In Times of Fading Light (13 page)

And off went the coffee mill once more, a curious thing, this car, in which you couldn’t even have a conversation. In the rear seat you were thrown back and forth. Moreover, Irina drove alarmingly fast, thundering through the intersections without looking right or left.

“Aren’t you supposed to see if anyone else has the right-of-way?” asked Charlotte politely.

No one answered, perhaps they didn’t know which of them she was asking, or they had failed to hear the question over all the noise. Charlotte let the subject drop.

They drove to Sanssouci Park, intending to get out. But Alexander said, “I want to go on driving in the car!”

“We’ll be driving home later,” said Kurt.

But the child was not to be moved: Want to drive in the car!

Irina said, “Well then, let’s go to Cecilienhof.”

“That’s not far enough,” stated Alexander. “You said a tour in the car!”

This was incredible. They actually considered extending the trip to Bornim or Neufahrland. In the end they settled on the Cecilienhof palace and the nearby Neuer Garten park after all, but with some detours. Alexander was satisfied.

“Our car has a reserve tank,” he informed Charlotte.

Charlotte nodded.

Cecilienhof at last. Parking maneuver—it was like steering a ship. Kurt helped her out, which was quite a feat of mountaineering, and then he asked, “Well, how do you like our car?”

“It’s wonderful,” said Charlotte.

Alexander wiped a bird dropping off the car with his sleeve. Charlotte refrained from saying anything about that. Alexander turned several times to look back at the car, and Charlotte waited until it was well out of sight.

“When I was your age,” she began, for the third time, “I had to go to the Tiergarten park with my mother every Sunday, because my mother had taken it into her head to bow to the Kaiser, who sometimes went for a walk there.”

Alexander was wide eyed.

“The Kaiser?”

“That’s right,” said Charlotte. “Kaiser Wilhelm. And then we sometimes waited for hours—would the Kaiser be there today or wouldn’t he?—and I always had to wear a white woolen dress that was horribly scratchy. A really scratchy dress,” said Charlotte, looking at Alexander’s face for his reaction to her remarks.

There wasn’t any. Instead, Alexander asked, “And did the Kaiser turn up?”

Irina said, “Do stop it, Mutti. If something bad happens to you in life, you don’t have to wish it on other people, too.”

“And did the Kaiser turn up?” Alexander insisted.

“Yes,” said Charlotte, “then the Kaiser turned up. And I hated him.”

At the outdoor swimming pool at the end of the Heiliger See bordering the park, Irina and Alexander went to feed the swans. Charlotte sat down on a bench with Kurt. There was a pleasant, light breeze, and you could hear the reeds rustling.

“Well, what did you think of my article?” asked Charlotte, adding, “But don’t be too hard on me!”

She saw that Kurt was hesitating.

“Come on, out with it! So you didn’t like it?”

“I don’t understand you,” said Kurt. “Or how you can go along with something like that.”

“What do you mean, go along with it? Go along with what?”

Kurt looked at her. She suddenly noticed that he was looking at her only with his one good eye, and for a moment she felt something like guilt—as if she, as his mother, were responsible for that.

“Mutti, this amounts to a political campaign,” said Kurt. “People here are trying to take a harder line.”

“But it’s a bad book,” objected Charlotte.

“Then don’t read it.” All of a sudden Kurt was unusually brusque.

“No, Kurt, that won’t do,” said Charlotte. “I have a right to express my opinion too. I have a right to think a book is bad and harmful, I do think this book is bad and harmful, and I’m sticking to that.”

“It’s not about this book.”

“It is for me.”

“No,” said Kurt. “This is about factional struggles. This is about reform or stagnation. Democratization or a return to Stalinism.”

Irritated, Charlotte put her hands to her temples. “Stalinism ... suddenly everyone’s talking about Stalinism!”

“I don’t understand you,” said Kurt, and although he kept his voice low there was a sharp edge to it, and he emphasized every word as he said, “Your son was murdered in the Vorkuta gulag.”

Charlotte jumped up, signaling to Kurt to keep quiet.

“I don’t like to hear you say a thing like that, Kurt, I don’t like to hear you say it!”

Alexander came running up to tell them that the gulls were stealing the swans’ food, and then he was off again.

Kurt said no more, and nor did Charlotte.

You could hear the reeds rustling on the bank.

The first thing she noticed in the house was the stuffy air that descended on her lungs like an old rag. She knew the reason for it when she climbed the stairs to the bathroom: Mählich and Schlinger, each with a brush in his hand, were busy working on a large poster in the upstairs corridor and—obviously so as to have a smooth surface underneath the poster as they painted—had rolled up the long carpet runner. The air was thick with dust.

“What do you two think you’re doing?” snapped Charlotte.

“Wilhelm said ...” Mählich began.

“Wilhelm said, Wilhelm said!” Charlotte muttered through gritted teeth.

In the bathroom she took a prednisolone tablet. After showering, she held a damp cloth over her mouth in order to get down the corridor. By now the two artists had summoned reinforcements in the shape of Wilhelm.

“What’s going on?” asked Wilhelm.

Charlotte did not reply, but made her way along the narrow corridor, inadvertently bumping into Schlinger, who in turn lost his balance and stepped on the freshly painted poster, right on the word
revolution,
still incorrectly spelled thus instead of
revolución.

“What’s come over you?”

Charlotte walked on without turning and went downstairs, with Wilhelm behind her. He barred her way into the conservatory.

“Can you please tell me what’s going on?”

“Wilhelm,” said Charlotte, as calmly as she could manage. “You ought to be aware by now that I suffer from an allergy to household dust.”

“From what?”

“An all-er-gy to
household dust,
” said Charlotte.

“How you do keep on about all that,” said Wilhelm.

Charlotte closed the two halves of the conservatory door in his face, and drew the curtains.

She lay down on the bed, listening to her heart beating. Listening to the slight rattle in her breathing. She could still taste the bitterness of the prednisolone tablet on her tongue.

She lay like that for some time.

She remembered the Queen of the Night. The plant she had taken back to the flower shop without ever seeing it in flower.

And come to think of it, she had never had asthma in Mexico.

That night she had bad dreams again, but couldn’t remember them in the morning. Nor did she want to.

She spent Sunday pulling up weeds.

On Monday, she heard on the news that an invading army equipped by the United States had landed in Cuba.

On Wednesday the army of invasion was wiped out.

Comrade Hager didn’t phone again.

Wilhelm’s raffle was a great success. The district secretary made a speech. And the representative of the National Front decorated Wilhelm with the gold Pin of Honor.

She had no idea how long she had been sitting there on her bed, where she always sat, ankles crossed, hands in her lap as if they weren’t hers at all. She had stopped crying. Her tears had dried up, and the faint salty encrustations they had left behind tickled her face.

Outside it was very bright when she looked up, so bright that the light hurt. The birch trees glowed yellow, a warm fall this year, thought Nadyeshda Ivanovna. In Slava they’d be harvesting potatoes now, smoke would be rising from the first fires as the potato stems and leaves burned, and when you began burning the potato stems and leaves that time, inexorably, had come: the time of fading light.

Nadyeshda Ivanovna blew her nose and picked up the knitting that she had put down on her pillow in the morning, the socks for Sasha, well, Kurt would get them now, one sock was already finished, she was just turning the heel of the other, she knew a thing or two about socks, she’d knitted so many, Sasha’s first were no bigger than egg cozies, that was thirty years ago now, but to this day she could still smell the hairs at the back of his neck when she thought of the way he used to sit on her lap and they played
maltchik-paltchik
for hours on end, or she would sing him something, about the little kid who wouldn’t listen to the grandmother in the song, he liked to hear that one again and again, again and again, the boy will have forgotten it now even though he knew it almost by heart when he was two, but again and again: Why, why?
Nothing left but hoofs and horns, sadly she mourns, nothing left but hoofs and horns,
well, never mind, maybe he’d write a postcard although he probably had more important things to do there, he’d have to get used to everything, America, she knew about it from TV, on the other channel, you switched channels twice, to be honest she usually watched the other channel, she’d seen enough of Brezhnev, America was somehow more interesting, even if you didn’t always dare to look at what the programs showed, so long as he didn’t go to the bad there, thought Nadyeshda Ivanovna, or was what they showed on TV maybe just TV, and really it was much the same as here where you could almost look across and see it, or was what you saw overseas still Germany, or was Germany America, well, a part of it, the part of Germany that was a part of America? It was all so confusing, enough to send you crazy, and what was the point if it all came to the same thing in the end, as Ira claimed, except that you could buy everything there, so Ira had said, in that other Germany that was America, not that she understood that because on the square where the trolleybus came in and where Sasha used to go to school you could buy everything as well, it wasn’t even rationed, buy as much as you could carry, you could buy milk—in bags, no one back in Slava would believe that, only to be honest, whether it was because of the bags or because those cows were state-owned and milked by a milking machine she didn’t know, but anyway their milk never thickened if you left it to stand, it just went bad, the milk from those state cows, now having your own cow in the cowshed at home was something else, milk curds with sugar, he’d always liked that, you had soft quark cheese as well, and butter, you had everything you needed.

For the heel she had to divide the number of stitches by three, but she never counted them, somehow or other it always came out right of its own accord, then the stitches were decreased, and after that it was straightforward, you just went on along needle after needle, Kurt took the same size as Sasha except that he never, to be honest, wore the socks, he always thanked her politely when she gave him socks, but what was a person to do, your hands wanted to be busy with something, in spring there’d be the garden again if she lived to see it, but you had to fill the days until then somehow, watch TV all the time and you went soft in the head, sometimes she read the book Kurt had given her, she could read, after all, she’d taught herself to read when they went to Slava where the Soviets were, only the book was too fat,
War and Peace,
when you reached the middle of it you’d forgotten the beginning, it was about mowing the grass for hay, she remembered that, heavy work, she’d made plenty of hay in her life, mowing after work when she came out of the sawmill, the hay harvest was in August, then came the potato harvest in September, that’s how it had been in Slava. Now she had only the cucumbers, but they practically looked after themselves, you only had to water them now and then, turn on the hose and there you were, life was so easy in Germany, no one in Slava would believe her, life was really easy, but on the other hand it went ahead at such a pace, and Ira did nothing but grumble, sometimes she wondered whether it had been a bad idea to give up the house in Slava, but what was a person with her old bones to do if she couldn’t even climb the ladder any more to oil the weatherboard, no, she wasn’t complaining, but somehow it was getting to be enough, after all, she was seventy-eight, her sisters hadn’t even lived to see twenty, Lyuba and Vera, they were lying somewhere between Gríshkin Nagár and Tartársk, and here she still was, sitting in this place Germany, she even got a pension, three hundred and thirty a month, at first she’d gone on saving for her funeral, she’d always been afraid she might die before there was enough for her funeral, and who knows, then she might be burned, they did that sort of thing here, but by now she had enough three times over and here she still was, still stuffing her pension away in a pillow case, she’d always given a hundred to Sasha right away, Ira wouldn’t take any money, didn’t need it, you see, proud as she was these days, it annoyed Nadyeshda Ivanovna.

Now there was a knock at the door, it was Kurt, was she going to Wilhelm’s birthday party with them? Dear heavens, this morning she’d remembered it, but then it had gone out of her old head again, not that she was going to admit it.

“Of course I’m coming with you,” she said. “What else?”

Only the flower shop near the cemetery was closed by now,
ach ty, rastyopa,
now what, she still had a box of chocolates, she hoped it wasn’t one that Charlotte and Wilhelm had given her, they always gave her chocolates although she didn’t eat them, but it didn’t hurt to have something to offer when Sasha came with his girlfriend, Kalinka or whatever her name was, the new one, was she in America with him or had she stayed in Germany? She hadn’t been so bad, arms a bit too thin, no use for working, but she didn’t really work at work anyway, she was an actress, after all, thin girls were needed in films, or she could give Wilhelm the pickles, good gherkins pickled in the Urals style with garlic and dill, Sasha had always been crazy for her pickles, only were they the right thing for a birthday present, she’d ask Kurt, ninety, that was quite something, and he still looked good, Wilhelm did, almost like eighty, and always wearing a suit, he looked like a government minister and talked like one, too, with emphasis, you could tell at once that he’d seen the world, they’d gone over the sea in a ship, God forbid, she’d once seen the sea, nothing but water all the way to the sky, no one in Slava would believe her, and right at the top, right on the rim of the sea, tiny ships were crawling along as if it was a roof ridge, terrible idea, she’d rather travel by rail, at least you were on God’s earth, and when you were on the move it wasn’t so bad once you were used to it, in the end she actually dropped off to sleep and then woke up, and suddenly she was in Germany, and didn’t even know how far it was, Sasha had once tried to show her on a map, as if you could see from a map how far it was from Tartársk, for instance, to Gríshkin Nagár, on the map it was four fingers away but in real life they’d been on the move for four years or longer, she didn’t know how long now, but they’d been on the move for an eternity, ever since she could remember, going on and on. To be honest, she didn’t remember Tartársk where she’d been born, her father who never came back from the raft, her mother, Marfa, had told them, then later he was suddenly said to have fallen in the war, it was all darkness where she came from, and the first visible thing when she thought back was the road, a faint and flickering picture, the road that never ended, and when she looked down she saw her own dirty feet, that was the first thing she remembered, and the eternal thirst, and she remembered that her hand was red with blood if she struck her forehead with it because of all the mosquitoes.

She put on her good dress, lilac with gold threads in it, and a little, well, showy for her age, in Slava she couldn’t have worn something like that, but here people wore all kinds of things, even the old people, when she’d gone dancing in the Volkso-Dali-Rit ät club once a year, admission free, she’d liked going there when her feet still worked well, even if she didn’t know the proper steps for the dances, she simply danced as they did at home, in the Urals way, you drank a little liqueur and then, all of a sudden, they were all dancing in the Urals way, more or less, now she just had to put her shoes on, good shoes, Ira had found them for her but the state had paid, no one in Slava would believe her, such shoes, good leather shoes, as a child she’d always looked out for shoes like that when they came to a village and she sat in front of the church, she’d hated that, her two big sisters could go looking for work in the village but she, the smallest, had to hold out her hand all day long, head bowed, hand held up in the air, but if no shoes came by you could drop your hand again, she’d been quick to understand that, rags around the feet brought you nothing, raffia shoes only now and then, but as soon as proper shoes turned up you were on the alert, real leather shoes like the ones she was wearing now,
ottopedic
they were called, back in Slava no one had ever seen such things, twelve holes for the laces each side, a pity really that she wasn’t going to Slava, Nina had invited her, there was even a visa for her, but what was a person to do, she couldn’t even get to church with these feet, even her
ottopedic
shoes didn’t help, her feet were finished, had been around the world enough, all the way from Tartársk to Gríshkin Nagár, four years or however long it was on the road, walking, walking every summer, from the thawing of the snow until harvest, and then God grant that the kulak took pity on you, even if it was only a place in the stable that you got for the winter.

To put the shoes on she always had to unthread the shoelaces almost entirely, now she pulled them up again through the twelve holes, tied a bow, and another knot above the bow for safety’s sake, then it was done. She brushed her hair, without going into the bathroom specially, the TV screen was enough for her shaggy locks, thought Nadyeshda Ivanovna, all the better if you didn’t see yourself too well, then she put on her summer coat, it was still warm outside, and instead of the bag that she carried around on such occasions—although why bother, she had the key around her neck on a chain anyway, and she hid her purse in a pocket specially sewn into her skirt—well, instead of the bag she picked up the jar of pickles that had been standing on her table since this morning, sat down on the bed again, and waited for Kurt to fetch her. She didn’t mind waiting when she knew what she was waiting for, far from it, she was happy to wait then. It occurred to her that she hadn’t had anything to eat yet, the cheese roll that Ira had slammed down in front of her still lay on the desk with not a bite taken out of it, but she decided not to touch it, after all, she wasn’t a dog, so she stayed sitting where she was with the jar of pickles in her lap, waiting, thinking of nothing, or at least of nothing in particular, only that the things she was thinking of today were strange, of when she was a child sitting outside the church looking out for shoes, it was a long time since she’d thought of that, but where it was she had no idea now, the village, the faces, all of it forgotten, like the beginning of the book called
War and Peace,
only of course she remembered the day when they found Lyuba lying in the snow, you might have thought she was a frozen rag. She was said to have threatened one of the men with an ax. And then they had to move on, because they were “trouble makers,” in the middle of winter, but the kulak gave them a quarter of a
pud
of bread, she remembered that, and how the people stood at their windows watching, and then—she didn’t remember the rest of it. No idea. Somehow or other they came through. Somewhere or other they found places to stay. Sometime or other—was it that summer, was it the next summer?—they reached Gríshkin Nagár, still the three of them: their mother, Marfa, Vera, Nadyeshda.

She could still remember Vera very well. Lyubov had been the most beautiful, their mother Marfa always used to say, but Vera was the gentlest, and that was how Nadyeshda Ivanovna still remembered her, God-fearing and quiet, and to this day she wondered why Vera, of all people, died such a terrible death. She had only a single winter in Gríshkin Nagár. The first time they’d had a home of their own, their cousin had let them have the use of the little cottage, the gaps were well stopped up with moss, the stove was big enough for exactly three to sleep on it, in the evening the pinewood chips burned there with a resinous fragrance, while they sat together at the table doing this and that in a desultory way. The samovar hummed. Outside the wind howled, or when it was very quiet you heard the wolves howling, far away, as it seemed, but when winter had gone on long enough they came closer, slinking past the houses of Gríshkin Nagár, and when you opened the door in the morning you saw their tracks in the snow. In the summer they were cowardly, you were more likely to be eaten by the mosquitoes than the wolves, you had to be half dead before they attacked you, the men said, she had probably been half crazed with thirst, who knew how long she had been wandering about, people who lose their way go around in circles, it was said, she had been found two years later some twelve or fifteen versts away, they brought back the zinc bucket that she had taken with her when she went out gathering berries, and in the bucket, oh, don’t ask, to this day it gave her goose bumps to think of what was left of Vera, only hoofs and horns left, now you know why, you turn around twice, you reach out for the berries twice, then you’ve lost your sense of direction, the taiga is large, you quickly lose all sense of direction, and then you find out what’s left of the little kid, only hoofs and horns left, in vain she did cry, only little hoofs and horns ... ah well, he’ll have forgotten that, the boy will, and why remember, there were no wolves in Germany, everything was neat and tidy in Germany, even the forest, and who knew if they had any forests at all in America?