In Times of Fading Light (18 page)

Who knew what kind of stuff she was giving him? Stalin himself had been poisoned.

Wilhelm went into the hall where the tombstones were standing, drawn up in rank and file. Their blank labels shone faintly in the reddish light. What for, thought Wilhelm, what are they for? The idea of getting his red pen and writing their names on the labels—Wilhelm controlled himself. Anyway, he knew only the cover names of most of them. He did still know those. Clara Chemnitzer. Willi Barthel. Sepp Fischer from Austria ... he still knew them
all.
Would never forget them. Would soon be taking them to the grave with him.

The doorbell rang. Outside stood the Pioneers’ choir. The woman conductor said: “Three, four ... ,” and the choir struck up “The Song of the Little Trumpeter.” Nice song, but not the one on his mind. Not the tune that kept going through his head all the time.

He hummed it to the Pioneers’ conductor, but she didn’t know it.

She was young to be in charge of a troop of Pioneers, not much older than a Pioneer herself. Wilhelm took a hundred-mark bill out of his wallet.

“Oh, Comrade Powileit, I can’t possibly accept that!”

“Stuff and nonsense,” said Wilhelm. “Buy the children ice cream, it’s my last birthday.”

He put the hundred-mark bill down inside the neckline of the Pioneers’ conductor.

“Then we’ll accept it for the class funds,” said the Pioneers’ conductor.

There were spots of red on her face. She shepherded the children out of the garden. At the gate she turned and looked back once more. Wilhelm ground his teeth and waved.

He marched into the salon. Marched, because that tune kept going through his head. Charlotte was standing by the telephone. When he came in she put the receiver down.

“No one’s picking up the phone,” she said.

Wilhelm could see that Charlotte was on edge. Instinctively, he pursued his previous point.

“So—where
is
Alexander?”

“There’s no one picking up the phone,” Charlotte repeated. “Kurt isn’t picking up the phone.”

“Well, there you are,” said Wilhelm. “Here we go again.”

“Where do we go again?”

“It’s a mess,” said Wilhelm.

“Something has happened,” said Charlotte.

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

“You are not going to extend anything, you’re going to leave me in peace to think for once.”

“Stuff and nonsense,” said Wilhelm. “So who
is
going to extend the extending table?”

“You for one are not going to extend the extending table,” said Charlotte. “You’ve already wrecked enough of this house.”

An outrageous claim that Wilhelm could easily have refuted by enumerating all the repairs he had carried out over almost forty years, all the electrical items he had put right, all the alterations he had made, all the technical household improvements he had introduced—so many difficult words, too difficult, too elaborate, too long, and so Wilhelm just took a step toward Charlotte, stood impressively before her, making play with all his physical height, and said:

“I am a metalworker. I’ve been a Party member for seventy years. How long have you been a Party member?”

Charlotte was silenced. Silenced!

Wilhelm turned and left the room, so as not to spoil his little victory. Two men were standing in the hall.

“Delegation,” said Lisbeth.

“Ah!” Wilhelm shook hands with both of them.

“Your ... your ...” said one of the men, pointing to Lisbeth.

“Household help,” supplied Lisbeth.

“Your house whole help let us in,” said the man.

“Nice fish,” said the other man, pointing to the shell into which Wilhelm had fitted a lightbulb.

They were standing close together, both of them stocky, almost stooped, both wearing coats that were a little too pale and too clean. The man who had said house whole help was holding a plate.

He cleared his throat and began to speak. He spoke softly and laboriously, the words slowly making their way out of him, so slowly that Wilhelm had forgotten his last word before the man got the next one out.

“Come to the point, comrades,” Wilhelm urged them. “I’m busy.”

“In short,” said the man, “you will remember, Comrade Powileit, keyword Cuba, our campaign, at that time, for donations, and we thought it would be to your way of thinking if we were to represent the subject thematically here, that is to say, er, represented as an, er, a vehicle, that being the object of our campaign.”

He held the plate in front of Wilhelm’s nose. Ah, thought Wilhelm, so that’s it. He took a hundred-mark note out of his wallet and slapped it down on the plate.

How they stared at him. But he wasn’t going to be stingy, he’d splash out on his birthday.

Then Mählich arrived on the dot of eleven.

“Wilhelm,” said Mählich, shaking hands with him.

That was what he liked about Mählich: he didn’t use many words. “Take those vegetables to the graveyard,” said Wilhelm. “We’ll extend the extending table.”

They went into the salon and moved the table over to the window. “But Alexander ought to be here any moment,” protested Charlotte. “Stuff and nonsense!” said Wilhelm. “Stuff and nonsense!”

Charlotte left the room.

They pulled out the side panels as far as they would go. Mählich asked: “Wilhelm, what do you think of the political situation?”

He was looking at Wilhelm. Looking at him from under his mighty brows as if looking out of a cave. That was what he liked about Mählich.

He was a serious man. Wilhelm felt encouraged to offer an analysis.

“The problem is,” he said, “that the problem is the problem.”

He folded a central section down. Mählich did the same on his side of the table. Surprisingly, the central sections did not stay put, but gave way and fell right through the frame.

“I don’t understand it,” said Mählich.

“Hammer and nails,” said Wilhelm. “You know where they are.”

Mählich went down to the cellar and came back with a hammer and nails. Wilhelm picked up the central section, measuring the gap between it and the frame with his thumb and forefinger. That was where he placed the nail. Then he removed the nail again, because he felt that his analysis had not convinced Mählich one hundred percent, and said, “The problem is the Chevs, do you see? Chev-Chev.”

Very slowly, Mählich nodded. Wilhelm hit the nail with the hammer.

“Upstarts,” he said.

He hit the nail with the hammer again.

“Defeatists.”

He paused for a moment, and said:

“In the old days we knew what to do with that sort.”

Next nail. Charlotte came in.

“What on earth are you two doing?”

“Extending the extending table.”

“But you can’t go knocking nails into it.”

“Why can’t we?” said Wilhelm.

With his next blow he rammed the nail into the tabletop.

“Oh, my word,” said Mählich.

And Wilhelm said, “We live and learn.”

The big sliding door between the rooms was opened at three thirty, and the party began. In the meantime Wilhelm had had lunch and a little rest. Lisbeth had made him more coffee; she had trimmed the hairs in his nostrils and ears, nudging his shoulders with her swimming-pool breasts several times in the process.

The cold buffet had arrived, and was set out on the extending table. Alexander, on the other hand, still wasn’t there—a fact that delighted Wilhelm. He asked Charlotte several times about her grandson, whom he regarded chiefly as
her
grandson, just as he regarded the whole family chiefly as
her
family. A family of defeatists. Except for Irina. She had at least been in the war. Unlike Kurt, who had been in the labor camp—and now acted as if he’d been a victim. He ought to be glad he’d been in the labor camp! He’d never have survived at the front, half-blind as he was.

Now the bell never stopped ringing. Charlotte was running back and forth like a headless chicken, while Wilhelm sat in his wing chair, sipped cognac from his shiny green aluminum goblet now and then, and took a grim pleasure in embarrassing the guests who lined up in front of his chair to wish him a happy birthday by uttering the same remark over and over again.

“Take those vegetables to the graveyard!”

The Weihes arrived, tripping along in time with each other, speaking in unctuous voices.

Mählich came back with his wife, silly cow, a bottle blonde who was always complaining of her rheumatism although she wasn’t sixty yet.

Steffi, always dolled up these days now that her husband was underground.

“Take those vegetables to the graveyard!”

Bunke arrived, as disheveled as his bouquet of flowers, tie at half-mast, one side of his shirt collar overlapping his lapel. Even as he entered the room he was mopping sweat from his brow. To think that a man like that was a colonel in State Security now—while long ago they had declined to take him, Wilhelm, on the grounds of his being an
immigrant from the West!
That rankled to this day. He, too, would rather have stayed in Moscow. But the Party had sent him to Germany, and he had done what the Party wanted him to do. All his life he had done what the Party wanted him to do—and then, to be described as an
immigrant from the West!

“Take those vegetables to the graveyard!”

Bunke mopped the sweat away again and said, “Might as well stay there myself.”

. . .

Faces that Wilhelm didn’t know appeared.

“Who are you?”

Frau Bäcker who kept the fruit and vegetable shop.

Harry Zenk, head of the academy: hadn’t ever come to his birthday party before.

Till Ewerts—back after his stroke.

“Take those vegetables to the graveyard!”

Aha, Comrade Krüger. The community police officer.

“I’d have known you in uniform, comrade. Take those vegetables to the graveyard!”

. . .

The Sondermanns. Whose son was in prison for attempting to escape to the West.

“I don’t know you two,” said Wilhelm.

“But it’s the Sondermanns,” Charlotte pointed out.

“I don’t know you two!”

For a moment the volume of the voices in the room dropped lower.

“Right,” said Sondermann. He handed their bouquet of flowers to Charlotte and left, along with his wife.

. . .

Kurt arrived with Nadyeshda Ivanovna, but without Irina.

“Irina is sick,” said Kurt.

“And Alexander?”

“Alexander is sick as well,” said Charlotte, sticking her oar in.

Family of defeatists. Except for Irina. And except, of course, for Nadyeshda Ivanovna.

Nadyeshda Ivanovna gave him a jar of pickles.

Wilhelm rummaged around in his memory. It was too long ago that he’d been in Moscow, at that time for training in the Department of International Relations, and the only word he could still dig up from the ruins of his Russian was
garosh,
good, excellent.

“
Garosh, garosh,”
he said.

Nadyeshda Ivanovna said,
“Ogurzy.”

Wilhelm nodded.
“Garosh!”

He got the jar opened (by Mählich—Kurt couldn’t do it, not with his fingers, the fingers of an intellectual) and publicly ate a Russian gherkin. Once he used to smoke Russian
papyrossy.
Now at least he was eating a Russian gherkin.

“
Garosh,”
said Wilhelm.

“You’re spilling it,” said Charlotte. “Stuff and nonsense.”

. . .

Where was the district secretary?

. . .

A child all of a sudden instead. The child was carrying a picture.

“Your great-grandson, Markus,” said Charlotte.

Since when did he have a great-grandson? Wilhelm decided not to ask. He looked at the picture the way you look at pictures that children give you, and was surprised to recognize its subject all of a sudden.

“An iguana!”

“A turtle,” said the child.

“Markus is interested in animals,” said the woman standing beside the child, probably his mother, Wilhelm decided not to ask. Instead, he said:

“When I’m dead, Markus, you’ll inherit the iguana over there on the shelf.”

“Cool,” said the child.

“You’d better take it home with you right away,” said Wilhelm.

“Right away?” asked the child.

“Take it right away,” said Wilhelm. “I won’t be around much longer.”

He watched the child making the rounds of the room, shaking hands nicely like a good boy with all the guests. Only then did he go over to the bookshelves to look at the iguana for a long time, from all sides, still without picking it up ... Wilhelm ground his teeth.

. . .

A man in a brown suit and gold-rimmed glasses. Why didn’t he come closer? Why did he stay standing there?

“Who are you? I don’t know you.”

The deputy, as it turned out. Standing in for the district secretary.

Why the deputy?

“Unfortunately Comrade Jühn is personally incapacitated,” said his deputy.

“Ah,” said Wilhelm. “I’m personally incapacitated myself.”

Everyone laughed, to Wilhelm’s annoyance.

The man opened a red folder. He began making a speech. His eyes were blue. His voice had roughly the frequency range of a telephone receiver. Wilhelm couldn’t understand what the man was saying. Wilhelm was annoyed. The man went on with his speech. His words clattered. They clattered through Wilhelm’s head without revealing their meaning. Noises. Stuff and nonsense, thought Wilhelm. Training as a metalworker. Joining the Party ... immigration to Paris ... Suddenly he caught the drift of it. This was his own CV. The CV that he had written down dozens of times, the CV on which he had spoken umpteen times to the border soldiers, the labor force at the Karl Marx Works, the Young Pioneers—and from which, as usual, all that really mattered was missing.

Everyone clapped. The deputy came over to Wilhelm. He was holding an order; there were dozens of such orders in Wilhelm’s shoebox.

“I have enough tin in my box already,” said Wilhelm.

The deputy leaned down to him and hung the order around his neck.

Everyone clapped, including the deputy, who had his hands free now.