New Lives

Friday, June 1, ’90

Dear Jo,

I promised you a job, and I’m going to keep my promise, for purely selfish reasons. But I need a couple of days yet, maybe even a week or two, to have a clear picture of it all. I don’t know what’s been going on behind my back for the last few days. Out of the blue, things have taken the nastiest possible turn for the worse. The atmosphere has changed so completely that I can hardly breathe.

I start each morning with the best intentions, but then, with every unreturned greeting, every evaded eye contact, every comment just left hanging in the air, I find myself turning more and more into the shifty character people take me for.

Maybe I should have gone at things with a little more tact. But I don’t like that kind of finagling. Maybe I should have waited, biding my time just with Jörg. But he knew exactly how to prevent that. He and Marion love to play the happy, inseparable couple.

I had asked them what they thought of my worksheet, of my calculations for a free paper financed by ads. Jörg’s jaw literally dropped when he looked up at me. “It’s easy to put stuff on paper,” he said. Marion had buried herself in her work as I stepped in. He hadn’t given up a career as an engineer, Jörg said, to run some fish wrap.

You need to know, Jo, that I don’t want to do a free paper for its own sake, but as a backup, a moneymaking machine, to relieve the Weekly of its burden of ads — but without our losing our advertisers. We have to make the most of our resources, use the structure at hand, just as we did with the city maps or want to do with trips for subscribers, which I’m working on with Cornelia. What I said to Jörg was, “We really both want the same thing!”

“Every respectable newspaper has a chance,” he replied, “if it concentrates on the essentials.” As soon as we started printing in Gera, the paper would be able to take on enough ads without neglecting content. And with that we’d have everything we needed.

I tried to make it clear to him that the one didn’t exclude the other, that we would have to occupy positions before other people could lay claim to them. I’m with Barrista on that — he bends down to pick up coins he finds on the street.

I could set up a free paper on my own, Jörg said, since what I had written up to this point was more suited for that sort of thing anyway. Marion laughed, but didn’t look up — as if she had just read something funny.

I swallowed that too. It was our duty, I said, to make use of any and every possibility in our attempt to protect the newspaper — not only in our own interest, but in our employees’ interest too. I didn’t want anything more than his simple approval to give it a try. “And if it goes bottom up, what then?” he asked.

In that same moment Marion turned around and told Jörg she really couldn’t understand why he was even discussing this with me. He and she didn’t want to do it, and that was surely reason enough. “And if he doesn’t like it, he can give us back his share.”³⁰⁵

Ah, Jo, I stood there like a stupid little boy. Jörg at least had looked at me when uttering such monstrous things, whereas Marion didn’t think that was even necessary.

I didn’t need to worry about our employees, Jörg said. None of them wanted to work for a free paper. I could ask them myself. And then he made a comment about Frau Schorba, my best friend, “my bosom buddy,” with an exaggerated accent on the second word. She had chased the new mayor away on her very first day here — which, by the way, was a generally known fact, but something that I had kept from him for whatever deeply regrettable and inexplicable reason. And one could only be thankful she was here strictly on probation.

I asked him to think it over one more time, because I planned to bring the topic up again at our next editorial meeting on Wednesday.

He hoped I wouldn’t do that, he said, turning his back on me. Maybe it was simple cowardice that prevented me from demanding a decision then and there. At any rate, yesterday morning (what a long time ago that was!) memories of the conversation seemed more like a bad dream that would be forgotten the next day — that’s how much I trusted my arguments.

They, however, had read my amiability as weakness. Ilona, whom I treated to a new “opera bag” a few days ago, was too busy to look up and return my greeting. Jörg muttered something in passing, Marion ignored me entirely, Fred was leaning against the doorframe and talking about something with Ilona (suddenly they get along, suddenly she had time), which so preoccupied him that he just gave me the kind of nod he would give any customer. Even Kurt scurried quickly by and ducked into his office. Pringel was always on his way somewhere. Only Astrid the wolf came bounding happily toward me the way she does every morning. But ever since Ilona sprained her ankle stepping on Astrid’s ball, she mistrusts even that greeting. Frau Schorba presented me the booty collected by our sales reps, but without devoting so much as a syllable to the whole brouhaha. She smiled, business was going incredibly well.

To think that I would seek refuge with Georg, my old boss, of all people! I met him on Market Square, at the fish-sandwich stand. Although we had moved out of his place only two months before, I would scarcely have recognized him; his gait, his body language is so different. Not a trace of the old stiff knight on his steed. He moves downright supplely on those long legs now. The deep creases between his eyebrows and across his forehead have likewise vanished. In greeting me he almost gave me a hug. Did I want to have a cup of coffee or tea at his place? Yes I did, if only just to keep from having to go straight back to the office.

The garden gate is now overgrown with roses. But imagine my amazement when I entered our old editorial office and recognized the same screen we use, and the same Apple next to it too. His printer is a little smaller than ours.

The baron had proposed two books, and paid for a thousand copies of each in advance. The book about the hereditary prince will be the first, then a book about the Jews in Altenburg and environs and their deportation. Just on his own, Georg said, he had enough ideas to last for years. Although the barometer and the clock and the postal scales — everything really — were still in their same old places, I felt as if I were in a totally different room. It was the same out in the garden, which is green now and bursting with flowers and almost impenetrable along the edges.

Franka embraced me as if I had just returned from a long journey. When I saw the big table set for coffee and the three boys waiting for us along with their grandparents, Georg admitted it was his birthday.

And so I spent a cheerful hour in the company of his family. Georg told about an extraordinary encounter. Late one evening recently — it was raining cats and dogs — their doorbell had rung. Before him stood a short woman drenched to the bone, her hair plastered to her head. She stepped inside and asked if she might spend the night — her car had broken down and there wasn’t a room to be had at the Wenzel for all the money in the world. Just as he was about to ask why she had chosen to ring their doorbell, he recognized her: the newspaper czarina from Offenburg. Franka and Georg spent the night on air mattresses so that their guest could have a real bed to sleep in. The next morning, however, the czarina sat at the kitchen breakfast table pale and with circles under her eyes, claiming she hadn’t slept a wink — the bed was a disaster.

Wearing some of Franka’s clothes, which were too large for her, she was soon on her way. A trace of her fragrance still hung in the bathroom, or so he claimed. “A real millionaire,” Franka said in conclusion.

Later I climbed the slope with Georg. As we shielded our eyes from the sun with our hands to gaze out over the city — all the way to the pyramids — I told him my troubles.

“You guys have got to do it, just as you’ve said, it’s the only way, otherwise you don’t stand a chance,” Georg concurred. I had expected reticence and scruples, if not outright opposition. But now I spoke like a man set free.

If only Jörg had been there! Up there on the hill I could have persuaded him. Never before had even I myself so clearly understood the necessity for a free paper.

According to Georg it’s already a done deal that the major presses will be divvying up the Party newspapers among themselves — but dividing them up according to the old state boundaries. Since Altenburg would now be assigned to Thuringia, we’d be the only one to straddle the old lines; and in no time we’d be making deliveries from Ronneburg to Rochlitz, from Meerane to the gates of Leipzig. We wouldn’t just be holding the region together, we would be a little empire with Altenburg at its center.

We indulged ourselves in predictions about the size of the printing — I figured 100 to 120,000—and it came to me that the baron had been wrong. It’s of no importance whatever whether you want to be rich or not. No matter how many possibilities you think you’re choosing from, the crucial point is to make one single decision — the one that guarantees your survival. Yes, in the end there is always just the right decision, and the wrong one. And ultimately it’s far better to do something yourself than to write about what others have done.³⁰⁶

On the way back I applied for the official seal of our Sunday Bulletin.

Back in the office, Frau Schorba greeted me with bad news. Käferchen has died, the old man is plotting revenge. When he gets back, there’ll be no one to protect me from him, because the police can’t take him into preventive custody, and he can’t be locked up in a psychiatric ward either, not unless he has caused harm of some sort. At least Marion will have something to be happy about.

The one hour each morning when Frau Schorba coaches me on the computer makes me feel like I’m inhaling air for the whole day. If I make no progress, she says, “Yes, just like this,” as if in the next moment I would have stumbled on the solution myself. Only her upper lip betrays her impatience by creeping back and forth like a pink caterpillar over the firm line of her lower lip. The first ad I laid out by myself was Cornelia’s “Italian Weeks for Soccer Fans.” We cut the World Cup logo out of the Leipziger Volkszeitung, and simply pasted it in.

While I waited for Fred, my mind went limp at the thought of the afternoon’s upcoming argument. Fred’s reports of his country rounds lay before me. I compared numbers for the last two weeks listed on page one. Here one copy fewer, there three. In the best case, stagnation. But his totals showed an increase of thirty newspapers sold.

Of the ten reports that I had checked by the time Fred arrived late for our meeting, two were correct. I underscored the mistakes in his math with a red marker and exclamation points. Oddly enough, however, the errors more or less balanced out.

When he arrived Manuela, our secret weapon, happened to be in my office — she brings in more ads than our three other reps combined. Legs crossed, hands folded across his belly, Fred rolled his eyes to signal how pointless he found my putting up with Manuela’s chitchat. When he started shaking his head too, I handed him his lists without comment. If I didn’t know him, I said, I’d have to think he was cheating on us. I then sent Manuela on her way, asking her to have Ilona report to my office.

“Can you explain this?” I asked Fred after a long pause. “Can you tell me how you came up with these numbers?”

He had always turned the money in, never held a penny back, and Ilona had given him receipts.

“And you never,” I asked, putting the pages back in numerical order, “noticed any discrepancies?”

Fred shrugged. I said nothing. Fred asked if he could leave now. “No,” I said, “we’ll wait for Ilona.”

That sentence was the last one for a long while, until Fred volunteered to fetch Ilona himself.

“Good heavens!” she said when I spread the reports out for her.

“And you always took his money and wrote receipts?”

“I wrapped the coins and took it all to the bank, what else?” she said as if expecting praise. She didn’t seem to be in the least aware what this had to do with her.

“But didn’t check the figures?”

She had received the money and taken it to the bank, she repeated.

They competed at sniffing in outrage when I said they should put everything aside and recheck the reports. We would need numbers by afternoon. “Maybe,” I said in conclusion, “we’ve been broke for a long time.”

When things got underway shortly after five, the mood was excruciating. Ilona and Fred sat directly across from me, talking about something that kept them in stitches. They had had other things to do than to recheck figures, they announced. I was the comptroller, after all, that was really my job.

Pringel sat off to himself and stared at the blank sheet of paper in front of him. He already knew what awaited him, I was the only one still in dark. Kurt was missing, the sales reps hadn’t been invited. Only Jörg seemed his old cordial self.

His first question called Ilona and Fred to account: Why hadn’t they followed my instructions and studied the totals? They were completely flummoxed.

Frau Schorba gave the figures for the advertising receipts. We no longer had any need of a free paper, Jörg said, we already were one. Starting with the last week in June the Weekly would be printed in Gera, with four or eight additional pages. That would make room for more articles, which would be considerably more likely to increase the number of copies sold than this flood of advertising we were drowning in. And with that Jörg’s survey of the future came to an end. He presented his new lead article, which the Commission Against Corruption and Abuse of Office had delivered free of charge — they’re having to elect their third chairman, since the first two are themselves both under suspicion of corruption.

Then Jörg pulled out a sheet of paper and said, “We need to talk about this, Gotthold, you have to deal with this now.” Pringel’s childlike face shrank even smaller. Jörg explained the contents of the letter, signed by more than thirty employees of Air Research Technologies. In it they accused Pringel of being a “Red scribbler.” “What is a Red scribbler doing on the staff of your newspaper?” They had enclosed an article Pringel had written for their house journal in October ’89.

Jörg began to quote from it, and after citing phrases like “with the full force of the law,” “a threat to the health and welfare of our children,” broke off with an “and so forth and so on.”

When Pringel looked up he was hardly recognizable. His lips were quivering. He tried to smile, his glance skittered across the room.

He couldn’t really understand, Jörg said, why this letter came as such a surprise. But above all he wanted to ask why Pringel hadn’t shown his cards to us to begin with. In his mind that was the real offense. Pringel nodded. By October no one had had to write stuff like that anymore, Fred muttered, squelching Pringel’s own answer after he had just taken a deep breath.

It had been right after the riots in Dresden, Pringel finally stammered. But the text had been shoved in front of him, he had had no choice but to publish it, it hadn’t been his article at all, but he had had to sign off on it — as the accountable editor he had to put his name to it. His eyes wandered wildly. “What was I supposed to do?”

“Show us the article,” Marion said, which set Pringel stammering again — but it hadn’t been his article.

I asked him what he had been afraid of. Of course I meant in terms of the situation last autumn. But he misunderstood me.

“That you wouldn’t let me go on writing,” he said. Working for a newspaper had never been such fun before, so fulfilling. He was so happy to show up every morning…

What was the point of torturing him any longer? He agreed that for now his name would no longer appear in the paper. Pringel is an amiable fellow, and intelligent. You only need to tell him what you want, and the next morning you’ve got it. His little stories about various firms are a big hit at Gallus. Hausmann furniture has been placing half a page a week with us ever since.

Were there any questions, Jörg wanted to know.

Yes, I said, we hadn’t yet discussed the most important topic.

This was an editorial meeting, he interrupted, any discussion of fundamentals would have to be between the two of us. He wished I would finally get that into my head. Besides which, the matter was already settled.

As far as I was concerned, I replied, the matter was not settled, and the others should at least have a chance to hear my arguments. But “the others” had already stood up. Even Frau Schorba was reaching for her handbag. Only Pringel had remained in his seat. The two of us had evidently forfeited any power to influence decisions. But then I felt Astrid the wolf’s muzzle against my knee. She was looking up at me with her one good eye. Sure, you can make fun of me, but I’m certain that the wolf understood my situation precisely. I am going to have no other choice than to double my bet. I believe in winning.

Hugs, Your E.

PS: Maybe it would be better to publish Anton Larschen’s memoirs with Georg. I think Georg would be pleased, and the book would have a real publisher.

Sunday, June 3, ’90

Dear Nicoletta,

I hadn’t actually been all that surprised that my mother had shown up at our place on October 9th. But after Robert was in bed, she said, “I’ve got something to tell you two.” And after a short pause: “I was arrested.”

My mother’s report was far less detailed than Mario’s. She had also been arrested on Friday evening, that is, on the 6th, in front of the Dresden Central Station. She had wanted to verify with her own eyes what she had heard in the clinic and on the radio. But no sooner had she stepped off the streetcar — that is, well before she was able to get any sort of sense of demonstrators and uniformed personnel — than she was grabbed and thrown into a truck. They had beaten and cursed her. After her release on Sunday morning, she had taken a streetcar to Laubegast, to see Gunda Lapin, a painter and friend of hers. She had recuperated there until Monday morning. She had then had herself examined at the polyclinic and placed on medical leave for a week. If she were still locked up, she said, no one would know where she was.

Listening to her was pure agony. Michaela fought back her tears and tried to clasp Mother’s hands in hers. That seemed wrong to me, because it was like a restraint on my mother, and I was glad when Michaela left to call Thea from a phone booth. Being left alone with Mother, however, was even less bearable. I turned on the television. But neither she nor I watched. We cleared the table without saying a word, and didn’t break our silence as we made up her bed. Mother went to the bathroom, and I could hear her gargle and spit into the basin. I sat in front of the television — I had turned it back off — and gazed at my silhouette on the dark screen. I kept taking deeper breaths, until the rise and fall of my shoulders was clearly visible in the reflection too.

Suddenly my mother was standing before me in her underwear and asked me to rub her with lotion. Her back was covered with bruises, they had even struck her on the thighs and calves. She braced herself against the table and bent forward. There was a slight odor of sweat. In prescribing such things, she said, few doctors actually thought about the fact that old people are usually alone and can’t rub themselves down. We exchanged good-night kisses. My mother hadn’t turned the bathroom light off or screwed the top back on the toothpaste. Her towel lay on the toilet lid.

Michaela asked what that odor was, and then said that Thomas had just rubbed Thea down with liniment too. The word had a cozy sound, as if we’d put everything behind us now.

By Tuesday there was no longer any way to prevent the Dresden resolution from being read from the stage. Except for Beate Sebastian, who was unwilling to take part in such an action unless the Party gave its approval, the whole house was for it.

As for as the resolution itself, I didn’t share the others’ enthusiasm. When I proposed we write our own, I was told that the orchestra, most of the singers, and the corps de ballet had already agreed to it and that we couldn’t start all over again now.

The whole tone was taken from the ritual of criticism and self-criticism. There’s a worried functionary hiding behind every line, I said. Michaela shook her head, no, I was mistaken. We went through it line by line, and even I was surprised at how with just the slightest pressure on the lever, the pseudorevolutionary rhetoric gave way. For instance, this sentence: “A national leadership that does not speak with their people is not credible.”

“Don’t you hear the whimpering of some disillusioned lickspittle?” I asked. “Who says I’d ever want to speak with that bunch? Why call them our national leadership when they came to power by fraudulent elections? And what does that mean: with their people? Why don’t they quote Brecht: ‘They should dissolve their people and elect another…’”

Michaela admitted that those lines could be deleted, but that the formulation “a people forced to be speechless will turn to violent action” was not just courageous, but true as well in the present situation. Why, I asked, didn’t they write: “A people imprisoned for twenty-eight years and treated as property of the state, punished and bullied for the slightest contradiction, has finally taken over the street! Down with a band of criminals who beat defenseless people, mock and torture them.”

Michaela didn’t reply. “Why,” I asked, “don’t they simply say: Tear down the wall, throw out the Socialist Unity Party, establish human rights, take to the streets, be brave, don’t let them bully you anymore.”

“That’s going too far,” Michaela said, “that calls everything into question.”

“Of course,” I shouted, “it calls everything into question! Leipzig calls everything into question, what happened to my mother, to Thea, calls everything into question. We have to call everything into question.” Why was she willing to put up with the same old crap from the pens of apparatchiks? “‘It is our duty,’” I quoted scornfully, “‘to demand that the leadership of our country and Party restore their trust in the population.’ Isn’t that disgusting? To conclude with that? Doesn’t that mean, please don’t beat us, we’re really in favor of socialism? That’s more wretched than wanting some prince to take us by the hand? You know what that Dresden crowd is like.”

“Then why,” Michaela asked, “don’t you say it?”

“I will say it,” I replied. “You can depend on it!”

I have to add that we weren’t alone. We were standing beside the little round table in the dramaturgy office and had those who were sitting at it or leaning against their desks for an audience. Ever since her performance of the day before and our return from Leipzig, Michaela had become the Bärbel Bohley of the theater and I her husband, whose mother had been beaten, no, tortured by the police. One by one the others had all fallen silent. We had spoken the last sentences as if onstage.

Under their attentive eyes, Michaela walked over to my desk to get her purse. “There is a difference,” she said, returning to her first position, “whether something is said in the theater or on the street. There is no anonymity in the theater—”

“Which simply means,” I broke in, “that the street needs to enlighten the theater. God knows, not a single person arrested was anonymous. They all had to present their IDs!”

In her eyes, she said, it would be an achievement for the theater to arrive at a point where the resolution could be read at all. With that Michaela left the dramaturgy office. From my vantage point at the window I saw her walk to the bus stop. Yet another Gotham rehearsal had been canceled.

My arguments were so irrefutable that I found myself in a state of euphoria. I had given my aversion free rein and, by following it as if it were a divining rod, had discovered a logic that worked. Do you understand me? Suddenly I had cogent reasons why I did not want to be a part of it all.

My new outlook provided me, I thought, a line of defense that no one would breach all that soon and that allowed me to observe these theatrical follies with a derisive smile. Of course people said I was right, but they took Michaela’s side and talked about small steps, cunning, patience.

At two o’clock on the dot I drove home. Mother had prepared a meal. She had filled Robert in on what had happened to her. He enjoyed the “extended family” and the “Sunday dinner.” “The longer I think about it,” Mother said, “the more clearly I realize they all belong behind bars, not just their bullyboys and officers, but all of them, Modrow, Berghofer, Honecker, Mielke, Hager, the whole rotten pack. And if they didn’t know anything about it, so much the worse.” Michaela didn’t look up. Had I arrived earlier, she probably would have thought I had coached my mother. For coffee we drove to Kohren-Sahlis. There was poppy-seed cake and whipped cream. Mother ordered seconds and said she’d earned it. Then I drove Michaela to the theater. The Gypsy Princess matinee for retirees had begun at three o’clock.

While the performance went on up front, backstage the battle over the resolution had flared up again.

The orchestra and corps de ballet had voted yes, as had the soloists, with one exception, but the chorus was divided. The gypsy princess herself could not be persuaded to read the resolution. Kleindienst, the conductor, likewise refused. Finally we had a volunteer, Oliver Jambo, our gay heldentenor — I mention this only because Jambo celebrated being our gay heldentenor with every step he took. He would consider it an honor to read the letter. And with that I drove home.

That evening Michaela told us that the whole thing had fallen apart because of Jonas. He had sat in the smoking corner, smiling. He asked everyone who made the mistake of wandering past to put a hold on “this gesture.” He was asking for just one day. They should wait one day more. He had spoken to Michaela as well. It was difficult even for her to hold her own against him. One day, he kept saying over and over, just one day. When asked how that would change anything, he cited the meeting of the politburo.

At this point in Michaela’s narrative I couldn’t help laughing. Yes, she said, she found it shameful too, but in the end there had been nothing she could do. The singers were suddenly in favor of a one-day postponement. But the orchestra hadn’t been informed, so they had waited in the wings. Finally Kleindienst called them onstage to receive, or so he said, their well-deserved applause. The musicians had left in such a rage that they probably couldn’t be counted on from now on.

Wednesday, however, was to be Michaela’s big day. Mother, Robert, and I took our seats for the performance of Emilia Galotti. Michaela wasn’t at her best. At the point where Emilia starts to tell her story, she forgot her lines.

At intermission I ducked out to go to the dramaturgy office. All the lights were on in the general manager’s office. The technical director, the office manager — she was also a Party secretary, and is currently the general manager — were sitting with three or four others whose voices I didn’t recognize.

I kept hearing footsteps and the sound of a door opening and closing. All the same I was surprised at how many people had gathered. On the lowest tread of the little set of steps that led to the stage stood Jambo, lost in thought and playing with the cord of his glasses. A woman’s voice whispered, “The general manager!”

I hadn’t even noticed him. He was sitting at the table, his head resting on his crossed arms as if he were asleep, his shoulders jerking. At first I thought there had been an accident, that someone was dead.

There was a crackle in the loudspeaker, and Olaf, the stage manager, called the actor playing Odoardo onstage. He left the loudspeaker on, so that we could now follow the performance. “Is no one here? Good, I shall be colder still,” snarled the loudspeaker.

“Didn’t you hear it on the radio?” Jonas asked in the middle of the line, “He who obeys no law, is equal in power to him who knows none.”³⁰⁷

Jonas’s eyes, veiled with tears, moved around the room, crawling from one person to the next in search of mercy. “Didn’t you hear it on the radio? Don’t you pay attention anymore? Can you think only in one direction?” He shook his head. “So you don’t know,” he shouted, “you don’t know about the most important change in decades. Haven’t any of you heard the politburo’s announcement this evening?”

“Hah!” Jambo exclaimed. “Is the wall gone?”

Jonas bellowed, his voice exploded into the room. Michaela claimed later that you could even hear him through the steel-plated door. His head turned such a livid red that I expected to see him collapse onto his desk, eyes staring wide, mouth hanging open.

The cord had got tangled on the bridge of Oliver Jambo’s glasses, so that it looked as if he were shaking a thermometer down. “Could you repeat that?” he asked in a low voice.

Instead of hurling himself at Jambo as I expected, Jonas began to preach. His entire statement was so silly that I don’t remember any of it except two sentences, which he repeated several times: “There won’t be any Chinese solution,” and “The politburo wants an honest face-to-face dialogue with the nation.”

The applause at the final curtain was now coming over the loudspeaker. Jonas kept on talking. He was starting in again with his “face-to-face” when, a little short of breath, Michaela’s voice could be heard from the loudspeaker: “Okay, here we go!” “Ladies!” Jambo said, holding the steel-plated door open. I was the last to follow. When I turned around once more, I saw Jonas standing there with one arm raised, pointing vacantly.³⁰⁸

Michaela stepped forward and began. One couple stood up and dashed for the exit. In the dim light cast over the audience I could see Mother and Robert, both sitting up ramrod straight and listening as if Emilia Galotti had risen from the dead to take her revenge on Marinelli. Her tone of voice when she said, “We’re stepping out of our roles here,” was the same with which she had said, “But all such deeds are from times past!”

I felt uncomfortable just standing there, reduced to a physical presence.³⁰⁹

The audience applauded, most of them stood up, including Mother and Robert. I saw Michaela reflexively want to bow in response to applause. She was just barely able to control herself, but now spread her arms, as if to say, All of us here agree, and then stepped back. People continued to applaud as if waiting for something, a song or a postlude. Some of those onstage followed Michaela’s example and extended their arms to applaud the audience. Instead of an orderly exit, a few of us began to wander offstage one by one. The last ones to leave, including Emilia Galotti, looked as if they were in fact fleeing. The audience, 124 purchased tickets, kept on clapping as if to force an encore.

When we arrived at the theater the following day, an emissary of the Library on the Environment was waiting for us at the door. “The whole city is talking about what you did,” he said with an earnest nod, and invited us to Martin Luther Church that evening so that we could inform others about our declaration. Since I had never heard about a Library on the Environment in Altenburg, I thought at first he had come from Berlin.

The invitation extended to us was for a “prayer service.”

At the noon break Michaela took up residence in the canteen and received her due homage, even from the orchestra and chorus. Nothing like this had ever happened to her, not even after a premiere. Michaela announced who would read the resolution that evening, since she intended to appear at the church.

Martin Luther Church, that neo-Gothic forefinger rising at the far end of Market Square, was jam-packed. I followed Michaela down the center aisle to the front, where the emissary greeted us. It had been ages since I had been inside a church!

“Ghastly, truly ghastly,” a woman with short hair and a long, thin scar across her right eyebrow kept repeating. “Truly, truly ghastly!” She was referring to Bodin, the pastor of the church, who had demanded that instead of presenting bombastic speeches they should hold a thanksgiving service. God needed to be thanked for the politburo’s declaration, which was an attempt at reconciliation. There were, moreover, strong elements of his congregation who would have no sympathy whatever for such proceedings. If she and her friends did not understand that, he had no choice but to yield to those members of the congregation and close his church’s doors to a crowd of rowdies.

Somehow I sympathized with Pastor Bodin, an elderly, totally bald man, who had seated himself in his clerical robes against one wall and now appeared to be deep in thought or prayer.

Michaela and I were greeted by several people. The founder of the Altenburg New Forum (every town had its own New Forum) fought for air as he told us how that same morning he had found the lug nuts loosened on his Trabant. A gaunt long-haired fellow with an inscrutable Chinese smile was holding a rolled-up banner in his arms like a giant doll. There was a steady flow of young women who introduced themselves as members or chairpersons of environmental and peace groups.

Women were likewise in the majority among the people thronging the aisles and balconies. “Something has got to happen today!” the woman with the scar said, and planted herself in front of us.

“What’s supposed to happen?” I asked.

“Why, a demonstration,” she exclaimed. “We’ve got to get things started here! Somebody’s got to speak up today for once.”

The long-haired fellow came over and interrupted her to say, “If someone is going to speak, it ought to be a person no one here really knows.” Strangely enough at that moment that seemed plausible to me. I realized too late that by nodding I had got myself into a precarious situation. The fellow from the New Forum returned to repeat his lug-nut story and said he was already asking far too much of his family. Michaela didn’t budge. “Can’t you do it?” the woman with the scar asked, gazing at me. I was trapped.

“And what am I supposed to say?” I asked. “Super,” she cried, “that’s really super!” The fellow with long hair bent down over me and patted my shoulder. “Fine, Enrico, very fine!” I was so discombobulated that I asked how he knew my name.³¹⁰ In the same moment the church orchestra struck up. The bass player, who had given the downbeat, nodded like one of those plastic dachshunds that for a while you saw in every rear windshield.

After the first few bars I regretted the whole thing, after the first stanza I was desperate. Had I not very wisely kept my distance from such people until now? I could understand Pastor Bodin better and better as he sat there breathing heavily. His pouting lower lip dangled like a trembling reddish blue nozzle through which far too many words had flowed.

While someone from the civil rights movement was speaking, I was passed a note: “Get ready, you’re up soon. Thanks.”

Michaela, who had been greeted with lots of applause at the start, made the mistake of reading the Dresden Resolution with the same flair she had at the theater. I could hear Emilia Galotti. She herself was aware how from one line to the next she was losing energy and how ultimately all that was left was an artificial theatrical pose. Toward the end she spoke faster — a deadly sin for an actor.

“I wasn’t good,” she whispered. I took her cold hand, held it tight for a while. “Doesn’t matter,” I said as the bass player gave his downbeat nod to that rotten orchestra.

Hundreds, thousands of times I had imagined giving a revolutionary speech, as if my life had been aimed toward this moment, this wish, this dream, which I was now damned to turn into reality.

Clutching the little note in my left hand, holding fast to the pulpit with my right,³¹¹ I fought back the urge to laugh.

I looked up. Not a cough, not a cleared throat, not a shuffled foot. And into this perfect silence I said, “My name is Enrico Türmer. For a year and a half now I have been living with my wife and son at 104 Georg-Schumann Strasse. I work in the theater and am a member of no party.”

I looked out over the heads of the people and down the center aisle, and began:

“We have made mistakes, we confess we have, we indict ourselves.

“We tied on our pioneer neckerchiefs and sang the song about the dove of peace, while tanks drove through Budapest.

“We wept and laid our hands in our laps as we were being walled in.

“We said nothing while Soviet tanks crushed the Prague Spring.

“We paid our solidarity dues while workers were being shot and killed in Gdansk.”

The breathless silence lent my words a strength that had nothing to do with me, these were no longer my words.

“On May Day we demonstrated in honor of our unending loyalty to the Soviet Union while its troops murdered people in Afghanistan.

“We cracked jokes about lazy Polacks while the Poles were fighting for free labor unions, and we swore an oath to our flag as the National People’s Army took up its position along the Oder and Neisse.

“In the midst of the graveyard silence that has reigned over Tiananmen Square for months, we still hear Honecker and Krenz clapping their approval.”

I could feel the words whirling about me, felt them rip me from the spot, felt myself being swept away with them.

“We put on our finest clothes when we went to vote.

“We learned to talk about our country without using the word ‘wall.’

“We let ourselves be draped along the curb like living garlands.

“We went to our Youth Consecration and swore loyalty to the state.

“We practiced throwing grenades and shooting air guns while the best of our writers, actors, and musicians were forced to leave the country.

“We congratulated one another on our brand-new apartments while the old centers of our towns were being razed.

“We counted our Olympic gold medals, but the dentist didn’t know where he would get material to fill our teeth.

“We hung flags from our windows, although in Prague and Budapest we were ashamed to be recognized as citizens of the GDR. We rose from our seats for the national anthem, although we would have preferred to sink into the ground.”

I cast my eyes into the distance.

“We do not want to burden ourselves with guilt any longer. Our patience is at an end. We will let them see us, on the streets, in the marketplaces, in churches and theaters, in the Rathaus, in front of the buildings of local government and the State Security’s villas. We have nothing to hide, we will show our faces. There is no reason for us to keep silent, we will speak our names. The time for begging is past. The wall must go, State Security must go, the Socialist Unity Party must go! Bring on free elections, a free media, bring on democracy! We need no one’s permission. We will now take to the streets! This is our country!”

The silence burst open. The whole room was in an uproar — stomps, applause, whistles. If it doesn’t sound too absurd, I stared out into the clamor, clutching the pulpit, dizzy from my own words. People were crowding out the doors. “Super,” the woman with the scar shouted, “really super!” Michaela had crossed her arms, clutching her elbows with her hands. Later she said the pastor had pushed me aside to get to the microphone. But the organ had drowned him out.

The closer we got to the exit the more clearly we could hear the chants.

The demonstration moved past the police station, past the Rathaus, on across Market Square, and turned left at the far end onto Sporen Strasse. We formed the rear guard. Suddenly someone opened the police-station door, two uniformed men raced toward us, and asked where we were headed. How should we know, the long-haired fellow shouted as he started to unroll his banner (FREE ELECTIONS!). The woman with the scar described our probable route for them: past State Security and the District Council and then up the hill to District Administration. They should probably block Zeitzer Strasse and Puschkin Strasse.

As we crossed Ebert Strasse, we heard a concert of whistles that could only be directed at the Stasi villa. “Let’s hope they don’t do anything stupid! Let’s hope, let’s hope,” Michaela whispered.

That night around one thirty, I heard car doors slamming directly below our window, I listened for footsteps, thought I could already hear the doorbell. But then nothing more happened. And that was almost more unnerving.

Your Enrico T.

Pentecost Monday, June 4, ’90

Verotchka,

now I really must write you a letter:³¹² Mamus was here for two days.

The first evening Michaela invited us over.

Suddenly it was all just like old times, each of us sitting in his chair, and if our friend Barrista hadn’t been running around in his slippers we might have taken him for a guest. Mamus acted as if nothing had happened and ignored the new constellation. Robert is her grandchild and Michaela her daughter-in-law, and now as luck would have it the baron has been added to the mix. Mamus agreed with everything he said and praised Herr von Barrista’s objectivity several times. He kept going on about Dresden and how much he had enjoyed the tour by streetcar and her warm hospitality. That was three weeks ago.³¹³

It was news to Mamus that Michaela has given notice at the theater. “But why?” she exclaimed. Michaela just went on eating, as if she hadn’t heard the question. And instead her baron began to hold forth for her. First he talked about the state of the world and declared our current situation to be flat out the best this old earth has ever known — strong democracies without rivals and technological progress that increasingly relieves man of his burdens and allows him the freedom to pursue his true calling. Now that the iron curtain has fallen, what lies before us, or so the baron said, is an era of action and deeds, while contemplation and brooding belong to the past. Things change now more in one week than they used to over the course of years, which means that art, be it in the East or the West, is a losing proposition. Life’s experiences are not to be found in the theater nowadays, but in commerce, in the marketplace. The changes we see daily are not only more exciting than Shakespeare, but also can no longer be grasped through Shakespeare.

He was basically saying nothing all that different from what I had heard him articulate last January. At times he used the very same words. But now Michaela was nodding with egregious eagerness, and Mamus seconded the baron and kept repeating that we needed to see things with businesslike objectivity now.

After the meal our friend Barrista passed around something in a little box with a glass lid. It didn’t look at all promising, some sort of desiccated stuff in a kind of mousetrap. Have you guessed? It gave our poor Mamus such a fright that she flinched and pressed her back to her chair — a couple of Boniface’s knuckles.

Our farewells were also “businesslike,” although each of us felt embarrassed. Robert came with us to the car. (Our friend Barrista has such a bad conscience that not only has he transferred the car’s title to me, he’s also paying the insurance.)

As I drove I told Mamus about the new apartment, described to her the view to the castle and the spaciousness of our rooms. I mentioned it in the hope that it would make the bleak room where she would be spending the night with me more bearable.³¹⁴ Besides which, it seemed to me it was better to talk with her than to leave her wrapped in silence.

“I’m not moving in alone,” I suddenly said — it just slipped out. Mamus didn’t react. Only when we came to a stop did she announce the results of her ruminations: “Vera!”

“Yes,” I said, “Vera.” I asked Mamus if she wanted to take a walk with me, because besides the two air mattresses there was only one chair in the room. She shook her head. I was truly alarmed at how slowly she climbed the stairs.

Cornelia and Massimo weren’t home. We could have sat in the kitchen, but Mamus wanted to “get ready for bed.” When I used the bathroom after her I discovered a whole hodgepodge of medications and salves in her cosmetic bag.

Mamus had already turned out the light and instead of lying down on the air mattress with fresh linens, had stretched out on mine.

I asked her what she needed all those medicines for. “All sorts of things,” she said. I wanted to know if “all sorts of things” also meant she was still in pain from her beating.

“Serves me right,” she said.

“Who says so?” I asked. “Your colleagues?”

“No,” Mamus replied, “I say so, I do.”

She had pulled the blanket up to her chin, the sharp profile of her nose jutting up. I would have loved to turn the light on again.

Suddenly she said, “I’m so ashamed of myself,” and rolled over with her back to me.

I stood up and knelt down beside her. I begged her to talk to me, I tried to pat her cheek, I bent down to look into her eyes. But nothing I did was right — I was told to lie back down, to please lie back down. No, I said, she needed to tell me what was wrong.

She said nothing.

“That damn camera,” she announced, after I had retreated to my air mattress. “That damn camera.”

I barely dared take a breath, as if I were eavesdropping.

On Friday, October 6th, Mamus had taken the streetcar from the clinic to the Central Station. She had been curious, wanted to see what was really going on. And she had her old camera with her. She had stuck it in her purse without thinking much about it. On the streetcar she ran into C., a pediatrician, whose consignment seat for the Staatskapelle was right next to hers. C. rode with her to the Central Station. At first it all seemed harmless enough. But then the demonstrators began to throw stones. Mamus held up her camera and snapped a shot. The police started going after the demonstrators, and C. shouted, “Now!” “There!” “And there!” “Now!” and pulled her along with her. Mamus told how, egged on by a megaphone, some special forces turned on the demonstrators. Suddenly everything started getting blurry. “Tear gas!” C. had shouted — she needed to close her eyes tight and put her hands to her face. They linked arms. Without being able to see where they were going they walked about a hundred or two hundred yards, until they thought they might be out of the cloud.

After that Mamus said good-bye to C. and boarded the first streetcar that came by. The driver, however, refused to ring the bell for departure because he claimed demonstrators were attacking the streetcar. People on the car started loudly offering their two bits — you couldn’t even take a streetcar to go see a movie in the evening anymore. A couple of rowdy demonstrators climbed aboard, and one of them shouted, “Fucking pigs!” Then everything just went “lickety-cut.” Mamus had no idea what was happening to her. The rear car was emptied of its passengers. She saw people get off, fall to their knees, then stretch out, facedown, on the paving stones in front of the Central Station, while policemen with truncheons and dogs stood over them. “Just like Chile,” she said, and when she paused I could hear her breathing.

“I was so damn stupid,” she went on, “so damn stupid, because I thought it was none of my business. A fat man in a uniform got on at the front of the car and shouted, ‘Everybody off, please, and then lie flat on the ground.’ He said it very politely, as if there had been some accident. But a wiry guy, who approached from the rear, started shouting, ‘Out! Facedown on the ground!’ And silly willy that I am, I do what he says. I go right ahead and do it. Do you understand? Your mother gets off the streetcar, gets off and lies down flat on the ground in the filthy street — do you understand?”

In a voice choked with tears she said, “I was a failure, an utter failure…” I didn’t dare touch her. I said she had no reason to blame herself. What did any of this have to do with failure?

“Oh, but it does, it does,” she whispered, only to suddenly bark at me, “Of course I failed.”

Mamus asked for a handkerchief and blew her nose.

“Next to me,” she begin again, “a woman lay whimpering and sobbing like a child throwing a tantrum. I raised my head to look at the streetcar, and there in the empty car sat an older, very well-dressed woman. She looked incredibly elegant. Twenty, thirty people were lying there on the ground, and there’s just that one person sitting there, looking out the window to the other side. Suddenly a woman tugs the sobbing creature beside me to her feet, links arms with her, and walks her right past the ‘polite’ policeman and climbs aboard. But as for me, my head is full of utter nonsense, not one rational thought. I’m thinking, Well, that’s the last of that contingent, they can’t make any more exceptions. I’m thinking that they mustn’t find my camera, if they find it they’ll arrest me. And the whole time I kept looking at the elegant lady, and then the streetcar bell rings and it pulls out with those three women in the front car.”

Mamus gave a laugh. “If it weren’t for that elegant woman I wouldn’t blame myself now. They simply broke us, Enrico, they broke us!”

It was pointless to try to comfort Mamus. She would permit no excuses. She had already seen how they were running people down, whaling away at them. But that really had nothing to do with it, that’s what she wanted me to understand. “I put up no defense, I just yielded to my fate, I was submissive, nothing else, just submissive.”

Everything that happened afterward, what those younger guys had done to her, how she had been forced to kneel on her hands — all because of that damn camera — was, as she sees it now, punishment for her own failings.

She had whispered these last words because Cornelia and Massimo had returned home. When I made some remark, Mamus hissed for me to hush. Floorboards creaked. We listened to Cornelia’s shrill giggle and Massimo’s permanently hoarse voice. I heard a bottle being uncorked and the chink of a toast. And then suddenly I heard Mamus snoring.

She slept until eight, and declared she hadn’t slept that late in years. At breakfast she said that the pictures had all turned out jiggled.

Robert spent all of Sunday with us. And on the drive to the train station, Mamus said she was glad to learn that the family would all be back together again soon.

Should I try to make you jealous? Do you know who visited me on Friday? My handsome Nikolai!³¹⁵ Suddenly there he stood, in the middle of the office, smiling, practically melting with smiles. But not to worry, he’s built a family around himself too — Marica, “pretty as a picture,” as Mamus would say, a Yugoslav, who, when she wasn’t ordering her two girls around, talked about what all Nikolai had told her about me. Sometimes she has the impression, she said, that she knows more about me than about him. Nikolai left for the West in ’84, to Bielefeld, where his father had settled. He took technical courses, something to do with electronics, and is making “good money,” as Marica puts it. At any rate they drive a huge Mercedes, big as an official limo, that makes my LeBaron look like a toy. We hadn’t heard anything from each other in seven years.

Johann will be starting with us in August. Franziska has finally agreed to check in to a clinic, their apartment will be ready in September, it’s to mark a new start for both of them.

With love, your Heinrich

Friday, June 8, ’90

Dear Jo,

I apologize if my most recent letter left you feeling uneasy. Please believe me that your job was never in jeopardy for a moment. But I thought it best to let you know what’s what.

You can’t imagine the incredible hysteria and acrimony. I had no choice, I had to pull the emergency brake. Even now, after all the garbage dumped on me, the separation still leaves me feeling more disheartened than gratified. Things could have gone so well for us. We would have been invincible. Toward the end Jörg himself saw he had overshot his mark, but he already lacked the strength and courage to rescind his decision. Now he’s suffering for it. No wonder, given all the missed opportunities.

Since I wasn’t prepared to submit to his dictate I had no choice but to do precisely what Jörg proposed was my only recourse, that is, together with the baron, to launch a free paper financed by ads.³¹⁶

Do you know what happened when I informed Jörg and Marion of my decision? They demanded “their share” back. At first I didn’t even grasp what they meant. I was sitting at the computer beside Frau Schorba and could hear Marion and Co. squawking in the next office — instead of using my name, they referred to me only by pronouns. I wasn’t expecting good news when Jörg came in.

“I have just one question,” he said. Was I prepared to repay my share, which had been given me gratis?

“Which is to say,” I said as softly as possible, “I should pack my things and go?” No, that’s not what he meant, Jörg said, rubbing the back of his neck. I gave him plenty of time. But when he just went on massaging his neck, I asked him how he pictured the situation.

He didn’t know himself, he said just as softly, but it couldn’t go on like this. I pleaded with him one last time to let me do a free paper.

Jörg, however, repeated that there was no way we could expand, especially not at this critical juncture.

“The money’s there!” I cried, and pointed to the stack of ads. “It’s there!”

“Are you going to give back your share?” he asked.

“And what do I get in return?” I asked.

“So just as I thought,” he said with a bitter laugh. I asked what “just as I thought” meant. But he had already ducked out of my office. Shortly thereafter Marion stormed in like a Fury. She called me Herr Türmer. To be on a first-name basis with someone like me was an insult. And then she really let loose. She even called me a thief, and a shadow of a man. I was a shadow, nothing more than a shadow. I have no idea what she meant. They would do anything to be rid of me.

“There’ll come a time when you’ll regret saying such things,” I said. My reply was in reference to their ruining the paper. I said it with great sadness. But Marion screeched, “And now he’s threatening us!” And pointed her finger at me: “He’s threatening us!” Jörg came bounding in and forbade me to harass his wife like this. And it went on and on like that. How disgusting! Jörg and Ilona tried to calm Marion down by laying into me. I’ve never seen such bogus theatrics on a stage. Frau Schorba sat there next to me like a block of ice. In all the excitement Astrid the wolf started barking. Even ever-silent Kurt can’t take it anymore and wants to quit.

So now I’ve come to an agreement with the baron, and am transferring my share in the Weekly to him. He figures it’s worth thirty thousand D-marks — if Jörg can come up with the money, then of course he has first right of purchase. Which means we’re starting fresh again and will use the thirty thousand for computers, printers, layout tables, a pasting machine, a camera, and a car — Andy offers the baron better deals than he does us. The baron’s going to deposit the other thirty thousand in a checking account so that we can stay in the black. Until we can become a limited liability corporation, Michaela will once again be my official partner, which is not without its humor.

It’s an ideal solution inasmuch as the baron will not only be our chief negotiator but will also necessarily have a strong interest in the success of both papers, which obliges everyone to cooperate. For now we’ll share our present office space. And for the time being the sales reps will be working for both papers, which means that — at the baron’s strong urging — there’ll be a discount for advertising with both. In principle we’ll be doing everything just as I had planned, except we’ll be keeping two sets of books and will have to almost double the staff.

Frau Schorba is, of course, coming with us. I can do without the rest of them. You’ll be the editor for Altenburg, Pringel has applied for Borna/Geithain, where it’s unlikely anyone will recognize him as a “Red scribbler.” But we should decide that together.

The biggest problem is distribution. We need to be in every household.

The baron is looking forward to meeting you. There are days when I never see him at all. If he isn’t assisting his people in opening new branches, then he’s busy with his “Boniface hobby.” He’s planning a show, an open-air spectacular, that is evidently dearer to his heart than anything else. Andy’s wife, Olimpia, is his right-hand woman for the project. The rest of us know nothing except for vague hints. And he’s using his reliquary to wangle the Madonna away from the Catholics. He’s constantly cracking jokes — some of them rather off-color — about it all.

Because of the old man upstairs I’m never without my flashlight. I don’t want to encounter him in the dark at any rate. Last Monday he unscrewed all our fuses.

We’ve lost another hostile neighbor, however. As I was passing the hardware store today on the way to my car, the whole family came out. I greeted them and then turned away to look straight ahead. Then I heard my name called. The hardware lady came right up to me. She has a firm handshake. It was a little premature to be saying good-bye, and it made her a little sad too, because we had all actually got used to one another, but this seemed like a good opportunity. Her husband also gave me his hand. “Well, yeah,” he said, “it’s jist about over.”—“You’re not giving up, are you?” I asked. All three nodded.

“Yep, yep,” she said. They had started drawing their pensions in the spring, and there wasn’t a red cent to be made out of a shop like theirs anyway, why should they keep on slaving away.³¹⁷ They looked at me as if they had said it just to test my reaction. Before I could put together an answer she reminded me of the free ad I had once promised them. I renewed the offer. The sooner they’re out of there, the sooner we’ll be able to move our ad office into their space.

Ah Jo, my dear friend, so many things happen every day. When I got to my parking space, a woman was leaning on my car. She was embarrassed that I spotted her before she saw me. It was the wife of Ralf, the brown-eyed man whom I had sat at the same table with at a New Forum meeting last January. Come July, Herr Ralf will be losing his job as an auto mechanic. “He doesn’t talk, doesn’t sleep, doesn’t eat,” she said. And now I’m supposed to help in some way. We made a date for her and Ralf to drop by and see me. Then I made the mistake of driving her home. “There he sits, behind that window there,” she said as she got out, and begged me to come inside with her.

I’ve never seen anything like it. He glanced up, but didn’t return my greeting, stared off to one side, and let me do the talking. What could I say? I can’t hire him as a sales rep. It was totally pointless. My stopping by had robbed his wife of her last remaining hope. When I promised to look in again in a couple of weeks, she began sobbing.

After that I drove to Referees’ Retreat, but went the long way around on country lanes — with the top down to give myself a good airing out.

And finally some good news: Nikolai, the handsome Armenian, sends his greetings. He’s married to a Yugoslavian girl now. We made a bet on the game.³¹⁸ Whoever loses has to go visit the other guy…

Hugs, Your. E.

Saturday, June 9, ’90

Dear Nicoletta,

With my speech at the church I had shot my wad, I had done whatever it was in my power to do. I didn’t know what more I could do. I felt a great void. Michaela talked about depression and she was not about to let go of the term, either. I couldn’t blame her. After all, she was the one who had to suffer the most from it.

“They understand only if you rub your fist under their nose,” was my mother’s comment to my “incendiary” speech. And that was the end of the matter as far as she was concerned. Robert was uncertain whether to be proud of me or if my performance at the church was just one more thing for him to be embarrassed about.

Michaela was called out of rehearsal the next day. Together with Anna (the woman with the scar), the long-haired fellow, Pastor Bodin, the man from New Forum, and a couple of women whom we had first met the previous evening, she was invited to the Rathaus for a discussion with the district secretary of the Party. Michaela described the old Rathaus main hall with its inlaid wooden ceiling, the council chamber with its antique furniture, and told how scared she had been when she saw Naumann, the first secretary of the Party. She had never seen him close up before.

He’d crush you without batting an eyelash, she thought. The head of the “bloc” parties sat there with her head lowered and literally cringed whenever Naumann said anything to her. Only the Christian Democrat, whose name she hadn’t registered (Piatkowski), had blatantly checked her over. Whereas the mayor was so agitated that he had spoken far too loudly. Naumann remarked several times how moved he was by our town’s first demonstration — which left her feeling a bit less afraid. The whole time she couldn’t stop thinking about Robert. Piatkowski, however, kept insisting that what they were talking about here was an illegal, unauthorized demonstration that had endangered people’s lives — something he could not reconcile with his Christian conscience. He was talking about the lack of traffic control. To which blue-lipped Pastor Bodin had replied that they should be glad they had people they could talk to. There were some who were no longer willing to engage in conversation, for whom actions spoke louder than words. It wasn’t until she was out on Market Square again that Michaela realized what Bodin had in fact said. It was his way of distancing himself from me — who else could he have meant?

Saturday noon we took Mother to the train. On the drive home Michaela asked if we thought it might be fun to drive to Berlin — she had no performances that weekend. I said yes. Robert thought I was joking. He couldn’t believe I was prepared to give up a free weekend — that is, two days when I could be writing — without a struggle.

After Michaela had organized the reading of the resolution for the weekend performances, all she had to do was notify Thea we were coming.

Michaela had always described Thea’s apartment on Hans Otto Strasse — just a minute from Friedrichshain Park — as grand and bourgeois. And it was, too, compared to our new little apartment. There was plenty of room for the forty people who gathered there that evening.

How I had once been thrilled by the thought of carrying the day at such a gathering, as the man whose book — published in Frankfurt am Main — would be prominently placed on the coffee table beside the art nouveau lamp. But that evening pretzel sticks were set out on it, and sprawled beside it was ***, a tall and gaunt fellow who was held to be the most promising young actor in Berlin and who stuck one pretzel after the other in his mouth, breaking off each protruding stick with a loud crunch.

Michaela sat like the court jester at the foot of the armchair to which Thea had withdrawn, tucking her legs up under her. Plucking at the fleece throw rug that surrounded her like an ice floe, Michaela talked about Leipzig and the seal. Not one word about me. Earlier Thea had pulled me aside in the kitchen and warned me in that caring, confidential way of hers not to do anything stupid, not to play the hero — Micki (as she calls Michaela) was very worried about me. Thea instructed me on the difference between bravado and courage. But all the same she couldn’t help admiring me — and instantly took on that shy girlish expression actresses evidently love to use when they themselves want admiration.

Berlin chitchat was no different from what I knew from Altenburg — except that here big shots were called by their first names, so that I often didn’t know who was meant.

Thea’s husband, the perfect host, was the only person with whom I conversed for more than a few minutes — about their two children, both girls, into whose room Robert had vanished.

It was around eleven o’clock — all I wanted was to get some sleep — before someone finally decided to talk to me. It was Verena, a professional potter. What you first noticed about her was the fresh, smooth skin of her cheeks. There wasn’t much to say about her work, she said, and warded off any further questions with a shake of her head, even as she gazed at the roughened palms of her hands. Her voice took on a downright humble tone when she spoke of “this circle of people” and how she considered herself ennobled when “people like Thea” praised her work.

“Once the wall is gone,” I replied, “everyone here will be like fish stranded on the beach, their eyes bulging. It’ll be a good thing then to have a real profession.” Although I had intended this as encouragement, she pulled back in fright. But it was just really getting started, she said — no censorship, no boundaries, we’d soon be able to do just as we wanted. All the things that had been forbidden were only waiting to be taken out of the drawer. She talked about an “incomparable new start” and “a blossoming like none we’ve ever known.”

“But will anyone still be interested?” I said.

“Why not?” she exclaimed testily. “What would be the reason?”

“Because it’d be just too lovely,” I said evasively, and sensed how ideas fall back on you with their full weight when they’re yours alone.

“Thea can always find a theater anywhere she wants,” Verena said, of that much she was certain.

Perhaps a scene might have been avoided if Thomas hadn’t asked me to come with him to fetch a couple of bottles from the cellar. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Verena sit back down in the circle around Thea.

Later, in front of the bookcase, out of habit I took note of what we didn’t have — a complete Proust, for example — but I no longer felt any envy. I stood in front of their books like someone who doesn’t recall that his friend has moved away until he’s standing at his door.

Suddenly I heard Thea’s voice behind me. Somehow I felt caught red-handed and reached for the slim orange-bound Strindberg.

I immediately knew what was up. All the same I asked, “What fish are you talking about?” She repeated what I had said to Verena.

“When the wall goes, it’s all over for us here,” I said, and thumbed through Fräulein Julie. Conversations had already died before my reply.

“But it’s really quite clear. No wall, no GDR,” I said, and kept on thumbing.

“I earn seven hundred marks,” I said, after things had quieted down, “that’s less than two hundred West-marks, maybe less than a hundred and fifty. I’d pull down that much in West Berlin as a waiter on a good weekend.”

I turned to the guests like their teacher. “If I can earn ten or twenty times more at odd jobs than I earn as a dramaturge, why shouldn’t I be an odd-jobber? What does society need theater for these days anyway?” They laughed and booed and called me a clown and a traitor.

“What duties are those?” I called back. “Who am I leaving in the lurch?”

Pretzel-cruncher said he didn’t know who I was and what I did, and he didn’t care either, because whatever changes needed to be made, he didn’t want anything to do with reactionaries. ***, an actress from the Deutsches Theater, said in a high falsetto that I was a provocateur, yes, a provocateur.

“What I mean is,” I exclaimed, temporizing now, “is that your audience is going to run in the other direction…”

Ah, Nicoletta! I chose the word “audience,” but meant something different, something fundamental — the term “audience” didn’t do it justice. Any attention paid to us — the attention that had called us onstage — would vanish from the face of the earth, that’s what I was trying to say. But no one understood that. They didn’t even realize this was pure masochism on my part, that I — terrible to say — was losing much more than these actors were. Yes, of course, they would always find something. Thea would always have a role of some kind to play. They didn’t need to be afraid. But I was losing everything, EVERYTHING! My weal and woe! West and East! Heaven and hell!

Michaela sat pale and miserable on her ice floe and attempted a smile.

Around two we went to bed. The stuffed animals above my head — a dog that had tipped over and a bear lying on its back — seemed to be resting from play. Robert and the two girls had listened to music till after midnight and were now sleeping in another room.

Michaela entered in rumpled blue silk pajamas. Thea, she said, had intended to throw them out because they had been ruined in the wash. Now they belonged to her. Her weeping woke me up in the middle of the night. It was all too much, she said, just too much. With her wet check resting on my hand, she fell back asleep before I did.

The next morning Thea and Thomas served a breakfast that I took as a kind of apology, but it was also a ritual that Michaela held in high esteem. A snow-white starched cloth had been spread over the Biedermeier table. If your thigh touched the hem, the cloth rose up along the edge of the table. Our hosts’ napkins were inserted in silver rings bearing their initials, our napkins were folded to form a kind of crown. Michaela’s attempt to imitate her hosts failed in the same moment that the two girls unfolded their napkins with a casual flick and leaned back as if waiting to be served.

The table gleamed with porcelain rimmed in red and gold, real silverware, including the serving forks — and, yes, knife rests. Two kinds of bittersweet jam glistened in crystal bowls, making a plastic container for mustard and a jar of horseradish look like harlequins at court. Except for them, the only comparable item in our household was a small Russian pewter frame for the saltcellar, although our little spoon had wandered off somewhere.

Our table conversation had nothing to do with what had been said the evening before. Mostly it was the girls who talked. Robert ignored us completely. He had fallen in love with one of them — or maybe both, I never quite figured it out. The background music was a Chopin piano concerto. It had all been staged in order to convince me that the world was still the same as during my last visit in April.

Suddenly Thomas was in a big hurry. This was the first I had heard of a meeting of “Theater Union representatives.” Thea was supposed to deliver a “personal report” of her arrest. I hoped that my promise to spend the day with Robert would spare me from having to attend. But Robert had suddenly lost all interest in the planetarium. And so I had to set out for the Deutsches Theater.

We found seats in the second balcony. I swore to myself this would be the last time I would be so considerate of Michaela’s feelings. The only person seated onstage that I recognized was Gregor Gysi. We needed to realize, he said, that the special alert police were under psychological pressure, their structure was very basic and they weren’t prepared for a situation like this.

Various personal reports were read, including mention of blows delivered to the back, legs, kidneys, and head. Thea read hers without pathos, it was one of the shortest. At one point she said, I don’t want to go into that. Two women in front of us were weeping.

Applause, laughter, boos, and catcalls tumbled over each other. Suddenly it grew louder. Derisive laughter from all sides, the same sort I had been pelted with the previous evening. Just before it broke out, I thought I had heard Gysi’s voice.

“He had the nerve to ask us why we didn’t notify them about the demonstration!” Michaela shouted in my ear.

The thought raced through my head: That was the devil prompting him! But I was laughing too. Of course there were more speeches, but only for the sake of making speeches; people were whispering, clearing their throats, shifting in their seats, unabashedly carrying on conversations. But the devil’s seed had taken root.

I’m not sure, but I think it was the general manager of the theater in Schwedt who stormed the stage like a man possessed. Close to choking, he screamed in a trembling voice — he was also holding the mic too far away — that if the issue here was that there should be notification of demonstrations, then he wanted to notify the authorities that notification was being given here and now that in every town where there was a theater, where there were people like us, notification would be given for demonstrations — everywhere, throughout the country. “Thank you!” he shouted into the applause and joyous tumult that washed over him. Thea and Michaela had jumped to their feet clapping.

Up onstage talk turned immediately to procedural matters, how far ahead notification needed to be given and so forth. In the end the date was set for November 4th.

On the drive home that evening we stopped in Leipzig and went to the Astoria — I showed it to you, the luxury hotel right on the Ring, next to the train station. They let us in, showed us to a table, and fed us a regal meal. “Actually, we’re doing quite well,” I said. That the street in front of the Astoria was the same one where thirteen days before a military cordon had been drawn up, where six days before seventy thousand demonstrators had marched — that seemed equally as absurd as the assumption that there might be fighting in the streets here come tomorrow.

On Monday I was at my desk in the dramaturgy office by ten, read a little, went to the canteen at noon, and drove home at two. I did some household chores, went shopping, lay down for a while, and later prepared supper. After that I joined Robert to watch television. It was reported on the news that a hundred and fifty thousand people had taken to the streets in Leipzig. Not a word about arrests or street fights.

Michaela, who arrived shortly afterward,³¹⁹ stood beside us, her mouth agape. “Really?” she asked. “A hundred fifty thousand?” She kept staring at the television, although something entirely different was on by then.

On Tuesday morning, then — since Jonas hadn’t been at the theater on Monday — Michaela and I sat waiting in his office. At half past he called us in, asked his secretary to bring three coffees, and leaned back in his throne, which came from props. His smile remained as good as unchanged while Michaela informed him about the “Berlin resolution” and demanded that he notify the authorities of a demonstration for free speech and a free press.

“Was that all?” he asked. Did we realize what we were asking, were we really serious, and did we actually expect him to go to the police and notify them of our demonstration. He didn’t give a tinker’s damn about such “re-so-lu-tions” (he provided the quotation marks by emphasizing each syllable). We could go right ahead and continue to make ourselves unhappy by announcing as many demonstrations as we, as private citizens, thought necessary, but should be prepared to put our heads on the block and not ask for his help later on because — and he was telling us this in advance — he would be unable to do anything else on our behalf, not one thing.

Michaela wanted to verify one last time, as she put it: He was not therefore prepared to sanction a demonstration here in Altenburg that had been approved in Berlin by the union representatives of every theater?

He knew nothing about any union resolutions. He could, of course, give union headquarters here a call if we liked, maybe they would know what we were talking about.

“So that means no?” she asked.

“It most definitely means no,” he said. We exchanged smiles. “Well then,” Michaela said, and stood up just as the secretary appeared with three cups of coffee.

After rehearsal, we went to see the police,³²⁰ rang the bell, and within moments were standing before the two officers on duty, one black-haired, the other blond and chubby-cheeked. From seats behind their desks, they gave us a once-over.

“We want to give notification of a demonstration,” Michaela said, then introduced us and repeated the same sentences she had used with Jonas. The black-haired cop reached for the telephone, the blond looked out the window and grinned.

A minute later and for the third time that day Michaela was using the phrases “Berlin resolution” and “meeting of working theater professionals.”

Even when he spoke, the Altenburg chief of police, a tall, skinny man with hunched shoulders, seemed somehow distracted — looking up, if he looked at us at all, only briefly. After a longish pause he said something about traffic safety, which, “given current staffing,” he could not guarantee, and then complained about the short notice we were giving him. After which silence reigned. I examined the traces of dark red wax along the baseboard of a pale wall cabinet and black streaks left by the mop.

Suddenly the chief of police asked what would be the theme of our activities.

“Sanctioning of the New Forum, free elections, secret ballot, freedom of information and the press, freedom of speech, freedom to travel — in fact, all the things that are guaranteed in our constitution,” Michaela said. The chief of police pushed himself up from his desk, took up a position at the window, and crossed his arms, hunching his shoulders even more. There was a holstered pistol at his hip.

Michaela and I crossed our legs simultaneously, which I found a little embarrassing.

Never budging, he finally instructed us to go back downstairs and fill out the necessary forms, gave a nod toward the door by way of a farewell, and then went back to staring out the window.

The blond cop was still grinning. On his desk lay two blank forms for “Registration of Open-air Activities.” Michaela frowned. “There’s nothing else,” said the black-haired cop, whose lips glistened and whose bowed eyebrows lent him a girlish look.

For number of participants we entered ten thousand, for time frame we gave from one to three p.m., and on the line asking about music we wrote “undecided.” There wasn’t enough space at the line for “Location of Activity.” In describing the route we decided to keep the same one as had been taken on Thursday, except that we wanted to begin our demonstration at the theater. We both signed. When we asked about any further formalities, the blond told us to return the following Tuesday and cast a quizzical glance at his darker colleague, who shrugged and repeated, “Next Tuesday.” Michaela extended her hand first to one, then the other — they shot up from their seats. I shook their hands as well. The doorkeeper greeted us excitedly, as if we were old acquaintances, and buzzed us out the main door. “The only thing we forgot to do was ask them for their guns,” Michaela said once we were outside.

On Wednesday I waited for Michaela beside the car — she was later than usual. I heard someone softly call my name. The general manager’s secretary had opened her window just a crack and was waving at me as if she had a dust rag in her hand.

“Well, do you hear the chains rattling?” Jonas called out to me as I entered the administration offices. “Haven’t you heard the tanks yet? You can forget your demonstration. Krenz is the new general secretary!”

To this day I don’t know what provoked Jonas’s outburst. He evidently mistook my smile for mockery. He turned red and he bellowed, “Krenz was in China!” And when I continued to say nothing: “He was there three weeks ago, just three weeks! You don’t get it, you just don’t get it.” And slammed his door behind him.

In fact I had to agree with him. I also thought a “Chinese solution” was a possibility, yes, in a certain sense the next logical step.

Michaela and I ran into each other at the main door. She was furious with Amanda in props, who had given everyone a hug before rehearsal and announced she had to say good-bye — off to the West. “All this time she’s been waiting for her exit visa to be processed, but kept her mouth shut, and now she’s as free as bird!” There had been squabbles in the canteen. Allegedly management had proposed that the Gotham premiere be called off. “Because of Krenz,” so people said.

Sitting beside me in the car, Michaela played with her purse handle. She couldn’t be talked out of attending a meeting of the New Forum. She might well be safer there than at home, she said. Afterward she wanted to return to the theater, just to make sure the resolution got read at the end, especially today of all days. “That would give the wrong signal,” she said. I offered to drive her, but she thought it best for me to stay with Robert.

Shortly after seven, we were lying in each other’s arms. Michaela caressed my cheek, the palms of her hands were cool. “I envy Amanda,” Michaela said, and was about to kiss me — when the doorbell rang. We froze. Robert soundlessly opened the door to his room. We all looked at each other and waited. The second ring was a short one too.

Standing at the door and blinking wildly was Schmidtbauer, the founder of the Altenburg New Forum. At his side were a short man with a beard and beret — the only one who smiled — and a fellow with a long beard and glasses that greatly magnified his eyes. I didn’t even get a question out or tell them they could keep their shoes on — no, as if nothing could be more perfectly obvious, they marched in in their stocking feet.

The sight of their shoes next to our doormat didn’t please me, in fact it was unsettling. Besides which I was annoyed at how their mute invasion seemed a matter of course. On the spur of the moment, Schmidtbauer had relocated the “meeting” to our apartment. Since we didn’t have a phone, we, of all people, had known nothing about it.

In the entry Schmidtbauer turned around to ask me if we could come to an agreement that socialism should be reformed, but not abolished.

“No need,” I said, “to come to any agreements with me.”

I was chiefly annoyed that Michaela let all three of them address her with informal pronouns.

While I set out teacups for them, Schmidtbauer said, “The meeting of the New Forum of Altenburg, Thuringia, is now open.”

“Why Thuringia?” the long-bearded, big-eyed fellow asked.

“There’s a very simple answer to that,” Schmidtbauer replied. “Because Altenburg is located in Thuringia. And its people feel they’re part of Thuringia. Ask anyone you like.” All the while he played with the push button on his ballpoint.

Only the long-bearded fellow disagreed with Schmidtbauer when he moved not to announce the various committees of the New Forum at the open church assembly the next evening, but to wait and see what Krenz would do.

“What does Krenz have to do with it?” Long Beard asked. “Can someone explain to me what this has to do with Krenz?” His huge eyes moved from one person to the next, and finally landed on me too.

“I can explain it for you,” Schmidtbauer said. “All of us sitting here right now, you”—he aimed his ballpoint first at Michaela—“you, you, and me, can be arrested at any moment. If Krenz — let me finish — if Krenz gives the order, God have mercy on us.”

Long Beard raised his hand like a schoolboy and fixed his eyes on Schmidtbauer. “Well, what is it,” Schmidtbauer grumbled, and finally aimed his ballpoint at him.

“I have another question to ask you, Jürgen. May I?”

Schmidtbauer nodded.

“Aren’t you proud to be in the New Forum?”

“What?” Schmidtbauer looked from one person to the next, as if everyone should see how difficult it was for him to keep from bursting into laughter.

“I can only tell you that I’m proud to be,” Long Beard said. “And I don’t care who knows it.” He sat up erect. “Do you know what I did yesterday?” Then he told about how the construction outfit he works for had sent him to do some repair work at the Stasi villa. He had eaten in their canteen at noon and had run into a couple of acquaintances. He had told them, “I’m in the New Forum. Take a look at our agenda, you won’t find anything wrong with it. And then I said I’m proud to be in the New Forum. I don’t care who hears it. And if I’m allowed to head up the economics committee, I don’t care who hears that either. So, Jürgen, you can go ahead now.”

After I brought them a pot of tea, I closed the doors to the living room and kitchen. I cleaned up and for a lack of anything better to do began mopping the floor, until Michaela called for me. They were all sitting in front of the tube.

When I saw Krenz, I knew that nothing was going to happen. His spiel about developments that had not been understood in their full reality, about how the country was hemorrhaging, and about his newfound compassion for the tears of mothers and fathers had a calming effect even on Schmidtbauer. Maybe I was so surprised by Krenz, by his facelessness, only because I had never really taken a good look at him. This pitiful creature spoke as if every word he said disgusted him, as if his speech were some sort of slop that he had to choke down while the whole world watched. Plus I had never seen him wear anything but a Schiller collar — my mother’s term for the way our functionaries wore the collar of their blue shirts³²¹ turned out over the lapels of their gray jackets. In a white shirt and tie he looked like a circus bear.

When the trio had left, I opened the window, and Michaela said that she no longer needed to go to the theater now. Along with Jörg, the short fellow with the beard and beret, she would be heading up the New Forum’s media and culture committee. I asked if people like Schmidtbauer were worth her being put in danger on their behalf. Michaela said that Schmidtbauer’s wife had moved out, leaving him with two little children. How would I react if suddenly tomorrow morning all the lug nuts had been loosened on the car?

Why couldn’t Michaela see that Schmidtbauer was really small potatoes, not see his craving for recognition, his callousness. But the more I got upset about him, the more ridiculous I appeared in her eyes.

And the next morning things kept moving in the same direction. Since Michaela had rehearsal that evening, I was supposed to stand in for her at the church and talk about the Berlin meeting and the demonstration permit we had applied for. I refused. “And why?” Michaela asked. She sounded as hard, as cold, as if I had been cheating on her. “Am I allowed to know why?”

“Because I don’t want to have anything more to do with these people,” I said, mimicking the pretentious downbeat nods of the bass player.

Michaela let air pass through her nose with such disdain that I knew what awaited us. Five minutes later she said, “I don’t understand you, Enrico. I simply don’t understand you anymore.” I said nothing, but that evening I attended church.

Actually, it was all just like I had once pictured my future fame would be. I had to walk to the front through a veritable guard of honor to my left and right, people recognized me, and some even called out to me. Someone demanded that I should take the reins here. A spot had been reserved for me on the aisle in the first row to the right. It was not pleasant to discover Michaela’s name and our address clearly visible on a large well-placed poster inviting people to join the media and culture committee.

They began after a little delay — speeches, music, speeches. Forty-five minutes later it was finally my turn. The hush was so total it was as if people were literally holding their breath. I reported about the meeting in Berlin. That took about one minute. As offhandedly as possible I added that we had officially registered for a demonstration on November 4th. This was once again cause for jubilation, people once again moved out onto the street, Pastor Bodin was once again unable to get a word in. And once again, as I came out of the church, there were the two policemen. The blond smiled. The black-haired cop was so excited he literally spun on his axis. We shook hands. The same route as last time, I said. And with that they climbed into their Lada. I offered Robert as my excuse and drove directly home.

From that point on I find it difficult to tell one day from the next. I no longer took part in any of it, and Michaela was too proud to ask me to.

When I was alone, I lay in my room, a forearm across my eyes, and tried to steer my thoughts as far away as possible from myself and the present. Usually I thought about soccer.

You may have heard of the legendary quarterfinal game for the European Cup between Dynamo Dresden (the team I hang my heart on) and Bayer 05 Uerdingen, played on March 9, ’86, one day after International Women’s Day. Even today I have no idea where Uerdingen is. Dresden had won 2 to 0 at home and was strutting its stuff in Uerdingen — the “Dresden top” was spinning. I still remember how Klaus Sammer, our trainer, jumped up from the bench when Uerdingen scored a goal against themselves, making it 3 to 1. He bounded over an ad banner and waved good-bye — a gesture meant to imply, “That’s all, folks.” Watching on television, I wondered why people were still in the stands.

Dresden could have been scored against four times in the remaining forty-five minutes and still have made it to the semifinals. In the fifty-eighth minute Uerdingen scored a goal. In the mood in which I found myself I regarded that goal as corresponding to the magazine Sputnik being banned and Ceauşescu’s being awarded the Karl Marx Order. I equated the 3 to 3 that followed shortly thereafter with the election fraud of May 7th. Uerdingen’s 4-to-3 lead was more or less the same thing as Hungary opening its borders, and the 5 to 3 corresponded to the Monday demonstrations. There was no doubt at that point that it would soon be 6 to 3. Which is what happened, and Dresden was eliminated. But what would 6 to 3 be in the autumn of ’89? Freedom to travel for everyone? And 7 to 3? The final score of 7 to 3 was now no longer of any interest to me.

Scored against six times in one half. That was the most improbable and the worst possible turn of affairs. At the same time those goals seemed to have an inevitability about them, as if it were perfectly natural for the ball to bounce into the net every seven minutes.

I was surely not the only person who recognized that game as the handwriting on the wall.

On Monday, the 23rd, a letter from my mother arrived. After Michaela and Robert drove off to Leipzig — Robert needed to see history in the making — I read the closely written pages. It was all about the clinic and the reaction to her having taken sick leave. They had in fact checked up on her to see if she was actually resting in bed — and she hadn’t been at home. Her sick leave was rescinded, and she was to be docked one week’s vacation. The remarks of her colleagues, which she provided in minute detail, were likewise unpleasant—“When you stick your nose into everything, you shouldn’t be surprised to get it punched at some point.” What worried me, however, was her tone of voice and her obsession with having to quote all of it for me. Of course it was clear to me that her arrest and torture (what else could you call it?) couldn’t help having its aftereffects. And of course she had already seemed changed to me during her visit. But there was something ominous about this letter.

Instead of replying to her, I sent Mother’s report on to Vera. Until the wall came down I received mail from Vera on a regular basis. From week to week Geronimo’s diarylike epistles grew more and more expansive, as if he felt he had to prove something to me. Evidently only I no longer knew what I should write. In Berlin I hadn’t even risked giving Vera a call,³²² that’s how unsure of myself I’d become.

I could have written about Michaela, about her practically boundless energy. In an era when sorcery and exorcism were part of daily life, someone might have presumed that I had transferred all my energy to her. After our argument about Schmidtbauer we had less to say to each other. I tried to chauffeur Michaela as often as possible, and then wait for her in the car. As long as no one from the theater rapped on the wind-shield, waiting for her was a cozy way to pass the time.

Once I was back home, I no longer left our four walls. I was happiest when I was alone. Even Robert was too much for me. I was usually startled by the sound of his arrival.

There were little things I liked to do. I remember having been downright proud to have come up with the notion of cleaning the refrigerator. The mere idea of being able to spend a whole hour or more tidying things up lifted my spirits. I plunged into the farthest corners, tracked down moldy half-empty jars of marmalade, removed a dried-out mustard container from its permanent position, and emptied a vodka bottle that had been saved for months for the sake of one tiny sip.

The next day I went to work on the spice rack, then the silverware drawer. Later I rearranged the dishes and separated our plates from those that came from our mothers’ households, which, since they were smaller, were always on top and had to be lifted up whenever we wanted to eat from our own.

Between bouts of cleaning up, sorting out, and throwing away, I went shopping. In the afternoon I would finish off a bottle of beer that had already been opened so that I could get rid of it along with the other empty bottles, but made sure each time that I bought more bottles than I took back.

It wasn’t until I was cleaning the toaster with the vacuum — a method I still think makes good sense — that I noticed Robert eyeing me with some suspicion.

Sensing I was being watched, I sought shelter in my room. I played records. I wanted them to hear me listening to music. But since the records I owned confronted me with memories I preferred not to be subjected to, I bought new ones. I grabbed them up almost at random, especially jazz, because I’d never listened to jazz before.

But after Michaela’s snide remark about how once again the German spirit was uplifting itself with music, it was clear there was nothing I might do that she wouldn’t find fault with.

At the theater people interpreted my silence and reticence as a kind of radicalism. Michaela was prepared to allow me a certain amount of time, to tolerate me for a few weeks, simply by holding out and living life as usual with no questions asked. She told others it was a matter of distribution of labor.

Climbing into bed at night, I was glad when she fell asleep quickly. Sometimes she would first press her back against me, pull my arm over her shoulder, and say, “This is nice,” as if all I needed was a sense of security, a little reassurance, and I would soon be my old self again. But there were other nights too.

The people who rang our doorbell all through October wanting to join the media committee were almost exclusively men, who seldom showed up a second time. Michaela and I received anonymous letters, threatening to rip the masks from our faces and accusing us of demagogy and addling people’s brains.

Each day brought with it some unprecedented event, and perhaps I ought to list those that I can recall to give you some approximate sense of the situation in which we found ourselves.

But I need to finally bring this to a conclusion, which is why I’ll now set my sights on November 4th.

Our request for a demonstration was refused — we hadn’t given long enough notice. Instead we were granted permission for a demonstration on Sunday, November 12th. The hitch was that Michaela and I were required to sign a statement in which we guaranteed that no demonstration would be “initiated” by us on November 4th. No one could possibly have predicted Michaela’s reaction. She had no problem signing that, she said. But the authorities wouldn’t be doing themselves any favor. Everyone in the room froze and watched as Michaela stepped up to the desk, unscrewed the cap of her fountain pen, bent down over the sheet of paper, signed her name, and passed the pen to me — thus giving the whole affair the look of some diplomatic ceremony.

Two days later, she reported in triumph, there had been boos and nasty catcalls when she described in church what she had done. But then she had said, “I’m sorry, but evidently some of you didn’t hear correctly. I said I would not initiate a demonstration starting from the theater at one o’clock on November 4th. You don’t agree with that?”

On Saturday the 4th we drove to the theater at around half past twelve. “Good God, what have we started,” Michaela exclaimed when we saw the huge crowd. It was the largest demonstration Altenburg had seen until then. Anyone who had been in Leipzig wouldn’t have been particularly impressed by twenty thousand people. But Altenburg was home territory, and in so small a city the throngs looked all the larger. Although Michaela said that she and I were the only ones who weren’t allowed to do anything today, she cleared a path for us to the steps of the theater. At the very top, Schmidtbauer, plus the Prophet with his long beard and big eyes and Jörg had taken up their posts like three field commanders.

And once again I sensed how much of an anomaly I had become amid all this glee and excitement and expectation.

People were enjoying the beautiful weather that the good Lord had granted them yet again. As church bells rang the hour the crowd grew restless, people looked up at us and then all round, waiting for a signal of some sort. The chanting began on our right, and that set the crowd into motion. Those at the head were marching beneath a wide banner, but instead of taking Moskauer Strasse, they turned left down the Street of Worker Unity. I burrowed through the crowd — I had to get away from Schmidtbauer! — to a police car blocking the way to the Old Stables. The blond and black-haired cops were joined by a fat one. From their standpoint they had only just now noticed the shift down Worker Unity.

I advised them to drive to the Great Pond, where the procession would turn right down Teich Strasse. You remember Teich Strasse, I’m sure, one dilapidated ruin after the other, the epitome of devastation. They would also have to close off Teich Strasse at the far end, I said.

All three agreed with me, and the blond asked if I wanted to ride with them. “Yes, please, come along,” the fat one shouted, squeezing onto the backseat while I was allowed to take a seat up front. With blue lights flashing we zoomed up Frauen Gasse. It was too late now to turn off at the little bridge. We couldn’t turn onto Worker Unity until we were between the Small Pond and Kunst Tower, and then raced with sirens blaring to the intersection at the Great Pond. I tried to calm the three of them down. Even if we were too late to block off Teich Strasse from the other side, I said, they would be able to drive at the head of the demonstration. In Leipzig, I filled them in, that had never been a problem. Only the blond, who as the driver was also in charge of the radio, stayed with the car while the other two went to block off Kollwitz and Zwickauer Strasse — which was absurd, since those two streets were the only ones that offered a detour around the paralyzed center of town. I told the blond that. He nodded, grabbed for his cap, and dashed off to the others.

In the quiet of a sunny afternoon I leaned against the squad car and listened to the chants.

And suddenly there it was — a pistol. Or better: a white leather belt with a holster with the pistol in it, right below the driver’s door. And just as suddenly I knew: It’s yours! I bent down, picked up the belt, took out the pistol, shoved it casually inside my waistband, and pulled my sweater down over it. With a kick I slid the empty holster under the car.

I think I smiled, as if I had cracked a joke. The blond returned, plopped into the driver’s seat, called some code into the radio mic, looked up, and said, “Hunky-dory.”

My dear Nicoletta, I should have been at the office long ago.³²³ To be continued. With warm greetings as always,

Your Enrico T.

Monday, June 11, ’90

Dear Jo,

I’m so sorry that you had to learn about it the way you did. Of course I should have been the one to tell you about our separation. I simply couldn’t bring myself to put it to paper, as if that would make the loss irrevocable, as if it would mean giving up my last hope. I wanted to talk with you about it here, it was going to be the first thing you would hear from my lips. And then you go and run straight into the new couple…³²⁴

My dear Jo, what can I say?

Last year during those long weeks while I lay buried alive in bed, I was forced to watch Michaela go crazy watching me. I was empty and numb, and yet every fiber in me could sense how her love for me was draining away, day by day, bit by bit.

Believe me: when I awoke from that nightmare I was full of hope and full of love. And I knew what I had to do. Michaela has never understood that it was for her sake that I gave notice at the theater. Yes, I did it for Michaela and Robert, for us three.

It was during a walk the three of us took at the beginning of the year — it had snowed, and we had taken off across the fields — that I suddenly saw how wonderful my life could be. I realized how wretched, calculating, and loveless my behavior had been. It was no longer possible to go on living as I had — and it was impossible for me to write. Instead of breathing life into my characters, I had let my own life wither in the pestilent air of art. All of which came to me as Robert was leading me across the field — I had gotten a splinter in my eye. I wanted to save myself and thus Michaela as well, and above all the boy. I hoped for a new life that would bring us happiness. Michaela and I even started sleeping together again, and I was certain she would soon be pregnant.

In my despair I sometimes think Michaela’s love would have had to last only a few more weeks, so that if Barrista were to arrive in town now, his sorcery could no longer accomplish anything. And yet it was I who prepared the soil for him, I literally led Michaela to him. I spin these cobwebs in my darkest hours. I still don’t want to believe it’s true: Michaela and Barrista! He simply took her by surprise. He’s the surprise attack in person.

Michaela sees things differently, of course. In her opinion our separation has followed an inner logic. She had fought for me to the point of self-destruction. And then who had left her in the lurch? I had, by betraying her and the theater. She was left behind alone, her back to the wall. She claims we were already no longer a couple when the baron showed up. That isn’t true, of course, along with a lot of other things she now claims. Michaela saw very clearly what all a relationship with the baron would make possible — and couldn’t resist. He not only rescued her, he has also provided her a sense of gratification, maybe even of retribution. With one swift move, she eclipsed everyone — including, last but not least, me. As she gazes down from the heights now, I’m just one of a host of clumsy tyros. Even her larger-than-life Thea is now merely one of many people forced to prostitute themselves onstage. Michaela told you, I’m sure, about flight school. She doesn’t talk about anything else now. To circle the town on high, while all other earthbound creatures creep to their labors, is for her the epitome of her triumph.

Her bad conscience, however, leaves her testy, especially since Robert has taken my side. Presumably Michaela told you about Nicoletta — the woman who was sitting beside me when I had the car accident last March. Michaela read some letters I wrote her³²⁵ —and of course found nothing improper in them. But she has managed to magnify into grounds for separation her conviction that I confided things to a “woman who’s a total stranger” that I had “held back” from her. Ah, Jo, I actually wish her accusations were true, because it would probably make it easier for me to deal with the separation. It’s so absurd. I don’t even know if Nicoletta has a boyfriend, or if she lives alone or with someone or even what she thinks of my epistles, which I write early in the morning when I can’t sleep. Nicoletta is the ideal person — at least the Nicoletta I imagine when I’m writing — for me to tell about the past. By picturing her, I can understand what has happened to us.

Nicoletta didn’t believe me when I told her that I had voluntarily left the theater to put together a provincial newspaper. Her ideas about writers and artists are similar to those my mother entertains — even though she now sees the world with “businesslike objectivity.” Besides which, Nicoletta has read ten times more Marx and Lenin than all of us put together. She’s not like Roland, Vera’s old admirer, but she still goes on and on about exploitation and capitalism, even concepts like “aggressive imperialism” or “the military-industrial complex” (allegedly a term first used by former U.S. president Eisenhower) flow from her lips with no problem.

I suffered irredeemable loss of status in her eyes when I began “working in tandem” with Barrista. To her Barrista is unadulterated evil. I am not going to try to convince her otherwise, but I have every intention of making clear to her why I have chosen this life. And someone can only understand that if they know how we used to live.

I’m really not talking about love. I’m not in any condition yet for that either.

Besides which — and up until now it wasn’t even a possibility — I want love between equals, between people who act on the same assumptions. I want love without quirks and contortions. I want an alarm clock ringing in the morning and supper at the same time every evening, I want vacations and Sunday outings. I want a family. Yes, I long for a bourgeois life, for order, both within me and around me. Nicoletta would probably run for cover if I confessed that to her.

Did you read the article about the Lindenau Museum in our next-to-last issue? Nicoletta is behind all those plans. What’s more, she has her heart set on reconstructing Guido de Siena’s altar at the Lindenau — she’s already been to Eindhoven, where one panel is — the others are at the Louvre, in Princeton, and of course in Siena. The Dutch have evidently already agreed — a reconstruction would be a sensation!³²⁶

As soon as my apartment is ready to be moved into, Vera is coming to Altenburg for a few weeks or months.

She has separated from Nicola, or he from her, which she would never admit — Vera’s vanity, her feminine vanity, is too easily wounded for that. Which makes it so difficult for me to console her. But she still can look very chic. No one would believe she lives out of two suitcases. Beirut turned out to be a bit too much of an adventure for her. Nicola’s mother’s constant chatter about kidnappings left her terribly anxious, the power keeps going out, generators make a deafening racket and pollute the air. There’s no such thing as a “green” movement there. The sea is a sewer, and cars speed through the streets at sixty miles per hour, brake hard, then speed away again — for fear of snipers. Compared to West Beirut, West Berlin is as expansive as a prairie. The only thing that worked to her advantage was that she was baptized. That’s accepted. But please, no atheism!

Nicola thinks he’s about to make some big money. His oracle is a glazier: if people are buying window glass, there’s hope for peace. So people are sure to buy up everything he has in stock.

She definitely doesn’t want to go back to Dresden, and she no longer has a job in Berlin — in her beautiful West Berlin. She’s giving up her apartment and closing out Nicola’s shop, dumping everything at a loss. And if her luck runs out she may even end up with debts to pay. So you’ll be seeing each other here.

Give yourself and Franziska a couple of weeks to get acclimatized. As far as the business goes, the baron takes a very down-to-earth view of things. Don’t let it bother you. I’ve already written you about my first meeting with him. Pringel and Frau Schorba have no reservations whatever, and as far as our élèves³²⁷ are concerned, you’re a celebrity already. They’ll probably fight over who gets to initiate you in the arcana of layout. Jörg is jealous of you because of the book. He and Marion really didn’t expect to see someone like you at my side.

Anton Larschen, who was on the verge of turning into an evil spirit, is back to extracting fine items from his backpack. Your suggested changes are “correct from start to finish.” Frau Schorba will be typing the text into the computer this weekend.

Let me worry about the business end of things. Time is on our side. We’ll pay for your driving classes, and you no longer need to get on a waiting list. Come autumn, then, you’ll be driving the LeBaron.

You’ll be able to move into your new place by September at the latest, since the construction firm has to shell out for every day of overrun past August 31st — it’s in the contract. The rent will be modest. Did I tell you that the plans are not just for a snazzy tub in the bathroom, but a real small-size whirlpool?

Just picture a late-summer afternoon, the scent of apples drifting up from below, everything up top smells a little new yet, the castle rises up before you, behind it hills and, in the distance, mountains. You’ll have enough money, no worries about the future, and each of us can peacefully pursue whatever he wants. And next year we’ll all go to Italy or fly to the U.S. for lobster.

Give Franziska a kiss for me,

Your Enrico

Tuesday, June 19, ’90

Dear Jo,

I’ve thrown myself into work — I really don’t have a choice, either. The situation is sorting itself out faster than I would have thought possible. Hardly a week has passed and already our newspaper is taking shape in the midst of all the mayhem.

And we are undergoing a transformation too. Whether it’s Frau Schorba or her husband, who’s our distribution manager, or Evi and Mona, our élèves at the computer, even our bruised Pringel — we all are not just working faster and more focused, downright impatient to tackle each new task, but we’re also more cordial and open — we have nothing to hide, nothing to lose! This is what the daily routine should always look like. Yes, this is how things should stay.

Officially Herr Schorba is still working for Wismut. But he’s been put on leave and is just waiting for termination papers and a final settlement. As a mining engineer he’s a good organizer. I enjoy watching someone attack problems with intelligence and prudence. He has papered a whole wall with maps. By his calculation we should do a printing of 120,000. Schorba assigns clearly defined tasks and supervises rigorously. When I asked Kurt how he pictured his post-July world, he replied, “Why, here with you.” Fred, on the other hand, is completely overwhelmed. Every day, almost every hour he has to patch up his distribution network because vendors go out of business or are selling fewer and fewer copies, so that it’s no longer worth the drive.

Plus we’re calculating on the basis of ten or even a hundred times larger accounts. Jörg and Marion are kids playing store. My dear Jo, it’s the start of a new life! Our articles have, if at all, raised some dust now and then, but it always settles quickly. But now we’re really going to set some things in motion. Our ads are the motor. We’re going to be changing the world. Just imagine our publishing house, and the passage we’ll build to connect with Market Square. And above all: Who else is going to pull it off — a free paper, and in every household? Jörg reminds me of the eternal loser sitting at the roulette table, studying and analyzing the numbers, and when he does bet, he loses again. But we’re going to win at this game. Because we have probability and time on our side. And the more money we have, the less chance chance has to muck things up. Just let Jörg go on studying and analyzing and writing about it; in the meantime we’re playing a new game for him to study and analyze. How lucky we are to start all over again with a clear head.³²⁸

I was only too happy to accede to the baron’s request that, after all the uproar and confusion involved in our project, we go back and recheck every detail from start to finish. Amid the muddle of trying to accomplish everything all at one time, we’re likely to lose the thread. I had assumed it would be a working dinner, but he saw me as giving my report in the mundane space of our editorial office. Suddenly I knew what needed to be done: every single person in the office had to be assigned his or her role and make an appearance onstage. And I was the director.

For four days I did almost nothing else but talk with everyone. Nothing was to be accepted without question.

Fred and Ilona, who were happy to be spared such “gimmicks” at first, are now feeling neglected. Ilona looks like a cross-eyed magpie every time I assign a task to Frau Schorba. Besides which, the “Rolex affair” is about to drive her crazy. People come into the office and slam the “piece of junk” on her desk — either it’s stopped running or the new subscriber has figured out it’s not a real Rolex. Some of them refuse to leave until they get their money back. And then Ilona’s explanation that the ad never mentioned a Rolex, but simply read, “You will receive this watch…” really drives them up the wall. Ilona’s only port in the storm is the wolf she’s always disparaged; since the commotion usually wakes Astrid up, she often yawns — and shows her fangs. Her white blind eye likewise instills respect in hoodwinked subscribers. Thank God that nuisance isn’t our problem. We don’t have to woo subscribers. Isn’t that a marvelous emancipation from our readers?

Yesterday was the big conference. I had asked Frau Schorba to set the room up a bit, by which I meant clearing the table and making sure there were enough chairs.

But for my people this meeting was a kind of special celebration. They had covered the long table with sheets of newsprint and set out candles on saucers. Each place had two plastic cups. They had bought mineral water and wine, plus loads of pretzel sticks. The room was, of course, too bright for candles.

Pringel and Schorba were wearing the same gray suit, and both had on dark shirts and both were sporting reddish blue ties. You might have thought it was the office uniform. Kurt, on the other hand, was clad in Bermuda shorts and a yellow short-sleeved shirt. Sitting silently off to one side, his elbows on his knees, he was openly and calmly ogling the women. Manuela, who has had the wart on her chin removed, was showing off one of her skirts split up one side, and her décolletage is getting more and more daring. Evi and Frau Schorba had been to the beauty parlor and their permanents made them look the same age, like those super-numerary spinsters who used to attend Youth Consecration ceremonies. Mona had merely put on some lipstick. For the first time I noticed that she’s quite beautiful.

All the chairs were on one side of the table, as if it wasn’t us but the baron who was to be put to the test.

When he came swooping in ten minutes late, he crossed the room in double time, chucked his attaché case on the visitor’s table, grabbed the telephone receiver, and dialed.

Deathly silence reigned as he spoke his full name. He was so perfect at reporting the accident it sounded as if he were reading from a Red Cross brochure. “Yes, I’ll wait,” he said, looking around at us for the first time. “Right outside your door,” he whispered.

I don’t know why none of us made a move. Only after the baron had hung up did we follow him out.

The baron, who had maneuvered the crazy old man to a stable position on his side, knelt down beside him and called out, “Herr Hausmann, help is on the way!” The old man groaned, blinked, and seemed to be checking us all out, including me, but with no visible reaction that I could notice. His hands were smeared with blood. The baron kept calling out, “Herr Hausmann, Herr Hausmann!”—it was the first time I’d ever heard the old man’s name — and told him to try to stay awake. After the baron had rejected a glass of water for the old man, there was nothing more we could do other than keep pushing the button for the light timer. The baron later helped heave the old man onto the stretcher, who then closed his eyes as if he didn’t want to watch while he was being jockeyed down the steep staircase. Astrid the wolf barked at him as he was carried out.

As cold-blooded as it may sound, the accident had eased the tension and awkwardness. Without a trace of irony, the baron thanked us for the lovely setup of the room. Within moments he had succeeded in making himself the center of attention. And so the next few hours simply flew by.

The baron promised everyone—“and when I say ‘everyone,’ I mean each and every one of you”—a thousand D-marks if our city-map project succeeds. We just have to be the first.

Evi and Mona now knew that when it came to advertising there was not a better, more modern, more efficient workplace in the world than theirs. They might well be the very first secretaries in East Germany to be already working on an Apple Macintosh.

He called Herr Schorba and Kurt the backbone of the enterprise. Distribution would grow in importance from week to week. Were they aware that their work would prove crucial for the success or failure of such a medium-size company?

He dubbed Pringel the salt in the soup, Frau Schorba the heart of the enterprise, and Manuela the diva and star of our troupe. Because without her and her colleagues, no matter how good our product, how hard we worked, we would simply have nothing whatever to do. (He didn’t mention that her earnings will turn out to be a serious problem. Manuela has moved her mother in with her, and since that means she no longer has to worry about the children she’s scouring the countryside day and night; I’m afraid that she’ll soon be able to live solely from her contracts.)³²⁹

A time like what we all—“all of us sitting here right now”—would be experiencing over the coming months and years was not likely to come again soon. “One hundred twenty thousand copies!”—we should let those words melt in our mouths. And that was only the beginning. “Do you know what a concentration of power this is? From the Battle of the Nations Monument to the foothills of the Ore Mountains, from the fortress churches at Geithain to the pyramids at Ronneberg — that’s your territory. That’s you!” His gaze shifted continually from one of us to the next.

“And you need to keep in mind that you are the only ones who are going up against the big boys in the business. This newspaper, you — you who have gathered here today — are defying international conglomerates. You’re sailing out in a nutshell to do battle with a whole armada. Whether you want to or not, you are defending something that makes this world worth living in.”

Like a sorcerer the baron held us spellbound in his gaze. And if a pair of eyes did wander off and lose themselves in the room, then it was only to make certain that all this was not a dream.

Our enterprise is going to have to grow in the near future. We’ll need more new staff. And yet each of us has had the good luck to be in on the ground floor, and each of us will soon be in charge of a smaller or larger division. That’s an enormous responsibility. Because if one of us fails, we’ll all feel the consequences.³³⁰ He admonished me to be hard and uncompromising when it comes to sloppy work and to make no exceptions, always to keep a firm grip on the wheel.

It was only after we broke up that we thought about the old man again. There were a few splotches of his blood on the hardwood floor. Which was why each of us took a giant step, as if he were still lying there.

Hugs,

Your Enrico

Dear Jo,

I forgot to take this letter with me this morning. I can now tell you the outcome. The relationship has now been clearly defined. We set up an appointment with a notary public. I sat across from Jörg and Michaela — she represented the baron.

I can talk with Jörg. If only it weren’t for Marion! Just as dirt always collects in the same corner, I find some new hatred written on her face each morning […] Besides which, she has lost weight till she’s just skin and bones. Her belt is all that holds her trousers up. She looks right through me, and if I don’t get out of her way, she jostles me. If I let her provoke me, we’d come to blows every day. Of late she’s been claiming that the articles I write are intended to block out as much space as possible so that really essential things won’t get published. My “machinations,” my “shameful behavior,” are the essential thing. Marion has even come up with the theory that journalists should be elected by the voters.

How quickly the worm has turned! So now you can go right ahead and plan your move to Altenburg.

Hugs, Your Enrico

[Wednesday, June 20, ’90]

Verotchka,

I’ve tried a hundred times now, but can’t get through. Where are you hiding?

We have nothing to blame ourselves for.³³¹ Not on Michaela’s account. I always guessed it was the case, but now I know for sure. The affair with Barrista didn’t happen just by chance. Michaela planned it all, in cold blood.

No, it’s not just my imagination. I’m talking about her miscarriage. It was all so unreal, in this world, but not of this world. I’ve never forgotten, of course not — but how to talk about it?

I was at Michaela’s today, I needed to speak with Barrista (his stupid Rolex scheme has become a curse!), I thought he would be at home. Michaela didn’t hear the doorbell. I rapped on the window of my old room. It’s now her “studio,” her “exercise studio.”

There she was, standing in front of me in her underwear and red sneakers, covered with sweat, and told me how she’d “lost four and a half pounds, four and a half pounds in two days.” I watched her get back on her treadmill, dumbbells in hand. “Another five hundred meters,” she panted.

I waited in the kitchen. How strange things can seem in so short a time. Mounds of zwieback, diet crackers, and low-fat milk. I didn’t notice the freezer at first glance. Its gleaming whiteness made everything else look grungy.

Michaela patted her stomach and said she wasn’t tucking it in, the fat was gone — I had to admit it, didn’t I? She talked about willpower and how much you can accomplish just by training once a day. She kept talking about her tummy while she puttered around half naked. And then I said, “Actually it’s kind of sad that your tummy’s so flat.” Verotchka, don’t misunderstand me, you and I, we could have taken the baby, I would have wanted it. At first I thought Michaela hadn’t got what I was talking about or didn’t want to. But then she looked at me and called me a dreamer and egotistical and some other things too. Suddenly she said, “You’ll believe anything”—and was startled by her own words. I asked what she meant by that. She didn’t reply. Even she couldn’t find a way to talk herself out of it that fast. YOU’LL BELIEVE ANYTHING!

At the time I had hauled the head nurse over the coals — how could she allow it, what a brutal thing to do, to put a “miscarriage” in the same ward with the “abortions”…The hallway would have been better, I said, yes, the hallway, that would have been more humane. No one said a word, not even the nurses. YOU’LL BELIEVE ANYTHING!

I told Michaela to swear it had been a miscarriage, and she swore it. But it was a lie. A lie, perjury. I couldn’t take anymore, I left, without a good-bye.

That’s all, Verotchka. We would have taken it, wouldn’t we?

Your Heinrich

Thursday, June 21, ’90

Ah, Nicoletta,

It seems to me as if untold riches await me, await us at the end of this month. Everything will be, must be, very, very wonderful. Please don’t be angry that I haven’t written for so long, there’s been so much to do here. What I really want to ask is: How are you? What are you up to? Would you have an hour to spare if I came to Bamberg? I would love to talk with you in the present, instead of always writing about the past. But it looks as if I have no choice.

And so back to Altenburg and the pistol under my sweater.

During the whole demonstration I was completely calm and detached. If someone had noticed I would have shown them my booty, pretended it was a joke, and handed it over at the next best opportunity. Michaela kept me at her side by linking her arm in mine and was busy the whole time responding to greetings, whether she knew the people or not. She whispered to me which of our neighbors she had spotted, and now and then called my attention to someone. Sometimes we tried to guess where we knew them from — a salesgirl, a post-office clerk, and Robert’s grade-school teacher was in the crowd too. A couple of times people greeted us, and then after just a few words crowned our serendipitous camaraderie with a hug.

There was the usual barrage of whistles and chants in front of the Stasi villa. Once we arrived at Market Square, the whole thing threatened to peter out, but then a voice caught people’s ears — it sounded as if it were used to bellowing. The man had climbed up on a bench and was hurling his tirades of hatred to the crowd. The adjectives he assigned to the Socialist Unity Party got nastier and nastier: rotten, prostituted, fucked-up. He thrust a fist heavenward at every stressed syllable. After six or seven sentences he couldn’t come up with anything else, and so started over again, so that his brief oration began to turn into a kind of refrain. Above all his demand that all these fucked-up functionaries be sent to the coal mines was greeted each time with cheers. But then, just as I thought he would call for us to storm the Rathaus, he let it go at that, shouted, “We’ll be back! We’ll be back!” and climbed down from the bench. I’ve told you once before about this revolutionary orator. He was the guy who offered to write a letter to the editor demanding that Wieland Förster’s sculpture be demolished.³³²

As we drove home Michaela was euphoric. But it was only when we turned on the television that the day became a real triumph. A live report of the demonstration in Berlin was on. She had never watched television with such a good conscience, Michaela said, because ultimately we too had made our contribution. And she kept on watching the entire afternoon, slowly moving ever closer to the screen, hoping to catch a glimpse of Thea.

But as for me, from one moment to the next my mood turned so wretched that I would have loved to break into sobs and confess everything in the hope that Michaela would take pity on me and remove that pistol from my life. I was convinced that at any second they would arrive to search our apartment. I gave fate its chance by going to the kitchen after first laying the pistol on the sofa and leaving the door ajar. And in fact Michaela did call my name, but only because the pretzel-cruncher from Thea’s gathering was on. He gave the appearance of profound thoughtfulness and concern, all the while moving his small head from side to side as if he wanted people to remember his face from all angles. I stretched out my arm, aimed over my forefinger, and pushed down with my raised thumb—“Bang!” Michaela laughed.

I put the pistol in the cupboard with my manuscript files and sat down next to Michaela. My wooziness appeared to have passed. When the live report was over, all the news broadcasts, both East and West, included clips of the speeches. That gave me the opportunity to pursue the question that all my thoughts were whirling around: Who was it that I was supposed to shoot?

At first I thought any of the speechmakers would do. Then I chose my victims on the basis of sympathy and antipathy. In the end I realized how pointless it was to make the forces of opposition my target. That narrowed my choice down to Schabowski and Markus Wolf, and so I decided on Wolf, because that would result in the mobilization of Stasi troops. Every time Wolf lowered the hand that clutched a sheet of paper and the chorus of whistles and boos swelled louder, I pulled the trigger, sometimes from out of the crowd, sometimes from the rear. I came close to creeping into the screen, trying to find the best standpoint, and could feel the pistol fly upward, recoiling against my right wrist as I fired the shot. I realized how difficult it would be to escape without anyone recognizing me. And there might be sharpshooters posted somewhere too. Far and wide, not a policeman in sight. Suddenly it came to me: I don’t want to remain unrecognized. Why shouldn’t I own up to my deed?

At the next repeat of the clip I am already on the podium, just two steps behind Wolf, and as the concert of whistles reaches its high point, I shout, “Comrade General!” Wolf glances my way, I take aim and say, “You’re gone!” As he turns around his eyes reflect incredulity to the point of doltishness. “You’re gone!” I shout once more, and point the barrel toward the stairs. For several seconds no one moves. Then, in a monstrous failure to grasp his situation, Wolf reaches inside his coat — the Napoleonic gesture, or so I think. We stare at each other as if turned to stone. Wolf grows smaller and smaller. The motion with which he pulls out his gun scurries before my eyes like a shadow. Then the shot rings out, and the hot cartridge bounces across the podium.

I see the little silver pistol in Wolf’s right hand, its barrel aimed down and away, and I’m still wondering how much lighter, more modern, and accurate it may be, when he falls full length right in front of me, his pistol skidding past the tip of my shoe and vanishing under a loudspeaker.

I use the moment to look out at the crowd, where the whistles are ebbing away. I leave the podium unmolested. I have to walk a long way before I spot the first squad car. Relieved and happy, I hand over my weapon, because I have now done what it was in my power to do.

The whole time she watched, Michaela had been jotting down notes and working on the first draft of her speech for the following Sunday. Once in bed, she fell asleep immediately.

Around half past midnight I got up, went to my room, and sat down at the foot of the couch. As if my task were to awaken a beast and release it from its cage, I was afraid to open the cupboard door.

The weapon had been well taken care of and the clip was full. All the standard procedures came back completely naturally.³³³ Even removing the ammunition proved to be no problem. Bracing my left hand against my hip, I took a breath, raised the weapon above the target, and slowly lowered it along the window frame until the bottom edge of the window handle was in line with the front and rear sights at the precise moment your breath rests between exhale and inhale and your finger presses the trigger. The first shot yanked my hand way off target. And on my next tries it was the especially hard action that gave me problems and drew the weapon off its ideal position. It would barely have been possible to hit a target more than twenty feet away. I practiced for a while, then stuffed the bullets into a matchbox³³⁴ and wrapped the gun in the undershirt I had tossed over the back of the chair as I had undressed. I washed my hands several times, but they still smelled of smoky gun oil, as if I had emptied the whole clip.

After a few hours’ sleep I woke up in a fright because, just as a month before in Dresden, I thought I heard the doorbell ring. I assumed a squad car would pull up in front of our building at any moment. Shortly after seven the doorbell did ring. Michaela ducked into Robert’s room. I answered.

Emilie Paulini’s daughter Ruth stared at me in a dulled daze. I asked her in. “She’s dead, Herr Türmer,” she said. “She’s dead now.”

I again invited her in. “She had waited for you to come see her, Herr Türmer, ah, she waited and waited.” Ruth took two steps into the entryway and then stopped.

Michaela greeted her with equal amounts of relief and annoyance. But Ruth ignored her outstretched hand and words of sympathy. Ruth’s gaze was fixed on me. “Why didn’t you stop by?” she whined. “Aaah, Herr Türmer! How our mommy waited for you.”

I said that there had been so much going on this autumn. We had scarcely been home at all in the last few weeks, Michaela said in my defense. “Aaah, Herr Türmer!” Ruth exclaimed. “Why didn’t you stop by just once for an hour or so? Nooo!” As if by way of punishment, my question as to when her mother had died was left unanswered.

“You will be coming to the funeral,” Ruth commanded. She gave the date, turned around, opened the door, and vanished without a good-bye.

Once Ruth had departed the scene, my fears returned. I spent the whole day interrogating myself. In the same way that we can get caught up in imagining our own funeral, I began making a detailed and water-tight inventory of what I had done over the last three days or tried to recall exactly when I had gone to bed two weeks before.

Then I again found myself being tried as Markus Wolf’s assassin. As a result of my deed, tanks had rolled across Alexander Platz, and now they were in every town, side by side with the Russians, martial law had been declared. I was to be found guilty in a show trial. Like Dimitrov³³⁵ I presented my own defense before the eyes of the world.

That evening I drove to the theater and hid the pistol in props, where no one was now in charge. I thrust the bullets into the soil of a flowerpot on the desk of one of my colleagues.

I drove with Michaela and Robert to Leipzig that Monday. It was to be my dress rehearsal. But there was no longer a single uniformed man in sight. After marching around the Ring, the demonstrators quickly dispersed. Everyone wanted to get home in time to watch themselves on the news.

On Tuesday I was called into the general manager’s office. And who was sitting there — just as I had expected? Two policeman, one blond, one black-haired. Jonas said he was merely putting his office at our disposal, nothing more.

Of course I was the obvious suspect. “Why should I want to steal a pistol?” I planned to reply with as much amusement as possible. They had put on deeply serious faces, they looked tired. Their chitchat about a “partnership for safety” for the demonstration on the 12th could only be a pretense. Although far more people had volunteered to help keep order than they could possibly use, they still couldn’t banish their reservations. They made statements like, “That’s a presumption we can’t make,” or “The comrades need to know what is going to happen.” I said nothing because I didn’t want to encourage a harmless conversation out of which would burst the surprise of the real question. Finally there we sat, helplessly staring in silence at the general manager’s empty throne.

Later that day something happened that actually did take me by surprise. Constantly revolving around death and corpses, my thoughts evidently obeyed an old reflex — suddenly an idea lay before me, the idea for a story, in the science-fiction genre. In the society I was going to describe, hardened criminals were imprisoned for life on a well-guarded island, the Island of Mortals, where they truly lacked for nothing, not even amusements. All the same — and this is their real punishment — they are doomed to die a “natural death.” As the result of gene manipulations or brain transplants, everyone else can count on living, if not for eternity, for one or two thousand years.

The rest of the story followed from the premise. A man condemned to normal mortality — his youth gene had been removed, and he was aging from day to day — escapes from the Island of Mortals and strikes terror in the heart of the capital. Because he really has nothing to lose, people consider him to be without any scruples. In the minds of those living “eternally,” it’s all the same to him whether he’s shot or dies a natural death after twenty or forty years.

Suddenly I was back at my desk. I worked on describing daily reports in the media aimed at inflaming the public to feel fanatically disgusted by mortality. Anyone who no longer enjoys eternal life — so the upshot of such stories — is a priori a ruthless man.

My hero talks about his fear of death and how creepy the thought of death is, because he’s so alien to everyone else. I kept finding new starting points from which I could circle the moment of death, the inconsolability that is part of experiencing something all alone.³³⁶

What spurred me on was the hope of returning to the German Library. I could see myself plowing through all the relevant medical journals. Weren’t the body and death the last topics still open to me?

When she returned home late from dress rehearsal, Michaela was surprised to find me at my desk. She smiled and went straight to bed.

On Wednesday Robert woke me very early. He was standing in the middle of the room, shouting something. The first thing I saw was Michaela’s calves. Michaela was running. And then I heard it — way too loud — the radio.

Robert’s voice, the garish light of the lamp, the weather report — suddenly I felt unending shame in having yielded to the temptation to write. Now I understood what Robert was shouting.

The fall of the wall felt like stern but just punishment for my regression. I pulled the covers up over my head.

“Nobody will be coming to our demonstration now,” Michaela grumbled. Later I thought I heard her heels clacking on the sidewalk. Alone now, I was overcome with the sense of being personally responsible for the fall of the wall, because I had hesitated, because I had never managed to simply pull the trigger. I had never been in the vicinity of an actual deed. So this was the 6 to 3, the inconceivable fifth goal scored in the second half, the end, the knockout punch.

Michaela returned almost cheerful. She had phoned her mother, had got her out of bed, and said how strange it made her feel to tell someone about IT, about how odd the moment was, because the other person was blindly continuing to live in the old world.

At the dress rehearsal — and this is the only memory I have of it — I said in the presence of both Jonas and Norbert Maria Richter that I would advise against a premiere. Jonas agreed with me, but left it up to Norbert Maria Richter whether his production should open.

Whereupon Michaela called me a traitor. “I’m living with a traitor!” I was obviously trying to pick a fight, evidently all I wanted to do was destroy, everything, willfully destroy everything — family, work, everything.

Michaela and I said scarcely a word to each other until Sunday, and then only to discuss the demonstration. I asked her to plan at most two minutes for my speech on Market Square. She asked what I was going to talk about. “The future,” I said, a remark that in regard to myself sounded absurd, since I no longer saw any future whatever.

Only half as many people came to the demonstration as on November 4th. In front of the Stasi villa and Party headquarters there was the usual music of catcalls, but no one halted. There were traffic wardens everywhere — Michaela had distributed white armbands, was wearing one herself, and had offered both Robert and me one. I saw the fat policeman from the previous Sunday again — Blond and Black, however, didn’t show.

As the procession turned onto Market Square, I saw red flags and GDR flags being held high in front of the speaker’s platform by a group of a hundred or two hundred people, almost all of them women. They were also carrying old banners and signs: THE GDR — MY FATHERLAND or SOCIALISM AND FREEDOM.

A short, mustached man kept circling this bunch and shouting, “Keep together, keep together!” although not one of them had stirred from the spot. Surrounded now, the Red bunch was being pelted with a seemingly never-ending chorus of “Shame on you!” In response they waved their flags.

Standing on the speaker’s platform I could see the angry, but also frightened look in these women’s eyes. One of them, way at the front, was resting her head on her neighbor’s shoulder and sobbing. It may sound rather strange to you, my dear Nicoletta, but I can honestly say that these women were the first people I had ever met who championed the cause of the GDR of their own free will.

I had put together a note card with a list of my points. I didn’t want Michaela to think I was taking the matter too lightly.

While giving my short speech, I gazed steadily at those women. I spoke to them like a doctor trying to explain to his patients what therapeutic measures need to be taken. Basically I said what I had said in Berlin three weeks before when Thea had confronted me.

I was the only person that day to offer a few remarks about money. “In West Berlin the exchange rate for the D-mark to the East-mark is one to seven.” That’s what I claimed, I didn’t know exactly what it was, but Vera had mentioned it once. Plus I invented a minimum wage of eleven D-marks an hour and said anyone could figure out how many days a man would have to work in the West to earn what he earned here in a month. “For most of us,” I said, “it probably wouldn’t take two whole days.” This earned me some applause. But the woman whose shoulder had supported her weeping friend’s head shouted that money isn’t everything.

“We have only two alternatives: either we close the wall again, or we introduce a market economy here too, otherwise no one will stay.” I had to repeat my conclusion over the enraged howls of the Red bunch. They hurled curses you might have heard shouted at strikebreakers at the beginning of the century. “Capitalist lackey” was among them, and “reactionary” and “counterrevolutionary.” Someone — alluding evidently to my white armband — called out that I belonged in the White Army. The women had the upper hand until the large crowd whipped itself up again to a “Shame on you!” and drowned them out.

The sooner we understand, I shouted, that there is only an either-or, the better it will be for all of us. “Or do you want to go to Paris as beggars?” Unable to read my next point, I stepped back from the mike and turned to one side — with the result that the applause for my last statement continued to grow. As backup music to my departure, the women had struck up the “International,” and no sooner had I reached the pavement than their singing could be heard above the applause. At first there were some whistles; then, however, the majority of the crowd likewise began to sing the “International,” just as I had heard people do in Leipzig.

I planted myself on one of the concrete flower boxes and hoped the whole circus would be over soon.

You probably can’t suppress a suspicion that what I’m trying to do here is to put myself in the best light after the fact, to paint myself as the only person who knew so early on what lay down the road ahead.

But that’s not the case. Just as in a game of chess, I was merely trying to calculate a few moves in advance. I certainly didn’t see reunification coming, although even then there were a few already demanding it. And as I’ve said, I had no concept of any future. With the fall of the wall, my personal future had dissolved into nothingness. Had I not had to climb the orator’s pulpit for Michaela’s sake, such pronouncements would never have passed my lips. Of course I could have said something different, too. But what? What else was there to say? There wasn’t anything else to say.

Whenever Michaela took the podium to announce the next speaker and, as the Leipziger Volkszeitung put it, request that the crowd show “moderation and decorum,” she seemed so free and self-assured — and earned more applause for her quick wit than most of the others had for their speeches. But now that she had managed to extract herself from the cluster of people wanting to talk with her and came over to us, she seemed depressed. She didn’t deign to give me a single glance. On the drive home her mood toppled into total darkness. I took it to be stage fright before a premiere.

Once we were home and I was finally able to ask her what had happened, she said, “Nothing,” and vanished into our room. She was crying.

“Is this it?” she asked when I entered. She held the envelope up. “Is this why you’re the way you are?” I recognized Nadja’s handwriting on the envelope. “You don’t need to worry about us,” Michaela said, “we’ll manage all right.” She blew her nose.

It was one of the few moments in my life in which my conscience was pure, ready for any kind of interrogation.

I asked Michaela to open the envelope. She shook her head. “Please,” I said. “No,” she said. She wouldn’t subject herself to that.

I slit the envelope open with a nail file lying on her nightstand, unfolded the sheet of paper, and began to read aloud. Right at the start Nadja wrote that she was aware that I now had a family. She herself was living with Jaroslav, a Czech, and was expecting her first child at the end of February. She asked about how my manuscript was going and complained about her work.

Michaela said nothing. Even when I laid the letter down in front of her, she didn’t budge. Finally she asked if she could have the stamps. Then she folded the letter back up and inserted it in its envelope.

“So then what is the reason?” She stared at me.

“For what?” I asked.

“For being the way you are.”

Before I could reply the doorbell rang for all it was worth. My mother was standing there, her chin jutted forward so she could peer out from under her cap. A cyclamen rose up threateningly from her right hand, and in her left she was holding a swaying shopping net, whose contents I recognized as the familiar springform pan.

“Justice triumphs!” she cried. She spoke very loudly, carrying on like someone hard of hearing, and each of her movements was accompanied by a rattle, rasp, or jingle.

Loyally devouring his cheesecake, Robert didn’t let Mother’s chatter disturb him. The fall of the wall was her personal triumph, and she made fun of us for not having been in the West yet. She definitely wanted to travel to Bavaria, because the “welcome money” was highest there,³³⁷ and together it would come to 560 D-marks, a sum that you could actually do something with.

Later, at the theater, my mother admitted how shocked she had been by the way Michaela looked. Weren’t we happy because of what had happened?

Except for one woman whom nobody knew the whole first row was empty. The balcony hadn’t even been opened. Of just short of sixty people in the audience, fifteen belonged to Norbert’s entourage and about thirty were friends and family of the actors, just like us.

At first the audience fell into old habits and applauded every punch line. But this enthusiasm soon faded, as if they finally realized what had happened over the last few days.

After intermission several people did not return to their seats, and the play simply sickened and died. Since there was no reaction to the punch lines now, the actors rushed their lines all the more.

At the end Norbert Maria Richter barely managed to get a bow in.

Tuesday I was called to the general manager’s office again.

Jonas and Frau Sluminksi were both sitting at his desk, as if they were doing homework together. They both stood up at the same time, extended a hand without saying a word, and we all sat down. Jonas looked at a letter in front of him. His hair fell down into his face. “I’m leaving,” he said. And then, raising his head and flipping his hair back, he added, “I’ve resigned.”

He enjoyed my surprise. Happiness glistened in Sluminski’s eyes. Had it been because of Gotham, I asked. He shook his head, and Sluminski rocked hers slightly too.

“What’s left here for me to do?” he said, gazing at me with his perennially moist eyes as if actually expecting some sort of answer.

“Yes,” I said. “I’ve asked myself that question.”

Instead of wishing him good luck, extending my hand, getting up from my chair, and leaving, I just sat there. I was sorry to see him go, I said. But I could well understand his decision.

He knew, he said, that people talked behind his back and how they would lambaste him now, but he had no regrets. If he could see even the slightest chance of being able to accomplish anything meaningful here, he would stay. But that was out of the question now. I nodded. And then he said that Sluminski would be running the business end of things for now — and she looked up and noted that she would welcome any and all support. I nodded again. “Or would you like to do it?” Jonas asked, grinning his old grin. “Would you?” I shook my head, and then we shook hands again.

As I entered the canteen Jonas’s departure was already being celebrated as a victory. I sat off to one side like someone from the old regime, happy to be left in peace.

“Jonas is leaving,” I told Michaela, who hadn’t been at the theater. And because she looked at me as if she wasn’t about to have her leg pulled, I added, “He told me himself.”

I had no explanation for her as to why I of all people had been singled out for special consideration. Michaela presumed one of Jonas’s tricks lay behind it, some really nasty machination. When I didn’t reply she asked if I was actually so vain as to think he had done it out of personal concern. I shrugged. “No, no, my dear,” she said, “there’s strategy and tactics behind it. Did someone just happen to drop by and see you two together?”

I said no, but did mention Sluminski. At the sound of her name Michaela jumped to her feet. “What was she doing there?” she exclaimed.

Even as I repeated Jonas’s words, a vein swelled at Michaela’s temple. “She’ll be running things for now? Her? The Party secretary?”

“Only the business side,” I said.

“And you?” she shouted. “What did you say?”

I tried to recall my words. “You didn’t say anything,” she shouted before I could even answer. “Nothing, not one thing.” Michaela stared at me, her head was starting to tremble, she was about to say something else, but then fell silent, as if she didn’t dare say what she was thinking, and left the room.

Somehow I had lost the capacity for emotions that Michaela experienced on such a grand scale. I had become numb, mute, devoid of emotion. I no longer felt my wounds.

When at the end of the week and without an inkling that anything was up, I called Mother, the first thing she said was, “Did you know about this? Did you?”

“Know what?” I asked. And when she didn’t reply, I said, “What am I supposed to have known?” Instead of answering, my mother hung up.

I called her back. I knew she would never be able to survive it. I had no hope at all, but she answered.

“Mother!” I exclaimed. I don’t think I’ve probably ever sounded so pleading.

“Actor my foot! Vera works in a fabric shop. She’s a sales clerk! And you knew that! Right?”

I was just happy to hear that accusation.³³⁸

“You wanted to believe it,” I shouted. “Didn’t it ever bother you that Vera never sent any reviews?”

My mother said she’d always thought the Stasi had removed them from the envelope.

Finally she said, “I demand only one thing: not to be deceived by my children. That’s something I cannot handle, Enrico, not in my own family. How can you even expect me to take it?” Then she hung up.

I walked home. On the way I thought about Emilie Paulini again for the first time, and how she had presumably been buried at some point over the last few days.

Your

Enrico T.

Thursday, June 28, ’90

Dear Nicoletta,

Why have you remained so present to me, Nicoletta, so much so that it sometimes makes me shudder? How many times have I painted your portrait in my mind — it’s so vivid in my memory. As if in a fever I evoke your presence with an unhealthy craving. I’m frighteningly good at it, but when I find myself alone again, my own company seems intolerable. And then I write you a letter.

Two weeks after the wall was opened there was no one left who hadn’t been in the West except us. All the kids in Robert’s class had seen Batman. Michaela found some excuse every time. “The West isn’t going anywhere,” she said, and she had tons and tons of work to do, by which she meant the meetings she attended at least once a day, sometimes holding them at home. It was her idea to publish a newsletter in which all of New Forum’s working committees would have an opportunity to place items. In Michaela’s eyes that meant publicizing injustices and abuses — the Sluminski case, for instance — because no one else was going to do it.

When the chief dramaturge assigned me the task of delivering several cartons of libretti to Henschel Verlag in Berlin, I agreed mainly because I was worried about Vera. I could guess what the opening of the wall meant for her. Her lies, big and small, would blow up in her face.³³⁹

When I invited Robert to come along, he hugged me for the first time. And now Michaela wanted to go to Berlin too.

First, however, my self-control was to be tested.

In November you still needed a stamp in your papers to cross the border. Robert accompanied me to the provisional office set up by the police in the one-story building behind the Konsum Market. (Michaela had refused to appear as a supplicant before these people ever again.)

Since the place looked dead, I assumed the door was locked and was just trying to jiggle at it when it flew open in my hand. There was the odor of a noonday meal. The room we entered through folding doors was as dark as a church. Except that just above some desks that had been shoved together, a lamp had been hung, and beneath it sat the uniformed personnel, all of them hunched over as if trying to hide their faces. The counters and the door to the kitchen were barricaded with stacked tables and chairs.

Uncertain from which side I ought to approach, I chose a circuitous route. I kept at least one person’s back in front of me and glanced down into a drawer full of stamps and inkpads, keys and seals. A metal lunch box shimmered beside a briefcase, there were two apple cores in the wastebasket. For a second I was afraid I’d walked into a trap. The blond didn’t recognize me, or at least pretended he didn’t. He raised his arm, his hand opened up, I gave him my papers.

It was like remembering a dream. In the same moment the two other uniformed men looked up from their work, and by the light of the lamp I could tell that it was the black-haired cop and the fat cop. The trio that I had joined in their squad car on November 4th was now complete.

I didn’t seriously consider trying to flee. But I did glance toward the door as if I expected someone to be standing there blocking our retreat. I called Robert over to me.

“Have you been over yet?” I asked, looking at the blond as he inspected my accordion-fold passport to the last page,³⁴⁰ as if every stamp from every border crossing held great interest for him. The blond then added his stamp and folded it all back up again. Robert said later that I paid a fee, even got a receipt, but I don’t recall it. With the same gesture with which he took my pass, the blond handed it back. Just as he had ignored my thank-you, he now ignored my question. I headed for the exit, Robert kept close to my side.³⁴¹

The next day we made our libretti delivery in Berlin and then had our noon meal in a pub near Henschel Verlag. We had driven our old route, instead of the one I had pictured in my mind: turning off in the direction of West Berlin just after the three-lane asphalt stretch near Michendorf. Berlin, by which I mean the eastern half of the city, was nothing more than an antechamber where you waited before striding into the great hall. I was amazed that the waitress and counterman were still working here in the East, as if the wall were still there. After we had eaten, we drove down Friedrich Strasse in the direction of Checkpoint Charlie. This was Robert’s wish. While we were waiting to be passed through — there were only a few cars ahead of us — I realized for the first time the meaning of the word “checkpoint.” The syllables checkpoint-charlie had been just a sound, a noise, a bubble-gum bubble that bursts just as the bells of the Spassky Tower ring³⁴² out into the moment of greatest silence. I asked Robert if he knew what the word “checkpoint” meant. He did. Michaela said I shouldn’t play high school teacher. Pass, glance, pass, thanks — and through. No thumbing to find the stamp, nothing. Michaela said the real checkpoint had to still be up ahead. I turned right. I had no idea where I was driving. We had wanted to go to West Berlin, and here we were in West Berlin. Do you understand? West Berlin meant arriving there, meant being in the West, not just driving around aimlessly.

An hour later and we ran ashore at the lower end of the Kurfürsten-damm, where I found a parking place to squeeze into and a bank where we collected our “welcome money.” Then we walked up and down the Ku’damm, lost our bearings in the adjacent streets, and landed on another major thoroughfare with lots of stores. With Michaela in the lead we entered a bookstore where several stacks of a novel³⁴³ by Umberto Eco were sprouting from the floor. I had to laugh when I saw those oversize wheeled shopping baskets outside a supermarket.³⁴⁴ They instantly roused a desire in me to hoard supplies, so that I wouldn’t have to leave the house for days.

Later we found ourselves in a department store in which it was way too warm and, with coats draped over our arms, we moved from floor to floor as if looking for some particular item. When Michaela suddenly got the idea to buy Robert a jacket for his Youth Consecration,³⁴⁵ we went our separate ways for forty-five minutes. She handed me two fifty D-mark bills and shoved Robert ahead of her to the escalator.

I watched them go, but I had no real desire to spend three quarters of an hour alone. I thought: You’re free, freer than you’ve ever been before in your life.³⁴⁶ I was in the middle of West Berlin and could do or not do whatever I felt like.

I was most interested in the kitchen utensils and housewares — coffee machines, pots, tableware, and corkscrews, but there were also gadgets whose purpose I would have liked to inquire about. I definitely wanted to buy something for myself. Just for me. Suddenly I had an idea I couldn’t shake — if I didn’t spend the money now, it would be lost for good. At any rate, with much wringing of the hands, I searched for some perfect object. One moment I thought I had made a decision, the next I lost my confidence. I needed a Chinese teapot, I needed a windbreaker. I was already at the cash register with a Walkman when, tormented by regret, I stood there just shaking my head as if I didn’t speak German, left the Walkman on the counter, and fled. If Michaela and Robert had been on time I would have greeted them empty-handed. But then, lured by a clutch of people, I began to rummage through a square box full of gloves. Large or small, they were all the same price. At first I tried thrusting my hand down into unexplored regions and trolled along the bottom, but all I brought to the surface was junk, children’s mittens or singles, one of them a black leather glove that fit perfectly. I kept it on and searched for its mate, but in vain. Finally I conquered my aversion and considered those that other people had tossed back. It was difficult to try them on because each pair was sewn together at the wrist. Once you had pulled off the trick, however, you stood there manacled. I decided on a dark blue pair lined in a red and green plaid, and, properly handcuffed, walked over to the cash register.

“I thought you don’t like gloves,” Michaela said. “Because I didn’t have any,” I said. Robert was carrying a plastic shopping bag so cleverly crafted that rain couldn’t get into it. Michaela confessed that she had only one D-mark left, but at least we no longer needed to worry about a suit for Robert to wear at his Youth Consecration.

I treated us to currywurst at a food cart. That improved the general mood.

After that I dialed Vera’s number. It was the first time I had ever used a push-button phone and I felt like I was in a movie. I kicked the phone-booth door open again and asked where exactly we were. Michaela ran off to look for a street sign.

Vera had an answering machine. Her voice had a hard, stiff sound, as if the only calls she got were from total strangers. I was sure she would pick up the receiver as soon as she recognized my voice. I said, “Hello!” a couple of times and that we would love to have coffee at her place. I called the shop, and the male voice — presumably Nicola’s — on the answering machine said in German that I was to leave a message after the beep, after which I heard what I presumed was the same message in Arabic and French.

The woman at the food cart explained how to get to Wedding.

It was already dark by the time we found Malplaquet Strasse. At first I couldn’t locate Vera’s name on the doorbell register because the name was reversed as Barakat-Türmer.

“They live in the rear building,” Michaela said, a fact that I likewise found disappointing. When I heard footsteps behind the main door I assumed it was Vera. All we saw of the short woman in an ankle-length robe was her face — she didn’t bother to give us a glance — and she now retreated like a windup doll. The rather shabby corridor was crammed with prams and bikes, the main door sprayed with graffiti, the lighting dim.

We had to climb to the fifth floor. There was no one at home, but there was something special about just seeing her door and her doormat.

On the back of the receipt for Robert’s suit I wrote, “Greetings from your Altenburgers.” I folded the receipt and stuck it in the crack of the door.

Michaela asked if I would invite her and Robert to see Batman.

I let them out in front of a movie theater near the Zoo Station and drove off to find a parking place. I got lost several times during the endless odyssey. I didn’t really care about the movie, but I panicked at the idea of missing the beginning and I was afraid they would wait for me. Every parking space proved too small. I was lucky nothing happened when I drove through a red light at a pedestrian crossing. Finally I hit it right just as someone pulled out. I parked with my right rear tire up on the curb. The cold air did me good. The exhaust in West Berlin really did smell like a pungent perfume.

I was surprised when the woman at the ticket boot told me I was just in time.

Michaela and Robert were sitting near the entrance. Given the plush armchairs I at first thought we were in a private box. But then the lights went on, and Michaela burst into laughter as a vendor appeared beside us selling the same ice cream we had just seen advertised. I couldn’t get my head around the notion that we were allowed to eat ice cream while sitting in such plush seats, and in the dark besides. Calculated on the basis of what money I had left, one movie ticket plus ice cream cost as much as my gloves.

After the movie Robert was as happy as could be, and Michaela seemed to be too. From the map the woman in the ticket booth had given Michaela free of charge we saw how easy it was to reach the autobahn. Michaela played navigator. Robert had turned on his cassette recorder and, to the accompaniment of Milli Vanilli and Tanita Tikaram, gave us a detailed plot summary of the film, as if we hadn’t just seen it. When he was done he demanded we all list our favorite scenes. Five minutes later we were at the autobahn. With the lights of the Funkturm rising up in the background, I merged into traffic. After a couple of hundred yards I changed to the middle lane.

Michaela shouted for me to be careful and not to drive so fast — this was absolute madness. “What do you mean?” I exclaimed. “What else can I do?” I wanted to hit the brakes and slow down but I didn’t dare risk it. Next to us, in front of us, behind us — we were racing along with them, faster than I had ever driven in my life, a pack of wild dogs, with us in the middle. I tried leaving more space in front of me, but immediately a car would shoot in from another lane and just make things worse. I had no choice, I had to drive like everybody else. But since everyone was driving at that speed, it couldn’t be all that dangerous, or at least not as bad as we feared. I gradually calmed down.

At the airport exit I realized we weren’t headed south but north. Michaela was also aware of our mistake. Trying to find a more comfortable position, she stretched out her legs. Robert had fallen silent and, propping his elbows on the backs of our seats, stared straight ahead.

We sped along through wide curves and tunnels — a little like a roller-coaster ride. Instead of driving on to Hamburg I followed the sign for the last exit before the border and turned around. We had an even longer stretch of asphalt autobahn before us now. The music on the radio was seldom interrupted.

During the trip back I kept thinking about the sea, I pictured ships crossing the ocean and I made a list of harbors: Hamburg, Hong Kong, Valparaiso, New York, Helsinki, Vancouver, Genoa, Barcelona, Leningrad, Istanbul, Melbourne, Alexandria, Odessa, Singapore, Auckland, Marseille, Rio de Janeiro, Cape Town, Aden, Bombay, Rotterdam, Venice. I saw these giants of the ocean anchored beside garland-trimmed seawalls. The radio reception had grown worse and worse, but there was one AM station that held a signal — music and words sounded equally magical and distant. I saw terraced cafés above a town, with day-trippers and lanterns and fireworks. I was already traveling in some foreign region of the world. Just as Jim, the slave in Huckleberry Finn, believes he can see the lights of Cairo and the pyramids in the distance, I wouldn’t have been surprised if suddenly a road sign had announced St. Louis or New Orleans.³⁴⁷

I no longer know what I saw as I steered the car through Leipzig. The first thing I can recall is a gesture of Michaela’s hand that passed directly from the light switch to my forehead as we stood in the entry hall. “You have a fever,” she said, and showed me the sweat on her fingertips.

“I’m ill,” I replied.

“No need to shout,” she said.

“I’m ill,” I repeated, and immediately whispered it again, as if I dared not forget it.

“I’m ill” was the expression I’d been looking for in vain over the past several weeks. I quickly washed my hands and face, undressed, and took to my bed, from where, with ample time and no disruptions, I would finally be able to marvel at all the ships and cities of the world.

The next day I awoke alone in the apartment. I had the feeling it would take hours before I had assembled enough willpower to spread a sheet over the couch in my room as well as transfer my pillow and blanket from the bedroom. I knew that this would be the last chore I would accomplish for a long time, and closed my eyes.

And with that I’ve really said it all. Because it’s impossible to describe my condition. Words don’t come close.

My dear Nicoletta, looking back on it now, I am writing to you from terra firma. Anyone who can tell about his own adventures didn’t perish with them — a certainty that in fact stands everything on its head. Besides which, the logic of dreams is hidden from the eyes of those who are wide awake, just as sunlight obliterates an image on film.

If I had lost the sensibilità one needs for this world — in lesson 14, Signore Raffalt³⁴⁸ says that a corresponding word does not exist in German, only to translate it boldly one sentence later with Resonanzfähigkeit—it was not because I had become numb, callous, and apathetic, but simply because I was a broken man. There was no me left.

Do you understand, Nicoletta? Everything that had defined me since that first Arcadian summer, everything that had interested me, had kept me alert and alive, had now been rendered immaterial by the last few weeks and months.

The vast emptiness that had taken my place corresponded exactly to the overwhelming endlessness of time in which it floated. I was amazed at what an infinity lay hidden in each day. No, it wasn’t that simple. I lay in bed, getting up only when I had to go to the toilet and sipping at the tea Michaela placed beside the bed every morning and evening. I dozed off and woke up, dozed off and woke up, and wondered what was keeping Robert, why he hadn’t come home from school yet. But it wasn’t just him, Michaela kept arriving later and later. It seemed to me that the longer I waited, the greater the probability, yes, inevitability of some kind of trouble, maybe even an accident of some sort. When I finally brought myself to fetch my watch from my desk, it had stopped at half past nine. But my touching it had started it up again. Later — it was still light outside — I managed to make it to the kitchen. The clock above the door read twenty till eleven, the same as my watch. I lay there in bed, filled with amazement at what had become of minutes and hours, at what monsters they had turned into. I sneered at the thought of what all I could have accomplished in a single morning. I could have easily written one story per day, taken care of household chores as well, watched a little television, and read. Now that all that was of no concern to me, I had a godlike dominion over time. Not even eleven o’clock yet! Imagine that you’ve just had a long dream, a very long dream, one that unfolds into further dreams. When you wake up you’re certain the alarm will ring at any moment, when in fact not ten minutes have passed, and all the lights in the building across the street are still on.

I counted the seconds it took for me to take a breath in order to get some sense of what a minute, what five minutes meant. As soon as I laid my watch aside, I was convinced that I could break every diving record. Another experiment, one that I had often performed as a child in the hope of speeding up time, proved less successful: with the help of a magnifying glass (Robert has one for his stamp collection) I watched the minute hand. Yes, I saw it move, but that was no help.

At some point pain paid me a visit. I have to put it that way, the toothache seemed like a guest in my void. I was grateful. Closing my eyes, I tried to discover where it would settle in, for at first it darted about like a will-o’-the-wisp, bounding upward, plunging downward, now on the right, now on the left. But then it found its spot, lower left. To help you understand I probably have to express it this way: I clung to this pain. Or better, it has to be put like this: I was the pain. Outside it, there was nothing. And so it was only natural for me to try to nurse it. I watched it constantly, the way a child watches a hamster on that first day, and gave myself over to time beyond all measure. The greater the pain, the smaller the void. It first had to take total possession of me, and only then, as the capstone of my torment, did I want to see the dentist. I kept losing myself in the details of an agonizing session in the dentist’s chair.

Like someone who fears he has been robbed as he slept and starts hastily patting his pockets, I explored my pain each time I awoke. And was always relieved to find it in its proper spot. And not only that, it spread, creeping and pommeling³⁴⁹ its way along my jaw, until it slammed into the back of my head. For me it was a kind of guarantee, the only reliable unit of measurement.

I went to seed. The odor that hit me when I lifted my covers, the long fingernails, the fuzzy coating on my teeth — I perceived it all simply as a defect in my environment, like a burned-out lightbulb when you don’t have a replacement in the house. When my stubble had grown so long it stopped being prickly, I forgot my body entirely. That was, of course, in part due to my fatigue, a permanent exhaustion in which dream and reality often remained indistinguishable. I continued my survey of distant cities and ships. It didn’t matter whether I kept my eyes open or closed, I wandered aimlessly around those same cities, without ever actually making an appearance myself.

To Michaela and Robert it looked like uninterrupted sleep. When Michaela brought me my tea each morning, she put her hand to my brow. She made every effort, cooked rice pudding, and asked Aunt Trockel to make me her applesauce. I didn’t want any of it, I wanted peace and quiet, but let it all roll over me as if it were a way of thanking Michaela for having Dr. Weiss sign off on my sick leave first for one, then for a second week.

When the time was up, I dragged myself to the polyclinic. It was St. Nicholas Day, December 6th, the very same day on which Michaela and Jörg and a few others occupied the Stasi villa, after first printing and distributing a flyer at noon that called for the demonstration to assemble at the theater at six o’clock. Michaela appeared finally to have incorporated all the energy I lacked. In the half hour she spent at home that afternoon, she used my absence to toss my bed linens into the washing machine, but didn’t have time to put on fresh. When I got back with a renewal of my sick leave, this time for two weeks at a shot, I found my sickbed had been dismantled — a smack in the face that made me feel as if I had been thrown out. I did without new sheets, rummaged in the wardrobe till I found my old down sleeping bag, unrolled it on the couch, crept into it still in my underwear, and pulled the hood up over my head.

That evening Michaela was out of control. I couldn’t remember her ever having entered my room without knocking first. Suddenly there she stood before me — I had heard her key ring and her voice before I opened my eyes. It wasn’t just that she was talking too fast. Every sentence demanded three or four more sentences of explanation that drew still more sentences in their wake, so that she barely had a chance to catch her breath or swallow and so kept on talking faster and faster. But the real demand upon me was her presumption that I would get up, get dressed, and return with her to the demonstration.

Even if I had not been ill, she surely must have known how little I cared about any of it, yes, how it made no difference to me whatever whether those at the head of the demonstration chanted “Germany, united fatherland” or “We are one people” and whether some Jörg or Hans-Jürgen had or hadn’t attempted “to bring a halt to that.”

With each of her statements I realized anew how incapable I was of taking any part in this life, how pointless every effort seemed.

My response to Michaela’s question about what the doctor had said rekindled her anger. At some point she compared me to a caterpillar, a fat caterpillar — which, given the sleeping bag, was not exactly original. I understood it as an announcement that from now on she wouldn’t be taking care of me. What was annoying was the covert charge that I was faking it. The accuracy of this conjecture was revealed the next day when Robert asked me to help him with his homework. The worst thing was his nagging me to drive him here, there, and everywhere. Michaela seemed actually to be egging him on to do things she had once forbidden for pedagogical reasons. As if she had completely forgotten my condition, she in fact tormented me with wishes of her own over the next several days.

Living together with the two of them became more and more of a torture. I ruled out the idea of returning to the theater. Vera had ducked out of sight, but the mail brought rambling letters from Geronimo almost daily — which after a while I no longer bothered to open. At the time I still knew nothing of the difficulties my mother was struggling with. She offered the absolutely foolish assertion that Vera was to blame for my breakdown. Michaela, on the other hand, took the miseries of the world upon her shoulders on an hourly basis, including feeling responsible for my deterioration, until finally she would once again lose all patience with me. I stubbornly defended my sleeping bag against her onslaught, but did allow her to tuck a clean sheet on my couch.

As I’ve said, my condition at the time is alien even to me now. I’m reporting to you like someone who repeats hearsay for better or for worse.

Then it happened. It simply happened. Have you ever collected your kitchen garbage in a paper bag? And when you pick it up the next day, all the crap plops right through it. The horror of it suddenly hit me.

But what does that mean!³⁵⁰ I had suddenly realized what had happened to me and what a state I was in.

Ah, Nicoletta, the total disappearance of Herr Türmer is almost incomprehensible. You can, of course, also attribute it to the loss of my writing, or more accurately, the loss of the West, the loss of our Beyond, the death of the benevolent gods…And with that, if you recall, the circle of my observations has closed on itself.

On the other hand, perhaps my descriptions have, or so I hope, laid a foundation that will make what is yet to come comprehensible.

But enough for today.

Yours,

Enrico Türmer

Sunday, July 1, 1990

Dear Jo,

I can move in the day after tomorrow, that is, if the baron has no objections. I’ve ordered a new mattress — thanks to Monte Carlo, the best of the best.³⁵¹ All the rest in due time.

Vera will be coming by train, with her predictable two suitcases.

The new family has flown to the Baltic, to Denmark, which makes a lot of things easier. No one knows just how the baron gets permission for his aviation stunts or how he has managed to get around the Russians.³⁵² It wouldn’t surprise me if he’s soon flying a MiG-29. D-marks will get you anything. The baron is already making grand plans for the day the Russians have departed for good. Discount fares from Altenburg-Nobitz to London and Paris! I wouldn’t put anything past him.

As I was getting out of my car on Friday, I thought I saw seagulls — seagulls here in town. But it was only paper, whirling scraps of paper of all kinds coming toward me along the sidewalk and out in the street. I stopped for a moment and watched the pages as they skittered over the parking lot, fluttered down the slope, pirouetted across car roofs, and finally landed along the brick wall or in the chain-link fence. I even stepped on one and wondered if it was worth bending down for the paper clip. I kept on walking — only to turn on my heels a moment later and start chasing these white birds like a desperate child. Marion’s shrill voice from the window had wrenched me out of my trance. Evi, Mona, and Frau Schorba came dashing and screaming out our front door.

Frau Schorba attempted to snatch up the pages drifting along the street. She shrieked at regular intervals whenever the one she was chasing escaped her grasp at the last second. Meanwhile Ilona and Fred had joined the pursuit, and like the drivers in a hunt we were now combing the parking lot. We were able to glean the lion’s share of the flyaway ad forms from along the wall and fence. Evi climbed up and over the fence to pluck Rüdiger Bajohr Finance Agency and Noëlle’s Bookshop from the bushes. Mona crept under every car and fetched Copy Service from under my front wheel.

Ilona and Fred checked along Jüden Gasse and on Market Square, while the rest of us hurried to assist Frau Schorba. She had changed tactics, and now trotted along behind the pages and then slammed her heel on the pavement with a cry of “Bastard!” It took at most two or three “Bastards!” and the ad was saved. Cars that had been forced to pull over had turned on their warning signals.

Fred proudly displayed his muddy pants, and, apparently happy to have lost a heel, Ilona hobbled along pretentiously. We learned from Pringel — whom we probably have to thank for the fact that the computer came through unscathed — that Jörg had already loaded Marion into their car and driven off.

She, Marion, had stormed into the computer room and, without saying a word, made a grab at the pile of ads and flung them out the window. Then, as wind from the Baltic scattered the forms, she had once again cursed everyone as shadows. I asked them all to treat the matter with discretion. I would encourage Jörg to get Marion to a psychiatrist. No sooner do we have one lunatic out of the house — the old man had to be put in a nursing home — than we’re threatened by a second one.

Yesterday Marion even came at me with a knife. It was a perfectly innocuous situation. Because Schorba was out of the office, Fred was answering some questions two of our new deliverymen had asked. Marion had accidentally overheard him, and began laying into Fred right in front of them. Her screeches fetched Jörg and me to the scene.

Since Jörg refused to do anything about Marion’s outburst, I let myself be drawn into it with a few words — enough was enough, and would she please leave us alone. As I turned toward the deliverymen I realized their eyes were wide with terror.

Marion was holding Fred’s knife clamped in both hands, the blade and the pupils of her eyes directed menacingly at me. Her face was contorted, as if an attack of madness had suddenly obliterated her familiar features […]

“Just try to drive me out of this office,” she shouted ominously. “You evidently think I wouldn’t dare?” Marion’s mouth wrenched into a skewed smile as I backed away.

“No,” I said, “I don’t think there’s much of anything you wouldn’t do.”

“Then we understand each other,” she announced with satisfaction, lowered the knife, and turned to leave. We all stood there frozen in place. As she departed Marion shouted a cheerful “Hi there!” to Schorba — who was just back in the office — a greeting that he happily returned. But Schorba now stared at us as if we were a gathering of ghosts.

I’ve learned from Fred that the Weekly’s printing is now under ten thousand, despite Jörg’s histrionic headlines: “Poison in Our Groundwater?” or last week’s “Mass Graves in Altenburg?” He no longer knows what to write. While the celebratory mood is increasing day by day, Jörg hunkers down in his office, growing ever paler and smaller. The baron has given him a free hand. The only question is for how long yet. Have I told you about Ralf?³⁵³ I’ve hired his wife as a sales rep, he and his daughter will be delivering our Sunday issue in North Altenburg — not bad extra pocket money.

I’ve been spending my evenings at Referees’ Retreat. Each time the Germans score a goal, Friedrich, the bald owner, shoots off fireworks and pours a round on the house. A shame we’re not playing today.

Hugs,

Your Enrico

[This letter was never sent.]

Tuesday, July 3, ’90

Verotchka,

Yesterday Michaela showed up at the office to bring Barrista his thick pocket calendar. It was the first time I’ve ever seen her kiss him. She was wearing her fancy red sneakers. She couldn’t look me straight in the eye.

Later I happened to hear Mona and Evi talking about Michaela. Their suspicion that Barrista would move in on “one of the prettier ones” has now been confirmed. A little later Robert called and asked when I’d be free. We made a date for lunch.

I would barely have recognized him. Not because of the new outfit — he’s wearing sneakers now too, plus a jacket with heavily padded shoulders. His hair is a lot shorter. Maybe I have been a little inattentive of late — Robert has turned into a young man. He gave me a hug all the same.

I let everything lie just as it was and left with him. Outside we ran into Pringel, who had been doing research for his report on Day Zero and the introduction of our new money. (Johann will have to work hard to hold his own against Pringel.)

On Market Square I took a place in line at the fruit stand. It went fast, since most of the others apparently just wanted to view the wares. I felt like a gate-crasher, like the guy who’s at the buffet table before it’s even open. I asked for four kiwis, which I was allowed to select for myself — and at the same moment recognized our old friend, the D-MARK ONLY fruit vendor who had helped Robert sell his first newspapers. Our last meeting seemed so long ago now, he was like a figure out of a fairy tale. His greeting was friendly, but his mood was gloomy. He hadn’t done a hundred marks’ worth of business yet. He wouldn’t even make the cost of his fee to set up his booth. The prospects were bleak, hopeless. While bystanders watched, I impetuously began grabbing at random, as if I had to buy any piece of fruit I touched. I paid with a ten-mark bill and held out the palm of my hand, where he deposited the change. Robert was given a free banana, which he immediately deposited in my pocket out of embarrassment.

The whole town was like an exposition that had just opened its gates, and we strolled through it like visitors. My sack of fruit was duly noted in the same way that I eyed every filled shopping net, every even half-full plastic bag. The air above Market Square seemed to flicker with expectation and nervousness.

The Ratskeller was completely empty. It wouldn’t have taken much and I would have used the open door as our excuse for having barged in, but then the waitress told us to take a seat anywhere we wanted and handed us each a menu.

Robert and I had scarcely spoken. He had trotted alongside me lost in thought. He kept chewing at his lower lip, with one corner of his mouth tucked in. I asked where they had gone for their vacation. His answer was monosyllabic. I assumed there was friction at home, something to do with Barrista, and suspected Robert might want to move in with us. I finally asked him what had happened. He raised his head and stared at me. In that same moment his farmer’s omelet arrived. Once the waitress was gone, a tear rolled down his cheek.

I don’t know what I should think of the matter. Even if I overlook things that are obviously his imagination, the story is still fantastic enough.

They had gone to Denmark, the Baltic shore. From Robert’s description the hotel must have been a small castle. They had ridden in a carriage from the airport — Barrista travels only through the ether these days — no cars were allowed in the nature preserve.

On the steps leading up to the castle stood a squad of servants in livery to receive them and carry every piece of luggage, including Robert’s old camping bag, up to their rooms — which had balconies and a view to the sea. He couldn’t decide which was more wonderful: to sit out on the balcony or to lie on the beach, to ride in a carriage or in a boat, to eat breakfast in his room or in the splendid dining hall. He also had tennis lessons and played mini-golf with Barrista and Michaela. No sooner had he eaten the roll on his breakfast plate than one of the waiters would abduct it and replace it with another. He had found it unpleasant, however, that girls and boys who he guessed were hardly any older than he had to be ready to respond to the guests’ every need — even at night, when they would sit on red velvet cushions in the lobby, dozing off now and then, but bolting up pale-faced out of their sleep the moment they heard footsteps. He had made friends with a few kids his own age at the beach, and was once even asked along on a sailboat ride.

There were fireworks at midnight on Saturday, more spectacular than New Year’s Eve, as he put it. He had invited a few of his beach acquaintances to join him for them. They had drunk a little too much. Michaela had quickly sent them on their way and shooed him off to his room.

He hadn’t been tired. He had stood on the balcony “listening to the sea,” as he put it.

Suddenly the lamp on his nightstand went on. He saw a young room-service waiter standing there facing him. But his astonishment was all the greater when the fellow took off his cap and let his hair fall down over his shoulders. He, or better she, just stared at him. Her eyes had a pleading look, she smiled a weary smile. Then she had turned off the lamp, slipped out of her uniform in just a few quick moves, and climbed into his bed.

“I turned the light on again. I asked her who she was and what she wanted. But she just closed her eyes. When I took her hand, though, she opened them again.” He may not have known what he was supposed to do, but he understood completely that it would have been pointless to ask her any more questions. He lay down under the blanket with her.

He enjoyed every bit of it, but then again not really, because he kept thinking about AIDS and was afraid he might catch it. The few words that she let slip had sounded to him like Hungarian. But he couldn’t say for sure. Suddenly he thought he recognized her. But in that very same moment she vanished. He ran after her, rousing the entire startled hotel staff at five in the morning to ask about her. People were friendly, and they smiled, but they all said, no, sorry, they couldn’t be of any help. He had walked up and down the beach until breakfast, and it was there, listening to the surf, that it struck him like a lightning bolt where he had seen her before. Robert swears it was the same girl or woman who had breathed a kiss against the window of our bus as it rocked its way down the street of whores in Paris. He was certain, absolutely certain of it.

We poked at our food and afterward went for a walk around the pond. I told him he should be happy to have experienced something that lovely, and not to worry.

I haven’t been able to ask Barrista yet, but if I know him, he was behind it — although I can hardly tell Robert that. I’m absolutely certain Barrista sent that girl.

On my right, across the fields, it’s still glowing red, the whole sky shimmering and glistening a pinkish violet that turns a paler, duller hue to the east, the same sky that we saw above the pines in Waldau. Verotchka, our lives will never know trouble again as long as we’re on this balcony. Believe me, Verotchka, never again.³⁵⁴

PS: Verotchka,

³⁵⁵

just sixteen more hours! I’m sitting on our wooden balcony and gazing at the castle, which looks like a spotlighted piece of fairy-tale scenery rising up against a lilac backdrop. I don’t want to deal with these next sixteen hours. I’m afraid you might delay your departure.

When you read this we’ll already be co-owners of it all — the name slot under the doorbell, the bank account, the pillows. And then let time stand still. It’s so strange that everything we always wanted and always, or almost always, forbade ourselves is about to come true — for us, the oddly silent siblings who didn’t know what to make of each other when we were alone. Until you, at seventeen, let a thirteen-year-old boy join you in your bed — and stay there. If I regret anything, then it’s only that it happened so seldom. And all the while I never wanted anything else, could never love anyone else. I always had to outdo your boyfriends, your men, and prove how extraordinary I was. Of all the men you knew, I wanted to be the most famous, the most desired. I wanted to lay the world at your feet — yours alone.

Why were we always trying to enrage each other? You with your love affairs, me with mine. Nadja, who loved you through me, just as I loved you through her. And then how you tried to free me of you by leaving, and how, on the night I brought you to the train station, I finally admitted that I loved you, that I had never held anyone else in my heart. It made me feel pure — pure, because that was the sole emotion stirring within me.

And then how I punished myself by remaining here and let Michaela slip into your shoes, and how history took us by surprise and you went into hiding, which almost made me lose my mind, because I didn’t know where to go from here. And then I suddenly realized that I had no money, and for the first time in my life I cared that I didn’t have a cent, no dough, no moolah, no lettuce, no hardtack, no hay, no simoleons, no wampum.

³⁵⁶

Otherwise I would have followed you to Beirut and hijacked you off to Rome or New York or Altenburg. Ah, Verotchka, you fled from me, all the way to the Orient, but intrepidly encouraged me to keep on writing and to love other, strange women, the way one advises a teenage boy to exercise a lot and take cold showers. And all the while I wanted nothing but you! I want to live with you, Verotchka. Only with you can I begin a new life.

There’s nothing left to tidy up here. The smell of fresh paint blends with that of my new mattress. The pictures are on the walls, there’s room for them here and they look much handsomer too. But the loveliest part is that we will be able to shop together and buy everything that we may still need and want. I’ll lie beside you while you read and caress your back and kiss the most beautiful shoulders in the world.

Verotchka, not even sixteen hours now.

Wednesday, July 4, ’90

Dear Nicoletta,³⁵⁷

In the void words become superfluous. Today, now that any real sense of the state I was in has been lost to me, I regard myself as an accidental witness whose answers to questions are tentative and contradictory.

I had to defend my sickbed almost daily. At one point Irene and Ramona, my colleagues in the dramaturgy department, were suddenly standing at the door. They seemed disappointed to find everything just as Michaela had described it to them. She marched in ahead of them, flung open the window, threw a blanket over my sleeping bag, as if I would be too cold otherwise. Later she complained about the chaos in the room and how dreadful I looked. Michaela accused me of having put the two women in an embarrassing situation. That may have been true, but my discomfiture was far, far greater. I broke into a sweat when I saw that Irene was carrying the flowerpot from the dramaturgy office. It had, she said, flourished wonderfully, and I should take my example from it. I took her remark as a discreet hint, an allusion to the bullets in the pot.³⁵⁸ When Michaela left the room, I expected to be taken to task. Should I lie to them? Should I take them into my confidence? But nothing of the sort happened, and they soon took their leave.

Just as I was about to investigate the soil in the pot, Ramona returned. Didn’t I want to confide in her, about something that was tormenting me, weighing down on my soul? As she asked she looked at me as if she were offering to pray with me. I said nothing and stared directly into her nostrils, the left one narrow and shaped like a boomerang, the other a circular crater. Ramona sniffed and left.

All the bullets were in the pot, and nothing indicated they had been discovered.

Shortly before Christmas I managed to finagle another two weeks of sick leave. I had to promise that in the new year, if I showed no improvement, I would see a psychiatrist or neurologist. Dr. Weiss recommended long walks, exercise in general, and fresh air. He had no idea how dismayed I was by his observation that the days would be getting longer now. I’ve always enjoyed rainy days more than a blue sky. But the prospect of bright, warm evenings, of birds chirping and children screeching at a swimming pool, the mere thought of Easter and summer vacation, was unbearable.

Then came Christmas. Of course I had bought no gifts. What was more, I refused to sleep in the same room with Michaela so that she or my mother could have my room.

Mother, who had not missed a single demonstration in Dresden, who had even responded to an appeal over the radio and shown up at Bautzner Strasse to take part in the occupation of the State Security offices, was in awe of Michaela. Michaela had actually become an actor. Michaela played leading roles. Michaela had raised her boy all by herself — Michaela was extraordinary, period. As proof, my mother handed me the first two issues of klartext, which had come into being under Michaela’s tutelage and about which I had been completely oblivious, even though meetings of the “media committee” had been held, as it were, right outside my door. Within hours two thousand copies had been handed out. Mother insisted on reading to me at least the article about how Schalck-Golodkowki’s people had sold off the Council Library to the West for a pittance. Whereas I had not even managed to open the little doors of my mother’s Advent calendar.

Robert was the only one who had reconciled himself to my condition. He no longer asked what was wrong with me, and instead enjoyed being my superior at every level.

On New Year’s Eve I watched and clapped as Robert and Michaela shot off their three rockets, but then retreated to my sleeping bag shortly after midnight, where I’m told I then mimicked hissing and popping sounds. Later I threw up. Dawn found me sitting on the toilet and staring out the window. The gray morning corresponded exactly to my view of the future. An entire year with all its days awaited me, a man who didn’t have sufficient energy for even its first few hours.

I was vaguely aware that it would take some deed to save me from going under. More than once now I had placed my right hand on my forehead as if to cross myself.

What kept me from doing it? Defiance? Self-regard? Pride? Wasn’t in fact my problem God and His eternity? Is there anything more hostile to life than immortality, whether that of saints or artists? Both artists and saints are egomaniacs. Someone who would truly sacrifice himself, descend into hell in someone else’s stead, that would be a saint. Judas is the only person whose legend perhaps allows for such a supposition.

Should I have confessed? I no longer wanted words, chatter, promises. I had had enough of my devotion to words. Their overweening arrogance in the midst of the most submissive gesture disgusted me. Please, no more prayers, no confessions.³⁵⁹ No, it had to be something entirely different, something as unexpected as it was close at hand, something that I had never done, had never thought of — simply something different.

In the night between January 1st and 2nd I had turned off my light early as always, but awoke shortly after ten. I opened the window, no snow, no rain. I expected to do nothing more than to pull the blanket around my shoulders and go back to sleep. But a moment later I found myself standing beside my bed, pulling on my trousers. I smiled to myself, something inside me was laughing at me. But all the same I went on dressing, grubbed the bullets out of the soil, loaded the clip, and stuck the pistol in my belt.³⁶⁰ I took two sweaters and a pair of old hiking boots from my wardrobe. I pulled one sweater on over the other, I laced the boots to the top eyelet. I climbed up onto the windowsill. My eyes were used to the dark, I could see the lawn below, jumped — and landed square on both feet. No pain, no stiffness, the jump was behind me.

I marched through Altenburg North, climbed Lerchenberg hill, and then walked down into town without meeting anyone. A couple of figures scurried along at some distance, but otherwise only cars. After passing the Great Pond, I made a slanting turn uphill to the left at an auto repair shop, and soon there were no buildings at all.³⁶¹ A few snow islands shimmered against the black of the fields. Once the road started downhill I could see only a very few distant lights. Either there were no more streetlamps here, or they had been turned off by now. Once in a while a car passed, splashing mud on my trousers. A car that avoided me only at the last moment came to a halt, backed up. “You trying to commit suicide?” the driver bellowed. Was I? If I had wanted to, I could have put a bullet through my head — a luxury that terrified me.

Once in the valley, I turned onto a country lane that led uphill.³⁶² Suddenly, fifty or a hundred yards ahead, I saw a blinking red eye. The cross-arms lowered in the reddish haze. I forced myself to keep walking, on and on, right up to the barrier. The train was approaching quickly, a freight with empty coal cars rumbled past, and now the cross-arms were being raised again, the signal light went out. Night descended around me. I stared into the blackness, to the spot where a moment before the tracks had taken on a reddish glow. My eyes refused to get used to the darkness now.

Locating the tracks with the tips of my shoes, I groped my way across and could at least see just enough to avoid puddles.

I kept on going. Can you guess what I was looking for?

An intersection, a crossroads,³⁶³ as remote as possible. After a hundred yards, just as the moon appeared, the lane led me to a narrow asphalt road.

Of all the people who have ever sought out a crossroads, I am probably the only one who couldn’t have explained even vaguely what he wanted there. And then once again I almost died of shame at the idea that someone might learn what I was up to here.

I waited. My breathing was rapid, I was sweating. Where had this fear suddenly come from? What if a feral dog were to come bounding at me, or a rabid fox? Would I shoot?

Just hold on, stand still — I bolstered my spirits — you have nothing else to do. You’re not going to leave here.

The reel of moments and minutes unwound, time whirled and spun. It was now after midnight, then half past. The cold crept up through me. I had to cough. The sky turned black. I found it unpleasant just to look up, as if I were exposing my throat. To be strong means to stand still, to hold on, I repeated.

And of course nothing happened. Did you perhaps think that I really expected something to?

When the moon came out again, I tried to memorize the few square yards within my field of vision: porous asphalt that formed little fjords along its edges. At one spot it was so thin that you could trace the network of cobblestones beneath it. Two scrawny trees off to one side, and all around me: weeds, fields of winter grain, and islands of caked snow.

But to the south, to my great astonishment, I made out a mountain jutting up out of the moonlit landscape — a head without a neck, trees suggesting hair, two serpentine paths as furrows across the brow…and something glowering at me from two eye sockets³⁶⁴ —but in the next moment it vanished, reemerged, dissolved. The whole thing seemed to tilt to the left, shaping and reshaping itself like clouds. Sometimes I could immediately make out the mouth and the snub nose, over which a veil would then fall.

Suddenly I was freezing, my feet felt as if they were shrinking, I was amazed that I didn’t lurch or stumble. It was after one, maybe one thirty, when I started treading in place. Finally I ran a few steps back and forth, picked up a stick, and drew a circle around me, like a child playing a game.

I sneezed, sneezed again and again. I was on the verge of catching a cold, my laughter sounded hoarse. Was something happening, or not?

Was I supposed to take the light breeze or the distant barking of a dog as an answer? I felt like singing nursery rhymes. “The moon arises nightly,” I began, then, a little louder, “the stars they shine so brightly against a velvet sky.” I faltered and then started up again with whatever came to mind. “There was an old woman who lived in a shoe.” Then: “Itsy-bitsy spider went up the water spout, along came the rain and washed the spider out.” This last one was the only one I knew from start to finish. I repeated it several times. Later I began to count, I could count to the end of my days…

I spun around. No scream, no wolfish howl could have chilled my blood like that chirping had. I was convinced I had heard a cricket, a cricket right next to me in the grass. I listened, snapped for air, listened. The silence was like a lump of amber enclosing that chirping sound.

“Ah,” I sighed, and once again, “ah!” And in that moment I understood what it was I wanted. It was nothing more and nothing less than my life. I wanted my life back, the one that I could barely remember, that I had given away far too soon. Everything I had done — and I had long since known this — had not been a life, but a crude misunderstanding, a muddle, a madness!

I wanted at last to know who I was, if not the person I had thought myself to be for all this time. It didn’t matter what would be revealed to me. I would accept it. I would give anything for a new life, anything!

I reached for the pistol. It was warm. I held it in my hands for a while, then flung it away with every ounce of strength I had.³⁶⁵ It came to me that it was the only thing I could offer in exchange. I didn’t hear it land. Silence pressed down on my shoulders, silence filled my ears.

Then a bark again, longer this time, joined by another, then another, one dog waking a second, then the hush returned — like a blow to the head. The scraping of my shoe soles was horribly loud. Me. Nothing but silence and the void into which I stared wide-eyed.

“What the hell is so bad about that?” What, I asked myself, could be more desirable than to be a void, to be emptied out, to be cleansed of the madness of words and fame, of the beyond and immortality. Wasn’t it splendid to be rid of all that?

What I had taken for illness, was it not in fact healing? Had I not wished for something that would be more than a mere realization? Was I not finally free to do what I wanted? With everything behind me, everything before me!

I was thirsty, I had lost my train of thought. Only the cold — cold within and without.

In sharing so much palpable experience, am I not lying? Such hours in life cannot be grasped, either with the hand or the mind, they are at home alone in the night, which turns us inside out.

I had no idea how long I had stood there. Church bells had stopped ringing the hour. Not a rustle, not a bark anywhere in the distance.

At some point the rumbling began. I wasn’t afraid, it was more like a disturbance. Two points of light appeared, two shining eyes that had opened in the darkness. The rumbling drew ever closer from all sides, it thudded across the fields, through the air. Soon a second pair of shining eyes appeared behind the first, then a third, a fourth. They seemed to be floating above the ground, yet approaching rapidly. Suddenly it all merged as one — blinded, I hid my eyes in the crook of my arm, no longer knowing where the road was, whether I should move forward or backward. And in that same instant, the horn, a ship’s horn, the trumpet at the Last Day. Four semis on their wild ride between autobahn and highway thundered past me, the undertow of air sucked me up, whirled me around, set me tumbling. I staggered a few steps in their wake — and that was enough, the spell was broken. I put one foot in front of the other again and made my way home.

It was noon when I awoke. Had I dreamt it? It was midday, quiet, bright midday. In my room lay mud-caked hiking boots and splash-soiled trousers. That frightened me, but only for a moment.

As always

Your

Enrico Türmer