New Lives by Ingo Schulze

opens the door to the fridge, the way she holds her coffee cup with both hands, elbows planted on the table. Sounding as if she were offering me some condensed milk, she asked if we would also be voting for the Alliance for Germany. 29 Mamus has suddenly begun to spot people toadying everywhere and sees her fellow nurses as “pure opportunists.” I asked her why she herself had never thought of leaving. I wouldn’t have wanted to, she replied, without looking directly at me.
    There’s been no change in her situation at the clinic. If she has bad luck and is assigned to a shift with her “tormentors”—and that probably includes most of the nurses in surgery—she sometimes doesn’t say a word the whole day.
    Robert treats Mamus like a second grandmother, which obviously does her good. And each time Robert agrees to come along, I feel like I’ve been honored too. Although I’m always afraid I’m boring him. This time I should perhaps have made the trip without him, except that it would have taken on its own special significance, as if I were pressuring her for a heart-to-heart talk. There would hardly have been a chance of that in any case, because the doorbell was constantly ringing. Maybe the change Mamus has undergone has become the rule now. All sorts of people are showing their true colors. Did you know that Herr Rothe is a longtime fan of Franz Josef Strauss? Frau Schubert explained to me what difficulties I would have had as a teacher, and the two Graupner sisters talked about Denmark, where a cousin of theirs lives, and how at last they could write to her. When I asked in amazement why they hadn’t written to their cousin before now, I was corrected by cries of “Wrong, completely wrong,” and then Tilda Graupner proudly proclaimed: “As head of accounting I didn’t dare have contacts in the West.” You’re the star of the building. Your leaving makes you the first to have made the right decision. And some of the glow from your halo illumines your brother. The Schaffners are said to leave their apartment only after dark, or at least the revolutionary (or reactionary?) residents of the building have agreed not to greet those Stasi spies.
    Robert wanted to look at photographs again. I had never noticed before that the albums only go up as far as Father’s death. 30 The cupboard still has that same old darning-egg, sewing-kit odor.
    Suddenly Mamus grabbed a photo and looked at it over the rim of her glasses—a handsome young couple—and cried, “What are they doing here!” She shredded it like a check that she had filled out wrong. “You weren’t even born yet,” Mamus informed me. “Total strangers!” She kept the scraps in her hand and went on providing commentary for the pictures that Robert held out to her. I secretly pocketed two shots of you. Sometimes I’m afraid I can’t bear our being separated any longer. If only I could figure out what your plans are.
    We had supper with Johann. His epistles are getting shorter. There were still a dozen of them lying around here, and I had no choice but to read them before the trip. When I did, it occurred to me that he might be gathering materials for a novel about a parish. Ever since he confessed to Franziska about us, 31 he’s behaved rather rudely to me, especially in her presence. He could barely bring himself to offer me his hand. He had to “finish something up,” he exclaimed, and disappeared. And so Robert and I waited in the kitchen, helping Franziska set the table and gazing out the window at the city. Franziska’s charm has entirely deserted her over the past two years. She talks quite openly about her drinking and that she really needs to quit. Listening to her you might think she simply doesn’t have time to spare for treatment at a clinic. Johann confided to me a couple of years ago that he sometimes provokes arguments