In Times of Fading Light (17 page)

When Günther—stiffly, and without any rolling of his eyes—had opened the meeting, and read out the sole item on the day’s agenda, Comrade Ernst took the floor and, flanked by Günther’s mournful face and the nodding, pregnant with meaning, of the director of the institute, began talking about the
increasingly complex international situation
and
the intensification of the class struggle.
Unlike Günther, Comrade Ernst spoke fluently, almost eloquently, in a thin but penetrating voice that he lowered beguilingly when he wanted to emphasize something—and all at once the way he spoke seemed to Kurt familiar, or perhaps it was his curious habit of leafing through his notebook without actually looking at it as he mentioned the
revisionist and opportunistic powers
in whom, according to Comrade Ernst, the
archenemy
was to be found, and at the word
archenemy
Kurt caught sight of Paul Rohde, who had obviously been sitting close to the committee table all along, gray, shrunken, looking into empty space—done for, thought Kurt. Paul Rohde was finished, expelled from the Party, dismissed without notice, suddenly it was all clear to him. This wasn’t about Paul Rohde. This wasn’t about some damn letter, far from it. This was the realization of something that Kurt had feared for a long time, more precisely since the fall of Khrushchev (although in fact he had feared it since before the fall of Khrushchev), after all, there had been plenty of signs, only those signs had not been signs, Kurt now understood, but the thing itself: the last plenary session at which writers who expressed criticism had been crushed, the minister of culture removed, they had broken with Havemann,
that
was it, it was
there,
in the institute, in the figure of the man with the ever-smiling face, the beguilingly lowered voice, with the notebook through which he leafed without looking at it while he enlightened the meeting on the
role of historiography in the struggles of our time,
and on
the connection between the Party line and historical truth.

Silence had fallen in the room, a silence that did not turn to coughing and rustling even when the speaker came to an end. Now it was Rohde’s turn: self-criticism. Kurt listened to Rohde jerkily reciting the text he had learned by heart, every word of it obviously fixed in advance, Kurt heard him swallowing, the pauses stretched out at unbearable length, until remarks like
with hostile intent ... acted ... irresponsibly ...
slowly formed structures resembling sentences.

Then Günther asked for opinions. The head of the department “spontaneously” spoke up, condemned their colleague Rohde, in whom he was severely disappointed, and then, to a nod of approval from Comrade Ernst, apologized for his own
lack of vigilance.

Next in line was Kurt, that was the order of events. He sensed the attention of the others turning to him. His throat was dry, his head was empty. He himself was surprised by the words that came out of his mouth.

“I’m not sure that I entirely understand what this is about,” said Kurt.

Comrade Ernst narrowed his eyes as if he could hardly see Kurt. You might still have thought he was smiling, but his face had changed to something malicious and piglike.

For a moment silence reigned, and then Günther leaned over to Pig-Face. It was so quiet in the room that Kurt could hear what Günther whispered:

“Comrade Umnitzer was in Moscow last week.”

Pig-Face looked at Kurt and nodded.

“Comrade Umnitzer, no one is forcing you to express an opinion.” And turning to everyone, he added, “We’re not here to stage a show trial, are we, comrades?”

He laughed. Someone laughed with him. Only when the next of his colleagues spoke up did Kurt notice that his own hands were shaking.

One hand was still shaking when he raised it to vote for Rohde’s expulsion from the Party.

Then he felt thirsty. After the meeting he went down the stairs to avoid the rush for the gentlemen’s toilets on the upper floor, and when he opened the door of the toilets one floor lower down he found himself facing Rohde. Rohde looked at him and offered him his hand.

“Thank you,” he said.

“What for?” asked Kurt.

He hesitated to take Rohde’s hand, and when he did it was cold and damp. But he hoped, thought Kurt, that meant it had just been washed.

Shortly before six, Kurt was already at Berlin East station, earlier than usual. The train left punctually, but then stopped one station before Bergholz: a malfunction, the conductor asked the passengers to be patient.

Not that a malfunction on this stretch of the line was anything out of the ordinary, but the low-voiced conversation of the other passengers suddenly got on Kurt’s nerves. He wanted to think, but even his thoughts seemed blocked in the stationary train. He climbed out, crossed the track, which was against the rules, and started walking. Twilight was already beginning to fall, but it was less than ten kilometers to Neuendorf, and he knew this area, they had once gone searching for mushrooms here in the fall. But instead of following the road, which made a long detour around a neighboring village, he struck out from Schenkenhorst along a track that would bring him back to the road a little to the northwest—he could rely on his sense of direction.

He walked briskly, although he was so hungry that he felt a little weak at the knees. At Berlin East he had thought of buying a curry sausage, but then didn’t, fearing it might upset his stomach. Now his sense of hunger was gradually affecting the hollows of his knees: hypoglycemia, that was the word for it. Nothing to worry about. Kurt knew how long the body was still capable of functioning in spite of hunger; it went on functioning for a long time. The sky clouded over. Kurt instinctively quickened his pace. Gradually images of the Party meeting came back into his mind... Pig-Face. Those eyes. That thin, sawing voice:
We’re not here to stage a show trial ...
Who the hell was it that the man reminded him of?

Now the track led straight into the wood. It was distinctly darker here than out in the open fields, and Kurt hesitated. Maybe it would be better to skirt around the wood? Still, what kind of a wood was it? Only a little one. Think how often he had walked in the taiga. Think how often he had spent the night in the taiga! All the same, he was now striding along fast. At this point, however, the track curved farther and farther to the east. So as not to lose his sense of direction, Kurt turned sharply off it and to the left, and walked straight over the soft, mossy ground into the darkness ... then, suddenly, he remembered.

The Lubyanka, Moscow 1941.

Now he saw the man before him. A striking similarity: the narrowed eyes, the crew-cut hair, even the way he had opened the file in his folder and leafed through it without actually looking at it.

“You have criticized Comrade Stalin’s foreign policy.”

The facts of the matter were that, back when the German– Soviet Non-Aggression Pact between Hitler and Stalin was signed, Kurt had said in a letter to his brother, Werner, that time would show how much of an advantage it was to make friends with a criminal.

Ten years’ detention in a labor camp.

For anti-Soviet propaganda and forming a subversive organization. The organization consisted of Kurt and his brother.

And now the soft woodland floor underfoot suddenly seemed uncomfortable. He felt that he heard the grating of the double-handed saws, the eerie roar of the giant trees as, each turning slowly on its own axis, they fell to the ground. And after a while there were images as well, fleeting, disconnected: numbering off in roll call at thirty degrees below freezing; the sight of ice on the ceiling of the hut in the morning, a sight bound up with memories of the muted activity of two hundred occupants of that hut as they got ready for the day, of their body odors, their bad breath (caused by hunger), the stink of the rags around their feet, their nocturnal sweat, their piss ... hard to believe that he had known all that, had known
and survived it.
He thought of Krikhatzky’s Latin primer again, the little book that he had carried in his breast pocket to his work shift—his last private possession, apart from his spoon. The last evidence that another world still existed somewhere out there.
That
was why he had not exchanged the pages of Krikhatzky (to be used as cigarette papers) for bread, had taken it with him into that winter, the worst one, 1942–43, when there was nothing left to barter, no bread because everyone ate his own. You got six hundred grams to fulfill your norm, meaning that—factoring in all the coefficients of severe weather, eight cubic meters of timber in pairs, fourteen trees a day, all chopped by hand into one-meter planks and stripped of branches—meaning that if you fulfilled ninety percent of the norm you got five hundred grams of poor-quality, slimy bread. Less than that and you starved to death. On only four hundred grams of bread you couldn’t fulfill the four-hundred-gram norm, and so on down, until a time came when you got that look men get before they’re found lying dead on their mattresses in the morning, then you were carried out the way you’d carried others out, past the guard, where they stopped for a moment, and the man on duty stubbed out his
machorka,
picked up the hammer, rules are rules, and smashed your dead skull in with it ...

Kurt had been leaning against a tree—a pine, he knew it by its smell. He had closed his eyes, his forehead was touching the bark. Isolated images were still flashing through his mind, but gradually he calmed down. Another sound followed the images, a kind of grunt or groan. An animal, a large one? Kurt knew the rules in that case: play dead. Lie on your stomach, and if it turns you over (because bears did exactly that), then hold your breath. Stop breathing.

Kurt stopped breathing, turned his head to the right, and looked past the pine tree into a small clearing, where a blue Trabi stood ten or fifteen meters away. It was bouncing up and down in a fast, regular rhythm.

Trakhayutzya,
thought Kurt: they’re fucking.

He put on his glasses and checked the license plate—not Irina. Not the Indian chief. He breathed a sigh of relief. His own breath tickled his throat, and his sigh turned into a soft gurgle of laughter. Then he skirted the bouncing car at a tactful distance and walked away.

It was drizzling slightly now, but not really raining. Obviously a storm was caught up somewhere over the River Havel. Kurt’s sense of direction was back, he strode out at a regular pace now. No, he was not in the taiga. There was no labor camp here, there were no brown bears; instead, blue Trabis stood about in the woods with people fucking inside them. If that’s not progress, Kurt asked himself, what is? And wasn’t it also progress if, instead of shooting people, you expelled them from the Party? What did he expect? Had he forgotten how laboriously history moved forward? Even the French Revolution had brought endless confusion in its wake. Heads had rolled. A self-crowned revolutionary general had overrun all Europe, bringing war. It had taken that revolution (incidentally, a bourgeois revolution)
decades
to achieve its aims. Why would the socialist revolution fare any better? Khrushchev had been replaced. Someday there would be another Khrushchev. Someday there would be socialism deserving of that name—if not in his lifetime, in that tiny segment of the history of the world that he happened be witnessing and that, damn it, he intended to use to good effect. Or anyway what he had left of it, after ten years in the camp and five years in exile.

There was a clattering behind him: the Trabi was on the move. Kurt stepped aside and, contrary to anything he would normally do, raised a hand in greeting, dazzled by the headlamps. Although he couldn’t see them, he felt a happy complicity with the strangers in the car who—very probably—had just been cheating on someone.

Now it was really raining. The air smelled of rain and woodland, with a slight note of two-stroke exhaust fumes. Kurt took a deep breath, inhaled it all, breathed in the traces left by the Trabi, and the sweetish odor seemed to him like the smell of sin. It was wonderful to be alive—and also surprising. And as so often at those moments when he could hardly believe that he really was alive, he thought at the same time that Werner was
not
alive: his big little brother, always the stronger and better looking of the two of them ... But while the thought of Werner was normally linked to a certain sense of guilt, this time Kurt felt something new and different, something that did not, like a guilty conscience, lie in his belly but higher up, in his chest, in his throat. It constricted his throat and swelled his chest, and after a little while Kurt identified it as grief. It wasn’t as bad as he had thought. And nor, strangely, could it be separated from the happiness he felt; it mingled with it in an exalted sensation embracing the world. What hurt him was not so much Werner’s death as the life he had not lived. But at the same time he suddenly found it a comfort that he could think of Werner, remember him, that as long as he, Kurt, lived his brother would not have disappeared entirely, that—unlike his mother, who refused to listen to anything about Werner—he preserved his brother from final annihilation in himself, and as rainwater ran down his face he was carried away into imagining (admittedly unscientifically) that he could live for his brother, breathe for him, smell for him, even—and now he remembered his strange duplication—even fuck for him, thought Kurt, and Vera’s
things
appeared in an entirely new light: he could fuck, thought Kurt, in the name of his murdered brother.

Sometimes he forgot what he had to do.

He felt as if he had petrified overnight.

Experimentally, he rolled his eyes.

His left hand twitched.

He turned his head first right, then left.

He saw something grinning at him in the dim light.

Wilhelm took his dentures out of their glass of water and stood up.

He went into the bathroom. He ran bathwater. He turned on the big sunlamp, the Sonya model, and sat down in the tub, equipped with a pair of dark glasses.

His head was empty. Nothing in it but the gurgling of the bathwater. The gurgling bathwater was playing a tune. A tune he knew. A kind of battle song, although at the same time it sounded sad. Sad and belligerent. Unfortunately he couldn’t think of the words of the song.

What a mess. That was the first thought to occur to Wilhelm today.

He nodded. A mess—that was it. He ground his People’s Own Teeth, as he called them, to dispel his sudden melancholy. He went on sitting there until the water came up to his navel.

The fact that his back always stayed white with this method of tanning didn’t bother him. No one saw his back.

After his bath he shaved, holding his mustache down with two fingers. He had cataracts, and they were getting worse and worse. He had often shaved off a piece of mustache by mistake, until he finally adopted the two-finger method so as to preserve at least what was left of his mustache. He put on his long johns over his short underpants, inserting a layer of toilet paper folded several times. He put on his socks and fastened them to his sock suspenders. Regrettably, the diameter of his calves was less than the diameter of the sock suspenders, so there was nothing Wilhelm could do except stuff the sock suspenders inside the socks to keep them from slipping down.

He went downstairs. The tune started up in his head again, sad and belligerent. He ground his teeth. His knee joints hurt as he went downstairs. His feet couldn’t keep time with the tune.

When he saw all the empty vases for flowers in the hall, he remembered that it was his birthday. Instead of going to the mailbox first, as usual, he marched into the kitchen—before he forgot his question.

“Are the vases for the flowers labeled?”

“Many happy returns,” said Charlotte.

She looked at him, hands on her hips, head to one side in her typical way. She looked like a bird.

“I know it’s my birthday,” said Wilhelm.

He sat down and spooned up his porridge. It tasted of nothing. He pushed the plate away and reached for his coffee.

“Don’t forget to take your tablets,” said Charlotte.

“I’m not taking any tablets,” said Wilhelm.

“But you have to take your tablets,” said Charlotte.

“Stuff and nonsense,” said Wilhelm, standing up.

He marched off to the mailbox, but it was empty. It was Sunday. There was no
ND
on a Sunday. Once there used to be a Sunday
ND
as well, but they’d stopped it. What a mess.

He went to his room and closed the door. Suddenly didn’t know what to do next—another of those moments. It was probably because of the tablets. He’d suspected as much for some time. The stiffness in his joints. The emptiness in his head. Who knew what kind of thing she was giving him? Those tablets were making him stupid. Making him forgetful. Making him so forgetful that in the morning he forgot he had made up his mind, the evening before, not to take any more tablets.

The fear of losing his memory. On an experimental basis, Wilhelm tried to remember—but remember what?

He went to the cupboard and took out the shoebox where, as well as medals and orders, he kept various documents relating to his life. He took out a newspaper article that was already slightly damaged by frequent folding. Picking up his magnifying glass, he read:

A Life Lived for the Working Class.

Under the headline, a picture of a man with a bald head and big ears looking confidently into the future.

Wilhelm put the magnifying glass over the middle of the text. Beneath the glass, sliding about and rearing up, the words came through:

... joined the Communist Party of Germany in January 1919 ...

Wilhelm thought it over. Of course he knew he had joined the Party in 1919. He had said so on dozens of CVs. He had told the story hundreds of times: to the comrades, the workers at the Karl Marx Works, the Young Pioneers, but if he thought back, if he really tried to remember that day, all he really remembered was how Karl Liebknecht had told him, “Boy, blow your nose!”

Or hadn’t that been Liebknecht? Or hadn’t it been when he joined the Party?

Charlotte came in with a glass of water, and tablets.

“I’m busy,” said Wilhelm, crossing out the article with a red pencil to lend emphasis to this statement—the way he usually crossed out all articles that he had read so as not to read them twice. Luckily he noticed his mistake at once, and turned the cutting over before Charlotte reached the desk.

“If you don’t take your tablets,” said Charlotte, “I’m going to call Dr. Süss.”

“If you call Dr. Süss, then I’m going to tell him you’re poisoning me.”

“You’re out of your mind.”

Charlotte left—taking the glass of water and the tablets with her.

Wilhelm sat there looking at the life he had accidentally crossed out. Now what? Eliminate it, his conspiratorial instincts told him. He tore up the newspaper article and threw it into the wastebasket ... the hell with it. The most important part wasn’t in it anyway. The most important part wasn’t on any of his dozens of CVs. The most important part was kind of
crossed out
anyway.

His other life. Lüddecke Import & Export. His days in Hamburg. Odd, he could remember them without any difficulty.

His office down by the harbor.

The hiding place for his Korovin 635 pistol—he’d still be able to find it today.

Now the tune was back again. He looked out the window. The sun was shining. The sky was blue, and clusters of red berries hung among the gradually yellowing leaves of the rowan tree. A fine day. A fine, wonderful day, thought Wilhelm, grinding his teeth. Trying to grind his thoughts away.

What for?

What had he risked his ass for? What had people died for? For an upstart like that to ruin everything now?
Chev,
another of them, like Khrushchev back then. Funny thing, both of them ending in
chev.

He took the shoebox over to the cupboard. The orders and medals clinked as he put it away.

He went into the hall. For a moment he wondered what he had gone there to do. When he saw the vases for the flowers he remembered. He went back to his room and found the magnifying glass. Then he picked up one of the vases. There was a label on the vase. The label said—nothing. He picked out a second vase: nothing. He checked the third vase ...

Wilhelm marched into the salon.

“There’s nothing on them,” he said.

“Nothing on what?”

“On the vases for the flowers.”

“Look, I really do have more important things to do right now,” said Charlotte.

“Damn it all, I said the vases ought to have written labels on them.”

“Then write on the labels,” said Charlotte, taking a tablecloth out of the cupboard and paying no more attention to Wilhelm.

He would have liked to explain to Charlotte that her idea was silly; there was no point in writing on the labels now. Written labels ought to have gone on the vases
before
the birthday, so that everyone would get the right vase back
after
it. But arguing with Charlotte wasn’t worth it. His tongue was too heavy to argue with Charlotte, and it took his head too long to turn his thoughts into words.

He marched back to the hall. What was he to do now? He stopped and, at a loss, scrutinized the flower vases drawn up in rows in the cloakroom alcove.

Suddenly they looked like tombstones.

The front door opened. Lisbeth arrived. Bringing the scent of fall in with her. She had a bunch of roses in her hand.

“Many happy returns,” she said.

“Lisbeth, you shouldn’t be spending money on me.”

Lisbeth held out the flowers to him, beaming. Her teeth were a little crooked. But her buttocks were taut, and her breasts rose above her neckline like ripples passing through a swimming pool.

“But you must take them home with you again later,” Wilhelm told her. “Now, make me some coffee, will you?”

“Charlotte said I mustn’t make you coffee,” Lisbeth whispered. “Because of your blood pressure.”

“Stuff and nonsense,” said Wilhelm. “You just make me some coffee.”

He went into his room and sat down at the desk. What ought he to do? He didn’t know, but as he didn’t want to admit that he didn’t know in front of Lisbeth, he picked up his magnifying glass and looked for a book in the bookshelves. Acted as if he were looking for a book in the bookshelves. But he found the iguana. It was a small iguana. He had killed it with his machete a long time ago and had it stuffed. The iguana was very well stuffed, looked almost lifelike. But it was dead. Dead and gathering dust in the bookshelves, and suddenly Wilhelm was sorry he had killed the iguana with his machete. If he hadn’t, who knew, it might still be alive today. How long do iguanas live?

He found the volume of the encyclopaedia with the letter
I,
and leafed through it.

Then Lisbeth came back and put the coffee down on his desk.

“Psst,” she went.

“Come here,” said Wilhelm.

He took a hundred-mark bill out of his wallet.

“That’s too much,” said Lisbeth.

But she went over to him all the same. Wilhelm held her close and put the hundred-mark bill down her neckline.

“Ooh, you bad boy,” said Lisbeth.

Her cheeks flushed red and were even plumper than usual. She extracted herself gently from his embrace, took the little tray on which she had brought the coffee, and walked away.

“Lisbeth?”

“Yes?”

She stopped.

“If I die, she killed me.”

“Oh, Wilhelm, how can you say a thing like that?”

“I’ll say what I like,” said Wilhelm. “And I want you to know it.”

For a little while he thought he could still feel the swell of her swimming-pool breasts against his body.

The doorbell rang. Wilhelm heard someone arriving. Then there was no more to be heard. Murmuring. Then Schlinger appeared. With a bunch of carnations.

“I’ll be off again in a minute,” said Schlinger. “I wanted to be the first.”

Wilhelm was studying the encyclopaedia. Iguanas, he had found out, grew to be up to two meters twenty in length. Unfortunately he couldn’t find out how long they lived.

“Many happy returns of the day,” said Schlinger, “and I wish you plenty of creative power on into the future, dear Wilhelm, and ...”

“Take those vegetables to the graveyard,” said Wilhelm.

Schlinger laughed.

“Always in a good humor,” he said. “Always with a joke on his lips.”

“And what did
she
say?” asked Wilhelm.

“Who?”

“Charlotte.”

Schlinger made a stupid face. Corners of his mouth turning down, eyebrows raised. His forehead was furrowed with fat, sausage-shaped folds.

“I know what she said,” said Wilhelm. “The old man’s off his rocker. Crazy as a coot.”

“But Wilhelm, you’re not entirely ...”

“What?”

“I mean, for your age you’re still entirely ...”

“Off my rocker,” said Wilhelm.

“No, no, intellectually you’re still absolutely ...”

Schlinger waved the carnations about in the air.

“I’m
slightly
off my rocker,” said Wilhelm. “But not
entirely
off my rocker.”

“Of course not,” said Schlinger.

“I can see how things are going.”

“Of course you can,” said Schlinger.

“Downhill, that’s what.”

Schlinger took a deep breath, but then said nothing. Wagged his head, you couldn’t tell whether he was shaking it or nodding. Then, grave all of a sudden, narrowing his eyes: “To be honest, there are problems.

But we’ll solve them.”

“Stuff and nonsense,” said Wilhelm.

He would have liked to point out to Schlinger that problems— problems of that kind—weren’t solved by the Potsdam District Committee. He would have liked to point out to him that problems—problems of that kind—were solved in Moscow, and that the problem was that very thing, it was that Moscow itself was the problem. But his tongue was too heavy and his mind too sluggish to find the words for such a complicated idea. So all he said was:

“Chev.”

Schlinger’s forehead was set in those sausage-shaped folds. His head came to a halt. His eyes looked upward at a slant and past Wilhelm.

Suddenly he looked like an iguana.

“How old do iguanas live to be?”

“What?”

“Iguanas,” said Wilhelm. “Don’t you know anything about iguanas?”

“They’re some kind of reptile.”

“That’s it,” said Wilhelm. “Reptile.”

“I think they live to be old,” said Schlinger. His head waggled, and he made a face as if he had said something intelligent.

When Schlinger had left, Wilhelm remembered what it was he had to do. He marched into the salon.

“I’m going to extend the extending table,” said Wilhelm.

But Charlotte said:

“Alexander will do that.”

“I’ll do it myself,” said Wilhelm.

“You can’t,” said Charlotte. “Alexander will do it,”

“Alexander! Since when can Alexander do
anything?
”

“Only Alexander can extend that extending table, we’ve been over this I don’t know how many times.”

“Stuff and nonsense.”

Of course he could extend the extending table. After all, he’d trained as a metalworker. What had Alexander trained to do?
What was he, really?
Nothing. At least, Wilhelm could think of nothing that Alexander might be. Apart from unreliable and arrogant. The fellow hadn’t even joined the Party. But his tongue was too heavy and his mind too sluggish to argue with Charlotte.