New Lives

Tuesday, March 13, ’90

Dear Jo,

I had a car accident, and a madman who as good as forced us off the road was at fault. I have a slight concussion and pulled a couple of muscles in my neck, but that’s really all. We⁹⁸ were lucky. Suddenly we came to a halt — with a shattered windshield — midway between two trees.

Without a car I feel like an amputee, everything’s a mess at the moment, and it’s downright depressing too. There was a time when I just had to look at Jimmy⁹⁹ and I felt better. The cost of repairs will probably be so high that it’s not worth it. It was Michaela’s late father’s car, that he fussed over and took such good care of — and for her mother it was the chief reminder of better days. Worse still, she’s now going to find out that we never took out collision coverage.

I’ll be back at the office starting tomorrow and will try to call you from there. I’m glad I’ll be back among people. Just lying around here is not living.

I’ve had plenty of visitors. Old Larschen walked all the way here, his backpack full of homegrown apples — each wrapped individually in rustling tissue paper — that he now placed one by one on the table like precious jewels. The apple, he informed Michaela and me, belonged to the rose family, to which Michaela replied that it had been a long time since she’d received such lovely roses. The two were instant friends. She’s even allowed to read his memoirs manuscript. We invited him to share supper with us. When we sat down at the table, Larschen broke off his excurses on the juniper, lowered his chin to his chest, and prayed silently. Robert witnessed this for probably the first time in his life. We looked at each other, but didn’t dare smile. Larschen raised his head, saying, “The juniper can grow to be five hundred years old, the broad-leafed linden can reach a thousand.” And we were in motion again now too, as if the film had just stuttered briefly. After Larschen left, something of his odor lingered in the apartment. But there was also the fragrance of apples.

Jörg thought he would need to console me, since we’re selling only seventeen thousand copies or fewer. The election will help us, and Jörg is still following leads for a couple of stories from his Commission Against Corruption and Abuse of Office. He’s the only untainted person on it, and so has an easy time of it.

Today Wolfgang the Hulk appeared at the door, along with his equally hulking wife. He hadn’t heard about the accident and they had come to invite us to dinner. When we bought our pots in Offenburg, he had promised to cook for us. (So far we haven’t dared use our pots.) He’s working for Jan Steen now, drives a company car, and is evidently earning such a pile of D-marks that he’s embarrassed to talk about it. Jan Steen, Wolfgang says, reads every word in our paper. He’s interested in everything. When I asked what he himself thinks of it, he gave a tentative laugh. A little more pepper wouldn’t hurt, he said. I reacted somewhat angrily, after all you can’t have a scandal like the Council Library¹⁰⁰ every week (and even there everything is said to have been on the up-and-up) or some incident in the schools.¹⁰¹ He responded to my question about his old job as if I were giving tit for tat, though I had asked it more out of discomfiture. From his wife’s hints, I concluded the decision still bothered him. But as for Jan Steen, he didn’t want to hear¹⁰² —“a word said against him,” was what I was about to write. It’s almost midnight. Barrista was suddenly standing at the door. He’s incredible. The bouquet was so big that I couldn’t tell who was standing there in front of me. There’s no one I’d have been more surprised to see. He, on the other hand, seemed astonished to find me in “such fine fettle.”

Robert was greeted with the same bow that I received. Barrista spoke to him as if to an adult and expressed his “appreciation”—he knew what it meant to stand all on your own in the marketplace, and told him how very lucky he was to be so young in these times, to be able to learn everything, to begin everything anew. Barrista’s sermon had thwarted Robert’s attempt at flight. Without being asked Robert looked after Astrid the wolf while I laid out napkins for our light supper, adding a bottle of cabernet and a serving fork for the cold cuts, which Robert accepted as concessions made for a guest. (Michaela was onstage, she’s still having to work as the backup in Rusalka.)¹⁰³

Barrista buttered his bread with a meticulousness that I’ve never seen anyone except you apply and positioned his slices of cold cuts with such precision that the curves of bread and sausage were nearly congruent.

As I was about to pour him some wine, he declined it and stared at me through bulletproof glass. Would I be willing and able to drive him to the train station in half an hour? The situation was as follows — and then he explained in great detail and at great length why it was better for him to take the train, in a sleeping car of course, to Stuttgart (or was it Frankfurt am Main?), and ended by asking if he could leave his LeBaron in my care.

Of course I should drive it, he would very much like that, indeed he took joy in the idea. Laying his hand imploringly to his heart, he repeated how happy it made him to think of me driving his car and that he wished in this fashion to be of some assistance to me in the wake of my accident. Of course he had, as always, selfish motives. He couldn’t leave his car here parked in the same spot for several days. “Please don’t misunderstand me, my dear Herr Türmer,” it wasn’t that he’d had any bad experiences here with such things, but one need not provoke an incident, either. If he absolutely could not persuade me, I should at least obey his maxim that one ought never present the state an unnecessary gift — after all the taxes and insurance were paid in full, the car was parked out front with a full tank.

There was just enough time left to make him some coffee. While Barrista excused himself to wash his hands, we slathered a few sandwiches, piling them high with what cold cuts were left, and Robert came up with the idea of sending him off with a thermos of hot coffee. The baron was touched.

I was the one who drove the car to the station. I was afraid that in return we’d be required to take care of the wolf, which sat beside Robert in the backseat. The baron and Robert talked about music, or what Robert calls music. The baron knew most of the bands and even some gossip about Milli Vanilli and their ilk. The source of his knowledge was in the trunk, a stack of Bravo magazines that he bequeathed to Robert. He had already read them himself — it’s required reading, a way of getting some idea of what young people are up to. Which brought him around to his own two children, whom he’s allowed to see far too infrequently. There wasn’t time for more questions. At his urging I tested putting the top up and down — since spring is on its way, after all — and was handed the registration. A can of dog food, a big plastic ashtray (a Stuyvesant cigarette promotion) for a bowl, and his attaché case was all the baggage he had.

He lifted the wolf onto the train, said a quick good-bye, and pulled the door closed behind him. Robert and I followed him down the platform, moving from window to window, watched as he took a seat, opened his attaché case, and extracted a pile of papers. As he read he rested his head against the windowpane, as if dozing. In that moment I think I gained some understanding of why he always has the wolf at his side.

Do you know the series with David Hasselhoff and his talking car?¹⁰⁴ This LeBaron looks a lot like it. You steer more from a prone position than sitting upright. And that was how I watched people streaming out of the theater as we drove by. I felt like a reptile gliding quietly through the water. Almost in shock, people turned to watch us pass.

Michaela got in without so much as a comment, that’s how despondent she was. She didn’t even say anything about Robert, who should have been in bed by eight. “Just get us away from here,” she said, which I took as a request for a little jaunt.

All the same she enjoyed the ride and smiled when we hit a hundred and sixty on the long straight stretch on the other side of Rositz. When we got home I thought Michaela and Robert had fallen asleep, but actually they just didn’t want to get out of the car.

Once in the living room we pounced on Barrista’s box of candy — chocolates that melted on your tongue. Michaela took one of each sort and, sitting down where Barrista had just sat, laid them on his plate, assuming it was clean. I managed three, Robert two, Michaela ate them like cherries, and took the rest with her when she sat down in front of the television — where she still is, listening to oracles about the upcoming election.

Dear Jo, I find it hard to say anything about your latest work.¹⁰⁵ All that seems so far away now. Invented stories no longer interest me. That’s no argument, of course, and certainly no criterion for measuring quality. The new literature, if it does come about, will be literature about work, about business deals, about money. Just look around you! People in the West don’t do anything but work. It will be no different with us.

Say hello to your wife and daughter for me, hugs, E.

[Thursday, March 15, ’90]

Nicoletta, what happened?¹⁰⁶ I’m practically numb. I heard about it just in passing from Jörg. But don’t know anything else about it. Why should you care about Barrista? When I think about how I was lying in bed at precisely the same moment, counting the minutes until your departure — and now I know. I suspected something of the sort, something disastrous. But Barrista? What does he have to do with us? When it comes to us, he doesn’t exist. What are you accusing him of? Or me? Why is he important at all? Isn’t he a person who ought to arouse our sympathy, or forbearance? As a man who has to compensate for so much? But none of that matters. Why are you making me atone for what he did? How else am I supposed to understand your silence? At first glance B. seems an odd duck. I have no idea where he gets his strange manners and attitudes. Do they have any purpose other than to draw attention away from his looks? People here make fun of his pointy boots with their out-of-whack heels. Ultimately I can’t tell you anything about B., other than that he approached the newspaper with his unusual request. The explanations he gave for it are flattering. Is there any reason why we shouldn’t cooperate with him?

Where do you know him from? Or was he — I don’t dare put it in words — impolite or otherwise crude? Believe me, it would take no more than a hint of something of the sort — and he can go to wherever!

B. has left, no one knows when he’ll be back.

Please drop me just a couple of lines, I beg you.

With all my heart,

Your Enrico

Monday, March 19, ’90

Dear Nicoletta,

Up until the very last minute I was certain you’d appear at the office, as if there were some natural rhythm that would necessarily bring you back to Altenburg. Sometimes I’m seized with the fear that you might be ill, that something’s wrong, maybe in aftermath of the accident. Have you had X-rays taken?

My desire to see you was so strong that I believed it might conjure up your presence. That’s also why I came to the office early — and thought I had been rewarded. I ran into Georg in the vestibule, and he promised me a visitor, in fact someone was waiting for me. Georg’s smile was so broad I had no doubts whatever.

But I played the innocent — yes, I blame myself for that now, as if my foolishness had driven you away — shrugged, as if I couldn’t imagine who it might be, and asked Georg what needed to be done, hoping you would hear my voice. Of course I had nothing against his going right back upstairs. Ah, Nicoletta, those few moments of promise!

Three men from the newspaper in Giessen sat sipping coffee, happy to have new playmates. I recognized one of them from his lilac-colored jacket.

My responses were mechanical. My thoughts were racing here and there, but at some point I calmed myself with the realization that there was lots of time left, that the day had just begun, so everything still lay ahead of me, a day with lots of hours with lots of minutes — and you might arrive at any one of them. With astounding speed the familiar happiness that comes with such an expectation reasserted itself. The soft light of a spring day too warm for this early in the year could only be your harbinger.

The men from Giessen had been out watching polling stations open and had retreated to our office as if to a pub. They didn’t believe me when I told them I’d been up for only an hour instead of doing research since the crack of dawn. But after I asked them to pass on their article on the general mood, they set their misgivings aside. I laid out the page proofs and started in. I wanted to earn your appearance, Nicoletta, and be finished early.

Each time the door opened it seemed more and more likely that you would appear.

The fellows from Giessen deployed their forces one by one, but were never gone for long. Their favorite story was about how Hans Schönemann, the former “district secretary for ideology and propaganda,” was now a candidate of the German Social Union. Although I told them right off that there were two people who went by that name, the guy with the hedgehog haircut kept telling the story over and over, and left it to me to correct him. Then he would smile as if to say: Are you sure of that?

Around two I stuffed myself with pastries and was afraid you’d catch me with my mouth full. I expected you by five, or five thirty at the latest, at any rate before the polls closed. I was as convinced of that as if you had just told me so over the phone.

Around four I had finished up with everything and would have been done even earlier if I hadn’t had to play host the whole time, as well as putting off calculating the last article. I wanted you to find me hard at work.

Franka had some folding chairs that were usually set out halfway up the back garden — the white paint was flaking and stuck to your trouser seat. We had put the newspaper to bed and had shoved the table’s extensions back in. There hadn’t been that many people in our parlor the day of our first issue. I hadn’t seen many of them since last October or November. Georg announced that he had figured out that anyone born after 1912 had never taken part in a genuine election.

When the clock struck the hour, the sixth stroke caught me unawares. I thought I had counted wrong, but the portable radio also announced six p.m. Squeezed in among the crowd, it seemed to me other people were holding their breath too — utter silence. Until Jörg laughed out loud. Others joined in. Suddenly everyone was shouting something — the prognosticators were vilified and mocked.¹⁰⁷ I fought my way outside and climbed up the garden slope.

The fellows from Giessen and a few of our delivery people were still there an hour later. They were sitting around the table where the radio stood — silence reigned. At any given point at least one of them was shaking his head. The fellows from Giessen drew the harshest conclusions, talked about betrayal, betrayal of the ideals of last autumn, and even abandoned their story about Hans Schönemann.

They were also the only ones who really dug in when Franka set out a tray of sandwiches. Georg had crept away somewhere. Staring at the table between his elbows, Jörg shooed away Georg’s boys and finally turned off the radio. At that moment the telephone rang. Or maybe the telephone rang first. Jörg was closest to it, but took forever to pick up the receiver. He said “Hello,” repeated it more loudly, and finally bellowed that he couldn’t understand a word. The guy in lilac nudged me. “The receiver,” he whispered. I didn’t get it. “Look at the receiver,” he hissed. Shouting into the earpiece, Jörg was holding the receiver backward. I signaled the fact to him, which only made him angrier. I took the receiver away from him, but by then there was nobody on the other end.

I said my good-byes, Jörg caught up with me at the front door. He wanted me to write the editorial for the front page — on the right, boxed, a thousand characters, he’d always done it until now. When I got home I gave myself over to the notion that you were watching the same pictures on television.

Those thousand characters were easier than I had expected. Georg will probably accept it, I’m not so sure about Jörg. There’s not much time for major changes. After all the hopes I had pinned on this day, I find my fatalism almost heroic.

My thoughts are with you,

Your Enrico

Tuesday, March 20, ’90

Dear Jo,

I hope you were able to cope with Sunday better than Michaela (my views on the election will be on the front page). You can hear “two point nine” sung by Michaela in all keys and timbres — today sardonic, yesterday more despairing, toneless, dramatic. Compared to her I felt like a stone. Ever since her klartext was consigned to the grave, Michaela hasn’t been near the New Forum. She also steadfastly refused any and all nominations, though she was flattered by the offers. Send Michaela Fürst to parliament!

As if knowing what was coming, she had had her hair cut short on Friday. Not even Robert knew about it. The idea came to her at the beauty parlor. And so she’s playing Nefertiti, as somber as she is standoffish. Sunday mornings, when I set out at eight thirty, she never fails to ask if I had ever imagined my new life would be like this. Let’s hope she doesn’t see the line of people at the train station waiting to buy their Bild tabloid.

On Sunday Michaela made her appearance in a new dress that Thea had given her — more an outfit for the opera. Our delivery staff and the people from the New Forum who crowded into our office received her as if their legitimate sovereign were making her entrance.

She kept her composure after the first predictions came in. As long as the people around her reacted with despair or, like Marion, broke down in tears, Michaela could even play the consoler. She kept repeating that it’s never over until it’s over. Some people cursed Bärbel Bohley and her entourage for doing nothing but their Berlin thing, others damned the Greens in the West for having neither a clue nor any money. Marion then remarked that we hadn’t been hard enough on the bigwigs. We did ourselves in with our own false notions of fairness — why hadn’t we published all the Stasi lists and banned the old parties? What had been the point of reading Lenin in school?

Within a half hour the outrage had exhausted itself. And with each person who slunk away, Michaela lost a piece of her energy. People didn’t even bother to say good-bye to one another. The simplest things went awry. Cigarettes refused to be stubbed out, two glasses were tipped over within seconds of one another, we bumped into each other or stepped on people’s toes. Michaela admitted to me today that for several minutes she had been unable to recall if Marion’s name was Marion. The fellows from Giessen kept jotting down notes, but in the end appeared to take offense at the results and said things like “the ugly side of the East.”

Once we got home Michaela couldn’t be dragged away from the television. Wrapped in a blanket, she didn’t even turn her head when she spoke to us. At every miniscule change in the numbers she would call us in and stretch out an arm, pointing at the screen.

Michaela had promised Robert she’d make fondue. It was all ready to go, the trays in the fridge, the broth in the pot. But even when it was on the table and we two had stuck our forks into the pot, she was still crouched in front of the TV. Robert was on the verge of tears. I asked her twice to join us — she knew how it had turned out.

What did I actually have to say about the disaster? I was acting as if it were no concern of mine, as if our provincial rag hadn’t also played its part in the catastrophe. I replied that there were few things that could keep me from eating my fondue. I’m sure you know how I meant it. But Michaela turned to stone.

Nothing, nothing had any meaning, she said, if people were going to cast such sick, idiotic votes. She couldn’t breathe the air here, could barely look anyone in the eye, and I was just as moronic as everybody else.

As if hurling the question at me from the stage, she suddenly asked: Who are you, who are you really? I had to laugh, not at her question, but at what raced through my mind. A searcher, I said. And what was I searching for? The right kind of life, I said, and surprised myself at how calmly I pronounced those self-evident words. Astonishingly enough, she then sat down with us at the table.

Ah, Jo, what am I supposed to do? I want so much to help her. But she won’t listen to the truth, at least not from me.

When I returned from my midday meal today — innkeeper Gallus was “flying the flag,” meaning he had laid starched white tablecloths to celebrate the election victory — there at my desk sat Piatkowski, the local CDU vice chairman, sucking on lozenges to cover the alcohol on his breath. And who was he talking with? With Barrista!

When Piatkowski saw me come in, he opened up a dark red document folder and handed me the letterhead of the Altenburg District CDU announcing that it was “deeply moved” and thanking the men and women who had given the party their votes. I said we couldn’t accept anything more — nothing more this week.

“Or one could pay the surcharge,” the baron said. That’s what he’d done recently. For twice the price one could surely buy a half page. Piatkowski’s moist lips began to quiver. What, he asked, would a hundred fifty marks get him? Barely two inches, one column wide. Mulling this over, Piatkowski cinched the folder’s black-red-and-gold cord tight, then finally agreed — with a sigh at having to forgo his new CDU symbol (their old ex oriente pax was evidently no longer valid) — and chose one of the heavy obituary frames. You’ll need a magnifying glass to read the text. I gave him a receipt for his cash payment.

Once Piatkowski was gone, I asked the baron whether he knew whom he had just been speaking with. Last October, the day after Altenburg held its first demonstration and Michaela and a couple of others had been invited to the Rathaus by the district secretary of the Socialist Unity Party, Piatkowski had been sitting across from them at the table and had threatened them, saying anyone who tried to block open dialogue should not count on magnanimity — a statement that even earned him the censure of the secretary, who declared how “deeply moved” he had been by the demonstration.

The baron shrugged. What was I upset about? About that poor nobody who had just slid out the door? Piatkowski, I said, was the last man on earth to get my pity. But I was told to consider what I was saying. The fellow wouldn’t be watching the next local elections as a Party official, and Piatwhatever knew that better than anyone. He would lose his job for the same reason. Did I know why Piatwhatever had joined the CDU? To salvage his parents’ drugstore, because he had been told it was either stick with the Socialists or lose the store. And he had sought refuge with the CDU in order to keep the business afloat for at least as long as his father was still alive.¹⁰⁸ Then he’d been offered an administrative position, in the exchequer — the baron’s term for the budget office. (Piatkowski had evidently completely turned his head.) We could finish him off with a snap of the fingers, the baron replied, we only had to place a call and threaten to write an article, that’s all it would take, we didn’t even have to waste column space on him. And hadn’t I just seen proof of how hard they were making things for him, just to get a line or two published, whereas I could write as much as I wanted on any subject. He didn’t like to see me wasting my time with people like Piatwhatever, the baron said, quite apart from the fact that it wasn’t very chivalrous to kick a man when he’s down.

“Especially now that we’ve reached a critical point,” he said, “you have to know what you want to do.” His voice was insistent, but so low that even Ilona, whom we’d just heard moving about in the kitchen, could not have heard him. Then Felix, Georg’s oldest boy, came back from taking the wolf for a walk, and the baron asked if I’d care to accompany him on a stroll through town. So far he’d just been rushing from appointment to appointment, but now he’d just like to be carried along with the current. I had to turn him down, but was told we can keep the car for a while yet.

Your E.

Wednesday, March 21, ’90

Dear Nicoletta,

Even more promising than the Bamberg cancellation on the envelope are the two exclamation marks in the margin and the underlining, which I take is your handwriting.¹⁰⁹

Barrista is back in town already. He admitted that you had had an argument. Of course he denied my questions at first and refused to admit that there was an “argument,” but then conceded that he had not understood why he should have any less right to spend time in our office than you. If we didn’t want him here, then I should tell him so. Finally he confessed that his reaction had been a bit “defiant,” but assured me twice that he had no reason to accuse you of anything, and spoke effusively of your articles in Stern magazine, of which I’m sorry to say I was quite unaware. If there needs to be a reconciliation, he’s willing to take the first step.

Barrista went on to ask whether I might not be thinking differently about some things today. I asked what he meant. In the West, he told me, considerably more people were disappointed about the results of the election than here. He — that is, Barrista — wasn’t interested in any particular political point of view, but rather in democracy. The state at any rate stood in its citizens’ way more often than it advanced their progress.

When I showed him the articles you sent me, he raised his arms and then wearily lowered them again. That was precisely what he meant when he had suggested talking things over calmly. Barrista had once expressed a wish that as time went on we ought to discuss things more, so that we could put as many ideas on the table as possible — although that surely is not quite the same thing […]

From his attaché case he pulled out a binder that was much too small for the mass of paper bulging out of it. On top was an almost undecipherable cover letter — I could barely make out my own name — in which he advised who ought to be informed of the contents of this dossier. For the most part it contains copies of newspaper articles and documents by his defense lawyer, plus the final court decision […]

While I thumbed through it — your own material is all there — he worked hard to persuade me. After all, a man doesn’t just walk in one day and say, “Hello, fellows, the prosecuting attorney showed up at my front door two years ago.”

As I would come to realize myself as soon as I assumed the responsibility of running a business, you always stand with one foot in prison. You have to make decisions that — because of unexpected developments, or somebody else’s mistake, or just plain bad luck — can end up taking a wrong turn. All too often he had had to take responsibility for what had been done against his advice, counter to his opinion, counter to his express wishes.

He offered to answer each and every question I might have, although he saw no reason why he should have to justify himself to us.

He urged me to place more stock in the court’s final decision than in the charges. The law regarded him as having no criminal record.

His glibness has made me very suspicious, at least for now. But it is only a hunch, a feeling. Will you help me ask him the right questions?

And now the continuation of my efforts, although I don’t know whether you even want to hear¹¹⁰ another chapter.

With warmest regards, Your Enrico

The first weeks of school saw the high-spirited and happy mood of my vacation deteriorate occasionally into one of sanctimonious self-accusation. Not a day went by that I didn’t fail in my attempt to obey God’s commandments. Keeping a diary meant answering for my conduct. Future generations were supposed to know what their famous author had felt, thought, and done as a young man and learn what high standards he had demanded of himself.

What I’m going to tell you about now isn’t in the diary. I’ll try to be as brief as possible.

After my arcadian summer I found my classmates — we were eighth graders now — to be a childish bunch. No one with whom I would have been able to talk about my incredible experiences, nothing they might talk about in discotheques, garages, and cellars held any interest for me. Hendrik must have sensed this, it must have emboldened him.

A speech defect and frightening skinniness had made Hendrik a favorite object of bullies since first grade, and I had defended him on many an occasion, although without much real sympathy. He would strut around me like a raven, holding his birdlike head at an angle and pointing an elbow at me, crooking first his left arm, then his right, as if scratching at his armpit, and then lunge closer with a hop to ask me a question. Sometimes he wanted to know if I had gone on an excursion over the weekend, sometimes whether we had a record player, things like that. Each time I would provide an answer, to which he then responded with a wicked smile and slunk away without another word, evidently convinced he had just had a great conversation.

It must have been November already — we had stopped going to the schoolyard for recess — when he whispered to me something about creatures of a higher intelligence. This was all the more surprising since his mother worked for the police and his father, a stern, tightfisted man, was the school janitor.

From then on, day after day, Hendrik muttered some new infallible proof for our having descended from extraterrestrial creatures and — while intertwining arms and hands as if trying to put himself in shackles — offered his theory about the form of energy he assumed they had used to power their extraterrestrial spaceships. Shortly before Christmas Hendrik asked me if I now believed his theory. It was the first time he had sounded angry. “No,” I said, “I believe in Jesus Christ.”

The words — I had never spoken them before — shocked even me. It was as if a voice had announced from the clouds during roll call: “Enrico, you are my beloved son, in whom I am well pleased.” It took me all weekend to capture this last scene in my diary.

On the morning of December 24th, Hendrik appeared at our door and, without waiting to be asked, stepped inside on his raven legs. He had to talk to me. As if his mother actually did dress him — as everyone claimed — almost nothing of his face was visible between cap and scarf. He admired my strong faith, he said, wanted to be able to believe the way I did, and asked me for help. He announced this in our vestibule. The pair of flat-nose pliers in my hand didn’t seem to bother him. My mother — we had been pulling tendons from the turkey’s drumsticks — told Hendrik to take off his coat and dismissed me from duty.

What I told him was that there wasn’t much I could do, that he had to do it himself, but I offered to read the Bible with him, something from the New Testament, and to pray. Obedient as a sick patient, he cracked open the Bible — and his eye fell on the passage where Jesus asks the children to come unto him. Did I think that was a miracle? he asked. I told him that everything is a sign from God. After we read the whole chapter, first I prayed in a low voice, then he did. Suddenly I opened my eyes as if to assure myself that we were actually doing what we were doing. My gaze fell on the ankle-high work shoes that Hendrik had taken to wearing now that his feet were unfortunately as large as his father’s. They hung from him like weights and turned his already stilted gait into a perfect circus act. Although he himself would sigh and try to laugh it off, there wasn’t one gym class in which those old boots weren’t sent hurtling around the dressing room.

I had credited it to my own influence that after the last gym class before summer vacation his shoes of tribulation had stayed in one spot. Hendrik sat down to put one on, but as he picked it up water gushed out, drenching his stockinged feet — and I likewise found myself standing in the middle of the puddle, which added to the hilarity. And those same shoes had now crept into our house, had made their way to my room, where their heels were scuffing my bed frame.

“Amen,” Hendrik said. His hands still lay folded on the open Bible. His head hanging askew, he eyed me as if it were now my turn. “Amen,” I said, and stared again at his shoes.

Since I didn’t know what else to do and could hardly ask him to repeat his prayer, I suggested we take a walk. He instantly agreed. But first I had to take the pliers back to the kitchen. Have you ever roasted a turkey? My job was to set the pliers to the tendons my mother had cut free and tug them out while my mothers held on to the headless bird. The meat on the drumstick would slip up the bone to form ridiculous knickerbockers. Each drumstick has several such tendons, and although I would pull my mother almost across the table, while she let out little screeches, we never managed to rip them all out. Already repacked like a Christmas Räuchermännchen, Hendrik watched us, and then smiled vacantly as he took leave of my mother with a low bow.

Hendrik didn’t leave me in peace for a single moment of our walk. He wanted to know how often I prayed, what I did when I felt I couldn’t love certain people and instead really detested them, and if the desire for eternal life wasn’t selfish. Hendrik elaborated on his own understandings and suggestions, and where before he had talked about “Christians,” he now said we, which at first I misheard as ye, until it became absolutely clear that it was we who no longer had to fear death and we who were called to conduct ourselves differently from other people. His conversion was obvious, but because I wanted to be totally convinced of it — yet found a direct question inappropriate — I kept extending our walk. It was only as we passed the parish hall on our way back that I was granted certainty. There was a poster pasted in a street-level window: “God’s word lives. Through you!” The poster was about a special donation, but it seemed to me that Jesus himself had written this with me in mind. I smiled in some embarrassment and lowered my eyes, expecting Hendrik to break into cries of astonishment, if not admiration. Wasn’t it a miracle — this poster, right here, right now? But Hendrik didn’t notice the poster or didn’t apply it to us, though that did nothing to alter my certainty that I had saved a soul and become a true fisher of men. I said good-bye to Hendrik. His visit, I told him, was my finest Christmas present. We shook hands — his mother had taught him to grip with exaggerated firmness. I was about to turn away, when Hendrik’s upper body tipped forward. I assumed he was going to bow — instead his forehead touched my shoulder. And at that moment my entire euphoria vanished. I realized that from now on I’d have Hendrik on my back.

I’ve described this to you not for its own sake — there are so many other things I could tell you — but because I planned to make the experience the stuff of my first short story.

The broad rib of the fountain pen that had miraculously found its way into Aunt Camilla’s package along with the candy gave my handwriting a certain evenness. Writing itself — the motions of my hand, the look of each loop — provided me an unfamiliar satisfaction.

My new pen accelerated my thoughts; after only three pages I had arrived at our joint prayers. When suddenly — and at that moment I was still certain that the flow of my words would lift me imperceptibly across this dangerous reef — my memory was paralyzed by my mind’s digression, by the sin of having thought of Hendrik’s shoes and my schoolmates’ high jinks instead of praying for his conversion. If I couldn’t manage to lend assistance to someone struggling toward salvation…I screwed the cap back on my pen, holding it in my left hand and turning the pen three times, then laid it, the tool of my trade, across the top edge of my diary. It was as if I had ended each workday with this same gesture for years.

Suddenly I understood: The fact that I had failed as a person, as a creature of God, was precisely what would enable me to be a literary figure. And that was the crucial realization: I was not to keep a diary, but to write a work unlike any other, a work that glorified the deeds of God.

I slipped into the living room, where the fragrance of Western coffee and Fa soap contended against local odors, and pulled my mother’s stationery pad from its drawer. I flipped it open, set the lined paper to rights, took out my pen, placed the cap on the other end, and without hesitation wrote the word “Birth,” centering it at the top of the page. And beneath it: A Story by — new line — Enrico Türmer. And as content as if I had just completed my opus, I went to bed.

In the light of dawn and with a sweater pulled over my pajamas, I was once again at my desk. I longed to describe my failure in expansive loops that swung above and below the lines, forming as if all on their own great, long sentences. But since this was to be a story, I first needed to describe the terrain and the persons moving across it, so that after my first sentence—“The doorbell rang.”—the plot came to a halt for a long while.

My plan for completing my work over the first two days of Christmas, then at least before year’s end, and finally before the end of the holiday break, proved illusory.

I was deeply aware of the ambiguity of the situation — meeting Hendrik in the morning and then writing about him in the afternoon. As expected, he had lost all inhibitions and made a beeline straight for me. He would even be sitting in my seat every morning, as if to say: I’ve been waiting for you. It was almost impossible to talk to anyone else without him at my side. If he tripped over an outstretched leg, or couldn’t find his shoes, or saw drawings on the blackboard — the teachers called them smut — bearing his name, he would simply draw himself up, set his head at an angle, and smile, which was his way of saying: I shall turn the other cheek to you. At least I was able to convince him to unbutton the top button of his shirt. I also put up with Hendrik’s babblings about positive and negative energies in the cosmos, for who besides Hendrik could tell me what it felt like to be seized by the Holy Spirit — the greater the detail, the better.

One day during winter break as Hendrik and I made our way to Youth Fellowship, I interrupted him in the middle of his theorizing about the creation of the world. Hendrik didn’t understand what I meant. I turned angry — so did I need to ask him outright whether he had heard a voice and what it had said to him?

The Christian faith, Hendrik replied at last, brings order into life. And besides — and here came his “turn-the-other-cheek” smile — it certainly couldn’t hurt to be a believer. If it isn’t true, Hendrik concluded, we’ll never be aware it of anyway.

I flinched. I wanted to smack his ugly face, call him a goddamned fraud, hand him over to every torture that the hell of a schoolroom is capable of. “The devil is a logician!”—I later read somewhere in Heine.

“Hendrik slapped the pen from my hand”—for months that remained the last entry in my diary.

I was still wallowing in my suffering in August when we returned to Waldau, where I did nothing but read eight volumes bound in marbled gray and bearing a gold-on-blue mantra on their spines — the name Hermann Hesse. They were a present from Aunt Camilla, which had simply arrived without notice. Hidden in their pages was a fragrance richer and finer than any Intershop¹¹¹ perfume. The fragrance filled my hours of reading, it was my incense and blended only very slowly with the scent of the Waldau woods and cottage. But I didn’t realize that until I was back home.

Yours, yours entirely, Enrico

Wednesday, March 21, ’90

Dear Jo,

Yesterday the baron and I made good on our stroll through town, the weather was just right. Leaving the Red Tips behind, we went on to the Great Pond and then down along the hat factory. I suggested he take a walk with Georg, who could tell him all about Barbarossa and the abduction of the princes, about Melanchthon, Bach, Lindenau, Pierer, Brock-haus, Nietzsche’s father, and so much more. The island zoo was closed. I wanted to take a little detour past Altenbourg’s¹¹² house, but since the name meant nothing to him, we walked back by way of the movie theater and then up Teich Strasse, which is no more than ruins, with hardly one building occupied. We made slow progress because Barrista was constantly taking photographs. Both his steps and gestures were as cautious as those of an archaeologist or spelunker. We couldn’t even get into a good many courtyards; the walls had buckled to create organic shapes, protruding potbellies, sagging rows of windows. Young birches sprouting from the roofs looked like feathers on a hat. I told him what everyone says: Even after the war a man could hardly have drunk a beer in every pub along Teich Strasse — reportedly there were over twenty of them, now just one is left.

Every so often Barrista would run his hand along the plaster. It was his show of sympathy — it opened my eyes and shamed me. As we walked along it came to me: the utter coarseness of it all, a coarseness inside me, inside us, a coarseness that meant letting a town like this fall into ruin, yet without going crazy. I had always regarded this deterioration as the natural order of things.

I thought of the frog experiment that the baron mentions on most every occasion — if you raise the temperature one degree per hour, so he claims, the frog ends up boiled, even though it could jump out if it wanted to. And maybe all those who jumped out of this country did the right thing. That’s what I was thinking as I watched the baron take shots of the faded lettering and signs above walled-up windows or capture the murky twilight of shops through broken panes.

(Georg is sitting just behind me at the table. I can hear him groan and sigh as I write this. He wanted to know if I could tell him what to say when he’s asked why we founded the newspaper. I repeated his own words from those days: Create transparency, accompany the course of democratization, provide the people a forum, tell the bigwigs…Yes, he knew all that, Georg interrupted, but could we still write those same words today? His scruples won’t let him finish a single article, and instead he constantly nitpicks at ours.)

When Barrista and I finally reached St. Nicholas cemetery, he asked a man of indeterminable age who was leaning against one jamb of the bell-tower doorway whether we were very late. The man shook his broad head, grinned as if he recognized me, set two fingers by way of greeting to the bill of his cap (Robert calls it a “basecap”), and pulled out a cord with a large key, then a safety key, and finally a sturdy wooden weight. I was amazed that it all came from one pants pocket. He gave another salute and sauntered off whistling like a street urchin. He was the same man who had been talking with Barrista on the steps of the Catholic church the day we took our little excursion to visit Larschen.

As the baron turned the safety key in its lock, the sound echoed inside the tower.

I’d probably have no trouble making the climb, Barrista remarked, and waved me on ahead. He followed. I tried to keep some distance between us, but he stayed hard on my heels, meanwhile chatting away about how the tower was closed because the stairs were in need of repair — I should watch my step. He had found Proharsky to be a man who carried out little requests without further ado. Proharsky was actually a Cossack, the child of so-called collaborators, whose adventures had landed them as strangers here among us. He had helped Proharsky’s mother apply for a special pension that had long been hers by rights.

“You know,” he said as I took the last step and my gaze swept the rooftops, “I’ve fallen in love with this town. While I was away I felt it more strongly then ever before. All the jabbering and blathering we do over there had me literally longing to get back here.”

The baron even had a key for the watchman’s room, a cluttered mess with a foul odor.

The baron had fallen in love for a strange reason: The town had as good as no chance, and if it ever could be saved, then only by a miracle. He laughed and massaged his left knee. The name itself, Altenburg: “old” plus “fortress.” Old didn’t sound all that inviting, a town with that prefix would have a difficult time of it from the start. And people associated fortress — here he laughed more loudly — with awful things, with cold, cramped dungeons. Nomen est omen—all he had to do was say “Alten-Burg” and foreign investors would throw up their hands at the thought of some colonial fort abandoned by Charlemagne. That was without even mentioning an autobahn that was as far away as hell and back. One glance at a railway map and it had been clear to him that it wouldn’t be long before only milk trains stopped here. Moreover, I could ask anyone I wanted — the local factory behemoths were close to folding, and the D-mark, whenever it did arrive, would finish them off. D-mark wages would put an end to selling vacuum cleaners at dumping prices, and as for industrial sewing machines — that train had left the station long ago. And the vehicles for the Volksarmee, those fully obsolete trucks — for the Western German army maybe?

Then we stepped out onto the encircling balcony. It took me a long time to find Georg’s garden and our viewing spot there, but I immediately located the Battle of the Nations Monument on the northern horizon.

Brown coal, the baron went on — and I knew this as well as he — had, according to his information, a water content that made it more profitable to process it as a fire retardant. And environmental agencies would close that muck spinner¹¹³ in Rositz the moment the cancer rates became public knowledge. And as for uranium — we were looking now at the pyramids to the west — that was a matter of pure speculation.

“So what does that leave? Altenburger liqueur? Altenburger mustard and vinegar? A couple of decks of skat cards? The brewery maybe?” And suddenly, turning toward me: “I’m asking you!”

How was I supposed to know? I replied. But he wouldn’t let go. Surely I’d given it some thought, ultimately it was all of a piece, and without money in their hands it didn’t matter what people were offered. One really ought to be able to expect a prognosis from someone who had founded a newspaper, which itself involved no inconsiderable risk.

“The newspaper doesn’t have anything to do with any of this,” I replied. These kind of worries, I proposed, had played no role in our founding the paper. Barrista was scaring me. I thought of my grandfather’s prophecies: someday I’d find out just how hard it is to earn my daily bread.

So tell me more, was what I really wanted to say — the same way you do when you want to hear how, as improbable as it might seem, the storyteller escapes in the end.

“There isn’t much left, in fact,” Barrista finally said, “except for these towers, houses, churches, and museums. The theater, if you’ll beg my pardon”—he bowed—“surely can’t be something you would add to the list. Two years, maybe three, and its glory days are over.” And after pausing, he added, “Wonderful view, isn’t it?” Then he fell silent, and strolled on. We could see the Vogtland to the south and the ridgeline of the Ore Mountains, and to the east, behind Castle Hill, I thought I could make out the gentle hills of Geithain and Rochlitz.

“But it’s all got to be kept going somehow,” I exclaimed. He turned around and, after gazing a while in astonishment at me with his deep-sea eyes, raised his right eyebrow in silent-film fashion. “Well, then tell me how…!” he cried.

“Why me?” I burst out.

“And why me?” he echoed with a laugh. Yes, he was making fun of me. The matter required some thought, he went on. A good general with only half as many soldiers as his foe needed to come up with something — or seek refuge in retreat. After all, I had studied in Jena and surely hadn’t forgotten what had happened there in anno Domini 1806.¹¹⁴ Hegel’s Weltgeist wasn’t going to come riding into town all on its own.

I shuddered, as if someone had slipped an ice cube under my shirt collar. The baron had turned up the collar of his jacket. “If only the hereditary prince could see this,” he said. “What all wouldn’t he give for such a view.”

The baron laughed and then began rubbing his hands like crazy. “We’ve got to find something — a vein of silver, gemstones, something’s always lying buried somewhere. We just have to find it!” He gave a raucous laugh and showed me the red palms of his hands, as if they had just released something into the air. “Shake on it,” he said, and I grasped his hand without knowing what pact I was entering into. But because his hand was warm and his gaze so momentous, I clasped his hand with my left as well — on top of which, obviously moved, he laid his other hand.

We were greeted down below by Proharsky. Without a word he took back the keys and wooden weight, and wandered off.

We walked across town, heading for the office. I slowly began to grasp what he had in mind, that is, the decision he had come to. Approaching by way of Nansen Strasse, with Market Square lying in its full expanse before us, he merrily prophesied that within a short time I would see how everything he touched would turn to gold. He himself had ceased to be amazed that this was so. First he needed an office, a spacious office with a telephone and all the rest. He would be grateful if I could help him find one over the next few days.

Now I had to laugh. Was he just playing stupid, or was he really that out of touch? With everybody wringing their hands these days in search of a few dry square feet of office space, he wants to be able to pick and choose?

He plans to announce the opening of his real-estate office in the Weekly. “During the next few weeks of renovations, contact possible only by mail.” By the time the ad appeared, he said, he’d have his business license. He asked me to suggest a name. “LeBaron,” I replied without a second thought. Not bad, he replied, and asked whether Fürst was my life partner’s last name, he had seen it listed next to mine on our door. I nodded. “Well then!” he announced, joy apparently propelling his step. That was the ticket, but even better in the plural, Fürst & Fürst, Prince & Prince, which would probably present few problems, he added, since there was surely no one else by that name in Altenburg. He would, if I had no objection, ask my partner for her consent, a deal that would provide some ready cash for Michaela — he actually called her Michaela.

What I really wanted to do was invite him to Robert’s birthday party, if only because of the wolf, which Georg’s boys normally take for an afternoon walk. But there have been enough arguments already, because both grandmothers are arriving tomorrow, and Robert can’t be dissuaded from selling newspapers on Market Square. Michaela’s mother insisted on at least keeping Jimmy’s steering wheel. I’ll present it to her tomorrow — the urn of her deceased companion, so to speak. I’m to keep the LeBaron for now.

You really must meet Barrista, if only to taste his wine and to behold a Hero of Contemporary Literature.

Hugs, E.

PS: Georg is still brooding, but breathing calmly and regularly.

Saturday, March 24, ’90

Dear Nicoletta,

There are times when I interpret your silence as a test to maintain my trust in you and not to let my emotions drive me crazy. I go over and over the hours we spent together, searching for some clue as to what I might have done wrong. If only I knew that much! Is my task to discover my own failings? Or have they sent you to Hong Kong? Can Barrista really be the reason for your silence? A single word from you — and I’d have no trouble making that decision. Or is my search for reasons itself presumptuous?

If the question weren’t so absurd, I’d ask whether you read my letters. Not one has been returned. Which gives me the courage to continue.

The high point of my second summer in Arcadia was our annual visit to Budapest. Instead of whiling away the night on the train, we flew — the ultimate in luxury. Plus the added benefit that we traveled without Vera, who had a job at a vacation camp on the Baltic.

Our landlady, Frau Nádori,¹¹⁵ whom as always we paid with bed linens,¹¹⁶ greeted us with an invitation to join her in the kitchen, made us coffee, and puffed away on a Duett from my mother’s pack. She inhaled deep and blew the smoke into my face. (She had been a friend of Tibor Déry’s mother and had helped Déry’s wife out during the difficult days after ’56. The name meant nothing to me at the time.)

As always we walked up to the castle. This time, however, I was no longer a child — I had my pencil and notepad with me.¹¹⁷

And then I saw it, the tower! It reigned over the street like one of those all-seeing, omnipotent constructions in a Jules Verne novel. A tower like that could strike us with some mysterious ray or send a life-saving message. But if we got too close to it, it would vanish.

“Foreign currency hotel”—Frau Nádori’s term for this miraculous tower of golden glass — missed the mark completely. The thing we were staring at was not of this world, and yet stood on solid ground. A UFO — it had inexplicably landed in the here and now and had simultaneously become the crown, the capstone of our own world.

I’ll never forget my mother’s smile as she entered the Hilton, or her wave to me to follow her. Unmolested by either the police or State Security officers we made it inside — just as we were.

You need to know that prior to that I had never seen the inside of a hotel, not even a fourth-class one. We walked across carpets still wearing our street shoes — no one cared. I heard primarily West German and English and one other language, presumably Italian. Plus there was an inexplicable light, neither bright nor dim, and a general hush, even though people spoke here more loudly than on the street. Mostly older married couples were sprawled in leather armchairs, something I had never seen before in public. Some of them had even pulled up footstools to stretch their legs out across them. No one demanded these Westerners remove their shoes. And to my even greater astonishment I saw one of the uniformed personnel heave suitcases and bags onto a gilt cart and push it toward the elevator. They were police, weren’t they? Or were they servants maybe, real live servants, who carried Westerners’ luggage for them? A portal onto the underworld could not have astonished me more than this passageway into the beyond.

My mother, who evidently wanted to confirm the reality of the species, asked a lanky uniformed fellow, whose hair was cut far too short — were they soldiers maybe? — where one could have a cup of coffee here. He directed her with an open hand to our left, circumvented us with a few short steps, and repeated the gesture. My mother thanked him loudly, and in German. German of all languages, she had always drummed into us, should never be spoken loudly in other countries.

I recognized the tall, uncomfortable stools from a milk bar in Dresden. I was both disappointed and relieved to see something for which I had some reference.

My mother closed her purse and shoved it onto the counter. A pack of Duetts crackled in her right hand, the cigarette lay between the forefinger and middle finger of her left, her ring finger and pinkie pressed a brown D-mark bill against the ball of her hand.

So as not to betray us with her box of matches, she asked the woman working the bar for a light. This time my mother had spoken too low. I had to help her, had to protect her. I went over the question in English several times before I risked asking it out loud. “Do you have matches, please?” I repeated it and blushed. I was less in doubt about the correctness of my English than whether it would be understood outside my schoolroom.

The pack of matches not only shimmered white, it also bore a flourish of golden letters and lay on a white porcelain saucer. And then the shock: “You are welcome, sir.” The woman had called me “sir” in front of my mother. The phrase instantly suffused my flesh and blood, and I would use it later to the amazement of my English class.

I took a match from the pack, set it ablaze, and cautiously raised it — for the first time ever — in the direction of the cigarette.

My mother looked older. The worries of the last few years, my arrest, and finally my expatriation were deeply traced in her features. Her joy in my worldwide success could not change that either. Her only son had been taken from her. When had we last seen each other? It had taken five years for me finally to be issued a visa by the Hungarians. The whole time we had each thought one of us would be sent back at the border, just as had happened so often before at the last moment. But then, incredible as it seemed, it had happened, and mother and son could embrace. Was it not perfectly understandable that words came slowly, if it all, that we simply took silent delight in each other’s presence?

I had no idea what my mother was thinking as we waited for our coffee and orange juice. I had always found her occasional social cigarette something of an embarrassment, because she preferred to squint and cough rather than give up her imitation of whoever it was she was imitating. But here and now it seemed right.

I was so charmed by my new role that I despised these Westerners — children, all of them, young and old. How naive they were! What did they know of the rigors of a divided world — they could reach out and grab anything in their world, not to mention ours.

Gazing through the windows on the other side of the counter, I could see the columns, arches, and fragmented walls of a former grandeur. And above them now rose this tower. From up here the city lay like a gift at your feet, and here I celebrated my triumph. Even Westerners fell silent when they recognized me.

While I had been dreaming, my mother had ordered a fruit pastry. No, that was for her! The pastry was hers to enjoy, I could have it anytime. But of course to her — and I had booked her into the most expensive room — all this had to seem outrageously new and incomprehensible. She didn’t dare let all this splendor touch her too closely if she wanted to continue to set one foot in front of the other. And so I ate the pastry.

To show just how at home I felt here, I went to the restroom and sat myself down on the shiny toilet seat — something I normally did only at home. And I have never — ah, Nicoletta, forgive me for such intimate indiscretions — never since taken such a glorious dump. In that same moment, I decided to learn Hungarian.

I luxuriated in washing my hands with warm water and liquid soap, examined myself in the huge mirror — and liked what I saw.

My mother was waiting for me. She took my hands in hers and smelled. “How fragrant,” she whispered. And with that we stepped out onto the street.

At least two roles were available to me over the next few days. I vacillated between that of the banished writer and that of the precocious, observant poet. Only a couple of years lay between the two.

The next day we made our pilgrimage to Váci utca. Whereas on previous visits I had been on the lookout for devotional trinkets like printed T-shirts, Formula One posters, or records, this time I was drawn to book displays. As if to mock me, the jackets offered the names of authors — Böll, Salinger, Camus — but all the rest was hidden behind an unpronounceable barrage of letters.

I found myself standing before yet another bookstore, and at first didn’t even notice that I was reading and understanding. Once inside the shop I couldn’t believe what I actually saw. Even when the clerk, protected by a counter from his numerous customers, took the book down from the shelf and presented it to me, I was slow to grasp the reality. It was in German, had been printed in Frankfurt am Main, bore the logo of three stick-figure fish, and no matter how many times I read the title and the first and last name of the author, they remained the same. Impossible as it was, what I held clenched in my hands was Sigmund Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams.

The moments stretched out endlessly until I found a chance to ask the price. Slowly seeping into my mind was the certainty that I would never have to let go of this book again.

If this particular work by Freud was what I wanted, my mother said, then she’d gladly buy it for me. More out of a sense of duty than curiosity, I had the clerk hand me one volume of Freud after the other. Although he was evidently supposed to put each book back on the shelf before he could hand over another, one quick glance over the rim of his glasses and he capitulated, stacking the collected works in front of me. It was a hopeless situation. Even if we had stayed out of the bar in the Hilton and had headed home right then, we still would not have had enough for all the volumes. Can you understand what it was like? Suddenly, as if by a miracle, here was a chance to buy something you couldn’t buy, and now there wasn’t enough money.

I decided in fact on The Interpretation of Dreams, because it was the thickest and hardly any more expensive than the others. I watched as it was passed on to the cashier, who wrapped it; but no sooner was I out on the street than I ripped open the brick-shaped package to seize The Interpretation of Dreams as my inalienable possession.

It didn’t matter to me where my mother went now. All I wanted to do was read.

I began reading on a bench beside the Danube. I read and read and loved my mother for doing nothing but sunning herself and smoking. “Don’t gloat too soon,” she warned me that evening, “it’s not across the border yet.” Never, under any circumstances, was I to admit that the Freud belonged to me — that could, if worse came to worst, cost me high school, my diploma, university, my entire future existence.

Whenever after that Frau Nádori provided me a room for a week, for the first two days I would rummage through secondhand bookstores and visit the shop on Váci utca. Moderation was pure torment. Every book shortened my rations. I had to decide what I could afford to eat and in what quantity — a strange, bewildering feeling, which I mistook for hunger. By the same token, each book left behind unbought in a bookstore was agony. How could I be justified to write anything as long as I had not read all of Freud — or everything else, for that matter?

On the flight back the sky turned red in the dusk of sunset. But it was still bright enough that I spotted our building shortly before we landed. I regarded the fact that I had been able to locate it from such a height as an honor bestowed on the place to which we were returning. And for a moment I thought: This is how God looks down on us.

Enough for now. I have to be on my way. Once again in the hope of receiving a letter today,

Your Enrico

Wednesday, March 28, ’90

Dear Jo,

And now Böhme too! It just keeps getting more and more absurd. State Security was the de facto founder of our opposition groups.¹¹⁸ The local CDU candidate withdrew when it came out that all members of parliament would be subject to a check.¹¹⁹

Our most recent issue sold better. There were a few responses to my election editorial.¹²⁰ One letter said that the people of the GDR had shamed themselves before the whole world. It ended with the sardonic wish that we wouldn’t go bankrupt all too quickly in the capitalist marketplace we so admired. The Prophet reappeared as well. There he suddenly stood in the office, looking from one of us to the other, but without responding to our greetings. He thrust his chin out in triumph, his cotton-candy beard protruding into the room, and then ripped to shreds a sheet of paper — our subscription form, as it turned out. He tossed the confetti into the air. “That was that,” he said, and departed posthaste. The scene proved all the more grotesque, because Fred has assured us that the Prophet’s name was nowhere on our subscription list.

We now have four extra pages. We’re lucky if we’re done before one in the morning.

This morning the baron stopped by to tell us about his latest discoveries. Astrid the wolf always trots straight for her water bowl.

He had more to tell us about the Madonna. Evidently no one knows how it ended up in the parsonage. He has already invited an expert from Hildesheim who is supposed to offer some clarifications. “Shall we pilfer her from the clerics?” Barrista asked. From his attaché case he pulled an illustrated volume,¹²¹ wrapped in the same washable protective jacket as Robert’s textbook atlas. He read to us from it — the purport being that in its Sienese and Florentine panels Altenburg possesses a collection in which can be traced the birth of postclassical art in the West. He asked if I could guess his intentions.

“Just picture it — the hereditary prince arrives, and the Madonna enters the museum in triumphal procession.”

To be honest I don’t understand why that should be so important.

As he spoke Barrista ogled the plate of pancakes Ilona had set dead center in the table. I told him to dig in. Which he did, and with gusto, and forgot all about his Madonna. He pursed his lips, licked at the sugar, and opened wide. Ilona’s eyes grew bigger with each new pancake Barrista gobbled down. She was still chewing on her first. Once his plate was empty, Barrista sighed. Lost in thought, he patted his potbelly, slipped down deeper into his chair, and licked the fingers of his right hand, one after the other. He left it to the wolf to clean up his left hand dangling at his side. Ilona chewed and chewed some more.

An older gentleman burst into this idyllic scene. He asked for Georg — they had an appointment, and he was right on time. Georg and Jörg had left for Leipzig to read proofs. I hoped that would take care of the matter. “No-o-o,” he bleated, this time he was going to insist on speaking with someone in charge, even if evidently only people who pulled up in black limos could get a hearing here. He meant the LeBaron. But a yawn from Astrid the wolf and one glance at its blind eye were enough to disconcert him.

“Pohlmann — from Meuselwitz, Thuringia,” the man said, introducing himself, greeting first me, then the baron, with a handshake. Still chewing, Ilona jumped up and ran into the kitchen.

The man was not, as I had feared, a local folklorist, at least not one with the usual photographs of the kaiser. Once we were alone in the next room he seemed calmer, more friendly.

“You should know,” he said, and addressed me by name, “that I have waited forty years for this moment.” An enlarged passport photo lay on top. “Siegfried Flack,” he said, “my ninth-grade German teacher, was arrested on March 27, 1950.” Pohlmann listed the names of teachers and students, most of them from Karl Marx High School, who had passed out flyers and painted a large F (for freedom) on building walls — which had cost all of them their lives, except for the few who managed to flee to the West. One of the leaders of the group, a pastor’s son, had smuggled flyers in from West Berlin on several occasions. At some point they nabbed him. It wasn’t until 1959 that his parents were informed by the Red Cross that he had “passed away” in Moscow’s Lubyanka prison in 1951. Pohlmann spoke with deliberate calm, and sometimes his sentences sounded rehearsed. As he handed me the folder, he stood up. “We must break the silence. Truth must see the light of day at last.” I assumed these were his parting words and thanked him. But Pohlmann sat down again and gazed at me. I paged through his folder. I flinched each time he thrust his hand between the pages. Again and again I was forced to leaf back and submit to yet another explanation, even if the previous one was far from finished. And all the while I could hear the baron’s singsong coming from the editorial office.

Pohlmann had entrusted me with letters and minutes of conversations, all meticulously dated and footnoted. I asked what he wanted done with them, and just as he shouted, “Publish them!” Ilona burst into the room. Ashen pale she stood on the threshold, staring at me as if I were a ghost. “Oh, here you are,” she said lamely, and retreated.

Ilona had frequently rescued me from annoying visitors. But this time something really must have happened. Pohlmann had likewise been disconcerted by the sight of her.

I asked him to wait and walked across to the editorial office. The baron was leaning against the table, waving a fan of hundred-D-mark bills. “All you need to know is right here,” he said, spreading the money on the table as if showing a winning hand. The wolf shook itself, its collar rattled. “They didn’t ask for a receipt,” the baron said, tugging at his right lower eyelid with one finger, and was gone.

There were twelve, twelve D-mark hundreds. All I could read was GRAND OPENING, and to each side a rather deftly sketched hand extending an index finger.

Hoping to learn more about what had occurred, I entered the little kitchenette. Ilona cringed. I touched her shoulder; she collapsed onto the low stool.

I crouched down beside her. I was hit with the scent of Ilona, a mixture of perfume and sweat that doesn’t usually pervade the office until noon.

“I’m so embarrassed,” she whispered. “I’m so embarrassed!” Steering clear of any questions, I took her cold hands between mine, and only then did Ilona start to talk, although it was all so muddled that I constantly had to interrupt.

She had thought she was alone in the office, except for me and Pohlmann, of course. She had cleared the table, but also stacked the platter with more pancakes, and started to wash up. There was a knock and she was about to go to the door, when to her surprise she heard my voice — at least, she thought it was mine. She had felt sorry for me, because once again it was me who had to play receptionist.

But then — and she swore she never eavesdrops — it had been such fun listening to me deal with the two Westerners. They finally came around to admitting that they were interested in getting in on the ground floor of the video business “in a big way.”

She had had to chuckle at how good I was at describing the local appetite for videos, particularly special videos — I knew what she meant, right?

I had claimed we couldn’t possibly take any more ads for next week, that we already had more than we could use — actually, I had said “overcommitted”—and deeply regretted, given present circumstances, that we were in no position to increase the number of pages from one day to the next. She had especially admired this last assertion.

One of them kept asking what it would cost — and it was immediately clear to her what he meant, but I had played dumb. In the end she ventured to step across into the office. At first she had seen only backs — two charcoal gray overcoats bent over the table. And then, yes then, she saw Herr von Barrista in the swivel chair, his sticky hands folded across his stomach. Barrista had spoken in my voice, even grinned at her, and gone right on talking in — yes, she would swear to it — in my voice.

I gave her time to have a good cry, and then tried to get back to basic facts as quickly as possible.

I asked Ilona what was so horrible about all this. She had simply confused the voices coming from the room on her left with those coming from the right — they were both about the same distance from the kitchen. An acoustical illusion, that was all. Why would the baron imitate me?

But Ilona just shook her head. What was that supposed to mean? I asked. She shook her head again; to everything I said she just kept on shaking her head.

Suddenly Pohlmann was standing at the door. He offered to leave his folder here with me for a few days. I thanked him.

“The money,” Ilona suddenly exclaimed. “Where’s the money?” It was still lying there fanned out on the table. But instead of calming down now, Ilona pointed at the platter and whispered, “He ate every one, all by himself!”

I sent Ilona to the bakery. The fresh air did her good. She kept mum too, since I could hardly tell Georg that it was Barrista who had accepted the ad for us. We got into enough of a squabble as it was, because Steen’s full-pager also had to appear in our next issue. Georg says we’re digging our own grave for the sake of short-term financial benefits. And I’m offering all the wrong arguments in claiming that the article is yet to be written that would increase sales by twelve hundred D-marks.¹²² Jörg said not a word until I offered to return both the money and the ad. Because actually none of it is really any of my business.

Hugs,

Your E.

Friday, March 30, ’90

Dear Nicoletta,

I’m not sure whether all the things I’m allowed to experience these days should be called compensation for those I’ve missed out on until now. Believe me, I love to wake up and to fall asleep, brushing my teeth is as much a joy as shopping or vacuuming. I love to calculate the price for a half-page ad at 20 percent discount as a standing order plus a 50 percent surcharge for being on the last page. No matter what I do I am suffused with a quiet sense of passion, a contentment that is very difficult to describe. It’s not a sense of being lost to the world, like a child at play, although it’s probably more that than anything else. It’s as if I can now take up in my hand every object that I could only look at before, as if it’s only now that I’m able to experience the world as space and myself as a body. As if I’ve finally been granted permission to participate in life. Each memory, precisely because it brings such misery with it, allows me to judge how wonderful the present is.

I’ve been trying to describe my fall, my original sin, to you, just the way I remembered it before I began to write my novella. Because now there’s hardly a memory left — at least in regard to those days in October — that I can trust. I’ve toyed with these images too often.

Picture the hiking map outside a country inn and the red dot that says, “You are here,” until it’s erased by countless fingertips tapping at it day in and day out. Over the years that white spot gobbles up its environs, the local tourist sights and outlook points vanish, then a village, a city — it’s all merely a question of scale.

Of course this is no special inadequacy peculiar to me, but rather the standard practice of every writer. Not an experience that isn’t trimmed away at and twisted, that doesn’t undergo amputation and then get fitted with a more efficient prosthesis. It’s really quite simple, but until you realize it, your most important memories have already been bungled. There’s truly no lack of examples.

Which is why, for example, I always imagined the autumn of my second summer in Arcadia to have been cradled in the sounds of Schütz motets. Their spiritual tones seemed to have flung open the school windows, they filled late Saturday afternoons in the Church of the Holy Cross,¹²³ and resounded every day from my record player. Like some comforting prophecy, they accompanied me, enveloped me.

Ten years later, as I was working on my novella (I always called it a novella, although its oversize torso had grown to several hundred pages),¹²⁴ I only needed to put on The Seven Last Words and I would react like one of Pavlov’s dogs. In a flash those days of September and October would reappear: the chestnut trees in front of the school, the rusty bicycle stands, the wind — at times a wild ocean gale that would scoop up the wet leaves still lying shimmering yellow on the asphalt, at other times a warm breeze that seemed to hold within it the last days of summer as it swept down across the Elbe from the slopes of Loschwitz with its Italianate villas. My characters emerged out of those voices, and I could see the muted light of trams, see clouds angled against the wind in the bluish pink late-afternoon sky; but I could also hear the rattling key chain of Herr Myslewksi, our homeroom teacher, whenever he led us down to the cellar for one of his “private talks,” as he called his interrogations.

After I had given up on my novella — so that The Seven Last Words reminded me more of my attempt at writing than of that autumn — I noticed the dedication on the back of the album cover: For Enrico, Christmas ’79, from Vera. Which meant I had been given the motets two years afterward. And to this very day I own no other Schütz recording.

In writing to you about all this, I have to pull my memories out from under the opulent scenes of my novella the way a medic pulls bodies out from under a wreck, not knowing whether they are alive or dead.

Holy Cross School,¹²⁵ with its looming dark walls, was my Maulbronn.¹²⁶ Enmeshed in my Budapest dreams and the freedom of my vacation reading, I could regard this building, which I would enter and leave for the next four years, only as the setting for a novel. At the same time I wanted to take seriously the inscription written above its main portal: “To the glory of God, in honor of its founders, and for the benefit and piety of the young.”¹²⁷ From the first day after my return from Budapest, when I inquired about the shortest route to school, that motto fit nicely into my Hermann Hesse world. As did Schiller Platz with its Café Toscana, the Elbe with its ferries and meadows, the Blue Wonder Bridge, the Elbe Hotel, the Wilhelminien villas and palaces in Blasewitz — they all enlivened my dream world. Farther up the Elbe one could trace the rocky plateaus of Saxon Switzerland, beyond which — after a hike of several days — lay Prague. Just as in Montagnola,¹²⁸ a pilgrim in search of the good and the beautiful could stop to sojourn in all these places. Reread Narcissus and Goldmund or Beneath the Wheel and you’ll understand what I saw.

The drama of the weeks that followed, however, was not because of Myslewski, who called us boys, one by one, to the cellar, where in a locked chamber full of oscillographs he began my interrogation with the question of why I thought world peace was unimportant. Nor was the drama a matter of my suddenly getting Cs and Ds instead of As and Bs, plus an F in spelling. I might even have been able to cope with the loss of my free time had it not been for HIM. HE left me in a despair unlike any I had known until then — and would not experience again until last autumn.

Geronimo¹²⁹ was a choirboy whose voice was cracking and who sat beside me at our desk. He was the only one who didn’t wear a blue shirt, having declared himself a conscientious objector at age fourteen — even though the lenses of his glasses could have been made from the bottom of soda bottles. All the things I had imagined in my boldest summer daydreams, he managed almost offhandedly — like finishing his homework on the walk home, while I brooded over my textbooks on into the evening. He was playing the role that I wanted to claim for myself later. And he played it magnificently. He was not only the head of the class, who spoke only in sentences ready to be set in print and used a slightly old-fashioned vocabulary that coming from anyone else would have made people laugh, but he was also loved by his schoolmates and teachers alike. And those who didn’t love Geronimo at least respected him in a way that I had never before seen among boys my age. In Geronimo’s case, the “private talks” were conducted not by Myslewski, but by the principal.

Geronimo was my nightmare — even though I ought to have been grateful to him. He never contradicted me in German class, never inundated me with English or Russian vocabulary words I couldn’t possibly know. He slipped me his homework for problems that to me seemed beyond solution. In music class, however, he did cover his ears whenever I finished one of my attempts at singing, amid the laughter of the whole class. He was a total failure only at sports.

Geronimo had chosen me to be his pal, or better perhaps, his attendant. Every week he demanded I supply him a new Hesse. In return I received dog-eared tomes by Franz Werfel jacketed in newspaper. I never touched them, if only because their stained and yellowed pages disgusted me. He, on the other hand, took potshots at Hesse, although he also quoted him often enough. No one suspected that I had read the books too, let alone that I had supplied them to him. I would have accepted that as the price I paid for his forbearance in other matters, but likewise not a week went by that he didn’t ask me: Why do you do it? Do what? I would ask in return each time, blushing and breaking into a sweat. He would eye me through his deep-sea glasses and his lips would form a pained smile. What he meant was: If you’re a Christian, why aren’t you a conscientious objector too, why do you agree with the proposition that existence conditions awareness, why don’t you say grace before meals, why does your voice sound high and thin when Myslewski says something to you, why do you waste so much time on this school crap? Geronimo didn’t have to ask any more questions. I knew them all by heart.

Every day began with the prospect of my being subjected to a painful examination. I began my walk home each day either relieved that for once I had escaped him, or suffering the torments of hell. For I never had an answer for him, and hoped the school bell would soon end our strange dialogue, which often concluded with his offering me a Bible quote: “Fear not, for I am with you always even unto the end of the world.” Once he said, “It’s my guess that you’d make a very good catechumen.” It was left to me to be content that Geronimo, who planned to study theology, at least found me good for something.

I was no better at keeping up my diary or praying — apart from a fervent Lord’s Prayer or two — than I was at providing Geronimo with answers. What was I supposed to write, or pray for? I really did know right from wrong. There were lies, and there was the truth — you could be either a traitor or a man of God. I didn’t have to put my self-indictment in writing. I knew as well as anyone that there was not a single argument I could offer that would not have been an admission of my guilt. Cowardice, duplicity, doubt, weakness — why couldn’t I act like Geronimo? Why was I living my life like everyone else?

The conflict once again grew more intense at the end of October, in the week after fall break, during which the flu had preserved me from worse torments.

That Monday Myslewski ordered me to join him in yet another cellar conversation. I felt honored, was surprised that I was the only boy to be summoned for a second round. Geronimo made sure everyone heard that he would be waiting for me at the school door — to lend me his aid, to stand by me.

Myslewski was apparently unprepared for my refusal to become an officer in the National People’s Army or at least to serve for three years as a noncom with weapon in hand defending the homeland against all enemies. He stammered with outrage, struggling to deal with this from my first “no” on. Suddenly he shoved a book at me, in which he said I would find all the information necessary to deliver a ten-minute report about the aggressor, the West German Bundeswehr, during Friday’s physics class. He smiled and patted me twice on the arm, so paternally that I felt a need to thank him, to cheer him up, to tell him that I would reconsider serving in the NPA for three years. Yes, I would not have minded staying there with him a while longer. I left school through the side entrance and, making a wide detour, ran to the bus stop.

I was disgusted with myself, because I had to admit that I would have much preferred to hug Myslewski and win his friendship, and had now run away from Geronimo. And although a greater disgrace was hardly imaginable, my real humiliation still awaited me. The ugliness of what I had just experienced and the ugliness of what lay ahead were so overwhelming that I finally started to take pleasure in my misery — a pleasure that found pubescent release as I ran to catch the streetcar. I swear to you that it took an act of will just to stay on my feet and not sink to my knees, whimpering with delight and shame at the moist spot in my underwear.

My novella, however, revolves solely around the days between my second cellar conversation and the ten minutes of my report. The situation had everything the genre requires, from exposition — by way of a bit of suspense — to a surprising twist at the end.

Although my feelings at the time have long since been exhausted literarily, I still have a sense of reeling back and forth for hours between those two end points, as if bouncing from one wall to another and never finding my footing. How could I, in the presence of my classmates, in the presence of Geronimo, present arguments against him and against myself?

I shall spare you the further agonies of a ninth grader’s soul. What I find touching now is my mother’s fear and helplessness. In the end it was she who wrote my report and persuaded herself to forbid me from even mentioning conscientious objection — there would be time enough for that later. But her words had no influence over me. On the contrary. It didn’t take a Geronimo to remind me of Jesus’ words about forsaking father and mother to follow HIM.

In presenting the finale in my novella I oriented myself roughly on the stations of the cross. In fact I was totally at the end of my tether when my name was called ten minutes before the bell marking the end of class. I got up, pushed back my chair, and stepped into the aisle, without any idea of what I would now do.

My knees were shaking — a phenomenon that I registered with both amazement and interest. My upper body remained unaffected, my hands were calm, although moist as always. Out of some sense of tact in regard to my body, I stepped behind the teacher’s desk, where I did an about-face like a soldier. Here my knees could shake as much as they wanted. I raised the two letter-size pages a little higher and was ready to begin to read. All the rest would take care of itself.

I kept to my mother’s text, word for word — my tongue worked hard at it, but what burbled up were sounds, sounds outside the human realm, gibberish that evidently provoked laughter. Was in fact everyone laughing — except a couple of scaredy-cats — but that Geronimo and Myslewski were glowering at me? Or am I just quoting myself again?

My second attempt failed as well. I gagged on each syllable, my tongue performed wondrous feats — while my vocal cords remained out of control.

The chair at the teacher’s desk had been pushed away. I fell back onto it, shoving the teacher’s grade book aside. From a seated position, I could manage words for the first time, the first sentence formed slowly. And with that Myslewski’s barrage of words drowned out everything else.

The class was hushed. I knew that numbness only too well.

The next moment I watched myself stand up and lean against the desk, bracing myself on one fist, the thumb of my other hand hooked into a belt loop, the report dangling between forefinger and middle finger. Everything about this boy expressed contentment, like the lethargic pleasure you feel while you dress yourself still half-asleep or when you stretch your legs.

But was that boy at the teacher’s desk me? Wasn’t I floating above everything, out of everyone’s reach and surveying the whole scene in a way I had never done before? I gazed down, observing what was happening below me, a diorama of school life, nothing unusual. That fellow Enrico Türmer interested me no more or no less than the other students. Enrico Türmer differed from the others only because I could give him instructions. I said: Smile — and he smiled. I said: Don’t fight back, just stay on your feet and ask to deliver your short report. I said: Ignore the demand to sit down — and he ignored the demand to sit down. I fell silent. I wanted to see what he would do without me. Enrico Türmer likewise fell silent. A few quick breaths later and he repeated: “I would now like to deliver my short report, I worked very hard on it.” After he had paid no attention to yet another demand to sit down, I knew enough. Another brief breathless hesitation — I gave my permission, and Enrico Türmer returned to his seat.

He heard Geronimo clear his throat, heard Myslewski’s squeaky shoes scrape the floor. He looked around — no one returned his glance. When the bell rang Enrico Türmer got up from his seat like everyone else and smiled as he watched Myslewski depart. It looked to him as if Geronimo, who scurried out the door next, was following like an attendant, as if he hoped to carry the grade book back to the teachers’ lounge.

For the next few minutes I was completely happy — you must believe me. What a grand reversal of affairs it was! Do you have any idea of what had happened? Can you imagine what I suddenly realized, how the experience hit me like a thunderbolt?

I was invincible, I had become a writer!

Although this realization came not as a revelation, but more like something I had always known, but that for various reasons had slipped my mind only just recently.

“It’s my guess,” I said, mimicking Geronimo as I walked home, “that you’d make a very good catechumen.” If it weren’t too pathos laden, I’d have to say: I gave an infernal laugh. A fourteen-year-old¹³⁰ can manage that better than people generally like to believe.

And do I also need to say that it was only several days later that I first noticed that I had lost God, that He had been expunged without my having even been aware of it? Not a single Lord’s Prayer has ever passed my lips since.

I was hovering in the same place from which God had been looking down on humankind. But now it was I who was gazing down on them, at myself as well as at Geronimo or Myslewski, and I could observe what they were doing. I knew that it was of little significance whether they were brave or cowardly, strong or weak, honest or deceitful. The only important thing was that I was observing them.

Geronimo could do or not do whatever he pleased. It would vanish in the universal mishmash. I would determine whatever picture of him was to remain. Yes, no one would even care about Geronimo unless I wrote about him today, tomorrow, or whenever.¹³¹ I was the keeper of the keys to Dante’s hell.

My disaster of a report had no repercussions. I didn’t speak to anyone about it. The explanation I fed to my mother was that I had been saved by the bell.

I had every reason to keep my experience to myself. For a while I even concealed it from myself and tried to assign some other origin to my carefree state. Needless to say, my novella also took a different and surprising turn.

At the time I had no idea of the price I would pay for being so carefree.

Within a few days my pattern of speech, my voice had changed. I smiled as I spoke. Everything I said had a shade of ambiguity, isolating me from my classmates. What was meant in earnest? What was just a game? For the first time I was living the life of the outsider. Other people no longer interested me. Time spent with other people, at least those my own age, was time wasted. Could the intensity of a conversation ever match that of reading a book? I needed what little free time I had for reading and writing. Those hours were too precious to piddle¹³² them away in the company of others.

Geronimo avoided me, but without attacking me. He was praying for me, he whispered to me at one point when he caught me observing the sharp line of his clenched jaw and the nervous twitching of his lips.

I took delight not just in my triumph but also in my having escaped both him and Myslewski — small revenge.

Whenever there was a game during gym class, usually soccer or volleyball, and Geronimo and I were chosen to be on the same team — he was almost always the last choice — I never missed a chance to pass him the ball and thus include him in the team, just the way our gym teacher demanded.

Nothing frightened Geronimo more than a ball. His body would instinctively flinch. He first had to overcome his urge to flee — but then when he did confront his foe, as he always did, it was too late. I was successful right off. Soon a victory by any team Geronimo was on was considered a sensation. Scorn, mockery, and rage were directed solely at him. The altruism of my playing the ball to him was evidently never questioned.¹³³

On the day grades were handed out at the end of our sophomore year, a “farewell” was extended to five of our classmates. Four had to leave because of their unsatisfactory performance (I had found refuge somewhere in the middle), plus Geronimo for still insisting on being a conscientious objector. With the approach of our last day in school together, old anxieties returned. I had the sense that accounts were due to be settled, that for months now Geronimo had been planning some spectacular action that would imprint itself for good on our memories. But I wasn’t afraid of that. My insecurity came from feeling so secure, because I couldn’t imagine an attack that could really touch me. My carefree state was suddenly full of care.

My memories of that day are bathed in the garish light of July. Geronimo’s long, never really dirt-free fingers trembled above the surface of his desk.

“I must likewise say my farewell to you today,” Myslewski remarked, drawing himself up beside our desk. Once Geronimo was standing fully erect — a good head taller than Myslewski — he started shivering, as if suddenly chilled. Glancing at the grade card, Myslewski announced the grade average: a perfect four point, disregarding a two in gym. Somehow Myslewski managed to grab hold of Geronimo’s hand and held it for a while.

As he sat down Geronimo bent forward as if he were going to throw up, and then began to weep. He wept as if he had been saving up his tears his whole life long and were trying to shed them all in the space of thirty minutes. To the sound of his weeping, with here a sob and there a whimper, we were all handed our grades.

I laid my hand on his shoulder, on his head. I ran my hand over his hair, which was greasy. Geronimo never looked up until the bell rang.

With that, I left the classroom to wash my hands.

When I returned Geronimo was encircled by our classmates. They stood so close to one another that I couldn’t even see him. And so we parted without saying good-bye.

Suddenly I shuddered at the thought of transforming this scene into literature, either immediately or in the future — of turning my greasy hand into a metaphor. Because I have never succeeded in doing so, my recollections of that day are still very clear.¹³⁴

Saturday, March 31, ’90

Dear Jo,

Events have come tumbling one after the other over the last few days, and I’d give a pretty penny to know how we come off once you’ve read this.

Friday we were all sitting together in the office — Georg, Jörg, Marion, and I. We needed to decide whether to publish an article submitted by the local Library on the Environment. It’s not about Altenburg, but about Neustadt an der Orla, a town in the loveliest part of the Thuringian Forest, where a farm factory for fattening two hundred thousand hogs was built in the midseventies. Children in the area were having asthma attacks, pollution of well water was ten times above allowable limits, villages were getting water only from tank trucks, and so on. Pipping Windows, which places ads with us, wants to buy into property there. The crucial issue is that they also want to take over management of the hog farm. But the farm belongs to Schalck-Golodkowski. Eighty percent of the hogs were for export. All of which prompted an environmentalist to write an open letter to Herr Pipping, whereupon several of the comrades she mentions in it filed suit against her. You’ll get to read about the whole thing.

Georg, who usually keeps meticulous minutes, sat there propped on his elbows, deep creases between his eyebrows, hands covering nose and mouth, while he listened to Jörg read the article. If we publish it we’ll lose the account of the Altenburg subsidiary of Pipping Windows — and at two columns/sixty, on a weekly basis (one-year contract), with 50 percent surcharge for the last page, that loss comes to 10,870 marks, more than half of it paid in D-marks. And what’s more, we can’t check the accuracy of the article, nor can we know the legal ramifications of publishing it. It’s a head-on attack, based solely on our confidence in the environmentalists. On the other hand there’s no one we trust more than Anna, the Jeanne d’Arc of last fall. Other papers had squirmed out of it. Pro and contra cancel each other out. But there came a point when there was no ignoring Georg’s silence.

“I’d like to propose to you,” Georg said with a smile, tucking his head between his shoulders, “that we shut down the paper.” As he went on talking his forehead shifted swiftly back and forth between a smooth surface and deep furrows. We should hold out until local elections,¹³⁵ and with that our job would be done.

There suddenly came a moment when I could no longer endure his smile. I despised him. There was nothing left to mull over. He wanted to rob us of our daily bread and drive us out of the same office into which he had lured us with his promises in the first place. I despised him for his arrogance — an arrogance at odds with the world because it is what it is — for running off in pursuit of this idea or that, of essential, philosophical ideas, instead of holding one’s own in the everyday world. All his qualities, some of which I admired, others merely respected — his deliberate meticulousness, his honesty, his doubts and self-inflicted agony at being unable to write even a few normal sentences — all that suddenly seemed childish and despicable because he let himself defeat himself, because he was not willing to do battle with himself, because, to put it succinctly, he acted irresponsibly.

“And what are we supposed to do?” Jörg asked as calmly and amiably as a radio moderator.

Georg — I don’t know what else he expected — seemed to be in torment at having to say anything more than the remarks he had evidently prepared.

“We’ve failed,” he repeated, “we didn’t take our job seriously enough.”

Jörg wanted to know what job it was he meant. Flaring up and gazing at me for the first time, Georg replied that that was surely clear to each of us.

I told him to answer Jörg’s question, after all we’d all burned our bridges behind us.¹³⁶

“The world lies open before us,” Georg said. “Let’s not forget that!”

Jörg had leaned back and kept pressing his pencil with the tip of one finger, as if playing Pik-Up Stiks. Marion followed Georg’s lead and said that, yes, she was in full agreement with him, but chose to draw another conclusion — that from now on we should do everything different and better.

At which we all fell silent.

There was the sound of footsteps outside, but Jörg and Georg didn’t stir. I heard a resigned laugh from Ilona, who had been told that we were not to be disturbed. Then the baron entered, our most recent issue in hand. Had we been waiting long for him? He apologized and took off his coat. Ilona brought some fresh water for the wolf.

Georg virtually turned to stone. Jörg requested that Barrista leave us alone — the future of the paper was on the line here. Then the only sound to be heard was the wolf lapping water, and then, as if the animal were bothered by the silence, even that stopped.

“Most regrettable,” was Barrista’s initial remark. He should have been informed before now. Scheduled for today was the first discussion of preparations for His Highness’s visit, a summary of which lay in triplicate before us. He had the welcoming statement with him and a letter for us written in the hereditary prince’s own hand. Most regrettable, but under such circumstances he had no choice but to arm himself with patience, most regrettable as well because the number of letters in reply to his ad had far exceeded all expectation, which meant nothing less than that our little newspaper was indeed being read by, was of uncommon interest to, businesspeople.

Her face drained of blood, Ilona was standing beside the stove. “But you’re not really going to do that, right?” Her pleading eyes wandered from one of us to the other. “I don’t even have a contract yet…” She sobbed.

It would be helpful to be immediately informed of our decision, the baron continued coolly, since the prince’s visit dared not in any way be put in jeopardy. He led Ilona out, the wolf trotting behind them. The door was left ajar, so that Barrista’s attempts to console her were still audible — and sounded like the same English singsong I had heard on the first evening we met.

“We’re going ahead,” Jörg said, turning to Marion. And then to me: “Right, Enrico, we’re going ahead? No matter what, we’re going to keep going!”

Then Jörg turned to Georg and asked him — warily, as if inquiring of a patient — how long he was willing to grant us the right to stay in his home, whether Georg was agreeable to providing us asylum until early or mid-May, presuming we couldn’t find a space before then, whether Georg — Jörg kept addressing him by name more often than was necessary — could keep the rent at its current level, and whether Georg had any suggestions of how we should deal with the telephone bill. “But of course, but of course”—it came from Georg in a stream. Jörg proposed we keep Georg on salary until the end of July, paid in D-marks, and asked if that would cover the transitional period.

But of course, that was very generous, Georg said, but it wasn’t necessary. Jörg thought it was, and asked if we could count on Georg until the end of the month. But of course, but of course! Jörg proposed that we publish the hog farm article.

I found it a bit much when Georg and Jörg extended hands across the table and Georg then held out his hand to Marion and me as well. Eyes glistening, he departed. Hardly a moment later, Ilona was standing before us. Fred appeared just behind her.

“Have a seat,” Jörg said. In those three words, in his simple “Have a seat,” were the ease and authority that proved Jörg the born boss. At last he could speak as he wanted.

A couple of sentences later and Ilona jumped up from her chair, clapping her hands. Fred could no longer suppress his smile. They didn’t need a lot of explanations. The disaster was not a disaster. It was just that no one had dared think like this before.

Three articles, Ilona exclaimed, holding up three fingers, three little articles was all that Georg had managed to produce over all these weeks — three! Fred growled that he knew enough businesspeople we could get advertising from if we really wanted.

Suddenly the baron was standing at the threshold again. And what decision had been made? From his very first sentence he fixed his eyes on me, as if I and no one else were responsible for all this. He did truly hope he would be spared such childishness in the future. He was accustomed to being able to rely on his business partners. There was no point in agreeing to a plan that no one was going to follow through on. As Jörg attempted to raise an objection, Barrista didn’t even look his way. Only after I said that he need not fear any further annoyances of this sort, nor any delays, did he seem satisfied.

That was precisely what he wished to hear. The baron promised that for his part he would not disappoint me, and from his attaché case he extracted four packages, which he now distributed, remarking that we all had children who would enjoy an early Easter bunny.¹³⁷ He disregarded all our thanks and testily went on to say that he had no intention of keeping us from our work, but he didn’t want to depart our office while still in our debt. As a small demonstration of support for the paper — and in the hope of his ad being effectively placed — he wished to pay in full, in D-marks, which he hoped would be agreeable.

No sooner had he completed this sentence than the telephone rang — which until then had remained miraculously silent. We could hear voices coming from the vestibule. In three shakes of a lamb’s tail we were all busy, and when I looked around again for the baron, he had vanished. The exact sum lay before me on the table.¹³⁸

When I got back from my rounds in the countryside that afternoon, Marion was at her typewriter. “There you are!” she cried in delight. From now on she would like to write Georg’s articles, and by doing so ease my workload.

At which point I made the mistake of suggesting we address each other by our first names. Her face froze, her eyes bounced about in all directions. “Why not,” she finally said, extending a hand. “Marion.”

“Enrico,” I said, and then fell silent. Thank God the telephone rang. “Our special friend,” she whispered, and held the receiver out to me.

I had never experienced the baron so beside himself. They had canceled his room at the Wenzel, and he didn’t want to get upset again, but just wanted to inquire if I perhaps knew where he could spend the night, after that he had other quarters, just the one night. I invited him to sleep at our place.

By the time the baron rang the bell at nine thirty every bit of eager anticipation had vanished. Robert and I had raided the grocery shortly before seven. Robert was really looking forward to the baron and his wolf and remembered to get the pickles that the baron had found so tasty the last time, plus dog bones. We made potato salad as if it were Christmas. Michaela had a performance, Hacks’s Schöne Helena, which has officially been taken out of the repertoire, but because it’s an ensemble favorite — there’s a role for every idiot — they’re still cranking it out a few last times.

We began eating around nine, so that the deviled eggs decorated with little swirls of anchovy paste were already gone, and obvious inroads had been made on the platter of cold cuts and the potato salad — only the two little suns cut from apple slices, which Robert had arranged on saucers, were still shining, though a bit more dimly.

If it had been up to Robert, I would have had to go on forever telling stories about Georg and “Herr von Barrista.”

When the bouquet and, behind it, Barrista himself finally did appear — bouquet is hardly the right term for such a burst of jungle flora — all our expectations revived in one fell swoop. Our vases were all too small, the whole apartment was transformed into a dollhouse.

The baron didn’t torture Robert on the rack for very long and handed him the new Bravo and — to Robert’s jubilation — a baseball cap, whose two intertwined letters I at first took to be two knucklebones.¹³⁹

When Robert asked about the wolf, Barrista put him to a little test of his courage by handing him the car keys. He could go ahead and free Astrid all on his own.

“If you need money,” the baron said as soon as we were alone, “do not scruple to ask me. I can only advise you to buy in now!”

What do you suppose he meant? Up to that point I hadn’t even admitted to myself what he now spoke of openly. Yes, I did hope to take Georg’s place at Jörg’s side as an equal partner. I asked what it would cost me. The amount, he said, was not the problem, almost any sum could be justified. I’d have to find out whether Georg was actually prepared to give up his share.¹⁴⁰ Should Georg demand twenty thousand or more — that was twenty thousand D-marks, by the way — he suggested that I ask for time to think it over first, which tended to hold the rush of speculation in check. The Schröders, that is Jörg and Marion, didn’t have that sum in ready cash themselves. Twenty thousand D-marks, however, were mine to use at any time, and he was certain I’d be able to pay him back the entire amount by autumn, with the rate of interest equal to the rate of inflation. “Do it, and if only for your boy,” he concluded when we heard Robert at the door. Astrid trotted in.

Barrista isn’t the sort of man you respond to with a hug. But I feel as if my wishes and longings are in better hands with him than in my own, as if he is constantly shaking me out of a kind of daze and asking: Why are you sitting at the children’s table? Come over here, join me, join the adults.

The baron thanked Robert, addressing him, however, with the formal pronoun of one adult to another, and had nothing but effusive praise for the handsomely set table. I told him that it was quite all right to still use the informal pronoun with Robert. If that was the case, the baron said turning to him, he would be happy to do so, but then he had to insist that Robert call him Clemens and use the informal pronoun too. Turnabout was fair play. It would be on those terms or not at all.

The next chance I got I whispered to him that neither Georg nor Jörg had said anything about money, but he responded with a smile and said under his breath that now wasn’t the time to talk about this.¹⁴¹ Then he dug in with the same gusto he had shown on his first visit, just nodded with his mouth full when I offered to warm up what was left of the sausages, and went on chatting about pop music with Robert. He pulled a couple of CDs from his attaché case and smiled because, unlike me, Robert knew how to hold them so that the plastic box opened easily.¹⁴²

In the baron’s presence Robert seemed incredibly grown-up. He even took to heart all the things Michaela was always preaching to him — he sat up so straight in his chair he looked almost ridiculous.

Robert inquired about where the baron lived. “Here and there,” was the answer. Since his divorce his things were stored at his mother’s, and he lived in furnished rooms all over the republic. By “republic” he meant the Federal Republic of West Germany. His son was fourteen years old,¹⁴³ and what was more, his name was Robert too. He even looked a little like our Robert. He extracted an envelope of photos from his attaché case. He was right.

Robert’s questions became increasingly more specific — where did he spend Christmas, where did he go on vacation, what were his hobbies? And each time the baron responded with angelic patience and candor.

He once again declared how, except for himself, he knew no one who interpreted the job of a business consultant the way he did, that is, who invested in speculative projects by being paid his fee in shares of them — because he had no problem sharing the risk for his own decisions — provided his advice was followed. “Actually,” the baron said, without taking his eyes off Robert, “it’s a matter of trust. And since far too many people nowadays no longer even trust the word of a gentleman, I have to deprive them of a bit of their tidy profit.” He hastily chewed a pickle and then continued, “Thus far everyone who has paid me with shares has regretted doing so. They could have had it all at less cost, far less.”

And after yet another pickle, he provided his summary: “I make money out of ideas in order to have money for my ideas.”

What did that mean, making money out of ideas? Could the baron divulge one of those ideas to him?

“And who can assure me,” the baron replied, “that you won’t take it and earn a pile of money and I’m left out in the cold?”

“Because I promise I won’t,” Robert said, as if perfectly accustomed to carrying on such conversations.

“I read each weekly issue very carefully,” Barrista began. In the latest he had found two articles that instantly gave him an idea. Could Robert guess which articles those had been — he had sold the same paper, after all. Robert looked at me, I shrugged. The baron meant the committee that was supposed to provide new street names by June. “Well? Any lights go on?”

Robert blushed.

“What’s the first thing a businessman does when he arrives in Altenburg?”

“He goes to his hotel,” I said.

“Wrong! Utterly wrong! How does he know here his hotel is?”

“He stops and asks someone.”

The baron covered his eyes with one hand. “And what if it’s one o’clock in the morning?” he asked. “A businessman,” Barrista cried in triumph, “drives to the nearest gas station and buys himself — a map of the town!”

We vied with each other to inform the baron that gas stations are closed here at night. With a single gesture he brought us to silence. “I swear to you,” he said, and it sounded in fact as if he were swearing an oath, “that within a year there will be maps at gas stations here at one in the morning. Our maps of the city!”

The baron pulled out a note card and began scribbling. “Before we award a printing contract, we need to have calculations of costs and profits in our pocket.” Robert stared at him as if hypnotized. The entire project would be financed by the ads bordering the map.

Deducting all costs, that would leave a profit of approximately three thousand marks. We nodded approval. And that was excluding the sales revenues. And who in Altenburg wouldn’t want a map with the new street names? And why just in Altenburg? Why not Meuselwitz, Schmölln, Lucka, Gössnitz? And who said that there should be just one map for Altenburg? Those three thousand marks had suddenly become thirty thousand, sixty thousand. “Let’s say,” the baron concluded, “we’re talking about clear profit — that will amount to between forty and eighty thousand, forty to eighty thousand D-marks. Just takes a little organization. Gentlemen, money is lying in the streets of Altenburg. And this idea is my gift to you.” And with that he handed Robert pencil and note card and leaned back.

The performance was over. We didn’t know what to do — clap, say “Thank you,” ask questions?

But the big bang still awaited us. Caught up in the mood, I thought I had to present my own brilliant idea and proposed that the same people who approached shops and firms for ads in the map should canvass for advertising in the paper as well. Robert nodded.

I could see a goo of potatoes and sausage in the baron’s half-open mouth.

“What?” he asked, chewing more quickly. “You don’t have a sales force?” I shook my head.

“No agents in the field, no canvassers, or whatever it is you call them here?”

“No,” I protested.

“You…” he began, hurrying now to swallow, “you sit in your editorial offices and wait for people to come to you?”

I replied in the affirmative.

“And Frau Schorba?”

“She’s the exception,” I said.

The baron burst into terrible laughter — and swallowed the wrong way.

I can’t describe the entire evening for you. But it ended strangely. For it suddenly occurred to Barrista to say that he had been able to keep his hotel room after all. This was followed by an abrupt departure.

We walked with him to his car, a red Saratoga. As he said good-bye he put on a cap, one identical to the one he had given Robert. As he drove off a taxi turned down our street, and Michaela climbed out of it.

At first she was taken aback, then she went into a tirade about how it was way past Robert’s bedtime. She felt his forehead — he actually did have a slight temperature. We transplanted the jungle bouquet to our biggest stoneware pot. It’s now standing on the living-room floor and the fragrance is enough to befuddle you.

I thought about the maps and a sales force, slept fitfully, and awoke as frazzled as if the night had cost me as much energy as the day before. But just the thought of Robert picked me up again.

My plan was to greet Georg warmly and ask him straight out to sell me his share. I planned to offer him ten thousand D-marks for starters.

Michaela had a headache and stayed in bed. I promised I’d be back as soon as I could.

When I entered the office, I abandoned all hope. Georg, Jörg, and Marion were sitting cozily together drinking tea. It sounds absurd, but I had come too late. I had missed my chance by about half an hour.

Their friendliness, or better, chumminess was a cruel blow. I was given a cup of tea and a large piece of Marion’s cake. The fact that today of all days was her birthday seemed to seal my fate.

But then everything turned out differently.

One of Georg’s boys suddenly let out a howl in the garden, and Georg went to see what was wrong.

From across the table Jörg remarked that everything had been cleared up, that I didn’t have to worry about a thing. Georg wanted a nice clean break, that was all. And now it was up to me whether I wanted to take on Georg’s share and from here on out put my head on the block with him, Jörg, and share full responsibility. He didn’t want to place that burden on Marion, the paper shouldn’t be their family enterprise. I didn’t have to decide right off, but it would be a load off his mind if I could find my way to saying yes.

I drank my tea sip by sip and waited until I thought I could reply with a firm voice.

It’s two in the morning, and I hope I’m tired enough now to finally get some sleep.

Your E.

Wednesday, April 4, 1990

Dear Nicoletta,

I have no idea whether or not my letters ever reach you, not to mention whether you read them. But as long as none is returned or you don’t expressly ask me to spare you my story, I’d like to continue to write them.

I didn’t hear anything from Geronimo for a long time. At the start of his junior year, he had moved to Naumberg, to a preparatory seminary there, whose three-year course was not officially recognized, so that he would de facto graduate without a diploma. Now and then he sent greetings my way in letters that he wrote to a few girls in our class.

Astoundingly enough, at the start of my junior year I was accepted into the school choir and by November — hidden among the baritones — had already taken part in a performance of Brahms’s German Requiem. This isn’t the place to describe either our music teacher or what rehearsals with him were like, although those hours as a singer — even a very mediocre one¹⁴⁴ are the only classes I can recall without chagrin.

It was in the choir that I also first saw Franziska, a ninth grader, the daughter of ***,¹⁴⁵ whom everyone knew, and not just in Dresden — a man able to do, yes, allowed to do anything he pleased. Her existence was known to everyone in the school.

Franziska sang soprano, wore jeans and tight-fitting sweaters, and had smooth black hair. The decal on her shoulder bag was no less exciting than she herself: “Make love, not war!” During rehearsal I always took a seat on the aisle so that I was as close as possible to the sopranos seated on a slant across from us. It was months before Franziska returned my greeting. When out of the clear blue sky she asked me if I didn’t want to join her class for their dance lessons — there was a surplus of girls — I saw my dreams already fulfilled. But nothing ever came of the promised dance lessons, and she turned me down all the many times I invited her somewhere. Nonetheless I lived in the certainty that I would one day win Franziska over.

I tried my hand at writing poetry and had moderate success in contests called “Young Poets Wanted” that were part of the “Poets’ Movement of Free German Youth,” a term that strikes me much funnier now than it did at the time. We were to write “friendly” poetry — that was one of the maxims I recall being inculcated with by a friendly, indeed downright jolly, older man who had, it was said, succeeded in writing a perfect poem about a Bulgarian jackass, although I never came across it.

I was not considered a great talent or a precocious wunderkind — terms that, if not used often, were not uncommon either — but was sufficiently stuck on myself that I was firmly convinced my day would come.

Vera was leading a bohemian life, or so my mother and grandfather called it. She delivered noon meals for People’s Solidarity, for which she was paid two hundred marks a month, plus insurance and a meal for herself — and a person could live on that. Since Vera smoked like a chimney and was forever in need of money, she also worked as a model at the Art Academy — which soon developed into a career of sorts.

From the late ’70s to the mid-’80s there were a good many paintings and sketches by Dresden artists that showed a woman with a broad catlike head and auburn hair, frequently nude and looking lost, but sometimes also as a carnival queen. Vera is not a beauty, but she didn’t have a GDR face. I can’t explain to you just what a GDR face is, but you recognized one at once.¹⁴⁶ Vera soon had enough connections and money to be able to dress elegantly. Sometimes she was even taken for a visitor from the West.

She lived in Dresden Neustadt, in the garret of a rear-house that lacked a front-house. Since only her apartment had a bell and the other gates and doors were locked at eight o’clock, if you arrived in the evening or at night you had to somehow make your presence known. Vera’s neighbors took revenge the next morning by ringing her bell or pounding on her door on some pretext or other. Or pilfered her underwear from the clothesline. Our conversations often took place in the dark, because one of her admirers was raising hell out on the street and, once he’d drunk enough courage, would try to scale the fence.

Two tiny rooms opened off a long hallway with a little cabinet and sideboard that served as a kitchen.

In the back room Vera would perform for me her repertoire for passing the drama school’s entrance exam. “Pirate Jenny” was always included. I loved those performances in that tiny room, but feared the moment when she fell silent — should I break into tears or applause?

Of course I find it difficult to speak of Vera without already seeing premonitions of what happened later. Though we rarely met if she “had somebody,” we were inseparable in the days and weeks between such affairs. She introduced me to what was called “the scene.” I was always greeted with twofold joy: first as a brother who you were nice to in order to please her, and second because I was living proof that Vera was free game again.

I never knew when Vera would invite me in or send me on my way. I would often break off with her, but still stopped by to pick up bowls that had contained food my mother dropped off now and then.

Whenever Vera reemerged — she would usually be waiting for me outside school — she would reproach me, wanting to know why I hadn’t shown my face for so long.

Vera lived a life that I wanted to live too as soon as I could — a nonstop series of exhibitions, readings, parties, performances, and night prowls. My clothes would likewise reek of ateliers, I would write whatever I wanted, until the day when I’d become too dangerous for the honchos of the GDR, and be deported, to the West, where my books had already been published and where Franziska and I would enjoy life together, making love, writing, and traveling.

But first I had to survive school. I wondered if it would be worth it to say something abrasive and so provide myself with material. An event worth writing about was sorely needed! Should I write on the blackboard, maybe a “Swords Into Plowshares!”

In January 1980, panic broke out as the result of “Karl and Rosa Live!” being painted in red on the wall beside the main entrance. All I got to see was a gray cloth draped over the inscription, as if some memorial plaque were about to be unveiled. Everyone was in the crosshairs — especially those who were thought to be truly convinced. (You do understand what I mean by “convinced”? Our “Reds,” the ones who believed in the GDR.)

The only thing that prevented me from confessing to the deed was fear that the real perpetrator might own up. But no one, male or female, hinted at being the offender. At least I heard nothing about it. The inscription was swiftly removed, although its traces now achieved the status of “the handwriting on the wall.” Some thought they could make it out at the upper left of the entrance, others believed the four words were distributed across the whole wall, and ended not in an exclamation mark, but a hammer and sickle. Just gazing at the wall was held to be an act of resistance. Small gatherings repeatedly formed as if by chance before it. I never saw anything.

I mention this wall episode because I intended to make my memory of it the embryo of a novel years later.

In hope of being provocative I tacked a poem to the bulletin board — resulting in serious consequences for one of the school’s wunderkinder. Myslewski ripped off the page along with the thumbtacks and called me to account in front of the whole class. He had walked right into my trap. That same poem was scheduled to be published in a student anthology.¹⁴⁷ Couldn’t I have said what was on my mind somewhat more simply? he asked, and then to universal laughter sent the tattered paper sailing down onto my desk.

The publication of Ehrenburg’s memoirs in the GDR offered the opportunity to raise questions about Stalinist work camps. The camps, I was told, were the outgrowth of the cult of personality, a phase that had long since been put behind us and was condemned by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union as early as 1956.

I searched in vain for something I could do or leave undone that would really have a payoff.

My hope was the army!

Ever since my first appearance before the draft board — after that first experience of being questioned by men in uniform — I knew where I could find what I was looking for.

Once inside District Military Headquarters I felt immediately inspired, ideas came to me all on their own. No other place possessed such poetry, such ineluctability. I think I compared the banner of the Army Athletic Club with my underpants — banners were intended to cover a vacant spot on the wall, but in fact revealed instead just how barren that wall was — it was the same with my underpants and my body. Or something like that. I jotted down a whole sequence of such comparisons right there on the spot. Uniforms made suffering plausible. This was no longer just pubescent hypersensitivity, or a shirking of duty that carried no risk à la Neustadt or Loschwitz,¹⁴⁸ this was a cold war, this was theater on a global scale.

The high point of my appearance before the draft board was a certain interview. “Several highly placed individuals,” the officer behind the desk said, “have great plans for you. Great plans!” He recommended a three-year tour of duty, which would be of advantage to my further development.

In his eyes my exhilaration was simply arrogance, and when I turned him down, he threatened, rather clumsily, to deny me my diploma or matriculation. He was more successful at gloomy descriptions of the everyday life of soldiers who were a disappointment to a government of workers and peasants. Much to my satisfaction I noticed the spit thickening at the corners of his mouth, his rapidly fluttering eyelids, the reddish blue tinge of his complexion, most intense around the nostrils, and watched as the ballpoint pen in his right hand practiced Morse code against the desktop. Trying hard to provide a literary fullness to my ideas, I saw myself standing at attention in my underwear, shivering in the chilly room, but undaunted.

Believe me — after my first draft board appearance, I looked forward to the army.

An intermezzo at the end of my junior year might also be worth mentioning. It was about four months after the Karl and Rosa episode, when without warning, right in the middle of class, the door handle clanked and the vice principal called out my last and first names. I stood up, she waved me toward her. I knew right away: this was not about my mother’s being in an accident or some other private catastrophe.

I followed her. From behind closed doors came the grumble of classes in session. Up the stairs, past a mural of the eleventh of Marx’s Feuerbach theses, according to which philosophers had just had different interpretations of the world, but the main thing was to change it. I concentrated on the play of our vice principal’s calf muscles. I exchanged a mute greeting with the secretary in the principal’s reception room. I would later describe the odor as a blend of cigarettes, floor wax, and plywood — but I probably didn’t notice a thing. I tried to gain control over my agitation by focusing on the secretary’s sandals.

Geronimo had had to deal only with the principal. Two more men were waiting for me. They sat side by side at a table turned lengthwise to abut the principal’s desk. They took their time putting out their cigarettes. When they looked up, I greeted them as well.

I wasn’t disappointed by their appearance. The older one at least, with his rheumy eyes and black hair combed straight back, matched my expectations. The other one seemed more friendly, the jock buddy on your team. The director sat there like an umpire, his palms pressed together. He looked exhausted and perplexed. Rheumy Eyes began in a disciplinary tone of voice, saying that they were here for a very serious matter. I already had hopes that they would let me remain standing, like a prisoner, when Rheumy Eyes briefly extended his forefinger, which was his way of saying, Sit down.

In my mind I was running through my poems. Which one had made them prick up their ears, which one did they think was the most dangerous? Jock Buddy was resting his hands on the file, it was imposing. How had they got hold of them? What I wanted to say was: “Yes, you’re speaking with the author, but I’ve already thrown that poem out”—because of faulty rhythms and rhymes. Only recently I had run across Mayakovsky’s A Drop of Tar, a slim volume put out by Insel, in which he describes the construction of his poems — highly recommended reading. Mayakovsky, who would take his own life, writes a poem upbraiding Yessenin for committing suicide. Yes, I planned to use Mayakovsky to lead our Checka agents around by the nose.

The bell rang for a change of class, then rang again for class to begin, and I still didn’t understand the point of their questions about my family, especially about relatives in the West. Yes, we were planning to fly to Budapest. If they wanted to chat — please, I had time. This was getting me out of chemistry and Russian both. Jock Buddy and I were now engaged in a smiling contest. When he asked for his next cup of coffee, he also ordered a glass of seltzer for me and offered me a cigarette — then immediately pretended he had forgotten I was just a student.

I was expecting a nasty turn of events at any moment. I was curious how they would segue into my poems. My first district poetry seminar had begun with the question, who among those attending were of the opinion that literature must be oppositional.

It had all happened so fast that time.¹⁴⁹ Now I finally had the chance to correct my mistake. True literature is by its very nature oppositional.

When the bell rang for the last class of the day, Jock Buddy asked why my mother was planning, together with me, with the Enrico Türmer sitting here now in this room, to leave the German Democratic Republic by illegal means. “We merely want to know why. We have more than enough proof that this is the case.”

Rage and shame throttled me, I fought back the tears. So that’s what they thought was a direct hit. Rheumy Eyes and Jock Buddy fired their barrage of questions, bang, bang, bang, bang. I got to hear things I had said during class breaks, disparaging remarks about the antifascist protection barrier; Vera was quoted and described as an element hostile to the state; Geronimo was granted the honor of being mentioned several times. Over and over, Geronimo! It was like some curse. Which is why it took me longer than I would have liked to regain command of a firm voice. I don’t think that I did in fact stand up, but when I recall that day I can only see myself standing to deliver my speech. We both spoke at the same time. Not in my wildest dreams had I ever thought of leaving this country. For me nothing could be worse than having to abandon it. This was my spot, these were my roots — my family, my school, my home was here. What would I do in the West?

I babbled away like a windup toy, and at some point they fell silent. “I want,” I said, “to become a writer, and as a writer I have no choice but to work where I know my way around, where people live who share my experiences. A person such as myself would never leave a country in which literature is of the utmost importance.” Did they get my threat at all? “What would I do in the West?” I repeated, fully aware that I had succeeded in sounding convincing — except for a missing a word or two: What would I do in the West now? was the real question, or at this point. But the more I kept on talking, the more I realized that I was slowly running out — if not of rage — then at least of arguments.

I defended Vera, an exceptional talent, who found herself thwarted in her development and self-realization, Vera, who merely offered her candid opinion, which they ought to be happy to hear.

I added several remarks about the social role of literature, before I asked finally asked them what justification they had for this false charge of wanting to flee the republic. And then I heard myself calling their suspicions shameless — shameless, yes, shameless! I couldn’t have put it any better. They had to know that there was no rebuke more beloved by the people’s pedagogues than: “I’m ashamed for you! I’m ashamed for you all!”¹⁵⁰

“We’re asking the questions here,” Jock Buddy interrupted, smiling yet again. I assumed that his smile came from the fact that he was quoting a well-known phrase, a joke for insiders.

Rheumy Eyes wanted to know why my mother claimed that our trip to Budapest was one awarded her for professional excellence, and whether perhaps she was, without my knowledge, planning to flee the republic. Both of them noticed how I hesitated before I replied. Then we all fell silent, until Jock Buddy gave the principal a nod.

I washed my face in the restroom — my eyes were red from tears — and leaving school, headed straight for the Café Toscana.

As for the Toscana, suffice it to say that I transposed every café scene I ever read to that particular oasis beside the Blue Wonder Bridge (so that even today I could show you the table where young Törless once sat). I populated the café with famous colleagues. Sometimes they called out my name and waved me over. Sometimes they whispered among themselves, uncertain whether the marvelous verses being passed from hand to hand had in fact come from the pen of the young fellow sitting there solitary and pallid over his absinthe. Sometimes I was all by myself. The waitresses probably thought I was a Holy Cross choirboy, one of whose greatest pleasures was to have breakfast there after morning rehearsal. I seldom had to wait for a seat.

That day I was greeted downright rapturously by my famous colleagues. They congratulated me on the courageous speech I had given. Both their reception and the ragoût fin did me good. I immediately ordered seconds.

Gradually the scene in the principal’s office acquired some good points. After all, I had my first official interrogation behind me. That was as significant as a hundred-page manuscript. Besides which, these guys now knew that they were dealing with a future writer. From now on my response to any questions would be a whispered “Stasi” and silence. Along with my ragoût fin I relished the rumors that would soon envelop the whole school, arouse Franziska’s admiration, and ultimately find their way to Geronimo.

Vera — she was living with Nadja at the time — tended to me as if I were someone who had been severely injured and walked me home that evening.

My mother not only had a three-and-a-half-hour interrogation behind her, she had also had two gentlemen escort her back to our apartment. The two had insisted on seeing the application of my request, which the school had approved, to be released from classes. There was nothing in it about an award for professional excellence. All the same we were puzzled — my mother had in fact been considering using the phrase to avoid making people envious. Were we being bugged? Were there mics behind the wallpaper? The solution was perfectly banal. The only officer candidate in our class had recently spent the night with us because our apartment was close to the airport. We two represented our class on a committee providing the hoopla for a visiting foreign nabob (whose plane never landed). Evidently the vigilance of my schoolchum had set off the false alarm.

The next day, after each bing-bong that preceded every announcement on the loudspeaker, I expected to hear our names called out. My expectations were in vain.

It was only much later that I realized the real appeal of this involuntary session had lain in the mistake made by State Security. At the time I was almost ashamed of having been interrogated on false suspicions — which is why I never made literary use of the incident.

With warmest greetings,

Your Enrico

PS: Georg has quit. I’m taking over his share of our enterprise. Not one nasty word has been said, general relief on all sides. We’re looking for new quarters.

Thursday, April 5, ’90

Dear Jo,

Yesterday Jörg presented me as his associate; he spoke in serious tones with unusually long pauses, lending even more weight to his sentences, which always sound as if they’re ready to be set in print. Although everything he said was already known, no one dared disrupt the ritual, not with so much as a look of boredom. Marion sat erect, nodding at me as if to say: Courage, Enrico, courage! Ilona pressed her bony knees together and kept smoothing the hem of her plaid miniskirt. She and Fred are evidently especially receptive to orations of this sort and waged a contest to see who could look more dignified. Kurt, Fred’s assistant and deliveryman, as well as our film developer and ad hoc photographer — he’s a member of a photography club — sat there inert, arms crossed. I’ve never heard Kurt speak a single complete sentence. Whenever we meet he raises his hand in greeting and answers every question with “Fine” or “Could be better.” For him every job is alike. If you were to ask him to wash windows, he’d immediately find himself a bucket, rag, and newspapers and would not stop until every window sparkled. The Wismut mine had let him go, which left him with just his job as a night porter at the hospital. I don’t know if or when he ever sleeps.

We had also asked Pringel, one of our freelancers, to join us. I got to know him in Leipzig, where he put together the house journal, Air Research Technologies—he’s an impeccable proofreader. Because he’s stocky and overweight he can’t keep his legs crossed for any length of time, although he seems to think that’s important. So he’s constantly changing legs, which gives him a strange fidgety look. Pringel’s beard keeps growing wilder with each passing day, like a hedge framing a child’s face.

Jörg spoke at length about the responsibilities and risks we’ll both be sharing. He called on everyone to show discretion in terms of content and numbers, especially now, because next week we’ll be leading with the announcement of the hereditary prince’s visit.

Jörg will represent us in public, I’ll work on in-house issues, and we’ll share editorial duties.

Then it was my turn to say a few words. No sooner had I finished than Fred asked just what if anything would be different? He was upset because Jörg doesn’t want him to sit in on editorial meetings — but has asked Ilona to.

Although I didn’t have to answer any questions, I was glad when the meeting ended.

The baron has invited Jörg, Marion, and us to join him at the Wenzel next week. He pleaded fervently with me not to hide my wife away again this time.

We talked a good while as we sat in his new car — I’m to keep his old one until I can afford to buy my own.¹⁵¹ He had to admit that he didn’t know the rules of the game in the East, but the longer he thought about the fact that half the firm had been as good as foisted off on me, the more he was inclined to look for some attached strings that were dangling so close to our nose we couldn’t see them. I told him what I knew — that neither Jörg nor Georg had needed his own ten thousand marks and both had already returned the money to their mothers. Steen’s twenty thousand D-marks were news to the baron. The more details I told him, the less believable the whole thing seemed to him.

But be that as it may, he finally said, from now on at any rate I wouldn’t be sleeping so soundly. He didn’t want to have to reproach himself later, which was why he needed to make clear to me, even at this moment of my greatest happiness, that according to civil code co-owners in a company were fully exposed. “You’re liable down to your wife’s last blouse, to your son’s last pair of pants.” He swore he wasn’t implying anything, but I should be prepared for the tricks and treachery of this new world. Sometimes just a roofing tile or a banana peel can lead to a firm’s ruin. His motto was: “the limited liability corporation, a GmbH!” He traced the letters on the fogged-up windshield and went on with his lesson. Then he rummaged in the glove compartment and, as a farewell gift, handed me a paperback published by dtv. From long use it opens to the law covering limited liability.

Hugs,

Your Enrico

Sunday, April 8, ’90

Dear Nicoletta,

I awoke a little while ago with a strange sense of joy. It was in anticipation of something, and do you know of what? Of now, of this moment, when I can write to you. It’s as if you have just sat down beside me. And through you what I tell you takes on its own special color. I share my memories with you and you alone. To whom else should I tell these things?¹⁵² And each time I do, I find myself just this side of writing you real love letters. It takes every ounce of will not to. You entered my life, and yet before I could even stretch out my arms to you, you were taken from me again. Without you I feel incomplete, like an amputee.¹⁵³ And I’m afraid that you will have forgotten it all when we meet again […] and won’t even recognize me. To keep from becoming a stranger to you, I shall go on writing.

In October 1980—I was in the twelfth grade — I received a telegram. Geronimo asked if he could spend the night at our place that coming Saturday, and noted his time of arrival. It’s not as if I had expected a visit from Geronimo, but I wasn’t surprised either.

Geronimo had definitely grown, he was clearly taller than I, his hair fell down over his shoulders and was so greasy it glistened, so that my mother asked if it was raining.

When we sat down to coffee, he polished off our weekend supply of rolls and scraped the last bit of honey from the jar. My mother covered her faux pas with a steady barrage of questions. Each began with “Johann,” as if she were calling on him in class.

After he had eaten his fill, we retreated to my room, about which he had no comment, not a single syllable, in fact he didn’t even seem to notice the splendor of my books and pictures (the latter on loan from Vera). I asked who he planned to visit in Dresden — no one except me. Was there a concert or a play he wanted to attend — not that he knew. He answered every question with monosyllables. If I fell silent, he remained mute too. I didn’t know what to do with him. My question about where he intended to study theology¹⁵⁴ arose from the same awkwardness as the rest of my inquiries.

I assumed he was fed up with my queries and that that was the reason he was staring at me so angrily. And then Geronimo began his monologue. The sentences were declarative, but their intonation was that of questions, as if he expected to be contradicted. Life wasn’t worth anything if death was the final station. “Without eternity,” he said, “our life is meaningless.”

Geronimo went on and on and seemed somehow furious with me. What was he getting at? I saw only his desperation, which culminated in his assertion that it didn’t matter to him if he went on sitting in his chair or threw himself out the window. I realized that for him God and the meaning of life were still one and the same thing.

My shrugs only increased his rage. He pressed his lips together and stared at me as if my silence were the same silence into which he used to maneuver me three years before. What did he want from me? So I did exactly what I had been prepared to do.

I opened my desk drawer and took my treasure from its hideaway. I was scarcely still capable of listening to Geronimo. My fingertips tapped the pages into place. I barely cast him a glance as I said that this stuff was what held me above water. I handed my work to him, to my important reader — and slipped out into the kitchen.

When I returned to my room with two glasses, Geronimo was sitting there just as before. Finally he raised his head. He wouldn’t have had to say a single word, and certainly not a string of adjectives, all he had to do was to look at me like that, shaking his head in disbelief. It wasn’t a success — it was a triumph!

It wasn’t Vera and her entourage who made a poet of me, it was Geronimo. I believed him. He said things that it would be ridiculous to repeat today, but at the time were tantamount to my consecration — and his subjugation. That he was able to offer me such praise surely came from the fact that he himself had lost his footing.

The whole evening Geronimo talked about nothing except my poems, as if it were up to him to convince me how extraordinary they were. And I made every effort to reciprocate his pathos as best I could. I could tell him now just how overwhelming my response to him had been at one time, how much I had longed for him to be my friend.

There is a kind of openness that finds every trace of distance to be a blemish. After Sunday breakfast, my mother asked me if Johann had been crying.

We talked and talked without letup, but neither was there any letup in my fear — that with one false word, one nod given too quickly, our euphoria would be transformed into a will-o’-the-wisp. As the conductor flung the door closed behind him, I felt almost as if I had been redeemed, as if only now was his praise irrevocable.

Although that weekend might be regarded as the date of the true founding of our friendship, out of tact I also never reminded Geronimo of that evening.

When I got back home I sat down at my typewriter and began my first letter to him. “Dear Johann,” I typed, left one line blank, and placed my fingers on the keyboard the way I had been taught in typing class. “Darling Johann,” I said softly. “My darling Johann.”¹⁵⁵

Trusting that you’ll continue to listen to me, I send warmest greetings,

Your Enrico T.