Pilgrim’s Progress

The little East German town of Altenburg makes an unlikely Peyton Place. When we first come upon it, in Ingo Schulze’s “Simple Stories,� Altenburg is in the limbo of the spring of 1990. The Berlin Wall has fallen, but the unification of Germany has yet to take place. The first entrepreneurs, like Harry Nelson, have come to town “looking for real estate, and especially for construction sites along the town’s access roads. It was all about gas stations.� Nineteen-year-old Connie Schubert, a waitress at the Wentzel, where Nelson and other commercial travelers rent their rooms by the week and commute home on the weekend, falls in love with Harry’s Adam’s apple and gives him her body on a little patch of lawn at “the intersection where the main road starts uphill and off to the right is the train car repair shop.�

By the end of “Simple Stories,� the ‘90s have gotten older. Harry has become a vague memory, and Connie has long since decamped to the Caribbean, care of an English cruise company. But we have been treated to 29 vignettes of happiness and sadness, politics and sex of several shades and a story that weaves the lives of a couple of dozen ordinary people into a loose macrame of magic.

There are Ernst “Red� Meurer, a former apparatchik, and his wife, Renate, and her two sons, Pit and Martin, from a previous marriage to a doctor who defected to the West. There is Martin’s wife, Andrea, who, forced to ride a bicycle after Martin loses his job teaching art history at the University of Leipzig, dies in an unexplained accident, leaving Martin depressed and her young son Tino in the care of her sister Danny (who’s trying hard to keep her journalism pure and not give in to the pressures of advertising) and her ever-changing household of boyfriends. There are the psychiatrist Dr. Barbara Holitzschek and her weak-willed politician-husband, Frank, and her high school friend Hanni, who has lost her job as the director of the Natural History Museum (where Lydia also worked as a taxidermist, running after road kill in the hopes of bagging an elusive badger) but finds love of a rather unusual variety with Christian Beyer, Danny’s former boss. And there are taxi drivers and students, mountain climbers and fishermen, hitchhikers and nurses and an unsuccessful writer who asks his neighbor to break his leg so he can continue to live off welfare.

Do the stories add up to the kind of complete vision we expect from a novel? Do the fragmented lives of Danny and Pit and Red and Zeus combine to give us a kind of good old-fashioned catharsis, to solve the mystery of this Everytown, this jederdorf, of the New Germany? Well, no. And while “Simple Stories� is tremendously rewarding, it is far from an easy read. Characters appear and reappear in an endlessly changing variety of combinations. Pronouns dangle like spatzle, scrambling antecedents and meaning as they hit the ground.

But Schulze, who astonished readers in his native Germany and America two years ago with his debut collection, “33 Moments of Happiness: St. Petersburg Stories,� writes with a confidence and solidity that trample objection and difficulty beneath their unlaced work boots. Far from alienating the reader, Schulze’s fragmentation and deunification create a precarious and affectionate backdrop against which his heroes struggle to live out their simple stories.

Martin Meurer, Schulze’s hero (to the extent that a novel must name only one), owes our affection to the virtuosity of his creator. The unlucky schlemiel of the book, the unemployed art historian turns his life around on the road with a fortuitous job in Munich, where he meets his biological father for the first time in 20 years. The father has had a stroke and walks with difficulty, if with dignity. And no one is more surprised than Martin when, over coffee in the English Garden, his father gives him a pair of potholders and a sermon. “If you’re lonely and in despair,� he said, “Jesus Christ is right there beside you. All you have to do is say yes, Martin, just say yes.�

Martin isn’t maudlin enough to accept his father’s blessing in any classical way. Yet on his return to Altenburg, Martin comes back to life. He finds himself an apartment, cleans it up with the help of his Turkish friend Tahir and finds his father’s epiphany in the simple act of sweeping the moss and mud and leaves off the corrugated plastic above his balcony. “From his crouch Martin squints up at the roof, where the rain is pounding now, drowning out every other sound. A single fir-tree needle jumps to one side, just the least little bit, and back again, the needle twitches back and forth, and now there’s another needle and another and another. They’re all twitching in the rain. ‘Good God!’ Martin says. ‘Do you see that?’ �

In the final simple story of the novel, narrated by an ex-nurse named Jenny, Martin is even vouchsafed a bit of romantic heaven. He has left Altenburg for Stuttgart and a job advertising a chain of restaurants called North Sea. Dressed in diving suits, complete with flippers, snorkels and goggles, he and Jenny wander the shopping malls of the city asking passers-by, “Can you tell us where we can find the North Sea around here?� “And what if they say no?� Martin asks her. “But we do!� she answers. “Schul Strasse 10a and Schul Strasse 15!�

For a while, all goes well. Martin smiles and finds that he is, mirabile dictu, a success. Then, during an afternoon shower, Jenny loses sight of him. When she finds Martin again, he’s sitting on the ground, nursing a black eye, compliments of a burgher of Stuttgart who thought Martin was putting the moves on his wife. With his short-lived success destroyed, Martin insists on giving up the job. But like Mary with her Jesus, or Estragon with his Vladimir, Jenny picks Martin up off the ground and asks:

“So where to now?�

“ ‘Anywhere,’ he says, ‘as far from here as possible.’ He spits again, puts the snorkel in his mouth, and secures it in place under the band of his goggles. I do the same thing. . . . We hold hands, because the goggles restrict our peripheral vision and neither of us can tell if the other is still walking alongside or not. The band is inside the tent again, playing something louder and faster, a polka I think. Actually, I don’t even know how a polka sounds. Maybe it’s just a march or something. Whatever it is, Martin and I fall in step with it. And that doesn’t change even when we leave the pedestrian zone.�

So simple, nicht wahr?