Authors: Clemens Meyer
Now it belongs to a Parisian collector, and once when Johannes Vettermann was in Paris he visited him and stood a long time looking at the angler and the forest and the water.
Almost all the pictures in his collection were auctioned off for a lot of money; Berlin, London, New York; the wholesale fruit market and the bridge where he’d stood for so many years were gone but so were the debts, and Johannes Vettermann gave up eating fruit.
‘Paint, you have to paint again, Johnny …’ And he painted. The end and the beginning. It took quite a long time until he managed to get the pictures out of his head and onto canvas. And it took quite a long time until the critics, the collectors and the other painters started celebrating him.
‘Hell on canvas. The genius nightmares of Johannes Vettermann.’
And now here’s his friend, the man he painted to look like Mephisto, like the devil himself in human form, standing in front of him and saying, ‘Johnny Superstar’ and ‘At the end, Johnny, everything goes very fast,’ and then he’s gone. And Johannes Vettermann finally reaches for the receiver and presses it to his ear. But all he can hear is a very loud and never-ending beep, beep, beep, beep …
We called him ‘The Boxer’ because his nose was beaten so flat it almost disappeared into his face.
Sometimes when I sat with him by the window in the evening and we smoked in the floodlights and waited for the night, he laid his big hand across his battered face and left it there until we got up and went to our beds.
We had plenty of beaten-up guys. I saw them at work, I saw them in the corridors and the yard; there were some who came in with really pretty faces and went out mashed up, but in all my time I never saw a nose flat as the Boxer’s.
At night, when I lay awake and he was asleep, his nose made whistling sounds, and when I listened for a while and thought about things, they’d turn into real little tunes.
‘Hey, Boxer, play something else,’ I said quietly, but he stopped whistling altogether – he’d woken up and started tossing and turning above me. ‘You know,’ he whispered in his hoarse night voice, ‘you know, I really used to … back then …’
‘Yeah,’ I said, ‘that’s what they’re all saying. This guy came in last week, short guy, going a bit grey …’
‘Wolfgang,’ he whispered.
‘Yeah,’ I nodded a couple of times, even though he couldn’t see me.
‘Always was a big-mouth,’ he whispered.
He turned over above me. I saw his foot for a moment in the light of the prison moon; we hung our towels over the window, but the floodlights were in the yard and outside the walls, and we never managed to completely cover it. I heard him breathing, and a few minutes later he started up his whistling again.
‘He weren’t bad,’ Wolfgang had said, passing round cigarettes, he was shit-scared, ‘back in the East. Not right at the top, but a couple of times he nearly made it to the Olympics a couple of times.’
The Boxer had never told me that, even though we’d been sharing a cell for more than two years. The Boxer didn’t talk much, and once he did get started, because the Russkis had brought us some
samogon
, he used to tell me about his daughter. She must have been seventeen, eighteen.
He still had a few years to go. They said he’d knocked some guy out and he hadn’t got up again, in the pub, a fight, money, women, no one knew exactly and of course he’d never told anyone anything.
One of the old dossers, who came and went, and were all back inside again for the winter, even told me once the Boxer was a lifer, on a long stretch. Apparently he hadn’t just knocked out that one guy but beat a security man into a coma too when he tried to hold him down, and he slept so deep he never woke.
‘The Boxer lost it; it was the drink,’ the dosser said and shook his head and rolled his eyes enough to make me dizzy. ‘They got him down to ten or eleven years; it was the drink, you know.’
‘I know,’ I said, and the old guy licked his lips and I gave him a bit of tobacco. But I didn’t believe the Boxer was carrying
two
cold ones round with him, and the tramps talked a lot of shit when they were coming down.
‘They should have built it by the river,’ the Boxer said. We were sitting at the table, like every morning. It was slowly getting light outside; the window was open although it was cold and it had snowed. We were eating and looking out across the walls at the bare trees and the city. ‘What?’ I asked, although I knew what he meant. He tapped one of the bars, and I nodded. ‘Might have been better.’
‘The view, you know.’ He pushed his plate aside and got up. ‘You know, a river, when you can see it all the time, on a river there’s always something going on.’ I got up as well and stood next to him, and we looked out at the buildings, a long way off, that the river must have been behind somewhere. He did us two roll-ups and passed me one. ‘You gonna look at it?’
‘The river?’ I gave him a light and he nodded.
‘Maybe,’ I said.
‘Gonna get your leave after all, eh?’
‘Looks like it. But you never know with them.’
‘You gonna go on a trip?’
‘It’s only a weekend.’
‘I mean a
real
trip.’ He looked at me and I saw a thin trail of smoke coming out of one of his nostrils, now just a slit.
‘Nah, they always find you anyway. A trip …’ I laughed, and he smiled too and flicked his roll-up out between the bars.
‘So … so d’you wanna go anywhere, got any plans?’
‘This and that,’ I said, ‘Leipzig, the usual, you know.’
‘Our city,’ he said. I stubbed my rollie out in the snow on the windowsill. He rolled two more, lit them up and passed me one.
‘Wanna visit your sister, eh?’
‘Nah, better not. She’s just got married.’
‘Kid?’
‘Yeah. Still a littl’un.’
‘When my daughter …’ He flicked his half-smoked roll-up out the window and closed it. I picked up the ashtray from the table and lay down on my bed. ‘You know your leave …’ The Boxer turned round to me for a moment, then he leant his forehead against the window pane. I smoked and looked at his back. It was a pretty broad back; maybe he’d been a cruiserweight, maybe even one class higher, in his golden days, when he’d nearly made it to the Olympics. I dragged on my rollie until I felt the heat on my lips. ‘When you’re out on leave …’ the Boxer said, muffled against the glass and moving his head back and forth. I pressed the butt into the ashtray, the key banged in the lock, the Boxer turned to face the door, I jumped up, the ashtray fell on the floor, I nudged it under the bed with my foot. The warden was standing in the door, seven a.m., time for work.
‘When you’re out on leave,’ said the Boxer in the middle of the night, when he woke up, ‘You listening …?’ I didn’t answer, I didn’t breathe, but he kept on talking because he knew I was awake. ‘… And when you’re in the city, in Leipzig … you know, son …’ I hated it when he called me ‘son’. I’d celebrated my thirtieth with him last summer. He’d got hold of some
samogon
and home brew from the Russians, and then he’d spent all night talking about his daughter until he fell asleep. ‘Got such dark hair, nearly black, not from her mother, no. Had it down over her shoulders, back then, you know … And take a good look what she looks like now, you listening son, take such a good look that … How tall she is and that, her eyes, her eyes as well …’ He came down the ladder, I saw him dark in front of my bed. I sat up and leant against the wall. ‘Course,’ I said, ‘I’ll tell you all about her eyes, if that’s all you want.’
‘Something else,’ he said, and I heard him walking across the dark cell to the table and sitting down. His lighter clicked, and then I saw the burning tip of his cigarette moving to and fro as he spoke. ‘There’s these two poofters owe me something. Won’t be any trouble. Got a little shop. Beer, schnapps, herring rolls. I’ll let them know you’re coming. It’s not much. Take it and give it to her. S’a surprise. She’s on a training scheme, not much coming in. I trust you. And tell her … tell her …’
‘I’ll tell her, Boxer.’ I leant against the wall, pulled the blanket up and over my head and breathed through the material.
The Boxer was standing at the window. But when I looked up at him and raised my hand briefly, I wasn’t so sure any more, so far away, and the twisted wire between us on top of the wall. I looked at the big clock on the tower, ten to eleven, same as always. I noticed it was snowing, and wiped the snow off my hair. Then I walked slowly away from the gate, turned around again, saw the woman behind the glass of the porter’s lodge, old and white-haired – been here since Adolf, we used to say. I walked past the little shop, closed now, saw the original jailbird products in the window: guaranteed organic potatoes, wooden figures, baskets,
my
baskets; I’d got to be a great basket-weaver during my time. I stood still by the commemorative plaque in the little car park a few yards away from the shop. ‘In memory of the victims of the fascist dictatorship in Fort Zinna.’ Someone had laid flowers in the snow. There was another commemorative stone a bit further along, because the Russkis had been here too. When I first arrived I’d walked to and fro between the stones until it got dark and I went up to the gate. I put my bag down and looked past the jail to the fields. I lit up and squatted down. I pressed my hand into the snow and felt it melting between my fingers and kept looking at the white fields and dragging on my roll-up, until I noticed the snow had put it out. I wiped my wet hand across my face and got up. I threw the roll-up away and walked towards the bus stop. I passed the low building where the day-release boys lived. Two of them were standing outside and nodded at me. I raised my hand briefly, fingers slightly apart – that was how we used to put them on windows, doors, walls. When I turned round again a few yards later they were still watching me go, hands in their pockets. ‘Drinks World,’ ‘Sports Corner,’ ‘Torgau welcomes careful drivers’. The bus drove so fast I felt sick, but I knew it would get slower the further we drove. Someone once told me he’d had to puke the first time he got on a bus after five years.
I felt people looking at my bag and staring at me and leant my head on the window. When we drove past the brewery I wanted to get out, but I stayed put. The bus stopped at a crossroads and I saw the sign ‘Riesa 182 km’ next to me. There was a big juvenile facility there, out in Zeithain, in the middle of nowhere, but I was a few years too old for them now. ‘How much time you done now, son?’ asked the Boxer.
‘It’s been a few years now,’ I said, ‘all together.’
‘Can’t grumble either,’ said the Boxer. We were playing chess and I offered him a pawn. He ate it up, and a few moves later his king got what was coming to him. It was only boxing he’d been top-class at. I’d learned to play chess more than ten years ago in Zeithain. ‘Traudi’s Inn’. I got out. The station was one stop away, but the trains to Leipzig ran all day, and I went in to see Traudi. The door swung to behind me, and I opened it again and looked out. The bus was driving down the road and I saw a couple of heads moving behind the big rear window. ‘Hey, it’s getting cold,’ someone said, and I flinched, dropped my bag and turned around. Just an old bloke at one of the tables, holding tight to a beer bottle with both hands and looking down at the tabletop, pretty far gone. I picked up my bag and went up to the bar. Some scrawny guy was fiddling with the beer pumps, but when I sat down on one of the bar stools I saw that the scrawny guy had a truckload of lipstick on and must have been a woman. As if she wanted to prove it, she stuck out her chest and smiled. She had a name-tag on her apron, it said, ‘Traudi Schmidt at your service’.
They talked about
Big
Traudi inside, ‘Got this great place, you gotta go there when you get out, Big Traudi’s got the best beer in town, you better believe it,’ but perhaps Big Traudi had been on a diet over the years. ‘All right,’ I said.
‘Beer and a shot, right?’ she said and smiled and looked at my bag and curved her scrawny back so far forwards I started worrying about her spine.
‘Coffee,’ I said, and she turned round and got to work on the coffee machine. I went through my pockets and put a tenner down on the bar. ‘Can you change this for me?’
Traudi put my coffee down next to the note. ‘No problem,’ she said and took it. She held the tenner between her forefinger and thumb and fanned it in front of her face and smiled at me as if she’d been in another kind of business, back when she was fat. I unwrapped the sugar cube, dipped it in the coffee and watched it slowly dissolve. Traudi was still grinning at me and now she stroked her lips with the note. I drank a mouthful of my coffee, then I poured in some milk and stirred it around a couple of times with the spoon. ‘How d’you want it?’ asked Traudi and looked at me over the note.
‘For the machine,’ I said. She screwed up the tenner in her fist and bent over to the till. She fingered through the coins and slapped three twos and four ones down on the counter. I nodded and went over to the cigarette machine. The old bloke looked up for a moment, still clinging onto the beer bottle, empty now. He really did look pretty far gone, like the alkies and dossers inside when they couldn’t get hold of any home brew. Some of them tried to make their own, and collected every crust of bread and every rotten apple they could get, but most of them had the DTs and messed it up.
‘A beer,’ said the old man, ‘a nice cold beer. And a shot, you know. You’ll think of me, won’t you, drink one for me?’
‘Yeah, right,’ I said, ‘a double just for you. Soon as I get to the station.’ The old guy smiled, and for a second his head stopped wavering and even his eyes were still. The coins jangled through the machine and I selected my old brand. I had to put more money in; the prices had gone up. I leant over and picked up the packet. I looked around. Traudi had poured herself a beer and was drinking and flicking through a thick catalogue in front of her on the counter. Looked like underwear and clothes.
‘Mate, got one for me?’ The old man looked at me, lowered his head slightly and let go of his empty bottle. I put the new packet in the inside pocket of my jacket and gave the old man four of the roll-ups the Boxer had given me that morning, ‘For the journey, son.’ He smoked the cheapest stuff, we called it ‘pubes’, but some evenings, when we were sitting at the window and waiting for the night and swapping cigarettes, his roll-ups tasted better than Davidoff Filter. I paid for my coffee and left.
I saw four chemist shops by the time I got to the station, three of them on the same road. Maybe people in Torgau were really run-down and got ill easily, or they beat each other up all the time and needed loads of bandages.
There were a couple of people in the ticket office so I got my ticket from a machine. The station pub didn’t open till the evening, and I stood in front of the timetable and smoked and read the names of the towns, until they announced my train and I noticed I was cold and felt a bit sick. On the platform was a girl with a dog. Fairly pretty even, maybe a bit too young, seventeen or eighteen, dark hair and nearly black and down over her shoulders, and her eyes …
The little grey dog danced around her, and she took a couple of steps so the lead didn’t get tangled around her legs. I dropped my bag and squatted down as the little grey dog danced in my direction and stopped a couple of yards in front of me; maybe the lead wasn’t long enough or she was pulling him back. But I didn’t even see her any more, although she was really quite pretty; there was only the little grey dog in front of me, in the middle of the platform. He raised his head and sniffed, his nose was shiny. I held out my palm to him, my fingers slightly apart, the dog danced to and fro a bit and howled quietly. I heard the train pulling in and straightened up.