From the start we were the top dogs in B. We never turned down a job and worked late into the night if necessary, whereas our competition got bogged down trying to make a killing in computers and other office equipment. We invested in binding machines.
Ute and I slept together almost every day, sometimes even had sex in the office as we waited for the copiers to spit out the rest of a run. In that regard we were made for each other. With Julia — maybe she was right about that — I’d always felt a little inhibited.
“We sure do a lot of screwing,” Ute once remarked. She said it the same way she might have said, “We sure do have a lot of business.” But she might have claimed just the opposite without it having sounded any different. Do you understand? I mean, for her the only important thing was that we were together. Without batting an eye Ute would have dropped everything on the spot to follow me through thick and thin. I’m not saying this out of vanity. It was the same with me, except for me it was Julia.
At the end of August, it was just growing light, Ute’s head lay on my chest and I was just about to doze off again, when she whispered: “I’m pregnant.” She hadn’t expected me to be happy about it. Fritz was born on February 28, 1991, he was named after Ute’s grandfather Friedrich. His middle, and last, name came from me, Friedrich Frank Reichert.
All the same Fritz was Ute’s child, hers alone. The boy didn’t change my life in any fundamental way. He helped reconcile me with my parents, who had long been upset with me for having given up on my dissertation. And it meant more work, although within a few weeks Ute was at my side again in the shop.
I soon avoided being alone with Fritz. In his mother’s presence, however, everything I said went in one ear and out the other. The older he grew, the more I irritated him — and at the same time the more devoted he was to his mother. Fritz turned on the charm for her in a way so unchildlike that it was almost worrisome.
Even before his birth we had hired employees. We used mainly students, who stood in line to get a job with us. But that’s taking me down the wrong track. It works perhaps as a kind of backstory. The ups and downs of our business are not the issue here. I was a really good boss, at least a better one than I am today — and I know what I’m saying. Back then people actually considered me a cool guy, and I probably was, too, when it came to business. I didn’t really want to be a success.
Do you understand? Nothing I did was done out of conviction. Nothing connected me with my work, it was just an accidental fit, with one thing leading to the other, as if in my worry and confusion I had landed in some parlor game.
Of course I could always have traveled to Berlin and rung Julia’s doorbell — she’d had a couple of minor roles at the Gorki Theater in 1991, but after that only jobs on off-off stages. But a visit seemed an inappropriate, random act — a far too simple solution somehow. I was hoping, if you want to put it that way, for fate to beckon — ultimately for Copy 2000 to go bankrupt. It sounds ridiculous now, but at the time I regarded Ute and myself as two people running a company, business partners who also happened to live together.
Yes, I did hope that we would have to fold. All the same I couldn’t bring myself to make mistakes on purpose. I wanted to lose out not to the competition but to circumstance. But evidently our responses were always the right ones.
In 1993—and by then there wasn’t a soul who hadn’t realized that there would be no economic miracle — we totally demoralized our rivals with our delivery service. But a year later, when we lost the bid for a copy shop at the Technical University, I figured that was the end. But then we started giving students and the unemployed a discount, kept our prices low — and what do you know, it wasn’t us but Technical Copy that went belly up.
I wish nowadays I still had that same effortless flair for regarding difficulties as a mathematical problem, an equation to be solved. I knew that we had to grow, not because we had done any market research, but because B. consists of three zones, the old city, the new city, the Technical University. Besides which, three is a good number, the best, if you ask me. Once you have three copy shops in a city like B. you’ve sucked up the air for everyone else. Nevertheless I was surprised each time my calculations worked out.
After my separation from Julia, contacts with friends, in fact even my relationship with my brother — two years younger than I, an orthopedist — were almost totally broken off. Everyone suddenly had too much to do, or they moved away or simply faded into the woodwork, just as I had done. I didn’t want to have to explain to anyone why I was living with Ute now instead of Julia.
Of course the pain subsided, I’d be lying if I were to claim anything different. But pain was still a constant companion, a shadow, sometimes a demon that could attack out of the blue. All it took was the fragrance of strawberries or for someone to speak Hungarian or just the sound of familiar music (I particularly had to beware of Brahms and Suzanne Vega). Often I had no idea what had lured the demon back. Summer months were the hardest, and strangely enough, autumn was my best time. But New Year’s Eve was ghastly. Someone would say, “just two hours till midnight,” and I would think: I’ve got two hours left to find Julia. And when it came down to counting minutes and finally seconds, I wanted to scream. What was I doing here in the middle of a meaningless life among strangers? Every year I was convinced that this would be my last New Year’s Eve, I wouldn’t be able to endure another. It took days, sometimes weeks, for me to calm down again. One year, it must have been in the midnineties, I lay wide awake on my back, beside Ute. Suddenly she asked me whether I still thought of Julia often. I barely had time to hide my face in my hands before I broke into sobs. It’s a mystery to me how Ute put up with my theatrics.
Another woman? And how was that supposed to happen? It was difficult, impossible actually, for me to fall in love in B. An affair with one of the students who worked for us was not what I was after — which probably explains why there were never any sparks. And otherwise? I could hardly take out lonely hearts ads, although I constantly read them, looking for one that would be a match with Julia.
But then I did in fact hear about her.
Ute believed that when it came to her circle of friends I got along best with Claudia, whom she had known since kindergarten and grade school in Döbeln. Claudia worked as a bookkeeper for a theater in Berlin — it’s not important which — and hung around, as Ute put it, with theater types. Ute must have said something to her about Julia. And so during a visit in Berlin in February 1997, I learned from Claudia that Julia had a child, a daughter. That upset me less than the fact that someone had spoken the name Julia in my presence and had called her (with a certain undertone — with Claudia there are almost always undertones) “your great love.”
Until the call in October 1999 that I mentioned previously, it was never clear to me from the few things that Claudia told me about her if Julia was a kind of secret between Claudia and me or if Claudia likewise kept Ute up to date. What I’m trying to say is that hearing Claudia speak Julia’s name had not been totally unexpected. But all the same it was like being awakened out of a profound stupor. “And your Julia too!”
So there I sat in my office chair, my right foot on the handle of the desk drawer, the tip of my shoe wedged in under the desktop, listening to Claudia chatter away while I gazed through the open Venetian blind out into the shop. Even when the place is bustling, at the beginning of the winter semester, for instance, our employees are still identifiable by their white T-shirts. To me the “Copy 2000” written across the breasts of female students always looked just a bit obscene. But it had been Ute’s idea, and no one ever complained. The red lettering has faded on the shirts of those who have been with us for a while, but glows like a signal on new hires. I counted four of our T-shirts, recounted, but couldn’t figure out who was missing. I tried to calm myself down. When Claudia mentioned Julia a second time, I couldn’t take it any longer. “Julia?” I asked, reaching for the file of designs for our new logo, with the 2000 dropped from our name.