Adam and Evelyn (30 page)

Two women were standing at the fence and gesturing in Adam’s direction. The man from next door was trying to climb over the hedge. He was holding a spade above his head like a rifle and shouting something. A male voice could be heard from the ground floor, then a window slammed shut.

Adam went on paging, pulling out photos, tossing them on the fire, and laughing. The bottle beside Adam’s feet was stoppered with a blue-checked rag.

From one moment to the next the fire collapsed. The flames crouched low to the earth. Adam clapped the book shut.

The man with the spade grabbed the bottle and took it somewhere out of her line of sight. He quickly returned and started beating the fire with his spade. Sparks scattered. Adam stepped back to make room for a second man. Both men were yelling as they raked wet leaves over the embers and stomped out the last few flames.

All at once Adam looked up at her over his shoulder, as if he had known she had been standing there all along. He doffed his hat, smiled, nodded to her, and set it back on his head. Evelyn felt a chill run up her back.

She closed the window and retreated into the room, until all she could see were the two women at the fence, and then not even them. She bumped against the table and just stood there. The magpie hopped along across the bare boughs and branches of the chestnut tree, all the while rocking back and forth as if at any moment it might lose its balance. In the windowpane was a reflection of the ceiling lamp. Beneath it Evelyn saw herself and the whole room around her, looking much larger than in reality, almost huge, and right in the middle she saw, small but in bright colors, her own image.

I have Péter Bacsó to thank for the idea of sending a tailor and his wife from the East German provinces to Lake Balaton in August 1989.

The following films and books, among others, spurred my imagination:
Kein Abschied—nur fort
, a film by Joachim Tschirner and Lew Hohmann, 1991;
Und nächstes Jahr am Balaton
, directed by Herrmann Zschoche, 1979/1980;
The Swimmer
, by Zsuzsa Bánk, translated by Margot Bettauer Dembo (New York, 2005);
Heimspiel
, by Ines Geipel (Berlin, 2005); and
Balaton-Brigade
, by György Dalos (Berlin, 2006).

A large portion of this book was written in 2007 at the German Academy Rome Villa Massimo, a paradise of a place. The role of patron was played by the Federal Republic of Germany, those of angels/cherubim by the staff of the villa. The other stipendiary fellows became my fellow exiles.

My warmest thanks to them all, and especially to my family.

MAY 7
Local elections in the GDR. For the first time in the republic’s history, individual citizens (from oppositional groups) participate in the count and claim massive ballot fraud.

MAY 20
Gorbachev in West Berlin, viewing the wall: “Nothing is eternal.”

JUNE 16
Imre Nagy, premier during the 1956 Hungarian resistance to the Soviet Union, is buried with full honors after a ceremony on Heroes’ Square.

AUGUST 8
Arrival of 170 in West Germany aboard a special train from Vienna after crossing illegally from Hungary.

AUGUST 19
Mass flight of GDR citizens during a pan-European picnic on the Hungarian border with Austria. Approximately six hundred storm a normally locked border gate that was to be symbolically opened during the picnic.

AUGUST 24
Hungary tolerates the crossing of the Austrian border by GDR citizens. Those in the West German Embassy in Budapest are allowed to leave the country.

SEPTEMBER 4
After prayers for peace in Leipzig, many demonstrate for freedom to travel. This is in fact the first of the Monday demonstrations.

SEPTEMBER 7
One hundred GDR citizens cross from Hungary to Austria.

SEPTEMBER 10
Hungary “temporarily suspends” the twenty-year-old agreement with the GDR on repatriation of refugees. Gyula Horn announces that the estimated sixty thousand GDR tourists vacationing in Hungary will be allowed to travel to the West from midnight and will not be required to show an exit visa.

SEPTEMBER 11
Neues Forum, the first attempt at organized political opposition in the GDR, constitutes itself. Hungary opens its border with Austria. Thousands surge across.

SEPTEMBER 13
More than fifteen thousand GDR citizens have crossed to Austria from Hungary since the eleventh.

SEPTEMBER 25
Eight thousand demonstrate in Leipzig for freedom of expression, the right to hold meetings, and the authorization of the Neues Forum.

OCTOBER 2
Monday protesters in Leipzig number twenty thousand. Police break them up violently.

OCTOBER 7
The official fortieth anniversary of the GDR. Honecker meets with Gorbachev.

OCTOBER 9
The GDR experiences its largest demonstration since June 17, 1953, with seventy thousand gathering in Leipzig’s Karl-Marx Square.

OCTOBER 16
More than one hundred and twenty thousand parade through Leipzig.

OCTOBER 18
Erich Honecker resigns from all offices. He is replaced by Egon Krenz.

OCTOBER 23
Three hundred thousand demonstrate in Leipzig. There are large demonstrations in four other cities.

NOVEMBER 4
Approximately one million demonstrate in East Berlin.

NOVEMBER 6
Five hundred thousand attend the Leipzig demonstration.

NOVEMBER 9
The collapse of the wall. The Council of Ministers decides to open the GDR’s borders to the West and with the Allied sector of Berlin. Masses surge forward to the crossing points in the wall (9:00 p.m. Central European Time).

NOVEMBER 10
Berliners gather on top of the Berlin Wall at the Brandenburg Gate. East German border guards start to demolish the wall.

NOVEMBER 11
Seven hundred thousand GDR citizens visit the Federal Republic of Germany.

DECEMBER 2
Krenz, the entire Politburo, and Central Committee of the SED resign.

Ingo Schulze was born in Dresden in 1962, studied classics at the University of Jena, and worked as a dramaturg and newspaper editor in Altenburg. For his first book,
33 Moments of Happiness
(1995), he won various prizes, including the Aspekte Prize for best debut. In 1998 he won both the Berlin Literature Prize and the associated Johannes Bobrowski Medal for
Simple Stories
. In the same year
The New Yorker
numbered him among the six best European young novelists, and the London
Observer
described him as one of the “twenty-one writers to look out for in the 21st century.” In 2005 his novel
New Lives
was honored with the Peter Weiss Prize and the Premio Grinzane Cavour. In 2007 he won the Leipzig Book Fair Prize for
One More Story
, his second collection of stories. He is a member of the Academy of the Arts in Berlin and the German Academy for Language and Literature. His books have been translated into more than thirty languages. He lives with his family in Berlin.

John E. Woods is the distinguished translator of many books—most notably Arno Schmidt’s
Evening Edged in Gold
, for which he won both the American Book Award for translation and the PEN Translation Prize in 1981; Patrick Suskind’s
Perfume
, for which he again won the PEN Translation Prize in 1987; Christoph Ransmayr’s
The Terrors of Ice and Darkness, The Last World
(for which he was awarded the Schlegel-Tieck Prize in 1991), and
The Dog King;
Thomas Mann’s
Buddenbrooks, The Magic Mountain
(for which, together with his translation of Arno Schmidt’s
Nobodaddy’s Children
, he was awarded the Helen and Kurt Wolff Prize in 1996),
Doctor Faustus
, and
Joseph and His Brothers;
Ingo Schulze’s
33 Moments of Happiness, Simple Stories, New Lives
, and
One More Story
. In 2008 he was awarded the Goethe Medallion of the Goethe-Institut. He lives in Berlin.