise to any difficulties for you. I am at your service, whenever it suits your conveniency.” Conveniency! He used words that he evidently dared to utter only with a bow. I was just about to say that I didn’t recall an appointment, when a sound arose from his direction, a decorous yowl — or how do you describe a dog yawning? So that was it. The dog in the animal shelter photos. And him next to it, clearly in focus, although his glasses had reflected the flash. He had spelled his name for me, but I had forgotten to ask for his address and profession, had been angry at myself for not doing it. So I could make up for it now.

I had wanted to characterize the dog as “a little wolflike,” above all the muzzle, its build not as powerful as that of a German shepherd, the pelt blackish gray. It’s blind in one eye. Its fate was to be the framework for my article.

“Everyone will read about your good deed,” I said, walking over and handing him the photos. He looked through them, but before I could sit down again or had time to learn his name, there they were in front of me again, on the edge of the table. What I really wanted was to ask him to repeat the trick — he had tossed the little stack so casually with a flick of the wrist. There was nothing arrogant about it, more an expression of his keeping a sympathetic distance toward himself.

He bent down to the dog at his side — a singsong, no, a calming lullaby, and in English!

“I hope I need fear no indiscretions,” he exclaimed with what I discovered was an English accent. “I understand nothing of literature and eternity,” he continued. “My visions are of another sort!” I had no idea why he had said this, and assumed I had missed something.

He merely wanted to remark, he said, coming to my aid, that it would be better if people who were the subject of an article did not read it in print themselves. He could not help being aware of one thing or another that was publicly reported about him. Often it was the journalists themselves — few who called themselves that deserved the proud title — who compelled him to read such things and then were amazed…he waved me off, and in the next moment was holding a business card between his fingers—“better one too many than none at all”—and slipped it across the table to me.

Clemens von Barrista — white lettering on black. Nothing else. But that wasn’t how he had spelled it for me. But it seemed familiar all the same.

You would of course have no real picture of Barrista were I to leave out a description of his eyes — compared to his glasses, yours are a windowpane. Huge google-eyes, as if he’s peering through a peephole. A dark mustache provides makeshift cover for his harelip and, together with his black hair, makes his acne-scarred face look even more pallid. Evidently he has come to terms with his looks — not a trace of insecurity. He pushed back from the table a little, his white shirt spread taut across his little potbelly.

The more I lost myself in gazing at him, the less I knew what I was supposed to do. At which point Clemens von Barrista stood up and said something like, “There’s nothing to be done,” and offered his hand in farewell. Where had my mind been?

“Please do sit down,” I said quickly. “Make yourself comfortable.” He thanked me, looked about the office, and, once he was seated again, fell back into his peculiar German that I can barely reproduce, if at all. He made fun of our hard chairs, or better, he praised a good armchair as the “hallmark” of reason, of reason thirsting for deeds, hungry for deeds, and sang a hymn in praise of luxury, of humankind’s rebirth in a spirit of luxury. His patois culminated in the aphorism: “The beautiful would appear beautiful, the good may be good, but better is better!”

I found his insinuations tactless, removed the pillow from my swivel chair, and offered it to him. “There’s not a lot of luxury here,” I said.

That wasn’t what he meant, not for the world! It had been a quote, intended as a compliment, a quote from the treasure chest of a relative, of a true friend of animals, an adage that had become dear to his heart.

“What is it you would have of me? How may I be of service?” I asked, sensing how his stilted phrasing was already rubbing off on me.

Clemens von Barrista looked up from the bottom of the sea, bowed slightly, and said without any accent whatever, “You hoped to have reached your decision by today.”

After a bow that imitated his I replied we had first met each other on Tuesday,⁵⁰ at the Volkspolizei kennel, where, much to my regret, we had barely spoken and had departed without arranging any further meeting…

“I banged my left knee at your place yesterday,” he said, flaring up, “because the light wasn’t working, and still isn’t.” With each word he gained better control over his exasperation. “We sat here and I offered suggestions. Your newspaper”—he took off his glasses and massaged his eyes with thumb and forefinger—“was recommended to me!” I expressed my regret that I knew nothing of this.

“Then you are not Herr Schröder?” His google-eyes were now peering through his glasses again.

I introduced myself, mentioned again our meeting at the VP kennel, and was about to step out and turn on the vestibule light, when he halted me with a vigorous motion of his upper body.

“My concern is the visit of the hereditary prince!”

Finally the coin dropped. Of course I knew about the prince’s ambassador. Barrista is an acquaintance, if not to say admirer, of Vera’s. Except that I had pictured him quite differently.

“We’ve been notified of your visit, accompanied, of course, by the loveliest expectations on all sides,” I offered by way of apology. I had jumped up, but then, as if this knowledge had robbed me of my energies, I realized that I was having trouble speaking. I was suddenly afraid I might spoil things, very important things. Hadn’t a smile meandered across his lips at my mention of “loveliest expectations on all sides”? It can’t have been just my fault that I caught only some words, a few fragments of a sermon, like an AM broadcast after nine at night. “…excellent reputation!..accomplishments, commitment, will…substantial…can well imagine…new energy, new energies…waiting for this…resurrected out of…trust…impeccable…times such as these…speculating…congratulations, yes, my congratulations.”

He was doling out compliments. That much I understood. His turns of phrase had me on the verge of laughter. “We bid you the warmest of welcomes. We do indeed,” I managed to say, but was afraid it may have sounded like a parody. I weighed words in my mouth as if they were fillings that had fallen out, and it wouldn’t have taken much and I would have bowed and scraped like a lackey.

Barrista had warmed to his topic, spoke, if I rightly recall, without accent now and rubbed his hands as if under a tap. With total determination he cried, “Not I! I am not one of those for whom speech is silver and silence gold. Balderdash, no, no, my good man,” he said with a smile, “special considerations not even on behalf of those involved, even a child knows that, truly, even a child. Moaning and groaning, the sooner the better, wean themselves, aware of that myself, does no good, no training, can’t fail to be noticed, no one left, nowhere, no father confessor, unoccupied position, second-rank, third-rank, an enormous transformation, absolute void, on this side and that, unique chance!”

I was no longer trying to follow his leaps and bounds from one thought to another, and assembled a few sentences about myself instead. Sprawled now on his chair, Barrista gave me exaggerated nods as I started to speak, raised his eyebrows, and with a flood of ahs and ohs urged me on — his shy pupil, who kept to short statements in order to maintain his footing. It was all so terribly simpleminded, but his encouragement calmed me. When I fell silent, Barrista look disconcerted. What did he expect? I shrugged.

“Well, he’ll probably not be stopping by now,” he sighed, and rummaged in his pants pocket. Before I could ask whom he meant, he apologized. “Oh, beg your pardon. It really is late.” He scrutinized a wristwatch without its strap. “Ten till twelve,” he said, suppressing a yawn.

“Ten till twelve?”

“My first thought,” he said, ignoring my astonishment, “was that your eyes were shining with enthusiasm. But, my dear Herr Türmer, you need to look after yourself. May I give you a ride, may I take you home?”

I pointed to the window. “I have my own—” was all I managed. I meant my car.

“Then perhaps I may escort you?” He extracted two slightly used red candles from an attaché case that I had not noticed until then, held the wicks together, and lit them both at the same time with a lighter. A candle in each hand, the attaché case under his left arm, he stood there like a Saxon Christmas ornament, his deep-sea eyes directed at me. You know my weakness for courteous people, but I had to smile all the same. He waited until I had gathered up my things. The wolf scraped with its front paws. Before I turned off the light, I noticed wax running down over Barrista’s hands and dripping on the floorboards in front of the wolf’s muzzle. I edged past the two of them, opened the door to the small antechamber, then the one to the vestibule, where I groped for the switch.

“Why do you mistrust me?” he asked. His eyes swam toward me. The switch clicked, but nothing happened. “No problem, no problem,” he cried, raising the candles higher. I was embarrassed and angry, and especially the latter because I could hear Fred’s excuses.

“I have made it my firm custom to be prepared for anything here in the East.” He again gave a hint of an apologetic bow, because he would not let me precede him. “Dealing with people is a fine art, truly a fine art.” Undaunted, he hobbled ahead of me, holding the burning candles as far away from his body as circumstances allowed. “Work must be learned as well, and never make any exceptions to that!” He anticipated my move and opened the front door with his elbow. The draft blew out the candles. Clemens von Barrista, however, strode ahead by the streetlamp’s murky glow as if he himself were still lighting the way. Then the bell of Martin Luther Church began to toll. The next moment the streetlamps went out. A brief flicker, and night had swallowed Barrista and his wolf. For a while I still heard footsteps and his English singsong. I called out my good-byes twice in his wake, and waited for the lights of his car to come on at any moment. But it stayed dark, and after the last toll of the bell there was universal silence.

I slept like a stone.

Enrico

PS: When I got to the office today, Jörg was already fully informed and asked what I thought of Barrista. “A special case,” I said, and immediately wanted to correct myself. I don’t like the term. But Jörg agreed with me at once. “A special case” was probably the best way to put it. “But whatever the case,” he said, turning to Georg, “Barrista wants us! Us and nobody else.”

Jörg had dropped by the Wenzel at eight o’clock, where he had in fact found Barrista eating breakfast and joined him in “beheading a soft-boiled egg,” as he put it. Barrista had not only filled him in on his fellow guests, but was also able to mimic their gestures and speech. It had struck Jörg as “funny as hell!”

What Barrista had to say about the hereditary prince had, despite requisite caution, pricked his — Jörg’s — interest and curiosity about the old gentleman’s upcoming visit. Barrista’s sole proviso had been a “reasonable outcome of the election.”

When Fred showed up, I took him to task. But he just turned on his heels, leaving both doors wide open behind him — and switched on the light. The vestibule was bathed in previously unknown radiance. Fred claimed he had put in new bulbs yesterday, something everyone but me had noticed…

Here’s hoping you at least believe me,

Your E.

Saturday, Feb. 17, ’90

Dear Jo,

And now I’ve typed your name once again, but the man who wrote you that previous letter, the very same man who two and a half days ago walked out on Market Square with bundles of newspapers, seems so strange and childlike to me. Don’t expect any epiphanies! It was all terribly secular and ordinary. As I paged through the newspaper that had seemed so faraway and mysterious during proofreading, I was relieved just to find no white spots. It all had to go so fast. The drivers had been sitting around on their hands since Wednesday. The volunteers from klartext days had divvied up the Konsum Markets among themselves. The telephone never stopped ringing. I didn’t even finish the champagne that Jörg treated us to. Georg gave Robert a conductor’s satchel, plus a supply of small change. I slung an old pouch of crackled patent leather around my shoulder, the strap across my chest. Then we hustled off through the drizzle, each with two bundles of 250 copies.

Once at Market Square, near Sporen Strasse, we set down our bundles and massaged our fingers — they were numb and scarred purple from the cords. Five booths were huddled together as if afraid of the expanse of Market Square. A fruit and vegetable vendor took up residence closest to us. The D-MARKS ONLY sign hung above these splendors of paradise was as large as it was unnecessary. He called out the names of exotic fruits, but they might just as well have been oriental spices. The truly fabled wares, however, were the tomatoes and cucumbers, the pears and grapes. The few people scattered across Market Square could hardly have been the reason for his ballyhoos. His highly trained voice was the icing on the artificiality of the cake. He could have been trumpeting arias.

I worked at undoing the knots on my bundle, but never let anyone heading our way out of my eye. I expected every one of them to stop and ask whether we were selling that new newspaper, the Altenburg Weekly. Robert was staring at my hands. He was already so unsure of himself that it never occurred to him to hand me his pocketknife. But he readily let me drape a sheaf of papers over his forearm. I stood next to him and unfolded the front page with the masthead at eye level.

After several people had walked past us without asking about the paper, I suggested Robert speak to people. He needed to tell them what he had here. But as soon as anyone approached, instead of opening his mouth he stuck his newspaper arm out a little farther like a clumsy waiter. Michaela had told me it was irresponsible to “corrupt him with child labor.” It was too late now to send him away, he would just have to hold out.

I finally had no choice but to show him how it should be done. I left no one out. I fixed my eye on people, smiled, and spoke to them, even those who passed a little farther away did not escape. “Do you know about the new Altenburg Weekly?” I shouted. No one stopped, no one bought. They didn’t even look at me. That very morning a large article about us had appeared on the regional page of the LVZ.⁵¹ Even they thought we were important.

Now and then someone bought a fish sandwich. I don’t know how I would have felt if I had been alone. Robert’s presence was agony for me.

Suddenly an elderly woman came up, her shopping bag swaying back and forth, and asked us what we had to offer.

“Well now,” she said, eyeing the front page. Her coat was buttoned wrong and hung askew. “Then give me one.” Her arm plunged up to the elbow into her shopping bag. I asked for ninety pfennigs and handed her a newspaper from the middle of the stack. Her index finger poked around in her change until she found a one-mark piece. I dropped a ten-pfennig piece into her outstretched hand. After she had folded the paper and crammed it into her bag, she gazed at me as if trying to make sure just whom she had been dealing with, and then with a loud “good-bye” moved on.

It works, I thought. Just one success had turned me into an addict. I needed more. I handed the mark to Robert.

It wasn’t long before I hit the jackpot again. A slim man with smooth black hair held out a mark to me, waved me off as I held out his change, and smiled so affably that his eyes vanished into a tomcat’s little angled slits.

With that I lost all inhibition, walked over to two women, and asked them whether they already had their copy of the Altenburg Weekly, the new newspaper for the whole region. I fixed my attention on the younger one. Not until I was standing directly in front of her did I notice the countless wrinkles that blurred the traits of her girlish face. She reached for her wallet, when her companion, a woman dressed all in black, barked at me, asking what all this was about. “It’s not important!” the woman in black said, interrupting my reply. “Not important!” She slapped the back of her hand against the newspaper and shouted, “Ninety pfennigs? Ninety pfennigs!”

“Ninety pfennigs,” I insisted, and all I had to do in that moment was take the mark from the open palm of the gentler soul.

“It’s not important at all. Not important!”

The hand closed slowly, and I stared at the little fist, delicate enough to be porcelain.

Rage and desperation welled up in me. “Altenburg Weekly!” I yelled after them. “Altenburg Weekly!” I must have been heard as far away as Martin Luther Church.⁵²

Ah, Jo, you won’t understand how I could carry on like that over something so trivial. But suddenly it was all there again — the last six months, the fear, the desperation, the accusations, the theater and its horrors, the horror of my sickroom, my mother, Michaela, Vera, the whole bottomless pit. And Robert standing beside me, who had set his heart on those bundles, all one thousand copies.

Every bit of reticence left me. I don’t even know where the rhythm came from that I adopted to proclaim my AL-TEN-BURG-WEEK-LY! I hammered, banged, punched hard each time, aiming at the black core of my dactylic syllables. AL-TEN-BURG-WEEK-LY. I did it for Robert, for myself, for Michaela, for Georg und Jörg, for my mother and Vera, for the town, for the whole region. And after each verse, I breathed more easily. Someone held a two-mark piece under my nose, he actually demanded two copies and no change. And Robert likewise got rid of his first copy. The two of us quickly sold five papers, one after the other. As if trying to make up for what I had failed to do last autumn, I shouted my AL-TEN-BURG-WEEK-LY to the hammer strokes of SANC-TIONNEW-FO-RUM! This was my revolution now.

The fruit vendor evidently took it as a challenge and responded with a sirenlike yowl.

Ten minutes later I picked up two bundles and took up my post across from the Rathaus. From there the market booths looked like the coastline of home. I don’t know why — was I exhausted, had I taken a chill, did I miss Robert — at any rate my cries lost their power. After each verse I stopped to watch what was happening.

I changed positions again, this time farther up Market Square, at the corner leading to the Weiber Market. There were more people there. And I could watch Robert extending his arm to hold out newspapers to passersby. I was responsible for this tragedy. It wasn’t hard to imagine how his pride at seeing my name in the imprint, his admiration for the art of making a newspaper, how all that was suddenly collapsing. I had always been afraid the whole thing might fail — because of a lack of authorization, poor delivery, or our incompetence. I had never given sales a thought. If I was wrong about something like that, why shouldn’t I doubt everything, our entire strategy? What I wanted more than anything was to tell the whole world that we would be bringing the hereditary prince to Altenburg. Yes, suddenly I wanted that strange man, Clemens von Barrista, beside me. I found thinking about him somehow comforting. But I said nothing and let people pass by as if I were invisible. And then…

I had already grown so used to the fruit siren that I didn’t even notice at first. But something at any rate was different. It was now shouting “Weekly!” No, shouting isn’t even close. “Weeeekly, Weeeekly, Aaaltenburg Weeeekly!”—it stressed the first syllable, swallowed the second, then ascended from the depths and like a siren blared the A of Altenburg, his mouth stretched wide. And then came the unmistakable imperative: “Buy it, folks, buy it!” followed at once by the equally urgent “Only ninety pfennigs! Ninety pfennigs for the Aaaltenburg Weeeekly…” The beginning and end, the A-E, A-E rose into the air above Altenburg Market.

The town began slowly to come alive, as if the cry of the fruit vendor had found its way to both Altenburg North and Southeast.⁵³

A group of women surrounded me — they all bought and no one wanted change. To lend support, as they put it. One of them recognized me as the Herr Türmer from the theater, who had given that speech in the church.

My luck held. In a few minutes I had disposed of thirty copies. And it just kept up. I only had to hold up the newspaper and, once the fruit siren’s “Weeeekly” had died away, to repeat the idea, as if explaining to everyone around: Weekly, he means our Weekly. And then — at first I thought it was a woman’s voice — I realized that a new “Weeekly! Weeekly!” was Robert’s.

I didn’t need to say anything more, from then on people bought all on their own.

By day’s end it was so dark that I could barely make out faces. I could give change with my eyes closed, and I stuffed bills into my pants pockets. My feet were ice cold, I couldn’t even feel my toes now. The patent-leather pouch hung heavy at my neck. And whom do you suppose I sold my last copy to? Yes, to Clemens von Barrista. But he and his wolf didn’t seem to recognize me in the darkness. Or might I have been mistaken about that?

Robert was still busy, and it was only by his irrepressible smile that I could tell he could see me. Erwin, the fruit siren, didn’t want to hear anything about thanks. He handed me a sheet of paper, an ad — we’re to publish it every week — and gave me a hundred-D-mark bill! We left the rest of Robert’s copies with him; he planned to distribute them in his hometown of Fürth, in Franconia.

We started the walk home empty-handed, but our satchels were stuffed full and banged against our hips with every step. A record — one thousand, one-twentieth of the printing. In four hours Robert had made ninety marks (twenty pfennigs a copy), plus tips.

Jo, my dear friend. What a delight it is to sell something you’ve made yourself. My laurel wreath is woven from the oak leaves on every coin.

Your E.

PS: Your copy is being sent in a wrapper. Unfortunately the photographs are very dark.

Tuesday, Feb. 20, ’90

Dear Jo,

We’ve been working like the devil. And I still didn’t get home until after midnight.⁵⁴ But four hours of sleep are enough, and since I pass the time writing letters, I’m gradually learning to love these long mornings.⁵⁵

I won’t bore you with newspaper stuff, but I do have to tell you something I wouldn’t have mentioned if it hadn’t been the cause of our first crisis.⁵⁶

Have I ever told you about the Prophet? He’s an odd duck. Everyone notices that right off. The Prophet’s mouth is constantly in motion, as if he has just sampled something and is about to announce what it tastes like. He keeps his chin jutted out, so that his beard, which appears to have the consistency of cotton candy, is thrust menacingly forward.

During the demonstration after the wall came down, he demanded the creation of a soviet republic. He’s always full of surprises.⁵⁷

The Prophet arrived early to honor our first-issue celebration⁵⁸ with his presence, but quickly retreated into a corner. As we’ve since come to know, he didn’t like the look of our guests. Jörg’s and Georg’s invitations had gone out — as is only proper for a newspaper — to the town council, to the district council, to all political parties (with the exception of the comrades), to the museums and the theater, to Guelphs and Ghibellenes. The only guests to arrive on time, however, were members of the old officialdom, because all the rest, those who felt they naturally belonged at our side (the reception was held in the office of the New Forum), were slow to make an appearance since they had been out selling and delivering our newspaper.

Even the “bigwigs,” as the Prophet later called them, seemed out of sorts. Either they didn’t want to talk with one another but with “fresh faces” instead, or they were very skittish. When I suggested to the mayor that I wanted to interview him soon, he removed his glasses, rubbed his eyes for a good while, and then asked, “What is it you want from me?” Before I could reply, he exclaimed, “Do you know what I’m going to do? Not one thing. I’ve done far too much already!” And sad to say Jörg and Georg weren’t exactly at the top of their form, either. Jörg kept pumping the mayor’s hand and had hardly been able to unlock his jaw to thank him for a monstrous pot of cyclamens. Georg gazed down on his well-wishers with all the earnestness of a Don Quixote, amazed that the same people he wanted to take on were smiling and squirming at his feet. But all this just in passing.

By the time Dr. Schumacher, the mayor of Offenburg, entered the room surrounded by his minions — with roses for the ladies and a Dictaphone for us — the bigwigs had fled the scene. Once the citizens of Offenburg had vanished and just our sort, as Michaela might have put it, were still amusing themselves, the Prophet tapped his glass with a spoon, jutted out his beard, and asked in a loud voice, “What’s in the Altenburg Weekly?”

He gave a table of contents, page by page. It sounded more than just a bit too droll, but I laughed along — certain that kudos would follow. But by the time he got to Jan Steen’s ad, which he called a mockery of our customers and readers, the effrontery of his speech began to dawn on me. “What was it we wanted?” the Prophet thundered, paused — while his mouth began the search for some new taste — and asked in a tone of bitterest accusation, “No, what was it you wanted?” And it was not a rhetorical question. But to make a scene? Because of this crazy man?

He laid into each of us, even nitpicked at my gardener Dippel article. There hadn’t been one thing in our paper he couldn’t read these days in the Leipziger Volkszeitung.

And finally, alluding to our launching celebration, he added, “Are you once again the lackeys of authority, the lackeys of the same bigwigs who harassed us for forty years?”

Naturally I hoped that one of our guests would defend us. They had been listening to the Prophet somewhat too eagerly while they sipped at our wine and champagne. Only Wolfgang the Hulk and his wife bravely shook their heads, but even they did not risk protesting aloud.

Presumably they considered any disagreement superfluous, that a response would lend this farce too much significance. “What do you plan to do?” the Prophet boomed in conclusion and, after shooting a glance around the room, marched straight out the open door.

Now people began to mimic and make fun of him. The mood grew more relaxed, and there was even some dancing after Fred discovered a piano in an adjoining room and “cracked” the fallboard. Although I was glad that Barrista had been spared the crazy man’s theatrics, I also regretted that our invitation had evidently not reached him in time.

On Friday Georg confessed that it never would have occurred to him in the old days to drink champagne with bigwigs, and I didn’t realize at first just what he was getting at. But Marion now joined in the self-flagellation. Suddenly once again none of our articles was good enough for them. It was totally absurd. Even Jörg strewed ashes on his head and no longer understood why we had invited erstwhile officialdom. When I asked him what harm the invitations had done, a hush first fell over the room. “They harmed our reputation,” Georg said finally, and Marion added, “Our dignity.”

“Not mine,” I replied, which initiated a great silence that didn’t lift until yesterday.

Hugs, Enrico

PS: We’ve heard that we were rebuked as idolaters from a Protestant pulpit last Sunday — because of the horoscope on the next-to-last page.

Tuesday, Feb. 20, ’90

Dear Frau Hansen,

If you knew what it had cost me to bring myself to ask Frau *** for your address. I puffed myself up like a fourteen-year-old and claimed you had promised to show me Rome.⁵⁹

I’m sorry I was of so little help to you and that it was on our account that you missed meeting the museum staff. To make up for it, I’m enclosing the little Reclam volume⁶⁰ and a few other items about the pavilion. I’ve prepared a list of a dozen people for Frau *** to interview and have already sent it to her. I think that ultimately it doesn’t really matter with whom she talks. The best choices are left to chance.⁶¹

When do you plan to or when will you be able to come back again? I would love to know for all sorts of reasons.

With warmest regards, Your Enrico T.

Saturday, Feb. 24, ’90

Dear Jo,

Yesterday, as if meeting me for an appointment, Barrista came bounding down the long stairway of the Catholic rectory. The man at the front door with whom he’d been talking watched us without budging from the spot. Which was why I thought Barrista would be returning to him. Instead, he asked if he could join me, and was soon sitting in the passenger seat with the wolf in the middle behind us. He had made a find. “A Madonna,” Barrista said, “a Madonna, Herr Türmer, a Madonna…And no one knows where she comes from.” I barely recognized him, his speech was so lively — without accent or stilted bombast.

He said he didn’t care where I was going, that I should make no special allowances for him, if need be he’d simply wait and walk the dog. When I stopped at the gate of Larschen’s farm, I interrupted Barrista’s gushings about the Madonna. He ignored what I had said and followed me with his wolf. I had to express myself more clearly and ask him to excuse me for a few minutes. He stopped in his tracks in the middle of the courtyard, muttered something, and only now seemed to notice where he had landed. A couple of chickens beat a retreat and a farm dog was barking close by. Anton Larschen appeared before I had even found the doorbell. He grabbed me by the elbow and led me to a low doorway, commanded Barrista to follow us, and insisted on treating us as his guests. “Ten minutes!” he exclaimed, and preceded us up a steep set of stairs that I wouldn’t have ventured on my own. Barrista hesitated as well. The low room was very overheated, the bed, the only object of normal size, looked huge. Anton Larschen hurried to set another place at the table, buttoned the top button of his jacket, and plucked at both trouser legs. He wasn’t wearing socks, so his naked heels were visible with every step of his felt slippers. The top of his tower of white hair brushed the ceiling beams. “Please!” he cried. We sat down at the table, he vanished back downstairs.

“Splendiferous!” Barrista whispered, holding his cup up to the light. I no longer remember the name, but evidently Larschen’s porcelain is Chinese. The room looked like a museum, everything in perfect order. The only chaos was a hodgepodge of items that lay or stood atop the radio: a battered convention mascot, a mug from Karlsbad, a ship in a bottle, a darning egg, a straw doll, a pair of framed photographs, and other stuff. The wolf had stretched out in front of the dark blue upholstered armchair and now blinked up into the narrow boxes of light — the windows were barely larger than roof scuttles. I was about to tell Barrista a little about Larschen when he came climbing back up the stairs, teapot in hand. He passed us a plate of licorice cookies and ginger pastries. (No novelties to Barrista!) These, as well as the tea and the lump sugar, came from relatives in Bremen, Larschen explained.

Barrista apologized for his barging in like this, but he spoke so softly that he was interrupted by Larschen, who announced how glad he was to be able to welcome two guests into his modest home. Yes, it was an honor, and now he began a speech he had evidently prepared for the occasion. As he spoke he held a folder clamped under his arm, stroking it constantly, as if to dust it off and press its corners flat. With downright frightening candor he described what he called the dramatic high point of his “little opus”—that is, his failed attempt at flight to the West. Not only would it have provided him with a farm to match his wishes, it also would have meant the fulfillment of his love for a married woman. The woman had not been willing to get a divorce, but was prepared to flee with him. They were betrayed, arrested, interrogated. He didn’t recognize his lover in the courtroom. Her hair had turned white as snow. He knew the people who had betrayed them — but that knowledge would never give him back those lost years. For him, the knowledge was an additional punishment. Larschen used the phrase “a nobody like me” several times, and in conclusion asked if I would be willing to cast a brief glance at his “memoirs.” I reminded him that that was, after all, why I had come. Barrista’s wolf, which had at first been startled by Larschen’s rhetoric — there’s barely a sentence he doesn’t speak with added emphasis — was now dreaming and shuffling its paws.

As we were climbing back down the stairs, the grandfather clock struck eleven. Exactly twenty minutes had passed since our arrival.

Barrista had again spoken too softly for Larschen, who therefore didn’t hear the answer to his question about whether Barrista would also like to read the manuscript. “If it’s only half as good as what he told us,” he said, “you should print it.” He even suggested that we turn it into a book. Barrista thanked me profusely. I couldn’t imagine, he told me, how much this meeting had meant to him. And had I seen the darning egg? He had been genuinely touched. He himself always carried a darning kit with him, not because he couldn’t afford new socks, but because darning had a calming effect on him, took him back to the evenings of childhood, and inspired his best ideas. He described for me at length his vain attempt to find a darning egg. No one had been able to help him — not in department stores, variety shops, not even in secondhand stores, until finally a salesclerk had taken pity on him and brought him a darning egg from home.

As I was about to drop Barrista off in Altenburg, he asked if there was any reason why he could not accompany me farther. It was so interesting to him, he said, all the things I had to do, all of it without exception. And so I turned up everywhere with my little companion — the council hall in the village of Rositz, the town hall of Meuselwitz. I introduced Barrista to secretaries and in Wintersdorf even to the mayor. The wolf remained in the car, and I enjoyed the freedom — at Barrista’s encouragement — of leaving the keys in the ignition. He’s right. It is a different way of living.

On the return trip Barrista urged me to turn right on the far side of Rositz, he wanted to show me a discovery.

The scene presented to me was desolate: a soccer field overgrown with weeds, next to it a barracks with a sign reading REFEREES’ RETREAT and white grating at the windows and doors. Not a soul far and wide. Barrista strode ahead in his old-fashioned pointed boots, and although his left knee was still giving him trouble, he nimbly took the few steps of the small porch, opened the grated door, and stepped inside. I couldn’t believe my eyes. The interior was furnished as a hunting tavern, neither the wainscoting nor the numerous guests matched the wretched exterior. Barrista took off his coat, rapped each table affably, greeted those behind the bar, and slipped into the corner bench set aside for regulars. I was barely seated before a beer was placed in front of me. The most remarkable thing was that the innkeeper, a bald-headed man, called the wolf “Astrid”—and Astrid came trotting over, looking neither left nor right, and vanished through the open kitchen door. Barrista rubbed his hands. “Isn’t it wonderful here?”

We had mutz roast.⁶² It was so tender and so well seasoned that I would have loved to place a second order.

Barrista was in his element. I told him how we had all gathered to count the take from our first issue, had rolled the coins, and been halfway satisfied with the results — until it occurred to Georg that the currency was still in the safe. Barrista couldn’t get enough of such stories.

I kept my eye on the innkeeper the whole time. There was something unusual about him. It came as something of a relief to realize that it was just that he had no eyelashes.

Let me hear from you! E.

Wednesday, Feb. 28, ’90

Dear Frau Hansen,

Here is a little scene on the topic of art that might interest you: I was on the telephone this morning, when a man with fire in his eyes entered the office, doffed his seaman’s cap, pulled over a chair, and slipped a well-worn wallet from his hip pocket. My hunch told me he wanted to buy an ad.

“May I speak?” the man asked, even though he saw that I still hadn’t hung up.

“Does this mean anything to you?” he asked, thrusting both arms up high and tucking his head between his shoulders. “Doesn’t this mean anything to you?” He repeated the gesture. “We’ve got to get rid of them — our monuments to the cult of the proles!” We as the “new media” had to take up the issue. “Communist art belongs on the junk heap!” He offered to write a letter to the editor.

You would probably have grasped more quickly than I what he wanted, and been quicker at showing him the door. He wants to tear down your favorite statue⁶³ outside the museum. He crammed his wallet back into his hip pocket and departed with a promise to finally bring the West German tabloid Bild to Altenburg.

We’re still waiting for our Golden Age of art. But as for what lies hidden in our desk drawers, which is the hot topic at the moment — you can forget it. Who’s still interested in that? Our experiences are as much use to us now as a medical education from the last century.

All the mistrust with which people such as ourselves⁶⁴ have been regarded for thousands of years was far more justified than any respect or admiration.⁶⁵ No, I no longer have any part in it, thank God that’s behind me. It wasn’t easy. You think you have talent, and then you screw up your life with it.

It’s a new experience to be living without a future, in a world where a D-mark will get you anything you want, but with no prospect of redemption. But I far prefer this present state of affairs to that of the past. Even the loveliest memories seem obscene now.⁶⁶

I’d like to tell you about Johann, a friend of mine. He is too clever not to realize that not one stone will be left on another, but too in love with himself not to keep on going just as before all the same. Johann studied — although not quite voluntarily — theology in Naumburg and this summer will have to report as a pastor to a village in the Ore Mountains. In Dresden, however, he’s known as an underground poet and musician. Besides which, his wife has a last name that counts for something even outside of Weisser Hirsch (the neighborhood for bigwigs that looks down over the city) and the city of Dresden. He’s trying to save himself by going into politics. Even if he should get elected, he will quickly sense that as an ersatz drug it’s too weak.⁶⁷

I don’t know whether this is of any interest to you at all. I simply wanted to send you greetings that, even if they may not quite read that way, are sent with the warmest intentions.

Your Enrico T.

Thursday, March 1, ’90

Dear Frau Hansen,

Had the letter not been in your handwriting, I wouldn’t have believed it could possibly have come from you. Please don’t let this be your final word.

I shall never forget how you came bounding down the broad stairs of the museum and did not look up until I greeted you. And your confusion, because you thought we knew each other, and hesitated to go on your way. You didn’t belong in Altenburg, anyone could see that. But in that moment what I lacked was more than courage — I had no notion what to ask you, how to address you.

I had decided during the press conference in the museum to invite you to join me somewhere — if good fortune should give me a second chance.

And that is why I regarded our second meeting as a special dispensation. I don’t want to make excuses by appealing to unlucky chance, but your friend, your colleague, was directly blocking our line of sight. And to be quite honest, I noticed your reaction and had no objection, because I was afraid that I would betray myself too soon otherwise. You can accuse me of that. But only of that!

The way you leaned against the windowsill, camera in hand — I was happy to be in the same room with you, and tried hard not to stare too often, forced myself, that is, to look only rarely in your direction. But my looks could not have been taken wrong […]

Why did you follow me into the garden? And why these accusations now? Why didn’t Frau *** complain to you then and there? I don’t understand any of it.⁶⁸

To be candid, when you both had gone, I said: This woman is dangerous, and of course everyone knew whom I had in mind. I meant it in a general, impersonal sense — I can’t help thinking of that now.

Hadn’t the interview turned into a cross-examination long before that? Without your remark to rescue him, Georg would have ended up accused of being lost forever in “the good old days.” We aren’t children. I won’t even mention the microphone insistently shoved under his nose. And I won’t carp about the sharp tone of voice in which he was presented with one well-formulated written question after the other. And unless you’re given time to think things over, how can you ever reply at that same level?

What Georg called “real life” became “existential” for her. She quoted him as saying the end of the wall was “secondary,” when he had called it a “logical consequence.” She left him no choice but constantly to justify himself.

Your interjection: “But after all, a person has to see the Mediterranean!” is the most beautiful sentence I’ve ever heard. It was a kind of redemption. Yes, I do want to see the Mediterranean.

I haven’t forgotten one word of everything you said. The way you spoke about how lucky we are to live in a place like this, a home to such splendor, and how every road to Italy has to lead through Altenburg — yes, I know, you were talking about the museum’s collection…But for me it was a metaphor, a promise, and to be able to stand that close to you was already its fulfillment.

I can still see those bright pale blue streaks along the horizon, and towering into them the cones⁶⁹ at Ronneburg, which you called pyramids, and above us the heavy blackish gray blanket of clouds that had already brought the streetlamps on, so that we looked out over the town as if gazing out of a window. And then how we broke off in midconversation because the streaks of cloud had turned bright orange […] I want to remind you of nothing more than that.

Your Enrico Türmer

Monday, March 5, ’90

Dear Jo!

What do you think of our newspaper? Robert and I got rid of another thousand copies last Thursday. Michaela, however, is beside herself. She had convinced the general manager to remount Julie,⁷⁰ after almost a year and a half. Flieder⁷¹ was here only very briefly. He has a brain tumor and is to be operated on in Berlin this week. So even without Sluminski⁷² interfering, there is no way he’ll be considered for new head director. Yesterday’s performance, the second premiere so to speak — which Michaela had such hopes for — was a disaster, only 32 tickets sold. Despite our having promoted it well, thanks to Marion.

As I walked over to the theater around eleven — I had a “newspaper to get out”⁷³ —it was already dark and there wasn’t a single car in the parking lot. The doorkeeper refused to let me in yet again. First, I didn’t belong here anymore and second, there was no premiere party, because this hadn’t been a premiere, and there was certainly nothing to celebrate, either. “Thirty-two in the audience! Thirty-two! Just imagine!”

As I entered the canteen, Michaela was declaiming, “Oh, I am so tired. I cannot do anything more. Oh, I’m so tired — I’m incapable of feeling, not able to be sorry, not able to flee, not able to stay, not able to live — not able to die. Help me now. Command me — I will obey like a dog.”

So you see, I still know it by heart.⁷⁴

Four of them were sitting there, the new girl from props with handsome Charlie from costumes, and at the corner table Michaela and Claudia, her friend and colleague. Claudia declared she was going to last till morning. I asked how they planned to do that with just half a bottle of vodka.

“Go on,” Michaela exclaimed.

“That was before,” Claudia began, and clamped the cap of a felt pen between her upper lip and nose. “Now we have other things to think about.” With these words she threw herself across the table and burst out laughing. Handsome Charlie applauded and tried to join in the laughter.

“If you would ask me how it was, assuming, that is, that you would ask me,” Michaela replied, “then I would respond on the spot — well? What would I say? — I would say…”—and after a brief puff of laughter—“thrilling!” With a grand gesture she presented the deserted canteen to me.

And it went on like that. You can call what the two were up to absurd or witty, but I was slowly starting to feel anxious. It’s my suspicion that Claudia was enjoying the flop. She had been humiliated at not being cast as Julie the first time.

“Aren’t you my friend?” Michaela asked, looking at the girl from props. There was a long pause, during which Michaela stared at the poor woman, until she blushed and peeped, “Yes, of course I want to be your friend.” Claudia couldn’t suppress her giggles.

“Flee? Yes — we shall flee!” Michaela went on. “But I am so tired. Give me a glass of wine.” Charlie got up to pour her what was left of the wine. Michaela appeared to be on the track of some realization, as if she had noticed something that had escaped her until now. The sentence “Where did you learn to speak like that?” truly moved her. After another pause, in which she sat up ramrod straight, Michaela announced mournfully, “You must have spent a good deal of time in the theater.”

No one laughed. It was eerie.

“Excellent! You should have been an actor.”

The silence was breathless, like after the last note of a requiem.

Michaela let me lead her outside without resistance. I told her to call in sick, but she won’t do it, says it’s not her way.

I can’t console her. The theater has become an alien world to me.

In our latest issue we have an interview with Rau.⁷⁵ Jörg was given the chance, and not the Leipziger Volkszeitung. Rau gave a speech on Market Square praising the “more private” style of life in the East, and said that his only worry was that “a passion for the D-mark will turn everyone here into what we already are.” He too seems to be searching for his soul in the East. Let him. Then he just chatted, like another skat player, so to speak, and told us how to cast our votes right, and presented Altenburg Transit with six buses from North Rhine-Westphalia — they still have the old ads on the sides. Michaela was peeved because Rau handed over the keys to, of all people, Karmeka, a dentist who had kept nice and quiet all last fall, but is now a representative at the opposition Round Table. Tomorrow Otto von Habsburg will be here at the invitation of the German Social Union. At one point they distributed flyers reading: “If we had hanged them, we would have been no better than those who ruled over us with their Stasi and ‘shoot to kill.’”

Clemens von Barrista and his wolf are everywhere and nowhere. Last Friday he climbed out of a big black American cruiser and asked for water for Astrid, the wolf. When I asked if he wanted some coffee, Barrista responded exuberantly, as if some secret wish had come true. We left the office together. I had to go to Lucka. He wanted to know if he could come along. “Yes,” I said, “of course!” And with that he opened the door of his black vehicle and tossed me the keys. The wolf jumped in. I said I’d rather not. It was a mystery to me how he had ever negotiated Frauen Gasse with the monster. “Give it a try,” he said, “it’s child’s play, you’ll see.”

How right he was. We rolled gently through town and then zoomed off. I could feel the wolf’s breath at my right ear. Every fear had vanished. Suddenly everything turned bright and loud — Barrista had put down the top.

Twenty minutes later we pulled up to the town hall in Lucka. I left the keys in the ignition, the wolf jumped up front.

During my first visit in January Robert had come along, and we had found Frau Schorba, the mayor’s secretary, crumpled up in her chair, weeping. I had finally offered her a handkerchief. Even now I don’t know what it had all been about, but at my next visit she returned my handkerchief, freshly washed and ironed, and asked whether there was anything she could do for me. And now Frau Schorba takes in ads for the Weekly.

Standing at the door, Barrista observed our weekly ritual: While I skim reports in the Weekly file, Frau Schorba sways back and forth, playing her typewriter as expressively as a pianist. After watching her for a while, I always say, “I do admire you, Frau Schorba.”

Then her hands sink into her lap. I ignore her pregnant silence, express my thanks, and call out as I depart, “See you next week.”

“You’ve forgotten something,” she then replies, casting me a wicked smile. In one hand Frau Schorba holds out the ads, in the other the envelope with the money.

“That’s a record!” I exclaimed loudly this time. Three of the six ads were for two columns, one of them eighty millimeters long.

Suddenly Barrista was standing right there. He grabbed her hand and said, “Someone like you really should be taken under my protection.” I was no less flummoxed than Frau Schorba. “Whenever you need me,” he promised, laying his business card next to the typewriter. Bowing and spinning elegantly around, he said his farewell and was out the door.

“He’s the hereditary prince’s ambassador,” I whispered to her, and followed him out.

We again drove out to Referees’ Retreat for “lunch,” as Barrista called our noonday meal. After Barrista had asked me what year I was born, he then invited us — Jörg, Georg, and me — to be his guests at the Wenzel on Tuesday. I’ll tell you all about it.

Hugs, Enrico

Wednesday, March 7, ’90

Dear Jo,

Vera keeps calling from Beirut. She sits in a cramped little booth; last time the connection was relayed via New York. I’m always standing in the middle of the office, the receiver pressed to my ear, and seldom alone. The stories that Vera has heard, the misery she sees around her, the cripples, the blown-up buildings and palm trees, the barricades, and then at home there’s her headstrong mother-in-law and dithering Nicola, the whole dreary scene — I don’t know what I’m supposed to say to it all. My letters don’t get through because the post office isn’t functioning. But there’s no problem buying French cheese, cognac, or other delicacies. I hope Vera comes home soon.

Michaela has gone to Berlin to visit Thea, her famous friend. She also wants to see Flieder in the hospital. It’s strangely quiet here. Even the crime rate dwindles from week to week.

There’s only the occasional office argument about ads. There’s no talking to Georg about it. The ads bring in about the same amount we lose on returned copies. But according to Georg we’re losing readers precisely because we print ads. He talks himself into a rage — we’re not keeping to our agreements and without a second thought are throwing our real cause overboard.

All the same, after each of us had said his piece, we put the argument behind us. But then Ilona stuck her head in at the door and reminded us that Herr von Barrista had called several times now and wanted to know what year each of us was born.

“I’ve never set eyes on the fellow,” Georg shouted, “and yet all I hear is Barrista, on every side, Barrista, Barrista. Well, I know where he can shove my year of birth!” Jörg quickly calmed him down, reminding him of the possibilities that a visit by the prince could open up for us. Besides which he’d get to know Barrista come evening.

At eight on the dot we were at the Wenzel. The restaurant was full, and Herr von Barrista hadn’t reserved a table, which he did every evening, but not today, no, sorry, not today. The bar was closed. Our only choice was armchairs in the lobby.

Fifteen minutes passed and we agreed to give him another ten. At which point the elevator opened and Barrista stepped over to us. He sighed with a shake of his head; his upraised hands expressed both regret and reproach. Everything was ready and waiting. And here we were just sitting around!

Barrista confided to us in the elevator that he had hoped “we might have found quarters for him here — in the Prince’s Suite. That really has a nice ring. But it is out of the question. He cannot stay here.” To my eyes, however, the suite to which Barrista now opened the door was splendid. An armada of three-branched candelabra cast the room in a honey gold light. The furniture shimmered honey gold, the place settings sparkled honey gold, the very air seemed bathed in the hue. “Beeswax?” Georg asked. “Excellent!” Barrista replied. “And do you know where I get these candles? From Italy, from an ecclesiastical supply house.”

The stereo system was stupendous; we were standing in the middle of an orchestra, it was playing Handel.

“Damn it all!” the waitress said, who had evidently been standing the whole time in front of the mirror puttering in vain at her hairdo, but now, tossing her head back and forth a few times, sent hair cascading down over her shoulders. She extended a hand to each of us; her smile squeezed her cheeks into little hillocks behind which her eyes twinkled. Her white blouse hung loose, but this could not disguise how deeply her skirt’s waistband was cutting into her flesh. I recognized her from somewhere, but couldn’t place her.

Barrista admonished us not to just stand around — there was so much to do yet. And so we sidled along the old-fashioned chairs as if playing musical fright⁷⁶ and tried to decode the names scribbled on place cards.

“Let us drink, drink; champagne must be enjoyed ice cold.” After a brief toast to our common future and a successful outcome to our plans, he lifted his glass to each of us. When it came my turn, we gazed into each other’s eyes longer than normal — that is, I gazed into a vast darkness floating behind his thick lenses.

My dear Jo, if only you could have been there. Just that first sip of champagne — how ridiculous to call it effervescent or bubbly. Oh no, no sooner had this liquid touched the palate and tongue than it evaporated into something lighter still. What a shame, I thought, that was it — and only then did I feel an unfathomable coolness deep within, yes, for a moment I myself was nothing but an icy pleasure. As if examining myself under a microscope I perceived with perfect clarity how this elixir diffused from cell to cell.

It was as quiet as a prayer meeting. A raised eyebrow, a connoisseur’s smacking of the lips, even a word of praise would have been silly, would have been a sacrilege. Barrista likewise surrendered to the mysteries and hearkened to some inner voice. And for the first time I understood why someone would smash a wineglass. Forgive me the pathos — but already the second sip had a soupçon of the mundane.

I used to want to be able to describe pleasure in all its nuances and hues. I am now content to have experienced it.

The waitress placed a silver bowl in our midst, and from its center a glittering dolphin leapt up out of a sea of ice, on which — or so I thought — lay twelve black wrinkled mussels, plus lemon slices and another smaller bowl of sauce. The waitress gave my shoulder a pat, as if she were the hostess.

The baron began his lecture, using an open hand in lieu of a pointer. At first there was something touching, if not almost absurd, about the earnestness with which he provided us the names of different kinds of oysters, their origins and characteristics, But that impression quickly vanished. There were various species — Pacific oysters, Atlantic oysters, Antarctic oysters, oysters from the north of France.

“And now proceed as follows.” Barrista brandished a curious little fork. “Separate — lemon — sauce, not too much — slurp!” And he actually slurped. The liquid in which it floated was, he claimed, still seawater.

No sooner did I have the slippery stuff in my mouth than he cried, “Chew! You have to chew, chew, and do you perceive it?” It had the odd taste of something that isn’t really food and yet has a flavor, a little like nuts. I paid no attention to the others — Jörg later admitted he would have loved to spit his out — and reached for a second. The oyster experience was the opposite of that of the champagne. I truly enjoyed the second one.

Barrista raised his glass again. White wine, he said, clarified and enhanced the taste. I slurped a third.

“Evidently they’ve lighted a fire!” Barrista clinked glasses with me and divided the rest of the oysters between us.

He had driven to West Berlin at six o’clock that morning and shopped “in certain specialty establishments.” This was a treat for him more than anything else. He had refrained far too long and was happy to be able once again to enjoy himself in our company. We should not imagine that first-class quality was easily obtained, one often had to journey far to find it. One could depend only on one’s nose. Which was why he traveled with just one small suitcase, and why most of the space in his car’s trunk was filled with coolers and his portable infernal machine. The waitress stepped to one side and gestured with both hands toward a two-burner stove.

“Avanti!” Barrista exclaimed. “Steamed scallops!” We were each served just one, garnished with herbs and a dark sauce, a Chinese specialty.

“You will be amazed,” Barrista said, announcing the next course. We need not take fright, this was not a dessert, but a mere nothing, as he liked to call it, a nothing that would give our taste buds a chance to recover, a kind of peppermint ice cream. (It had another name and wasn’t really ice cream.) He then passed around cigarettes, in a pack that reminded me of our Orient brand.

“The hereditary prince,” the baron commenced, “sends his warmest greetings. You should perhaps know that the prince draws only a small pension, the lion’s share of which is withheld to defray the cost of his lodgings. The moment you have made his acquaintance you will want him to be your friend.”

He went on to say that beyond his chambers, His Highness — that being the correct form of address — had no assets, nor did he lay claim to any, having, it should be noted, no right to do so in any case. And yet it had always been his dream to be allowed to return to the place from which he had to depart more than seventy years previous. He, Barrista, was saying this not so much to allay any possible suspicion, but rather he feared that there might be certain expectations and hopes attached to the person of the hereditary prince that he could in no way satisfy, however much His Highness himself might wish to do so. “We therefore have,” Barrista said in summary, “only money to lose.” Here his English accent reasserted itself. “You, of course, have nothing to lose,” he remarked, raising his glass. “I am responsible for the loss of moneys. Your responsibility is to assist me in that.”

He paused and smiled at his aphorism. “You will have exclusive rights. That is all.”

“And what does that mean?” asked Georg, who had suddenly grown quite calm and relaxed. Obviously glad that one of us had opened his mouth, Barrista turned slightly to get a better view of Georg and explained in his hyperbolic fashion how it was through us, the Altenburg Weekly, that the city and region of Altenburg would learn of the prince’s visit, it was to us that politicians would come if they wanted to know something about it, through us that people would first be informed of the events surrounding the visit — and even be provided with a quick course in proper court etiquette, although the hereditary prince placed no exaggerated value on that. Although people should at least make some effort. At that moment the waitress arrived with four globes of lettuce — iceberg lettuce, Barrista explained. These were accompanied by a plate of sliced gingered duck and two small bowls of a special Chinese sauce. The baron peeled away a leaf of the green iceberg, slathered it with brown sauce — which was, he noted, the very best quality — and, using his fingers, wrapped the leaf around two slices of duck.

“If you knew how long I’ve waited for this! There’s nothing finer,” he said, and took a bite. “Absolutely nothing,” he whispered as he chewed. The sauce dribbled on his napkin.

Among the loveliest surprises of his expedition was the discovery of decent meats in the East, including mutz roast — he mispronounced “mutz” with a short “u”—which was a first-rate delicacy. And who knew what all might become of it, for what was offered in gourmet temples from Monaco to Las Vegas was in large part simple peasant food ennobled by sophisticated preparation. At which he took his first sip from a new bottle of white wine — drawing it through his teeth with a hiss, pursing his lips, shifting them from side to side like a miniature elephant’s trunk — culminating, then, in a brief smacking sound. We toasted home cooking.

I took advantage of the silence as we set our glasses down to finally ask him what his profession was. I had no idea what it was I had done. His entire body recoiled from me. He wasn’t joking when he said, “Surely you’re not asking to see my tax return?” I assured him that, for God’s sake, I wasn’t trying to get personal. “Leave God out of it!” he barked at me even more sharply.

“Is it customary,” he said, turning to Georg, then to Jörg, and finally back again to me, “for you to ask someone his profession?”

I could only reply with a perplexed yes.

He had never presumed to ask such a thing except when conducting job interviews. Of course it was of interest to him — we shouldn’t take him wrong — of burning interest how someone earned his money, since a job was often the only thing that wasn’t ridiculous about a person. “Then perhaps I can parry with the same question to you later?”

One could, “simply and cogently,” term him a business consultant, which was the simplest euphemism for what he did and did not do. And yet his “interpretation” of his profession differed somewhat from the usual definition. He made investments of his own at times, in this and that, since in his eyes it “made sense” not only to provide his clients the necessary trust in his recommendations but also to supplement their investments with his own capital — for he could never offer anything more than recommendations. To him it seemed immoral to take money from his clients independent of their success or failure — as was the preferred practice of banks or his special friends, lawyers. He did not wish to comment on his own profession, since all too often the results were those of the fox guarding the henhouse. He fell into a study for a few moments, muttered something, and then apologized for his inattention. He would gladly, he continued, subject all professionals, including physicians — them above all — to such a law of success. He could only say that one’s own interests were always the best councilor — not only for oneself, but for the community, for mankind. Of that he was profoundly convinced.

We were now offered toothpicks from a shiny golden tray. Barrista took a good many and, leaning back, tipped his chair. As if pitching back and forth in a rocking chair, he went on. If there was one thing he did not understand about this world it was the regrettable fact that there were hardly any people of his stamp. Why did people constantly get involved with crooks? That was the question he put to the world. Several years previous he had written a little book on the subject,⁷⁷ in the hope of finding adherents to his method, indeed he had secretly — and he jabbed at his teeth behind a hand held up to his mouth — dreamed of being called to a chair at a university. We needed only look at how the Nobel Prize was awarded to the wildest economic theories. Nobel Prizes for theories that when applied plunged entire nations into ruin. One of his few dreams still left unfulfilled was to become a university professor.

“Ah,” he exclaimed, “a chair for poetry!”

As if he hadn’t noticed our astonishment, he put the screws to us like a real professor.

“What comes to mind at the mention of 1797?” he asked.

“The year of the ballads,” I said.

“Hyperion,”⁷⁸ Georg said.

“Very good,” the baron said, “but this is not a literature class.”

“Napoleon,” Jörg shouted.

“Napoleon is always right. But this is about England, an achievement for which the entire civilized world is indebted to the Empire. On February 24, 1797, a law was passed that allowed the Bank of England to refuse to offer coinage in exchange for paper money.”

We stared at him.

“And what, gentlemen, happened next?”

“Inflation?” Jörg inquired.

“No!” Barrista cried. “Just the opposite. Exchange rates rose. One sees what a dubious figure Napoleon is, because besides other mistakes, he believed this would mark the end of British stability. Meanwhile Napoleon, the stupid magpie, was hoarding all the precious metals he could. But by April 1797, French assignates were worth only one-half of one percent of their face value. Just imagine! Even though they were backed by all that ecclesiastic property. From which one draws what conclusion?” We were silent.

“Where something is, nothing comes of it!” he gloated. “And where nothing is, something comes of it! If that isn’t poetry, then I don’t know what poetry is.” His final confession, that he loved dealing with money because nothing is more poetic than a hundred-dollar bill, even sounded plausible to me.

The baron⁷⁹ tipped his chair back upright at the table and shook his head.

He had grown accustomed, he said, to being a voice crying in the wilderness, and was grateful for other gifts that fate sent his way instead of fame. “Doing good business is so easy. Today, however”—his right hand traced a semicircle, as if he were admonishing us to be silent—“today we have other things to talk about.”

The baron called the waitress over. She had been kneeling down beside Astrid the wolf, stroking its coat, which looked almost mangy against the universal glow of honey gold light. The waitress hurried over and⁸⁰ began to clear the table. Tugging his napkin from his shirt collar, the baron stood up, and cast a searching glance around the room. He was handed a basket, the contents of which were hidden under a white cloth.

“Gentlemen,” he said, “I have taken the liberty of bringing along a little present for you. It took some effort”—he lifted the basket briefly, as if to imply he was speaking of its weight—“but I hope that my inquiries haven’t led me astray.” He stepped back a little — I thought I spotted something stir in the basket — and flung the cloth aside. Dust rose. And revealed dark bottles with mottled, tattered labels.

As we could see, the baron instructed, the authentic hallmarks of age had been preserved. His gift came with one modest request — that we invite him to partake of only a half glass of each.

Ah, Jo! His nose almost touched the label. He removed the first bottle from the basket as if it were a newborn being lifted from its bath to be dried and swaddled.

“Let us begin with the youngest, with you, Herr Türmer — a ’61 Château Ducru-Beaucaillou.”

I had stood up, but he motioned for me to remain seated and pretended he could see me over the rim of his glasses. He noted that he never opened an old bottle without consternation, indeed anxiety, for what was to be revealed in a single moment was the work of decades. The baron scratched the enamel seal on the cork with his fingernails — which are far too short, I think he chews them. “Even I am helpless,” he declared, “against the actions of time and chemistry.”

Of course every child knows that wine can turn to vinegar. But none of us comprehended the enormity of this admonition.

We heard the baron bark a laugh. Almost soundlessly he pulled the cork from my bottle and gave it an investigative sniff. “My congratulations!” he said, pouring me some — not much, barely more than a finger. We both reached for the glass at the same time, I jerked back. The baron swirled the wine endlessly, just as Jan Steen had with his brandy, and held it up to his nose. “May it be a blessing,” he said, filling the glass for me. I felt like a charlatan as with purposeful circumspection I gave the wine in its chalice a swirl, smelled it, and then, following the baron’s example, set it to my lips. I rinsed my mouth with it properly, but swallowed as I felt the tongue and lining start to turn numb somehow. Well that’s that, I thought. The baron fixed me with his eyes, no one said a word.

Gradually something earthy rose up within me — alien and pleasant, the herald of the remembrance of another existence.

Am I boring you? My words awaken no memories within you. It’s six o’clock already, it’s my turn to read proofs in Leipzig. So I’ll cut this a bit short.

What happened next was somehow depressing, although we didn’t want to admit it.

The baron passed white bread around before picking up Jörg’s bottle and announcing, “Vintage ’53!” I wasn’t really paying close attention as the baron described this ’53 Beaujolais. When I looked up, he was red-faced, struggling with the cork. His cheeks, which had been parentheses for a smile, suddenly went limp. He could tell just from the odor of the cork. We couldn’t even persuade him to let us sip at our own risk. Barrista, his face still red, was deaf to our pleas. I was surprised how easily he lost his composure.

Georg muttered something about how he was usually the wet blanket on such occasions, Jörg attempted a laugh. He’d never liked the year of his birth anyway, so this hadn’t come as much of a surprise. I’m afraid Jörg’s remark was closer to the truth than he admitted. But — not that I’m blaming him — it was Barrista’s fault. Perhaps Barrista felt he’d been swindled, a wine like that doesn’t come cheap.

Georg, our ’56 baby, sipped the Barolo dedicated to him. It took a good while, and then he said, “Thanks so much. That was magnificent.”

Then came a most extraordinarily noble chateaubriand and for dessert, chocolate pudding and Italian schnapps.⁸¹

The baron chattered away about the hereditary prince, but he wasn’t able to hide his own disappointment. Just one dud had ruined the atmosphere.

We left the honey gold Prince’s Suite shortly before midnight. The waitress escorted us downstairs, along with the wolf, who needed to be walked. Out on the street Jörg asked what Barrista really wanted of us. Whereas I, with a glance toward the old familiar train station, asked myself where we had been exactly. What did he suppose Barrista wanted? To find out who he was dealing with. If only everyone would make half the effort he had.

We had gone our separate ways when it came to me where I knew the waitress from. She was the buxom blonde who had stumbled past us leaving the bar back in January.

Your E.

PS: Something I keep forgetting to write: Gesine’s musical presentation so impressed Robert that, although we didn’t buy Aunt Trockel’s piano from her, we did manage to jockey it into Robert’s room. Robert’s actually taking lessons. What poor Aunt Trockel was never able to accomplish, Gesine did. We’ll see what comes of it. At least he’s already learned a few notes.

Thursday, March 8, ’90

Dear Nicoletta,

Ever since you left, I’ve thought only of you. I don’t have to imagine you. You’re present, and I listen to you. Only sleep interrupts our tête-à-tête. When I awoke, the separation was more than made up for by a sense of incredible joy — it was no dream, you really had visited me. Your presence had restored me to consciousness. Don’t laugh! It’s not easy to write something like that. I was happy to be with you. When I’m with you I find myself in a state of grace — I don’t know what else to call it. Nicoletta, I want to tell you everything, everything, and all at once, but I would give up all those words just to see you.

Do you remember — you were telling me about your famous uncle,⁸² about the peculiar circumstances surrounding his death — how you said that when it comes to really important things we never know what we should actually think? You said it so offhandedly and went on to something else. No, we don’t, I said, still stuck on that remark, and you looked at me in surprise, and I had to control myself to keep from kissing you.

I was in agony the whole hour I knew you were still in Altenburg. You should have waited here, in my room, even if we hadn’t said a word. That would have really helped me to “rest up.” I didn’t calm down until the moment I could assume you had left town. I hope your train was on time and you made all your connections.

Wasn’t the proof room⁸³ like being in school? You, the new girl, looked hesitantly around the classroom, as if not knowing where to sit. Then you decided on me, to share my desk, and stuck out your hand, as if you’d just read in a guidebook that that’s how it’s done in the East. And while the others were running around during recess, we sat there like model pupils. I watched the calligraphy of your proofreaders’ marks grow denser and denser, and my courage failed me. The goose bumps on your arm, clear up to the shoulder, the scar on your left elbow, kept distracting me. There wasn’t a single motion of your right hand that I failed to notice. You asked for a dictionary and were so intent on making corrections, it was as if you wanted to give me time to get used to your presence.

It suddenly seems so absurd to be writing you, instead of simply taking off to see you. I can only plead my current condition as my excuse. By now I’m in hardly any pain.⁸⁴

I kiss your hands,

Your Enrico

Friday, March 9, ’90

Dear Nicoletta,

The first bus has already gone by, and the next thing I hear will be footsteps above me and the sounds of morning. My window is cracked ajar. How are you doing? I would love to talk with you. And when I think of how you won’t get this letter before a few days have passed, these lines seem to lose all meaning. I can’t wait that long!

The headaches have become bearable. I convinced the doctor at the polyclinic to remove the neck support. Holding his hands to my temples, he watched me as intently as if he expected my head to fall off. I’m supposed to imagine I’m balancing my “skull” on my neck, then the right posture will follow all on its own. I don’t think people moved around the Spanish royal court with any more dignity than I do here within my four walls.

I’ve ordered myself to stay away from the office. I definitely prefer the hope that greetings from you, however cursory, may be waiting for me there to the disappointment of that not being the case.

Maybe I’m lying here in bed so that I can think of you without disruption. How many letters I’ve already written you — eyes closed, hands folded across my belly. If only we could take up our conversation again where it got broken off! I was so angry and disappointed at the day being ruined and at your having to depart early that I was no longer in any condition to even notice what a stroke of luck your visit has been or, for that matter, how lucky we both are to be alive.

Where did you get the notion that the accident was an intentional attack? The first thing you cried out was: “That was on purpose!”

And so immediately I imagined that I knew the two men in the classy white Lada. I do everything I can to dismiss this as a chimera, but even as a figment of the imagination I don’t like the idea. And now, as I write this, it seems totally absurd. And yet those two figures loom up ever more clearly in my mind. It’s like in a fairy tale, when the devil demands his tribute at the very instant he’s been forgotten.⁸⁵

Dear Nicoletta, it’s evening now — and still no letter from you.⁸⁶ I know, I shouldn’t have said that.

I’ve been in a strange mood all day. I smell unusual odors, suddenly imagine myself being in another room, and need a couple of seconds to come to myself, as if I were just waking up. On days like this you only have to be inattentive, and you stumble and fall and fall. Is it only our imagination that we feel someone’s actual grasp, even though they have long since let go? Should I say that the past is grasping me or, better yet, that I’ve never been young? Do you think someone like me is capable of stealing a weapon? Forgive me my susurrations. It all sounds so preposterous. I’m merely afraid I’ll fall back into the same state I was in at the end of last year. I was ill and lay here in my room just like now. And that — and I’m not exaggerating — was the worst time of my life.

For several weeks now I’ve been toying with a question. At first I didn’t take it seriously; it seemed too commonplace. But over time I’ve come to think it’s justified. The question is: What were the ways and means by which the West got inside my brain? And what did it do in there?⁸⁷

Of course I might also ask how God got inside my brain. It amounts to the same question, though it’s less concerned with the matter of my own particular original sin.

Needless to say, I can’t offer any precise answer. I can only try to grope for one.

One of the few rituals observed in our family occurred whenever I tried to revive my earliest memories. I had achieved my goal whenever my mother would exclaim, “Impossible! You were barely two!”—or, “At eighteen months, out of the question!” She would successfully manage a good five such exclamations of astonishment. It gave me deep satisfaction to find my memories confirmed. Each incredulous shake of my mother’s head made me feel like some sort of wunderkind. (My sister Vera never failed to offer some corrections; I had no chance against her four-year head start and always had to hear how happy everyone had been before I arrived.)

Here’s one of my showpieces. I wake up, the room is still dark, but in the next room there’s light and voices. My mother carries me out, my grandmother says, “Sweetie pie.” A hat lies on an armchair, two coats with fur collars are draped over its back — strangers! There are strangers in our apartment. I start to cry. The strangers are hiding. Someone gives me a Duplo candy bar that sticks out of its wrapper like a half-peeled banana. My sister has a Duplo too. I can’t understand why she’s so unconcerned. The Duplo is meant to help me get over these strangers, who are going to move in. I’m given a little red car. A bright rod sticks out between the front wheel and the door on the driver’s side. That’s for steering it. The headlights are glass beads. “Diamonds,” my mother says, “from the West.”

Present after present is lifted out of suitcases and shown to my mother. My grandpa tickles my palm with an electric razor. It all comes from the golden West. I can see most of the room, but the strangers are hiding. They’re whispering with my grandpa.

Back in my bed, I ask whether the strangers are going to stay for a long time. I’m certain they’re going to move in with us. I don’t believe my mother.

I’m afraid, I’m impressed — toys with diamonds, and they come from a world made of gold. That’s also the reason why we’re not allowed to go to the West. Of course we’d all rather live in the West. I’m not allowed to play with my car outside, in fact no other kids are supposed to know about my car. Otherwise they’d be jealous because they don’t have a red car. The red car is irreplaceable, you can’t just buy one. Only a few kids here have Matchbox cars and Lego blocks and tins of Kaba powder. I also had shirts and pants from the West, and in time I would look just as handsome as the boy on that chocolate drink for kids. Actually I was a child of the West myself.

Are you still listening to me? Or do you think by now I’m utterly mad? Let me finish my story. With each passing year I understood better: We had things other families didn’t have and couldn’t have, no matter how much they longed to have them, even if they earned more than my mother and had more money in the bank than my grandpa. Items from the West were like moonstones, either they were given to you or they remained out of reach. Our relatives in the West were just like God and the Lord Jesus — they loved you, although you didn’t know them and never ever saw them face-to-face. And anyone who laughed at me because I believed in God was at least envious of my red car.

There were five special days in the year. St. Nicholas, Easter, my birthday, Christmas — Christmas was the high point, but Christmas was out-shone by the day when my grandparents returned from their visit to the West. The evening of their arrival at the Neustadt train station in Dresden was the real, unsurpassable Christmas Eve.

Every year my mother took off work for the day, and we were allowed to come home for our noon meal. After doing our homework, we helped her with chores, which gave us the feeling that by dusting thoroughly and polishing lots of shoes we were adding to the number of presents.

In our best clothes we walked to the streetcar after darkness fell.

What was so splendid, if not to say colossal, about it all was that it was we who had been chosen. How could other people live a life in which there would never be a day, an evening like this? I felt sorry for my schoolmates. I pitied them as I pitied Africans who had no Sport Aktuell, no coverage of four ski-jump tournaments to watch on Saturdays.

Once on the streetcar, where all the vacant seats only increased the thrill, we gazed rather haughtily at the other passengers. We were unrecognized royal children, and I was happy to be no one but me.

Then it began — the back-and-forth of deciding which platform the train would arrive on. We listened expectantly to the crackling loudspeakers, trying to sort out the syllables “Be-bra” from the rest of the cacophony. And what would the waiting have been without the train running late, or the autumn air without the steam of the locomotives.

There were no disappointments, there couldn’t be any, for every present from the West was a priceless treasure all by itself. The stories our grandparents told went beyond our powers of imagination — for example, escalators, escalators in a department store. You stepped on a carpet, held fast to a richly ornamented railing, and were borne soundlessly upward, floating like an angel on the ladder to heaven.

In the West the streets were heated from below ground, the gas stations never closed, and when people in the West didn’t know what else to improve, for the fun of it they tore up streets only recently paved with asphalt. Neon signs flashed above every shop, every door, the nights were bright as day and flooded with more traffic than filled our streets after a May Day parade. All the same, in the West you could always find a seat on a tram, bus, or train. In the West gas smelled like perfume, and train stations were tropical gardens where travelers could buy the most marvelous fruits. In the West people had hair down to their shoulders and wore jeans and chewed gum that let you blow bubbles as big as your head. And what was more, the global market was in the West. I didn’t know exactly where, but it was definitely in the West. When you pronounced the word “East,” didn’t your mouth spread in a simpleton’s grimace? Whereas “West” hissed like a Lamborghini Miora speeding off on superfast tires. “East” sounded like cloudy skies and omnibuses and abandoned excavations. “West” like asphalt streets with glass gas stations, terraces where the drinks came with straws, and music drifting across a blue lake. Cities with names like Cottbus, Leipzig, or Eisenhüttenstadt couldn’t possible be located in the West. What a different sound places like Lahr, Karlsruhe, Freiburg, or Graching had. Vera and I — despite all our quarrels — were always in agreement when it came to the West.

Just one thing more (please be patient with me): packages were something that by definition came from the West. Their contents weren’t immediately put away, but left lying out on the living-room table. It was New Year’s before the coffee, soap, stockings vanished into cupboards and drawers, where they never lost the aroma of their origin. They were resistant to all attempts to blend them into the world, were a category of things all to itself. They didn’t lose their value when used or eaten. The idea would never have entered our heads to throw away an empty tin of Kaba or Caro. Our cellar storage space was full of such cans and tins.

I would often go down into the cellar just like Willi Schwabe entering his attic — does the name Willi Schwabe mean anything to you?⁸⁸ And just as he might find a roll of film or maybe some other object that reminded him of an actor, the Kaba and Caro tins filled with nails or screws spoke to me of happy holidays and the West. Today I’d say that they first had to lose their use-value to become sacred objects.

These treasures also proved that Aunt Camilla and Uncle Peter had always thought about us, had always known our most secret wishes, and wanted only the best for us.

When I prayed, I prayed to God, who knew everything about me, always thought of me, and would always be there for me. And although he didn’t look like Aunt Camilla and Uncle Peter, he must in fact have been like Aunt Camilla and Uncle Peter, except more so.

Robert’s alarm just went off.⁸⁹ I’m going to make breakfast, wait for the mail carrier, and then go to the doctor again this afternoon.

With you in my thoughts, I remain

Your Enrico T.

PS: It was from Aunt Camilla that I first heard I was a writer, because in my thank-you letter I described what our Christmas was like and how we had barely been able to wait to open her package — which was a lie, since Aunt Camilla always stuffed it with candy (and coffee and, rather absurdly, condensed milk — truly no rarity for us), whereas in Uncle Peter’s package you might find Matchbox cars or even a cassette, which always made his package a real event. Aunt Camilla wrote back that my letter was the loveliest letter she had ever received, a real short story, which she often read aloud to other people.

Monday, March 12, ’90

Ah, Verotchka, you were two hours early!⁹⁰ And now you’re paying for your mistake with worry. But this message is sure to get lost like all the others. It’s so absurd.

If only it had been Georg or Jörg who picked up the phone. But Ilona! An accident! His sister! How marvelous! She told me she calmed you down and provided you all the details. I can just imagine how she calmed you down. By the time she was done you probably thought it was a stroke of good fortune that your brother ended up in a wheelchair instead of in Hades.

There’s a rumbling inside my skull — a concussion, but nothing more than that. What did she tell you about Nicoletta? She came away with just some bruises.

We had left Leipzig and were heading for Frohburg by way of Borna. We were on our way to the Schwind pavilion.⁹¹ It was actually nobody’s fault. A Lada (a white one, I think) had passed us in a curve to the left, slipped back in between us and the car ahead of us because of oncoming traffic, I braked, and in the same moment the windshield shattered — nothing but ice crystals up ahead.⁹² I banged it with my hand, trying to see something, the car went into a skid, and we plunged headlong down the embankment — I think I heard, and felt, the second loud crash. Sudden silence. We had come to a halt and were staring through a big hole in the windshield. The silence came straight out of a fairy tale.

I wasn’t in any pain, but what I wanted most was just to sit there. We had managed to sail right through a gap between trees; on Nicoletta’s side the clearance wasn’t two feet.

I didn’t notice the blood until later. Nicoletta used her handkerchief to dab at it. And then — you know me — I started to feel sick to my stomach. I tipped my seat back, closed my eyes, and left everything to Nicoletta. The people who came to our aid were more of a nuisance. Someone spread a blanket over me and kept trying to tuck it under me on both sides. I pushed the guy away because I thought I was going to throw up. From this position I studied the little piece of ground beside the car for a good while.

By the time the police and ambulance arrived my nausea had given way to a nasty headache.

Everything took forever, the ride to Borna, the X-rays, the neck support, the police again, the endless sitting around, then finally the taxi ride to Altenburg. There are suddenly more taxis than you can shake a stick at. Robert stared in horror at my neck support and turban à la Apollinaire. Nicoletta told the cabdriver to take her to the train station right away.

She lives in Bamberg. People like her can’t or don’t want to believe that I left the theater voluntarily. She has contributed a lot to our newspaper,⁹³ and since she’s writing about De Chirico and Moritz von Schwind is supposed to have been one of his favorites, I had arranged for her to visit the frescoes in Rüdigsdorf.

I’ll write about Barrista some other time. Thanks to his boots and Astrid the wolf he’s already become a fixture in town. He’s interested in everything and everybody, and he gawks at women’s breasts with his google-eyes. But that “von” in front of his name, his mission on behalf of the hereditary prince, and, last but not least, his courtesy and consideration — including a phenomenal memory for names — have not failed to have an effect. Was he ever one of your unrequited admirers?

Ah, Verotchka, my darling, how long must this waiting last?

Kisses from

Your Heinrich in his neck support⁹⁴

Tuesday, March 13, ’90

Dear Nicoletta,

I’m feeling better, much better. I plan to give the office a try on Wednesday, just for a few hours. And what about you? How are you doing? When I catch myself not thinking about you, it scares me, as if I had lost my wallet.

For some strange reason you’re the only person with whom I feel free to talk about my past and to explain why I’ve become the way I am.⁹⁵

There’s something I want to mention first, however.

My father was an actor — not even a mediocre actor, otherwise he would have had better roles — employed by various stages in Saxony. He had heart problems and knew that he would probably never make it to forty. Maybe that’s why he became such a tyrant. He was obsessed with the notion that my sister Vera was blessed with great talent, was an actress the likes of which appear only once in a generation. Vera was twelve when he died.

Sometimes I’m afraid that even now she still believes the only thing that kept her from a spectacular career was the lack of a father. At sixteen, seventeen, she was still blaming me for his death (he was supposed to pick me up at the afterschool club, was late as usual, and stepped out into the path of an oncoming car). Besides which, he stubbornly insisted that it was because of the long commute that he had rented a room in Radebeul, where the central office for all the state theaters was located.

In fact he lived in that room with a singer from the chorus and slept at home only when my mother had the night shift. The singer regarded him with the same awe in which my mother had once held him. He could once again tell her how he hoped to die onstage, and she could console him for having to live with a woman as hardhearted as my mother, who, according to him, once told him that, given the roles he played, no one would notice if he did die onstage, and to finally leave off harping about it.

If it weren’t for photographs I probably wouldn’t know what my father looked like — or his peculiar smile with just the left corner of his mouth raised. He thought it made him look Mephistophelian. Vera — there’s a snapshot of her — dressed like an adult for the funeral, all in black. She didn’t cry, or if she did, then only when she was alone, just as she didn’t speak to us about it, but confided things only to her diary. No one knows why Vera rejected my mother — well before the accident even, before puberty. Whereas, as long as I can remember, Vera was the favorite, which I felt was perfectly natural, since Vera gave the impression she had lost both parents and was forced to live with us — while I had my mother, after all. Our mother worked hard at fulfilling her husband’s prophecy and did all she could to turn Vera Türmer, Dresden’s admired “recitation prize winner,” into a stage diva, a Dietrich.

Although my mother was and is truly a good surgical nurse and, thank God, had no artistic ambitions, so-called normal professions were considered unimportant in our home. On our walks across the Dresden Heath the conversation was always about Mozart, who had been buried in a pauper’s grave, about Hölderlin, who went mad, about Kleist, who committed suicide, about Beethoven, whom his audience would laugh at. Had not every true genius been mocked, hadn’t they all — with the exception of Goethe — suffered horribly, and yet despite everything, hadn’t they created something for which humankind must be infinitely grateful today? To struggle out of darkness into light!

My mother’s experience with my father had changed none of that; on the contrary, she simply ratcheted up her notions of the genius and his work just that much higher. In other words, if my parents had been halfway satisfied with their life, they would have spared us, especially my sister, a lot of problems.

I’m sharing all this with you just to fill in details, they explain everything and nothing.

I’m not trying to tell you my life story, I merely want to trace the path down which I went so miserably astray, but my description of it may ultimately result in a kind of story, a painful story, which might not be without some purpose as a cautionary tale.⁹⁶

Three weeks of my summer vacation after the seventh grade — I started school a year later than other kids my own age, so I was almost fourteen — were spent with my mother in a cottage. It stood in the middle of a pine forest, near a little clear-water lake, in Waldau, southeast of Berlin.

This country place belonged to a childless couple from Jüterbog, friends of my father, who spent their summers in Bulgaria or Hungary, but whose continued loyalty to us was not entirely unselfish. My mother, who paid rent for our stay, was also the one who cleaned the gutters, washed the curtains, beat the carpets, pulled a handcart to the flea market, had the propane bottles refilled, called in the man to clean out the septic tank, and even initiated little improvements like the installment of an outdoor light — she wasn’t about to step on a toad a second time.

The cottage didn’t have a television, and even before we left I was afraid I’d be bored. Boredom defined my life in general. I was bored every day, although three times a week I took target practice — I was considered to have some talent at Olympic rapid-fire pistol.

There’s a snapshot of me in Waldau — I’m wearing shorts and sitting bent over the table, staring straight ahead and massaging my calves. I still know exactly what I was thinking at that moment: I was dreaming of the new soccer season and of Dynamo Dresden winning game after game with a perfectly balanced team, of their becoming league champions and taking the cup.

When I was in kindergarten I thought of reading as something magical, that when you reached a certain age you mastered it without even trying. But when the day came that I realized reading was all about a tedious, monotonous combination of letters and syllables, it turned into just another dreary subject in school.

So when my mother asked what books she should pack for me for our vacation, it was a question of almost unsurpassable hypocrisy.

For my sake she played badminton, chess, or battleships. I rode my bike and did the shopping at the village Konsum store, where the Sport Echo went on sale after eight in the morning. As an early riser I spent the first hours of the day on a rickety man’s bicycle, riding through the woods, listening to my music cassettes played on our landlord’s Stern tape recorder that I tied to the basket.

On my third early-morning excursion, I misjudged a puddle. My front wheel got stuck, as if an iron hand had grabbed hold of it — and I went flying. Pain, pain worse than the worst stitch in your side, knocked the air out of me. Sand burned in my eyes. But the awful part was the silence. Half blind, howling with rage and pain, and with a couple of broken ribs, or so I believed, I crawled back to the puddle and pulled the Stern tape recorder out of the muck. I ejected the cassette once, twice, three times, reinserted it again each time — all in vain. Only the radio still worked.

As I knelt there in the sand, trying to scratch the mud out of the cracks in the wooden housing, morning devotions were being broadcast on AM. God’s word falls like rain upon the soil, but it may indeed run off to no avail. To catch the rain, we must dig ditches. The pastor spoke at length about digging ditches, which was exactly the same as reading the New Testament in order to be prepared to receive God’s word. Moreover, God gave each of us a sign in due season. At the pastor’s concluding words, I turned the radio off.

I didn’t know what to do. One corner of the housing had broken off. A Stern tape recorder cost more than my mother earned in a month. When I looked up, there was a deer standing in the road about twenty yards away. It turned its head to me. After we had stared at each other for a while, it strode off, vanishing into a copse of young trees.

Had it been a unicorn, I could not have been more profoundly moved. Suddenly I was praying. I thanked God for his sign, that he had led me into the woods and spoken to me. And for the first time it was I who directed my words to the Lord God, not just some child reciting bedtime prayers. No, I was praying now. I begged for help, help amid my distress, and included my mother and the radio pastor in my request for eternal life. I promised that henceforth I would dig my ditches, deep ditches, which would collect God’s word and from which I would draw water forever and ever. Now strengthened and calmed, I in fact found the broken-off piece of housing and hoped for another miracle.

Had I fallen among thieves, my mother asked.

I rummaged the bookshelf above the night storage heater. Lord, I prayed, give me your New Testament. In my hand was a thick gray book without its dust jacket. I deciphered the red lettering as Martin Eden. The name Jack London meant something to me. I sat down in a chaise longue and started to read, and I would normally have given up very quickly, since it wasn’t about wolves or gold miners, but about a writer. But the fact that this book had chosen me could not be accidental. The more I read, the more the story spoke to me.

It was one o’clock, well after one, when I was called in for our midday meal — the entire morning had flown by. I had been reading for more than three hours. Then it came to me: I didn’t have to be bored anymore. Anyone who was a reader as a child cannot understand what Copernican dimensions that insight had for me.

The day was not over, and you may suspect what happened next. After all, I was reading the story of a starving but determined and undaunted writer who would make it in the end…

As I took my shower that evening I asked myself about the meaning of this substitution. I had been looking for the Bible and had found Martin Eden. What was God trying to say to me? As warm water ran down over my face, I was struck by my third insight of the day: I was meant to become a writer!

I stood there motionless under the shower for a while. I was meant to turn my experience in the woods into a story about how strange it was that my tape recorder had fallen silent, while the radio had remained intact so that I could hear the voice of God. I would write what others dared not say, that the West was better than the East, for example, that we weren’t allowed to travel to the West even though we wanted to. When everyone else went to work, I would stay home and write. When I entered a pub, everyone would turn around to look at me. Because everyone knew about my speech in which I had indicted the state. “One man at least,” they’d whisper, “one man at least who’s willing to speak out.” My family and I would have a difficult time of it, however, because I was a thorn in the government’s side.

Cold water wrenched me out of my dream world. My mother called me inconsiderate and selfish for not leaving any warm water — after all, she was the one who had heated the stove and glued the broken corner back on the tape recorder.

Her accusations were a double blow. I had to remain silent, however. But the day would come when I would write about it and my mother would read and finally understand that it had not been selfishness or even a lack of consideration, but just the opposite. She would be proud of me, would laugh and at the same time have to cry a little, because she had had no idea that a writer was being born, although it was happening right before her eyes.

When I awoke the next morning, I smiled when I spotted the gray book beside my pillow. I felt like Martin Eden was my brother. And then I had to smile for having smiled.

I rode my bike to the village bakery and waited until the Konsum opened. I hid my first notebook, a five-by-eight sketchpad, in the shed.

After breakfast I retreated to my chaise longue. But I was too excited to read. I felt compelled to record what I had experienced, was afraid I’d forget things. When my mother wasn’t watching, I laid the book aside, slipped the sketchpad under my shirt and a ballpoint into my saddlebag. I would write my first sentence at the place of my conversion. The first sentence of a great writer! For neither at that moment nor later did I ever doubt my talent.

When I finally put pen to paper, the pen didn’t work. Which is why my memoirs begin with crazy squiggles above the date and time. At ten on the dot I finally wrote: “Praise be to Jesus Christ!”

What happened then can only be explained as the work of the Holy Spirit. He guided my hand for seven pages, without my hesitating even once, without my having to correct so much as a single word. My turns of phrase thrilled even me. I was giving the world something unlike anything it had known before in this form. Even if I should never put another word to paper, these lines would endure.

When I returned home I discovered something remarkable that — though I was now acquainted with miracles — frightened me. The roof of the cottage was covered with snow. I got off my bike. What I saw, I saw — snow! A field of snow as large as our tin roof. No white anywhere else, and even after walking my bike halfway across the yard, what my eyes saw and what my reason told me were incompatible. Suddenly my mother was standing beside me. “Daydreaming?” she asked. My gaze was fixed on the tin roof. “Snow,” I said. “You’re right,” she said, “it does glisten like snow.”

Happy days followed. Mornings, between seven and eight, I would take my seat at a little table in the perfect silence, watching the sun cautiously grope on spidery legs through the pine trees, lie down on the bed of moss that my mother had raked free of needles and cones, turning it lustrous. The sketchpad lay under my opened Martin Eden, and no more than the book could hide it, was I now going to make any effort to hide my calling. That wasn’t even possible. I switched back and forth between book and sketchpad so often that reading and writing became one and the same. It was the only thing that I took any pleasure in and for which I seemed to have been born. Suddenly I found a hundred thoughts inside me, where before there had not been one.

I remember, however, hardly anything of Martin Eden and nothing of what I wrote at the time. It now seems to me as if I pursued the whole thing simply so that the world might be captured inside those pages, so that all its sounds, smells, and colors can fall into my lap whenever I remember those days. Otherwise how could I recall the Igelit⁹⁷ tablecloth, a green and white checkerboard that clung to my bare knees whenever I sat down to write? How many times was I just about to shove it aside, which would have been easy as pie, but then never did it, as if afraid I would lose the source of my inspiration.

When from the chaise longue I would gaze up through the crowns of the pine trees — the sunglasses I had found in a kitchen cupboard cast a turquoise hue over everything — I felt as if I were at the bottom of the sea, looking up to the surface. When the sun slipped behind a tree trunk, pinks and reds turned purple. Sunsets were the loveliest part, when the evening light lay almost horizontal over the lake, lending trunks and branches a rusty red glow. When the light vanished at last from the treetops, it drenched the bellies of the clouds in violet — to have looked away would have been a sacrilege. Each morning when I went to fetch our breakfast rolls, the gossamer webs draped among the grasses were the same whitish gray as the morning moon — lingering phantoms and shadows of night.

Every sound was there simply to affirm the silence (a silence that I will get around to talking about later, much later).

Happy that her son had finally come to his senses, my mother thanked me by coddling me and watching as I played with the twenty-six symbols.

I sat down to my meals as a writer exhausted by his labors. And I wanted to write about that too, about what it’s like when you rest from your work. Every thought, every sensation, every observation was precious and transient. I was a collector, a discoverer on a mission to glean all things remarkable and noteworthy, to describe them, to share them with humanity. How had I possibly lived before this? How had I endured this life? How did my mother endure her existence?

Vera visited us for the last few days. She asked no questions. She just looked at the book in my hands and announced, “Oh, Enrico is reading a book with the fascinating title Father Goriot!”—or—“Ah, my brother Enrico is familiarizing himself with the works of the great humanist Charles Dickens.” I had nothing more to fear from her. Besides which I profited from my mother’s conviction that anyone sleeping or reading was never to be disturbed — a rule that until then had worked to my disadvantage.

With almost half a sketchbook filled with the adventures of my soul, I experienced our arrival in Dresden as a triumph. Only three weeks before I had left the city as a foolish boy who had known nothing about himself and the world or his calling in it. I returned as a young writer who would soon be famous.

You will take this for childishness, Nicoletta. For me it was the beginning of the path that led me astray. I shall probably hear what you have to say about all this.

Thinking only of you, Your Enrico T.