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Sometimes, she says, I think that what Hans calls truth doesn’t even exist anymore.
Or it’s just not in the place where he’s looking, says Rosa.
Maybe, says Katharina.
I’m wondering, says Katharina, if I even know what I want. If I want anything anymore. If I exist. Isn’t that how you tell a person, by what they want?
Do you want to kiss me?
Yes.
There, you see, says Rosa, and pulls Katharina close.
Why don’t you leave him, she asks.
I love him.
Still?
Yes.
Hermann Kant wants to give up the presidency of the Writers’ Union, but it seems better for everyone — they take soundings — that he stay on as titular head, and five deputies do the work, instead of waiting for a new president to be appointed by Erich Honecker. And apropos Honecker, how long will he remain in office? Then which of the other oldsters will take over from him? In breaks between presidium meetings, there is talk of a “leaderless country.” The health minister, someone says — and this is unheard of — has asked to be relieved of his post. A colleague of Hans’s ran into a senior economist in the sauna, who proved to him that the system of state subventions for basic foodstuffs was wholly unsustainable. Supply and demand needed to be brought into alignment if the whole edifice weren’t to come crashing down. Bread rolls are still five pfennigs, but Ingrid recently paid seven hundred marks for a jacket at Exquisit. In the Party group of the Goethe Society there is a debate about evolution versus revolution. Change the system from inside or outside? Do the young have to be taught patience, or the old reminded of their former impatience? The minister provisionally put in charge of universities steps up and says Party decrees must be carried out to the letter, and the fight against “deviationists” conducted with a new ruthlessness. Then in the evening he sits in the hotel bar at the Weimar completely plastered, clutching hold of Hans’s sleeve. Hans runs off to his own room. From time to time, he takes notes of things he’s heard: The words “perestroika” and “glasnost” are no longer to be used. Or: Socialism in the colors of the GDR. Also jokes he picks up in the radio canteen: You never asked — we give you our answers anyway. Or: Why does Honecker not take the U-Bahn anymore? Because when the trains depart, someone calls out: “Step back!” Hans’s former lover Sylvia talks of “pink elephants,” which is her term for sentences and paragraphs she writes into program scripts so that there’s something to remove. [...]
wow
In the middle of April, Hans collects Katharina from a performance at the Volksbühne, The Drunken Ship, a play about Rimbaud. A Castorf production, but he didn’t want to see it with her, only afterwards does he tell her why not. You remember: My heart by the bow must vomit. The Rimbaud quote appears in one of his first letters after the revelation of her deception. My heart by the bow must vomit, he says, and takes her in his arms. And Katharina leans against his shoulder and says perfectly calmly that she doesn’t think he loves her anymore. All at once, that seems more savage than anything she’s ever said to him in the course of their differences. The next day he has an event in Dresden, a reading from an unpublished manuscript, for the first time he has pulled out those pages he wrote in the spring two years ago, in the high-rise cube, when everything was good, with the sleeping Katharina behind him. She didn’t think he loved her anymore, she said last night, and leaned against him and cried until his whole sleeve was sodden. To the Dresden public he reads what he wrote when there was happiness, and line by line he thinks: If Katharina were sitting there, and were proud of him, then it would be something else. She proud of him, he proud of her, that once kept them together. My heart by the bow must vomit. She thought he had no more feelings for her, is what she said. And said it as coolly as he had ever heard her say anything, not as though she were waiting for him to contradict her, but as if from some place beyond their relationship. Following the reading he has to stay in Dresden for another two days, there are recordings of rehearsals at the Semper Opera to be done for the radio. He’s away from Katharina for three days, for three days he can imagine what a life would be like without her.
Only now has spring properly sprung. Did Katharina ever desire Hans like this? She dances around her apartment, drinks wine in the middle of the day, sketches, paints, glues collages — and loves Hans whenever he comes by, and mixed in with the pictures of love that are happening are thoughts of women’s backs and breasts, Katharina is happy from top to bottom and right to left. Mozart is back on the playlist, and Bach as well, Hans personally gave her a recording of the Goldberg Variations. Before long she will put forward her favorite pieces from the past year at art school, every student gets a wall to him- or herself, Hans spends days mulling over the selection with her. Everything is the way it was before, and everything is also different. [...]
For you everything was emotional froth: your fling in Frankfurt, and unfortunately also what you had with me. On each occasion, it wasn’t anything to do with the conditions, it lay in your nature. You needed an atmosphere of adventure, of conspiracy, to excite you. Our early days satisfied that, but as soon as a certain consolidation loomed, you made use of your freedom to scratch your itch elsewhere. Anyone capable of manipulating their feelings that way is emotionally not to be trusted. The fact that you left that piece of paper lying around I am certain has nothing to do with your wish to be honest — as you like to claim — rather, as in some corny TV drama, you were engineering the catastrophe.
i find this accusation upsetting, on a personal level ... i guess that's why im bookmarking it
A week later, Katharina is standing next to Rosa in a field, slicing off the heads of cauliflowers. It’s nice that they’re all together again for harvest duty, just as in their first year, in foundation. Katharina, Rosa, Uta as well, who wants to be an industrial designer, and Robert, the sculptor. Somehow it’s ridiculous, says Robert, us chopping cauliflowers, while in Berlin people are being arrested. And clack, another head goes on the conveyor belt. After the incidents of October 7 and 8, the political economy lecturer brought up the protests and spoke of “counterrevolution,” and Katharina and eight or nine others got up and walked out in the middle of the lecture. Their names are bound to be on some list now. Half an hour later, she had a lump in her throat — so moved was she by her own indignation. Clack, another one gone. Are heroic feelings just a form of vanity? And does it take death or some severe punishment to eliminate it? Clack, another one. Was Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya vain? Or Julius Fučík? We lived for joy, we went into battle for the sake of joy, and we will die for it. Please do not associate our names with sadness. No, the only vain one is she. Head after cauliflower head lands on the conveyor belt that has been rigged up on the field, towards a truck. Anyone who is capable of manipulating their feelings that way is emotionally not to be trusted, Hans said to her lately, on the cassette.
love this for her
The government reacted forcefully to the commotion, but at least no shots were fired, thinks Katharina. Could it be because the so-called counterrevolutionaries reminded the ancients in power of themselves when they were young idealists? The passage of time. Strange, she thinks, that a crime is called a trespass.
THE PASSAGE OF TIME
Then she goes back into the kitchen to chop some herbs, Katharina leans on the doorjamb, can I help, no no, it’s fine. Rosa chops and talks and in between looks across at Katharina, then stops, Katharina sees the knife in Rosa’s hand, and Rosa looks at Katharina. Katharina takes a couple of steps to her friend, stops in front of her, looks at her expressionlessly, and Rosa looks at her, neither of them speaks, eye to eye, Katharina takes the knife from her friend’s hand and lays it aside, lowers her head into the hollow between neck and shoulder, blows out a little puff of breath, before she bites her friend, but her friend takes her by the hair, pulls her head up, and says: You know, I hate you sometimes for still being with Hans. Yes, says Katharina, I know. And then they fall down together. They sprawl in the corridor, then stagger into the bedroom, the referee counts to fifty thousand, but neither of them wants to end this fight which has no winner and no loser. All night, to breathe and to feel the other’s breath against her skin, or whose breath and whose skin is it? Running her tongue along the other’s teeth as against a friendly fence, feel out with her hands, her lips, her tongue what is dark and moist, listen all night to the sounds of the other, or are they her own? To know the other as herself. One being of flesh and blood joined to another, as by a key. To be one.
[...] Only when they’re drinking coffee does she notice that Hans is down. The radio station is being “restructured” as they’re calling it, but Hans doesn’t want to discuss it. He looks at her soberly, she looks soberly back. Are we finished as lovers, then? Why shouldn’t she look serious? When he told her lately, When I’m under pressure, I need tenderness from you, she shook her head at him in amusement, and that offended him. When all she meant to indicate was that she too had a right to independence and will. Are we finished as lovers? She looks at his ravaged face in January, in February, but she can’t help him. Sometimes he brushes the hair out of his eyes repeatedly in the wrong direction, without noticing. At the greengrocer’s he spends half an hour in search of frozen kale, they don’t have it here, don’t you see. But he absolutely must have his frozen kale now. He wanders around the tiny shop three more times. Are we finished as lovers?
She returns to Berlin with her sketchbook full. Welcome home, says her mother, who collects her at the station and has supper ready for her in Reinhardtstrasse. Home? Coca-Cola, she’s noticed, is now on sale in the eastern half of Friedrichstrasse station, also in Pankow in the little store where she always shops, Coca-Cola same as in New York or Munich. Coca-Cola has succeeded, where Marxist philosophy has failed, at uniting the proletarians of all nations under its banner. Is this home?