In Times of Fading Light (16 page)

He quickly put the note in the pocket of his bathrobe and went to the front door, still with that image before his eyes, an image dating from last summer, a vacation by the Black Sea, where they had been by chance at the same time as Vera, whom they had been surprised to meet in the transit lounge. Kurt had known her only slightly, a former colleague of Irina’s from her time in the archives of the Neuendorf Academy. Vera, it turned out, was with their own travel group, and as it also turned out, she was recently divorced, so she was flying to Nessebar on her own, and it was from there—from the beach at Nessebar—that the image, however fleetingly, went through Kurt’s mind as he took the twelve or fourteen steps from his desk to the front door. All three were visiting a southern seaside resort for the first time, and all three had been surprised to find, when they set foot on the beach, how
hot
the sand was. Kurt had instinctively begun hopping from foot to foot, and so did the women, suddenly they were all hopping from foot to foot, performing a silly little dance, and also joining the dance were Vera’s
things,
coming into view in some strange way or perhaps just because the belt of her bathrobe had come loose, Kurt thought of them as
things,
he couldn’t think of another word for them, heavy, white
things
with tiny blue veins running through them, and they were still dancing in front of Kurt’s nose when he opened the front door and looked into a round face with a crooked smile, which he identified a few fractions of a second later as being the face of his party secretary, Günther Habesatt.

“Hello there,” said Kurt.

“Sorry to bother you,” said Günther, shifting from one leg to the other as if in urgent need of a pee.

But Günther was not in need of a pee. He stood there for a while, still shifting from one leg to the other, in the middle of Kurt’s study, expressed his admiration of the house and the room and the imported Swedish wall unit full of books, refused coffee but asked for a glass of water, and then sat down in one of the rather shabby shell-shaped chairs that came from Charlotte’s house, into which Günther’s sizable body mass sank as if into a bathtub. Secretly, Kurt despised men who ran to fat. On the whole Günther was a nice guy, helpful, not an intriguer, but a rather weak and susceptible character, or so at least Kurt thought he could conclude from the fact that Günther had let himself be persuaded, if reluctantly (or anyway giving an impression of reluctance), to become party secretary. Kurt had also been approached, but he had—of course—refused.

After he had tipped the contents of the glass of water into his big body—downing it apparently without swallowing at all—Günther glanced around the room once more, as if he might have overlooked someone, and began, lowering his voice, wagging his head, and rolling his eyes, to explain why he had turned up. The occasion for his visit was as simple as it was stupid. In that historical journal the
Zeitschrift für Gewissenschaft
Paul Rohde, a rather high-spirited and not always well-disciplined member of Kurt’s study group, had written a review of a book by a West German colleague casting a critical light on the so-called United Front policy of the Communist Party of Germany at the end of the 1920s (which as everyone knew had really been a divisive policy, sullying Social Democracy and encouraging fascism in the worst imaginable way!), and then Rohde personally had sent his West German colleague a copy of his review, together with an apology for its negativity, the whole study group, he said, thought the book clever and interesting,
but in the GDR, unfortunately, they were still far from being able to discuss the subject of the United Front policy openly ...

Writing in such terms to a West German colleague was, of course, incredibly stupid, but ... there was something that Kurt didn’t understand. With growing discomfort he listened to Günther telling the rest of the story, which in brief was that the Scientific Department of the Central Committee of the SED, the Socialist Unity Party of Germany, was demanding the imposition on Comrade Rohde of a stiff penalty, its nature to be decided tomorrow, Monday, at the Party meeting, and on this occasion—
you know what it’s like
—it was expected that Rohde’s colleagues, but particularly his colleagues in the study group, and even more particularly Kurt, would express “spontaneous” opinions, and, Günther explained, he had wanted to let Kurt know in advance, in strict confidence, as he hardly needed to say ...

“And how, if you don’t mind my asking, do you know about the contents of the letter?”

Günther didn’t seem to understand him.

“Why, from the Central Committee,” he said.

“So how did the Central Committee know?”

Günther rolled his eyes, raised his fat arms, and then said, “Oh, well.”

When Günther had gone, Kurt put on his work clothes and went out into the garden. The weather was good, and you had to make use of good weather somehow. He got out the rake, but there were hardly any leaves lying around, so he wondered whether there was anything he could prune. However, he wasn’t sure; buds were already showing, maybe it was too late to prune. Although he had given up the idea of pruning, he went on looking for the shears for a while, but without finding them. Instead he found a few tulip bulbs and decided to plant them. He walked around the garden for some time, looking for a suitable place, but couldn’t make up his mind. His stomach spoke up: a rumbling that Kurt decided must be hunger. He put the tulip bulbs back in the shed.

When he entered the house, loud music was coming from Sasha’s room: the British Beat music that he listened to these days. Kurt knocked on the door of the room and went in. Sasha turned the volume down slightly. He was sitting at his desk with the tape recorder right in front of him, his textbook propped on it, and he was writing something in a school exercise book.

“You can’t do homework with that racket going on,” said Kurt.

“It’s only biology,” Sasha told him, as he played with a little silver cross that he was wearing on a chain around his neck.

“Well, well,” said Kurt. “Are you a Christian now?”

“Nope,” Sasha informed him. “It’s a hippie cross.”

Hippie. Kurt knew the word from TV—Western TV. They’d been talking about hippies more and more often on Western TV: long-haired figures whom Kurt somehow connected with this new kind of music, and who, this much was clear, on principle rejected any idea of working.

“Ah,” said Kurt. “Thinking of being a hippie, are you?”

Sasha grinned.

Kurt turned around and was leaving the room, but he suddenly stopped dead.

“All my life,” he said, “I’ve been trying to bring you up to work. And now ...”

All at once he heard himself shouting.

“So now you’re going to be a hippie! My son the hippie!”

He snatched up the tape recorder, which fell silent after a plaintive belch, and strode away. Only when he reached his study did he notice that he had pulled out the cable.

As he showered—not that he was dirty, but you always showered after working in the garden—the scene was still running through his mind. He was annoyed, although really with himself, but he tried all the harder to justify his fit of rage. There was certainly no acute danger of Sasha’s becoming a hippie. But his feeble attitude, his laziness, his lack of interest in everything that he, Kurt, considered important and useful ... how could he make his son understand what it was all about? The boy was intelligent, no doubt about that, but he lacked something, thought Kurt.
Something inside him.

He thought of the Krikhatzky for the second time today: the little Latin primer that had gone through the camp with him, and for a moment he wondered how far the fact that
even in the labor camp
he had been preparing for the Latin exam that would admit him to further studies could be assessed in educational terms—something of that nature went through Kurt’s mind, but he had to admit that it was nonsense. He hadn’t been preparing for his Latin exam in the camp. He’d been going hungry. And the hunger had made him so dull witted that he had sometimes wondered whether the damage was irreparable. It had been a close shave, anyway, thought Kurt, and as he began working on his legs with the body brush he dimly remembered the strange, half-crazed states of mind that had afflicted him, remembered the voice in his mind that gradually took over giving him commands, detached, indifferent and always—how strange—in the third person. Now he’s freezing ... now it hurts him ... now he must get up ...

Stop that. Wrong program. Using the body brush after the cold shower was part of his morning ritual, and he had inadvertently slipped into it. Kurt put the brush down, looked at himself in the mirror. Sometimes he found it hard to believe that he really still existed. And then the past seemed like a hole into which, if he wasn’t careful, he might fall again. Some day or other, he thought, he’d write all this down. When the time was ripe for it.

He dressed and set about warming up the lunch. It was beef goulash with red cabbage. Sasha came in—minus the hippie cross. Sat down at the table, stooping, eyes intently fixed on his plate. He pushed the red cabbage around with his fork, putting the sliced leaves in his mouth one by one. Even at the age of twelve, it was still his habit to eat everything separately, meat and then vegetables. But Kurt decided to overlook it this time. Instead he tried sweet reason again.

“I’ve always let you listen to your music,” said Kurt. “Haven’t I?” Sasha went on pushing red cabbage around.

“Haven’t I?” Kurt repeated.

“Yes,” said Sasha.

“But if your enthusiasm for that Beat music leads you to want to be a hippie, I must tell you that your teachers will be right if they tell you to steer clear of it. Do you wear that thing to school, by any chance?”

Sasha pushed the red cabbage about.

“I’m asking, do you wear that cross to school?”

“Yes,” said Sasha.

Kurt felt his anger rising again.

“Are you really such a fool?”

Kurt chewed thirty-two times, as the specialist in internal medicine had advised him, then put down his cutlery and observed his son, who was still pushing red cabbage around. Observed the slender wrists (or to be precise, the right wrist; Sasha’s left hand had disappeared below the tabletop), the long, curved eyelashes that he had inherited from Irina (they annoyed Sasha because he thought they made him look girlish), the uncontrollable curls that were like his own, Kurt’s (and that were always giving Sasha trouble at school because a school principal who toed the Party line one hundred percent detected the influence of decadent Western youth culture in every millimeter of hair that stuck out beyond the students’ ears). And suddenly he felt an uncontrolled, almost painful need to protect his son from all the uncertainties that were yet to come his way.

His stomach rumbled that night. In the morning Irina prescribed him bed rest with frequent changes of position. Kurt tried to do a little work on his new book on Hindenburg, with a heating pad under his sweater. Then, with nothing but chicken soup inside him, he set off.

The way to the institute—since the building of the Wall—was a long one. In the old days the suburban trains had run right through West Berlin, and for those who must not set foot in the western sectors there had been special trains that ran between Friedrichstrasse and Griebnitzsee without stopping. Now there was the Sputnik, describing a wide detour around West Berlin. To reach it Kurt first had to take the shuttle bus to Drewitz station, and from there go one station on to Bergholz, which was on the Sputnik ring. Boarding the Sputnik, he traveled, all being well, to Berlin East station, and finally he spent another fifteen minutes on the suburban train to Friedrichstrasse. Luckily he had to make this trek only on a few days, since one of the pleasing aspects of the notorious shortages in the GDR was a shortage of office space, and as a result those who taught at the Institute of History were urged to work from home. Kurt usually fixed the discussions of his study group for Monday, so it was an obligatory day for attendance in any case. He also shirked his duties whenever possible, declining to attend events of secondary importance on the grounds that, living in Neuendorf, he had farther than anyone else to come, even cutting meetings, on the pretext of buses running late—a difficult excuse to check up on, or pleading his poor health: the stomach problems that, without actually saying so, he managed to present as being caused by the labor camp, thus winning shamefaced understanding from his superiors, even if they guessed more about his experiences in the camp than they really knew—and he did all this without any guilty conscience at all. Far from it, he considered that every meeting he could avoid was working time gained. What counted for Kurt was the number of pages he wrote, and in that respect, so far as his number of academic publications was concerned, he held the undisputed record.

It was only five minutes’ walk from Friedrichstrasse. The institute was diagonally opposite the university on Clara-Zetkin-Strasse, in a former girls’ school built in the 1870s, sandstone facade now blackened by soot over the years and still, even twenty years after the Second World War, bearing marks of the artillery pounding it had suffered in the last days of the conflict. Once you were past the janitor, an ostentatious flight of steps led to the slightly raised first floor, where the management of the institute had made itself at home. Kurt’s department was on the top floor. The modest conference room was already very full when Kurt arrived, more chairs had to be fetched from the secretaries’ office, although these additional chairs stood in a cluster at the back of the room, while in front, where members of the small committee were just taking their places, the space was more sparsely occupied.

The committee consisted of Günther Habesatt, the director of the institute, and a guest from the Academic Department of the Central Committee of the SED, whom Günther introduced as Comrade Ernst. The man was around Kurt’s age. He was not very tall, distinctly shorter than Günther and the director, and had gray hair cut short and a face that seemed to be constantly smiling.