New Lives

Wednesday, May 9, ’90

Dear Jo,

What should we have done, in your opinion? Where else could we have got that many desks and chairs from one day to the next? And it was Helping Hand that got our obolus. Should it all have been demolished and burned? In Jörg’s eyes they’re trophies. During the occupation of Stasi headquarters,²²⁶ Michaela pilfered a silver Matchbox-size APC to prove she’d actually been “inside.”

Yesterday morning Ilona greeted me with sobs. Where had I been? She was close to pummeling me with her fists. She had wanted to come and get me, but she couldn’t leave the office unstaffed — and that’s what she had told Herr von Barrista too. He had called and hauled her over the coals three times.

It was a beautiful morning, warm and with lots of birds chirping away. I had bought breakfast rolls on Market Square. I asked Ilona to make us a pot of coffee, sat down at the telephone, and mulled over what it was Barrista might want.

The day before yesterday we were in Giessen. The publisher of the newspaper, who’s not much older than I, received Jörg and me as warmly as you could imagine. We assumed it was a bluff, since not one word was said about the reason for our visit. When Jörg openly addressed the issue and repeated the managing director’s threats, the publisher let loose with a peal of laughter. He knew nothing about that. He was so sorry, yes, really, it wasn’t his fault, or at most only to the extent that he had asked the managing director to extend an invitation for us to meet with him sometime, that was all — perhaps the fellow had thought that was the only way to rouse us to a visit. He couldn’t make any sense of it otherwise. All he had wanted was to learn a little about Altenburg firsthand. After that he gave us a tour of the whole enterprise and invited us to a little festive lunch in a Chinese restaurant, at the end of which he asked the waiter for the receipt.²²⁷

When Ilona, still stony with fright, arrived with the coffee, I put some life back into her face by telling her about the baron’s proposal for a trip to Monte Carlo. It wasn’t until Ilona pointed to the telephone and reproachfully exclaimed, “And you ain’t got nothin’ to say about that, huh?” that I noticed the silence. And it wasn’t just the telephone. There weren’t any visitors either. I picked up the receiver and heard the dial tone.

Ilona watered plants, I sharpened pencils. When she sat back down with her hands in her lap and stared at her shoes, I told her she needed to find something to do.

She said she’d been here till ten the night before trying to get caught up, she couldn’t get anything done during the day. “This is spooky,” she cried, and started crying again. “Really spooky!” And then Ilona, who is constantly and for no good reason the victim of exaggerated fears, asked, “You don’t suppose something’s happened — an atom bomb?”

I sent her to the market so she could convince herself this was not the case. After she left, I sat there alone, waiting; I would have been happy for any call, any visitor.

When the phone finally rang, I flinched. I answered and right away I knew from the baron’s “Well, how’s it going?” that the world was in shipshape order. “Guess what I’ve got for you?” I would have loved to have shouted, “It doesn’t matter what you’ve got for us!” and wasn’t the least surprised when the door opened and Jörg and Marion entered.

“We got it!” the baron said in triumph, and for a moment I enjoyed my own ignorance. “Sixty thousand, Türmer! For sixty thousand.” I still didn’t understand. “The shopkeeper downstairs almost had it in his pocket. Your building.”

“You’re a — genius!” I cried. I almost said “genie”—but decided to change the second syllable. “A genius!” I repeated, just to show him that I knew it was a word that ended in an s. Ever since we moved in here we’ve been trying to figure out how to become a publishing house with all the bells and whistles. And suddenly it’s all within our reach!

While we were in Giessen, Piatkowski — who was reelected, by the way, although he had been far down on his party’s list — had telephoned the baron. The baron had immediately paid him a call “with a little bouquet” for Madame Piatkowski. It turned out, however, that only one fifth belonged to her; her older brother, however, had two fifths, and the two other sisters the rest. He had hoped to take care of the whole thing by telephone, but in order to have any chance whatever, he had had to travel all the way to a village just south of Bonn, where the rest of the clan was already assembled.

He was almost too slow in realizing that it was less a matter of the brother than of his wife, and of the youngest sister’s husband, who both had instantly whiffed big money. Whereupon he had made it clear to them that the shopkeeper wouldn’t be able to get a D-mark loan in a hundred years — they’d have a long wait. And then he had played the “time card,” as he called it, and claimed he needed their agreement then and there, otherwise his clients would have to follow through on another option. They had dispersed around ten that night. Shortly after midnight he had forced Recklewitz — still in his pajamas and robe, he lives somewhere nearby over yonder — to draw up the necessary contracts. He himself had had trouble so early in the morning freeing up liquid assets even for just the small change he needed to have for a stuffed briefcase all set to present to the family.

The baron was very apologetic for not having had me at his side. The three siblings plus spouses had been so befuddled after one glance into the briefcase that they had assented on the spot. Of course he lacked our consent, but had felt there was no real risk there, since even in the worst case, he could easily resell it anywhere for sixty thousand. Since they more or less already had the money in their hands, he was not at all worried that they might spit the bait back out. The appointment with the notary was for three that afternoon. And as if all that were not enough, the baron had booked a half-page ad for our future issues, no termination date specified. A friend of his will be opening a travel agency in Altenburg shortly and, what’s more, she’ll be showing people what real publicity should look like…

The baron succeeds at everything! There was no response whatever to his article about the woman whose head had been shorn in public in 1941. But the baron had been able to discover the descendants of the hapless hairdresser who at the time had considered it an honor to do the deed. These descendants own a beauty salon right next to the Rathaus. And? Do you see where I’m going with this? And now the baron does indeed have his shop on Market Square. And Andy’s lease takes effect on June 1st.

After our noon meal I was about to go through the received mail file with Ilona, but was puzzled by her strange gestures when I asked her about what had come in so far. In the corner behind me stood Frau Schorba from Lucka. Like some oratorio soloist, she was clad in a dark dress that fell straight down from her bosom to just above the tips of her shoes. At first Frau Schorba didn’t budge, as if trying to maintain her stelalike appearance. She then followed me mutely down the hall, where I now set a chair beside my desk, sliding it as close to the wall as possible.²²⁸ We said nothing, as if we didn’t know what to talk about outside of our usual ritual. Her face, which has always been something of a mask, now suddenly betrayed her agitation, her every thought. “Nice of you to stop by,” I said, trying to relieve the tension trapped within her silence from getting the upper hand. Frau Schorba didn’t look up. I waited.

“Can you take me? Can you give me a job? Please! And don’t ask why.” She grasped my hands. “You must never, never ask me why. You must promise me that.”

Frau Schorba’s hands were ice cold. She had edged to the front of her chair and was bent so far forward that I was afraid that in the next moment she would sink to her knees. I asked her to sit back up.

“You must!” she whispered, still presenting me the shaved nape of her neck. “You must! Please, please!”

It wasn’t until I warned her that someone might come in at any moment that she straightened up and pulled a handkerchief from her sleeve. Shortly thereafter Jörg stepped in, letter in hand.

I introduced Frau Schorba and asked her to wait in the reception room. Both Jörg and I found the purchase of our building quickly helped console us in regard to Steen’s letter, in which he informed us that due to internal restructuring of his firm he would unfortunately not have any time free to meet with us over the next few weeks. This also meant, he wrote, that we would not be able to depend on an extension of his ad.

I told Jörg what I knew about Frau Schorba and asked him if he could include her in the host of job applicants — since we’ll truly be in urgent need of reinforcements.

Then I accompanied Frau Schorba downstairs. When I asked what sort of salary she had in mind, she gave a few joyful shrugs. She would take whatever we could offer her.

Hugs, Your E.

PS: You, of course, would receive the same salary I do.

Thursday, May 10, ’90

Dear Nicoletta,

I always picture you reading my letters standing — standing or walking. No sooner have you fished the latest dispatch from your mailbox than you clutch your purse and newspaper under your arm, open the envelope with your car key, unfold both pages, and start to read without giving a thought to anything else. You don’t even notice how your feet carry you up the stairs, from one step to the next, how you open your door, set down your purse and newspaper, or simply let them fall to the floor. It’s not all that important which lines bring a smile or a frown to your face. The only important thing is your undivided attention. It’s only on the second reading that you make yourself comfortable on the couch or in an armchair. As for anyone who might be watching you read — wouldn’t he envy the writer of that letter and wish he were in his shoes?

It is dreams like these that are to blame for my continued efforts.

In the middle of June ’87, barely a year and a half after Vera filed her application for an exit visa, I received a telegram. “Leaving today. Neustadt Station,” followed by departure time and as usual, “Greetings, Vera.”

The telegram arrived around eleven. I normally would have left my place by ten at the latest. And since it was Tuesday I would have been in the library, except that when I got up the tap didn’t work, no matter how I played with it. A note in the building entryway promised running water by ten thirty. I had lain down again and didn’t wake up until the pipes began to spit and grumble, flooding the sink with a jet of rusty brown water. And if, as I was leaving the building, I hadn’t seen the messenger — who was scanning the doorbell register with his glasses pushed back up on his forehead — and asked him who he was looking for…yes, a miracle that I got the telegram in time.

It was one of my few train trips without something to read or work on. Although I stared out the window the whole time, I never even took notice of the valleys of the Saale or the Weinböhla.

I walked from Neustadt Station to Vera’s apartment. The windows were closed, no one answered the door. I left a note and took a streetcar to my mother’s place. No one there either. Finally, an hour later, they arrived together.

Vera had spent the whole day running from office to office; for the first time in her life Mother had called in sick and now dragged in two suitcases full of new shoes, underwear, and bed linens. She couldn’t understand why Vera wanted to leave with just a little traveling bag. And if it hadn’t been for photographs and my father’s handkerchief collection, she wouldn’t even have needed that.

“What am I supposed to do with all this?” my mother cried, dogging Vera’s footsteps until she locked herself in the bathroom and we all three stood around shouting. Mother was the first to start sobbing.

As I write to you about all this, it seems to me as if this were the first time I’ve ever recalled those hours.²²⁹

Vera moved through each room one last time, opening every drawer, as if she wanted to print it all on her memory. She’d really prefer to go to the station by herself, she said. Shaking her head, she watched Mother butter one sandwich after the other, as if we were going on a family outing. We walked to the streetcar stop together.

Mother had bought a pack of Duetts and was chain-smoking. We rode to the Platz der Einheit. Vera and I had taken a few steps in the direction of Neutstadt Station, when Mother called her back. “Vera! I can’t do it!” Mother was still standing in the same spot where we had got off the streetcar. Vera ran back, set down her bag, and I watched as — for the first time, or so it seemed to me — she hugged my mother. I could also see my mother caressing Vera’s cheeks. Then I noticed people turning around to look at them.

Vera said nothing, cast a glance into her compact mirror, and linked her arm in mine. I took her travel bag. Someone might have thought she was bringing me to the train.

Neither outside the entrance nor inside the station did I notice anything unusual. It was a few days before the start of school vacation, and there were long lines at the ticket booths. We slowly climbed the stairs. I was afraid that some of Vera’s girlfriends — and boyfriends — would arrive and we wouldn’t be alone.

We walked along the platform. People were standing shoulder to shoulder in little groups. Bottles of wine and bubbly were being passed around. Almost every group had children, each with a backpack and some stuffed animal to clutch. To me it looked as if all these white-splattered jeans outfits had reassembled at their point of origin.

Under an open sky, at the end of the platform now, Vera unpacked her sandwiches.

“The Stasi asked about you,” she said, without looking at me.²³⁰ I exclaimed much too loudly, “What?” Yes, I think I crowed that “What?” like a fourteen-year-old whose voice is cracking.

“That’s how it is,” she said, “if someone’s a little more interesting than the rest.” She used her thumb to lift the top of a sandwich and remarked that even after thirty years, it still hadn’t registered with Mother that she didn’t like blood sausage.

“Those idiots,” I said.

“Why idiots?” Vera asked, tossing a pigeon some bread.

“What else would you call them,” I said. Vera smiled — and fed pigeons, as if that had been the point of our coming here. The blood sausage hung like a tongue from between the slices of bread and finally landed at her feet.

“Maybe they are idiots,” Vera said, “but they do exist and nothing is going to change that soon.”

The train pulled in with no announcement on the loudspeakers. While the others stormed their cars, Vera distributed the rest of the bread. “But it’s possible to talk with these idiots,” she said. “Do you have anything else to say in that regard?”

I felt a need to sit down or, better yet, lie down. I almost said, “That’s for you to decide.” Instead of asking Vera the reason for her comments, I said nothing, which was perhaps the worst thing to do. I stared at the black platform and at the pigeons battling for bread as they hopped over each other, beating their wings. From the corner of my eye I could see Vera successfully unsnap her purse with her pinkie and pull out a brown-and-white-checked handkerchief, one of the perfectly ironed huge ones that had belonged to our father and always smelled of the drawer they were kept in. She calmly wiped her hands. Appetites whetted by the bread, the pigeons waddled around pecking at anything, even cigarette butts.

Suddenly Vera was holding the yellow imitation-leather silverware pouch that I had had to make in shop class, my gift to her at her Youth Consecration ceremony. “Here,” she said, “this is what’s left of my fortune.” The pouch was stuffed with currency.

Vera had halted in front of a car door. She kissed me first on the cheek, then on the lips. I handed her her traveling bag, and she climbed aboard — she was the last, I think.

The people in the aisle pressed against the windows to let her by. I accompanied Vera from window to window. I saw Vera light a cigarette right below the NO SMOKING sign. She held up the pack, Mother’s Duetts. Then the doors closed, which unleashed a new battle for places at the windows.

Whenever our eyes met, Vera smiled.

Without any announcement or whistle, the train suddenly lurched and began to pull out. The outcry along the platform was deafening. Anyone who could reached for a hand extended from a window. Even Vera allowed herself to be caught up in the hysteria. I saw her hand in the upper corner of the window, as if she wanted to give me the last half of her cigarette. She pressed her lips tight and shook her head, until I could see her no more.

Far too many people ran after the train in order to hold the hand they were grasping for a few more seconds. As idiotic as I found it all, what a grand spectacle it was when all those hands let go simultaneously.

From the end of the platform a wave of faces reddened from crying washed toward me. One woman threw her arms around my neck and was then tugged away. The last car thundered past, and in the next second each of us was all by himself — low voices, just an occasional sob. We left the platform one by one, as if observing some previous agreement.

I walked along the Elbe, following the shore upriver as far as the Blue Wonder Bridge, and headed up the slope, all the way to the grand villa with its circular flower beds.

Franziska opened the door as if she were expecting me. Her greeting was as warm, even fervent, as I used to dream it would be. From the cellar I could hear the music of Johann’s band, just a couple of bars that kept breaking off at the same spot. “All they ever do is argue,” Franziska said. I said nothing yet, because I could hear singing now. I understood hardly anything, and the singer — it wasn’t Johann’s voice — soon fell silent again as well. How I suddenly detested this riffraff, these church mice who never took a risk. What difference did it make what faith you sanctimoniously pretended to believe, or where you pretended it? Would Johann have been permitted to study theology if he had admitted he was an unbeliever? My revulsion surprised even me. Instead of bidding her an immediate good-bye, I followed her upstairs. The light went out on the landing of the stairs leading to their attic apartment. Franziska came back down to grope for the switch, or so I thought. By the glow of the streetlamp I could still see Franziska shove her glasses up into her hair, felt her press against me — and we kissed.

We barely budged the whole time, but the hardwood floor under our feet creaked now and then. Of course I had noticed Franziska had had a little to drink. But it wasn’t clear to me that she was completely drunk until she suddenly slumped and I was unable to keep her from slipping to the floor. I tried to sit her down on a step, and she almost fell off. Franziska held me tight. “It’s true, isn’t it,” she whispered, “you do love me, don’t you?” I said I did.²³¹

The light went on, Johann was saying good-bye to his buddies.

I soundlessly freed myself partway from Franziska and pulled her glasses back down on her nose. But neither my presence nor Franziska’s condition seemed to surprise Johann.

“He loves me,” Franziska said, “he loves me!” But since she was glancing back and forth, now at Johann, now at me, it wasn’t clear whom she meant.

I waited in the kitchen while Johann attempted to put Franziska to bed. When he reappeared in the kitchen, all he wanted was a bucket, into which he ran some water, and then vanished back to her bedroom.

“She’ll be all right,” he said later, after he had drunk a glass of tap water and sat down beside me. He looked bone tired.

“I just brought Vera to the train,” I said. “She sends her good wishes.” I don’t know why I invented that. But Johann was happy to hear it.

In sequence I told him about the telegram, my trip home, about my mother and her suitcases and how she had called Vera back to her. I regretted that Franziska wasn’t at the table with us, since, or so it seemed to me, it was a great story. I had just got to the part about the pigeons when Johann leapt up and took off for the bedroom. As if in some film take, I watched him go and saw how the kitchen door swung farther and farther ajar.

And suddenly it happened — a feeling, a yearning, a certainty: I want out! I want to go to the West!

Maybe it was only my admission of a wish long latent within me. I sat there and enjoyed the clarity that comes with being governed by one single emotion. Yes, I too now loved the West with my whole heart — a love that flooded over me and coursed through me and that embraced Vera and all those people sitting on that train with her.

When Johann returned, we quickly said our good-byes — it was well after midnight. I ran the whole way to Klotzsche.

I was too exhausted to deal with considerations that would have led me any further. I wanted nothing more than to carry home with me this one decision, whose perfection would relieve me²³² of every uncertainty.²³³

Your Enrico T.

Monte Carlo, Sunday, May 14,²³⁴ ’90

Dear Jo,

I’m sitting on the balcony of our room in the Hôtel de Paris, wrapped in a white bathrobe, gazing out at the casino and a swatch of sea to the left and right. I’m sick as a dog. My exhaustion is like a crying jag, but no sooner do I close my eyes than I’m dizzy. Writing is a good distraction. Vera hardly slept, despite earplugs. She’s out strolling through the hotel now and, if she manages to strike up a casual acquaintance, will probably end up in the pool. Vera is far more suited to this life. She’ll not be returning to Beirut all that soon. The latest bloodbath, although it took place on the “other side,” was the straw that broke the camel’s back.²³⁵

I’ve been asking myself the whole time why Barrista took the risk, why he pressed five thousand D-marks into my hand, paid for the flight and a hotel room, and in return demanded only that I not leave the roulette table until I had either lost my stake or doubled it. I’m gradually beginning to figure out what he had in mind.

Just taking off all by myself, boarding the flight alone, was something new for me. The flight, the Alps, the Mediterranean, Nice, palm trees, then Vera — as if I had landed in a Belmondo movie, as if the West still existed! Vera looks the same as always. She had flown via Damascus and Athens to Paris on Thursday, but arrived here just before me. She can fit what few things she has into two suitcases.

Barrista had recommended we take the helicopter. Like blasé secret agents we ducked under the earsplitting rotors, the doors were closed behind us, and we lifted off a moment later. Is there any better metaphor for our new life than being hauled up into the air? We flew out over the water; the sailboats below were like a herd of wild beasts. Suddenly Monaco in the noonday sun. The sublime view, however, was visible only over a buzz-cut conk.²³⁶ Once we landed, Barrista’s Hôtel de Paris was a magic charm that was rewarded with respect. While the buzzed head climbed into a taxi, someone opened for us the doors of a vehicle that Vera claims was a Bentley.

Palm trees, yachts, blue sky — just as I had imagined it. Following the route of the Grand Prix, we floated up to the hotel. The carpet in the entrance lent my gait a feathery spring. All the same I felt like a tourist at a castle. Vera, on the other hand, passed out currency in all directions as if it were an old habit of hers.

I gave our names to an elderly gentleman who stood up to greet us with a smile and was immediately certain that there would be no reservation for us.

“Bienvenue, Madame Türmer, bienvenue, Monsieur Türmer”—and like a bride and groom we sank into armchairs opposite him. Mirrors set in the wainscoting and patricianly dimmed by time reflected only our faces.

John, yes, his name was John, recommended we reserve a table for the Grill that evening. We agreed, without any notion of what we were getting into. I passed on Barrista’s good wishes—“Makes no difference who you run into there, they all know me”—whereupon John spread his arms and bowed, as if only now had he recognized us. The crown at the top of this page of stationery is warranted if solely on the basis of his demeanor and tone of voice. John accompanied us to the “belle chamber” and explained how the telephone and remote control, light switches and refrigerator function. He was outraged by a full ashtray left on the balcony.

I couldn’t find it in my heart to dispose of a gentleman like John with a tip — though Vera assures me that was a mistake. She had not only given away all her francs, she didn’t have any cash whatever left.

After our luggage arrived — I hadn’t touched it since Nice — we went across to the Café de Paris for “lunch,” as Barrista would call it. Just that hour and a half on the café’s terrace would have made the trip worth it. But I have more important things to write about.

Before falling onto our king-size bed for a siesta, we bought me a bow tie and a pair of sunglasses.

When I woke up it was twenty till eight. I instantly panicked. The very idea of risking all that Western money seemed ludicrous. I didn’t calm down until I was under the shower. I put on fresh clothes as if suiting up in armor. These were the socks I would wear, and these the under-shorts. Every button I buttoned became a token of security. Except that the top button wouldn’t close.

That bit of bare skin called everything else into question. It’s more than likely that I don’t own a single shirt whose collar button I can button.

While Vera got herself ready in the bathroom, I put on my bow tie — and behold, a miracle! Le nœud papillon hid the blemish, was my seal of approval, so to speak.

An hour later I was confident I had discovered why I was here. This wasn’t about the casino, this was a totally different game. Here, in the Grill, on the ninth floor, vis-à-vis the castle of the Grimaldis — this was where we had to pull it off, to hold our own.

Doesn’t it require courage to pass in review before a phalanx of waiters, each repeating with the most cordial of smiles, “Bonsoir, madame. Bonsoir, monsieur.” Doesn’t it take bravery to fall blindly back onto a chair without reaching for it, in utter trust of a waiter’s dexterity? And what is valor if not a tranquil smile when confronted by such a menu? Although I admit I did warn Vera, whose menu contained no prices, about the Iranian caviar. At that point I couldn’t have brought myself to order an appetizer that cost over a thousand francs. On the other hand I repressed my thirst for beer and demanded the wine list. While I searched for a red wine under four hundred francs, Vera discovered that the footstool between us at the corner of the table was an ideal spot for her purse.

Our curiosity annoyed the waiters’ hypersensitive organs of perception. Just a fleeting glance or a careless gesture brought them bounding over, to no purpose of course, since our glasses were appropriately full, the ashtrays empty, both raisin and olive bread in plentiful supply, and they had only just now crumbed the tablecloth.

Isn’t there some form of meditation by which you cleanse your soul with a sequence of the most exquisite dishes? Rich people live healthy lives, Vera says.

At this point I thought that I might pull a fast one on the baron and be able to cheat him. Because the eighteen hundred francs that I gladly placed on the silver tray could not be taken away from us, either by him or the casino.

How naive of me! As if there were any emotion, any thought that was not included in the baron’s calculations. The more abundant, the more contradictory my own responses might be, the more successful his lessons proved to be. Presumably if Barrista had this letter in hand, he would first point out by way of critique that I’ve already mentioned prices three times.

Unfortunately Vera and I messed up at the end. My paying in cash had itself caused bewilderment, but our departure proved so abrupt that our personal waiters, who had intended to pull our chairs back, just raised their hands in reproachful disappointment.

Once in the casino we soon found ourselves standing at the first roulette table. I would have liked to have gone to work right away, but had not yet bought my jetons. I asked Vera what number she guessed would be next, and chose “eighteen” for myself. There was no reason to pick eighteen. It isn’t one of my favorite numbers. “Eighteen,” I repeated — and didn’t understand what the croupier announced in French. Vera looked at me in shock. Eighteen.

How was I supposed to interpret this oracle: “This is your lucky day!” or “That was your one and only chance!”?

Instead of the six thousand francs I had planned to bet today, I exchanged only fifty-five hundred with the cashier — and smiled at my own faintheartedness.

A guard at the entrance to the rear rooms made us hesitant. But we showed our gold hotel cards, waited for him to bow, and crossed the invisible border to the salon privé.

Two places at Table 7 were open. The board promised an above-average variety. To win all you had to do was muster a little consistency. The red field lay directly before us.

I passed on the first few rounds, trying to get a feel for the game. Then I placed a hundred on the lower third²³⁷ —it had not appeared for four times in a row. I lost and doubled my bet. Perhaps the most beautiful jetons are the greenish mother-of-pearl hundreds. The others at the table, all older gentlemen, bet on numbers. I won. A pink five hundred, an orange two hundred, and a green hundred were added to my bet; I was ahead five hundred francs after three turns of the wheel. “It’s working,” I whispered.

Vera played the thirds, the rows, the red, the odds. She didn’t always keep good track — the ball landed on fifteen and seven twice. The thirds alternated in an almost regular sequence.

Suddenly Vera wanted to leave; 20 percent profit was more than enough for her. I said that I couldn’t develop a method, a system, if she kept betting such sums simply at random. Maybe, she conjectured, my real task was to find my own rules. I had made a promise, I said testily. After that I lost four times in a row.

One glance at our cash on hand, and my courage failed me. Instead of doubling my sixteen hundred, I risked only a thousand — and lost. I bet fifteen hundred. It was already my last chance. So, I thought, that’s how fast it all went.

Vera stood up. We said our good-byes while the ball was still spinning in its bowl. I watched Vera go, she turned around, I waved, heard the ball bouncing, then its last click—the announced winner had several syllables. All I recall is that it was in the right third — victory! Victory! I was back in the running.

From that point on I played my apple green hundreds with childlike abandon, happy at last to be able to do or not do whatever I pleased. Success proved me right. My winnings grew steadily and always in the same way: as soon as a given third had not appeared four times in a row, I entered the fray: one hundred, two hundred, four hundred — and at the latest won with eight hundred.

I didn’t care if other people were speculating on the same third I was. Except that when a bet was larger than mine, I feared some alien gravity might spoil my luck.

Currency was constantly being changed into jetons. Anyone who left the table, left with nothing. I, on the other hand, had the feeling I was doing good work.

The only other player I admired was wearing neither tie nor bow tie and chewed the whole time on the stump of a cigarillo. I don’t know how big his stake was to begin with. After a half hour, however, there they lay before him: two big white ten thousands, those Lipizzaners among the jetons. I wanted so much to give him a nod of approval, but his eyes were relentlessly fixed on the green felt.

His counterpart was a freckled, unshaven gentleman, who sat at one corner and, tilting his head like a grade-school boy, jotted down each number in a plaid notebook. He calculated and calculated and looked up only to place one of his nominal bets — which he promptly lost.

The only person working harder than I was a delicate Frenchman, who was playing two tables at once and evidently trusted my choice of thirds. Our fate hung from the same thread — which for him, however, was no reason to return my smile. I soon realized how alone a person is, even in success.

I got too cocky twice and lost four lemon fifties on red, and lost again with an orange two hundred on passe. Have I already told you that at every spin I defended myself with a pink mother-of-pearl twenty on the zero? There wasn’t one zero, however, the whole evening. (The chambermaid doesn’t know if she should chase me off the balcony or not. She opened the door so that I can hear her vacuuming.)

Taking a cue from the man with the cigarillo, I awarded the croupiers an occasional lemon-or apple-colored chip. Shortly before one o’clock I totaled up the books: I had ten thousand francs in my pocket — winnings of forty-five hundred, plus a motley collection of other chips that came to twelve hundred, which suddenly meant nothing to me. I bet on red — and won, let the apples and lemons lie there, pocketed a blue mother-of-pearl thousand and all my oranges.

I had already whispered my bonsoir and started moving toward the cashier, when I noticed the cleavage on two women at the next table, and changed course.

I bent deep over both the ladies — and placed all my oranges on red. Seconds later I took another look down into the décolletage and raked in my winnings.

The cashier was cross-eyed, but that was the only irregularity. I strode out, bounding down the casino stairs and then up the stairway leading to the Hôtel de Paris, shouted, “Yes! I won!” and left it to Vera to sort out the bills on the bedspread. All in all, winnings of almost seven thousand francs.

It was when I woke up that I felt the angst. I know how silly it is to talk about angst. The fact that even if I had lost, I would have lost nothing, didn’t help. It was my own big mouth that was at fault. Without giving it a second thought, I had accepted the baron’s offer. But now I no longer comprehended where I had found the courage to bet a fifteen hundred francs. It seemed absurd ever to want to risk that much again.

Vera was not happy with me. Under a springtime sun, we trotted out into the bay and then up to the Grimaldis’ castle, missed the changing of the guard, did a circuit in the cathedral, and finally landed at the oceanographic museum. From its rooftop terrace we could watch the sailboats. But none of it proved a distraction. I tried thinking about soccer.

I dozed on the bed till seven, and had no idea how I would play it. I was convinced that I wouldn’t be successful again if I followed the same method. All the same, after a shower I put on the same outfit as the evening before, even the same socks. Vera, on the other hand, looked more elegant than ever — she had a new hairdo too. Neither she nor I had thought of a dinner reservation.

After being turned away at the Louis XV, I suggested we eat in the casino. Vera shook her head in revulsion. The front desk implied there was some hope of getting us into the Grill’s Churchill Room.

Bonsoir, bonsoir, bonsoir, bonsoir. We strode past the phalanx of waiters again, crossed the huge dining room, and in the end had a pick of any table in the empty Churchill Room. I didn’t understand why the waiters apologized for putting us there. To me it seemed more of an honor. Only after we sat down did I notice the large photograph of Churchill. His gaze was directed straight at me.

We recognized half the waiters, the stool for Vera’s purse was put in place, my menu was in English.

(With a heavy heart I’ve been forced to vacate the balcony and the room. Now I’m sitting over tea and zwieback in the hotel café, an insufferable piano plinking in the background. At least there’s not someone constantly taking your picture here.)

We went right into the routine, immediately chose our bread (olive), knew which butter was salted. I quickly selected a red wine; by now three hundred francs seemed a bargain. The waiter who had taken our order personally supervised the serving of the first course. And not just that. As if the cream in the middle of my empty soup bowl were the entire appetizer he wished us “Bon appétit!” hesitated mischievously, and only then elegantly poured the mushroom soup around the cream.

I tasted Vera’s risotto — and for a few minutes I didn’t think about the casino. The next transitional course was on the house. By then I was full.

Where had these knots in my stomach come from? During the entrée I concentrated on the fish, but just picked at it and left the rest untouched. The cheese cart wasn’t even allowed to approach us. This was followed — once again on the house and with the compliments of the chef — by filled crepes.

I was feeling sick to my stomach. I chose a calvados from the liqueur cart. It went down gently, gradually started to burn — and my nausea exploded. Our chief waiter helped me double-time it through the restaurant — don’t look at the tables! — to the restroom. I went to my knees before the toilet bowl and gagged a few times. In the corner lay some scraps of packaging, from a shirt maybe. I overcame my resistance, and stuck a finger down my throat. All I managed was a harmless belch.

My crepes had been sent back to the kitchen to be kept warm. Their return marked the return of my nausea. The waiters didn’t catch up with us until just before we reached the elevator — with my change on a silver tray.

Back in the room I turned on the television, locked all the doors, and planted myself on the toilet, hanging my head over the bidet. Twenty minutes later, mission unaccomplished, I crept into bed.

Shortly before one, Vera was forced to watch me dress again. As I stepped into my shoes, I broke out in a sweat. Vera retied my bow tie for me, spat three times over my left shoulder, and sent me on my way.

I exchanged six thousand francs, showed my gold card, and proceeded to Table 7, where the freckled, still unshaven gentleman was sitting at the corner, staring at his notebook, and calculating, head atilt.

The other players were standing. But I needed a chair.

Propping my elbows on the ledge, I was just about to stack my jetons when my gaze drifted across the table — for a moment I had to close my eyes. The sign above the croupier’s head still announced a minimum bet of fifty francs. But what was being raked in at that moment were two greenish white candy bars, each worth a hundred thousand, two violets at fifty thousand apiece, and countless Lipizzaners. My nausea was all that prevented me from bursting into laughter. Why had I let my fears torment me all day?

Totally liberated, I now began to play, working both my third plus red and odds, and smoking — although the dryness in my mouth told me my stomach wasn’t going to permit me all the time in the world. I employed my oranges only in little towers, and wasn’t niggardly with my blue thousands either. When I won, the jetons were too big to be distributed as gratuities. I ignored the zero entirely.

The combination of concentration and nausea apparently predestined me for an exegesis of the board. I was soon moving to the rhythm that concealed a world hung in the balance. A pink five hundred on the lower third — I won. That third had been neglected so long that the ball was not going to move elsewhere right away. I stayed with it — and won. And now enough energy had collected for a bounce that hurdled the middle third, and so back up top — I won. I smiled because any child would know what must come now. A pink on the middle third — and of course I won.

Side bets lost on red, odds, and passe reduced my winnings, but not my confidence. One pink on the upper third, and I owned another blue. By the next round I had doubled my six thousand francs — but that didn’t phase me much. I now wanted twelve thousand!

Believe me, my friend, in the same moment that the thought crossed my mind, I realized my mistake. I knew that the wish would be my downfall. But I went on playing.

I lost a pink on the middle third twice in a row. My nausea was now tinged with a sadness unlike any I’d ever known — sadness in expectation of my next win. And I did win, and once again had as much as I had had three spins before.

Nevertheless I let my pink chip lie — I could come up with nothing more clever. Suddenly a light went on: blue on red — and against my better judgment I held back. It landed on black and the first third.

No sadness now. I was in any case still four thousand to the good. No reason to be down in the dumps. I remained faithful to pink on the middle third. Or should I risk a blue? But I held back again — and lost.

I no longer felt anything, except the need to throw up. I had lost all my pinks, reached for a blue — and lost.

Something inside me rose up in protest at this injustice — blind rage! I wanted my blue back. It belonged to me. All I had to do was make a grab for the jetons and run!

I was sure I was going to have to vomit under the table any moment. But first there was something I had to do — an act of self-respect, the restoration of my honor.

Six blues in my breast pocket. The board showed the following sequence: red, black, black, red, black, black, red, black, black — everything on red? Six blues between my fingertips. I had to do it, I demanded it of myself. I was not going to be a pussyfooter.

The ball rolled — no! Not on red, not on odds, not on passe—stay with the second third! I was the only one to build my little blue tower there.

As the cry of “Rien ne va plus!” descended over the table like a bell jar, I glanced at the ceiling for the first time, and in the far corner saw a three-foot-high mural, Le matin. What did le matin mean? My eyes wandered to the right, across the empty tables in the restaurant and out into the darkness. Don’t think of victory, I admonished myself, resign yourself, you did the right thing.

There were several clicks, the ball bounced — I looked down, in the next moment came the announcement. I didn’t understand the croupier, but I saw it, the thirteen, I looked at it again, and then again, thirteen. Which third was the thirteen in? Thirty-six divided by three, twelve, twelve, twelve. I didn’t shout. On the contrary — as if I’d been standing the whole time, I felt as if I had finally sat down.

Freckles was staring at his notebook. The table was raked, no one had won — except me! Only me! I silently made fun of Freckles — go ahead and analyze, while I play. And when I’ve won yet again, you can mull it over and analyze what I’ve done some more. And on and on, to the end of our days!

My blue tower fell apart between the croupier’s fingers, all six jetons, I counted along with him — and received at last, along with two more blues, my Lipizzaner!

I would never have dared to dream of that white rectangle. If there is anything I regret it is only that I possessed my Lipizzaner for no more than two minutes. That’s all the time I needed to scrape up my little pile and head for the cashier without so much as a farewell.

I was too weak to wipe the sweat from my brow. Out in the lobby, somebody shouted something at me, a whole group of people burst into laughter. I was pale, my feet moved me with exaggerated precision toward my goal — I was seen as the epitome of the loser.

When I entered our room, Vera was holding her hand to her eyes, from the TV came screams. I disappeared into the bathroom, gagged and retched and fought for air — nothing.

I don’t know how I’ll survive the flight back. My third cup of tea is on its way. I’m still tortured by the idea that I could have failed at the crucial moment and not have bet all my winnings.²³⁸ If I had lost my nerve, I’d no longer be able to look at myself in the mirror. As you can see, I have stopped asking questions and have begun to understand.

Vera asked me to say hello for her. She’s insisting we be on our way.

Your Enrico

PS: As we walked out to get our taxi, John was sitting at the front desk again. He bowed, I extended my hand and slipped him a hundred in farewell. I saw immediately that I had not committed a faux pas.

Vera and I went our separate ways in Frankfurt am Main. She boarded a train for Berlin, I took the one for Leipzig. As soon as Vera has broken up her apartment in Berlin she’s coming to Altenburg for a few weeks. I gave her my winnings, and that was a great relief in the end.

Wednesday, May 16, ’90

Dear Nicoletta,

It really is strange. Now that I’m coming to the point in my narrative where I first met Michaela, we’re about to separate. Not one angry word has been spoken, that’s all well behind us. Robert says that he and I will still be together, that of course we’re a family — him, me, Michaela, and my mother — no matter what happens. “We are and always will be a family,” I promised.

Unlucky in love, lucky at cards. I did in fact win a few thousand, so there’s nothing standing in the way anymore of an excursion to Bamberg or Italy.²³⁹ So much for my present life.

If it hadn’t been for Anton I would never have ended up in the theater or in Altenburg, would never have met Michaela and Robert, would never have become a newspaper man — and we two would probably have just walked on past each other.

Anton wanted to become a dramaturge and move to Berlin. He pursued both goals with such unqualified zeal that he was willing to sacrifice everything else. Anton explained to me what all a “dramaturge” has to do. He wasn’t really looking for work as such, but for a comfortable position that would leave him plenty of time for his escapades.

In January ’87, six months before Vera’s departure, I sent applications to every theater in the country; there were circa forty (and if you didn’t find a job yourself, you ran the risk of the university assigning you to some library, museum, or publishing house).²⁴⁰ Four theaters invited me for an interview: Potsdam, Stendhal, Zeitz, and Altenburg. Not long thereafter I found a letter from Anton in my cubbyhole, which began very formally — so I took it for a joke. A few lines later, however, and I couldn’t believe my eyes. Since he, Anton, was leaving the entire country to me, he hoped I would in turn have the good grace to waive any claims to Berlin and Potsdam.

Vera raved about Altenburg’s Lindenau Museum and about how Gerhard Altenbourg lived there — and furze-faced Hilbig²⁴¹ likewise came from Meuselwitz, a town just a few miles away. Besides which, the town had survived the war practically unscathed.

And so I traveled to Altenburg, and after only ten minutes the general manager (a long-haired man in his late thirties, who wore his shirt open halfway to his navel) informed me that I would be hired — providing I passed my internship — turning my first walk through town into a tour of the arena where my real life was to begin.

It was snowing. The approach to the castle lay in spotless white before me. I had a headache from all the excitement and because of my spare pair of glasses, which had a different prescription from my regular pair (Vera had them on her conscience). Snowflakes big as postage stamps were falling faster and faster with every step I took. When I turned around and looked down as if through a veil to the theater below me and to the town rising off to the west, I could scarcely see my own footprints.

After a circuit of the castle courtyard (this was before the fire), I walked to the park, whose paths were now discernable only because they lay between rows of benches. At the foot of the hill, but removed into the distance by the drifting snow, stood the Lindenau Museum. All I knew about it were illustrations of its vases from antiquity. I don’t need to describe to you what happens when, having climbed the stairs and stridden across the octagon, you enter that suite of rooms hung with Italian paintings. I knew almost nothing about the Sienese, and very little about the Florentines,²⁴² and yet I felt I had arrived. Perhaps you’re thinking that I’m just mouthing your words.²⁴³ But just as some people suffer when they must do without the Elbe or the sea, I would never be able to move to a place if I knew there wasn’t such a treasure somewhere nearby.

The great collections in Dresden, Prague, Lódź, Budapest, or Leningrad lack a certain serenity. Here, however, you are alone with each painting. Even the guards remain hidden and you are reminded of them at most by a distant creaking of floorboards. I was already in Italy here. It was here that I understood that the best of the Renaissance comes from the pre-Renaissance. Here I could let pass in review the two hundred years so decisive not only for Italian art, but also for the intellectual spirit of all of Europe.²⁴⁴

To this day the same paintings that I took into my heart that afternoon have remained my favorites. Of course the three Guido da Sienas, Man of Sorrow by Lorenzetti, the Madonna by Lippo Memmi, the Adoration by Taddeo di Bartolo, the crucifixions by Giovanni di Paoli, everything by him really and by Lorenzo Monaco, and of course Masaccio; but I’m almost even fonder of Fra Angelico’s St. Francis’ Trial by Fire, with its skeptical sultan on his throne, but also his saints, plus the St. Jerome by Lippi, Botticelli’s stern St. Katherine, Signorelli’s artistic torturers, the Madonnas in his Internment, the Annunciation by Barnaba da Moden, Puccinelli’s Madonna with its angels and saints, and the joy of the one to whom the baby Jesus has turned his face.

As I left the museum a bluish red patch of late-afternoon sky shone bright above me.

Three weeks later I passed through the theater’s portals with a nod of my head, managed to catch the grated door before it closed behind a dancer in her warm-up outfit — and froze at the sound of a shrill “Halt!” The gatekeeper had jumped up and was pressing her forehead to the pane of her booth. Called to account as to who I was and where I was headed, I finally answered with “Hoffmann! Undine!”

“Step back! All the way back!” My shoulder bag and I were blocking the way for others. I was told to explain why I had tried to “break into” the theater. When I asked her to call the general manager, she laughed, grabbed the telephone receiver, and took her eye off me only long enough to jab a finger into the dial. With each new arrival she again asked me to give my name. I was forced to shout “Enrico Türmer” several times, and to repeat it a little louder, “if you please,” to spell the two words — so that every newcomer had learned the name of this stupid young fellow at the gate before I even got inside the theater. “Do you know a Türmer, Enrico maybe?”—or in her dialect: Dürmer, Ähnreegoh. That indefinite article before my name obliterated me.

I begged her to inform the chief dramaturge. The outraged gatekeeper laid the receiver down, put a finger to the cradle, and pressed hard. She was well aware of what she had to do, she didn’t need instructions. Besides which, people there would have no more idea of who I was than she did.

“He don’t even know where he wants to go,” she shouted into the receiver once more as two ballerinas came tripping by, “that’s what got me so riled, that’s the problem,” to which I could only keep on replying, “Hoffmann, Hoffmann!”

“Nobody knows you here,” she declared, and set down the receiver. Giving me another once-over, she leaned back in exhaustion and started to thumb through whatever it was that had been lying before her the whole time. It was unclear whether she was going to pursue my case or had already filed me away for good.

“Wait!” she cried out, still turning pages, but as she reached for the receiver again a woman in a white blouse emerged out of the darkness of the stairwell, bounded down the last three steps, and cast me such a friendly glance that I was afraid she had mistaken me for someone else.

“I know who you are,” she said with a smile, linked her arm under mine, and guided me in the direction of the gatekeeper.

“May I introduce you, Frau”—here she inserted the gatekeeper’s name—“to Herr Türmer, our new dramaturge…” This time it took the gatekeeper two tries to get up out of her chair; she extended a hand through the oval hatch in the pane and exclaimed, “Why didn’t he say so right off!” And with that we strode through the portal.

The woman in the white blouse ushered me through a labyrinth of hallways and stairs. Every few feet the odor changed. We passed the ballet room, a canteen, skirted a baroque sandstone stairwell, and stood there in the dark. I heard a key and followed her into a room where light barely seeped through the curtains. The odor was of midday meals.

On the way back we stopped in front of white french doors and listened. Suddenly my guide pressed down the door handle and shoved me inside, just as a piano struck up again.

Who was I, what did I want, who had sent me?…My good fairy had vanished, the director, hardly any older than I and with a haircut that highlighted the back of his head, had interrupted the rehearsal and was paging quickly through the piano reduction.

I gave my name, I repeated my name. I was informed by the director, who went right on paging through the score, that one did not attend a rehearsal uninvited, nor did one interrupt it. One needed to request permission in advance from at least the director, if not the entire ensemble. “In advance!” he repeated and finally stopped turning pages. Had I done that? No, I replied, I had not. It was too late for any excuses for my misconduct. A gentleman kneeling on the floor expressed in a bass voice his outrage at such a disregard for his person. How long was he supposed to keep crawling around, didn’t we people have eyes in our heads. He said “people,” but he had looked only at me.

Over the next five weeks, during which I was allowed to audit Tim Hartmann’s production of Undine, there was little I could do to improve the situation I had got myself into when making my entrance. I made it worse by using formal modes of address. Tim Hartmann took it as an insult that I did not call him Tim like everyone else. Just opening the door to the canteen was awful, leaving the counter with my tray of bockwurst and coffee was awful, taking a seat at an empty table was awful, joining other people at a table was awful. What’s more, I smelled like the kitchen, which was directly under my room.

Every so often the assistant director, a tall, beautiful woman from Berlin, took pity on me. When she stood before me, I realized what might have saved me: something to do.

Although I did like sitting in on rehearsals. At first I thought I needed to say something that would prove my theatrical credentials. I amazed myself at what all occurred to me. At the end of the first week I handed Tim Hartmann a list of suggestions. I hoped in this way to commend myself as a worthy partner in the conversation. At the start of the next week of rehearsals the assistant director asked me to refrain from taking notes from now on.

When there was no evening rehearsal I attended performances, where I sat in one of the first rows with program in hand and tried to memorize the faces of the cast. As if my future depended on it, I devoted great energy, indeed passion, to learning names. Which was why the last week of Undine rehearsals was especially important, because I could now coordinate names and functions even for people who never appeared onstage, but whom I knew by sight. I found it easy to learn names and equally difficult to correct my mistakes. For example I thought the lighting director was the man in charge of painting sets, and took the director of the set workshop for the lighting director.

I considered my audit to have concluded on a conciliatory note when I was assigned to write the press release, which Tim Hartmann then handed out at dress rehearsal, all the while repeating “à la bonne heure.” At the premiere I was even allowed to spit three times over the left shoulder of Undine herself, who had ignored me longer than anyone else.

Tim Hartmann’s production was no thundering success, but the audience applauded until he appeared onstage in a black suit, bowed, and rocked his head back and forth in the hope that everyone would notice his brand-new stub of a ponytail.

At the cast party I was given lots of hugs. I expected a speech from the general manager, a few words about the production and the singers’ fine performances. And I hoped he would also remember his promise to me.

He congratulated Tim Hartmann, shook hands all around the table, and also responded to a few bons mots with a laugh that was almost indistinguishable from a cough. But he refused to sit down and join us. His entourage, recruited mainly from stage actors, but especially from the ballet, were waiting for him two tables down.

I drank and chain-smoked and for the first time felt at home in the canteen. The assistant director introduced me to Antonio, a young Chilean from Berlin. Antonio asked what I thought of the production, which he himself termed a “yawn.” Antonio told me to sit down beside him, and pulled a chair over for me to join the “Jonas” table — he called the general manager by his first name. How easy it all was. Antonio offered me some vodka. Everybody at the table was drinking vodka.

In claiming that marriage and fidelity were unnatural, pointless, and ridiculous, Jonas managed to antagonize most of the women, which didn’t prevent him from plowing right ahead. He kept brushing strands of hair from his face while shifting his gaze from one person to the next. As our eyes met I automatically nodded as if I agreed with him. I was angry at myself for doing it, and all the more so since the actress Claudia Marcks loudly contradicted him, even laughed in his face — which he took half as an offense, half as confirmation of this theory about women.

I admired Claudia Marcks. I had never been able to strike up a conversation with her, I hadn’t even managed to work my way into her vicinity. Everything about her was beautiful and desirable, I especially loved her hands. They led a life of their own, which no one except me seemed to noticed. Suddenly I wanted nothing more than to feel the touch of those hands — today, tomorrow, whenever — and then to kiss them. And I was strangely convinced that that hour was no longer all that distant.

I asked Jonah whether he himself believed the stuff he was spouting.

He stared at me with reddened eyes. “Why don’t you just go get laid!” he shouted. “Why don’t you just…” Jonas repeated the sentence two, three times, four times, until the whole canteen had fallen silent.

Instead of laughing in his face as Claudia Marcks had done, I thought of Nadja. And now I heard myself saying, “Why should I do that?”

Everyone joined in the laughter. Even Claudia Marcks and Antonio. Antonio said he admired the people who were pure intellect, people like me. It was hell.

Sometime long after midnight the assistant director asked if she and Antonio could spend the night in my quarters, the bed in the guest room was nice and wide, after all, and they had missed their train. Neither of the two slept a single minute.

Lying at the edge of a bed and having to listen to those two beside me seemed to me the perfect metaphor of my life as an outsider. Jonas had humiliated me before everyone, and tomorrow Antonio would tell him about this night. Wasn’t the reason I hadn’t defended myself that I was afraid of losing my position, my job as dramaturge? How life takes its revenge on you, I thought, when you want something else from it. My life was that of a storyteller. And for telling stories a man needs distance and a cold eye. How could I have forgotten that.²⁴⁵

In the middle of June, a few days after Vera’s departure, I was back again in Altenburg. One more unpleasant experience — and what else was I supposed to expect from the theater? — and my desire to follow Vera would have been all the stronger.

The chief dramaturge handed me a small bright orange book, for which I had to give her a receipt. From bottom to top I read: Bibliothek Suhrkamp/Fräulein Julie/August Strindberg. I wouldn’t be staying in the guest room this time, but in the Wenzel. Flieder, the director, had not yet arrived.

That evening in the hotel I opened Vera’s imitation-leather silverware pouch, sorted the bills, laying them out in separate rows on the floor. At three thousand marks, more than my stipend for a whole year, I stopped counting.

From the bed I watched as the bills were caught up in a draft from the open window and began overlapping as if trying to couple, and finally I just closed my eyes and listened to their rustling. When I woke up the bills were strewn about the room, in one corner they had formed a little pile of leaves.

I showered, sat down at a breakfast setting in the restaurant, and, as the clock struck ten, headed off for the Lindenau Museum. After that I took a walk through town, circled the Great Pond, looked for the house of Gerhard Altenbourg, and had my noonday meal at the Ratskeller. Then I lay down in the park and read. In the evening I went to the movies. That was more or less how I spent the whole week.

My favorite pastime was to sit in the garden café beside the Great Pond and imagine I was with Vera somewhere on the Landwehr Canal in West Berlin, recovering from the interviews I had had to deal with all day.

That Friday I traveled to Dresden to see my mother. Despite my having announced my arrival, she wasn’t waiting for me at the station, nor was she at home. Nothing in the apartment indicated a welcome — no note, no stew in the refrigerator, my bed hadn’t even been made up.

When Mother arrived — after all, I ought to know she worked late sometimes — we spoke only about Vera. Vera should have left a lot sooner, Mother said, her path had been blocked from the start, she had been robbed of valuable years. I said that Vera had enjoyed her life and had learned more about the theater and read more books than I had at the university. How could I say that! That had all just been makeshift. Vera belonged in a drama school, they should have accepted her at the Deutsches Theater in Berlin. I hadn’t any idea of just how desperate Vera had been at times.

For supper Mother placed an unwrapped camembert on the table, I opened a tin of fish, the bread was stale. I felt miserable. This shabbiness toward both herself and me was something new.

I arrived late for Monday’s rehearsal discussion. It was a bad omen that Flieder likewise had a ponytail, even if it was just bound-up remnants of his wreath of hair and hung gray and scraggly over his collar. As was to be expected he didn’t turn to look at me when, after first knocking, I opened the door and took a seat at the table. As was also to be expected he had me repeat my name. Imagine my terror when I saw Claudia Marcks sitting at the table. She hadn’t been listed as a cast member.

“So this is our Enrico,” Flieder said, “Enrico will be helping us with everything here. At least I hope so. Good thing you’re here, Enrico.” No one laughed.

The only others at the table besides Claudia Marcks were Petrescu (Kristin, cook, thirty-five years old) and Max (Jean, servant, thirty years old). I also got a wave from Flieder’s young female assistant, a long drink of water with short hair, who was also the set designer and was perched on the arm of a chair off to one side, sipping at her Karo.

What followed was more like a seminar than a rehearsal. And I wasn’t prepared. It was just for me, or so it seemed, that Flieder went on at length about the book that he had left at the front gate for me, along with a note inside. As he paced back and forth, giggling every now and then, he began to look more and more like a faun or a satyr. His assistant repeated and augmented his comments, talked about behavioral research, squinting each time she took a drag on her cigarette.

At the noon break, Claudia Marcks took a seat beside me. “Do you know each other?” Flieder asked.

“Yes,” I said. Claudia Marcks looked at me. “Where from?”

“Undine, the premier, the cast party, at this very same table.”

“Oh, please, no,” she cried. “I was so sloshed, so sloshed, oh please, I’m sorry.” And as if by way of apology she laid a hand on my forearm and asked almost anxiously if we had drunk to our friendship that night.

“Sad to say, no,” I replied, “but I would have been happy to.”

“Just call me Michaela,” she whispered. “Okay?”

“Happy to, Michaela,” I said, repeated my first name for her, and gazed at her gorgeous hand, still lying on my forearm.

Your Enrico T.

Thursday, May 17, ’90

Dear Nicoletta,

Before I tell you any more about Michaela, I need to insert something that happened in the summer of 1987, but that I didn’t mention to anyone, since it didn’t seem worth mentioning. And how was I supposed to understand it anyway?

Maybe in fact there is something in us beyond our conscious and unconscious mind, something akin to the sixth sense animals have that lets them register an earthquake or storm, long before we do. Should I call it instinct, or the power of premonition? Or simply a heightened sensitivity?

In August I had gone to Waldau for two weeks so that I could finally do some more work on my novella. One night I awoke and thought I heard a shot reverberating through the house, through the whole woods.

If it hadn’t been for the creaking of the bed I would have thought I was deaf. I snapped my fingers. Not a rustle, not a breeze, not a bird. I had broken into a sweat and knew that I wouldn’t go back to sleep.

Naked as a jaybird, I stepped out the door. Everything seemed frozen in place. With each little noise I made, silence closed in all the tighter. The more intensely I listened, the more impenetrable the hush, until finally I thought I could feel it above my head like some giant black block of stone.

I tried several times to take a deep breath, but my lungs felt only half full of the air I sucked down into them, as if I were several thousand meters above sea level. It didn’t help to sit down either. I felt a rippling, swirling sensation around my heart. I was amazed I didn’t panic. At least I could distinguish between the deep black of the trunks of the firs and the grayish darkness between them. I was on the verge of saying a prayer or humming a tune just to escape the silence, the hush. Suddenly it seemed incredible that I should be sitting all alone at night in a stock-still woods — the only restive thing in a mute world. I thought I might be dreaming or losing my mind. My own laughter gave me a fright.

And like some stroke of grace a fly joined me. It whirled around my head, and suddenly I could see an illustration from a physics text before my eyes: an electron orbiting the nucleus of an atom.²⁴⁶

The fly landed on my left shoulder — I flinched and then held my breath. Had I scared it away? The fly dared not abandon me, it had to stay, the only living creature standing guard with me, my sole companion. When I felt it stir, I again held my breath and relished its touch as if it were a caress. Have you ever let a fly crawl over your shoulders and back? In the midst of my fear that sooner or later the fly could forsake me, for the first time in my life the idea crossed my mind that the world, just as it is, might end up lost to me.

It was not fear of nuclear war, of the end of the world. It was the fear that everything from which I took my bearings could be lost; the structure of the world to which I had adapted the permutations of my thoughts and emotions, might vanish from one day to the next, leaving nothing more than a great emptiness behind. Just as I had feared I would be inducted into the army too late, so now I feared that before I could fire my gun all the real game would be slain and only mice and rats would be left for me.

It was an absurd thought, but no less absurd than sitting naked in the woods, happy and grateful for the companionship of a fly.

Only the fly and the pain just above my heart seemed to exist, the sole realities at my disposal, the one thing that prevented my thoughts and emotions from evaporating into weightlessness.

On those spots where my sweat hadn’t dried I sensed a draft, and I felt chilled. With empty brain, with empty heart, yielding to my fate, I crept back to bed.

When I awoke, it was warm and flies, a whole swarm, were buzzing above me.

I presume that by now you think I am indeed crazy or at least more than a bit odd. But viewed from the present, that nocturnal experience is one of the few episodes that I can look back upon with sympathy for the person I was at the time.

But to return to Altenburg, to which I traveled in early September ’88, before starting my last year of studies.

Flieder’s rehearsals of Julie deserve a chapter of their own. Read the Strindberg play again yourself and pay attention to the breaks, to the steady flow of staying — going — staying — going. In a certain sense it was so much about me that it was eerie.

No less eerie was the realization of how closely related directing and writing are. From Flieder I learned that the purpose of dialogue is not to communicate something, but rather to clarify the relationships among the characters. That it doesn’t matter what the characters are talking about as long as you know what you want to say. That there is hell to pay if you neglect even one of the relationships, that not one item, not a single step in the choreography can be ignored.

Is there anything more beautiful than a plausible character? If I were able to attain Flieder’s level in my own writing, my novella would be a masterpiece. But then why, I anxiously asked myself, isn’t Flieder a famous director?

But what would Flieder’s rehearsals have been without Michaela! I was allowed to gaze at Michaela, to observe and study her, and no one, including her, could reproach me for it. One of my tasks was to devour her with my eyes. I dreamed that Michaela and I were a couple. This fantasy collided, to be sure, with my desire to leave the country as soon as I could. But I kept postponing taking the step — out of concern for my mother, only because it seemed better to first get my degree, because I hadn’t heard from Vera since her departure. And I had put on blinders to the fact that day after day Michaela arrived and departed with Max (our Jean). From her first marriage she had a son who sometimes waited for her in the canteen, where he painted or played cards with the kitchen staff.

After a rehearsal at the beginning of my second week, as always I gave Michaela a good-bye hug — and our cheeks touched. I was about to stand up straight again, but she held me tight — for an eternity, or so it seemed to me. And then as always Michaela climbed into the Wartburg with Max. I took that long hug to be part of the ragtag intimacy typical of the theater. The next evening, however, the same farewell repeated itself. This time I likewise held Michaela until she couldn’t stand tiptoe any longer. After Wednesday’s rehearsal we ran into each other in the entry to the canteen, or better, we ran toward each other. I still had my notepad in one hand. It would be too much to claim that the way she moved told me everything, but it would be no exaggeration to say that we virtually flew into each other’s arms — we were lucky not to have stumbled on the rippled linoleum.

“Do you know how to drive?” was the first thing Michaela whispered in my ear. She asked me to wait, stepped into the canteen, and returned with the keys to the Wartburg. It belonged to her, or actually to her mother, but neither of them had a driver’s license.

I drove Michaela home that evening for the first time. The light was on in Robert’s room. She called back to tell me what time to pick up her the next day, and ran off. The heels of her shoes echoed in the horseshoe of the new apartment building — and for whatever reason it filled me with pride. I stood at the open driver’s door, one elbow propped on the roof — it was as if I had won first prize in a raffle.

The next morning she asked me if I was a free man, whether the difference of seven years — she had found that out somehow — mattered, and whether I realized that she would always have to take Robert into consideration. Before I could answer, she gave me a kiss, and then Max rapped on the windshield.

I waited by the car for Michaela after rehearsal. When she finally appeared I could tell she wanted to leave with me. She said that I had on the shirt she loved to see me wear. I turned the ignition on, she slipped her left hand under my collar, I drove off, and we both stared straight ahead as if into heavy fog.

We scurried past the front desk; I had intentionally not left my room key with them. In the elevator Michaela said she felt like a fraud for having been taking the pill all this time. Robert wouldn’t be home before four thirty, so we had a little time. She pulled an alarm clock from her purse, and set it.

Once in the room, Michaela pulled down the blinds and drew the curtains. She extricated herself when I started to unbutton her blouse. She wouldn’t even let me watch her undress and called me out of the bathroom only after she was lying in bed with the covers up to her neck. At first I thought it was a game, but Michaela had very definite notions of what all I was and was not allowed to do.

Before evening rehearsal began, Flieder said he had done some rescheduling and needed only Max and Petrescu. Michaela and I drove to the hotel, and once again I waited in the bathroom until she called me. I asked her why she was embarrassed in front of me. I’d learn that soon enough — or maybe not — Michaela said, holding a hand over my mouth before I could ask the question I was on the verge of asking.

Later on we fell asleep and didn’t wake up until after midnight. In sheer panic Michaela could barely dress, but insisted that I turn my face to the wall.

The light was on in Robert’s room. I waited and listened again to the echo of Michaela’s footfall.

During the days left before semester began, we saw each other only at rehearsals. It was now Max who was again driving her between home and the theater.

A few weeks later Michaela revealed to me the reasons for her puzzling ritual. “It has to do with Robert,” she said, “with his birth.” I didn’t understand. “A C-section,” she said, and stared at me almost in fright, only then to suddenly bark at me, “It left a scar, a big, ugly scar.” I said that was no news to me, but only now had I made the connection.

“Well everybody doesn’t have to see it!” she cried angrily.

You’re probably asking yourself why I’m telling you all this? What does our love story have to do with my confession?²⁴⁷ Just be patient.

Robert fought me all the way. Plus he hated everything that had to do with the theater. And I had to admit Robert annoyed me. I wasn’t used to taking anyone else into consideration. I wanted to read, write, attend the theater and exhibitions, see movies. And that’s what Michaela wanted too. But I’m getting ahead of myself. In those first weeks the very idea of my spending the night at Michaela’s was out of the question. And in case I tried, Robert threatened to run away from home. The first time I paid an official visit, he locked himself in his room and wailed so loud that after ten minutes Michaela asked me to leave. There were times when I traveled to Altenburg to see Michaela for just half an hour. And even then Robert was the center of attention.

My first overnight came at the end of November, and that was because Robert had thrown my shoes out the window and they had to be dried on the radiator.

And it wasn’t just that Robert was a mischief-maker, he was a blemish on Michaela. I was in no way on Robert’s side, but at times I wished he would win out. Because I had had a different idea of a love affair.²⁴⁸ What was more, I didn’t want to stay here, here in Altenburg, here in this country. At least that’s what I wrote to Vera.

When Michaela glowingly announced that Robert had agreed to travel with her and me to Dresden — he wanted to meet my mother too — I couldn’t have been more conflicted.

My mother had baked and cooked, our beds — Robert had my room all to himself — were decorated with chocolate animals and licorice sticks, the kind I hadn’t seen for years. The towels were new and soft, and each of us was given a pair of slippers. Robert had apparently expected nothing less. While we sat drinking coffee he roamed the apartment, knocked over a vase, and peeked in every cupboard and drawer. Mother wasn’t upset and helped calm Michaela down. They competed at chain-smoking, and Mother gave her the pair of shoes she had bought six months before, on the day Vera left. Every few minutes Robert presented us with another one of his discoveries. He found not only my old teddy bear and children’s books, but also my first cartridge pen, the cap of which revealed distinct teeth marks and that had been such a trusty friend that it was as if I had laid it aside only a moment before. Finally Robert dragged over my grandfather’s compass set — the compasses resting in shimmering blue velvet. Robert asked if he could keep it. To my horror my mother said yes. But Michaela’s “No!” was so determined that I didn’t have to intervene. Then it was time for photo albums, and that evening Robert cracked every egg we had in a skillet and called the result an omelet.

Shortly before we left the next day Robert insisted on playing badminton with me in the courtyard. Yes, only with me. On the way back he fell asleep, so that Michaela could snuggle up against me. It was then that it first struck me: I have a family — a family. And I didn’t know if it was a dream come true or if I was caught in a trap.²⁴⁹

Saturday, May 19, ’90

Dear Nicoletta,

It may perhaps amaze you when I say that the next eighteen months — from the day of our weekend together in Dresden until May ’89—was a happy time. The internal conflict that I described still existed, but it wasn’t hard to live with. I kept postponing applying for an exit visa — no, I was saving it as a kind of reward that I would first have to earn. The longer I stuck it out in the GDR, the more I would ultimately have to show for myself in the West. Besides which I regarded family life as a new experience. It was a marvelous feeling to watch Michaela shave her legs, and it felt like the proof of intimacy to hang our laundry on the clothesline or to take it down.

The strain between Robert and me remained. I met with Robert’s approval only sporadically, for instance when I succeeded in holding the spout from our laundry spin-drier directly over the bucket. To do that I had to throw myself on top of the machine. My mother on the other hand was accepted without qualification, which was why we made frequent trips to Dresden.

My studies came to a lusterless end. A few months before my oral exams I came very close to being dismissed from the university without my intending it, because I had tacked a page of “concrete poetry” on the bulletin board.²⁵⁰ As liberal as it sometimes seemed, the university had never really become so.

After defending my thesis, my last task as a student, we — Michaela, Anton, and I — went to District Military Headquarters. I had to cancel — or to put it more correctly, change — my address. Michaela listened while I was told that as a driver I had a good chance of being called up again after two years. (Which would be now.)

That threat charged both my school novella and my army book with new energy.

The premiere of Miss Julie that September²⁵¹ was a flop. When Michaela led Flieder onstage there were a few bravos, but three quarters of the audience was already waiting for their coats. We coerced four curtain calls. Smiling up into the empty balconies, Michaela curtsied each time like an opera diva. In Berlin this Julie would have been as celebrated as Danton’s Death or Macbeth had been.²⁵²

It was not until we were driving home after the cast party that Michaela burst into rage. She had been stuck in Altenburg way too long, and all the talk about how the theater here was a stepping-stone had never been true. “I can’t take this Podunk any longer!” she shouted. Her despair reached the point that she declared she was ready to join the Party if that was what it took to get a role in Berlin. Half her friends at the Gorki or the Berliner Ensemble were comrades — none of them someone you would ever have guessed was.

“And what about West Berlin,” I asked as we turned down our street. “In an instant!” Michaela cried, and stared at me with eyes open wide. “In an instant,” she repeated.

When we got home she handed me a package — her premiere gift. It contained several smaller packages, which I had to open one after the other until I got to the last one wrapped in gold paper — a pack of Club cigarettes, but filled with peppermints. A note slipped inside read, “Smoking is dangerous for expectant mothers and fathers.” We hadn’t yet managed it, but we were trying to give up smoking.

Miss Julie had five or six performances. In Michaela’s eyes the fact that her Julie wasn’t on the season’s consignment list²⁵³ was pure censorship. There were a few scattered reviews, the local paper’s was scathing.

When I began working full-time as a dramaturge I was assigned a one-and-a-half room apartment in the home of eighty-eight-year-old Emilie Paulini.

We two shared a chemical toilet, halfway up the stairs, and a kitchen whose sink was my ersatz bathtub. The cellar, however, was filled with briquettes. I needed this refuge because Robert’s television habits, plus a cassette recorder that never stopped playing, literally drove me off. I had moved in with just a table and a chair — deeply disappointing Emilie Paulini. She was afraid, you see, of being alone “when it comes time to die.” To fall asleep some night and never wake up, that’s what she hoped for. But there should be someone close by. In my honor she wore a wig, usually perched like a lopsided beret. At regular intervals she would wave me into her parlor, invite me to have a seat, and then hand me a framed, brown-foxed photograph of a beautiful young woman. Did I have any idea who that was? She would then giggle, thrust her bewigged head forward like a turtle, and ask very loudly, “Well?” I would glance back and forth between her and the photo and finally say, “But of course, Frau Paulini, that’s you!” Emilie Paulini would screech, fling her arms into the air, and jump up to fetch me a piece of pastry from the kitchen.

Emilie Paulini didn’t like Michaela because she was a “theater person” besides which, she was to blame for my not living at her place.

Her daughter Ruth came to visit on Wednesdays and picked her up every Sunday for dinner. Ruth spoke very fast and, rather than pausing between sentences, let out a long high-pitched “aaah” or “nooo” that fell slowly on its column of air. In the kitchen she told me (“Herr Türmer, what all I could tell you, Herr Türmer, aaah, but there’s not enough time — nooo — so much, so much”) about how, while fleeing in April ’45, they had “fallen into the hands of the Russians” in Freital near Dresden. Her mother had always sent her away and told her to sing. “Whenever the Russians came, I would be sent out to sing. Aaah! Those are stories, Herr Türmer, stories…aaah! Even though our mommy was no longer young, but that didn’t help. Stories! Aaah, Herr Türmer. She arrived here pregnant, at age forty-three, pregnant! Nooo, and with no husband, just imagine it!”²⁵⁴ Ruth dabbed at one corner of her eye with a lace handkerchief she always kept at the ready.

I couldn’t figure out the point of the singing, but since Emilie Paulini never left us alone for long, I didn’t get around to asking Ruth about it until some time later. “Aaah, Herr Türmer, it’s really very simple. It eased her mind. She at least knew I wasn’t being molested. Aaah, nooo, stories!”

It was Michaela who initially suggested I turn the tales of the two Paulinis into a play, a monologue. For her as an actor it would of course be better to have Ruth narrate the whole thing, but a mother-daughter piece was also a possibility. If I could get them both to tell their stories, the piece would write itself.²⁵⁵

I now began spending an occasional night at Emilie Paulini’s. The idea that I could have at my disposal materials dealing with war, flight, looting, and rape — perhaps even with Jews and the SS — lent me a sense of strange superiority.

I began modestly by keeping track of Emilie Paulini’s routine: when she went to the toilet or to the kitchen, what she had Ruth buy for her, which noonday meals that People’s Solidarity brought her she liked and which stood in the kitchen until the next day. Her television habits were all too audible. I was sometimes awakened in the night by Emilie Paulini’s mumblings, which were indecipherable despite a very thin wall. I had to give up trying to slink up to her door because at the first creak of floorboards she would fall silent.

I never missed a Wednesday evening. Just as I had hoped I was always invited into her room, which I knew only by dim twilight, because Emilie Paulini skimped on electricity. The older any object that I could make out with Argus eyes, the more I expressed my admiration for it, in hopes of rousing the Paulinis to conversation. But there were no “prewar goods.”²⁵⁶ I was hoping for photographs, but was shown no others than the ones that stood framed on the sideboard.

I asked about Czechs, Jews, the outbreak of war. Nothing, and certainly nothing gruesome, occurred to her. By this time I was sure Emilie Paulini had realized there was some purpose behind my curiosity. She said of her husband, “They fought to the bitter end!” and burst into high laughter. I learned more in the kitchen. But Ruth’s aaah’s and nooo’s were so loud that Emilie Paulini would immediately come scurrying in from her room. Her husband had been a member of the Special Field Force, a bandog, and had been reported missing in action. Not so much as a picture of him was left. Long before her marriage and while still underage, Emilie Paulini had given birth to a son. He had grown up in an orphanage, volunteered to join the navy, been badly wounded in Norway, and in the end had died in an air raid on Bremen. Ruth had spoken about him with her mother only once. There had to be letters from him somewhere. But there was no point in asking her mother, Ruth said. The two of them couldn’t even talk about Hans, the Russian boy — but then Ruth didn’t want to talk about her half brother either.

I used index cards marked with felt pens. Black for household habits, red for Emilie Paulini’s stories, green for Ruth’s, blue for objects that arrested my interest. I hoped that at some point, by arranging themselves all on their own, so to speak, my notes would spin out my tale. Michaela read a whole stack of books about the end of World War II and swamped me with suggestions.

I had never had so much time to write as I did at the theater — we were required to be on the premises only from ten till two, and for that I got paid! And what’s more, my gross salary of nine hundred marks left me a take-home pay of seven hundred, which could only be called a princely sum.

I was in charge of the annual Christmas fairy tale, a reworking of Andersen’s Snow Queen, in which I even appeared onstage a few times as a wise raven. I waited in vain for a director the likes of Flieder.

The best productions were still those of Moritz Paulsen, who earned his living with fashion shows and who demanded extensive lighting rehearsals of two to three days. What won me over to Moritz Paulsen was his decision to turn a so-called glasnost play into a revue, the high point of which was a series of short scenes that interrupted the plot, each beginning with a shouted phrase he’d coined: “The Party flamingo!” All the actors stopped and, smiling radiantly, gazed up at an imaginary Party flamingo evidently winging its way across the stage sky. We figured we had a good chance of being closed down after the premiere. But except for an angry outburst by Jonas, the general manager — nobody was going to understand the point we were trying to make — there were only feeble protests. A teacher who had attended a performance with his class criticized us for stabbing pedagogues in the back instead of using our art to raise Party consciousness. Letters of that ilk, which we posted as trophies, remained few and far between.

You might say we were a happy family during the second Christmas we spent together. The presence of both grandmothers calmed Robert down. He spoke when spoken to and didn’t walk away when I sat down beside him to watch television.

And then, the morning of the second day of Christmas, I suddenly knew how my novella would end. I couldn’t understand why it had taken me almost three years to see it.

It must have had to do with the general mood, a mood influenced by what we were reading at the time. Michaela was busy with Eco’s Name of the Rose, and I had given Robert Tim Thaler, or Don’t Sell Your Smile as a present. Laughter was in the air, and all of a sudden Titus, the hero of my novella, could smile. Titus was no longer going to let himself be blackmailed. His suffering was replaced with irony. He had become an adult.

I was going to begin all over again, right from page one, but this time with a sure voice. Titus’s smile bathed the novella in a cheerful light and freed it from the sour tragedy of puberty.²⁵⁷

As the new year began I set to work. I couldn’t write as fast as the ideas bombarded me. And because I was now spending a good deal of time in my refuge — our Herr Türmer is always friendly and in a good mood — Emilie Paulini was a happy woman as well.

These days everyone believes that with the local elections²⁵⁸ that spring they heard the tolling of the system’s death knell. Viewed after the fact, that seems plausible.

Whereas at the university there had been major discussions about what time a student should appear at his polling place — that is, no later than fifteen minutes after it opened — no one at the theater paid any attention to elections. After Ceauşescu was awarded the Order of Karl Marx,²⁵⁹ Jonas himself had threatened to quit the Party.

Election Sunday was May weather at its finest. We got out our bikes and set out for an excursion. I can’t begin to give you any notion of the terror that used to accompany me on the way to my polling place. Or of how you always tried to conceal from yourself — just as everyone else was doing, and each well aware that he was — that your path led to the ballot box. Standing in line at the polls was like standing in a pillory.

We picnicked beside a lake near Frohburg and didn’t start back until well into the afternoon, when hardly any voters were still out and about. We had just stretched out when the doorbell rang. Robert answered. I thought it was his friend Falk. A woman and a man wanted to speak with us, Robert said. We got dressed again.

I felt up for a fight! I would take care of the matter with a few explicit words.

The woman was around fifty and was bouncing up and down on our landing as if on a diving board. Her bright red lipstick held an old smile in place. He was in his mid-thirties, had scraggly yolk yellow hair, and wore a black leather jacket. In order to prop his left elbow casually on the railing he had to lean ridiculously to one side. A ballpoint pen was thrust up out of his fist. He was holding a satchel in his right hand.

He spoke, she observed our game of Q-and-A.

No, I said, we had no intention of heading for the polling place before six o’clock, no, our reason had nothing to do with local politics, no, we didn’t know the people on the ballot, they didn’t interest us, we had a very different notion of what an election is.

I worked hard telling myself not to smile. But first Michaela and then the yolk-haired fellow himself began to grin. And even the woman tried to no avail to prevent her bright red lips from breaking into a smile. By now his elbow had slipped off the railing.

Did they need any other information, Michaela asked in such a friendly voice that it sounded as if she were offering them a glass of water. No, he said, they had no further questions. They were grateful for our being so candid with them, and they could now inform the polling place that the volunteer staff wouldn’t have to stay on and that the mobile ballot box needn’t stop by at our place.

“Well then, your visit hasn’t been completely in vain,” I said. And Michaela added, “So at least you can enjoy the rest of your Sunday.”—“Ah, wish we could,” Herr Yolk-Yellow exclaimed, laughing and rapping his satchel with his pen. We came close to extending our hands in farewell.

Michaela had to calm down Robert, who had been listening and was afraid he would be called out of class at school because of us. He was crying, threw himself on his bed and shouted, “Why can’t you be like everybody else?” When the doorbell rang again, he cringed. This time it was his friend Falk.

I’m not sure I can make you understand. But the wretchedness of one side made the wretchedness of the other all the more obvious. From that day on I was overcome with a sense of absolute futility. Wasn’t it absurd to sit down to work on my novella again? Wasn’t it a kind of unintentional parody? Just as in the scene on the landing, everything took on an undertone that provoked laughter. Every accentuation ended up vacuous, every gesture, every protest was superfluous. And my cool observer’s eye seemed equally incongruous. It was the most ridiculous thing of all, the purest kitsch.²⁶⁰

I sat down at my Rhinemetall and hammered away. I didn’t comprehend what I was writing. But I did suspect that it no longer had anything to do with literature.

It was a kind of farewell; I was driving myself out of paradise. Or maybe I should say, was driving it out of myself — sacrificing my individuality, my own distinctive voice, to the extent that I had ever had one.

I thought what I was doing was a necessary infliction of self-punishment. And by doing so, I was castigating all the others, the whole country, the whole system. What I was fabricating here was crap, but I, this nation, this society deserved nothing but crap. Maybe, I thought, this was a little like what Duchamp had felt in declaring his urinal to be a work of art. Just as he was perhaps tortured by the certainty that he could never again pick up a brush, never step up to his easel or smell the paints on his palette — that’s what this eruption felt like to me. It was a brutal exorcism I felt forced to perform. With each sentence of my election story, of my primitive fecal orgy, I was moving farther and farther away from Arcadia.²⁶¹

I was outraged not by the revolting and disgusting facts, but by the realization that these revolting and disgusting facts could no longer be communicated in any traditional way, as if every attempt to tell the truth and to call lies “lies” made distinguishing among them all the more difficult.

For me the massacre on Tiananmen Square in Peking²⁶² was above all a signal that the world would remain just as it was. That it would roll along like this for an eternity. I had not expected anything else, or had I? I couldn’t understand why such horrible news left me with a sense of relief.

During the summer theater break we loaded a tent into the car and drove to Bulgaria. In Achtopol on the Black Sea — where Robert burst into tears when he saw a dolphin stranded on the beach — I was struck with the idea of using Nikolai Ostrowski’s How Steel Is Tempered²⁶³ as the basis for a truly caustic work.

What all had actually happened that summer didn’t become clear to me until the start of the new season. We in dramaturgy laid bets as to who would be returning to work and who had already exited. Max, our Jean, and his family had traveled to Hungary. He was generally viewed as the favorite for clearing out. Max returned too late to attend the opening general meeting and couldn’t understand why he was greeted so effusively in the lobby. It was a strange mixture of joy and disappointment — yes, maybe there was even a little disdain involved too, as if people had expected more of him.

At the same time Michaela and I had been having arguments, or better, disagreements. Although Michaela had now turned thirty-five, we wanted a child of our own.²⁶⁴ It used to be, she said, that it was a relief to see the blood, but nowadays she just got more depressed every time. Each new menstruation ended up as a reproach to me. Michaela insisted I get a checkup. I found that humiliating, but to have argued the point would only have made things worse. The checkup was exactly how I’d pictured it. I stood there in a toilet cubicle reeking of disinfectants and suddenly didn’t even know what woman I was supposed to be fantasizing about. A week later I handed Michaela my certificate. “Funny,” she said, and that was her only comment about the matter.

Your Enrico T.

Monday, May 21, ’90

Dear Jo,

Gale warnings were sounded here early this morning. Waiting at the door were Black and Blond, two policemen I recognized. I asked if they wanted to search our apartment.²⁶⁵ “Last night,” they said without any change of facial expression, “someone broke into your newspaper.”

Black and Blond weren’t authorized to give me any further information, including an answer to the most crucial question: Were the computers still there?

I would have loved to hug and kiss that big screen. I turned on one machine after the other as if inquiring after their health, and stood there happy amid the humming. Everything else, I thought, is secondary. The metal cabinet in my office had been broken open, Ilona’s box containing last Friday’s cash take was missing — not more than three hundred marks. In Fred and Kurt’s office the petty cash had been plundered. It all looked more like a prank by some kids. Black and Blond took their leave.

We should be glad they found something, the detective said. Upstairs they had pulled drawers out and left Jörg’s, Marion’s, and Pringel’s manuscripts strewn across the floor.

I asked about Käferchen and her husband. The detective didn’t understand my question — we already knew each other from the police page, a squat fellow with a handshake like a vice and eyes like portholes.

We groped our way up the dark stairwell. The detective kept stumbling on the uneven and badly worn stairs. I searched for the doorbell by the flame of his lighter. The door was unlocked, but could be pressed open only a crack. He held the light up to the door frame. “Crowbar,” he said. The lock itself dangled loose. I called out Käferchen’s name, two, three times. In reply came — my blood froze! — I have to put it this way: an inhuman howl. Even the detective winced.

I didn’t recognize the old man’s voice at first. I shouted my name. The old man bellowed. “Butchers! Oooh youuu fouuul butchers!” The old man cursed us as bandits too.

With the help of two more cops we managed to get the door open, shoving the wardrobe to one side. The old man came at us with an ax, the lighter went out. All the same, the two cops managed to grab hold of him. I heard the ax sliding down the stairs.

The old man gave off an awful stench. He kept rasping his gruesome “Butchers!” in an almost toneless voice and threatened to wring our necks.

Frau Schorba pushed me into the computer room and offered me one of her green tranquilizers. She had arrived at seven o’clock and had reacted perfectly as per guidelines — back in Lucka she had been given instructions on how to handle a break-in.

Through the window I could see the flashing blue light. Shortly afterward I heard the old man’s voice as he and Käferchen were brought downstairs.

We set out on a tour with the team of detectives. Each of us had to say what was missing or damaged at their workstation. At first I thought I had come off scot-free. But then I could hardly believe it: the photograph of Robert, Michaela, and me had vanished. It had been lying among my papers. The burglars had dealt with Ilona’s framed family portrait by tossing it to the floor and stomping on the glass. Then they had dumped the contents of her “opera bag” over it. Surely I knew, she sobbed, what that meant. She was talking about the mirror. Ilona is superstitious. It’s seven years of bad luck, I explained to her, only if you break the mirror yourself. She shook her head, no, no, that’s not how it is.

The burglars had got in through the hardware store’s only window to the courtyard. The cash register had been emptied and was still open. Evidently they had been looking just for money — the only other thing missing was a mixer. There were crowbar scars in our space as well. Hardly neat work, the shorter detective said disparagingly. I couldn’t keep my eyes off his hands. He had more strength in two fingers than I did in my whole arm. Although the cup was hot, he held it like a mug, but with his pinkie sticking out. He is the older of the two, but evidently ranks lower. He always lets his partner through the door first. Even when I offered him coffee, he waited for his partner to say yes. His boss seems unsure of himself, is always quick to agree with us or laugh at some remark, while not a muscle stirs in Shorty’s face. He nodded, however, when his boss suggested it didn’t take much imagination to picture what they had done to the two old folks. Käferchen, he said, had been lying there wrapped in a sheet, whimpering. “It’s a disaster uptop” Shorty said, “Everything busted to smithereens.” The grandfather clock had been knocked over, the blanket shredded. How those oldsters had managed to push that wardrobe in front of the door is still a mystery.

The two detectives were just about to take their leave when Jörg arrived. They extended their hands to him too. But instead of shaking hands, he took a step back. Shorty said something to the effect that we had set up cozy offices here in this old ramshackle place — a harmless remark, it seemed to me.

He’d do better to refrain from such comments, Jörg responded with an icy stare, then shrouded himself in silence until they had left.

He was not going to put up with such insinuations, he exploded. And why had I let somebody like that sit down at a desk? I said that I had often sat at a desk with those two and that I’d had no other choice, because otherwise I would have had to stand to fill out a report they were filing solely on our behalf.

Jörg thought the remark had insinuated something about our office furniture. He had met these same two guys during the occupation of Stasi headquarters and had assumed they were both Stasi themselves. The whole bunch had been on a first-name basis. Only gradually had he realized that he was talking with a prosecutor and police detectives, and that the ones who kept their mouths closed belonged to the Stasi. “I mean,” he corrected himself, “officially belonged.” And it was in fact ironfisted Shorty who had accused him, Jörg, of being aggressive. Jörg was not about to let himself be calmed down.

Marion leads him around by her apron strings. Last week he admitted to me that ever since the day Piatkowski visited our offices, he’s been trying to write an article about him.²⁶⁶ “Winners Can Be Insufferable” is to be the headline. But the moment he sees that headline in front of him, he goes totally blank. No sentence, no phrase that he doesn’t immediately strike. He feels like a fly banging against a windowpane, over and over — even though the article is a matter of self-respect for him, of self-respect and independence.

Then we shouldn’t have agreed to buy the building, I said. Yes, Jörg replied, it wasn’t appropriate, and he hadn’t actually agreed to it. What was that supposed to mean, I asked. He couldn’t say really, and it wasn’t intended as criticism of me — he’d been happy about it himself, as I could see at the time, and he wasn’t trying to offer excuses by blaming the baron. “But it isn’t right, it isn’t right.”

“The voters elected Piatkowski,” I said. “He’s justified in claiming that at any rate.”

He understood that, he rejoined. But he can’t bear it when someone like Piatkowski floats right back up to the top, that really cheapens everything else. Doesn’t it? He just wanted to pose the question — at least that, a question.

“What are we supposed to do with people like those detectives? ‘Send the Stasi to the mines’ only works in socialism,”²⁶⁷ I said. I helped him tidy things up.

Jörg is a man full of scruples. After we published our scandal issue he was afraid that Meurer, the school director, whom he had attacked in his article, might become suicidal. Which is why he was happy when he spotted him on the street. Meurer, however, doesn’t know what Jörg actually looks like. People here in town really are afraid of Jörg. I likewise profit from his reputation.

I had to force myself to sit down at my own desk and get back to work. I would have loved to have asked the Catholic priest — he had accompanied the baron to “entrust” us with an article about the Altenburg hand reliquary — to move from room to room with his censer, cleansing everything with the proper ritual. Ilona once again burst into tears when the priest spoke a few comforting words to her. From hour to hour she was getting more and more wrought up over something that she herself couldn’t actually say what it was. Frau Schorba was filling in for Ilona after having sent her back to the kitchen, where I could hear her sobbing. Astrid the wolf loped from room to room sniffing excitedly, as if following a trail. I drove Ilona home. We drank some more coffee in her kitchen. She couldn’t stop talking about herself — for example, about how at age eighteen, after only a few months of marriage, she had been ready to throw herself in front of a train.

When I got back, Kurt — who normally doesn’t say a word — asked if I’d had a nice time at Ilona’s and gave me a nod, a thoroughly approving nod.

I first noticed Kurt wearing one of the bombastic watches that the baron had brought a whole boxful of. They say an authentic original costs hundreds if not thousands of dollars, but the baron gets them for just nine marks apiece. They’re intended as an incentive for new subscribers. Anyone who subscribes to the Altenburg Weekly prior to July 1st and pays 45.90 marks in advance gets a watch — while the supply lasts.

The problem is we need to provide ourselves with a little buffer so we can get past July. If just a thousand people respond to the offer that would come to 45,900 marks, minus nine thousand for the watches.

By evening the locksmith had got all the doors more or less back to normal. We had him repair the old folks’ door at the same time.

Hugs, Your Enrico

PS: I spent two hours running the figures yesterday and put together a paper with my ten theses that I want to hand out tomorrow. We have to act. If we just keep on going as we have up till now, we’re done for. Marion — who reproaches me for having accepted an ad from South Africa

²⁶⁸

— thinks that polishing doorknobs to get ads is demeaning, yes, humanly degrading for anyone, especially women. It borders on prostitution. I of all people should be able to sense the discrepancy between what is of importance to us — which is why we put out a newspaper at all — and what it is I’m planning. When I said nothing, she kept at it: Could I imagine that kind of door-to-door promoter on a stage or in a novel as anything but a wretched character. I don’t know if she noticed her mistake

²⁶⁹

as she said it or if she now fell silent because Manuela

²⁷⁰

had appeared in the door, beaming.

Ascension Day, May 24, ’90

Dear Nicoletta,

I do so hope that my ruminations about my need to write aren’t boring you. But my weal and woe depended on my writing. For if writing was a blunder, then I was a blunder.

By writing one reassures oneself of the world — it’s a platitude, but I filled it with life. As long as there are blasphemers, we needn’t worry about God. In my case that meant: as long as I succeeded in raging with a pure heart, something out there must exist — big game, monstrosities, socialism as it really exists, the Other, or whatever you want to call it.

You can see what thin ice I was already moving across. Security was reduced to a pure heart. Call it, if you like, a sense of style, or a regard for what was appropriate.

Michaela found my grotesque brain children amusing, but didn’t take them all that seriously and continued to torment me with suggestions for my Paulini piece. Geronimo never mentioned them. Vera, on the other hand, sent me a congratulatory telegram. She thought that precisely by abandoning my self, my ego, I would find my way to a unique position. I had, she said, discovered a shortcut on the road to fame and eternity. I’m afraid she still believes that. Just early last January she assured me that I am a player in an “immortal game.” My art, and it alone, was worth living and suffering for — she had long since staked her own life on just that, on her brother’s talent.²⁷¹

Despair alternated with euphoria. Eureka! I cried jubilantly, convinced that I had developed and radicalized my method. (Sitting on the john I discovered too late that there was no toilet paper and reached for a newspaper close at hand. As I departed, I noticed that one article had been torn on an angle and was missing its conclusion. What was left was a series of lines, each shorter than the previous and concluding in mutilated words that yielded a throttled stammer I found touching. The penultimate line ended with a “hear,” the last line with a “t.” I would never have been able consciously to achieve so convincing a linguistic disintegration of persons, things, and ideas as had inadvertently emerged here. When I typed it out, maintaining the same length of lines, what I finally pulled from my typewriter was a page that looked like a poem.) But no sooner did I have my effort in hand than I sank back into melancholy. What would such reductionism get me?

That was two days before the Hungarians opened their borders.²⁷² Until that point I had ignored the Hungarian vacationers as best I could. I don’t know what I had expected, maybe a compromise that would allow them to return, but never that the borders would be opened. A permanent gap in the wall was unimaginable. Michaela said we had to toast the event. And so Robert drank his first glass of wine to the health of the Hungarians. “Maybe,” Michaela said, “something will come of West Berlin after all.”

I didn’t correct her, because her failure to understand seemed too fundamental to me.

Norbert Maria Richter, the director of Nestroy’s Freedom in Gotham, was trying at the time to have me replaced as dramaturge. Our differences were, he said, unbridgeable.

As far back as June, Norbert Maria Richter had wanted to turn the play into a kind Knights of the Roundtable,²⁷³ a farce about a betrayed revolution, about revolutionaries turned nabobs, about history and how they prettify it by remembering lies. And all of it with lots of glitter and show.

And now, in September, Norbert Maria Richter thought he could see in the piece the spirit of revolution.

Precisely because it was this Norbert Maria Richter who told me about the founding of the New Forum — calling it “a significant step in the direction of democratizing our society”—I wanted nothing to do with it.

Nevertheless that same day Ramona, one of my colleagues, laid a couple of filled-out applications for membership in the New Forum on my desk. Michaela had promised her to take them along to a contact address in Halle.

I had no choice; I likewise had to fill out a form with my name and address. I knew what a stupid move it was, what childishness. Now I was playing “opposition” too. And sooner or later I would be shown this same form during an interrogation.

Michaela, on the other hand, wasn’t acting like someone risking her own existence and the future happiness of her child, but more like someone who had finally found the right role in the right theater.

The last Monday in September, the day on which we were supposed to drive to Halle, I couldn’t find the applications in my pocket. I ransacked my desk at the theater — but didn’t dare let my colleagues notice what I was up to. The idea that in my negligence I might have put Michaela and the others in jeopardy was unbearable.

I drove home, I could barely speak. “Gone,” I panted, “the applications are gone.”

Michaela had taken them out of my pocket to write down the addresses of the others.

As we drove along we saw several police cars, but even the highly unlikely possibility that we — Robert was with us — could have been waved out of the car and searched had lost all its terror.

Michaela was glad to make the acquaintance of someone named Bohley, evidently a relative of Bärbel Bohley.²⁷⁴ Except for a functioning doorbell and a nameplate on the mailbox, nothing suggested that the house was still occupied. The whole block looked as if it had been designated for demolition. Michaela was disappointed. We decided to come back later and drove to the center of town. We ran up and down the market square and ordered the most expensive ice-cream concoctions at a milk bar. We tried to describe for Robert what Feininger’s painting of the cathedral looks like; we extended our walk to the Moritzburg and then down to the Saale River. Michaela didn’t want to visit the Albert Ebert²⁷⁵ house or buy shoes, although she saw some she liked. She didn’t want to appear on the Bohley doorstep with a shopping parcel.²⁷⁶

We had no luck this time either. Application forms in hand, Michaela hesitated, looking first at me, then at Robert, and back to me, as if wanting to give us a final chance to stop her from doing something stupid. Or was her point to consecrate the moment in some way, because from now on nothing would be as it had been before? The slips of paper vanished soundlessly into the mailbox.

We hardly talked to one another in the car. On the highway from Leipzig to Borna I felt as if I had finally put something behind me for good. I hadn’t weaseled out, I had signed — and I wouldn’t deny it or take it back — and had sacrificed half a day doing it. I felt as if this justified me to go ahead calmly with my work. Even in the midst of that lunar landscape, even in Espenhain, the gentleness of that autumn was palpable. I thought of the smoke of burning potato plants after the harvest, of hiking the Saubach Valley near Dresden, all the way to the mill with its giant waterwheel, of country roads littered with windfall fruit, leaving you drunk on the scent of overripe apples and plums, on air quivering with wasps. I thought of the first home games at Dynamo Stadium, of the Königstein Fortress and the taste of bockwurst and herbed cider. My Dresden novella reminded me of some favorite book I hadn’t read for a long, long time.

The next day it was Jonas, our general manager, who told me — as if he had just accidentally happened to have been there — about Leipzig. There had been ten thousand people, ten thousand demonstrators! I would gladly have believed his fairy tale that they were all applicants²⁷⁷ —but ten thousand was too many, far too many.

Michaela told me that cameras had been set up on the roof of the Leipzig post office. She repeated everything Max had told her as if to say, “And what were you doing while this was going on? Where were you?”²⁷⁸

What I found so ridiculous about the demonstration was its “workaday” quality. One conscientiously does one’s job, then it’s off to demonstrate, but not for too long, because one wishes to report punctually and with renewed energy for work the next morning.

On Wednesday Michaela bought a new radio.

Norbert Maria Richter had scheduled an evening rehearsal for the next Monday. Michaela took this to be an alibi, a pro forma announcement. To judge from Norbert Maria Richter’s behavior and the way he had reacted to Max’s descriptions, the crew could only assume he would be the first to take off for Leipzig. Norbert Maria Richter, however, had no such intention whatever. Michaela called him a shifty bastard. Anything anyone wished to say, Norbert Maria Richter remarked, could best be said onstage. The latitude of the stage was a privilege to be used for the benefit of the audience — a responsibility that must be respected and not cavalierly misused.

Those who would play at rebellion, Petrescu allegedly interposed in best Stanislavsky tradition, could and ought not shirk from studying it. It would be a betrayal of one’s duty as an honest actor not to make full use of this opportunity. Otherwise some lovely day we, the people of the theater, would find ourselves being instructed by the audience as to what rebellion and revolution look like. Norbert Maria Richter spoke of being considerate of those who thought differently about the matter and of how necessary it was at precisely this juncture to maintain discipline and, by good work, demonstrate one’s irreproachability.

Michaela declared she would report in sick. As we listened to the news about the refugees in the Prague embassy, we fell silent, and Michaela made a gesture whose message was: There, you can hear for yourself, we have to go to Leipzig!

Monday noon Michaela appeared in the dramaturgy office. She just wanted to tell us that no one was going to Leipzig. There she stood, Miss Eberhard Ultra, our revolutionary in chief, in her leg and ankle warmers, a scarf flung over her shoulder. “It’s all so absurd,” she said, “I’m so ashamed.”

“Then I’ll go alone,” I said, as if that were the only possible reply.

Of course I had no real desire to. But to have missed the whole thing would have been reprehensible. If there was ever going to be a second demonstration, then it would be on that Monday, the last one before October 7th.²⁷⁹

No sooner had I said it than Michaela decided she didn’t want me to go. She kept going on about Krenz, about how he had just got back from China — and everybody knew what that meant.²⁸⁰

They couldn’t just take aim and mow down ten thousand people, I replied, at least not in Leipzig, and they couldn’t arrest them all either. I concluded by telling her I’d leave the car somewhere near Bavaria Station — and handed her the second set of keys.

We said good-bye, and Michaela actually appeared then on the balcony and waved as I drove off.

The sunlight was dazzling, late-summer warmth lay like a heavenly blessing over the day. The landscape in the rearview mirror was the paradise to which — after this final ordeal, filled with countless observations and sensations — I would be returning.

By four o’clock I was in the German Library, where I ordered up a couple of books on Nestroy and found an empty desk in the reading room. The lamp didn’t work, but that didn’t bother me; on the contrary. I was content just to be able to sit here in this asylum, aboard this ark.

Before me lay the script of Freedom in Gotham. When I pushed my sleeve up past my watch, my cold fingers felt like the touch of a stranger.

I figured I would be revealing my intentions if I were to leave at five on the dot. So I had hung on for a few more minutes, asked about the books I’d ordered, and then went to the restroom. Who knew when I’d have another opportunity.

After parking the car near Bavaria Station and stashing my Polish leather briefcase in the trunk, I slung an empty bag around my wrist as if I were going shopping.

At a pedestrian stoplight I ran into Patrick, Norbert Maria Richter’s assistant director. “Playing hooky?” The question just slipped out. He replied like a student caught in the act and avoided my gaze. He introduced the woman beside him as his fiancée, Ellen.

We were walking past the Gewandhaus when I heard the first chanted slogans. I couldn’t make them out. “Stasi raus!” Patrick repeated like someone forced to quote something embarrassing. He couldn’t have said it more softly.

Ellen was free only until seven o’clock. She had a piano lesson in Connewitz²⁸¹ at eight. The two of them discussed whether — and if so, when — streetcars would be running again. Even if she had to go on foot, Patrick said, a quarter till eight would work, otherwise she’d miss the best part. I figured it was inappropriate to ask what he thought the “best part” was.

I checked out everyone close by, from head to toe. Like an overeager dog, I let my eyes wander from one to the next, because now — it was a little before six, in the vicinity of St. Nicholas Church — there could be no one who was actually here to shop or simply on his way home from work.

Although close to the Krochhaus now, I saw no indication of anything overwhelming, although the chanting of slogans never stopped.

On the square in front of St. Nicholas people were standing shoulder to shoulder. Unable to move ahead, we craned our necks. That was quite enough for me. Ellen, however, was able to twist and wriggle her way through the crowd. People yielded to her as if she were a waitress. She would have made it even farther if Patrick hadn’t run into an acquaintance. Without exchanging names, we shook hands.

I stood on my tiptoes. I don’t even know anymore how I came to recognize the group shouting those outrageous words. Was there more light there? Were their arms raised? I can no longer match the image I still have today with what I saw that day on the square in front of St. Nicholas. All of it — the people, the twilight, the warm air, the underground current that flowed from that group — seems like a dream or a vision to me now.

Instead of registering each detail, each vibration, I felt less and less. All the same I was convinced I was experiencing a historical moment. Even if the partylike mood were to vanish in the next moment — the square would be easy to block off — this nevertheless would have been the biggest protest since 1953. People would soon recall October 2nd in much the same way they remembered June 17th.

As the crowd pressed tighter together in the twilight, the chants spread more quickly.

I was prepared to acknowledge and admire as our alpha animals those at the epicenter who invented and struck up chants. But did they truly believe they could change things?

The call of “Sanction New Forum” was a little work of metrical art, whose last three syllables pounded like a fist against a door. It touched me in some unique way, as if those squawkers were fighting for me, for legalizing my membership. The chorus’s chants bounced off the facades. It took people on the periphery a while to notice that those at the center had fallen silent or struck up a new slogan. “Sanction New Forum!” Patrick’s friend bellowed directly beside us. I admit — I felt embarrassed. Although he had done his part, I could not bring myself to utter something like that.

In the same moment they shouted their first “Let’s move out!” I thought I heard the trample of boots — it was just a flock of pigeons taking off from a roof. I would have loved to move out — the people nearest me had already taken up the chant — but we were stuck in the middle of it all. And in the next moment Ellen and Patrick had vanished without a trace.

Inside the pedestrian zone there was almost no way to tell where the demonstration ended and everyday life began. It was equally unclear in what direction the demonstration was going to move.

Hoping to find Patrick and Ellen again, I pressed up against a display window. And only then did it finally hit me: this is a demonstration, people are demonstrating here. I only needed to take a couple of steps forward and then keep putting one foot in front of the other. So it’s that easy to take part in an illegal demonstration, I thought.

I can no longer say how we made it to the train station, whether we had veered off before we got to the opera or not until Ring Strasse itself. Later images are superimposed on earlier ones. I can still see us with buildings on either side, in front of display windows, making us look like a second demonstration waiting to merge with the main column. A banner that when folded up was no bigger than a switchyard flag was passed along over our heads. “Travel Visa to Pisa.” I saw this as a clever way to smudge the fingerprints left on the sticks. Just as it was my turn to reach out my arm and grab one end of it, the cry of “Gorby, Gorby” swept over us in chorus. I looked at my feet and hoped that that one would soon be over.

I had to talk myself into walking out onto the streetcar tracks. All trams had been halted. One driver had crossed his arms and with a blank expression was staring directly down at me. “Join with us!”²⁸² was the next chant. People in the lighted car pressed their foreheads to the windowpanes, watching us as if we were characters in some boring movie. “Join with us!” It’s hardly likely you would recognize the song — we’d had to sing it in music class — and the refrain goes, “So left, two, three, so left, two three / Find your place, good comrades / Join with us in the Workers’ Front / Cause you’re a working man too!” That’s where it had come from, this “Join with us!” of theirs. Banal, isn’t it?²⁸³

Then came the cordon of special-alert police. I showed you the spot where they blocked the street. I instinctively moved toward the side. To me it looked like an all-too-obvious “step-into-our-trap.” The crowd marched straight ahead, pushing its front rows practically into the arms of the cordon. And all of a sudden — just like in the square in front of St. Nicholas Church, which they never should have let us leave — the whole scene could be taken in with one sweeping glance. They were sure to correct their mistake now.

On a high curb to my left stood a frail elderly woman with arms crooked at the elbows, half ballerina, half supplicant. The reason for her pose became clear to me only after I noticed she was holding leashes, at the ends of which two poodles were leaping about excitedly.

Written in lights above a new building that worked like an extension of the blockade was the announcement: “Bienvenue,” “Welcome,” “Dobro poshalovat”—greetings from another time when there were more pleasant things to do than stand in the street with thousands of others, shouting slogans until you were hoarse and waiting for backup units of the special alert police. There were hardly any lights in the windows. Were the people inside standing behind drawn curtains, sitting at their evening meal, or in front of a television? I envied them. The Astoria, the train station — their lighted billboards worked like the backdrop to some familiar play against which a new sketch was being rehearsed between performances.

To this day I still don’t actually know why we just stood there, why we didn’t move around the cordon or set off in a totally different direction. Weren’t we demonstrators just asking the powers of the state to encircle us? Or had our little stroll first found its meaning in this row of uniformed men?

I had seen and heard enough. I took my first steps in the direction of freedom, when at my back the cry went up, “Shame on you! Shame on you!” The third “Shame on you!”—yes, I was ashamed of such a childish chant — was earsplitting and drove the poodles crazy. They barked and got tangled up in their leashes. Suddenly one jumped at me, I could feel its claws through my pants. The woman didn’t react. She even let the leash out as I pulled back, and brazenly stared me in the face. Her mustache was especially thick at the corners of her mouth. The woman turned away only as the “Shame on you!” began to ebb. She had a limp, the poodles obediently followed her — by some miracle their leashes had untangled themselves.

If I was going to stay, at least I wanted to see something, and so I tried to press as far to the front as I could. People were helpful, calling out to those ahead by name or tapping them on the shoulder. I moved very slowly, trying not to upset anyone, especially after a man, almost still a boy, cringed and fell silent in the middle of his chant.

When I finally saw the cordon of uniformed men linked arm in arm directly before me — as far as I could tell they were unarmed — I couldn’t understand why we had let them stop us. They were ciphers compared to us. The faces under their billed caps lay in shadows. It was difficult to make out any expression.

In the narrow corridor that separated demonstrators and police three young women were running back and forth — or better, pubescent girls. Two of them blew a bubble, both at once, then smacked away at their gum with open mouths and laughed defiantly — they wanted everyone to see what fun they were having. In their white-splattered jeans they came across as both vulgar and charming. Why were they being allowed to carry on like that? And apart from me they appeared to be the only ones not joining in the chants.

Then the girls came to a halt in an almost classic contrapposto, hands on hips or an arm thrown around a girlfriend’s shoulder, and pretended to strike up a chat with someone they knew in the cordon.

I missed the crucial move. You’ll say I’m fantasizing, but I did hear the silence that announced the deed. It was like a great pause, the kind we know from nature, that moment when day and night collide and all creation falls silent for a few heartbeats. The silence caused me to look around — people were looking up, something was whirling above our heads — the cap fell with a smack! as its bill struck the asphalt, tipped over, and lay there upside down not five feet from me. Before I could decipher the name on it, one of the girls grabbed the cap and flung it over her shoulder high into the air again.

Her face was like a miniature portrait, hung at the far end of the world, but in perfect focus. I saw it all at once: the cap rotating on its axis, the head of a black-haired lad, the motion of the girl, and the witnesses frozen in place. What bewildered me most was the bare head, the black hair plastered to it, the forehead with white welts²⁸⁴ cut across it.

And now the second girl fished with one hand for the cap of a tall fellow and instantly tossed it into the air. Her other hand was casually thrust into her jeans pocket. This time the cap landed behind me. I picked it up. “Jürgen Salwitzky”²⁸⁵ was printed on the slip of paper under a plastic strip. The first cheers came now from the rear. Jürgen Salwitzky — he too with welts across his forehead — watched his cap go flying again. Before I could give it back to him, it had been wrenched from my hand like booty to which I was not entitled.

The jubilation that greeted each flying cap competed with cries of “No violence!” I couldn’t understand what the uniformed men were waiting for. What still had to happen?

The third girl twirled a billed cap around and around on her head.

Jürgen Salwitzky and his two bareheaded comrades now looked like the prisoners of the men in caps to their right and left.

The chants of “No violence!” had died away. The demonstrators wanted to see more caps, and a few brave souls snapped up a trophy. It was easy game. With their arms linked the only thing the uniformed men could do was throw their heads back and stare at the bandit’s hand with a mixture of rage and fear.

But people had grown used to all this. Which was why it came as a relief when a young fellow climbed up on something and gave a brief speech. We shouldn’t let ourselves be provoked, but go home now, and return next Monday, each of us bringing a friend, a colleague, a neighbor along. We had achieved a victory today, a victory that we could be proud of. The applause was sparse.

He waited, as if he intended to resume his speech or answer questions, but since nothing occurred either to him or anyone else, he vanished again into the crowd.

How easily I could have taken on that same role. But I would have said something quite different. My speech of indictment and rebellion had been lying at the ready inside me for years. A little courage, a bit of climbing skill, would have sufficed to accomplish something historical at such a moment.

I was among the first to leave, and saw how small the world of the demonstrators was, how few strides it took to return to familiar scenery, to the old play of which we had grown so fond.²⁸⁶

I got home shortly after nine. Robert had been waiting for Michaela, not me. At any rate his door closed again before I had caught sight of him. Michaela could hardly conceal her disappointment at my report, which ended up pallid and monosyllabic, as if I had been the one who played hooky. She may well have secretly doubted I had even been in Leipzig.

As I lay in bed I couldn’t help thinking about what we had been taught in school, about how the workers in the GDR didn’t need to strike or demonstrate, because anyone who took to the streets in a socialist state was ultimately demonstrating against himself. That turn of phrase was a perfect description of my situation. As a writer, that was exactly what I was doing. I was demonstrating for the end of my material, my theme. I don’t think I need to explain that any further to you. What was I, as a writer, going to do without a wall?

Fondly as always,

Your Enrico

Friday, May 25, ’90

Dear Nicoletta,

At the time I found it difficult to talk about those hours I had spent in Leipzig, but what was already in the past was no longer of interest to anyone else either. Michaela, who barely tolerated someone in the hall when she was sitting on the toilet, now began to leave the door ajar so she could still listen to the radio. We bought another radio when the border to Czechoslovakia was sealed.²⁸⁷ I had been expecting the trap to snap shut, but not before October 7th. Michaela was triumphant — the bankruptcy could not become more obvious, the opposing fronts more clearly marked. Her greatest disdain was for those who only now gave vent to their criticism and outrage.

It wasn’t easy to find words to counter Michaela’s euphoria. Without the windbreak of October 7th, I said, people could never have pushed things this far. The demonstrators had had a nose for the few days when they could count on easy treatment. The upcoming anniversary was the only possible explanation for such restraint. But now, earlier than I had expected, the game of cat and mouse had begun. Step by step, bit by bit, the end was drawing near.

I asked Michaela to hold back. Within ten days at the latest we’d be living under martial law. Or did she perhaps believe they would be impressed by our slogans and abdicate voluntarily? Why else did she suppose they had their State Security, their police, special forces, army?

My arguments seemed to me so cogent that ultimately it wasn’t just Michaela who was daunted by them, I was afraid myself.

And yet, my dear Nicoletta, that is at best only half the truth. These letters will not have been in vain only if you believe me when I say that above all else I felt a sense of relief, even a certain cheerfulness.

I would like nothing better than to break off my confession at this point. But my descent has not yet come to an end.

I had hardly anything to do at the theater and so I often sat in on the Nestroy rehearsals. Michaela was playing, as I noted before, Frau Eberhard Ultra. Ultimately it was no longer a role. Day by day she was playing herself more and more.

A description of those rehearsals would more than suffice to characterize the period. It would serve as a kind of chronicle, even without ingredients like demonstrations and police deployments: from the initial discussions of May and June, when Norbert Maria Richter had still regarded the piece as a kind of lampoon of functionaries and their revolutionary blather, to the excitement of early September, when the concept was to stage the idea that revolution is possible, on into October, when the production grew triter and triter with each passing day, because the street was always a good two steps ahead of the stage, until the point when — but I don’t want to get ahead of myself.

Michaela couldn’t be talked out of traveling to Berlin that Saturday,²⁸⁸ just as she did every year, for Thea’s birthday. I thought it was absurd for us to be separated on the very weekend when the die would be cast. She couldn’t turn Thea down, and they needed to stay in contact, especially now. Besides which, I was invited too. Even though she really didn’t want me to come along. Robert and I took her to the train on Saturday. She leaned out the window and waved, as if saying good-bye for weeks. Then I delivered Robert to Michaela’s mother in Torgau, where he was to spend the night.

On the way back I was able to gas up in Borna without a long wait. Once home, however, being all alone felt like unhappiness weighing down on me. I drove to the autobahn on-ramp, from there it was only sixty-five miles to Dresden.

Do you remember the trains carrying the refugees from the Prague embassy? I heard on the news that there had been scenes of tumult at the Dresden Central Station. Everyone who wanted out had tried to get to those trains.

I had last spoken with my mother on Wednesday, and it had sounded as if she was too frightened or cautious to talk about any of it on the clinic telephone.

On October 7th, however, it was all about Berlin and Gorbachev and what would happen on Monday in Leipzig. While I drove I listened to early music, some famous Neapolitan whose name I didn’t really try to remember, but even Bach reworked some of his stuff.²⁸⁹ Listening to the arias and duets a sense of calm came over me for the first time in months, as if these chords were setting the world and me as well back on a familiar track. But that mood didn’t last long.

After ringing my mother’s bell and waiting a while, I unlocked the door. As I pulled back the curtain separating the small vestibule from the hallway I smelled the odor of my childhood. The cup in the sink was half filled with water, no traces of lipstick on the rim. Bread crumbs were floating on the plate under it, a dark substance had dried on the knife, liverwurst or plum butter. The pot scrubber was full of grains of rice and stank just a bit.

I walked to the telephone booth and called the clinic. A nurse I didn’t know answered. Judging by the voice, she had to be very young. Frau Türmer wasn’t available at the moment. I asked how long the operation would last. She couldn’t say. I asked her to tell my mother that I would see her at the clinic. At first I thought the nurse had hung up, but then I learned my mother wasn’t on duty this weekend, and so wasn’t even at the clinic.

I called Geronimo. His line was busy. I called Thea. One of her little girls picked up the receiver, but before I could say a word, she shouted, “Nobody home!” and hung up. Geronimo was still on the phone. I walked to the little round bastion in the park with its monument to Theodor Körner, and then tried a third time, again with no luck.

When I got back home lights were on in the living room. I stormed up the stairs, unlocked the door, gave a shout, ran to the living room, where I stood for a while listening to the tick of the wall clock and finally turned off the light. I walked from room to room, made a second round, turned on the heat, and finally sat down in the kitchen. I wasn’t hungry, but didn’t know what else to do at the moment than to fix myself something to eat. The bread was stale, and what few things I found in the refrigerator I put back after standing there holding each one in my hand for a while. With my tea I ate one section after the other of some West chocolate I’d found in the butter compartment.

You will ask why I expect you to read such trivia. Of course none of these details are important, but the early music, the familiar four walls, and my mother’s absence had turned me into a child again. I drove off to see Francisca and Geronimo.

There was no mention of Dresden in the news on the car radio, at least nothing from which you could draw any conclusion about what was happening at the moment. On the far side of Dr. Kurt Fischer Platz²⁹⁰ I could see streetcars a quarter mile ahead backed up as far as the Platz der Einheit.²⁹¹

I turned around and took Dr. Kurt Fischer Allee to Bautzner Strasse,²⁹² meaning directly past State Security, decorated with “anniversary lights.” But except for one patrol car that turned just ahead of me, I saw no uniformed personnel.

In order not to awaken Gesine, I threw gravel at a window, over and over, until I heard footsteps in the darkened stairwell. Geronimo appeared at the little pane in the door, opened up, and gave me a hug. But that was his one little burst of joy. “What’s up?”

Just so I wasn’t to be surprised, he whispered on the stairs, he had a visitor.

Geronimo preceded me, the kitchen was empty. He opened the pantry. “It’s Enrico,” he said, and held the door open as if he were presenting me with his Golem. Nothing happened for a few moments. I sat down — and stood right back up again. Because he had to duck to get through the doorway, what I first saw was just a white turban, a bandaged head. And out came Mario, Mario Gädtke, the reddest Red in our class, who had left for the army as if setting out for summer camp. The left half of his face was swollen. We shook hands. “Nice coincidence,” he said, “here we are all together again.” Mario sat down on the sofa and pulled a stationery notepad from under his sweater. I waited for an explanation, including why he had vanished into the pantry at the sound of gravel against the window.

“He’s just been released,” Geronimo said. Mario pursed his lips, the same way he always had.

“Released from where?”

Mario sat there smiling to himself.

“The special alert police,” Geronimo answered for him. They had nabbed him the evening before and hadn’t sent him home until two hours ago.

“He brought that with him,” Geronimo said, pointing to the bandage. Mario raised his head. I asked about Franziska.

“She’s in no danger,” Mario said, and smiled again.

“She’s working on a conference for the Hygiene Museum—‘Bicentennial of the French Revolution,’” Geronimo explained. In such situations only one of them left the house, the other stayed with Gesine. He was about to go on, but Mario had begun to read — so loud that Geronimo got up and closed the kitchen door.

Mario’s report is reprinted in Geronimo’s book,²⁹³ naturally with some changes to what I heard that day. In his foreword Geronimo describes how he had barely recognized Mario — he was so badly battered and wearing that head bandage. Mario had drunk one glass of water after another before he was capable of uttering a word. At that moment, Geronimo writes — that is before he learned anything from Mario — the thought crossed his mind for the first time that all this would need to be documented. Then comes a lot of stuff about forgetting and preserving, about guilt and justice and atonement and forgiveness. One gets the impression, moreover, that Mario had come to him because Geronimo was just the man one turns to in an emergency, a rocky refuge in a tempest-tossed sea.

In his description of the evening Geronimo omits my visit. And in fact I said hardly anything. But as you’ll see it would nevertheless have been appropriate to have mentioned me, if only in a minor role.

What Mario read to us sounded at first like an accident report already officially on file, a statement of grievances addressed to whomever. First the date, time (8:15 p.m.), and the statement that he had gone to the Central Station in, he emphasized, “a totally sober state,” plus an enumeration of his “personal effects”: ID, wallet, cigarettes, matches, house key, handkerchief. This list made its way unaltered into the printed version. There it reads: “My goal was personally to witness what truth there was or was not to the reports of friends, neighbors, and colleagues. Near the Central Station and along Prager Strasse several thousand people had gathered. Prager Strasse and especially the area adjoining the Rundkino had been cordoned off by security forces. Several areas had obviously been declared off-limits. A canine unit was posted directly in front of the movie theater. There was no untoward rowdiness that I could see. As nearly as I could ascertain the security forces were made up of units of the special alert police, the transportation police, as well as the National People’s Army. One could hear chants coming from in front of the movie theater, about where the music instrument shop is: ‘Father, no billy club! Brother, no billy club!’ ‘We’re here to stay!’ ‘Nonviolence!’”

I asked if it shouldn’t be “No violence!” but Mario insisted it was “Nonviolence!” Missing in the book is his commentary on “We’re here to stay!” He had thought it necessary to explain that the slogan was meant to set them off from people wanting to leave the GDR and was in no way meant as resistance to a police order to vacate the area.

“A passerby took a picture of the barricade in front of the Exquisite Clothing Shop. In response 2 uniformed men approached him; the passerby attempted to flee, but appeared quickly to resign himself to being grabbed. He was roughly pulled behind the barricade, his camera ripped from his hands. It all happened in double-time. The security forces now advanced, clearing Prager Strasse. Anyone who didn’t run fast enough ahead of them was ruthlessly apprehended. Before each successive phase of their advance, they rhythmically rapped their truncheons against their shields, first slowly, then faster and faster, until they broke into a running charge. This obviously raised the level of fear and dismay among those fleeing before them.”

As I recall the passage about the sound the truncheons made, it was considerably longer. There were comparisons. In one of them Mario confused Roman legionnaires with gladiators. Whenever he fell silent he would tug his pursed lips to one side.

“Around 10:30 p.m. units of the army took up positions in the street along the front of the Central Station, roughly where the bus station is. Tightly linking arms, they spread out the full width of the street. There were approximately 10 to 15 rows, one behind the other. To a loud unison, ‘Left, 2, 3, 4,’ they set out at a quick pace, marching down the street in the direction of the Zeitkino. At this point, however, only a smaller group of citizens were gathered in front of the Central Station, where the situation could be described as relatively calm, whereas chanted slogans were coming from the direction of Leningrader Strasse.”

Something happened now that I hadn’t in the least expected. Mario smiled and shoved the pages across the table to Geronimo. I at once saw what I should have noticed all along: it was Geronimo’s handwriting, not Mario’s, which I had always envied for its even flow, the way it filled paper like an engraving.

Mario leaned back on the sofa. Geronimo arranged the pages to suit him.

“As a witness to the truth of my testimony,” Mario dictated, “I can mention my former classmate Johann Ziehlke, whom I met by chance on Prager Strasse. Do you have any objection?” Geronimo shook his head as he wrote. Mario spread his arms along the back of the sofa and, laying his head against the wall and gazing at the ceiling, continued to dictate. I also recall this passage differently and think I can spot the omissions.

“Nevertheless the uniformed men continued their relentless march and to no obvious purpose cleared the street before the Central Station (including the intersection). Behind them came an army vehicle called a Ural. Objects trailing smoke came flying from it and rained down on the crowd. I quickly realized this was tear gas. For about 10 to 15 minutes I couldn’t see much of anything, my eyes burned terribly, the stuff attacks mucus membranes — despite the fact that I immediately covered my face with a handkerchief. At that moment I realized that upon arrival earlier in the evening I had noticed the uniformed forces were equipped with gas-mask bags, but had paid the matter little notice until now. A short time later more men in uniform moved up from Prager Strasse, so that they had now encircled the large lawn across from the bus station. I had in fact previously moved to this open spot because only a very few citizens stood scattered across it.”

Did you catch it? During the minutes that Mario saw nothing or hardly anything, the scene goes blank. But that’s not how it was. Plus it was precisely at this point that the report lost its semiofficial tone. He and Geronimo had linked arms because they were afraid of being “collected like ladybugs with wings stuck together.” There were two, three humorously grotesque sentences in which he described the two of them running around blindly — there was mention of drunken chickens and the stench of rotten eggs. Suddenly Geronimo’s arm slipped out of his, he groped for him, shouted his name, and finally decided they were safely out of the tear-gas cloud. In the end he assumed Geronimo had remained behind, had turned back to look for him.

Geronimo hadn’t even looked up when Mario removed his arms from the back of the sofa, stared at him, and said, “You’d vanished from the face of the earth.” I thought Geronimo was just finishing up the paragraph before offering his explanation. But instead Mario resumed his previous position, put his head to the wall, and went on dictating.

“Very quickly, however, I realized that the uniformed men, banging away on their shields with their truncheons, were still advancing. Coming now from the direction of the bus station as well, they were moving down the street in a broad phalanx — there was no escape. Three or four youngsters tried to slip away to one side. A uniformed man made a dash for one of them and, lunging at full speed, purposely and brutally upended him. Then he began to whale away mercilessly with his truncheon, even though the fellow wasn’t even trying to defend himself. Another uniformed man hastened to lend a hand. Together they dragged their bundle back out of the way.” Mario described the actions of the uniformed personnel, the ebb and flow. Finally it was his turn. “Storm troopers started hunting and snatching up the last citizens still standing scattered about, dragging them inside their closed circle after first working them over. I heard someone shout: ‘There’s one!’ I didn’t notice that 3 soldiers were rushing me until it was too late. I turned around, looked around — no one else nearby. I realized — they’re after me. I took off. But because of that pause in my train of thought they were faster at getting at me than I was at getting away. So I just stood there, raised my arms, and shouted: ‘I’ll come voluntarily, I won’t put up a fight.’ Two uniformed men grabbed me, one put a head hold on me and squeezed very hard. The other pulled my right arm painfully up behind my back. They slugged me in the back 4 or 5 times and bellowed: ‘Shut your filthy mouth! Not one word, or you won’t be talking for days.’ They dragged me into the circle. ‘Don’t go easy on him. Or else I’ll help out!’ another soldier yelled. I was thrown to the pavement, with a booted kick in the back for good measure. Other citizens were already lying there, maybe 10 people. Somebody roared: ‘Face to the ground, arms spread above your head, legs spread, ass down!’ A man in uniform gave my rear end a kick and shouted: ‘Lower, flatter!’ I was able to read my watch. It was 12:25. The cold ground was slowly penetrating my clothing, I was freezing. Trucks (W50s) pulled up after a while. We were now frisked, all the while forced to hold the position I’ve described. To our right another soldier flung 2 bottles, one after the other, to the pavement. Some of the splinters flew dangerously near our heads. Soon, starting on the far right, they began dragging us one by one to our feet.”

Mario had spoken in a monotone until now, lowering his voice only at the end of each sentence. Given the already extraordinary situation, I wondered why neither ever looked at the other. As Mario described the tortures he was put through his voice grew more lively. Sometimes, as with the kick to his rear end, he even burst into laughter. Geronimo, on the other hand, bent farther down over his paper like a poor student. I remember Mario’s account, especially what comes now, as far less clumsy than it reads here:

“We were led to the truck and forced to climb in. That earned me more blows. 4 citizens were placed next to me. Swinging their truncheons 2 men in uniform sat down across from us. A soldier outside roared: ‘You’ll get yours, you filthy bastards!’ During the trip we weren’t allowed to look out the rear window and were ordered to hold our position. The trip lasted about 15 minutes and took a lot of curves. The 2 guards banged their truncheons against their bench as a threat. The truck halted. We were told to jump out. This was to be done in sequence, one by one. But on the other hand it didn’t go fast enough for our uniformed guards, they helped with a shove. We were on a military base. It was raining. We 5 were told to line up, hands clasped behind our heads, legs spread. I don’t know how long we stood there. Then we had to run up some stairs into a building, hands still behind our heads. We entered a room. Each of us had to stand with his forehead against the wall, legs spread wide but not touching the wall, hands behind our heads. We were frisked a second time. Each time, the uniformed men used the opportunity to make it even more painful to have your forehead bear your entire weight. Pockets emptied. After that each of us had to step up to the table and identify ourselves. Then we went into a larger room (the Officers Club?) with hardwood floors. Position: legs spread, face to the wall, hands behind the head. The room was filling up. I was able to glance at my watch again. It was 1:45 a.m. (Oct. 7th, ‘Republic Day’). We were guarded by 2 men. From somewhere in the background one of them gave us our instructions: ‘You are in a militarily secured location. Attempt to flee and you will be shot.’”

Mario gradually began to show some theatrical qualities when doing quotes. He seemed especially taken by the word “shot,” which he repeated several times. From here on I had the impression he was speaking more and more to me.

“During this period of standing we were frequently maltreated and humiliated. The man standing to my left had his legs pulled out from under him, he fell flat on his face on the hardwood floor. Any movement was repaid with blows by a truncheon. A fourteen-year-old young man requested that his parents please be informed, and added that he had kidney problems and had to take medication. For that he was beaten and led away. When you could no longer stand, you had to kneel down on the backs of your hands until they swelled up. I had to listen to things like: ‘They’re all ringleaders, we’ll be giving them a good hard look.’ And: ‘His won’t be the first skull I’ve cracked, or the last.’ We were called ‘Nazi swine’ and heard threats like ‘Now it’s time to play Chile.’ Around 5 a.m. — my watch had been broken during a beating — we were regrouped several times. The large window was opened. It was drafty. I no longer had any feeling in my arms and legs. I fainted at one point. That was when they bandaged my head, but it wasn’t long before I had to return to my row. After another regrouping my row was shoved into another room. There was a bucket of tea. One of us then had to crawl around on his knees and clean up the mess on the floor. Then we were given bread and lard. Then regrouped again. Finally we stood for a long time in a hallway, near the kitchen. Another identification check. Then we were called out one by one. My name was included, too, my real name. Until then they had just called me the Indian. ‘What, y’mean to say we got Indians here too?’ A police lieutenant in civvies, lent for the occasion from the criminal division, did the questioning. Then it was back down to the room. As before, 1 or 2 guards stood in the doorway. They were charged with making sure no one slept. Whoever showed a sign, even the slightest sign, of dropping off, was hauled to his feet and freshened up, which meant special treatment out in the hallway. ‘Tired? Well then, wake up!’ They made sure we could hear them going about their business out there. Those who received special treatment came back with no blood left in their hands and for several minutes couldn’t even hold on to a mug of tea. One well-dressed gray-haired man sat inert on his chair, staring apathetically straight ahead. One side of another man’s face had been badly beaten, it was swollen and bloodied. An older man very plainly dressed had hands that looked like pulp. At the end of my interrogation I signed a statement. A woman in uniform, a captain, gave me my ID back, handed me a notification of disciplinary proceedings that I had to acknowledge with my signature, and asked if all my personal effects had been returned. After being advised to cut a wide path around the Central Station, I was released at 6:30 p.m.”

Toward the end here — there is no reason to keep it from you — I have departed from the printed version and relied more on my own memory. But even with my changes there is no way of capturing the eeriness of it all, which grew sentence by sentence, almost word by word. Mario was sweating. Toward the end he started and concluded almost every sentence with a burst of laughter. He downed what was now a cold cup of tea in one gulp.

Geronimo stared wearily into space. Mario insisted we break this up. I don’t know why I didn’t stay behind with Geronimo and wait at least until Franziska returned. We hadn’t exchanged two sentences with each other. I led the way down the stairs, and heard Geronimo lock the apartment door behind us.

Mario asked for a ride to the center of town. Just when I thought he had fallen asleep, his eyes flew open and he asked whether I still wrote poems.

At an intersection between Fucík Platz²⁹⁴ and the Kupferstich-Kabinett we caught up with the demonstration. I stopped and let Mario out. Our good-byes were brief. As chance would have it, someone took a photograph, and so that’s how I ended up in Geronimo’s book. Except I’m the only one who knows that. In the photograph at the top of page forty-five, I’m the driver standing beside the open door of his Wartburg.

I had just waved to Mario, who had called something back to me over the tops of other people’s heads — my eyes were following his white turban — when I heard my name spoken behind me. I turned around and there he was, coming toward me on raven legs, shoulders raised, smile askew, his hand extended. His feet looked like they were still stuck inside his father’s work shoes. I shook Hendrik’s hand. “I’m looking for my mother,” I said. We should get together sometime, he said. I asked whether he wanted a ride home. He no longer lived in Klotzsche, he said. Shortly thereafter I lost sight of him too.

As always when I was home alone, I lay down on my mother’s bed and soon fell asleep with her nightgown tucked under the pillow.²⁹⁵

Your Enrico

Monday, May 28, ’90

Dear Jo,

If you were a local politician you’d be calling every day to announce you’ll be mailing us a letter — or maybe will just drop it off yourself — in a last desperate attempt to get on the list of candidates for a five-minute audience with the hereditary prince. Thanks to two pages on “His Highness,” our latest issue sold better than our scandal sheet.

The first resolution of the first meeting of the first freely elected people’s deputies in a little less than sixty years was an invitation to the hereditary prince — Barrista had more or less made the matter conditional on a unanimous vote, since “His Highness” did not want his wish realized in the face of any opposition or reservations. Even our members from the Party of Democratic Socialism thrust their arms high. They were all grateful that they could begin their work with an act so pregnant with symbolism. First they praised us — the visit carries the epithet “organized by the Altenburg Weekly”—and then themselves for attempting to revive a tradition eminently important for the city and region after its having been suppressed and suspended during the decades of socialist dictatorship. At the local dance school they’re already practicing curtsies.

A couple of black sheep are trying to sidle up to the hereditary prince behind our backs. Half of them want to touch him up — which, according to the baron, the prince wouldn’t even regard as brazen impudence.

The baron has bought two large apartment houses, one adjacent to the other. On the north side, facing the street, they are black with soot. And his enthusiasm likewise remained a riddle as we stood in the stairwell. The high ceilings with their ornamental plaster and antique doors made the deal more plausible. Every apartment has two wooden balconies, one of which is to be converted into a winter garden. And the view! To the south it’s a direct shot to the castle and — on clear days — to the crest of the Ore Mountains. The facade of the castle glistens like a snow-capped peak in the twilight. In the distance, a dark blue streak. And as if that weren’t enough, down below is a meadow filled with fruit trees and ending in a rocky drop-off ten or twelve foot deep, which marks the beginning of the backyards of properties down in the valley. Renovation of his favorite bit of real estate will be done around the clock, since he pays in cash.

Even though I think I’m hardly pampering myself, in comparison to others I live an almost contemplative life. Andy not only wants to open a second shop, he’s also taken it into his head to open a car dealership just for 4×4s — something you won’t find anywhere around here thus far. Even when I drive home at midnight, the lights are still on in Cornelia’s travel agency. You can book with her now too, and not have to pay until July. People stand in line outside from morning till evening. Her husband, Massimo, wants to open up a pharmacy in the polyclinic, which is why he commutes back and forth two or three times a week between Fulda and Altenburg. Recklewitz-Münzner is recruiting partners here, offering continuing education classes, and buying up one piece of property after the other for himself and others. Together with his friend Nelson he’s reconnoitering for places to put gas stations. Olimpia, Andy’s young wife, who speaks every language on the globe, is doing research for Jewish organizations at the land registry office. And Proharsky, the Ukrainian, has gone into debt collecting on behalf of his whole family, and thus for us too. Need I even mention that all these threads come together at Fürst & Fürst Real Estate?

I gave the baron a copy of my calculations for a free paper financed by ads, and assumed it would evoke no more than a smile. He gave it a once-over, said it was perfect, handed it back, asked, as he riffled through his attaché case, what I thought of the reunification of Yemen²⁹⁶ —about which I hadn’t heard a thing, was clueless as to the point of his question — and pulled out his own figures, which, he suggested, reached conclusions similar to mine. The only entries I had forgotten were the interest on credit and the rent.

The baron invited me to accompany him to visit Dr. Karmeka, our new mayor. He guaranteed it would be interesting, since he planned to make him a proposal — and I should watch the mayor closely as he made it — that could prove crucial for the future of the town.

Karmeka, who’s actually a dentist and switched to politics because of a bad back, has fired as many members of the city administration as he could. Only the “antechamber” has survived. Along with two secretaries there’s a personal assistant, Herr Fliegner, a pallid, frail young man who was busy sorting papers on Karmeka’s desk and didn’t even look up as we entered.

Karmeka, as everyone knows, receives all his visitors with the same ritual — no sooner have you taken a seat than he pulls out a pack of cigarettes (he smokes Juwels, an old GDR brand) and, holding it and his lighter up, asks, “Do you mind?”

In lieu of a reply the baron handed him a shiny brown leather etui. “A little something.” Karmeka (the accent is on the first syllable) froze, laid his own toys to one side, extracted a cigar, and sniffed as he drew it under his nose. With our permission, he proposed as he slid the case back to Barrista, he would smoke this delicacy come evening, in peace and quiet, which during work was almost out of the question — for although our presence was of course most welcome and ought not be considered work in any real sense…then he took a puff on his cigarette and forgot to end his sentence.

The baron led off with a complaint about the flood of petitions that had followed the announcement of His Highness’s visit. He himself had been forced to devote a great deal of time to them, since it was not something one could ask of the hereditary prince. Further lamentations of much the same sort followed. The vertical crease that began in the middle of each of Karmeka’s cheeks, ran past the corners of his mouth, and ended at his chin, began to twitch every now and then.

Things had in fact gotten so bad, the baron exclaimed, that our valued friends from the Altenburg Weekly were being subjected to something close to extortion to get them to publish His Highness’s home address. He mentioned this vexation only so that one might have a very clear picture of what all the visit would demand we be prepared for.

In response to Barrista’s palaver Karmeka’s gestures grew increasingly guarded and limp. He cautiously extended both arms to accept the schedule for the visit — a suggestion, merely a suggestion — contained in a folder of the same fine leather as the cigar case. And the instant his fingertips touched the leather, he was seized with a coughing fit that caused him to draw his arms up and hunch over as if he were being beaten, until he rotated to one side and finally, still bent over, stood up and turned his back to us.

The baron was relentless. “His Highness will not be arriving empty-handed,” he exclaimed, but since he was trying to drown out Karmeka’s coughs it sounded more like a reprimand than a promise. His face fiery red, his head tucked as he fought for air, Karmeka stared at us wide-eyed. He hadn’t understood what the baron had said about the hand reliquary. The solemn ceremony itself had not merely been a subject of discussion with the church, but indeed enthusiastic preparations — for the procession, for the transfer of the object — were already underway. “Can you — please…I didn’t…I mean — repeat that?” Karmeka managed to gasp.

“We’re bringing Boniface home!” the baron shouted, and with a smile handed the folder back to an exhausted Karmeka.

“Just a moment!” I heard a voice above me say. Fliegner had stepped between us and Karmeka with a glass of water. Fliegner shielded him so deftly that we couldn’t even see him take a drink. “Ten minutes,” Fliegner said, addressing Karmeka, and stepped soundlessly back.

“Please,” Karmeka said, now obviously recovered, “where did we leave off?”

The baron handed him the folder with the schedule one more time. Karmeka laid it down in front of him and gazed again at the baron.

“And now an offer,” the baron said. “I have an offer to make to the city.” And with a glance at Fliegner he added, “And I expect the greatest discretion.” Karmeka just kept smiling steadfastly at him. The baron appeared to be considering whether he should even continue the conversation. There was the sound of papers being reshuffled on the desk.

“A three-figure sum in millions, currently invested abroad in dollars, will become available this year,” the baron said. He was considering parking the lion’s share of it here, yes, here in Altenburg, and of course in D-marks, with the proviso that the city come to an understanding with the local savings and loan and offer him — given the size of the sum and its investment over several years — terms appropriate to such a transaction. “Altenburg is dear to my heart,” the baron concluded.

Karmeka’s attention was now directed inward, his tongue probed a molar. As he attempted to stub out his cigarette, it broke and lay still fuming in the ashtray. Fliegner had once again stepped soundlessly behind Karmeka and now bent down to whisper something in his ear.

“How can I reach you?” Karmeka asked. The baron pointed to me and bowed, as if thanking me for my services ahead of time. His smile flickered and died.

Karmeka, who was the first to stand up, grasped the baron’s elbow, as if to help him to his feet. “I shall enjoy your cigar this evening in my garden.” His eyes sparkled with cordiality. “See you soon,” he said. Turning to me, he whispered, “Keep up the good work!”

In the reception room Fliegner caught up with us to return the cigar case. We departed without an exchange of greetings. We crossed the main hall of the Rathaus in silence.

“Incredible,” the baron sighed as we stepped out under a blue sky. “Have you ever seen the like? Of that shyster? Plays the village idiot and the next moment gives us the cold shoulder.” The baron groaned. “Now that’s a humbug, that’s a bamboozler!”

I had never seen the baron so peeved.

“You need to send a shot across his bow, otherwise he won’t know whom he’s dealing with here. ‘Keep up the good work!’ How dare he! Did you notice that proboscis as he sniffed my cigar? But no, no luxuries, these Protestants can’t handle those.”

I would have liked to inform the baron that Karmeka is a Catholic, but there was no holding him back. “‘City Hall Turns Down Three Hundred Million!’” The baron punched the headline word for word in the air. “A shot across the bow, a nasty one!”

At our portal he blocked my path. “Do you know how much I hate that? How I hate to be kept waiting?”

“But what had you expected?”

“I hate it, hate it, hate it!” he shouted.

But then, when Frau Schorba opened from inside, the mere sight of her sufficed to make a total gentleman of him. Astrid the wolf came trotting up behind her. Frau Schorba takes care of her during the day. The dog lies under her desk, waits to be fed and taken for her midday walk, and to be played with. She never tires of fetching her green ball. In the afternoon Georg’s boys or Robert take her for a walk. These walks are a regular fountain of youth for her. Of an evening the baron stops by to pick her up.

The baron’s concern for our welfare did not prevent him from making a less than decorous attempt to steal Frau Schorba from us. But she swore she would never forget the trust I had placed in her, not for all the money in world.

She visits Käferchen and the old man at the hospital every day. Käferchen has pneumonia or something even worse; she talks as if she’s delirious with fever and babbles on about not knowing where she’s supposed to go now. Frau Schorba tries to talk the old man out of his craziness and hopes she may actually be able to speak my name in his presence soon. Leaving aside her warm heart and her gifts as a secretary, she would make an ideal advertising rep or a good bookkeeper. She’s the most inconspicuous student during computer classes, never interrupts with some silliness, never inattentive.

Andy began our first class two weeks ago by clipping on a little name tag and pulling a telescope ballpoint out to full length. It was as if he were talking to a hundred people. Each answer to his incisive questions was exuberantly affirmed with a “Rishtick, zerr goot!”

In Andy’s eyes we’re all equal, all pupils, and everyone has to take his or her turn in front of the screen — sort of like being called to the blackboard. Pringel is head of the class, has always done his homework, is always eager to give an answer, his childlike face beaming. Jörg has much the same, if not a better grasp of the material, but is calmer, not quite such a grind.

I feel a lot like a paterfamilias,²⁹⁷ who would rather ask for something to be repeated and assume the role of the slow learner so that everyone moves with the class toward our common goal. Marion is inhibited. Some criticism early on in front of the whole class ruined any interest she had, so that willy-nilly she’s at about the same level as Ilona, who never even gave it a try, but enjoys the cooperative spirit of the class collective and sees all criticism and scolding as a kind of special attention. She sits ramrod straight on the edge of her chair so that, whether her answer is right or wrong, she can plop back again with a happy groan—“I’ll never catch on, never, huh?”—luring Andy’s gaze to the hem of her skirt almost every time.

We’re paying Andy a hundred marks an hour — doing a friend a favor, as the baron says, although neither Jörg nor I see it that way. But he did manage after three sessions to get us to the point where we could print out a perfect newspaper page, spread out over two standard letter pages. Quod erat demonstrandum.

We then cut and pasted and stood around gazing at it as if it were the baby Jesus in his manger.

Hugs, Your E.

Thursday, May 31, ’90

Dear Nicoletta,

As long as I was still having dreams that I could remember in the morning, they stood in direct contrast to how I felt. If I was miserable, my brain spun out the most cheerful images. Days that I took to be good ones were often followed by horrible nights.

Early on the morning of October 8th — I was still in Dresden — the doorbell wrenched me out of my paradise. It was my habit to leave the key in the lock. Which explained why my mother couldn’t get in. I unlocked the door — but there was nobody there. I got dressed, went downstairs in my bare feet, found the front door ajar, looked out, nothing. Even today I would swear I heard the doorbell.

Back in bed I tried to find my way back into my dream, back to a table where Vera and I were peeling apples and cutting them in the shape of little boats and then dipping them in honey. But that was only the backdrop. The true joy lay hidden within a world whose logic fell apart on awakening. And yet what was left of it in the other so-called real world was a sense of warmth so palpable that I could actually console myself with it.

I woke the second time to the ringing of Sunday church bells. I found a glass of honey and toasted some stale bread. I went for a hike in the Dresden Heath — I hadn’t walked most of its paths since my school-days — and then around one o’clock drove by way of the Platz der Einheit and Pirnaischer Platz to the Central Station. What the radio and Mario had reported, including any trace of a demonstration the evening before, had vanished like a ghost. A half hour later — I had stopped at Café am Altmarkt, one of Vera’s favorite spots — it looked as if something was brewing on Theater Platz. The Dimitroff Bridge²⁹⁸ had already been closed off. After keeping an eye out for Mario’s turban for a while, I drove home via the Marien Bridge. I wrote my mother a note saying I was sorry we hadn’t been able to go on our outing to Moritzburg. After reading it I almost tore it up again, but then decided I was happy to have put anything to paper.

I never went over sixty on the autobahn, obeyed all other posted speed limits, listened to music, and for fractions of seconds thought I actually had seen Vera the night before.

Robert was waiting for me in Torgau. With a plastic bag in each hand, he ran ahead of me to the car. One contained some pastry, the other a pot secured in several layers of cellophane bags and canning-jar rubbers — stuffed peppers, Robert said, all of it for me. Why for me, I asked. “For all of us,” Robert said, “but especially for you.”

He asked what I had done. Just as I later told Michaela, I said that my friend Johann had sent a telegram asking me to come see him. And so I had driven to Dresden. He asked about my mother, and I said she hadn’t been at home. We drove to the train station.

Michaela got off the train directly in front of me. I could tell from the way she diligently avoided looking at me, from the way she kept brushing her hair behind her ear, and only then finally greeted me, that she was deep into a role, her new Berlin role, which she was now going to perform for us. Robert came running up to her, his backpack bobbing up and down, and even before giving her a hug asked if she wasn’t feeling well — because Michaela’s role now included looking exhausted, even as she summoned what little energy she had left so that we wouldn’t notice her weariness.

The only thing I talked about in the car — and she has held it against me ever since — was the stuffed peppers and the pastry. Months later Michaela accused me of having left her in the lurch and of behaving like a total idiot. Even though she ignored every one of Robert’s questions and just kept repeating that Thea sent her love and said we should definitely come along the next time.

I saw nothing disconcerting in the fact that immediately after we got home she withdrew to the bathroom. I put the pot on the stove, set the table in the living room, Robert spooned the sour cream into a little bowl and lit the candles. And just for us he put Friday Night in San Francisco on the record player. He called Michaela to come join us several times. After I turned the volume down, we could hear her sobbing.

She finally appeared trailing a streamer of toilet paper, as if she needed a whole roll to dry her tears and blow her nose. She opened the balcony window — the odor of food was making her sick to her stomach — collapsed onto the sofa, and pulled Robert to her. She gazed out over his head into some remote distance where she evidently saw what she had been keeping from us.

Before the birthday party was to begin that evening, Thea, Michaela, and Karin (another actor) had spent a couple of hours in Thea’s favorite pub on Stargarder Strasse, not far from Gethsemane Church. They had stayed there until seven o’clock, and Thea had talked about her guest appearances in the West — successful productions that nothing here could compare to. And the audience had been much more spontaneous and open, too. Tipsy not so much from beer as from her stories, they had stepped out onto the street only to be confronted by a phalanx of uniformed, helmeted men armed with shields and truncheons. They turned around, but there was no way to get through in that direction either — Schönhauser Allee had been blocked off at the same point. They walked back and asked the helmeted men to let them pass, they really needed to get home. Thea even showed her ID and said it was her birthday. There was no response. They tried again on the other side of the street. The uniformed men there had neither shields nor helmets.

At this point in her narrative Michaela blew her nose. The toilet paper rustled on the coconut-fiber mat.

They figured, Michaela continued, you could talk to the ones without helmets. Thea spoke to several of them, each time mentioning her birthday and the children and guests waiting for her at home. When she got no reply she raised her voice. She hadn’t realized that it was now forbidden to return to your home — that would be just like this government, they might as well arrest her on the spot. Thea had just turned back around to Karin and her, Michaela, when three men in civvies stormed through the cordon and pounced on her from behind. One of them had stepped between her and Thea, which was why she, Michaela, couldn’t say exactly what happened to Thea in those few seconds. Thea had screamed, probably in pain. They both could see Thea holding up her ID as she was led away. Then she had vanished behind a truck. They picked up Thea’s purse, gathered up the spilled contents, and discussed what they should do now. They tried to describe for each other what the three Stasi guys had looked like, but had to admit that they could never identify them in a lineup. Five minutes later they saw Thea being thrown into a truck by two cops. She and Karin could swear to that.

They fled back into the pub and called Thomas, Thea’s husband. Karin began to weep hysterically and had to stretch out on the bench of the corner table reserved for regulars. They could hear screams coming from the street, and new people kept dashing inside, many with scrapes, bruises, and bloody noses. They were all afraid the uniformed brigade might storm the pub. She, Michaela, had almost wished they would, since just waiting was the worst thing of all.

When they got back to Thea’s apartment around half past midnight, all the birthday party guests were still sitting there. Thomas had first yelled at Michaela and Karin, as if they were to blame for Thea’s disappearance. More than ten guests had spent the night in the apartment — on the floor, in armchairs, sleep was out of the question in any case. Thomas spent the entire night making phone calls. He also drove to the police academy in Rummelsburg, but no one would let him in. They waited the whole day and left the apartment only to take the children to a playground.

Talking had helped Michaela calm down somewhat, but only to the extent that she could now be all the more vehement in her self-accusations. Thea had called to them as she was arrested. She, Michaela, had even tried to hold on to Thea, but had been pushed back by the cordon of uniformed men. Michaela broke into tears again now. One of the policemen — or whatever that uniform of his was — had asked her if she wanted to end up there too. “End up there,” those had been his words, and it had been clear that “there” was some horrible place. But now she could only ask herself why she had been so horrified, why she hadn’t joined Thea as she ought to have. “No!” Michaela cried, rejecting all our attempts to comfort her, it had been her duty to follow her and not to have let that “there” frighten her. She could understand Thomas’s reaction — of course he was right to reproach her. “I let it happen! I abandoned her!”

Robert sat there totally helpless at her side. Then Michaela stood up and announced she was going to the telephone booth to call Thomas. Besides, she could use the fresh air.

Robert and I ate alone. As we were washing up, he told me how his homeroom teacher, Herr Milde, had said we ought never shed a tear for those who turned their backs on our republic (a well-worn phrase in the newspapers at the time), but that his friend Falk had responded that he was sorry that Doreen, his deskmate who had emigrated with her parents a few days before, was no longer here. At first Herr Milde hadn’t reacted at all, but then had admonished him to raise his hand if he wanted to say something. Falk had then raised his hand, but wasn’t called on. Herr Milde had said it would be easy for a boy like him to find a prettier girlfriend than Doreen. Robert asked me if he should have raised his hand too.

“Bad news,” Michaela said. It seemed to me as if at some basic level she was proud of the fact. Karin had stayed with Thea’s children, Thomas had written up a report on Thea’s arrest and read it aloud in Gethsemane Church before posting it there. Karin had signed as a witness and had given her address. Karin had promised Michaela that she would add her, that is, our address to it as well. “All hell must have broken loose there,” Michaela said.

We were at the theater by a little before ten the next morning. There was a press of people in the dramaturgy office, a long, low room directly under the roof.

Michaela at once grabbed for the telephone receiver, clamped it to her ear, and put a finger to her other ear while she talked.

Most people seemed to have ended up there out of pure boredom. They inspected our little library, paged through old programs, and spoke about productions and colleagues, as if this were what the occasion required. Each time the door opened, conversations faltered for a moment.

Amanda from props appeared and shortly after her our stage manager, Olaf. Norbert Maria Richter hadn’t arrived yet. Amanda lit a cigarette and asked what we planned to do. “I’m not planning anything,” I said.

Some were discussing a resolution that came from the Dresden Theater and was to be read from the stage there, others talked about blood banks and hospital wards cleared for patients. Word of it was in fact circulating in Leipzig, Patrick confirmed — Ellen had called him at the theater just to tell him about it. Amanda showed us an article from the Volkszeitung. “Working People Demand: Hostility Toward the State Should No Longer be Tolerated!” read the headline. A cadre that went by the name of Geifert felt inconvenienced by certain unprincipled elements disrupting their well-earned rest after a day’s work. The conclusion: they were ready and able to defend and protect the work of their own hands and to effectively put an end to these disruptions once and for all. “With weapons in hand if need be.” I read the article aloud and passed the newspaper around. Amanda held her cigarette butt under the tap and laid it alongside others next to the soap. She smiled.

“Today will decide everything,” I heard Michaela suddenly declare. “If we fail today, then we will have failed for good.” Her eyes wandered from one person to the next. “If we ourselves don’t take to the streets today, we’ll be betraying every person who’s been arrested and tortured.” This was followed by her report of what Thea had just told her.

Michaela took time to give her speech, rarely raised her voice, and let everyone sense that she was struggling to be factual and understood that she had to hold her emotions in check — this was, after all, her best friend. She sounded a lot like a television reporter when she mentioned a girl who had been forced to strip and then chased naked along the hall to the laughter of the police. Thea had been spared that bit of martyrdom. But she could still feel the blow to her head — she had lain unconscious in the truck for several minutes. But even worse was the pain in her back, her whole right side was one single bruise. They had been beaten at every turn, even when they were standing facing the wall with their hands behind their heads. And some of the younger guys had frisked them over and over again.

After thirty-eight hours without food or sleep they had been released. Yesterday evening someone had thrown the switch for all the streetlights in the area around Gethsemane Church and then uniformed men had started whaling away — to the sound of church bells ringing out a tocsin.

“If we don’t act today,” Michaela said, giving her coat collar a tug, “we’ll have squandered our chances for a long time, maybe forever.”

All of us were discomfited by Michaela’s speech. Which is why news that Norbert Maria Richter had arrived broke things up rather abruptly.

Had it been me and not Thea — of that I was absolutely convinced — Michaela would hardly have been inspired to make such a speech. Once again Thea had been one step ahead of her. That’s what Michaela found unbearable! Her famous friend was to blame for Michaela’s conviction that she would lose face if she didn’t risk her own neck.

My dear Nicoletta, I know how petty I must sound to you. Perhaps I still have too little distance on the whole affair. But in this case it’s not just my opinion at the time that I’m sharing with you.

There was no cure for Michaela’s madness.²⁹⁹ I knew she would be going to Leipzig. I knew better than to pin any hopes on Norbert Maria Richter or Jonas. Robert remained my sole argument, but then Thea had certainly shown no consideration for her family either.

At noon in the canteen everyone had stories about gyms and emergency rooms that had been cleared to take in patients. Jonas, who had held his tongue until now, said with a knowing smile that he would not advise anyone to travel to Leipzig today.

When we met after rehearsal — a real rehearsal had, of course, been out of the question — we drove to see Aunt Trockel. If she did not hear from us before ten o’clock, she was to look after Robert. After that we went to the Konsum Market — the shelves were incredibly well stocked, but the only thing I recall now are jars of pickles, oodles of them suddenly seemed available — likewise ultrapasturized milk and ketchup. Our refrigerator ended up as crammed full as if it were Christmas time. Michaela laid two hundred marks on the kitchen table, plus our hoard of twenty-pfennig pieces for the telephone, the rest of our pocket change, and my mother’s number at the clinic. I also jotted down Geronimo’s number. It wasn’t until he saw the currency that Robert began to grasp how different this afternoon was from all others. He wanted to come along. I was for it, Michaela against it. She talked with him in his room. When she came back out, I could see she had been crying. We took off around four o’clock. No one at the theater had taken Michaela up on her offer of a comfortable ride.

Just beyond Espenheim we were waved off the road — traffic control. All I would have had to have done was leave my ID at home or put a turn signal out of commission and that would probably have been the end of trip. We were sent on our way with good wishes. Before I got back in the car I surveyed the scrawny trees and shrubs that lined the rest area — and in that moment there was something idyllic about it all. It was relatively warm. It seemed to me as if I had not given a thought to writing for years.

Shortly before Leipzig, Michaela started to put on her makeup. We could do some window-shopping, she said, we had plenty of time, and laid a hand on my thigh as if to buck me up.

What happened then is quickly told:

We parked in front of the Dimitroff Museum. In a side street directly across from us were the special-forces trucks. Tea was being ladled from big buckets for men in uniform. They didn’t appear to be armed. We crossed the street and walked up to within ten yards of them. Those few who noticed us quickly looked away.

Passing the New Rathaus, we came to St. Thomas Church. We acted a little like tourists who’ve been given a free hour before their bus departs. We walked around the church and stood awhile in front of the Johann Sebastian Bach monument. Michaela was drawn to the bookstore across the street. In situations like this, she said, it was especially wonderful to be surrounded by books. I fell into old habits, but before I had scanned even the first few feet of a bookshelf, I knew I wouldn’t buy anything. I no longer saw any point in even picking up a book.³⁰⁰

We must have been fairly near the Opera when we ran into a whole convoy of those troop carriers. We walked on by — and it almost felt like we were reviewing them. A couple of uniformed men were trudging back and forth, eyes focused on their equipment. They also had dogs and water cannons.

We halted in front of the Gewandhaus. From its steps you have a view of the entire square.³⁰¹

My dear Nicoletta, you may perhaps assume that we had some serious discussions during these hours, conversations about the future and Robert, or that at least we promised each other to relish every moment of our lives from now on and to love one another. But no, nothing of the kind.

What made the scene so unreal was that I had never seen the state massed in such threatening force before. Each time a column of troop carriers turned onto the Ring from the direction of the Grassi Museum, they were greeted with honking cars and shrill whistles. But when the trucks had moved past, it was once again a lovely October evening with people smiling at one another, browsing in bookstores, and waiting for streetcars.

I explained to Michaela — I was carrying her purchases — from what direction the demonstrators would be coming, that was if they were granted access all the way to the main square. Once they got this far, there would be no stopping them. We had found an almost perfect spot. From here we could flee or join in or simply stay where we were. Who was going to prohibit someone from standing in front of the Gewandhaus with a bag of books under his arm?

Suddenly noise started coming at us from all directions. From loudspeakers came an appeal for nonviolence,³⁰² and at the same time I could hear chants, some close, some farther away. And all at once there it was, the demonstration. From one second to the next Opern Platz was filled with people, as if they had just cast off their magic caps. We were now part of the demonstration. It’s too late now, I thought. Michaela was kneading my hand. I was about to tell her she no longer needed to be afraid, when she pulled me away with her. Michaela was trying to make her way to a man with a mustache and bald head that made him look like a seal. They hugged. He was wearing West-style glasses and pretended not to notice me. For at least thirty seconds I waited behind Michaela and gazed at him over her shoulder. At some point she said, “This is Enrico, he’s in the theater too.” I asked what he did. To which Michaela exclaimed, “This is ***!” *** gave a quick nod as if deep in thought, then turned his seal eyes back to Michaela. And now we three were walking together in the direction of the post office. I wedged myself in beside Michaela and crooked my right arm for her to link onto. But she did nothing of the sort, just kept her eyes glued on the seal. I didn’t even know where she knew him from. “Crazy,” the seal kept saying, “crazy!”

If it hadn’t been for me, I think they would have flung their arms around each other several more times. Michaela told him about Thea. Was this what the director who could make Michaela’s dreams come true looked like?

I found it unbearable that this day would be eradicably bound up with this man. From now on he would be latched on to our memories like a tick. Comrade Seal had now switched from “crazy” to “not good.” Every one of Michaela’s sentences was blessed with this “not good, not good.” She seemed goaded on by it. Suddenly he pointed up at a camera and said, “What if those were machine guns!” Someone else had begun to wave at the camera, and now everyone around me was waving up at it. We halted for the pedestrian stoplight.

I’m sure you’ve seen the dim televised version. Did you notice how slowly people put one foot in front of the other, the considerable distance they kept from one another? The only demonstrations I knew were those from May Day, where you stood and stood until your leg fell asleep, shuffled a couple of yards forward, waited, only to be driven ahead at double-time so that there was never a gap in the parade before the reviewing stands. But here you strolled across the square in pairs, in threes, in little groups, making sure you didn’t crowd up on anyone else. The stoplight turned green. But we just stood there and waited. A man asked, “We can go on the next green, right?” And so when the little green man flashed again, we finally stepped out into the street.

We turned left, in the direction of the Central Station. People in cars that weren’t going anywhere now sat as if frozen in place, fear in their fixed stares. There was not a squad car, not even a policeman in sight — except for one policeman who stood legs astraddle in a side street, as if he wanted for once to get a good look at the demonstration for himself. After two or three hundred yards we turned around to look. As you perhaps recall the street falls away from the station at a slight slope. Michaela burst with joy and hugged me, the seal shouted, “Crazy, crazy!” The whole city seemed to be one huge demonstration.

All of a sudden the seal bellowed, “Join with us! Join with us!” At the second shout he raised his arm and chanted it with a balled-up fist as if threatening the people in a restaurant who had come to the window and were waving. “Join with us!” he roared, and Michaela chimed in the third or fourth time. Then they switched to “Gorby, Gorby!” It was awful. The two of them were making such a racket that conversations died away and people had no choice but to pick up the chant.

Michaela turned to me as if to say, “See, this is how it’s done!”

Whenever the seal paused, Michaela would tell more about Thea. Without complaint she accepted his interrupting her midsentence to break into the “International.”

We walked beneath the pedestrian bridge, thronged with people, and found ourselves at the vast open intersection on the other side, which was now completely empty. It was fun to be able to walk in the middle of the street. But at that same moment I saw helmets and shields, maybe three hundred yards ahead. We halted. The seal enlightened us by explaining that this was the “Round Corner,” the State Security building.

As we had at the pedestrian stoplight, we waited for people to move up behind us, for the demonstrating crowd to grow denser. It was at this intersection that for the first time I heard the chant “We are the people” (Wir sind das Volk, which in local Saxon sounded something like: Meer zinn das Foulg), which at the time I took to be an answer to the letter to the editor submitted by the Geifert cadre.³⁰³

At the Round Corner — not a single window was lit — I now realized how small the cluster of uniformed men huddled shield to shield at the entrance really was. To my eyes these hoplites looked like horses shying and prancing in place.³⁰⁴ In an attempt to calm them down, a row of demonstrators had formed opposite the shielded forces. Joining hands they watched as other demonstrators set lighted candles on the pavement at their feet.

Suddenly the seal vanished from our side and forged his way into the human chain opposite the men in uniform. As he did he glanced now left, now right, as if making sure all the others would bow simultaneously with him for the final applause. Instead of moving on and leaving him standing there, Michaela stepped in front of him. Caught up in the thrill of his new role, however, he now ignored her.

Michaela and I trudged in silence past St. Thomas Church, until we arrived at the New Rathaus.

I was amazed by the jubilation all around us. To me it felt more like we had ended up in nowhere. So what now? Another wide turn and back to the Gewandhaus?

Michaela wanted to stay. I kept walking straight ahead toward our car. She had no choice but to follow me. What did I have against ***, she cried, and why in the world was my nose out of joint? She had never told me anything about him, I said. There wasn’t anything to tell, she said, they had met only once in the canteen of the Berliner Ensemble, Thea had introduced them to each other. I said I didn’t believe her…I just didn’t want to admit, she interrupted, that this was perfectly normal for theater people, that they were all one big family and a greeting like that didn’t mean anything at all. Maybe so, I said; she had, in any case, acted as if I didn’t exist.

We didn’t speak the whole ride back.

When I unlocked the door, I at first assumed Aunt Trockel had arrived, but it was my mother who was having supper with Robert. I expected her to upbraid us for our foolishness and having left Robert all alone. But that didn’t seem to bother her. She had just wanted to look in on us, she said and, cocking her head to one side, listened now to Michaela as if this were all about her latest premiere. But when I went to fetch the key, Aunt Trockel wanted a full report. I owed it to her, after all, she had already packed her things. It sounded like a reproach, as if she had been robbed of a trip, of an adventure.

Your Enrico T.