In Times of Fading Light (11 page)

“You have to pay my work,” repeats the blowfly.

The blowfly has spread its wings, barring his way, footstool in one hand, case of cleaning materials in the other. Alexander makes for him, ready to strike. But he doesn’t strike, he shouts. Shouts at the top of his voice, shouts into the middle of the man’s face:

“I have no money!” he shouts in English.

The blowfly flinches back in surprise.

“I have no money!” shouts Alexander again. “I have no money!”

And then the Spanish for it comes to him.

“
No tengo dinero,”
he shouts.

Raises his hands in the air and shouts.

“
No tengo dinero!”

Shouts into the onlookers’ faces:

“
No tengo dinero!”

Turns in all directions, shouts:

“
No tengo dinero!”

The people turn away, and he shouts after them. They scatter like chickens. Seconds later the place is empty, except for the shoeblack, still standing there with the footstool in one hand, his little case in the other—he stands there in silence, staring at the stupid white man who has just lost his wits.

As usual on a Friday, she was the last.

She had been on her feet since five in the morning. Before the mailbox was emptied for the first time, she had read once more, one last time, through the article that Comrade Hager had told her to write. Two two-hour Spanish lessons to be given in the morning. After midday, the seminar on realism: progressive literature of North America. Suddenly, as she was speaking, she realized that she had just mixed James Baldwin up with John Dos Passos.

Autodidact. The word came into her mind now, at four fifteen, while she was tidying up her desk.

As an autodidact, she ought not to venture into subject areas unfamiliar to her—so Harry Zenk had said at the big staff meeting six months ago when she, Charlotte, had offered to give a seminar on the fiftieth anniversary of the Mexican Revolution.

She packed up the tests that she had given the students in the morning, spent some time looking around vaguely for her pen (she had hundreds of pens, but this pen, this particular pen was her favorite), finally gave up in annoyance. She took the used tea glasses to the secretariat and—for the fifth time today—washed her hands, but without entirely ridding herself of the feeling that she had chalk from the blackboard between her fingers. Finally she closed the filing cabinet that Lissi, her secretary, had forgotten to lock—Lissi too, of course, had gone home ages ago. Unfortunately the wooden rolltop of the cabinet jammed. Charlotte pressed against its handle with all her might. The handle came off. She went into the front room and slammed the handle down on Lissi’s desk, with a note saying: JANITOR. And an exclamation mark.

At the same moment, however, she remembered that the janitor had only just—well, a few days ago—run off to the West. She slowly crumpled the note and threw it in the wastebasket. She slipped into the chair at Lissi’s desk and propped her head in her hands. Stared for a long time at the portrait of Walter Ulbricht, which was still surrounded by a faint pale mark left on the wall by another, larger portrait.

Harry Zenk was to be assistant president of the academy.

The flavor of fish came up as she burped. She hated fish, she ate it only for the fish oils.

“As a woman,” Gertrud Stiller had said at lunch today, “you have to do twice as much to get anywhere.”

Twice or three times as much.

Charlotte stood up, took the documents labeled “For official use only” out of the rolltop cabinet that couldn’t be locked now, as well as—you never knew—a few Western newspapers that had accumulated there in the course of time, stuffed it all into her briefcase, and left.

Out in the corridor, a faulty neon tube was fizzing.

You could still see the marks on the doors that had been burnt into them after the war by the Russians with their
machorka
cigarettes.

The wall newspaper announced the latest triumph of Soviet technology and science: the day before yesterday a Soviet citizen called Yuri Gagarin had become the first man to fly in space.

It was warm outside. Spring had suddenly come, and Charlotte hadn’t noticed. She decided to walk the two kilometers, taking the path through the trees on the strip of ground along the railroad embankment, relax a little, enjoy the fine weather. She began to sweat after only a few hundred meters. Her briefcase was heavy. She was still wearing her thick cardigan under her coat. Images of her childhood suddenly came into her mind: a hot day, the white woolen dress that—as she now remembered—she’d always had to wear when her mother took her to the Tiergarten park on Sundays, to see the Kaiser pass by and “pay her respects,” that was how you put it. And then Charlotte had sneezed at the Kaiser. All of a sudden she saw the whole scene before her eyes again: the Kaiser himself, approaching at a brisk pace, in the middle of a wide row of his sons and his aides-de-camp; the woolen dress, much too warm and horribly scratchy on her bare skin; her mother’s rough hand hitting her full force while her eyes were still closed in the sneeze.

As a punishment, she had spent the rest of the day in her room, where she almost died of asthma, but her mother wouldn’t let her leave it—whether because she thought Charlotte was malingering, or because secretly she really wished her daughter dead. I wouldn’t mind doing without Lotte, her mother had once told their neighbor, and Charlotte remembered her martyred expression and the cross she wore over her high collar—I wouldn’t mind doing without Lotte if only Carl-Gustav were “normal.”

The school of life. If she hadn’t been through that school—would she be what she was today? Madame Look-Sharp, that was the students’ nickname for her. They thought it annoyed her. Far from it! Charlotte gripped her briefcase in both hands ... no, she thought, Madame Look-Sharp wasn’t one to give up. Madame Look-Sharp would fight. Harry Zenk as vice-president! Well, we’ll see about that.

Of course Wilhelm was down in the cellar, in his “headquarters,” as he called the old wine cellar that he had converted into a kind of meeting room. It was dark in the house, especially when you came in from the dazzling late afternoon sunlight. Only the shell, into which Wilhelm had omitted to fit a switch as well as the lightbulb, shone day and night—a waste of energy for which Charlotte tried to compensate by not switching the light on as she took off her coat and shoes. Groping about in the dim light, she found her house slippers and hurried upstairs: Alexander would be arriving at six for his Spanish lesson.

She fetched clean underwear from the bedroom, then went into the bathroom and showered at length. Since Dr. Süss had diagnosed her asthma as the result of a household dust allergy, Charlotte considered showering a medical treatment, and had no more scruples about allowing herself that luxury several times a day—a cold shower in the morning, of course, but a hot shower in the afternoon and the evening, when she washed her hair and let the water stream over her face and eyes at length, cleaned her nostrils and mouth cavity with a sense of well-being. There was at least that advantage to the fact that Kurt and Irina had moved out: there wasn’t always someone turning the water on somewhere in the house, so that as a result of the water pressure in Neuendorf, which was slight anyway, you were either scalded or chilled, like a boiled egg rinsed in cold water.

After showering, she slipped into the cotton underwear she had laid out ready, put on her cashmere sweater, no longer fit for best but nice and warm, in anticipation of the shivers that would come over her when she left the bathroom, and suddenly had the idea of giving herself up entirely to luxury by putting Alexander off for once and lying down for a while instead, until Wilhelm came up for supper. Didn’t she deserve it, after this crazy week?

She went down to the salon and phoned Kurt.

“Right,” said Kurt. “See you in the morning, then.”

In the morning?

“Going out in the car,” said Wilhelm.

“Oh, my word, yes. I look forward to it,” said Charlotte.

It felt good in the conservatory. The little indoor fountain hummed away, the humidity was almost tropical. Since Dr. Süss had told her that high humidity in the air was good for her allergy, she spent most of her time at home in the conservatory. Or more precisely, she had already spent most of her time at home in the conservatory before he told her that, but now she did it for scientific reasons. She even slept in here as soon as the season of the year allowed it. Now that her circulatory system was slowing down she began to shiver, in spite of the almost tropical temperature in the room. It didn’t bother her, in fact she enjoyed it. It reminded her gently of certain sensations that she had written off long ago, but she left it at that. She didn’t think it proper to pursue such a train of thought at her age. Pointless. Outlandish. Did Wilhelm still think of things like that? Why had he complained when she moved out of the bedroom? They’d been sleeping separately for a long time anyway; even in their shared bedroom the beds had been two meters apart. So what did he want? Did he miss it? Should she do it once again for his sake? The mere thought of the glass of water on Wilhelm’s bedside table sobered her; Wilhelm had lost all his teeth in 1940 when he had scurvy in the internment camp at Vernet in France, or if not quite all, the rest had dropped out on the way to Casablanca. Dear heaven, what times, what fears, what general confusion ... she was getting drowsy. Zenk crossed her mind again, Zenk with his truly magnificent teeth. Well, of course Zenk hadn’t been in the internment camp, thought Charlotte, Zenk had never been anywhere. Except, presumably, in the Hitler Youth ...

When she opened her eyes again it was dark. The house was quiet. Charlotte went through the kitchen to what had once been the servants’ entrance (idiotically, Wilhelm had bricked up the door between the kitchen and the living rooms, and now you had to go the long way around across the hall even to set the table for lunch), and she called down the cellar stairs:

“Wilhelm?”

She could hear indistinct mumbling and laughter through the double door to the old wine cellar. It was nine thirty now, and they were still sitting down there. Charlotte went down the cellar stairs, hoping that her appearance would hasten the guests’ departure. She made a lot of noise opening the door. A rather too jovial greeting came her way out of the cigarette haze, heightening her sense of being an intruder. The usual bunch were all there: Horst Mählich and Schlinger, a young comrade whose excessive zeal got on Charlotte’s nerves. Weihe, who wasn’t a Party member at all, was there too, as well as a few others whom Charlotte didn’t know so well. On the large oak table, among overflowing ashtrays and notebooks opened in a great show of importance, among coffee cups and Vita Cola bottles, lay some kind of poster design.

A LOCOMOTIVE FOR CUBA!

Underneath, in faulty Spanish:

LA VIVA REVOLUTION!

“Sorry, I didn’t mean to disturb you,” said Charlotte, suddenly deciding to withdraw without joining battle. But before she could close the door, Wilhelm called, “Oh, Lotti, couldn’t you rustle us up a few sandwiches? The comrades are hungry.”

“I’ll see what I can find,” muttered Charlotte, trudging up the stairs. For a moment she stood in the kitchen, stunned by the cheek of it. Finally, as if operating by remote control, she took a fresh mixed-grain loaf out of the breadbox (thank goodness Lisbeth had been shopping) and began to slice it. Why was she doing this? Was she Wilhelm’s secretary? She was director of the institute! ... Or no, of course she was
not
director of the institute. To her regret, the institute had been rechristened a department, and she was less resoundingly known only as “head of department,” but that made no difference in this case: she was a professional woman, she worked like a Trojan, she held an important post at the academy where the future diplomats of the GDR were being trained (Guinea had already recognized the GDR, the sole nonsocialist state to do so, and had withdrawn its recognition only under pressure from the Federal Republic of Germany!). She was head of a department at an academy—and what was Wilhelm? A nonentity. Retired, pensioned off early ... And probably, thought Charlotte, blinded by fury as she stared at the contents of the fridge, looking for something she could use for sandwiches, after his failure as administrative director of the academy, probably Wilhelm would have
gone to the dogs
if she herself had not gone off to the area head office of the Party and begged the comrades to give Wilhelm at least some kind of honorary occupation. She herself had encouraged him to take the post of district Party secretary, she had persuaded him that its holder fulfilled an important social function—the only trouble was that by now Wilhelm believed that himself. And what was even worse, so, obviously, did the others!

She decided on the round box of processed cheese and a jar of pickles, and began spreading the slices of bread laid out on the tray ... district Party secretary meant the man who collected their Party contributions from ten to fifteen veterans who lived between Thälmannstrasse and Opfer des Faschismus Square, the latter being named for the Victims of Fascism. That was all the job entailed. But what did Wilhelm do? He held secret meetings of some kind down there in his headquarters, planning “operations” of some sort or other. Last time there was a local government election, he had organized a
motorized action unit
to send agitators chasing up anyone who hadn’t yet voted by early afternoon. The idiots drove all over the grass by the roadside and ruined it! His latest idea was the locomotive for Cuba. Neuendorf, with under ten thousand inhabitants, was to raise the money for a diesel locomotive from the Karl Marx Works. They went collecting everywhere like crazy, the Young Pioneers took old clothes and textiles away, and finally the locals were expected to give something for a large raffle to be held next weekend in the People’s Solidarity Club, as the climax of the entire operation.

The way he could fool people was incredible, thought Charlotte, spreading processed cheese on the bread to make open sandwiches. With his hints and the airs he put on. With the hat that he wore year in, year out. He was, she had to admit, almost a celebrity in Neuendorf. Always in the newspaper, even if it was only the local rag. People knew him, they greeted him in the street. Not her, it was
Wilhelm
they greeted. They told one another fantastic stories about him ... how did he do it? Because you couldn’t say that Wilhelm put such stories into circulation himself. Yet somehow, heaven knows how, they got around. He nailed his lasso to the wall in his headquarters—and the young comrades were instantly convinced that Wilhelm had been brilliant at throwing the lasso. He mixed Cuba Libre highballs, and everyone believed that he knew Fidel Castro personally. And when he drank Nescafé “Mexican style” (meaning only that he stirred coffee creamer into the powder first, so that the coffee had a little crown of foam on top of it) and smoked a Russian
papyrosse,
it was clear to one and all that Wilhelm had built up the entire Soviet secret service network in Mexico.

If they only knew, thought Charlotte. She paused for a moment (she was just cutting the tiny pickles into tiny slices). Paused and thought of Hamburg: Wilhelm’s “secret service activity.” For three years he had sat in the office smoking cigarettes. That was Wilhelm’s “secret service activity.” Three years of lost jobs. Nothing turned out well anymore. News of arrests came rolling in, and Wilhelm sat there waiting. What for? What had they really been waiting for? What had they risked their lives for? She didn’t know.
Everyone knows only as much as he needs to know,
said Wilhelm. And instead of going to Moscow with the boys, she had stayed in Germany acting the part of his wife as camouflage. She had almost been glad—not that she could say so, of course—she had almost been glad when the whole thing was busted and they had to run for it in a great hurry. With Swiss passports—and there was Wilhelm with his Berlin accent. Some secret service! Couldn’t even get you proper passports.