New Lives

Tuesday, April 10, ’90

Dear Jo,

The weekend was a nightmare! Now that the panic is over, even I can see that I looked somewhat ridiculous. But first the good news: We’ve found a new — admittedly ramshackle, if not to say dilapidated — domicile for our headquarters. It’s a miracle! After even Fred’s connections as a hometown lad proved futile and except for innkeeper Gallus — whose job it is to keep his guests in good spirits — no one even dared try to keep our hopes up, it was once again the baron who helped out. I’m gradually getting used to it.

When, he declared, would we finally understand what a newspaper is for: ads and local news! He would, needless to say, put at our disposal all replies he had received to his real estate ads. Unfortunately only one was worth our consideration. It sounded to us like music of the spheres. The baron came just short of apologizing for having rented a splendid villa for himself without having first offered it to us.

Once we heard his proposal, it took us barely half an hour to find our way to Moskauer Strasse 47,¹⁵⁶ which runs between the Weiber Market and Jüden Gasse. As we waited for the owner, we were like children waiting to open their gifts — and got a nasty surprise. Who showed up? Piatkowski! Him and a long drink of water.

Piatkowski was panting as if he had had to drag the long drink of water the whole way all by himself. Even after Piatkowski and the baron shook hands we still didn’t want to believe that this was the person we had been waiting for.

Supple with the joy of enterprise, the baron gave his hips a roll and asked Piatkowski to lead the way. The first issue was whether the building pleased his clients, and then we’d see what we would see. The long drink of water shouted that he and Herr Piatkowski had already come to an agreement. We were to keep that in mind, please.

The long drink of water had a trained voice that carried very well. One after the other the heads of a father, mother, and daughter appeared in the display window of the private hardware store located on the ground floor. They watched the proceedings without returning my greeting. Passersby slowed their steps.

The baron paid no attention to anyone — neither to Fred’s babbling about urgency and being a local, nor to the other fellow’s booming voice. He gave Piatkowski a smile.

Unable to shake us off, the long drink of water stuck close to Piatkowski’s side, amiably and politely bending his ear, but he was the first to slip into the darkness that now opened up behind one panel of the wooden door. His voice echoed as he praised the ancient plaster. “Fantastic!” he exclaimed. “Fantastic!” His footsteps faded, but then quickly returned. “What’s wrong?” he asked Piatkowski. “Aren’t you coming in?”

The baron had come to a halt in front of Piatkowski and stared at him before admonishing us: “Keep your eyes peeled. If you see any shortcomings, we’ll ask for the rent to be reduced.”

The building is nothing but shortcomings. The long drink of water, however, found it all fascinating, enchanting, and “an exciting opportunity”: the smithy in the rear courtyard, which along with roof tiles, dust, and cat shit contains an anvil on a massive wooden base; the half-timbering — absolutely worth keeping! — and then there was the plaster, over and over, and at every mention it aged a couple of hundred years.

Piatkowski stood leaning against the newel, sucking on hard candy. The building had belonged to his in-laws, there had been a greengrocer here at one point, with first-rate connections to the farmers of Altenburg as well as of the more distant reaches of Saxony. They themselves, Piatkowski and his wife, had never earned a penny from it. There had been nothing but squabbles about the rent. And now this dump belonged to all four siblings, so there wasn’t anything left to speak of. The hardware store downstairs, and up in the garret a married couple, refugees back then, from Silesia — but the town had been full of them. “Ah,” the long drink of water said, “Silesia,” and buttoned up his coat.

The stairway is drafty and dark as a chimney, the light switch doesn’t work. On the second floor, two doors lead off a small vestibule to rooms looking out on the street. The one on the right, the smaller of the two, is twice as large as our editorial office. The door on the left opens onto an almost ballroom-size space with high windows and a door to another room almost as large.

“With windows like these you might as well just move out onto the street!” The baron stuck a fingertip into his mouth and then held it up to a windowpane, as if trying to determine the wind direction. “A pretty kettle of fish you’ve got here,” he chided Piatkowski, who took a deep breath and nodded twice.

“But I’ll take it! As is! With the shop downstairs. Agreed, Herr Piatkowski? Agreed?” The long drink of water gesticulated wildly.

“Have a look at the rest,” Piatkowski replied, and then warned Fred, who had shouldered open a warped door, “It gets a bit risky, leave that to me.”

We entered a long windowless hallway. To the left a wallpapered door opens onto the vestibule, so that you can move in a circle. Along the right are some tiny rooms — which Fred declared to be storage space.

Suddenly it turned bright again. The hallway ends in a room with windows facing a courtyard, and beyond it the rear walls of buildings lining the market.

Piatkowski remained in the doorway. The little room that I would have liked to move into then and there has been declared off-limits by the police — both the floor and the exterior wall are in danger of collapse. We all had a look before beating a dark retreat.

“Dear Herr Piatkowski, you actually want rent for that? What if my life insurance company were to hear about it!” The baron called back his wolf, who was sniffing in nooks and crannies. Even the long drink of water fell silent this time.

“Rubble!” the baron declared. “Quite simply rubble.”

The rent they had received up till now had barely paid the chimney sweep. And they’d put every penny into a new roof, Piatkowski said by way of apology.

“And now you want more rent? Who should I tell that to?”

The long drink of water shouted, “I’ll take it!”

“I’m really very sorry,” Piatkowski repeated.

“Are you even listening? I’ll take it!”

“Let’s go on upstairs,” Piatkowski proposed. We waited till we had lined up in our accustomed sequence, but this time the long drink of water backed off. He wasn’t about to play this game. He would rent it for a year, and that was that. He was sure they’d come to an agreement about price.

“Whereas I,” the baron said, “am unwilling to buy a pig in a poke.” He insisted on being led upstairs.

“But of course, but of course,” Piatkowski said, trying to mollify him. And that was why the long drink of water entered both rooms well behind the rest of us. Each of these rooms was likewise entered via a vestibule.

“How much do you want for this?” the baron asked, tugging and chewing at the hairs of his mustache. “It might work for the summer.”

“Now listen here…” the long drink of water broke in. He evidently no longer knew whom to address.

“What are you willing to offer?” Piatkowski asked.

“Not much, right?” The baron looked at me and then at Jörg. “Three hundred at most, 250 East-marks?” Jörg nodded, I nodded, Fred and Ilona thought that this was way too much, while Kurt wandered from window to window, digging his thumbnail into the putty and then blowing off the flaking paint.

“A thousand,” the long drink of water shouted in relief, “one thousand West-marks! Agreed?”

That was out of the question, the baron replied angrily, it would be the ruin of the market here, offering a thousand for a dump like this, totally off the mark, it was immoral, a man couldn’t do that, truly he couldn’t. If that were to set the pace…For a moment the long drink of water looked exasperated, but then triumphed over his response and said, “It’s a market economy.”

“Yes,” Piatkowski said, 250 would be about right, he really didn’t want to ask for more than that, he wasn’t a moneygrubber and the place needed some serious investment—250 East-marks, that was all right with him, but always in advance, on the first.

The baron held a hand out to him. “Starting May first,” he said. “May?” Piatkowski asked, but then shook hands.

The long drink of water gave a shrill laugh. “Herr Piatkowski! Herr Piatkowski? A thousand West-marks, agreed?”

“Yes,” Piatkowski said. He had understood him, calling the long drink of water by his long and melodious name, but surely he must realize that this was among locals, and just in general, it’s how we were used to doing things around here.

“Yes,” Fred said, “we’re locals!” Kurt nodded, one thumbnail cleaning the other.

The long drink of water gave a snort, stepped up to the baron, extended him a hand like a knife to his stomach, and bellowed, “Congratulations, really, my congratulations!” Since the baron was pressing his attaché case against himself with both hands, the long drink of water made do with some vigorous motions of his head, turned around, and vanished like a shade into the gloom of the vestibule. Piatkowski handed us the keys, and we said our good-byes.

Fred immediately started planning the renovation. If we gave him and Kurt a free hand, it would be completely taken care of within two weeks, completely. Jörg asked me to keep working on my article on Piatkowski, who was still deputy chairman of the Christian Democrats, even if he was our landlord now. He had promised Marion.

The baron is proud of his achievement. As soon as he has his new stationery he’ll send us his bill as the agent, one month’s rent — standard is three — his first earnings in the East.

The old married couple in the attic have yet to let us know if they are happy with their new co-renters. The hardware store people don’t seem to care one way or the other.

Furniture is no problem — Helping Hand is selling off the inventory of the Stasi villa cheap. And there’ll be more than enough parking spaces. We just have to clean up the area at the upper end of Jüden Gasse.¹⁵⁷

And now about the weekend. I wanted to check in on Fred and Kurt, who have been renovating since Friday, and on Saturday I drove over to the new building with several boxes of cookies and a bag of coffee. Ilona had mobilized her husband and children. They were ripping off wallpaper as if there were nothing they’d rather be doing. Kurt was plastering holes in the walls with stoic equanimity. Pringel was happy that I could see him in his mechanic’s jumpsuit. Fred was already painting the office. Next to the shashlik and Ilona’s cream torte my cookies would have looked pitiful, so I just left the coffee.

Jörg, Marion, and I had worked till midnight on Friday, and the twelve pages for Monday were as good as finished. I don’t know myself why I drove back to the office — maybe the others’ enthusiasm was infectious. As always I first went through the mail, slitting one envelope after the other with Ilona’s Egyptian letter opener, stamped readers’ letters, inquiries, manuscripts as “received,” and sorted subscription forms and small ads. Like some bonus, the last envelope was embossed with a coat-of-arms on the back.

I didn’t even suspect anything when I saw the list of names on the letterhead. I read the “in Re,” the salutation, moved on to the name of our newspaper, and the all-too-familiar generalization: “swinish business”…read ever more quickly, skimming sentences until I drew up short at the number 20,000 followed by the symbol DM, plus the words “twenty thousand” spelled out in parenthesis. This was soon followed by a “forty thousand” in numbers and words and, after a skipped line, a “Best Regards” and a signature with two big loops that tied up the name like the ribbon on a present.

I reread it from the top and, after a moment, a third time. A law firm was suing us for libel on behalf of their clients and threatened that if we were to make public such assertions yet again (that is, part two of our article on the hog farm), a fine of forty thousand D-marks would be assessed.

When I got to the door I had to go back, because I still had Ilona’s letter opener in my hand. I drove to Jörg’s place. No one answered. When I tried again a half hour later, a neighbor woman told me that they and the girls would be in Gotha until tomorrow, visiting grandma and grandpa. No one at the Wenzel knew when Barrista would be back, but he had booked his room for another week.

Why for just one week? And why had Georg thrown in the towel on account of that article? It seemed to me that everyone but me had seen this turn of affairs coming. I envied Jörg and Marion for their ignorant bliss, for an evening with their parents and children. In the crazy hope that I would see the baron’s car standing at the door, I headed for the new building — but then drove on past. I spotted Ilona at the window. I felt like crying.

If they had at least written marks and not D-marks!

Luckily Anna, the author of the article, was at home.

“Our further existence,” I said, “is in your hands.”

While she read the lawyers’ letter, I took a deep breath for the first time. When she said she would swear that she had reported everything exactly as it was told to her, and that her people were reliable, absolutely reliable, I found myself feeling almost cheerful. She fulfilled my deepest wish by emphatically repeating “absolutely, absolutely reliable.” With tears in her eyes she promised to reconfirm everything — I needn’t worry.

No sooner was I back in the car than my angst welled up again.

When I woke up Sunday morning at four, I realized I still had that damned letter in my pocket, that the goddamn thing had spent the night here with me, so to speak.

It took every bit of energy not to drive to the Wenzel right then — or at six, or seven, or eight o’clock. I had set my goal at ten o’clock, or nine thirty…¹⁵⁸

Herr von Barrista had left the hotel shortly after nine…Was there anything else they could do for me?

I shook my head, I was fighting back tears. I looked for the baron in the line of people waiting to buy a Bild tabloid at the train station. I reconnoitered the neighboring streets. I returned to the Wenzel. I wrote the baron a few quick lines, fervently begging him to stop by the office. The file with the mail was still lying on the desk. I folded the letter up and shoved it in. When Georg appeared to say that Franka wanted to know if I would be staying through the noonday meal, I declined the invitation. In a burst of chivalry, I told myself that he no longer had anything to do with it — spare him the worry.

Yielding to sudden inspiration, I drove to the building where — as the baron had pointed out to me — Manuela, the blond waitress, lives. She’s now working at Referees’ Retreat. But no one answered the door.

Around seven I returned home. I could hear music even from outside the door. When I entered Astrid the wolf was lying under the mirror console. She didn’t even raise her head. The baron had presented Robert with a CD player plus speakers, which they were trying to place to best effect. In their baseball caps they looked like professional installers. Michaela had a performance.

“And where were you?” the baron asked. He had missed me at the opening of the exhibition at the Lindenau Museum. So many local VIPs! It’s called working your contacts.

“And? Are they right?” he asked after I had poured out my heart to him — and then calmed me down at once. Anyone who sent something like that in the mail was not to be taken seriously in the first place. But shouldn’t we respond all the same? I asked.

“Yes,” he said, “by ripping up that piece of trash and forgetting it. Who’s to say you ever even got it?” And might there not be some other solution?

“If you like,” he said, “I’ll take care of it.” That’s exactly what I wanted to hear.

“But that always costs money, a letterhead like that unfortunately costs one hell of a lot of real money.”

I asked him about part two, whether we should print it or not. “Of course,” he said, “if it’s good. Otherwise don’t.”

So now we have our little scandal issue, because Jörg’s article about a teacher named Offermann is on page three. If we go under, it will be with flying colors.

Hugs, E.

Maundy Thursday, April 12, ’90

Verotchka,¹⁵⁹

I have to calm Mamus down every couple of days. Even with a hundred dead, the chance something has happened to you isn’t even one in a thousand. Mamus will be here for Easter.

Once the telephone is connected in our new offices, we won’t have to worry about imposing.¹⁶⁰ It’s strange, but I find it difficult to leave the old one behind. It’s been with me for so many hours, filled with so many hopes. The dial, the spiral cord, even the receiver, they all belong to your voice, your breath, to everything that you and I have said.

Verotchka, it won’t be long and I shall lay the world at your feet. At least some little piece of it. Your friend, the baron, has dropped a couple of hints, and I’ve responded accordingly — it’s quite possible that we, you and I, will soon be going on a trip. I don’t want to let the cat out of the bag yet, it sounds crazy and absurd, but I’ve learned to believe things for that very reason. You’ll see, it’ll all work out!

I’m so grateful to you for remembering Robert. He even wears the jacket in the apartment, it hangs on his bedpost at night.

Michaela attributes his “unimaginative” desire for money to my influence. What else is Robert supposed to wish for? He knows that within a few months he’ll be able to fulfill entirely different wishes.

A couple of days ago, Michaela admitted that she has been carrying around a letter from Robert’s father. She recognized his handwriting on the envelope.

I met him just once, that is to say, I saw him at the theater when he came to pick up his Christmas pyramid and his old candelabra. At the time it was beyond me how Michaela could have fallen for a man like him. The incarnation of the wannabe artist — gray ponytail, flashy ring, three-day beard. He was forever going on about Pablo or Rainer or Hanna,¹⁶¹ and if someone asked him about it, he took offense in the name of his gods. Robert would wait until ten or eleven at night in the theater canteen,¹⁶² until Michaela had removed her makeup. His father never had any time for him, because he was hot on the trail of another one of his inspirations or chasing some high school girl. All the same Robert was very attached to him.

But now Robert didn’t even want to read the letter. He cursed his father and cried. But at some point he’ll make the trip to see him. And I’ll have to let him, if not in fact encourage him.

Last night Michaela joined me at the Wenzel. We just now got home.

On the way there she claimed that by now half the town is making fun of Barrista, and that I should protect Robert from him. She’d put it euphemistically and called my nobleman a pushy, funny duck who’s so ambitious that he can hardly walk in those silly boots of his.

I’ve learned from Nicoletta (short, brunette, with cornflower blue eyes, and unflattering but expensive glasses, she knows everything, can do anything, and does it, but basically is more helpless than a child, always afraid she’ll miss out on something, and thankful just to get any “job” she’s hoping that with the help of the Lindenau Museum she can pursue a career in art history)¹⁶³ —from Nicoletta I’ve learned that he must have a skeleton in his closet, at least he’s not allowed to do business on his own and works through a whole network of straw men. Did you know anything about that? But this flaw only adds to his attraction, at least for poetic souls — as best as I can read them — especially for Johann. He downright lusts to hear about mysterious, inscrutable types who have a finger in every pie, and are successful at it, whether in business or with the ladies […] And when I describe Barrista’s limp, Johann regards it as somehow diabolical and talks about his “dark luster.”

Even Michaela couldn’t hide the fact that her tirade against Barrista was really just the reverse side of her curiosity — that she couldn’t wait to be introduced to him. And so I found it quite amusing to watch how quickly Barrista won her over.

Before he kissed her hand (and later on he would rave about her hands), before she was seated at the place of honor at our table — yes, more or less even as she was making her entry into the restaurant — the two of them were already playing their game. He likewise knows how to work an audience, without ever casting it a glance.

The baron handed us what he called the “bill of fare,” on which he had had the hotel print in gold lettering: “In honor of the rebirth of the Altenburg Weekly and in honor of Michaela Fürst and Marion Schröder.” Inside was a list of six courses, on the left in French, on the right in a German translation — that makes an impression.

Wasn’t this laying it on just a bit thick, Michaela asked brusquely, only to immediately announce how happy she had been to accept his invitation. But first she wanted to make sure she didn’t forget to thank him for the splendid flowers, which in their own way were as seductive as the names of these mystifying dishes.

Marion jumped in to say that she had not yet expressed her thanks for the largest cyclamen in all of Altenburg.

“When it comes to flowers,” Michaela resumed, “no one can hold a candle to Herr von Barrista.” I was strangely touched to hear his name coming from her lips. From then on everything was really quite clear.

During the main courses he entertained us with travelogues. In the fall he always flew to the U.S., to the East Coast for lobster. He described the inns, the little harbors, the various landscapes and the play of light, pumpkins in the fields, red foliage…His narrative was as vivid as it was lively, and without interpolated questions it flowed along like nonstop dinner music, wrapping itself around me as I basked in my dreams of you.

When we got up from the table, the baron laid a hand on my shoulder — the restaurant had long since closed, tables were being set for breakfast — and asked if we would like to finish off this extraordinary evening with a nightcap. The bar wasn’t worth much, but he had done some upgrading over the past few weeks. It would make a happy man of him if he could put a cocktail shaker to good use for us. “Why not?” Michaela responded like a shot out of a pistol.

“Well, that’s an answer!” the baron said in triumph. An arm linked mine, and I found myself in the bar at a table that was just being cleared.

The baron dedicated the next minutes to me with something very like fervor. More than the words themselves, I recall the pleasant, almost tender lilt of their melody. Yes, he literally wooed me. And I realized: He isn’t nearly as old as he seems, he’s much younger!

When I woke up, Michaela and the baron were snorting and giggling. Except for a couple of waitresses and a man as thin as a rail bent over empty glasses at a neighboring table, we were alone.

“We were just talking about the theater,” he said, as if I had just returned from a brief trip to the restroom. With one hand on my knee, he leaned over to me. I could smell his unusual perfume. It was five a.m. — which for me is relatively late.¹⁶⁴

He pried us into his car. Michaela chattered away, giggling to herself. As we rode along I tried to support her head from behind — it kept slipping off the headrest whenever we took a curve.

As we got out, she sank into my arms. I felt like her footman.

No sooner were we in the apartment than nausea brought her to. She was so weak I had to brace her forehead above the toilet bowl.

“Are you jealous?” she asked, and apparently thought she ought to gaze especially meaningfully into my eyes. I begged her not to kneel on her dress and tried to help her out of her coat. She reached into her coat pocket and held up an envelope. “That’s how much my name is worth,” she cried, “one thousand dee ems!” She was to receive the sum monthly as manager of Fürst & Fürst Real Estate.

When we were counting out the money later and I asked her if she knew what she was getting herself into, Michaela said that she trusted me, after all I had taken her with me, he’s my friend, that was the only reason she had agreed — only to add a little later: “He’s so ugly! Don’t you think he’s incredibly ugly?”

Do you think he’s ugly?

Kisses,

Your Heinrich

[The following handwritten lines are on a separate page and undated. Since the preceding letter was written early in the morning, immediately after their return from the Wenzel, one can presume this should likewise be dated April 12th. According to V. T., they both arrived by fax.]

Michaela had a miscarriage this morning. She immediately went to the hospital, I didn’t learn about it until several hours later. Maybe it would have been better if I never had — but of course that’s nonsense. I feel it’s my fault for dragging her with me to the Wenzel. I can’t understand how Michaela hadn’t noticed anything — surely she must have known! It can only have happened in Offenburg, nowhere else.

Michaela didn’t even want to be comforted, she’s very cool and collected. In a show of tenderness, the hospital put her in a room with three women who had just had abortions, there were no other beds available.

In a certain sense we’re both grateful that we didn’t have to face that decision. Which is why we don’t talk about it. Robert seems to be the one who’s saddest.

Verotchka, my dear sister! H.

Good Friday, April 13, ’90

Dear Jo,

Friday the thirteenth. I’m sitting here in my bathrobe, drinking coffee, and enjoying the quiet. I can’t remember what I wrote to you in my last letter.¹⁶⁵

On Wednesday the baron invited us to dinner yet again. There were several things to celebrate — our new building, my new position, Barrista’s real estate firm.

No sooner had we arrived than he spotted Michaela and couldn’t keep his eyes off her after that. I really believe he was surprised to suddenly see me right behind her.

Marion, who made a special trip to the hairdresser, looked more severe in short hair. She was wearing a lot of makeup and a muted red dress that pinched her under the arms. Jörg also seemed out of place in a gray suit that was a little too large on him.

Barrista, who was in the best of moods, cleared the long side of the table just for Michaela and asked Jörg to move down a seat, and then seated himself in his spot. He placed me next to Marion, who was already showering Michaela with compliments. The far side of the table was left empty.

There were always two or three waiters tending to our needs, young fellows who marched through the dining room with shouldered trays and, as they served up plates at breathtaking speed, removed the domed silver covers with a coordinated grand gesture as if on command. One of them would then solemnly announce the name of the dish.

Twice, without any consideration shown to other guests, the lights were turned off. The first time flames danced above the shoulders of our waiters, the second time the spray of sparklers glittered, followed by noisy minifireworks at the table. It couldn’t have been more spectacular. Michaela applauded like a child each time.

We would barely take one sip of wine and the baron would refill our glasses. He was pleased with himself and the world and led the conversation with a sure hand on the reins.

He revealed to us a few of his habits. He sleeps till nine, likes to take long walks out of fondness for the wolf, spends several hours in the city archives, and then rewards himself with an hour in the museum. Granted, whenever he and the hereditary prince had talked about his visit, the prince had insisted that he, the baron, seek out the museum, but had never been able to give the baron a true conception of what he had missed in life until now — nothing less than the key to happiness! We really should have our ears tweaked. Why had we not taken him by the hand on that very first day and led him to the museum, for it would have spared him many a gloomy hour of helpless brooding over the fate of the town. “What you have here,” he said, “is a Louvre en miniature, don’t you know that?” And segued at once to his Madonna again, which is slowly becoming an obsession with him.

As if to spare us further reproach, Jörg began to talk about Nietzsche’s father, who had been a teacher at the castle. Jörg didn’t get very far, however, before the baron interrupted him. Out of the blue he offered to write an article for our local pages. From the attaché case so familiar to us all he extracted a couple of photographs that he first showed to Michaela and Marion. He wouldn’t have had to say another word. Marion tried to shy away, Michaela stared at me, as if comparing the picture with me. The baron explained in a chatty voice that they were taken in February ’41. On Altenburg’s Market Square — the savings bank and the steam-driven Winkler Wurst Factory could be made out in the background — a woman’s hair was being lopped off before an assembled horde. Another photo showed her seated on a horse-drawn wagon, surrounded by a crowd of about two to three hundred spectators, maybe more. In the second picture she still had a headscarf on, and her chin was resting on a sign: I HAVE BEEN EXPELLED FROM THE PEOPLE’S COMMUNITY. A third photo showed her and an older man, with a hat and glasses, who was cutting her hair, after having first bound a traditional white cloth around her shoulders. The fourth also showed him “hard at work.” In the fifth her head had been shaved bare. The sixth picture was of her walking through the town. She was accused of having had intimate relations with a Pole; her husband was a soldier.

What he’d like to find out, the baron said, was where she had lived, whether there were still relatives. Photo in hand, he had visited the spot today where it had taken place.

It shouldn’t be difficult to find out the name of the barber or the circumstantial details of these — yes, you only had to look at the happy faces — these revels. What did we think? Shouldn’t we search for witnesses and question the townsfolk? If the photograph were enlarged, people could be recognized more easily. Promising to write an article, he gathered up his pictures again and carefully stowed them away.

“Local news with a twist,” Michaela said, raising her glass to the baron. She drank a lot, in fact.

Suddenly the baron leaned across the table. “Look there,” he whispered, pointing his head in the direction of the entrance. I didn’t know who he meant, since there were several parties standing there looking around for a table. A tall gaunt woman with an angular face and black hair made a beeline for our table. The man preceding her barely came up to her breasts. “Caesar and Cleopatra,” the baron said sotto voce. There really was something Egyptian about the woman’s hairdo. In the next moment the short man grabbed the back of one of the empty chairs at our table and was about to launch his question with a smile, when Marion and Michaela erupted into laughter. I couldn’t contain myself, either.

“I’m sorry,” the baron exclaimed. “We’re still expecting more guests.” The mismatched pair stood there as if searching for some explanation for our bad manners. Jörg, who had held out the longest, was now leaning forward, bracing himself against the table with one hand and covering his eyes with the other. His shoulders were bobbing. Marion and Michaela took turns chortling. I pressed the back of my hand to my mouth.

“I’m so very sorry,” the baron repeated.

“Well, enjoy your evening,” the short man replied, less angry than confused, which set Michaela into a new round of laughter, and the rest of us with her. My laughter was so out of control that the harder I struggled against it the more violently I shook. I have no idea what had got hold of us. There was absolutely no reason for us to carry on like that.

The baron tried several times to make some remark, but was so helpless against the demon that had seized us that he testily excused himself and left the table. As soon as he was just a few steps away, we fell silent. We stared at one another, each waiting for the other — and nothing happened.

I felt wretched, compromised. We just sat there speechless — excruciating doesn’t come close to describing it. It was as if the baron had annulled all words, gathering them up like playing cards from the table. And we had no choice but to wait for his return, for him to deal them again.

In those few minutes we seemed to destroy everything that held us together. The silence devoured everything we had ever felt for one another, it wolfed down respect, dignity, trust, affection, love. Had someone compelled us to disband at that moment, it would have been forever.

All of a sudden the baron reappeared. As he was about to resume his seat, Michaela said, “We’ve calmed down, do forgive us.” He took her hand and kissed it.

But now, just when the opportunity presented itself for us to forget the matter, the next catastrophe followed immediately on its heels.

Michaela suddenly raised her arm as if to signal a waiter, which was an instant alarm for the baron. “Something you need?”

I turned around. Standing in the path of the advancing phalanx of waiters were Wolfgang the Hulk, his wife, and Jan Steen. The three stepped aside, but as their eyes followed the waiters, they discovered us.

Wolfgang and his wife came over to greet us. The baron, to whom Michaela was about to introduce the pair, did not even put down his knife and fork, and turned away from her to speak to the waiter.

In order to salvage whatever could be salvaged, I joined Wolfgang as he walked back to Steen. In that same moment a new dish was solemnly unveiled. Steen asked who the silly ass was that we were sitting with, and insisted we join him at his table. There were several things he wanted to talk over.

I begged his pardon, asking him to understand our situation — whereupon in midsentence Steen lost all interest in me, sat down, and picked up a menu. The baron, on the other hand, chided us, muttering something about the quality of the cuisine losing every bit of subtlety once it had turned cold.

Whether by chance or on purpose, the courses now followed one another without the least pause — until the lights were doused again. For Steen that was the last straw. He, along with Wolfgang and his wife, departed then and there, without so much as a glance our way.

Although we all made every effort and, much to the baron’s delight, ordered seconds of the crème brûlée, the incident spoiled the mood until the very end.

The next morning, however, I awoke fully refreshed and without a trace of cobwebs in my head.

Hugs, Your E.¹⁶⁶

Tuesday, April 17, ’90

Dear Nicoletta,

With each new day I still hope to hear news of you. From the start I suspected that I would have to wait a good while for letters from you. But as long as you allow me to write you, I shall not complain and will proceed with my confession.¹⁶⁷

During the four months between graduation and reporting for duty I didn’t look for a job the way everyone else did. I had a job. My mother or Vera gave me what little money I needed for books, theater tickets, and train trips to Naumburg or Berlin.

As if Vera knew that she would soon have her passport taken away and be placed under a so-called Berlin embargo,¹⁶⁸ she was constantly underway — to the Baltic, to the Harz Mountains, to Mecklenburg — and sent me postcards and letters so that I could follow her journeys on a map. While in Berlin she scribbled a few walls full with her friends’ poetry, learned how to throw pottery, and, allegedly, smoked marijuana.

Vera’s absence brought a certain calm into my life. I set it as my goal to write five or six hours a day. But, unlike other precocious wunderkinder, I did not write poetry that apostrophized the Elbe, Dresden, women with long hair, or the copper hammers above the roofs of Budapest.¹⁶⁹ That was the last thing on my mind. I wrote about the army!

Constrained by orders, licked into shape by drill and maneuver, I would acquire an instantly recognizable style. And wasn’t the West waiting for smuggled messages and coded rappings from behind the barracks walls of the East, just as they had waited for the tales of Solzhenitsyn’s gulag?

The scene I was able to work on was the morning of my induction — those minutes between waking up and getting out of bed, to be followed by the descent into hell.

Most likely you’ll think I’m exaggerating when I claim that my thoughts had always revolved around this farewell. The army was the epitome of leaving home. Kindergarten, school, afterschool clubs, and vacation camps had been unpleasant, but nothing in comparison to the horrible farewell to which they were mere precursors.

We had grown up, after all, in the shadow of the endless Russian barracks that ran from Klotzsche all the way into the heart of the city. Soldiers marching in columns to their training area at Heller and the songs they sung by night behind barracks walls formed the background for grisly fairy tales. Those eighteen months in the National People’s Army had always seemed to me a black crossbar bolted across the entrance to real life.

My plan was to write about a sensitive young man’s despair on being inducted, illustrated with memories of a dread of the army that went as far back as early childhood. There was no evading, no escaping the totalitarian force that would soon watch his every step. It would all conclude with my hero sitting, despondent and pale, in the kitchen over a cup of coffee, while his mother — yet another German mother forced to surrender her son — silently waited on him, her face turned aside so that he wouldn’t see her tears.

To refresh your memory let me add: In the autumn of ’81, Poland was on the verge of being placed under martial law. I had learned from a neighbor drafted a year before that his regiment had been armed with live ammunition since summer. Even the regimental commander, a colonel, had taken to wearing his field uniform, and the officers had adopted a previously unknown cordiality. He himself had been assigned to putting up additional information signs for reservists who were to be moved up into place.

This was grist for my mill, it lent wings to my imagination. I was afraid I would arrive too late, but all the same would gladly have put off induction day, because I was enjoying my life just as it was.

At the end of October, about ten days before my induction, something totally unexpected happened.

Geronimo wanted to see me one last time before I was consigned to barracks, as he put it. We had been seeing each other once a month. We had taken long hikes and bike tours to Schulpforta and Röcken.¹⁷⁰

The tension that I had felt at our first reunion still existed, however. I both longed for Geronimo and feared our meetings. I felt really at ease only when writing him letters.

He had asked that I not meet him at the train station this time, I was to wait for him at home. When the doorbell finally rang, it wasn’t him who was standing there — but Franziska. I believed it was a miracle! Franziska had found out my address and had come to see me. Thank God I floundered so long for something to say, because Geronimo now stepped forward.

Although this suddenly explained everything, I was less dismayed than I was incredulous. I had never regarded Geronimo as a being who would be of any interest to women. And now, who but Franziska!

Despite all the displays of affection between them, I initially thought it was a joke. Was she using Geronimo? Didn’t she belong to me instead, especially now that she could compare the two of us? Her presence in my room, her unhoped-for existence in the midst of the same world where I had dreamed of her, left no place for Geronimo.

At first, as they say, I only had eyes for her. And yet however unwilling I was to accept Geronimo as the vanishing point toward which her every move, her every word was directed, I ultimately couldn’t avoid looking at him. And that changed everything!

Geronimo’s smile was so full of bliss, his face so totally enraptured, that he reminded me of a sheep.

Have you ever felt the degrading desire to hurl yourself like the devil between two lovers?

“Johann!” I said like a doctor speaking to an unconscious man. “Johann!”

I wanted to slap him, rip his glasses off and smash them, pound my fist into his face, and he would just go on smiling his stupid smile, making sloppy kissing noises, and letting himself be smothered with hugs. Make love not war! “Johann!” He didn’t even hear me now! I sat crouched there beside them, the forlorn outsider in my own room.

When he asked whether he and Franziska could spend the night here with us, it didn’t bother me at all to refuse, and without offering them any reason, either. I proposed he sleep on an air mattress, just for him alone, beside my bed.

They stayed for supper and held hands even while they were eating. My mother insisted on hearing every detail of how they first met. And the two of them, caught up in an insufferable need to tell their story, didn’t want to talk about anything else either.

Why was no one bothered by my silence, by the way I stared at my plate, a man turned to stone? They had already banned me from their society. It wasn’t just the brutal egoism of lovers — no, they were all rehearsing life without me.

At least I could tell myself how lucky I was that my mother didn’t invite them to stay the night. I can’t remember a word of what was said as they left.

Johann had lured me into a trap, he had betrayed me. And I lay there whimpering his name into my pillow.

The next morning I found an envelope on the breakfast table. “Is it a novel?” my mother asked later. That was Johann’s second betrayal. He hadn’t said one word about the fact that he had begun writing too. Was Johann secretly at war with me?

That was on Sunday. If this were a soccer match, the announcer would say: The following is being shown uncut.

Monday had more bad news for me in its pocket.

In compliance with the induction committee’s instructions, I had had a chest X-ray taken — not by an army doctor, but in the Friedrichstadt Hospital, where my mother worked. The results arrived in Monday’s mail. I didn’t even want to think of trying to decipher all that Latin and laid the envelope on my mother’s kitchen chair, so she didn’t discover it until we sat down for supper. Have you ever seen a familiar face reveal, from one moment to the next, the skull beneath it?

“It can’t be!” she whispered.

“What can’t be?” was all that I managed. Then I felt dizzy. A minute later I asked from the kitchen floor how many years I had left.

“Four or five,” she said, rammed her feet into her street shoes, and called out: “But it can’t be. This just can’t be!” And pulled the apartment door closed behind her.

The cold floor felt good. I looked up at the ceiling lamp where dirt had collected in its glass bowl, at the hot-water tank with its solitary blue flame. It did good to fix my eyes on things that had never changed my whole life long. Four years! I had to turn my head to see the window. I gave the chipped corner of the windowsill a smile. Four years! There was my ineluctability for me. I had time for one book, maybe two. Wasn’t the proximity of death the prerequisite for any and all creative work? Didn’t everyone try to fake that proximity one way or the other? Four years! I pressed the sentence to me as if it were a promise, an agreement between God and me.

Almost an hour passed before my mother returned. She had ridden her bike to various phone booths, but it had been too late to reach anyone in the X-ray department. She smiled and wiped a handkerchief over her still-reddened face. The results were wrong, she said — a mistake, utter nonsense, otherwise I would barely have made it up the stairs.

“Did you hear me, Enrico? It’s our chance. There’s no army in the world that would take you with those results. The dear Lord himself wants it this way,” she cried with joy.

I had never heard her use that expression. It wasn’t just that her “dear Lord” annoyed me, all I wanted was to be left alone, alone with the things of this world that in an instant had become mine, all of them beautiful, all important.

The more euphoric her words—“You just bewail your fate a little, play the role”—the angrier I got. “Either I’m a conscientious objector, or I go like everyone else has to.”

An hour later I was walking along the Elbe, which lay under a blanket of fog. “For all flesh is as grass,” the Brahms Requiem boomed in my ear, “and all the glory of man as the flower of grass.” How should I describe the state I was in? True, I was still the Old Adam who felt superior to Geronimo, and this was an experience that would set me apart from all other people. But beyond that, I was surprised, no, I was bowled over by the startling consolation that, whether dead or alive, I would remain on this earth. To die and rot did not mean to melt into nothingness, but rather, no matter what, to continue to be here, to continue in this world. The thought, insinuating itself as if in my sleep, calmed me. I don’t mean to say that as I walked along I overcame my fear of death, and yet it felt very much like that. Every beautiful thing was suddenly beautiful, every ugly thing ugly, every good thing good. For a short while I escaped my own personal madness — and would no longer have to do anything! Every compulsion, every plan, every need to test my powers fell away from me.

On Tuesday I rode to the hospital with my mother and had a new X-ray taken. When I returned home, I wrote Geronimo. It was my last will and testament, a farewell in so many different ways. Every sentence was the main sentence. I wished him luck, I wished Franziska luck. I would have preferred to tell him all this face-to-face — I was ill, I was deathly ill, but I accepted my fate, I would bear it as the lot assigned me, move forward along my path step by step. I was impressed with myself. I made no mention of his manuscript.

I had to call my mother at noon on Wednesday, at which point I learned that the enlargement of my heart was not pathological, just the opposite, I had an athlete’s heart. And in that moment my lucidity and insight vanished. Yes, I was angry at having lost so much time with all this ruckus, and could feel the old pettiness creeping back into my pores. But for a few moments I had experienced a strange clarity. And every word I write about it here is merely a pale reflection.

Wednesday, April 18, ’90

Since I had been writing about my induction almost every day for over two months, November 4th was as intimate as a pen pal whose long-awaited visit I looked forward to with curiosity. Granted, there was hardly any time to compare my preconceptions with reality.

As expected, I slept poorly. My mother’s behavior, however, bore only a distant resemblance to my previous description. We poured a lot of milk into our coffee so that we could drink it more quickly, and were silent. I was annoyed that she wanted to push me out the door much too early, and only as we said our good-byes were her eyes a little moist.

“Tomorrow,” I quoted from my manuscript, “it won’t seem half as bad.” (In my novel the first day wasn’t supposed to be bad, only all the days that followed.) My mother hugged me and gave me a farewell kiss on the brow, which made a very strong impression on me. I decided there and then to include this gesture in my departure scene.

The route that took me to the large Mitropa Hall, where we were supposed to assemble and which was at the far rear of Neustadt Station, reminded me of the evenings spent waiting for my grandparents to return from the West.

Suddenly I was aware of the hulking presence before me of our neighbor Herr Kaspareck. Evidently he was the officer in charge here and was patrolling among the chairs. He kept kicking at all the black bags that had to be removed from his path. Despite our civvies we were already prisoners.

I was astonished to see a pistol at Kaspareck’s belt. Years before he had chased after me because we had been playing soccer outside his windows on a Sunday. Now he could take his revenge.

I assigned to Herr Kaspareck the role of the Herald of Evil. He hadn’t greeted me, he had stumbled over the stretched-out legs of an inductee who had fallen asleep, and Kaspareck’s well-placed blow to the calves had almost pitched the fellow from his chair.

Every observation here would be of use, material for improving on my first draft.

A patrol unit, whose white patent-leather belts and straps reminded me of the harness on circus horses — a comparison that came to mind by way of Animal Farm—dragged a drunk past, a man in despair, sobbing his wife’s name. Or was he calling for his mother? Like dogs returning a stick, they dropped him between two chairs. He lay there whimpering. Two members of the patrol lifted him up by the shoulders, about even with their hips — were they trying to see his face? — tugged him a little more to the right and then, counting inaudibly to three, dumped him again. Their aim was good. His front teeth were knocked out on the edge of a chair. They immediately pulled him up from the floor and inspected their work. One of them shouted that they’d evidently netted a little Dracula. The other four grinned. The silence in the Mitropa Hall was impenetrable. In the same way that by stretching out their legs after Kaspareck’s attack, the inductees had made him stalk his way through the room like a stork through underbrush, so now their silence closed in around these traitors and came close to suffocating them.

These kind of scenes formed in my mind all on their own, as if I had finally found the beanpole on which my fantasy could entwine itself and grow. But as I’m sure you know: our inventions are never brutal and nasty enough, exaggeration makes its home in reality, and somewhere — of that much I was and still am certain — this or some similar scene had occurred.

As you can see, I felt from the start that I’d come to the right place. Here was the perfect dose of callousness and inevitability that had been lacking until then.

Watched over like convicts, we climbed the stairs to the train platform, and I listened closely to the orders, which needed to be decoded according to tone, pitch, and intensity.

Our cars were shunted several times back and forth across the Marien Bridge. The Canaletto panorama with the Hofkirche and the Brühlsche Terrace¹⁷¹ was the last thing I wanted to see at that point.

Naturally I would have preferred an escort of uniformed men, plus a phalanx of plainclothes men barricading me as I climbed aboard a train for West Berlin — where, surrounded by photographers and cameramen, I would then begin my new life. But that triumph presumed that here and now I had to fall in, buzz cut and all. Before I could display my treasures, I would have to enter the underworld and have a look around.

When we finally pulled out and passed through Radebeul — my mother and father had wandered those vineyards together, and later Vera and I, and once Geronimo and I, had strolled there too — I was for a few moments the dissident writer who was being exiled by his government, who would never be allowed to return to his hometown, who would be consoled by a speech given in his honor by Heinrich Böll¹⁷² or Willy Brandt. I gazed from the window and formulated the first sentences of my acceptance speech, an indictment that would leave no comrade unaware of what a huge mistake it had been to banish me.

Now began a veritably endless circuitous trip. A farm boy from Upper Lusatia treated our compartment to home-butchered sausage, because he was afraid — thanks to some remark by a noncom — that he would soon be relieved of his provisions. He himself ate liverwurst, neat. He became a hero when he pulled underwear out of his bag and peeled it away to reveal a bottle of high-proof whiskey.

My new comrades made fun of the Brandenburg landscape, which had always been my Arcadia, called it a sand and pine desert. In late afternoon we arrived — sober and a little more familiar with one another — in Oranienburg, which lies to the north of what was then West Berlin.

On the way from the train station to our barracks I was annoyed that no one turned around to watch us pass.

As if on command, a hundred feet suddenly kicked at piles of leaves by the side of the road, scuffled around in them, sent leaves spiraling and drifting ahead, scooped them against the heels of the man in front, over the shoes of the man beside, scattered them in all directions. No command, no barked order told us to stop. The rebellion didn’t end until there were no more piles of leaves. The yowls of those with six and more months already behind them were silly by comparison. They flung windows open and roared the number of days they still had left, as if in this country service in the army could ever come to an end, as if they didn’t know that at any moment they could always be stuck in a uniform again and imprisoned in a barrack. With a boom the gate slammed shut behind us…

At the rear of the base, between a frame structure and the House of Culture, you could see the building that marked what had once been the entrance to Sachsenhausen concentration camp.

I later wrote a long passage about how we stood there with our bags in the drizzle while we watched one company after another march into the mess hall for supper, about how we were vaccinated, made to fill out questionnaires and to wait until we were soaked to the skin. It was almost nine o’clock, an hour before lights out, before I was sent along with some others to a building that abutted the camp watchtower.

Although we had to stand for another hour in the entry as if at a pillory, the sparkling clean red floors and freshly painted walls had a calming effect on me. I wanted to get out of my wet clothes and, yes, I was looking forward to a dry uniform! The room assigned me came equipped with just two bunk beds — but looked comfortable. Pasted on the top bunk on the right was a slip of paper with the typewritten words: Private Türmer.

My only fear was that I wouldn’t be able to make a mental note of everything I saw, heard, and smelled. I couldn’t let any of it be lost.

At the sound of the wake-up whistle the next morning I jumped out of bed as if about to leave on an expedition. Morning gymnastics and breakfast were canceled for us late arrivals. Instead they threw at our feet a piece of canvas that could be buttoned up into a sack. With it in hand we shuffled through supply rooms. A steel helmet, a new and an old pair of boots, three uniforms (standard, dress, field), protective gear, gas mask, gym shoes, tracksuit — I accepted it all like a miner being outfitted. I was going down into the pit to uncover hidden treasures.

At the midday meal, as I was hungrily wolfing down my Königsberger meatballs, a big stocky fellow farther down the long table stood up and shouted that the only reason he could stomach this slop was that this was the first food he’d been fed here. Tomorrow he was going to dump this slop over the head of the sergeant at the end of the table.

I pressed my last bit of potato into the gravy — and was thrilled. My first character had just revealed himself to me, a combination of Thersites and Ajax.¹⁷³ I wasn’t going to let him out of my sight.

That afternoon as we were packing up our own stuff, I inserted among the damp clothes a greeting to my mother and an envelope addressed to Geronimo. Inside it were three pages of jotted notes, with a 1 at the top, then a slash, followed by a page number. I asked him to collect and save these rough sketches. I started on 2 immediately afterward.

My mother still talks today about the moment when she opened the package and found my clothes inside—“as if you had died.”

Enough for today. As always warmest greetings from

Your Enrico T.

Friday, April 20, ’90

Verotchka,¹⁷⁴

So that we don’t waste our telephone time: Roland was here. He’s on a lecture tour of the East. The Party of Democratic Socialism is allowing him to appear only in small towns. But what he loves to talk about most is you, as if you had left for the West because of him.

If I understood Roland correctly, he’s soon going to have to look around for a new job. Not even universities have any use for his theories now. He of course put it differently: just when for the very first time we’re going to need to give serious thought to socialism/communism, they’re going to terminate his position. I asked him who he meant by we. The oppressed and disenfranchised, people dying of hunger and thirst, people who’ve been driven from their homes, who’ve been raped and have no roof over their heads, he replied without a hint of irony.

Then he laid into the New Forum for having acted so irresponsibly, for being so naive and childish, as if they had never heard of capitalism. And now we can sit back and watch it all get smashed, everything that distinguished it “over against capitalism.”

It’s pointless to argue with him, I knew that beforehand. He has a knack for constantly maneuvering you into corners where you start justifying yourself all on your own. For him I was somebody from the New Forum, which, whether it intended to or not, had sold out the GDR to capitalists.

He wasn’t interested in our paper. At least there used to be nothing in our newspapers, he said; nowadays they’re just full of nonsense. In the very next sentence he claimed I wouldn’t publish anything about his lecture—“presumably for reasons of space.” When I asked him why he would accuse me of that, he mocked me, saying he could see my article already before him. I was speechless. And Roland’s reaction: he’d always admired reactionaries, the way they fall silent the moment something doesn’t suit them, they trust in the way things are, in the power of factuality, so why argue? I asked him whether he now regarded me as a reactionary. He laughed — I’d always been one! Unlike the people from the Party of Democratic Socialism, he has no guilty feelings and sees himself as totally above it all. That’s what annoyed me most.

He would probably only be satisfied if I printed his lecture in full, starting on the front page — anything else is censorship. But how do you write about someone who uses the concept of democracy, bourgeois democracy, so cleverly that even a child would have to believe it’s something suspicious, yes, despicable.

Roland claimed that his final triumphant volte—in which he praised Schalck-Golodkowski as the last internationalist, who was keeping Communist publishing houses and Party headquarters alive in the West, and concluded by calling November 9th the victory of counterrevolution — was an embarrassment to the cadres of the old Socialist Unity Party. They were afraid his lecture would become known to a wider public.

The Soviet Union, the socialist states, he went on, had been the only power in the world that had kept capitalism in check. We, in the East, had been the guarantors that capitalism in the West had worn a human face. But that was all over now. I would see. I would remember what he’d said when the state and its citizens were nothing, and the economy and consumerism were everything, when we’d all have to pay for kindergartens and universities, yes, probably have to pay to die.

Roland doesn’t shy away from any exaggeration. Actually what he’d like is to return to the situation in which it was impossible to know anything about capitalism.

Ilona’s husband, a former comrade, returned from Bayreuth floating on cloud nine because he’d been able quickly and without any fuss to find trousers that fit him, so that Ilona won’t once again have to shorten the cuffs. The comforting reassurance that his body is evidently not abnormal made a convert out of him. You can regard that as ridiculous, and I didn’t risk telling Roland about it either, but I understand Ilona’s husband. I believe he’s found happiness, a happiness that Roland can only scorn as a sign of bedazzlement and corruptibility.

Isn’t it a crime to say: You’re not allowed to see the Mediterranean — or only when you’re old and gray and can’t work anymore? Ah, enough of all this! I’m sounding like Michaela, who’s forever getting high on the fantasy of running into her former teachers and professors and confronting them. As if she hadn’t learned in the theater by now just how pointless that is — pointless, because you can’t demand shame and contrition.

But of course I also admire Roland. If only for his vitality, the way he loves to talk, to argue, for his extravagance (and by that I don’t mean just his belts, the swing in his hips, and that silk scarf). He’s a brilliant logician, unafraid of consequences. Yes, I admire him for his courage, but it’s a pernicious logic, not to say lethal.

I told him about how Mamus was arrested and what happened in Dresden last fall. Even while I spoke I was annoyed with myself for using her arrest as an argument, because it suddenly made me sound so self-serving. At least he didn’t try to invent justifications for it or go so far as to cast it in doubt. He expressed his disgust, but then couldn’t refrain from suggesting that I ask you about Shatila and Badra,¹⁷⁵ and then asked me about what happened in Greece or Spain, in Argentina and Uruguay.¹⁷⁶ And there they were again: Victor Jara’s hacked-off hands.¹⁷⁷

Why doesn’t he want to live in a world that is halfway decent, why must it always be struggle, suffering, dying? You, my dear Heinrich — I hear you say — you yourself should know the answer to that better than anyone. Because for people like Roland it’s not about living in a pleasant world, but about remaining productive. And for that they accept the rest as part of the bargain: revolution, chaos, death. That’s why Roland has to view November 9th as a work of counterrevolution. How could he go on writing otherwise? Well, let them all put their Budyonny caps¹⁷⁸ back on. You’d think there could be no end to the desperation of people like Roland, because history has hurled them back a hundred years, because their whole proletarian hoopla, all those millions of victims that they bore like an indictment on their banners, will now become as meaningless as those other millions of victims who were slain in the name of their own false gods. But that’s not the case. His eyes shine more brightly than ever. Are they fools? Maniacs? No matter what happens in the world — they hold on tight to their divine mission. I’m sorry, I’m repeating myself. Roland and his comrades are simply tiresome. In fact it gives me great satisfaction to see their tap turned off just like that and to watch them have to start looking for work like everyone else. We send greetings to the comrades of the German Communist Party for the last time! But let’s not waste so much anger, so much energy and emotion on them. They interpret everything that has to do with them — even if you spit at their feet — as a badge of their importance. Roland is completely right to view me as a reactionary. Isn’t it marvelous to hold tight to factuality, to fall silent, to smile?

How much does he actually know about us?

Love, Your H.

PS: Strangely enough, he got along famously with your friend Barrista. Barrista calls Lenin and Luxemburg terrorists, for Roland they’re revolutionaries. But in terms of their “analysis” Roland and Barrista were in agreement and blamed all the evils of the world on German reactionaries, who always first create for themselves whatever it is they then take up arms against.

With Roland, however, I’m not certain if he wouldn’t line us all up and shoot us if he were told to do it in the name of the revolution. There’s probably no danger of that in Barrista’s case.

PS II: I had a dream about Mamus. She’s at a spa for her health and I’m supposed to renovate the apartment. Nothing’s been done in preparation; she didn’t even take the pictures down. I look everywhere for brushes, buckets, paint. To no avail. But in the cellar I find Neudel’s painting equipment, which he had given me to wash out the last time around, but now the paint in the can is hard as stone, there’s a round brush stuck in it for good. When I try to push the wall unit toward the middle of the room, the Georgian vase falls off. But Mamus snatches it with one hand, as if she were doing the beer-coaster trick. She wants to know what I think I’m doing. At that moment I realize I’ve made a mistake. The woman who told me to do the renovation wasn’t Mamus at all. Just look around, Mamus says, pointing with a very grand gesture at the walls. They are in fact white, freshly painted white. And outside — she points to the window — there’s a blanket of snow. It glistens so dazzlingly that the building across the street is invisible. Mamus tells me to stand in front of the mirror so that I can finally see what I look like now.

Saturday, April 21, ’90

Dear Nicoletta,

I sometimes think I’m way too fainthearted. But then I think of how you cautioned the taxi driver to drive less recklessly. I took pleasure in your every gesture. Sometimes I clap my hand to my brow as if I might still find your hand there, when you were checking to see if I was feverish. And I see your other hand hastily buttoning up your coat. And that’s supposed to have been six weeks ago now?

Within the first few days in the army it was clear: Hell looks different. I was glad to know that, but also disappointed. There were lots of whistles and shouts ordering us around, we were cursed and ridiculed, but it was all just a big show. Besides, as part of the pack your hide gets tougher. Of course, it wasn’t pleasant to run in protective gear and a gas mask or do push-ups in a puddle. All the same I put on weight at first, because as trainees to drive an armored personnel carrier (APC) we had almost nothing but political instruction at the start. Except for the room corporals, who were our driving instructors, we were all newcomers, which helped keep stunts by those who had already served six months or more to a minimum. Even when you had room duty, there was still time to read and write.

We were sworn in at the Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp Memorial, where, so we were instructed, antifascists of some eighteen countries had been murdered. During the ceremony we faced the obelisk with eighteen red triangles at its tip — created, it would seem, to help us count off our eighteen-month stint.

I tried to capture as much of daily life as possible. Military jargon, every terminus technicus, fascinated me. I was the only one who kept his brochures on “Being a Soldier,” which appeared monthly, each time in a new color. I often took down conversations in shorthand — dialogue was my weak point.

In early December we had six days of home leave, the so-called rest and recreation we were supposed to get every six months. Vera and I borrowed a?

Skoda and toured almost every castle, fortress, and church between Meissen and Görlitz, then sat for hours smoking and drinking gin and tonic (if it could be had) in cafés filled with older women.

Instead of being horrified at the sight of her son in uniform, my mother thought I was “a hoot.” My description of general conditions and the daily routine had reassured her. She could see how well nourished I was.

Vera, however, wept when it was time to say good-bye. I had forbidden her to accompany me to the train station, I didn’t want her to see me in uniform.

But why couldn’t we — or at least hardly any of us newcomers — sleep until six each morning? I would lie awake for a good while, listening to footsteps in the hall, to the clatter of the metal grill at the entrance, and held the illuminated dial of my watch up to my eye, as if afraid of over-sleeping. The seconds before the wake-up whistle were counted down by beeps from a radio turned up loud.

Once outside, doing calisthenics in the dark — followed by a run that turned into an incredible farting contest — I soon forgot my restlessness.

If an alert had been declared, the morning wait was worse. Officers in full uniform and smelling of aftershave blocked our access to the toilet, while noncoms drove us out of our quarters. Nothing but shouting, clanging, rattling on all sides, as if a huge hunting party were being organized. We ran outside and then along the road in front of the barracks, as far as regimental staff headquarters, then back again, where we finally had to fall in and undergo an endless inspection of our equipment.

On December 13th,¹⁷⁹ however, an alert roused us out of our sleep. This time the whole regiment was throbbing. The noncoms, who couldn’t get into their clothes any faster than we could, didn’t want to believe what had happened and hesitated before opening the weapons store. Only after companies from the floors above us fell in did we get ourselves ready — bringing the chaos on the regimental streets to its zenith. I breathed in the exhaust from tanks that came clanking along the concrete slab road. Spotlights everywhere, an unrelenting din, columns of vehicles. I boarded our APC as if it were a cold-started ark. I felt neither fear nor opposition, nothing that could have prevented me from taking part in this decampment. On the contrary: even those of us at the bottom of the totem pole couldn’t help viewing the alert as a grand spectacle. We crouched beneath closed hatches, peering out through the embrasures and hoping that we could move out without officers.¹⁸⁰ They were the chickenshits this time.

No sooner had we left the base than we turned off the highway. For two hours we followed country roads and woodland lanes. We kept banging our helmets against the vehicle roof. Some guys didn’t know what else to do, so they pissed into their mess kit.

As it began to turn light, we climbed out and camouflaged our vehicles. We were standing at the edge of a clearing. The staff sergeant on the APC in front of us was fumbling with the antenna of a black Stern recorder, attempting to adjust it. Since this evidently didn’t work, he grabbed the apparatus in both arms and spun in a circle like a dancer. We didn’t learn anything from him. Gunther, a pale towheaded Saxon, who for a waiter moved with a peculiarly wooden gait and grimaced with zeal during every drill, held his “Micki” radio up to his ear and immediately began spouting off in a whiny falsetto. What a piece of shit, and now of all times. Hadn’t he always said that they’d do better to work instead of rocking the boat, that got you nowhere, nowhere, everybody knew that, but now here we were getting mixed up in their shit. Then came the words “Polacks” and “lazy Polacks.”

I realized that what I had wished for had now come true. Every hour on the hour Gunther stomped off into the woods. The first snowfall hadn’t melted — a Christmas landscape with evergreens and animal tracks. Ten minutes later he would return cursing. Instead of the latest news from Radio Free Berlin, however, he treated us to cock-and-bull stories about what all he had experienced with the Poles. When the noon meal turned out to be roulades and red cabbage, with canned peach halves for dessert, there was no longer any doubt about the seriousness of the situation. Word was that the corporal had brought boxes of ammunition with him. Our convoy leader was the first one to pass around a picture of his wife. When it came my turn, I produced Vera’s photograph.

As night came on it turned bitter cold. Our APC was a cave of ice. We tried to keep warm by passing around hot tea — of which there was plenty — and doing knee bends. A few men sparred with each other. The hands on my watch had evidently frozen. At one point we tried lying down, packed man to man, on the ground in the woods, but that didn’t last long. I kept fingering my pants leg pocket, checking for my notebook — my amulet.

The order to remount, which came shortly after midnight, was a life-saver. The main thing was that the engines actually started. We’d been underway for about ten minutes when our lieutenant ordered me to get out and threw two flags down to me, which I was to use to guide our APC. I ran along a wall ahead of the APC. My feet were like stumps; I could hear their plunk, plunk, plunk against the concrete slabs. Amazingly enough I kept my balance. We passed a large gate — and it was only then that I recognized our barracks.

The strangest thing about this alert was the silence after our return. I didn’t hear any noise coming from the companies in the floors above us either. Men just set a stool down out in the hall and cleaned their weapon, noncoms did the same, and officers vanished without a sound. People made tea in their quarters, shuffled along in their underwear and down-at-the-heel gym shoes, and took their Kalashnikovs back to the weapons store, sort of like returning a spade to its shed.

That night I heard a cricket chirp. At first I thought I was hallucinating or that it was radio static. Maybe silence had lured the cricket from its lair by the furnace in the cellar and it had now taken up residence under our locker.

I’ve never read a single one of the over two hundred army letters I wrote to Geronimo. Whether they could help me describe those days for you better than I’ve been able to do so far is neither here nor there. It seems more important for me to observe that my memories of those weeks are wrapped in vagueness.

Just as martial law in Poland provided a post festum reason — beyond just personal irritability — for my restlessness before the wake-up whistle, I consider what happened to me at Christmas to be further proof that my frame of mind over the previous week and a half had been more than a mere mood.

On December 14th, the day after the big alert, my idyllic world fell apart. I slept above Knut, our driver and room corporal, a conspicuously short, but powerful, man, a weightlifter in one of the lightweight categories. His girlfriend had jilted him shortly after his induction, which did not, however, prevent him from constantly raving about her. Knut neither wrote nor received letters; once a month there was a package from his mother.

It was ten thirty, and so the beginning of quiet time. Gunter and Matthias, a bowlegged amiable fish-head,¹⁸¹ were talking about what you could eat, or just in general, what you would have to do to get ill very quickly and land in the infirmary. Not that I would have made any use of their knowledge, but their conversation sounded very helpful. Dialogue was, as I’ve said, my weak point. I kept notes. The light was still on and Knut wasn’t in the room. Writing in bed meant that the next morning, in the same three minutes we had to get dressed and go to the john, I would have to cram the pages in an envelope, address and stamp it, and then hope we would pass by a mailbox during our morning run, so that I could dash to one side, slip the secret message out of my workout jacket, and send it on its way.

Knut loved to slap at door handles and give doors a kick so that they would fly open and bang against the wall. It was annoying, but who was going to stop him. Knut played the major again this time, looked at me over the top of his glasses, and switched the light out. I hadn’t expected anything else, finished my sentence blind, and caught a whiff of Knut’s beery breath as he undressed. He tossed back and forth, the bunk frame shook and squeaked, followed by quiet, as if he had found his sleeping position. I was just signing off when I was bounced in the air, once, twice. If somebody kicks a mattress from below with both feet, the guy on top is as helpless as a beetle on its back. I held tight to the frame.

When things had quieted down, I leaned down out of bed and offered some curse or other — and he kicked again. This time I lost my balance. I wasn’t hurt, it was almost like a landing off the parallel bars, softened as well by my blanket, which had slipped off first. I aimed an angry kick at Knut.

We stood there screaming at each other in the dark. He landed a couple of his blows. When the light went on, he was holding his side too. I had committed sacrilege. I knew I had.

As I went to fold up my letter the next morning, a page was missing. Even though I soon ceased to attribute any importance to the loss, I found myself feeling odd somehow. Everything about me, the sweat in my armpits and between my legs, the odor of my socks or the stain on my uniform, all of it suddenly seemed precious because it was part of me. I wanted to hide myself in my body, I was about to wrap myself in my cocoon.

In the last letter from my mother that had got through — a stop had been put on mail before Christmas — she seemed transformed. Even though I had written nothing to her about the alert, she felt guilty and was tormented by self-accusations. If she hadn’t interfered I would, she felt sure, have filed as a conscientious objector, and in the light of December 13th, that could no longer be regarded as a stupid move or a matter of false heroics, but maybe the only way to save oneself. She had read all of Arnold Zweig’s novels, and yet she no longer understood herself. She had evidently forgotten our argument about the X-ray.

And now I will attempt to describe an event that I’ve kept absolutely silent about until now. Not even Vera knows about it.

On Christmas Eve, of all days — we had had to spend the whole day cleaning — I was feeling better again. Half of those with more than six months’ service were on leave, Knut had stayed in hope of spending New Year’s at home. He claimed his mattress kicks were meant to toughen me up, or just for fun. It was my own fault if I didn’t get the joke. I had decided I wanted to rework chapter one and planned to read Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath, which I had bought in the regimental bookstore.

After supper a couple soldiers sang Christmas carols out in the hall. I stayed in my room and wrote Geronimo about how strange it felt to be all alone, if only for a few minutes. I felt as if I were playing hooky somehow, that’s how odd solitude had come to seem.

A few minutes later the door was flung open, and I had to shake off a sense of being caught red-handed. It looked as if half the company had come for a visit. My first impulse was to stand up, but I thought better of it. A kick to my stool brought me to my feet. Knut demanded I report in, he ordered me to get dressed in regulation uniform and report in to Pit, the only DC left in our company. (DC means discharge candidate — that is, the only man left who was in the last six months of his eighteen-month stint.) I could see men out in the hall rubbernecking and jumping up and down. I asked what he wanted.

Then someone grabbed me from behind, pressing my arms against my body. I was totally helpless. I thought that by not defending myself I might maintain what little dignity is left in such a situation. I was hoisted up several times, but remained on my feet. My locker was open wide. Knut flung my boots at my knees. He bellowed. I was let go of.

I put on my strap and belt and saluted, saluted slowly, with a smile. Knut demanded a confession, that I plead guilty. The guy who had grabbed hold of me — my Ajax-Thersites — pushed me from behind. When I turned around he yelled at me to look straight ahead. But all that quickly proved irrelevant once I saw a page of my handwriting in Knut’s hand. Even before Gunther and Matthias stepped forward, it was clear to me what was going on here.

Cursing me and my lousy penmanship, Knut haltingly read aloud what I had jotted down that evening. After each sentence he asked: “Did you say that?”—“Yes, I said that,” either Gunter or Matthias would reply. “Yes, I said that.” The jabs in the side, the knuckles to the head, the shoves — I could have endured it all, if each of them had not been accompanied by that one word: Spy! Everyone said it, “Spy! A spy!” Knut didn’t leave out a single sentence. The whole production was working only too well. “Yes, I said that!” Knut had become a magician. He pulled the strings. Even those with whom I was on good terms, with whom I had even made fun of Knut, were yelling, “Spy! Spy!” And they waited for something to finally happen.

Did they really think that’s what a spy’s report looked like? Only I could answer that question, Knut shouted. All he wanted to hear was why and for whom I had written all this. Someone else slapped my head.

Because I’m a writer, because I’m working on a book about the army. Why didn’t I admit it?

“Louder!” Knut shouted. “I wanted to give my friend a true impression of army life,” I repeated — every word a thrust of the knife. I had given up, I played along, I wasn’t even going to try to convince them. In a certain sense I even admired Knut. Raking a spy over the coals — a scene I would love to have invented myself.

Pit, who showered with a hose in the washroom every day and then came prancing down the hall with wet hair slicked back, a ruddy face, the hose over his shoulder — this same Pit crowed: What was the point of discussion, it was clear as day — a spy!

But Knut wasn’t finished. What sort of friend was that who I was writing to, the same sort of friend maybe as the girlfriend I had tried to palm off on them?

Someone grabbed hold of me again. Gunther and Matthias should be the first to “give it to him.” My Ajax-Thersites helped them out of their quandary by throwing me to the floor. I fell on my back. “Get his balls!” somebody shouted. I felt nothing.

I’ll spare you what happened next. You and me. The whole time I was amazed at how they did it just right, that they instinctively knew how to utterly humiliate someone. Maybe their aim was also so good because they were acting in good conscience, because nobody could have anything against punishing a spy. That is, there was one person, but I didn’t learn about that until later.

Knut’s one mistake was that he went too far. My chastisement lasted too long. And along with a renewed awareness of pain, my rage returned as well — and a euphoric sense of freedom. I had nothing left to lose!

Shortly thereafter I was ordered to potato-peeling duty. There I sat on an upturned crate in the tiled storeroom of the kitchen complex, peeling away and listening to what my fellow ostracized soldiers had to say. At that point I would have instantly agreed to spend the next sixteen months peeling potatoes twelve hours a day. I was assigned one penalty duty after the other. All the same, I was happy not to have to spend my free time with my company.

Since I had almost no time left to write, I jotted my notes sitting on the toilet — hurried catchwords, punctuation reduced to dashes. It was Geronimo who congratulated me for starting the new year with a unique, unmistakable style. Strangely enough, I no longer woke up before the wake-up whistle.

My silence precluded any attempt to approach me. I ignored apologies. I didn’t even deign a word of reply to the noncom who confided to me that certain people hadn’t notified me in the kitchen when my mother had come for a visit — he named the guilty parties and offered to be a witness on my behalf. The only part of the cake my mother left behind that found its way to me was a shopping net and an empty springform pan.

In a certain sense it was a comfortable role for me: I no longer had to show consideration for anyone. I ignored Knut’s orders. On the same day that he tossed all my underwear out of my locker, his blanket ended up on the floor. I was prepared for anything, including a long guerilla war.

Monday, April 23, ’90

It was at the end of March, on a Sunday, that Nikolai entered our room, and my life. Nikolai had the most striking physiognomy in our entire company. The tip of his long narrow nose pointed straight down, so that his face was reminiscent of a ram’s. His father was an Armenian; his mother, a Berliner, who later married a German. Nikolai was a very good runner, was one of the fastest on the obstacle course, and wanted to stay on in our company as a driving instructor. His uniform fit as if tailor-made. You always thought he was on duty because even in the evening and on weekends he ran around dressed as per regulation. When he halted in front of me, removed his cap, and asked if he could sit down, I assumed he was about to announce that he was an emissary on an important mission.

His request, he admitted, was a little unusual, but he would pay well: two packs of Club cigarettes. In return I was to write a birthday letter, three or four pages, not for him, but for Ulf Salwitzky. His wife’s birthday was coming up, but Salwitzky hadn’t been able to put a single word to paper. I could probably ask for more, but he, Nikolai, figured two packs was about right for starters.

I was pleased by the businesslike nature of the proposal, although I really didn’t need the reimbursement. Vera was modeling again and making enough money to supplement my army pay (110 marks) whenever necessary.¹⁸²

“All you need is your pen,” Nikolai said, and got up. A “junior”—that is, in his second six-month stint — Ulf Salwitzky was waiting for me in the club room with a writing tablet and some photos lying in front of him.

Nikolai sat down two tables away, pulled a bundle of colored pencils from his pants leg pocket, and began to sketch. Frau Salwitzky had a strikingly small upper lip. Her dimples showed when she smiled.

As if I had been doing this all my life, I sat down across from him and asked him to tell me about her. Salwitzky sniffed and shrugged. “We’ve been married,” he said, “for two years now.”

What did she like best, I asked, ready to take notes.

“First from behind, panties pulled down, in the kitchen or in the bathroom, the bed’s not her thing,” Salwitzky said, sitting as still as if he were getting a haircut. I was to start in, he wanted to see if I was any good. He didn’t think it was right to have to talk to me about it. What was there to understand, he snapped, he wanted me to describe a fuck, from behind, no fancy stuff.

“And what’s her name?” I asked. Before I started I had him describe their one-bedroom apartment for me.

I had half an hour, and then I was to read it to him. Ulf Salwitzky bent forward and added a few remarks of his own—“ass slapping, include ass slapping!” for example. The whole time he rocked his head back and forth. It turned out he knew what worked. He liked the way Kerstin didn’t even have time to put the bouquet in a vase, so that the bouquet became a prop, at first disruptive, but then adding unexpected spice to things. Salwitzky filled me in about the next position. Nikolai wanted to know if I was planning to do it “with bouquet” too.

After an hour I gave Salwitzky my pages to copy. Nikolai’s sketch showed drops of sweat flying off Kerstin’s bobbing breasts. Her whole body was surrounded by sound waves — one, two, or three curves, depending on the intensity of the motion. Salwitzky wasn’t prettified either, but the realism with which Nikolai had drawn his compressed lips or the way the body tapered to the shoulders only made the scene more believable. Only in the last sketch did Salwitzky’s face take on a Gojko Mitíc radiance.¹⁸³

Ulf Salwitzky stacked five packs of Clubs on the table and departed without a word. Nikolai gave me a nod, put his cap on, and left two packs behind.

I now learned what it means to become famous overnight, even though I was overshadowed by Nikolai. Like a ballad-monger Salwitzky had moved from room to room, showing everyone the sketches and reading my letter. We had our next job that afternoon, and by evening we were booked for the rest of the week.

Nikolai was the star and I was his assistant. Nikolai met with our clients, arranged the terms, and made appointments. And each time he would ask for my assistance and offer me the same cordial thanks for helping him out.

With equal pride and bewilderment Ulf Salwitzky handed us his wife’s letter, which concluded with her holding her husband’s penis in her hand.

As discharge day for the oldest class grew closer and closer, we had more and more to do. Nikolai in particular was working to the point of exhaustion. And it goes without saying that we were freed from other duties. Knut had to stand sentry instead of me.

Once discharge day was behind us, Nikolai and I were given day leave. He had arranged it for us and informed me no one else would be on “furlough,” as he called it, which meant the pubs wouldn’t be too overcrowded. For me it was all uncharted territory.

We strode side by side not saying a word. The walk into town was endless. It was an odd situation; I felt as if I were at his mercy. Yes, I was annoyed at Nikolai’s presumptuous way of taking charge of things.

He invited to pay for my dinner at a pub called Gambrinus, and ordered steaks smothered in onions and cheese, a specialty of the house. I insisted on a beer.

Nikolai tried to get a conversation going. First he talked about our prices and then about how we didn’t need to accept every job. Then he spoke about his own plans. After discharge he wanted to go to Armenia, to see his father, who was an artist. “That’s what I want too,” he said.

“What?” I asked.

“To be an artist,” he replied — and looked like a wise sheep.

“And I want to be a writer!” I grinned as if I had cracked a joke.

“I know,” he said, raising his chin. “You should have said that much earlier on.”

“That wouldn’t have helped,” I replied, and was angry because by saying it I was admitting he had guessed my thoughts and quite possibly had understood the whole situation at the time.

“I was waiting for you to open your mouth. Knut is the spy.”

“Why Knut?” I asked.

“Everyone knew about it, days ahead, don’t you see — it happened by prearrangement. If you really had been a spy, you would have been rescued. But evidently it suited the higher-ups…” Nikolai looked around, as if searching for a waiter.

“But what do you mean you were waiting?” I asked. He moved the glass he had been about to drink from away from his lips, raised it, and said, “I would have confirmed your account, would have said that we’d talked about it before and that you had told me about writing a story…” His upper lip twitched. “I felt sorry for you,” he went on, “but given how stupidly you acted — a person could almost believe you wanted it that way.” He didn’t respond to my laugh. Then he gazed at me — arrogant, sad, wise, prepared for any deed, and ready to meet his fate. Compared to him, Geronimo was a crude child.

Our food arrived, and Nikolai began to talk about other things. He wasn’t going to be a driver, but was taking over the job of poster painter, which had just opened up, with his own workshop and the whole she-bang. He invited me to visit him the next day, or whenever I wanted, to visit him in his studio. But my decision had already been made: I was not going to tolerate him in my presence anymore.

Enrico

Wednesday, April 25, ’90

Dear Jo,

We’ve moved, and I’m living on the high seas! The floor covering they nailed over the planks was a remnant out of Fred’s treasure trove, and its waves roll higher and higher each day and have turned the oil radiator into a boat that dances up and down whenever I move it around the desk from my feet to my back. That’s the price for my medieval view.

Our would-be visitors often find themselves before a locked house door, because the old couple above us — they’ve allegedly lived together unmarried for forty years now — can’t be convinced not to lock up whenever they leave or enter the building. She in particular, Frau Käfer — everyone calls her Käferchen¹⁸⁴ —is a busy little key beaver. Ilona has developed a knack — even in the middle of a conversation and with the windows closed — for hearing someone rattling the door. Whoever does finally risk the stairs up to our office finds himself in a bright reception room — with plants everywhere, which are supposed to distract attention from the shabby Stasi furniture.

Fred has had signs painted on the doors, SALES OFFICE, for example, and written up a list of rules for each room. In my room, I am to note the following: “No more than two people at a time! No jumping, no stomping! Oil radiator, maximum level 2! Upon leaving: turn off lights, unplug all plugs! Close windows!” His final instruction: “No smoking!”—to which he added a handwritten “at least try”—“Danger of fire!”

Yesterday when I joined Fred in a visit to speak with the man from the hardware store — we have to install a new circuit in my room — and asked him to show us the back rooms, they saw my request as the transparent pretext of a spy. “We ain’t got nothin’ to hide,” the boss exclaimed, “if you want to…please…do whatever you want…” And dashed ahead of us. My courtesy didn’t help counter his suspicion. Just the opposite. Each of my questions seemed highly open to misunderstanding, even to me. Finally, as we were leaving the storeroom, his wife blocked the way. There were tears in her eyes as she announced that she wanted “to get some things straight here,” because I probably didn’t know how long they had been running this store, how difficult it had been to put all this together, to build up a business and keep it going. “It didn’t do no good! He’s ruined his health, his health!” Her husband accompanied each word with a sound like a muted tuba. Toward the end of her aria of desperation he chimed in for a duet, which consisted of nothing more than: “We can’t do nothin’ about it, nothin’! Can’t do nothin’!”

“And now you can leave!” his wife said, halting in front of me. Her tears had dried. I invited her to visit our office, told her about the paper—“Yes,” she responded, and it sounded bitter, “we know your paper!”—and offered to run an ad for them free of charge. “Why should we do that?” he asked. “Ev’rybody round here knows us, why would we ever wanna do that?” The daughter, a beanpole of a woman, didn’t even return our good-bye, and instead snorted incredibly loud into her handkerchief as we left the store.

The day before yesterday I had just found the right headline for an article (“The Captains Abandon Ship First”) when Ilona announced three journalists from Giessen. We had spent election Sunday with two of them. Rejoicing in reunion, they raised their arms as if they were going to embrace me. Right behind them came their managing director, whom I’d watched compose page proofs. His air was earnest and reserved. I led them through the newsroom as far as my door, but they climbed with me up to where Jörg, Marion, and Pringel share two large rooms. Once again the guests from Giessen found it all very “exciting,” as if they were expecting some dramatic turn of events at any moment. I asked them about their own article on the election. They acted amazed and were inconsolable that it hadn’t found its way to us. As we sat drinking coffee we lied about our circulation numbers, basked in their admiration — for Jörg’s article and our scandal issue — and listened to remarks about the “strong ad market” that was developing here. After a half hour they departed, with a promise to send the article.

Around six o’clock the managing director reappeared and halted in the middle of the room. I was on the telephone, sitting in Ilona’s chair and waiting for the baron, who had promised to stop by with his lawyer and a surprise. “You were lucky,” I said, “that the front door was open.”

It might well be, he said, that luck was on our side, we were lucky that he had gone to the trouble of looking in on us again. He took a seat in the chair set aside for ad clients.

He wanted to speak with me quite candidly, and hoped we knew how much that meant and would recognize our moment of opportunity. His newspaper had decided to launch a daily in Altenburg — latest printing technology, professional journalism — the jacket section (that is, everything except local stuff) would be managed from Giessen. We should, however, give consideration to the idea of a cooperative effort, which would mean that they would buy us out, but certainly it was within the realm of possibility that “one of you might take over as manager here…”

I interrupted him and walked upstairs. I spoke very calmly, which is why Jörg didn’t react at all at first. “No,” I said, “I’m not crazy. He is sitting downstairs waiting.”

The managing director had to repeat the whole thing, which obviously didn’t improve his mood. Just so we knew the lay of the land, he couldn’t give us any time to mull it over. At nine on the dot the next morning, there would be a meeting to arrive at a decision based on what he took away from here this evening.

Jörg exploded. With Georg he had been cool and methodical, but now he was out of control.

“Of course we can do this,” the man from Giessen cooed, and you could tell just how at ease he felt by the way he stretched out his legs and crossed his ankles. What did he, Jörg, expect? A couple of rooms, electricity, telephone — we knew how it’s done. If things had been done by standard operating procedure, it wouldn’t be us sitting in this palace here now anyway, but very different people — and the managing director pointed at himself. Even if one had allowed the locals a head start, that didn’t mean that one intended to leave things that way forever.

Jörg, who for some inexplicable reason was holding his beret in his hands and flailing it about, attempted a laugh. “And who’ll be doing the writing?”

That was up to us. At any rate they had enough pros—“young, ambitious, well-trained people”—who were just waiting for a chance to prove themselves. And there was no lack of local talent either. In response to a tiny ad in the Leipzig paper — the tininess dwindled to next to nothing between his thumb and forefinger — over thirty applications had been sent in, from which they had already invited seven people for a first interview. He didn’t expect any headaches there. And his young friends, who — and we should have no doubt of it — always spoke about us everywhere they went with the greatest respect and admiration, had long since been hard at work preparing the first issues. “They’ve already taken up residence.”

Jörg blinked and said nothing. While waiting to have a panic attack, I asked why they needed us at all. The managing director pouted his lips and hung his head.

He recognized what we had achieved, he began — whenever he starts to speak, his tongue separates from the roof of his mouth with a smack — he had great respect for young people who wanted to do something for themselves and society, who rolled up their sleeves and set to work with real commitment. We were the new force that people could and indeed must depend on, because although a lot could be done from the outside, not everything could. That was a head start he was happy to credit us with. He was the first to recognize our effort on behalf of democracy and a free-market economy. By the harsh light of day, however, we lacked professionalism — and where was that supposed to come from in a dictatorship. But we could learn it, step by step, he knew he could count on our good intentions. In short, it was a question of empathy and fairness. We ought to look at it this way: we would continue to write whatever came into our heads, and with the concentrated force of their experience and capital, of their connections and tricks — yes, he was speaking frankly here, tricks were part of business, haha — they would come to our assistance and do battle with the Leipziger Volkszeitung, that old Party rag. And with cooperation and real effort on all sides something truly new would arise as a symbol, yes, a model for the entire country.

With each new sentence he had grown taller in his chair and was now swinging a hairy fist like a prophet. “A model for the entire country!” he repeated.

On our own, he continued, we had no chance against the big concerns, who would show up here sooner or later. To that extent they, the Giesseners, were a regular stroke of luck for us, even if we couldn’t see it that way yet. And smiling blissfully, he added, “Once the big boys come riding in here, no one”—and here he stubbed a finger across the table—“will ask you anything!” Now his finger began to wag back and forth like a tardy metronome. “No one will ask you!” he repeated, leaning back as if exhausted by this last statement.

Maybe I remained as calm as I did because that was the only role left me, maybe too because I sensed something wasn’t right here. The managing director’s inability to find a plausible sitting position sufficed for me as the basis for initial suspicion. His gestures looked fake.

“And why,” I asked, “do you really need us?”

“Not bad, not bad,” he said with an especially loud smack. “Okay, fine, let’s show our cards.” He played something like leapfrog with his chair, which had got hung up on the carpet. “What I’ve told you is true, every bit of it. We’re coming, one way or the other. The crucial factor, however, is as always — time. Every week that we can get the jump on the LVZ with five pages on Altenburg brings us subscribers that we won’t get later, or at least at too high a price. We have to be quick.”

His hairy fingers played a tremolo on the tabletop. “Just put the two papers side by side, which would you automatically pick up? And what if state lines are redrawn and Altenburg is moved from Saxony to Thuringia? Which will happen, as sure as God made little green apples. Who’ll want his newspaper out of Leipzig, who cares about Saxony!”

“And where are you going to have it printed?” Jörg asked in a monotone.

“I was in Gera,” he said, his voice taking on an affable, shoptalk tone. “They’re equipped with photo offset, and they’re licking their fingers already at the business we could bring them. But only on our conditions. Otherwise we’ll just have it all flown in from Giessen. That means the paper won’t be here till seven. When does it get here now?” he asked. “At eleven, twelve, two?”

“And what about us?” I asked. “How much are we worth to you?”

“Enrico!” Jörg erupted, and fell silent.

A smile enlivened the managing director’s face, but one so treacherous that I didn’t even notice the Matchbox car until it was touching my hand.

“One of these for each of you at the front door here,” he said. I shoved the little BMW on toward Jörg, who waved it off with his hand as if shooing a fly. “And twenty thousand up front, in cash, within a week, D-marks, twenty thousand, ten apiece.”

He could pocket his shiny glass beads, Jörg said, and then stared at me. “This really is incredible, isn’t it? Utterly incredible.”

What I really wanted to do — candor demands candor — was to tell our guest from Giessen a fairy tale. About how the same arguments that he had presented so impressively had already induced us to look around for a strong partner, one with a presence throughout Thuringia and with a printing press in the region at his disposal. But Jörg’s outrage didn’t allow me any leeway to bluff.

A shift in the scenario was announced by someone banging on the front door, while in the same moment the vestibule door was flung open and the baron’s voice rang out in English, “Anybody home?”—a question that always sets him laughing, although no one else can figure out what is so funny.

The office door handle jiggled uselessly several times before the door slowly swung open. All that was visible of the baron were legs and boots, the rest was a box.

In a radiant mood, the baron cordially greeted the managing director and then was convulsed with laughter, because Käferchen, whom he had just met on the stairs, had locked the others out. Jörg ran downstairs.

I helped the baron carry the box into the next room. He asked if he could leave some things with us for a few days, until his office was ready.

The managing director had got to his feet, magically drawn by the icon on the box, an apple with a bite taken out. Meanwhile Jörg had come back upstairs, together with two men also laden with heavy freight.

The one, Andy, an American who spoke as good as no German, the other our lawyer, Bodo von Recklewitz-Münzner.

We have von Recklewitz to thank that we can now sleep peacefully in regard to the Pipping Window affair. Recklewitz’s face — with a pointy nose that juts out at an angle — actually does have something aristocratic about it. His smile resembles the baron’s — he likewise tugs up just the left half of his mouth. Andy, a tall, broad-shouldered, blue-eyed, reddish blond, laughs a lot, and loud. His eyes are constantly checking out the baron, who translates things for him now and then. “Wie geht’s?” Andy said, squeezing my hand and seeming to explore my eyes. The managing director said, “How do you do?” in English, and asked me in a low voice, “You’re retooling?” I nodded.

Jörg must have said something on the stairs, because, rubbing his hands, von Recklewitz stepped over to the managing director as if asking for the time of day, “So you’re planning to steal our daily bread?”

And Jörg, grateful for the opening to complain, tattle-taled, “Either with us or against us. That’s what you said, isn’t it?”

“It’s not all that simple,” the managing director noted in his defense, and pulled out a business card. While he recounted the history of our friendship, Andy and the baron were busy in the next room removing gadgets from their boxes.

“And what becomes of our investment?” Recklewitz barked, thrusting his nose in my direction. He was magnificent.¹⁸⁵

The baron asked us to join him. “This is the best,” he enthused, “there’s no better…Are you in the business?” And after he too had received one of the Giesseners’ cards, he exclaimed, “Then you’ll confirm as much, won’t you?” And the managing director immediately confirmed it. They themselves were considering installing a couple of Apples — it “probably made sense,” at least in a few departments. And gradually the managing director once again became the same eager visitor he had been in February when he had bent over our page proofs. He grabbed hold of the box as Andy slipped the screen out. He gathered up the Styrofoam, kept close watch on every cable connection, and eyed our plugs as worriedly as Andy did.

The baron had even remembered to bring extension cords and a junction box. Only Recklewitz wanted to move on; he was hungry. We trooped upstairs with him, where Kurt offered him something from his lunchbox. Recklewitz thanked him, but refused with some irritation. He had heard so much about the local mutz roast (he too pronounced it wrong) that he’d rather hold back for now. Kurt flipped the top slice of bread back, pointed to a thick layer of country liverwurst, and then took a bite himself.

If you should ever happen to meet Bodo von Recklewitz-Münzner, you’ll see that he lives up to his name. At first he’s all Herr von Recklewitz, hurling commands out across the moat surrounding his castle. Yes, you can see from his eyes and temples that it gives him a headache if someone takes a seat beside him instead of waiting at a distance of several yards to be waved closer. Once he has got used to withdrawing his gaze from the far horizon and has overcome the inner resistance that each new contact with the world provokes in him, Herr von Recklewitz gradually becomes — in every utterance, in every explanation and observation — more and more the obliging Herr Münzner, who is to be at our side with word and deed from here on out. We were to pay him six hundred marks a month and in return can engage his services at any time and in any cause — only travel expenses are extra. Such an arrangement has always worked well for him, he says, and even better for his clients. We should not, however, make the serious mistake of confusing the law with justice. His business is the law, seeing to it that the law is on our side.

And suddenly, once the contract had been signed, our old schoolchum Bodo was all left-sided smiles, and now he was going to join us for a good meal.

“And now downstairs fast as we can,” he cried, “they won’t be able to get out on their own.” Bodo von Recklewitz-Münzner expected fabulous things of our local cuisine.

I invited the managing director to join us. “Believe me,” he said, clasping my right hand in both of his, “if I didn’t have this meeting tomorrow morning, I would. Yes, I would, and I would invite you, all of you here, to dinner on me.”

We accompanied him to his car, a real BMW, the model of which I was carrying in my pants pocket as the corpus delicti. “Beautiful car,” I exclaimed as the managing director let the window down with a hum. He leaned back and stuck his head out as if checking to see if we were all still there. As he drove off he stretched his arm up over the roof and waved his tremolo hand, revealing, like yet another promise, a gold bracelet.

“The son of a bitch!” cried Jörg, who had lowered his arm even before Recklewitz had. “That son of a bitch!”

“Be glad,” the baron laughed, “you ended up with someone like that. And be proud. No sooner are you on the market than they’re courting you. What more do you want?”

“Sits there the whole time with a toy like that in his jacket, waiting to pounce. Damn him!” Jörg shouted.

The baron said nothing, as if first making sure Jörg had in fact spoken his piece, and then he said: “Rebuild the wall, but you better hurry!”

We should be grateful to this managing director, yes, truly grateful. He had uncovered our weaknesses. “Your strengths and weaknesses,” the baron added. He blamed himself for not having been harder on us in the past. Because as was now evident it was rather unlikely that we would be granted any more time to learn without pain. “If there even is such a thing — learning without pain.”

He asked Jörg to tell him one thing the managing director had said that was incorrect. We were going to have to change, change very rapidly, otherwise we didn’t have a chance. “And at the least,” he said, “rethink your page size and the quality of the printing. You need room for ads, and no one is going to pay you D-marks for such fuzzy photos.”

They were still arguing as we sat in the Ratskeller. The tone remained friendly, but implacable. “You don’t want to be a daily? Then you’re going to have to come up with a different concept.”

Each time I was about to jump in to help Jörg, he had already lost the argument. That was probably why Recklewitz kept jutting his nose at me. What did I think? he asked. I couldn’t come up with anything. And I was annoyed at Jörg for carrying on so childishly that they must have thought we had forgotten to read the rules of the game.

“Enrico!” Jörg cried. “Don’t let them knock the wind out of you like this!” And then Jörg rehearsed his sad account once more. Of course no one knows what will happen after July 1st,¹⁸⁶ of course the East isn’t the West, of course we sold close to a thousand more copies of our last issue, of course it all depends on us, on what we want and on our hard work, of course we’re not just any newspaper. Plus if Jörg’s people get elected, then we’re more likely than the others to get things directly from the horse’s mouth. But will that be enough?

After that no one could think of anything innocuous to break the silence. Fortunately the food arrived. We raised glasses and I no longer understood what was really supposed to be so terrible about the baron’s vision or what made Jörg just keep shaking his head. If Jörg continued to balk, the baron had said (leaving it up to us to decide how serious he was), he himself would start up a free paper financed by ads. You couldn’t leave money lying in the streets. Besides it would be fun, it was always fun to make money. And in this case if you went at it right, right from the start, it would be child’s play. Hadn’t the managing director said they did photo offset in Gera? Well then, bring on as many Giesseners as you wanted. But it would prove fatal for the Weekly. “If you don’t react now,” he said, aiming his deep-sea glasses at me, “you’re finished.”

“No,” Jörg said, he wasn’t going to fall into that trap. He wasn’t going to let us waste our energies. We were going to lay into the oars.

“Then row away,” exclaimed Recklewitz, who, because the mutz roast had run out, was busy dissecting an enormous ham hock and wanted to talk about more pleasant things, soccer for example, although he had to know the baron thinks sports are ridiculous.

This morning at nine on the dot Andy appeared in the office. He sat down at the computer and three minutes later handed me a finished ad: a full half page! In white on black, nothing more than, “Andy’s Coming!” He asked for a discount, which I of course gave him. I did better with my English than I had expected, but then I didn’t have a choice.

All the same I wasn’t sure if I now understood him correctly, although I was sure twenty meant zwanzig and twenty thousand was zwanzigtausend. I once again tapped the computer, screen, and printer: “Altogether twenty thousand?”

“Yeees,” Andy cried, kept on saying “yeees!” I asked if that might not be something for us too. “Yeees, absolutely.”

It’s all so easy. We spent seven and a half for the VW bus, fifteen hundred on the camera. Our assets include the fifteen hundred¹⁸⁷ from the ad for videos that the baron pulled in for us, plus a few other hundred D-marks in income, comes to thirteen thousand plus a few hundred. We need another six thousand and change in D-marks.

I’ve already written Steen and called Gera about setting up an appointment. We’re not going to go under that fast.

Your E.

PS: Michaela just told me that some woman tried to kill Lafontaine with a knife or dagger. Michaela thinks that will improve his and the Social Democrats’ chances with the voters.

Saturday, April 28, ’90

Dear Nicoletta,

My transfer into a company of new arrivals meant that, even though I was the youngest, I was promoted to the rank of room corporal,¹⁸⁸ who is assigned the best bed (bottom bunk, at the window) and newest locker, who gets his meals brought to him every morning and evening, and whose word has greater weight than that of a noncom.

The commissioned letters had more or less run their course. And I didn’t have much else to do. Now and then we rode cross-country in our APCs, which was a welcome change. I enjoyed the ride — but wouldn’t admit it to myself. Even setting up field camp and going on short maneuvers had ceased to be frightening, plus the summer of ’82 was extraordinarily warm.

When I wanted to write, I retreated to Nikolai’s painting studio,¹⁸⁹ where the same banners lay draped over laundry racks for weeks on end. Each morning Nikolai would give the pots of paint a quick stir with a brush and then retreat into his studio, a small room with windows that overlooked the drill field and that he had turned into an incredibly cozy spot. He even had a record player and a scruffy leather sofa. The few guys who were allowed inside mostly served as his models.

You’ll scarcely believe my naïveté,¹⁹⁰ but in fact I couldn’t figure out why all the guys who modeled for him were very boyish and often looked almost identical.

Inspired by Baudelaire’s prose poems, which Nikolai read to me from an Insel edition, I wrote one or two sketches every day. These idyllic hours were interrupted only by the 7th of October parade, rehearsals for which were an idiotic, stomach-turning grind. But that’s not a topic for here.

As winter once again approached — I was now a DC–I was afraid time might be running out.

There was a good chance that much of what I had assumed would happen as a matter of course and had intended to experience would never find a place on my agenda before the end of April. I had taken it for granted that sooner or later I would see the inside of the brig. I almost managed it once without its being any of my doing. When the radio in our room, for which I as corporal was responsible, was checked out by a battalion officer, the red tuning line didn’t vanish beneath one of the paper strips you had to glue on to mark East-bloc stations. They threatened me with three-day arrest, but that was the end of it. Everyone, even the officers, listened to New German Wave, and the FM reception on West Berlin’s RIAS, SFB, and AFN was top-notch.

I was working on a story about sentry duty, and urgently needed more observed details. When I learned that my company would be assigned double duty¹⁹¹ on the three days before Christmas, I did everything I could to be included. But as one of three drivers in their third six-month stint, there was little chance of that. My only help was to play Good Samaritan. In an act of hypocritical sacrifice I gave a heartbroken paterfamilias my leave pass and took over sentry duty for him. To keep the gratitude of the man, who was on the verge of tears, within limits I demanded several bottles of vodka in return, which he smuggled into the barracks at risk of life and limb.

Such intentionally arranged incidents are seldom worth the investment,¹⁹² but this time it appeared as if my hopes would be fulfilled. Just when I had been relieved of duty at the end of the snowy second night — Christmas Eve — the police patrol brought in a stinking, roaring drunk sailor. They were holding him by his arms and legs and swinging him back and forth like a sack. They had a lot to do yet, so they unloaded him in the guardhouse and went back out on the hunt.

The sailor lived in Oranienburg and had been nabbed at his front door. He could no longer stand on his own, and would choke now and then on his gurgled curses and insults. He finally managed to make it to his knees, but then lurched over on one side again and raised one arm. He wanted us to let him go. Even in his pleas you could hear some of the disdain that he as a sailor had for men in gray. He claimed he hadn’t been trying to get to his girl, but to his mother, he didn’t want to fuck, but just to be home for Christmas, even “grunts” ought to understand that. He fumbled at his watch, pulled it off — it was ours if we let him go.

As a noncom and I attempted to get him back on his feet, he readily assisted us in the belief that we would bring him to the gate, and went on praising his Glasshütter watch, which had never let him down.

We moved quickly to consign him to the brig and agreed with him that the MPs were mangy dogs and jack-offs. The footprints left in the snow by his street shoes looked downright ladylike in comparison to those of our boots. He looked up as if he had only now realized where we were taking him. I grabbed him tighter. Whether because of that or because he saw the corporal stripes on my shoulder strap¹⁹³ —he took his rage out on me. He gave me a kick, the tip of his shoe met my shin. As if out of reflex I struck back, his nose started to bleed. He had pulled free and whaled into me now, banging at me in a fury with bloody fists. I somehow got a grip on him, clinching him from behind. He booted and kicked, until I didn’t know what else to do but to pick him up and fling him into the snow. Help arrived from the guardhouse. On all fours now, the sailor spun around inside the circle of his tormentors searching for me.

Four of us got the better of him, wrenched his arms behind him, tugged his head back by the hair — after he started spitting — and shoved him forward. He went limp, which is why we had to drag him down the stairs to be booked. And so I had finally made it into one of those cells I had wanted to occupy myself. The next evening, Christmas night, I sat in Nikolai’s studio, drank mulled wine, ate stollen, and listened to the “Christmas Oratorio.” Nikolai gave me Malaparte’s The Skin, a well-thumbed Western pocketbook.

I was already living in the euphoric state of a returnee when we were sent on maneuvers in the middle of April, barely two weeks before my discharge on the 28th. We crossed the Elbe and burrowed our way into a pine forest.

The last night we were waiting for our orders to return to base, sleeping in our APCs. As soon as it got chilly inside, the driver turned on the motor. That was forbidden, but our officers evidently chose not to notice.

After the second or third time I fell asleep. A pain in my shoulder woke me up. Udo, a noncom, was literally kneeling on me in order to get at the crank that opened the louvers on the hood of the APC — the only way to cool the motor. The thermostat indicator was out of sight, well beyond the red zone. The motor was on the verge of locking at any moment. An incident like that could be punished as sabotage, and you ended in the military prison at Schwedt. Udo’s chin lingered above my shoulder, we stared at the thermostat. I could smell his sleepy breath and awaited my fate. Out of stupidity, off to Schwedt — that would be unbearable!

When the indicator began to move I felt Udo’s hand at the nape of my neck, he was squeezing with every ounce of his strength. Then he opened the hatch and climbed out. I waited until I could turn the motor off and followed him. I thought he was standing somewhere nearby, having a smoke. But I couldn’t find him. It was still dark and perfectly still when I started my walk. From one moment to the next there was nothing to remind me of an army. No sentries, no barbed wire, no spotlights, only soft earth and silence. The vehicles were as unreal as the trees, enchanted reptiles murmuring in their sleep.

The farther I went the more excited I was. I don’t know how long I walked. I stopped at the edge of a field, dropped my trousers, and squatted. What all I discharged from myself was simply stupendous. It seemed to me as if I were not simply emptying out what I had stuffed myself with over the past few days, but was also ridding myself of every oppression, fear, and torment I had ever had to swallow. With my naked butt hovering above the forest floor by the first light of dawn, I was the happiest, freest human being that I could imagine. I saw my sun rising with the dawn. It was all behind me, I was returning from hell, and the completion of my book was only a matter of time. These minutes were now the yardstick of my happiness.

That very evening I began to try to describe the experience. And despite all the later changes, all the material I threw out or rearranged, I was determined I would end my book with this unexpected moment of happiness and dawn.

Late in the afternoon of the day I was discharged, I walked away from the streetcar stop, black bag in hand, only to run directly into my mother. She set down her shopping bag of empty bottles and threw her arms around my neck and would not let go even after I begged her to.

Sunday, April 29, 1990

I had returned, but I had brought a problem home with me. Nikolai had invited me to spend a weekend with him in Saxon Switzerland. I had no idea how I would survive those two days with him.¹⁹⁴

When Nikolai came to pick me up — standing there in the stairwell of our building, leaning against the railing, in a white half-unbuttoned shirt, faded jeans, and sunglasses pushed up into his hair — I followed him like someone wading into the water although he knows he can’t swim. To describe my hours with him would be a story all its own. I felt guilty for having nourished his hopes. He wasn’t used to having to woo someone. As soon as he met with resistance, he turned domineering. That night we almost scuffled. We had spread out our sleeping bags on a projecting rock. The drop-off was only a few yards away. It was so dark I couldn’t even make out his face. I could guess its expression only from his voice. I could deal with his arrogance, his accusations, his mockery and scorn, yes, even his disdain. What appalled me, however, was his self-hatred. I covered my ears — that’s how unbearable what I had to listen to was. I couldn’t console him, either. That whole night I kept my eye on him. He didn’t fall asleep until it began to grow light. I didn’t have to do much packing. Yes, I simply ran away. I never saw Nikolai again.

For eighteen months I had longed to return. But where and what had I returned to? To a world that didn’t interest me, in which there was nothing for me, nothing worth writing about. In the army every well-used minute was an unexpected gift, every day of survival a victory.

Instead of bearing witness to having made it through hell, I felt as if I had been driven from paradise. My world was turned upside down. And one thing led to another.

Vera’s boyfriend at the time was a disgusting human being. Daniel, as I learned later, was also fleecing her financially.¹⁹⁵ I tried to figure out if he was a writer or painter or if he did anything at all. Ostensibly he was a home health attendant, but he never went to work and lived off (besides Vera) what Dutch or French renters paid him for his apartment in Berlin. Daniel found Dresden unbearably provincial. He wasn’t going to stay a minute longer once Vera’s Berlin embargo was lifted. Vera admired Daniel because he could throw around words like “rhizome” and “anti-Oedipal” and had books from the West that he lent to no one. When he spoke the name “Foucault” it was as if he held his breath for a moment to listen for the echo of his own fanfare. To Vera, however, Daniel was the measure of all things.

At the beginning I couldn’t resist him, either. The first time you met him his smile was like bait tossed your way. And by the second meeting you had the sense you had disappointed him, because the eyes behind his nickel-rimmed glasses were purely inner directed — today, I’d just call them dull. Everything I said about what I thought was good and right he would turn into its rhetorical opposite. If you offered any opposition, you were making yourself an accomplice of those in power, but if you attempted to lend support, that was a particularly perfidious way of trying to control someone. Inside half an hour Daniel would manage to brand me — in Vera’s presence — as a complete idiot. How was I supposed to write contemporary prose without having read Foucault, Deleuze, Lacan, Derrida, and all the rest of them? I didn’t need to waste my time on Adorno, and as for the whole Frankfurt school, I could just forget it.

As she brought me to the door, Vera tried to comfort me. Daniel wasn’t blaming me for being ignorant of his authors, it was just that I should read them before attempting to write.

The last straw was Vera’s promise to show me some texts about the army that one of her admirers had written and that she judged “not bad.” I was alarmed precisely because Vera didn’t take the guy seriously otherwise — she made fun of his jealousy and those puppy-dog eyes that followed her everywhere. And above all I was disconcerted because somebody was poaching in my reserve.¹⁹⁶

Once I got my own notes back from Geronimo, who had kept them in meticulous order, they bored me. The pounds of stuff I now crammed into my desk drawer were junk. Just as I had once collected seashells at the Baltic shore and then insisted I had to take every single one home with me — where after a few weeks, with my permission, they ended up in the trash — I might just as well have tied up the bundle and taken it to the ragman.

Of course my letters — well, they weren’t real letters, but notes and sketches — paraded almost every one of my 541 days in the barracks before my eyes. But to what purpose? Where were the stories I had hoped to be able to net from these pages the way fat carp are taken from the ponds of Moritzburg Castle each autumn? All my fervor seemed so childish, so vain and pointless, that there was nothing for it but to admit Daniel and Vera were right. It was my plunge into hell.

Suddenly I was just anybody. I felt abandoned, forsaken. If I couldn’t write, my life was worthless.

Geronimo, who was studying theology in Naumburg, was helping Franziska study for her finals and playing in a band. Together we had argued with some Christian Democrats at the Church Congress in Dresden and had called Councilor of the Consistory Stolpe a political wet blanket. But otherwise we didn’t have much to say to each other. I was jealous of him because of Franziska and because he was a welcome guest in that large hillside villa in Weisser Hirsch, where he drank tea with her parents on the terrace while he gazed out over the whole city.

To top it all off, I was told by the Army District Command¹⁹⁷ that I had been discharged as a noncommissioned officer in the reserves, an ignominy that was too late to protest and that I had no choice but to keep to myself.

My salvation was Aunt Camilla, who for the past two years had sent me one hundred D-marks at Christmas and another fifty D-marks at Easter, so that I suddenly had three hundred D-marks, to which my mother added what was left of her own gift; she also paid for my train ticket to Budapest and for two consignments of bed linens. I stayed ten days and lived like a prince.

If this were a biography, one long chapter would be titled “Katalin.” Katalin was the niece of Frau Nádori and was studying English and German in Szeged. She was preparing for her exams. Every morning we sat in Frau Nádori’s kitchen and smoked her cigarettes until Katalin was banished to the living room, where she had to study Heinz Mettke’s Middle High German grammar. Each afternoon we would meet somewhere at four o’clock. Katalin was engaged and held fast to that role. After an evening at the opera, however, she visited me in my room. I pulled my sleeping bag from the bed and laid it on the old hardwood floor, directly in front of a white armoire that Frau Nádori always claimed was “genuine rococo.” Katalin now opened this genuine rococo armoire and made up a bed for us from the linens hoarded in it. She just wanted to lie beside me, she said, slipped off her nightgown, and warmed my hands between her thighs. At some point we both fell briefly asleep, but when we awoke it was all quite simple and lovely and unforgettable.

I owe something else to those days in June — a book, one that I could just as easily have found in our own living room. But that copy was wrapped in such a dreadful jacket that I had never laid a hand on it.¹⁹⁸

In Budapest I received it from the hands of the same antiquarian book dealer who had wrapped several small blue volumes of Nietzsche in plain brown paper for me.

I read the first story while I was still in the shop — and suddenly knew what I wanted. Stories exactly like this, except for today — in the here and now — a new Red Cavalry. I had found a new god. “Isaac Babel,” the lady had whispered, staring at the ceiling and elegantly spiraling her small liver-spotted hand in tiny ascending circles. Vera and David might be right a hundred times over, I was right about Babel.

Katalin noticed that something extraordinary had happened to me. And I could sense that she liked how I spoke, how I couldn’t help reading her passages aloud, and how my enthusiasm was evidently blind to the fact that she wanted to kiss me, in broad daylight, even though the silvery head of her aunt might appear in the door at any moment.

Your Enrico T.

Tuesday, May 1, ’90

Dear Nicoletta,

At the end of August my existence as a full-time writer was salvaged. I was off to Jena to study.

I’m almost ashamed to follow such a precise chronology. But each entry would be impossible to understand without the previous one. I promise you, however, I’ll move on now more quickly.

Had it not been for my scribbling, for my wretched calling, I might have made a good student. But instead I was continually driven by the question: How far am I still from completing my army book so that I can publish it in the West at the magical age of twenty-five?

I won’t write about my studies as such, although they defined my days and I was even afraid I might be asked to leave the university. There were nine of us students, five archaeologists and four philologists. I told you that day that the only faculty for classical studies was in Jena, and students were accepted only every two years. Of course that leads to arrogance, although God knows there was no reason for it.

Do you still recall the peace marches and decisions to expand the arms race in 1983? There were demonstrations in Jena — illegal and official ones, sometimes both at the same time. The unofficial signs and banners were carried by workers — and quickly smashed by Stasi agents. I watched demonstrators hold up what was left of their signs, until they were either arrested or vanished into the forest of GDR flags being waved by schoolchildren.

Together with a few other students I joined the contingent of theologians, who weren’t attacked despite the fact that their slogans weren’t welcome either.

Presumably all I would have had to do was bend down and pick up the remains of a sign and that would have been the end of my university studies.

That I didn’t do it was not due solely to the promise of continued studies. I was also afraid. Not everyone survived his arrest.¹⁹⁹ Every Sunday morning a vehicle fully manned by uniformed personnel would park near Cosmonaut Square. Their lurking just around the corner had its effect on the mood of the town. Anyone entering Thomas Mann Bookstore or simply strolling across the square might be instantly transformed into a demonstrator or a Stasi catchpole.

The “personal conversations” I had known in high school (there were attempts at something similar even in the army) had their continuation at the university level. It was presumed that every male student would declare in writing that he was willing to become an officer in the reserves. After my initial refusal — my reasons for which were not all that easy to explain — I was invited to a conversation with the eminence grise of the faculty, Professor Samthoven (it was said that the “v” had once been an “f”),²⁰⁰ an archaeologist — a meticulously well-groomed man, if not a downright dandy. He was as proud of his thick, perfectly trimmed beard as he was of his little feet and slender, well-manicured hands. During seminars he smoked cigarillos (we were allowed to smoke as well) and used a riding crop as his pointer. He had the reputation of being a Casanova. At any rate he had no inhibitions about showing preference for the prettier female students, especially if they had long hair. Ever since I had outlined the pattern of a sonnet on the blackboard (he placed “utmost value” on general knowledge) and, as a novice, had had modest success describing early geometric vases, he overrated me far too much.

He asked me to take a seat and treated me almost paternally — made tea and shoved an ashtray my way. We had both crossed our legs and were now gazing down at very different-size shoes, both jiggling gently and almost touching toes. He stroked the corners of his mouth with thumb and middle finger, pressed his lips tight, and began to speak. It should come as no surprise that I had been invited to this conversation. But before those paid to do so talked with me — by that he didn’t mean Stasi agents, but colleagues who owed their positions only secondarily to any expert knowledge — he himself wanted to have the pleasure of chatting with me, simply to make certain that I had also thought the entire matter through before making my final decision. He poured me some tea.

Except for him, he noted, probably no one else here knew I was a noncommissioned officer…I was about to contradict him, to explain — he knew very well what I intended to say, but begged to be allowed to finish. He himself saw that there could be some small shame connected with being a noncom. But not perhaps in the way I might think, quite the contrary. All states, whether East or West, recruited their officers from the elite. That was the case everywhere, except with us. Poles, Russians, Czechs — they weren’t even asked.

It would sadden him to see me ruin my professional chances, my life, by such a refusal — particularly, and here I surely would agree with him, since I had come up with no cogent reason for it, nor in all probability would I — only to end up being psychologically humiliated by these people. “For why, my dear Herr Türmer, should a noncom be frightened of becoming a full-fledged officer? If you argue the issue on principle, then you will also have to recant the very oath you swore. Or am I overlooking some other possibility?” He raised the shallow white cup to his lips and sipped.

All that was demanded of us, he continued, was a profession of allegiance, a symbolic yes. He again put the cup to his lips and gazed out over the rim. “Georgian tea, brought it back from Tbilisi. You’ll be traveling there soon, I presume.”

He would be quite satisfied if I merely ran the matter over in my mind one more time. There was no need for us to discuss the imperfections of socialism as it existed in reality, our two standpoints were probably not as far apart as some might imagine. He, however, always asked himself one question: What other society had in so short a time managed to conquer hunger, whether in Russia or China or Cuba? As long as tens of thousands died daily of starvation and curable diseases one must put the question just that way. “What was Allende’s first decree? A half liter of milk for every child. Allende was a physician, he knew what needs to be done.”

Samthoven struck a match and took a drag on his cigarillo.

Ultimately — and this was the only reason for him to tell me this, for him to take this time from his schedule — it was a matter of providing our state with its elite. “Don’t be so stupid as to forfeit your education!” he exclaimed, holding up the fingers between which his cigarillo glowed. I shouldn’t let myself be trapped in the net of the very people who had done our country greater harm than the class enemy. If I understood that, then we were both on the same side. He couldn’t say more, nor did he wish to. Instead of continuing to play the hero I would do better to join the Party. “The necessary reforms can come only from within the Party. You’ll live to see it.”

He would personally smooth the way for me.

These last words were spoken with a certain testiness, as if it annoyed him to have to say such things at all. We sat there in silence for a while, our feet still jiggling. Then he extended his small dry hand and said his good-bye.

My lungs were burning from chain-smoking. I came to a halt in front of the Haeckel Phyletic Museum. I wanted to forget his odious offer, I needed some distraction, I needed fresh air.

As I walked past the post office in the direction of West Station, however, I soon turned off to the right to avoid rush-hour traffic. My path led me up the steep hill, and I walked aimlessly through streets lined with middle-class houses and villas with gardens. From the multipaneled window of a sandstone villa hung a red and white banner that read VIVAT POLSKA! There were several of these in town. It meant that this was the home of someone who had filled out his application — who wanted out, wanted to go to the West.

I kept on walking. It was windy, but not cold. I was sweating. At one point I thought I had lost my bearings.

What can I say. I was standing halfway up the slope and suddenly knew what my army book would look like. As if guided by a magic hand, the Vivat Polska! and the graffiti on the wall of Holy Cross School merged with my army experiences. And I had the vague suspicion that I somehow owed the intellectual thread binding them to Samthoven.

An hour and a half later I was sitting in a pub, the Hauser, answering questions posed by the clique of four who were in their third year of studies.

I mimicked the elegant way Samthoven crossed his legs, observed the back of my outstretched hand with that same blatant self-infatuation, stroked my imaginary beard, perched a saucer at my chin and sipped, splaying my pinkie, repeating his comments about Tbilisi, and then tried to imitate his rhetorical periods, which were so lengthy that you could have laid wagers on whether they would end with the right verb form. If it was possible to lay Samthoven bare, then I did it.

The clique boomed with laughter. I relished the way our table had become the center of attention in the dark room. Edith, the owner, a woman somewhere on the far side of fifty and dressed in a white smock, waved her hand at newcomers looking for a seat to wait at the door, as if they were disrupting a performance.

I have never been a finer entertainer than I was that evening. Samthoven’s invitation to join the Party was its crowning pirouette.

Samthoven might have thought that I had held my tongue out of courtesy, just as these people believed I knew what I wanted. At the end of my performance I had no choice but to respond with a yes to their presumption that I would stick to my refusal to be an officer in the reserves.

A little later Edith sat down at our table and asked for a cigarette. The last round of beer was on the house. The evening had reached its climax. Time for the final curtain.

On the way home it felt like I had a plump wallet in my breast pocket — it was my book, whose fulcrum or pivoting point was to be the slogan Vivat Polska! painted in white on a dark wall somewhere in the basement furnace room of the barracks. One soldier after another would be summoned. Both the interrogation itself and the interval during which each man waited for his own name to be called would give me the opportunity for character studies and descriptions of the brutality of everyday life in the barracks. Who had put it there? No sooner do they have a suspect than the graffiti appears on another wall: Vivat Polska!

Soon there’s a third one, a fourth, and now it’s ten — even in the snow on the drill field, the inscription: Vivat Polska! And all the while — and that was to be the linchpin of the whole story — it is the Stasi that started it all as a provocation, a way to interrogate people and lure them into denouncing each other. And now this vile trick has turned on them and is out of control.

I only had to start, I could already sense the ecstasy that would bring it all together.

Your Enrico T.

Saturday, May 5, ’90

Dear Nicoletta,

In retrospect the affair with Nadja is transparent. At the time I was amazed that a woman like her would throw herself into my arms. Nadja was Vera’s first great love. Early in ’81 her mother had married a gay Swiss man, and they all left the country that same May.

Vera recovered only very slowly. Even now we avoid mentioning Nadja. Nadja’s real name was Sabine, but because of Vera’s enthusiasm for Breton it wasn’t long before everyone was calling her Nadja.

During the few visits I was permitted back then, Vera had treated me and Nadja like children, called us whelps and quickly sent me on my way every time. All I knew about Nadja was that married specimens of my gender — the word “man” never passed Vera’s lips in those days — had camped out at her door, leading to occasional brawls over a sixteen-year-old girl.

At three o’clock in the afternoon on March 23, 1985, I again ran into Nadja on the landing below Vera’s apartment. At first I didn’t recognize her, because she was wearing a hat and sobbing. She was dressed as always. But her new dialect disconcerted me.

Vera had slammed the door in her face. But Nadja was stubborn and had been trying to talk with Vera. And then I showed up. As if I had fallen out of a clear blue sky, there I suddenly stood before her…I can’t tell you how often we told each other the story in the months that followed. She had known at once: He’s the one! I want him!

I had a date with Vera, but I couldn’t bring myself to leave Nadja just standing there. Nadja asked if I would accompany her on a walk to see her old school, and told me about how often she had tried to get back to Dresden. We then walked to Rosengarten and the Elbe, which we followed until we crossed the Blue Wonder Bridge — without Nadja’s flow of words stopping for a second or her uncoupling her arm from mine. It was already dusk as we made our way back across the Elbe meadows.

My role was reduced to that of the listener, while she talked about money, work, her university studies, and her apartment in Salzburg, where she had landed the year before. She liked Austria better than Switzerland. Nadja didn’t seem to me all that content with her life, but my question of why she hadn’t changed jobs or her major was answered with a curt toss of the head and an almost irate “Why should I?”

Perhaps our meeting would have ended with that, but the sunset and the silhouette of the old city toward which we were now walking lent our silence greater meaning.

Nadja knew a waiter in the café Secundo Genitur on the Brühlsche Terrace, so we had a table all to ourselves. Nadja asked if I was still writing. I told her about my army book, but said nothing about having to report for the army base in Seeligenstädt two days later. Even after discharge, every male student in the GDR had to serve an additional five weeks.

I brought Nadja to a streetcar stop — she was staying with a girlfriend in Dresden-Laubegast. We said our farewells, precisely because we both could rely on a nose for dramatic possibilities. After all, there weren’t that many afternoon trains to Munich.

Beneath the arch of the train station roof and against the dazzling sunlight streaming in from outside, Nadja was just a silhouette with hat. When she came running toward me in her dark brown tailored suit, threw her arms around my neck, and whispered, “I knew it, I just knew it,” I was certain I loved her. How else could I explain the humiliation that I felt in saying good-bye — the humiliation of not being able to board the train with her — and that brought tears to my eyes.

My mother greeted me with a scolding. I had missed my appointment with a neighbor lady to have my hair cut. She now took scissors in hand herself, shaved the back of my neck, and plopped my packed bag at my feet.

The train to Jena was overcrowded. Which was fine by me. I didn’t want to read, I didn’t want peace and quiet. All I wanted was already inside me. I finally had time to develop²⁰¹ the scenes with Nadja and discover new details.

When Nadja whispered in my ear, she had tugged at the lobe. I could feel her breath, the tips of her fingers on the nape of my neck, on my cheeks. I could feel the strength in her arm, I could feel her breasts, her lips.

The last thing Nadja heard from my lips was, “Have a good trip!” I felt my face burning for the shame of it. And Nadja? What had she said? We were holding hands, I ran alongside the train as it pulled away. The faster I ran the more rollicking her laughter, the farther she leaned out, until she pulled back in fright, as if the end of the platform were some unexpected stroke of fate. The fright was still reflected in her face until all I could see of her was her swirling hair. And finally, the moment came when I turned around and walked back along the empty platform.

I don’t recall if we were loaded onto trucks or transported by train from Jena to Seeligenstädt, nor who was in command and divided us into companies. All that emerges from the fog are the explosions of laughter that greeted each newcomer to a drunken bash that lasted till dawn — as if shorn heads were an original costume. I drank from every bottle offered me.

My memories first begin with a gesture, a motion of the right hand, that opens a belt buckle and grabs it by the last punch hole as it falls, while the left doffs the cap. I executed this gesture with so little thought it frightened me, as if someone were mimicking me.

This horde of buzz-cut, uniformed men bewildered me. All it took was a certain way of walking or a twitch of the mouth and I would find myself greeting someone I presumed I knew from Oranienburg. On day two I was certain it was Nikolai I saw walking directly toward me. By the time I realized my mistake I had already called out his name. Faces I was actually familiar with, however, were the ones I didn’t recognize. Anton, my friend and fellow student, stumbled around so blindly and apathetically under his helmet that it was days before we discovered each other.

The instant I had a few free minutes, I would stretch out on my bed as if it were the only spot where I could think of Nadja.

Within a few hours it was clear to me that I had been mistaken, that there was nothing for me here in Seeligenstädt. What was going on around me neither belonged in my army book nor needed to be shared in a letter. This studious submissiveness of men of above-average intelligence was abysmally shameful.²⁰² And I was one of them.

My group, students from Jena and Ilmenau who were sports majors, fired one another up as they ran the obstacle course and once we were off duty tried to teach me how to take the scaling wall in one assault. They liked to play room check, showed one another how to “do a package” (folding underwear), were jealous if other men were issued more blank ammo to waste, and for pedagogic purposes liked to step on the heels of the man ahead of them on the drill field. There was no sand thrown in the gears here, no drunkenness or disorderly conduct, no reporting late or grousing. In Seeligenstädt there was no longer any need for orders — one nod, and the pack of hounds heeled.

Seeligenstädt didn’t match my experiences in basic training — or those I had hoped to have here. The opposing fronts had disappeared.

I shriveled, something crumpled inside me. I kept my mouth shut during political instruction and was glad to hang my helmet from my belt during marching drills — a noncom privilege.

Nadja’s letters reached me two and a half weeks later by way of my mother. Nadja had also telephoned her.

When the alarm whistle sounded the next morning — a good many slept in their sports gear in order to appear punctually out in the hall — I just lay there and fell in only after someone ripped my blanket off.

Instead of joining the morning workout I slunk over to the regimental dentist, complained about pain under a filling — and was actually sent on to Ronneburg. The dentist there didn’t even make me wait, just stamped the referral and wished me a nice day. Suddenly school was canceled, and my gait was as light as if a cast had just been removed from my foot. I rummaged through a bookstore, lay in the grass beside an old cemetery wall, and enjoyed the perfect quiet. When the clock struck twelve, I went in search of a meal, drank some beer, and then took another sunbath.

It was almost three o’clock when I stepped into a phone booth and for the first time heard the ringtone of Nadja’s phone, a velvety deep hum that would become so familiar in the coming months. There was no answer.

Just short of five o’clock, before boarding the bus with a bundle of books under my arm, I tried a last time. Again with no success.

Caught up in the triumph of having managed a free day, I wrote my first letter. I printed AUSTRIA and SALZBURG on the envelope in capital letters, as if they were the slogan that would guarantee me immunity.

The next morning I fell in again. Thus far I had been able to avoid issuing orders, but this time I couldn’t get out of a “target objective.”²⁰³ I reported pails of unidentified grub in the advance units, heavy friendly fire from goulash cannons that fell short of their mark, and ordered retreat. I know, that’s pretty wretched too, but at the time I basked in the laughter it earned me. The lieutenant, a student from Ilmenau,²⁰⁴ ordered retreat and had me repeat my target objective.

My second, and third, attempts were greeted with laughter. But then they all, without exception, wanted me to give some real orders. The other groups were waiting to move out. Now they had me where they wanted me. The humiliation was worse than having to march past a reviewing stand on the 1st of May. That afternoon I found a pass on my bed.

I rounded up some change and by eight o’clock was camped out in a functioning telephone booth.

It was after ten before Nadja finally answered. I had assumed she knew of my whereabouts from my mother and could picture my circumstances during these weeks. But she seemed happy just to hear from me and rattled off the names of friends who wanted to meet me. She asked for a picture of me, and letters, lots of letters.

I had to explain to her where I was and what I was doing here, and the longer I spoke the more palpable her silence became, a silence that forced me to reveal more and more of my daily life. I was hoping the connection had gone bad, when Nadja snapped at me, “Why would you go to a camp like that?”

Instead of answering, I began to tell her about my target objectives and how I had put my group practically into stitches and had been working on some new scenarios…“Don’t make such a fool of yourself,” Nadja shouted.

In that moment I turned very calm. The battle was over, I had lost, all the rest no longer mattered to me.

“It’s not worth it,” I then heard Nadja say. She knew a lovely bed-and-breakfast in Prague — when would I be able to come, she longed so much to see me…

My army book had become my blind spot. I didn’t know when I would ever be able to work on it. At the end of a day’s duties I played chess — when I didn’t just lie on my bed. Since I usually lost, I was everyone’s favorite partner.

At the end of our five weeks, on the next-to-last day, we had political instruction one final time. I don’t remember the exact question or my answer either, which evoked no response whatever. The topic was probably the global arms race.

At the start of the last hour — there was to be a test — previous grades were announced. With a D — in the first seminar, my silence had been rewarded with a B — I was the worst in the class.

No sooner had the lieutenant, an introverted computer science student, announced the results than a “storm of indignation” burst, derisive laughter and lots of catcalls. Gorbachev had been in power for a few weeks.

During the pause I was summoned by an officer, a colonel, who taught plastics in civilian life, who knew me by my first name, used the familiar pronoun, and did everything he could to “appeal to my conscience.” I was told I shouldn’t ruin my career for the sake of a few stupid remarks. He called me naive, accused me of a “running-your-head-into-the-wall” attitude. I should make compromises and so on. I replied like some simpleton that I was merely expressing my opinion, just as was always expected of us.

“It isn’t worth it, Enrico,” he shouted, “it really isn’t.” Resignation now dragged his voice down to a low, trust-inspiring register. I let him talk and gazed at the thin smile of a Honecker portrait against a blue background. And from one moment to the next I no longer felt like a castaway, but was once again the captain of my ship, the only honest man still standing, who was not going to let himself be infected with this general depravity.

I answered the poor lieutenant’s question about where I had been — I was late getting back to the seminar room — with a smart-aleck “Where do you suppose?” which I regarded as a strong gambit.

Within the hour I might very well be dismissed from the university. This sad sack of a lieutenant, this tool of fate, didn’t know himself which end was up — at least the red splotches on his neck seemed to indicate as much — but was able, strangely enough, to hold to his guidelines. And so inside of a few minutes he would have me on his conscience for the rest of his life.

I let question after question go by without volunteering an answer. But while I lay in resolute ambush, something happened that you might call either touching or dreadful: my chess partner from several desks away passed along a note with the “right answer.” One after the other they stood up and answered; some were given two, even three tries.

When I finally raised my arm, all the other arms dropped. They were directing the poor lieutenant’s attention to me. But it wasn’t me who was called on, it was my neighbor.

Before I could raise my arm again, I heard my last name, and a drum-roll inside my head. I asked the poor lieutenant to repeat the question.

I answered hesitantly, as if struggling with myself, wrestling for the truth, this time I added the adjectives “stupid” and “inhuman.” I hope, I concluded, that I’ve expressed myself clearly this time. From both the silence in the room and the look on the lieutenant’s face I assumed that that was that.

Everyone had “passed” the test. The lieutenant announced this at the end of the hour almost casually and left the room without another word. They celebrated me as the victor, wildly clapping me on the shoulder and back. The fact that I stood there turned to stone was taken as baffled happiness. “I never believed,” the jock from the bunk below me confessed solemnly, taking me in from head to toe, “that you belonged to the firm.”²⁰⁵

On the evening of a day that began with a whistle to wake up and calisthenics, I found myself in Prague, a beautiful woman from Salzburg in my embrace.

I had spotted Nadja on the milk train as it pulled in (as I recall it was coming from Linz), and was standing directly in front of her as she set her foot on the platform. She pushed me away, dropped her plastic bags and suitcase, and threw her arms around my neck. As if playing peek-aboo, from over her shoulder I watched the other passengers detrain.

“Let me have a look at you,” Nadja exclaimed, as if she had finally thought of the right thing to say. She was wearing the same brown suit she had on when we had said our good-byes in Dresden. Suddenly she pressed her lips to mine, thrusting her tongue deep.

We took a taxi to the bed-and-breakfast, which was in Vinohrady, a neighborhood of villas. It was all a little dilapidated, but neither the rotting fence nor the rust-eaten garden gate with mailboxes dangling from its chicken wire could diminish the elegance of the house. Walking between tulip beds and fruit trees, their fragrance heavy in the air, we approached the front door, where Frau Zoubková awaited us. She was holding Dora — a bitch both black as hell and somehow weary of life — by her collar. Frau Zoubková’s felt slippers made it appear that she shuffled around in them all day just so she could polish the linoleum. Most of the time she moved along close to the wall, and would wait until one of her guests left the kitchen table and made a beeline for the door, only to follow after and erase the trail.

Frau Zoubková occupied the two top floors, living in two rooms adjoining the kitchen on the second, and renting out rooms on the third, each designated with a symbol on the door: sun, stars, moon.

Do I even need to mention that we were given the sun room? The high windows faced south, where we saw, if not the city itself, the suggestion of it just beyond white treetops. The splash of a fountain and the chirping of birds were the only sounds.

I didn’t even know the names of some of the fruit that we rinsed off late that evening — under Dora’s mournful gaze. More astonishing still: grapes at the end of April — sort of like Christmas cookies at Easter. Nadja liked such comparisons. She gave me a sample of each fruit, and I had to say what it tasted like and reminded me of. Meanwhile I watched Nadja’s hands redden under the cold water as they peeled and sliced and constantly shoved things into my mouth, until I couldn’t chew and speak at the same time, which set her laughing, and the more she laughed the more nimble her fingers became, the more lively the play of tendons on the backs of her hands…Suddenly I firmly grasped her forearm — not to make Nadja stop, but because it was all so unbelievably beautiful.

I licked the drops from the palm of her hand, let my tongue wander a second time, starting at the wrist and following her lifeline just to make sure I had found them all, and I thought the dry sweetness tasted like grapefruit. Scraps of fruit waved like little pennants from Nadja’s fingernails — green, red, white. She shoved fingertip after fingertip into my mouth, brushing them against my teeth. Like a blind woman, she groped across my face, up and down my nose, tracing my eyebrows and lips, while I opened her blouse and pushed up her T-shirt.

We froze when we heard the creak of the wooden stairs, listened — water was spilling onto the tile floor. The sink was running over! Nadja turned the tap off, plunged her hands into the water, scooped the peelings out of the drain, turned slowly around to me, raised her arms, and stretched, as if to show me her breasts. I was just about to kiss her when I felt drops falling on my head. Nadja was still holding the peels in her hands. Dora, the hound of hell, lapped water from the floor.

We went to work like half-naked strangers, tidying up, rinsing off, packing our things, then waited for each other outside the bathroom before climbing those endless wooden stairs up to our room.

I saw Nadja’s silhouette against the window. She still had her panties on. It sounded like a confession when she whispered in my ear that she was having her period and we couldn’t do it today…I didn’t understand why that should stand in the way, why one thing excluded the other, but was likewise — I must admit — relieved.

I learned soon enough how unnecessary my scruples were. Nadja had a gift for making me feel like the inventor of all these unfamiliar caresses.

Then, it was toward morning, there came a moment when I feared I had spoiled all our happiness. Nadja’s head had returned to my shoulder, and automatically I said “Thanks”—everything she had done seemed so incredible. But the instant I uttered it, I felt her stiffen, and I knew how wrong, how stupid I had been. Her face appeared above me, she propped her head on one hand, stared at me, smiled, and wanted to know what number she was for me. I hesitated. “Out with it,” she said. I raised my left hand and spread my thumb and forefinger.

Nadja said I couldn’t fool her. First she made fun of me, then suddenly accused me of not having waited for her. When I refused to tell her about Katalin, she even turned angry.

At breakfast Dora plopped down between our chairs. Frau Zoubková gave us knowing nods. If we had left any traces in the kitchen they were long since wiped away.

Like somnambulists Nadja and I found the city’s loveliest spots, took the train up to Petrin Hill, got out halfway up, walked through the spin-drift of blossoming cherry trees, and lay down in the grass.

Near the Moldau, just a few hundred yards from the Charles Bridge, we inadvertently stepped through the arch of a portal and found ourselves in an enchanted park, at the far end of which were wide stairs leading up to a terrace of brown sandstone, where a copper beech stood. I was about to touch its leaves — from a distance I had thought they were withered — when we heard something rustling behind us. We spun around and saw two peacocks, both fanning their tails simultaneously.

When I brought Nadja to her train, all that was left of her baggage was one suitcase, and we barely spoke. We crossed the train station without a word. On the platform where her train was due any moment, Nadja remarked that next time I would have to tell her about my manuscript, she wanted to know all about it, since after all it would be her job to smuggle it into the West. If there was one thing still lacking in my happiness, it was those very words.

Back in Jena, the first sentence I wrote to Nadja took on a tone that set me on my way without any larger concept, without my even really having to think about it. As I folded the pages I was already formulating the first lines of letter number two.

I wrote Nadja every day, on a typewriter now, and was amazed that my everyday life was not at all as unliterary as I had thought.

Once I had received her first reply — the pale blue envelopes came rolling in every four or five days — in which she labeled my letter “wonderful prose,” I began to lay carbon paper between my pages.

I had started too late to cram for a three-subject exam looming up ahead: the literature, art, and history of Rome, plus the languages, and tests on eighteenth-century German drama and political economics (or was it dialectical materialism?). That left me no time for Vivat Polska! not unless I interrupted the flow of my letters — and if I had put off telling Nadja about my daily life until later, the tone would have been ruined. And so the only work I did on my novel was to report to Nadja how well I was progressing on it. At regular intervals I noted the conclusion of a chapter.

That’s funny, don’t you think? You can see, can’t you, that, given everything you know about me, my behavior was totally untypical? Why, particularly at that time in my life, did I toss my manuscript in the corner? Yes, love, you’ll say, yes love was to blame. Yes, I did love Nadja. But even love has to fit in with all the rest somehow.

I no longer know which letter it was, but after only a few days I was already convinced that I was writing an epistolary novel. And it was powerful! If my letters found their way to Nadja — or so my calculation — the work would essentially write itself.²⁰⁶

I found myself once again in a situation much like the one in Oranienburg. Everything I saw and did became literary material. Without my intending it, each letter unfolded as a kind of narrative. I was surprised how widely disparate events suddenly wove themselves together as if they were part of some plan of composition. The moment I took the lid off my Rheinmetall, I drifted into storytelling. I barely had to make any corrections, because I was able to enhance my experiences without a second thought, almost automatically. If you know where the roulette ball is going to land, of course you bet on the right number.

I loved Nadja, I loved Jena, I loved my life, and everyone could see how love had changed me. Only Vera had nothing to say.

Nadja and I met in Prague, Brno, or Bratislava every two or three weeks, sometimes for only a few hours. We had invented a secret code for our telephone calls, only to get trapped in it ourselves. For our third meeting — in the middle of my exams — I waited in Bratislava for Nadja, who was spending the week in Vienna, where her mother had moved by that time. Her train was supposed to arrive shortly after mine. When notice was posted that it would be an hour late, I took a taxi, asked the driver to recommend a hotel, paid for the night in advance — the two hundred marks were equal to my entire monthly stipendium.²⁰⁷ When I returned to the station, the train was now announced as two hours late. That abbreviation for Vienna South Station, which stubbornly stayed posted even while all the other names of cities changed, became my curse that night. Ever since, I also know that nástupiště means “platform” and příjerdy vlaků is “arrival of trains.” I nursed a hopeless lust for revenge and worked up a nasty critique of the station’s murals — a commentary that I hoped would make me look brilliant in Nadja’s eyes — where Sputnik was skewering the dove of peace high above the heads of all peace-loving peoples. After two hours I felt nothing but an intense hatred and asked for nothing more than that the three sinister figures slinking away at the left side of the mural would turn around and empty their submachine guns on all those socialist faces gazing happily into the future, mow them all down, from the blond steelworker to the granny clad in black. After five hours I begged a cruel Olympus to have mercy on me on last. We had been robbed of five hours, a quarter of our time, a lost evening, half the night.

Finally, sometime after midnight, the train from Vienna pulled in, but without Nadja. There were still tears in my eyes as I begged the hotel for my money back. They took pity on me. I grabbed my bag and boarded the next train for Brno. Between two and three in the morning I searched the station there for Nadja. Alarmed by the notion that she might have been detained at the border but would arrive on the next train, I leapt on a train heading back to Bratislava. I was lucky no one checked my ticket. From Bratislava I called her mother, who, although I had roused her out of her sleep, said, “Ah, my boy,” in a deep voice and gave me the number of the Hotel Jakub in Brno.

The people at the Hotel Jakub knew all about our story. A waitress preceded us into the breakfast room and with the gesture of a magician who has just pulled off a trick, garnered loud applause for the happy ending of our crazy trip.²⁰⁸ Wasn’t that the stuff novels are made of? With the help of Nadja’s few schillings, we played the Western couple. Every waitress, every museum guard was drawn into our tale, made a confidant — we found our audience in every passerby, in every person who sat down at our table.

Once, it was in Prague, Nadja made me feel very unsure of myself.

I would have stepped on the yarmulke if Nadja hadn’t bent down for it in time. She fastened it to my hair with a hairpin — she kept such utensils stowed in her purse. I think Nadja was curious about what I’d look like in a yarmulke. And since we were only a few steps away from a synagogue that we intended to visit, I kept the skullcap on.

Back on the street, I forgot to remove it. After we’d taken a few steps — Nadja had linked arms with me — a man spoke to us. He asked where the synagogue was and stared at my yarmulke. I almost tipped it as if it were a hat.

Why had he addressed us in German, Nadja asked him. Her pronunciation was somewhat like Frau Zoubková’s, except it had a more cutting tone. Why had he thought we would understand German, or that we would prefer to speak it.

He nodded. With a will-o’-the-wisp look in his eyes and trembling lips, he searched for an apology. Nadja, still linked arm in arm with me, took a half-step forward and directed an open palm toward the synagogue. “Geradeaus!” she rasped. He gave another nod, smiled suddenly as if redeemed somehow, and exclaimed, “Shalom!”

Nadja pulled me on ahead. I was waiting for some reaction on her part, perhaps even a laugh. The longer she kept silent, the more uneasy I grew. When I looked at her, we both came to a halt. Nadja was a stranger, sad and proud; yes, almost haughty.

She didn’t want me to take off the yarmulke, said it looked good on me. The next day we were talking about her mother, and Nadja said there had also been Jews in her family. I don’t know if that’s true. The yarmulke is still lying here among our caps and scarves.

I had given scarcely a thought to my exams. I believed in my good luck and passed each one, if just barely. The panel obliged me by honoring my term papers.

The longest time that Nadja and I spent together was eight or nine days in August.

We had rented a room from a Slovakian woman in the Jizerské Mountains. A picture of John F. Kennedy in a silver frame hung in the stairwell.

Nadja was apparently determined to clarify our relationship. On our first hike up to the TV tower at Liberec, she asked me how I viewed our future. I said I wanted to finish my book (on which I hadn’t worked for months). Then, if that was truly her wish, I could apply for an exit visa. Those four syllables lasted forever. They crumbled in my mouth like a moldy piece of candy. Nadja asked whether that was truly what I wanted. Yes, I said. She said that she would marry me. I said that would be the simplest way.

We hiked through the dying forest,²⁰⁹ and it was too late before we realized we had been misled by a faded signpost, which had indicated the remaining distance to be nine instead of nineteen kilometers.

By the time we reached the restaurant at the TV tower, my throat was so dry it took me two attempts to order a pivo.²¹⁰

According to our landlady’s map a narrow-gauge train would take us back to the village, but no one in Liberec knew anything about a narrow-gauge train. We had no choice but to march over the ridge in the dusk. I’ll never forget those minutes on the barren summit. As darkness crept up the slopes, our path was illuminated as if on a stage by the light of the setting sun. The air was clear, the horizon infinitely distant in all directions. Our footsteps were the only sound. When Nadja suddenly hugged me, I could feel the hasty beat of her heart. We held each other tight and gazed out across the highlands, like emigrants about to wander into the landscape.

Then came three days of rain, and when the fourth day also dawned gloomy, we headed back to Dresden. Frau Krátká closed the front door behind us without a word.

In order for you to understand Nadja and me, there’s something I have to disclose, something that increasingly disturbed me. Although outwardly the perfect couple, we never really became one.

At first there was always the one reason: Nadja’s fear of getting pregnant, and she didn’t want to take the pill. Then I would forget condoms again, or we were simply too exhausted from our escapades. I won’t trouble you with any of what were for me unpleasant details. For a good while now, as soon as the door was shut behind us, we would be overcome with an inexplicable shyness.

For a long time we never mentioned Vera. I had not seen my sister since the day I turned around at Vera’s door to join Nadja. Which meant I could reply to Nadja’s questions with just a shrug. But Nadja would not let go. I became jealous of Vera. In addition, Nadja hinted that she had knowledge of matters that Vera and I had sworn to keep secret.²¹¹

I tried to develop clear plans for a future shared with Nadja. I would tough it out in Salzburg as a cabdriver, and write during whatever time was left me. As soon as my book was published, Nadja wouldn’t have to work anymore and could concentrate entirely on her studies. And on weekends we’d find things to do — hiking, strolling the town, or traveling to Munich, Vienna, or Italy.

I immersed myself in this new chapter and was aware of how, at the end of each of my monologues, my eyes glistened. Nadja said little, a silence all the more stubborn, the more suggestions I heaped before her.

I was afraid that she was as relieved as I when it finally came time to leave for the station. But no sooner had we boarded the streetcar than I was overcome with a great sadness and a terrible dread of losing Nadja. I told her that I would give anything to repeat the past few days, even if it meant not changing one single experience. She hugged me, and we held each other tight just as we had on the mountaintop.

Until then I had had no trouble returning to correspondence after one of our meetings — on the contrary. This time I was thrown into despair. I ripped page after page out of the typewriter and finally lay down on my bed with no idea of where to go from here. When I woke up I was certain that I had lost Nadja during the night.

From now on I merely tried to keep writing letters as long as I possibly could. Instead of looking forward to her replies, I feared them. I gave up phoning her almost entirely when, in response to my question of whether she had received my letters and what she had been doing of late, Nadja replied: Plugging away, just plugging away.

“What can I do?” I replied. I would do anything I could.

We were too short of money to be able to see each other. My bank-book showed zeros. I had used up Aunt Camilla’s D-mark subsidies, asking Vera for help was out of the question. Nadja didn’t have time to write letters. I accepted that, and in time everything else as well. When the semester started, I once again had loads and loads of material for letters.

During my last call to Salzburg, Nadja suddenly sounded the way she used to when just her whispering my name was like an unbelievably tender caress. “I love you,” I shouted into the phone. “I love you too,” she cried, and laughed. I invoked our love one more time and could hear Nadja sending me kisses over the phone. Then the call ended because I had run out of change.

My epistolary novel was going to end with that punch line — unless at some point I could come up with a better ending.

Love,

Your Enrico T.

Monday, May 7, ’90

Dear Jo!

I’ll say it just once: If you want to study the confusions and complications of provincial life, if you want work and a steady income, let’s talk.²¹² As a columnist, you’ll be paid two thousand a month after taxes — after July, two thousand D-marks — and we’ll also find a decent place for you (and your family?) to live. We’re going to need new people in any case. The only question is when we’ll make our decisions. We could start printing in Gera tomorrow. It would be a third cheaper, on better paper, with needle-sharp photos. We can vary size by fours²¹³ —we’d have no limit on the amount of advertising, and we wouldn’t have to break up pages already set or postpone articles. Next thing to paradise! If only we could master the computer. Andy wanted eighteen thousand for everything, including software. We’re to be his showcase and are to give him a couple of free ads. He’ll get his money for the pasting machine and layout tables in July. (Even though I think we’ll make it through July 1st quite well, I sometimes wonder what would have happened if we had exchanged our twenty thousand back then for East-marks, which very soon now could end up amounting to sixty or seventy thousand D-marks, maybe even more.)²¹⁴

The Leipziger Volkszeitung is a sad bunch. Nobody there even thought it necessary to show up at the Auerhahn on Sunday, even though all the bigwigs — except from the Party of Democratic Socialism, of course — gathered there to wait for results to come in.²¹⁵ They greeted us as kings, because they know that we know that the whole lot of them weren’t exactly the spearhead of the revolution. That’s one of Jörg’s favorite topics. At the end of December he nominated Karmeka, who’s our new mayor, to be chair of the opposition Round Table although he was still a nobody — and that marked the start of Karmeka’s rise. Jörg probably expects too much to come of contacts with his “pupil” (as he calls him a bit too often), but certainly the connection doesn’t work against us. It isn’t clear yet who the new district councilor (the title reminds you somehow of junkers and the kaiser, doesn’t it?), but he’ll likewise be a Christian Democrat. If we’re lucky, it’ll end up being one of Fred’s buddies. Even today, three days later, there’s still not one line about it in the LVZ. We have Karmeka headlined on the front page, with interview and photo. And the Altenburgers will learn the rest of what’s going on from us first too. No wonder people like the managing director think they’ll have an easy time of it here.

On Sunday I had a long talk with Marion and Jörg. I told them about Barrista’s city maps, bonus gifts for new subscribers, and his “acquisitions brigade.” As for a computer, he literally had to carry one up to our office himself.

After two hours I had Marion to the point where she at least agreed to contract Barrista as a consultant. I had suggested a thousand a month, and that would have been a ludicrously low fee as it is. But the five hundred they agreed to is really little more than an embarrassing gesture.

When we made our offer, he thanked us, but appeared more surprised than pleased. What was it we expected of him? Jörg wanted to run his own ideas past him, Marion talked about organizing the workload, and I said that he should help us choose and train our sales reps — and have a look at our books, because none of us here understands the first thing about accounting.

The baron listened to us for a while, then stood up quite suddenly, and stepped behind his chair, as if it were a lectern. “Would I be correct in stating,” he said, his voice languid, his eyelids heavy, “that you have evidently not yet answered, indeed not even asked the fundamental question that needs to be resolved at the start of every business endeavor.” Barrista tensed his body and took a deep breath. “Do you or don’t you want to get rich?” He looked from one to the other and then added, “I admire anyone who decides he does not. That deserves my greatest respect. I merely need to know the terrain we’ve chosen to meet upon.” He interrupted me brusquely when I burst into laughter.

“It’s a more serious matter than you think. Take your time. Don’t choose too hastily! It implies far far more than you may perhaps expect.” When Barrista gets excited, you can hear his accent. He sat down again and promised that, whatever our decision, we could count on his good counsel, he merely wanted to know what course we planned for our ship. Then he aimed his glasses at me. I saw the trace of a smile at the left corner of his mouth. “And you aren’t going to contradict me?” he asked. “Why don’t you refute me with my own example? It’s a weird thing about exceptions…” He was evidently alluding to our first meeting, when he had lectured me about exceptions. “One can and should make them, one must, however, know that they are exceptions. I allow myself but two — His Highness and you! But I would advise you for now not to make any exceptions, they are for advanced students at best, and even then I’d be very, very careful.”

Marion and Jörg didn’t understand him at all. In their eyes the baron is an eccentric businessman trying to comfort himself for the loss of his idyllic family. I, however, have discovered in him a logician and philosopher. We, in turn, are for him a stroke of good luck, a kind of tabula rasa when compared to his own mind full of self-evidencies.

Everyone now has to tell him the function of his or her job, be it in sales, ad acquisition, accounting, the structure of actual newspaper production, etc. Sometimes we don’t even understand his questions. What does original printing price mean? How many deals have we struck? How high is our discount for direct bank transferals? What’s our discount percentage for write-offs? etc. When he looks from one of us to the other in that sad, helpless way, we know we’ve been throwing money away again.

It’s easy to regard him as a ridiculous character — which Michaela and her theater dunderheads evidently love to do.

The longer I think it over, the more difficult it is for me to answer his questions — questions I would have never thought to ask and would have impatiently dismissed as childish. What arouses my enthusiasm most, however, is that he would support us with the same attentiveness, the same expenditure of energy, and the same dedication were we to answer each of them with a no. In that case, too, he would pose the same Socratic questions and prepare more diagrams, just with different coordinates.

Of course we can see how sales are slumping and ad income is rising, and it’s no secret that either we’ll have to expand the amount of space or raise our rates or — at the risk of going under — come up with some new idea. But all that assumes a different power of persuasion when you’re looking at two curves: income from sales and from ads, lines that from week to week keep moving — or better, actually striving — closer and closer until you think you can predict where and when they’ll cross. Adding the two curves together, on the other hand, gives you the relationship to printing and salary costs. And suddenly we’re talking totally differently about how we can ensure our survival. In the weeks ahead we’re going to have to increase our profits, because we need a buffer to get through the period after July 1st. What functioned well before may just be spinning wheels afterward. And at least ever since the baron’s diagram, we know that our negotiations with the printer will decide our future existence. But the worst thing is that afterward you ask yourself how you could have ever seen it any other way.

Ah, Jo, forgive me. All this is going to bore you something awful. And my new knowledge isn’t exactly a fount of originality. If only you could experience Barrista! In his presence even the most serious matters seem easy — it’s all so playful, literally playful.

We had him at our place again last Monday (after he had been invited to Jörg and Marion’s several times and even joined them on a weekend excursion to Saale — which, to be honest, annoyed me a bit). He doesn’t enjoy living in a “hotel-room crypt” and eating nothing but restaurant food. If it were up to Robert and me, he’d be sitting with us at our table much more often.

Each time he visits, his flowers turn our living room into a hothouse. Even withered, the jungle bouquet attracted attention when Michaela threw it in the trash.

In contrast, Michaela was detached if not to say impassive as she took in the baron’s report about how his real estate business was progressing. She remained remarkably unruffled when she learned that she would be earning considerably more than the amount guaranteed her, and had not one appreciative word for the baron’s achievements.

Robert was grouchy because he wanted us to play Monopoly with him, which, true to character, his good father (and yes, there is such a person again) had sent him as a gift. The baron assured him that he would love to play, but please not Monopoly — that was the dullest game there is, and leads only to confusion. If a single day of his life as a businessman were as stupid and boring as Monopoly, he would look for another job right away. Robert’s pouting lower lip would have moved a heart of stone. But, the baron went on, he would love to play something else. Evidently Robert’s request suited his purposes. At one point he had let slip a few hints about his cultic research, as he called it. (In May ’45 the only Altenburg reliquary, containing the hand of St. Boniface, had vanished, presumably into the baggage of an American soldier when his army withdrew from town.) Barrista doesn’t believe his activities are ripe for sharing. Although he squanders half his time on the matter.²¹⁶

His reaction was truly euphoric when Robert held out a boxed game of roulette. “Where do you get something like this?” And was what was inside really what the box claimed it was? The contents amused him. “Sweet flannel,” he giggled as he unrolled the plastic layout with its boxes and fields, smoothing it several times. “Sweet velvet!” The jetons sent him into raptures, the little bowl with its numbered wheel turned him into a downright buffoon. “For Lilliputians!”

In the blink of an eye he had calculated the total value of the jetons and determined how many of each sort there were. Michaela cleared the table, but didn’t even have time to change tablecloths. The baron had already arranged everything; while he distributed the jetons, he urged Michaela to finally sit down with us, all the while switching back and forth between French and German. “Come on, play, do sit down, it’s your turn!” he cried, and began by placing a ten on the right row and the first dozen — hardly a gutsy beginning, I thought. I risked twice as much on three wagers: on red, odds, and the zero. Michaela strewed half her jetons across the numbered fields, Robert placed a hundred on black. It wasn’t until the baron stretched out his arm and described an oval with the palm of his hand above the field, while whispering, “Rien ne va plus,” that we realized the ball was whirling. A moment later it took a few bounces back and forth, and the baron announced the results in French, then added (what we all could see), “Fifteen, black.” He slid the croupier’s rake across the wrinkled plastic playing field — Michaela and the baron had lost everything. Robert was given another hundred; I got a twenty, but had lost forty. Barrista smiled and doubled his bet. By the second round I was already bored, the same state I thought I could observe as well in the generous way Michaela scattered the rest of her jetons. Robert risked another hundred, this time on red; my bet was the same as before, except this time instead of the zero, I slid a twenty next to Robert’s hundred. The baron repeated the same conjuring motion with his arm, the ball jangled — eleven, red. One of the baron’s fingers touched the eleven, restoring Michaela’s capital to its original state.

But it wasn’t long before Michaela was the first to have lost everything, which had evidently been her intention. With a run of incredible good luck, Robert followed every spin of the ball. After each loss the baron doubled his bet, risking forty, eighty, a hundred sixty — and finally won. His perseverance had paid off.

And yet joyful enthusiasm had turned into crabbed intensity. He engaged in no conversation, answered no questions, just stared at the layout, and hastily tossed the ball. He was like a machine. Whereas Robert was the real player and hero. He lost as much as he won, but he still had his winnings left from the first round. I raised my bets because I was tried of the endless, dreary up and down — and was the next one to go bankrupt. The baron kept on doubling his bet until he won. I had never before seen him so inattentive, yes almost impolite. It didn’t so much as occur to him that only we men were sitting there and Michaela was washing dishes in the kitchen.

He didn’t emerge from under the ice until he leaned back, presented his jetons, and said, “I’m getting out now.” “You did notice, didn’t you?” he asked, finally reanimated, and then added with childlike pride, “Toward the end it was all wins for me.”

“Unlucky in love, lucky at cards,” I said. The baron gave me such a piercing look that I was on the verge of apologizing for my tactlessness.

“No,” he said with a smile. “Probability. Maximal probability. Chance is only a question of the framework, the marked-off field, and, of course, of time. The more money you have, however, the less chance can make a mess of things. Just as in real life.”

He knew every gambling den between Wiesbaden and Las Vegas. It was only superficially a question of winning and losing or of whether you were a hopeless gambler or an upright fellow. It involved more, much more than that, maybe everything. He had learned what it means to hand yourself over root and branch to fate and wait to see if it touched you. Instead of an apple Eve should have offered her husband a handful of jetons.

I admitted that I hadn’t found our game all that charged with fate.

I shouldn’t make myself look ridiculous, he said — this here was less than child’s play, this was nothing, nothing at all — what had I expected? I was baffled, indeed frightened by the vehemence with which he thrust his hand under the plastic layout and flung it from him. It flopped to the center of the table, fell back, and ended up dangling from the edge of the table in front of him. A few jetons fell to the floor, which put him into a rage. He grabbed the plastic again between thumb and forefinger and held it up in disgust as if it were the filthy handkerchief of a foe.

That wasn’t meant as a reproach, he said, already in a gentler mood, as we emerged from under the table with the jetons we’d garnered. But for him this game was something almost sacred, a ritual, yes, yes, a cleansing and sacrificial ritual — he meant that in earnest. He repeated it verbatim again to Michaela, who had returned to the room because, as she later said, she assumed there was an argument.

What I needed was to experience the real game sometime, he remarked with studied casualness. And when he said “real” he meant just that, a weekend in Monte Carlo, what did I think of that, he’d take care of all the details. “Agreed?”

“Monte Carlo is not as far away as you think,” he said. Along with other lovely lessons I could learn there, there would be the concomitant and pleasant effect of an improvement in my financial status, because since it was my first time, and especially if I followed his instructions—“there are always rules and regulations”—I would be certain, absolutely certain, to win! We ought to consider sometime why it was that casinos set betting limits. That was the key to understanding. That was worth thinking about.

The baron hinted at something like this weeks ago, but I had just taken it for small talk. Apparently with him there is no such thing as small talk.

Hugs from your Enrico

PS: Just one question: Although he fully understands our situation, Anton Larschen refuses to wait any longer in regard to his memoirs and is behaving like an ornery brat. Jörg and I have read them, and want to publish them, but it requires lots of work by an editor. May I send you the manuscript? You’ll be paid, of course, can sign off as editor, and a preface and afterword would be very welcome too.

Tuesday, May 8, ’90

Dear Nicoletta,

It isn’t just the spring weather that is making it hard for me to continue my report and tell you about December — at the end of November Nadja and I had separated for good.

Upon returning to Jena I felt paralyzed and lonely rather than relieved. I had heard scarcely anything from Vera since March, the number of letters that Johann and I had exchanged during the year could be counted on one hand. I hadn’t even really congratulated him on the birth of his daughter Gesine.

On Monday I overslept, missing my Latin translation seminar, tried to no avail to prepare for my Greek class that evening — when I looked up a word, I’d already forgotten it by the time my eyes returned to the text — didn’t wake until noon on Tuesday, and barely made it to the bathroom and back. At least it occurred to me to report in sick.

Our language teacher, a gifted translator of Horace,²¹⁷ let me know that — signed medical excuse or no — he didn’t believe me. The indifference with which even Samthoven had been treating me for several weeks attested to my being hardly so much as a mediocre student now.

My weariness grew from day to day. The one thing I could manage each morning was to open one of the little doors on the Advent calendar my mother had sent me — a ritual that we maintain to this day.

At the start of Christmas break I took the train to Dresden and crawled into bed. When my mother was at home I hardly left her side.

We were expecting Vera for early-afternoon dinner on the 24th. To my surprise my mother set the table for four.

Roland was at least ten years older than Vera and a good two inches shorter. His delicate nose didn’t match his thick lips. The skin on his head glistened under his sparse black hair. He wore peculiar glasses, square and rimless, and spoke a pleasant dialect that I took for southern Thuringian. It was striking how interested he was in everything, even the label on the bottle of soda. As he listened he would nod and keep repeating, “Okay, okay, okay,” as if every sentence required his approval.

When Roland mentioned his comrades in “Torino,” where he had spent Christmas the previous year, several things became clear to me. All the same I asked how he had made it to Turin. “In my car,” he replied, and went on chewing contentedly. I said that I’d likewise love to have a car that you could drive all the way to Turin — Salzburg would do for me.

Roland was unimpressed, and lectured me instead on how people here have far too many illusions about the West. Travel wasn’t all it was cracked up to be — and anyway you needed money for it; and after two or three weeks, the drudgery started all over again. And so on and so forth.

“But after all, a person has to see the Mediterranean!” Ah, Nicoletta, if only I had known those words back then. I stood up and went to my room. But picturing how the story of Nadja would now be bandied about, I regretted my departure.

A little later there was a knock on my door. I let Roland in. He held out his pack of Revals. Standing side by side, we smoked the Western cigarettes at the open window. I don’t know if he took only deep drags or started to say something several times, but before he could get a word out, Vera appeared, ran her hand through my hair, and pulled him away. The cigarettes tasted awful.

That evening Roland was given more than his share of gifts. He himself hadn’t bothered, at least not for Mother and me. Vera was wearing a pantsuit that he had brought back for her, and she thrust her chin forward for us to smell the perfume on her neck. Then Aunt Camilla’s parcel was set on the table. Vera and I began at once to search for currency. As if by agreement and with a fervor worse than that of the worst customs agents, together we ripped wrapping paper from cans of pineapple and packages of coffee, tore off gold stars and ribbons, and paid no attention to what fell to the floor. When Roland turned away from us in disgust, I went at it with special gusto. I discovered the first hundred-D-mark bill in the packet of Fa soap, the second under the plastic tray in the Sprengel praline box. The third remained unaccounted for until Mother found it among the tattered wrapping paper.

The next day — granted, he did drive Mother to work at half past five in the morning — Roland made himself at home. He ran around in his underwear, smoked, ransacked the pantry, finished off the whole bowl of potato salad — standing — drank the Murfatlar²¹⁸ straight from the bottle, and never stopped scratching his hairy chest.

A decal with a white dove of peace against a blue background adorned the rear windshield of his Renault, and he and Vera used it for jaunts to Meissen, Moritzburg, and Pillnitz, and to the theater, too, along with Roland’s comrades, who were staying at Vera’s.

She and I hardly spoke. Roland was her revenge for Nadja.²¹⁹ From my mother I learned that the two of them had already decided to get married. At the dinner table I asked them where they would be living. “What a stupid question!” Vera said. Roland, however, admitted that he would prefer to settle in the East. But a move like that would be like stabbing his comrades in the back.

Roland talked constantly about the ban against leftists in the civil service, he had once been threatened with it himself. He asked me if I could give him something to read, something I had written, of course, or read it aloud, then and there, that same evening. He also asked if there was a “red-light district” in Dresden. I knew the term “infrared treatment” as a synonym for GDR propaganda and other expressions like “red cloister” for particularly hard-nosed schools, Red assholes, and a few others. I thought Roland meant some kind of governmental area.²²⁰

Mother dubbed Roland a fine man, because his outspokenness would cause him trouble everywhere, with both sides. I, however, found him tiring and pretentious. I regarded his presence as the reason for my chronic exhaustion.

New Year’s Eve was dreadful, the trip back was dismal.

I had locked the Nadja letters in a drawer. Vivat Polska! had become a stranger to me. If I was going to continue it, I would have to do what I had thus far avoided, that is, read what I had already written.

No, it wasn’t a debacle, not even a disappointment. Of course I saw how unfinished, how in need of correction the manuscript was — with no regrets I excised whole paragraphs and pages. A few details, moreover, some of the descriptions and metaphors seemed to me so close to perfect I was afraid I had pilfered them from Babel or Mailer.

All the same, on that Sunday afternoon — cold, sunny, no snow — I was overcome with a doubt that stained everything, made it all unpalatable. I no longer believed me!

Hadn’t I once considered taking the blame for the “Karl and Rosa Live!” graffiti? Why then shouldn’t one of my characters come up with the idea of claiming Vivat Polska! as his own work? There were plenty of reasons to. And what, beg your pardon, was really so bad about the inscription itself? Couldn’t anyone with some notion of the story of good soldier Schweik twist the meaning around enough to take the air out of the cheeks of Stasi interrogation specialists?

You can see, Nicoletta, that I’ve once again arrived at just such a point.²²¹ It’s like when an adult talks about the worries and fears of a child. Because you’re probably asking why I didn’t rejoice in these new ideas and use them. That’s precisely what would have done the whole project good and actually and finally made it interesting.

And yet, even if my own sense of life was not all that tragic, literature at least had to be. And that meant suffering. The greater the suffering, the better the literature. Don’t laugh! I didn’t know any better. Our role, the East’s role, was one either of suffering and resistance or of going along, tertium non datur. My heroic epic was tilting toward farce; and in the next instant it had become impossible.

My suspicion was that my own falsely led life had ruined my writing. Why didn’t I have the strength simply to brush my doodlings from the desk and set to work instead on Kaegi’s grammar?²²² Why didn’t I bring this to a fitting end? Because I didn’t have the strength to live without writing, without the illusion of a calling?

Since I wasn’t going to change myself, I would have to wait for the world to change.

I looked for some way out and, logically enough, I found it: I had to go further back, back to the time before my Fall, when suffering had still been suffering and God still God.

So, of course you’ve already guessed what comes next. Almost immediately I saw before me in seductive clarity a novella about a student who is on the verge of being broken by the system of the GDR. In fact all I had to do was write about what I had experienced, and make sure I gave it an appropriate ending, some surprising twist, something different from what had happened to me, a finale presentable to a wider public.

In my mind the tone of voice hovered somewhere between Young Törless and Tonio Kröger. The plot was quickly sketched out. Suddenly I felt free and adventuresome, as if now that my work was as certain as certain can be — its completion looked to be a matter of weeks — I could participate in other people’s lives as well.

Dear Nicoletta, it’s three in the morning. I’m waking up earlier and earlier. Yesterday, on the way to the office, I thought about what I should describe to you next. Suddenly there was Anton before my eyes. And in the next moment it was clear to me that Anton and his meeting with Johann ought to be part of the letter I had with me ready to drop in the mail.²²³

Of course it wouldn’t contribute much to our cause and would add confusion to my narrative if I were to report about every encounter and acquaintanceship that had some significance for me in one way or another. And yet Anton deserves a few lines, so that the picture you have of my life isn’t a frozen, one-sided view.

I don’t know whether I can call years of living alongside Anton a friendship or not. Our daily proximity to one another did, however, create an almost intimate familiarity that now and then counterbalanced all the partialities and secrets that Anton shared with others. Our seminar clique was always called “Anton’s bunch.” He was the only man I knew who placed exceptional importance on clothing and hairstyles and could talk about fashion for hours. David Bowie — whose music he considered merely average — was his idol. And from a distance at least Anton actually looked like him. On those special occasions when students were expected to wear their Free German Youth shirt, Anton would appear in a black suit, white shirt, and black tie, so that at first a good many professors thought he had just returned from a funeral and left him alone. When Anton burst into laughter, tossing back his blond locks and revealing gaps behind his eyeteeth, he always reminded me of a whinnying horse.

Anton was a man to be envied. He had a very beautiful and warm-hearted wife and a little boy. All the same Anton fell in love with a new woman every couple of weeks. He spent almost all his evenings at the Rose, the student club.

I found Anton’s seminar work and translations disappointing. It’s no exaggeration to say that I never heard Anton express an original thought. He reacted to criticism with defiance and even tears, and despite his stubborn resistance to wearing a blue shirt, he folded immediately when pressed to become an officer in the reserves.

Anton had never dreamed of applying for an exit visa. He was perfectly aware that his appearance and choice of majors wouldn’t be nearly as unusual as they were in the East.

When Johann visited me in Jena after Nadja and I had split up — we hadn’t spoken with one another for an eternity — suddenly there was Anton standing at my door, wanting to pick up the letter from his latest sweetheart, which had been sent to my address. Anton paid no attention to either me or Johann, ripped open the envelope, withdrew to a corner, read, whinnying loudly a couple of times, and immediately set to work on his reply. Johann made fun of Anton’s behavior, whereas I had long since grown used to it. All of a sudden Anton asked if he could read us something, but first finished the last few lines of his letter, then sat there pondering for a moment while we waited for his presentation.

Anton read in a monotone, occasionally repeating a sentence, only to correct it on the spot. Anton’s story was about the Good Lord, about how God created man.

After a few sentences Johann and I listened spellbound. What amazed me was not so much the plot as the turns of phrase and details. I recall that there was an angel who comes floating past God singing, “Thou who seest all things…” But God in fact doesn’t see everything. Finally God puts his hands to work all on their own, so that he doesn’t have to take his eyes off the earth. And like children playing hide-and-seek he keeps asking his hands, “Ready yet?” He wants to be surprised. Suddenly something from very nearby plummets to the earth, God fears the worst. And now his hands appear before him, muddied with clay but without any sign of mankind. After a thunderstorm God sends his hands away, “Do as you will, I know you no longer!” And yet without God there is no completion, which is why his hands become discontented and weary and finally kneel down and do penance the whole day long. Which is why it seems to us that God is still resting and that the seventh day still goes on and on.

Johann wiggled his toes in his woolen socks and sought out my eyes. I looked up at Anton like a teacher gazing at his prize pupil and tried to hide my bafflement as best I could.

“A stroke of genius!” Johann exclaimed.

The real shock, however, was that, after asking for an envelope and stamps, Anton now folded up the pages as if he attached no real importance to their preservation.²²⁴

I said we needed to celebrate his accomplishment — and invited Anton to share our dinner. At first I didn’t mind fading into the background. I was the host and my job was to take care of the two of them, who quickly took a liking to each other. What did annoy me was the way they accepted my waiting on them as a matter of course. While Anton ran through his repertoire of views and Johann, inasmuch as he was still under the sway of the story, was prepared to consider them or at least not dismiss them outright (Anton was a great fan of Klaus Mann and Erich Kästner), they began to eat and drink while I was still running back and forth like a waiter between the kitchen and the front room. A glance, a smile — and I would have been placated. Anton had moved on to his preferences in music, and Johann was trying to figure out what sort of music King Crimson played. They didn’t even notice when I raised my wineglass — theirs were already empty again.

After the meal, when Anton got up to go and Johann asked what his plans were, Anton invited him to come along to the Rose. They didn’t return until way after midnight, slept half the next day, and sat around in the kitchen after having first raided my fridge. It was Anton who accompanied Johann to the train station.²²⁵

On Monday Anton told me he thought we had both known Rilke’s “Tales of the Good Lord.” It had been a little unfair of me to saddle him the whole time with my visitor. Did I want to take a walk with him by way of reimbursement? I received a letter from Johann in which he expressed his regrets that we had had so little time for each other over the weekend.

A couple of days later Vera wrote to tell me she had applied for an exit visa and had separated from Roland.

Enough, then, of my confusions for this round,

Your Enrico T.