Authors: Clemens Meyer
He stepped out from under the bridge, seeing his shadow on the pavement. He pulled his hands out of his coat pockets and then he ran. His footsteps echoed in the road but the man didn’t turn around. And when he was right behind him and the man wanted to turn around – he must have heard his footsteps now – he shoved him in the back with both hands, pushing so hard that the man fell. He stumbled over him, holding himself up by the wall, and the man doubled over, clutching his hands in front of his face. What are you doing, please, what …?
You filthy bastard. She was waiting for me, you filthy bastard. He kicked out at him, but then he saw it wasn’t the man who’d gone into the house before. He was much smaller, lying there on the ground, and his jacket was completely different. The man before hadn’t been wearing a yellow jacket.
Please … please …
He reached for the man’s jacket, feeling the wallet in the inside pocket, then he let him go and ran down the road, over to the other side of the little town, where the canal led to the port.
•
So you’re looking for Zids, said the man sitting opposite.
Yes, he said. He’d been with her again, only a few hours ago.
You’ve found him.
Good, he said. She’d smelled of sweat again, only very faintly, but he smelt it clearly and it didn’t go away when he laid his face against her hair and breathed into it.
What do you want from Zids? asked Zids. He had almost no accent.
I’ve been looking for you for a long time.
Zids laughed. I’ve been busy. What do you want?
You speak Lithuanian, don’t you?
Yes, said Zids, sometimes.
You’re Lithuanian, aren’t you?
Yes, said Zids. What do you want?
If you speak Lithuanian …
Yes, I do, said Zids.
You are Lithuanian?
Yes.
I want you to translate something for me.
Why? asked Zids.
Just because.
Zids laughed and leant back. Just because.
It’s very important, he said. He’d taken her bathrobe and undressed her. Come with me. He’d taken her hands and pulled her towards the bathroom. No. She stood before him naked, shaking her head. Three showers today, she said, stroking her hair and her skin. He took the small bundle of money and put a couple of notes on the chest in the hallway, then he opened the bathroom door and said: Come.
Very important,’ said Zids, drinking a slug of his beer. How important?
He took the couple of notes he had left and put one of them down on the table in front of Zids.
Hey, hey, hey! Zids picked up the note, folded it up and pushed it back at him. What do you take me for? Money? For nothing? Let’s play a bit of dice for your money, then I’ll translate whatever you want.
Just a few sentences. Please, he said. He’d stood under the shower and held her tight, stroking her black hair over and over. She trembled although the water was so hot it was steaming. Everything’s fine, Baiba, he said, I’m here.
Just one little game, said Zids, putting the dice shaker on the table. Then he picked it up and shook it next to his head like a bartender, and the dice rattled and shook. The two men standing by the counter came over to them.
Tavo gražūs plaukai,
he whispered. He was lying in the dirt by the tracks. The man was punching him and he pressed his face into the ballast. No, no one was punching anyone. He was alone. He turned his head cautiously. He could hear trains nearby.
Tu esi geras žmogus,
he whispered. He didn’t know what that meant any more. Your hair is beautiful or you’re a good person. The piece of paper was gone. In her flat.
Linkiu sėkmės,
he whispered.
He laughed – he knew what that meant. Good luck. Something hurt inside him when he laughed. She didn’t want his piece of paper, she didn’t want his words–the words he’d got from Zids in her language. It was raining. It was cold and steam came out of his mouth. Now the drops turned white, melting on his coat and his face. The man slapped him in the face. No money, eh? Don’t want to leave? She stood by the calendar on the wall, gathering her bathrobe up over her breasts. Baiba, he said, and the man raised his hand but didn’t hit him. If she doesn’t want a shower, she doesn’t want a shower, he said. Was he Lithuanian like Zids? No, she’d said something to the man in Russian when he’d come into the flat. She’d spoken Russian when she was holding the receiver too. He’d been sitting on the couch, the piece of paper in his hand. Your hair is beautiful. She’d pointed at him when the man stood in the doorway. Baiba, he said, but she walked up to the man, pressed herself tight up against him, put an arm around him and spoke Russian, in a very fast, high voice, and pointed at him and the piece of paper he was still holding in his hand.
Tavo gražūs
…
How long had he been in this town now? Two weeks or longer? He thought of his wife and his workmates and the training course and the cash and carry. He felt like laughing but he was scared it would hurt again, somewhere inside him.
It’s cruel, he thought, dragging a person through the night like that. He was the deputy manager, actually the deputy of the deputy. Processed Foods section. Now he did laugh, and something dribbled over his chin. He heard the trains and felt his coat getting wet. She stood by the calendar and he looked over at her. 1995. A couple of horses.
I feel myself gradually waking up. I open my eyes. I’m in a train compartment. The train’s moving and I look over at the window but all I can see is the reflection of the compartment in the glass. I’m alone and it’s night outside.
I get up and pull down the blind. I don’t know what I’m doing on this train, I don’t know where I’m going, I don’t know where I’m coming from, I can’t remember any station. I’m a wine sales rep, I know that much, travelling from town to town for years now. I’ve been to France and Spain as well, but not by train. A white van, full of bottles and catalogues. I sit down again, trying to remember where the van is, where I am. Something’s happened but I can’t get hold of it. ‘A wonderful pinot noir,’ I say, ‘dry but very fruity, what ripeness, let it roll across your palate, feel it rolling, grown on the best slopes, you can drink it with anything, always, I’ll give you three hundred bottles of this wonderfully fruity pinot noir, a truly aristocratic wine, Prince Löwenstein vineyard, three hundred bottles for … or let’s say five hundred bottles, the good old prince gets better and better with age, you’ve got a flourishing business going,
noblesse oblige
, as they say …’ I grab hold of the holdall on the seat next to me; a couple of bottles clink together and I open the bag. Five litre-bottles of cheap red wine with screw caps, one of them almost empty, and I take it out and put it on the little table under the window. It’s pretty nasty plonk, I’ve never sold anything like that, and I shudder as I drink it, and the full bottles next to me in the bag clink again because the train’s moving with a judder now, and I rummage in the holdall, finding a vest, nothing else in there, and shove it between the bottles. Was it that clinking that scared me? I try to understand why; I’m a wine rep and a few clinking bottles shouldn’t scare me, but as I drink the cheap wine I get the feeling there must have been a monstrous, much louder clinking somewhere and sometime, it can’t be long ago, and I drink until the bottle’s empty. I screw the cap back on and start to put it in the bag, but then I put it back on the table. No, I’ve never sold such cheap plonk. I’ve got plenty of mid-range wines on offer, but good Rieslings as well … ‘Freimuth Spätlese 2002 vintage from the slopes of the Bischofsberg in Rüdesheim, in the beautiful Rheingau region near Wiesbaden. A wonderful
Qualitätswein mit Prädikat
, pressed and bottled by Alexander Freimuth himself. Do you know what we call the beautiful Rheingau? Teutonic Tuscany. I’ll give you two hundred bottles from the best vineyard in the German Tuscany for a special price of …’ I see images of towns, hotels, restaurants and corner bars, then vineyards I rep for, and the vines growing on either side like waves; I’m sitting in my white van and driving from town to town, wine samples and catalogues, and no trains and no stations.
I pace up and down between the door and the window. It’s a smoking compartment but I don’t smoke, I gave it up years ago; it’s bad for your sense of taste and smell. I search my jacket pockets and find an open orange pack of cigarettes, Ernte 23 brand. Automatically, I take one out, a box of matches in another pocket, and then I smoke and pace to and fro. ‘Prinz von Hessen 2004 vintage; Domdechant Werner 2005 vintage; Diefenhardt 2002 vintage from Martinsthal; F for Flick, vini et vita, from the vineyard by the mill.’ The names of the wines are in my head, coming out of my mouth along with the smoke from the cigarette I’m smoking even though I don’t smoke any more. I grab at the blind and make it snap back up and look into the night through the reflection of the compartment and my own reflection. What’s behind the wine? What happened yesterday, what happened today? Why am I going wherever I’m going? I sit down again. I pull the ashtray out of the armrest and put out the cigarette. I don’t like the fact that I’m smoking. I’m a wine rep and my sense of taste and smell are among the most important things. That and talking. I take a new bottle out of the holdall. ‘Don’t be fooled by the screw cap. The fashion’s moving away from corks, certainly for mid-range wines. And I’ll tell it to you straight, this is a mid-range wine. And to be perfectly honest, it’s even lower mid-range. But it’s solid, a good solid table wine, a simple French wine but the best you’ll get for the price. Simple but good. A good wine for a good bar. And a good profit margin for an honest business, for you, for me and for your customers.’
She must have been standing there for a good while but I only notice her now, even though my eyes aren’t closed. ‘Your ticket, please.’ I hold the bottle between my knees with both hands and put it down on the floor in front of me. I see the ticket collector looking at the empty bottle on the table. If I’m on a train I must have a ticket, so I search my pockets again – jacket, trousers, shirt. ‘This train will divide in Nuremberg; you’ll have to find a seat at the front of the train then, from carriage 29 on.’
Nuremberg. I’ve been there before, on business sometime. ‘How long before we get to Nuremberg?’ I ask. ‘About fifty minutes,’ she says. She’s holding some kind of device, presumably for my ticket, which I’m still looking for. Coins, pens, tissues. She has reddish hair, a couple of strands falling across her face, and I don’t know why but I can’t help staring at those red strands of hair in her face, and she doesn’t like me looking at her like that while I’m still searching through my pockets. She turns aside and now the device for my ticket is right in front of my face. Those red strands of hair – what is it with that red? I try to remember women I’ve known with red hair but there’s nothing, it’s something else, this red (the wine? No, not the wine), but I can’t get hold of it. I feel some paper in a small inside pocket, folded, and I give it to her. She unfolds it, looks at it for a while, then she takes the device and stamps my ticket. ‘There’s a twenty-minute stay in Nuremberg, you’ll have enough time …’ She hands me my ticket. ‘Yes,’ I say. ‘Thanks,’ and then she leaves, pulling the compartment door to behind her.
I’m holding the ticket in my hand but I’m looking at the wine bottle on the floor in front of me. I crumple the ticket in my fist, then I spread it out on my knee, stroking it smooth again without looking at it, hearing the rustle of the paper and picking up the bottle and drinking a swig. Why would a veteran wine rep like me ever drink this plonk? ‘Munich – Bitterfeld.’
I read it over and over again, ‘Munich – Bitterfeld, second class, eighty-four euro,’ and I ask myself why on earth I’m going home when I haven’t been home for almost fifteen years now. Bitterfeld. Huge factories with flames coming out of their chimneys at times. As a child, I often used to stand outside the huge factories, the air like rotting eggs, and imagine that one day I’d … it’s all very clear in my head, but what’s behind the smoke and the flames? I drink, and then I press my hands to my forehead.
‘Mind if I have a smoke in here?’ A man’s standing in the open door; why don’t I hear them opening the door? He’s wearing a brown cord jacket, and what I immediately notice is his long, thin neck, and it seems to me like I’ve seen that neck and this man before sometime and spoken to him – his voice seems familiar too. ‘I’m sitting further forward, I booked a seat but you can’t smoke there. You don’t mind me having a quick …’
‘No, no, of course not.’ I look at him and nod but he doesn’t seem to recognise me, and maybe I just saw him at the station in Munich, the station I don’t remember at all; it’s as if someone or something had teleported me onto this train, maybe the cheap wine’s to blame, I’m a wine rep though and I can take my drink, but it’s not just the station and the train; there’s something wrong but I still can’t get hold of it. And again I hear a clinking and again it scares me terribly, but it’s not clinking at all, it’s screeching; the train slows down and then stops. ‘Nuremberg,’ I say and reach for my bag. ‘No,’ says the man, sitting opposite me now and smoking. ‘It’s a while yet to Nuremberg.’
I look out of the window but there’s no station to be seen outside, only darkness, and somewhere pretty far off a few isolated lights.
‘How far are you going, if you don’t mind me asking?’
‘Bitterfeld,’ I say and wait for him to tell me where he’s going, but he just nods and that looks very strange, with his long, thin neck.
‘Bitterfeld. Where exactly is Bitterfeld?’
‘Near Leipzig,’ I say, and he holds out an orange pack of cigarettes to me; he smokes Ernte 23 as well, and I take one out. He gives me a light. ‘You’ll have to change then, won’t you? We’re not stopping in Bitterfeld, are we?’
‘I don’t know,’ I say. ‘Probably not.’
‘You’ll want to ask the ticket collector then.’ He pulls the ashtray out of the armrest and taps the ash in a couple of times. ‘I bet you have to change in Leipzig. I’ve been to Leipzig. Lovely churches they have there.’
‘Yes,’ I say. ‘Lovely churches.’ The train moves off with a jerk, the empty bottle on the windowsill tips over but the man with the long, thin neck holds onto it; he was pretty fast, as if he’d seen it coming. We’re moving off now.
‘Is it a big place? Bitterfeld, I mean.’
‘No, not very,’ I say.
‘And the churches, are there nice churches there?’
‘I don’t know,’ I say, trying to remember, but all I see is the chimneys and the smoke and the flames.
‘You don’t often visit Father Yahweh then?’ He croaks the word ‘Yahweh’ strangely.
It sounds almost like he’s coughing, and I ask, ‘Who?’
‘Father Yahweh, our Lord. You do know our Lord?’
‘A little bit,’ I say. ‘I’ve read about him.’ And that’s true. I’m lying in a small cheap hotel, I’m waiting until I can fall asleep, flicking through the hotel bible. I reach for the bottle and drink, then I pass it to the man with the long, thin neck. He leans his head back and drinks in large, greedy gulps, and I look at his Adam’s apple moving up and down very fast. ‘Thanks. The Lord gave us wine.’ He hands me the bottle, leaning far forwards as if he were bowing to me or his Father Yahweh, and I drink again, not letting him out of my sight. He’s lit up another cigarette; he smokes just as greedily as he just drank. ‘Did you see the beautiful churches in Munich? You did come from Munich?’
‘Yes,’ I say, ‘Munich. Lots of churches in Munich.’ I’ve been to Munich on business a lot, although I’d have done better business there as a beer salesman, and I search, search in my head for what happened this time in Munich. And there’s that clinking again and a smashing as well, but I can’t get hold of it yet, can’t concentrate on it either because the man’s started talking about his Father Yahweh again, telling me it’s all thanks to Father Yahweh that he’s sitting here now.
‘And he sent me to you, to this compartment.’
‘Do you think so?’ I say, drinking and handing him the bottle.
Very quietly he says, almost whispering, ‘Lots of compartments were empty but I came to this one. Father Yahweh leads me, his rod and his staff guide me, although he has reason to be wrathful at me, and he has great wrath at me, and yet he leads me to the laid tables.’
He’s starting to scare me, this man. Now he’s drinking and I almost forget that I could use someone to guide me too, someone to clear my head, to give me back all my memories, and I say, ‘The Lord’s angry with you?’
‘You have to say his name,’ he says, very quietly again. ‘Father Yahweh, his name’s Father Yahweh, we have to say his name for him to hear us.’
‘Father Yahweh’s angry with you?’ We use the familiar form of address; I don’t know when we switched over from
Sie
to
du
, but it’s another thing that makes me think I know him already, as if we’d talked to each other before, but for God’s sake, I don’t know the man, I’d definitely remember if someone had told me such crazed nonsense before, and what else can I call it …
‘Father Yahweh put a curse on me.’
‘Now which is it?’ I say, losing patience now. ‘He leads you but he puts a curse on you, what kind of …’
‘Calm down,’ he says, smiling and lowering his head in my direction. ‘We have to love Father Yahweh and recognise Him. And I recognised Him too late, spent all those years without His light, and that’s what he’s punishing me for, and not just me.’
I close my eyes and press my head against the headrest. I hear him talking, talking about God and illumination and punishment, and for a brief moment there’s a memory, the man with the long, thin neck standing very close to my white van, there’s a woman too, lying down, and something about her reminds me of the ticket collector, I want to reach out and grab hold of it but the picture blurs, the memories aren’t clear, and when I open my eyes I see a small Madonna statue right in front of my face. The Virgin Mary’s holding a tiny Jesus in her arms, and at first I get a shock, then I feel the train moving and I think that I’ve never seen anything as ugly as this. China, or probably just cheap plastic or plaster; white, pink and pale blue.
‘Isn’t she beautiful? Isn’t she absolutely beautiful? The way she’s holding the Baby Jesus? If you look really carefully you can see him smiling.’
And I look carefully but all I can see is a tiny line that’s supposed to be his mouth, and I say, ‘Yes, beautiful.’
He puts the figurine carefully in the breast pocket of his jacket, smiling again or still smiling. I see his yellow teeth when he smiles. He’s smoking again or still smoking. ‘You ought to visit Father Yahweh in the churches of your town.’
I want to tell him about the huge chimneys with the flames coming out of them but suddenly I’m very tired and I drink and all I say is, ‘Who knows … my town.’
‘Father Yahweh,’ he starts again, even though I’ve passed him the bottle, but suddenly I think of something and I interrupt him and his smile, which I can’t stand any longer, and I ask, ‘Who, my friend, who has He punished apart from you?’
He puts the bottle down. He looks at me for a long time, and I can’t hold his gaze so I lower my head, as if his gaze had hit something right in my eyes, and I look at the floor and hear him whispering very quietly, ‘My wife.’
‘Dear passengers, we’ll shortly be arriving in Nuremberg, where the rear section of the train with carriage numbers …’