In Times of Fading Light (19 page)

The cold buffet was opened. Irregular traffic began moving between the two rooms, until people settled down at tables, both large and smaller, with their plates. Wilhelm sat to one side in his wing chair, sipping from his shiny green aluminum goblet. He thought of what really mattered. Of what his CV left out. Of Hamburg and his office by the harbor. Of the nights, the wind. Of his Korovin 635 pistol. He didn’t
think
about all this, he remembered. He felt how it had lain in his hand. He felt the weight of it. He remembered the smell—after you had pulled the trigger ... and what, Wilhelm wondered, what for? He closed his eyes. There was a rumbling in his head. Talk. Pointless talk. Stuff and nonsense. Only now and then—or was he imagining it?—now and then, through the stuff and nonsense, he could hear a hoarse barking: Chev! ... And again: Chev—Chev.

Wilhelm briefly opened his eyes: Kurt, who else? You’re another of them, you’re a Chev yourself, thought Wilhelm. Defeatist! The whole family! Apart from Irina, at least she’d been in the war. But Kurt? Kurt had been in the camp during the war. Had been made to work, what a terrible thing, work with his delicate little hands that couldn’t even open a jar of pickles. Other people, thought Wilhelm, had risked their asses. Other people, he thought, had perished in the struggle for the cause, and he would have liked to stand up and talk about those who had perished in the struggle for the cause. Talk about Clara, who saved his life. Willi, who soiled his pants with fear. Sepp, tortured to death in some Gestapo cellar because
one traitor too few
had been eliminated. That was how it had been, Professor Smart Aleck who can’t open a jar of pickles. That was how it had been—and how it still was. That’s what he would have liked to say. And there was something else he’d have liked to say: about then and now. And about traitors. And he’d have liked to say what was to be done now. And what the problem was, he’d have liked to say that, but his tongue was too heavy and his head was to old to make words out of what he knew. He closed his eyes and leaned back in his wing chair. Didn’t hear the voices anymore. Only the murmuring in his head, like the bath-water gurgling in the morning. And a tune came out of the murmuring. And out of the tune came—words. There they suddenly were, the words he had been looking for: simple and sad and clear, and so natural that at that same moment he forgot he had forgotten them.

He sang quietly, to himself, emphasizing every syllable. With a slightly dragging rhythm, he realized. With an unintentional tremolo in his voice:

Then the truck stopped, and the tailgate opened.

A head appeared. The head was wearing a uniform cap. The head began shouting. Little bubbles of saliva formed on its teeth, shining in the white glare of the lights before they burst.

As for what the head was shouting, you couldn’t make it out. A peculiar language that seemed to consist almost entirely of vowels.

A second head emerged, and then another. Next moment four or five uniformed men were standing beside the tailgate bawling, bawling all at once and in competition with each other.

There was movement under the tarpaulin. People grabbed their bags and jumped off the payload area one by one. Stumbled, got caught up somewhere. Alexander jumped, too. His hand touched the coarse surface of the parade ground, which felt like a cinder track.

On the second day he began to understand the bawling.
Attaduble aaarch
meant: at the double, march. And
kumpny tenshun
meant: company stand to attention. With individual variations.

On the third day he found that he could understand almost all the consecutive sentences containing the word “ass”:
Move your ass, you loser,
or,
You’ll be cleaning the latrine floor with your toothbrush, asshole,
or, instructively:
When you run your ass is the highest part of your body.

On the fourth day they had political instruction for the first time:
Neo-Fascism and Militarism in the Federal Republic.
Anyone who fell asleep had to stand through the rest of the lecture.

On the fifth day his first letter from Christina arrived. He tore it open at once, read it on his way to the dormitory. Read it again more carefully, put it in his breast pocket, and then read it that evening in bed.

The sixth day was a Sunday. On Sundays you could go to the company’s formal common room, known as the Culture Room—if you put on your walking-out uniform. If you had brought coffee from home, you could drink it there.

Alexander had not brought any coffee from home. He stayed in the dormitory. Lying on his bed, he read Christina’s letter for the tenth or fifteenth time. Read, with relief, that after his departure she had been “sad all day long.” Read, uneasily, that this weekend she and a colleague from the library were going to the Scharmützelsee holiday park to “take their minds off things.” Reproached her mildly for that in his answer. Struck out his reproaches. Started his letter again. Described the view from the window: a newly built block, a fence behind it. He could have added: a tank exercise ground behind it, but he wasn’t sure: was that one of the military matters about which they had been told to keep quiet. Would his letter be censored?

On the seventh day they were standing on the exercise ground,
drawn up in rank and file
(meaning in three rows), waiting for something to happen (Alexander had already discovered that standing around and waiting was among a soldier’s principal occupations). He still had slight headaches, caffeine withdrawal symptoms, head squeezed by his steel helmet, both parts of his combat pack on his back, gas mask container around his neck, Kalashnikov over his shoulder. His ears, still not used to exposure, began aching in the keen wind whistling by under the prominent rim of the National People’s Army helmet, but they were standing to attention, they weren’t allowed to move. Alexander looked at the neck of the man in front of him and his ears, which looked exactly the way his own ears felt, that is, bright red—and suddenly he thought of Mick Jagger, wondering as he stood here on this exercise ground, a hill known as the Katzenkopf, looking at the red ears of the man in front of him, what someone like Mick Jagger was doing now. He vaguely remembered a photograph from some Western magazine: Mick Jagger in his bedroom, in a fleecy pullover and leggings, a little effeminate, sleepy, obviously he had only just gotten out of bed, so maybe, Alexander imagined, next moment he would go into a large, sunny kitchen, make himself coffee, unless someone had already done it for him, he would eat a fresh cheese roll and grapes (or whatever it was people ate over there), and then, while Alexander was crawling over the Katzenkopf or doing shooting practice with blank cartridges or moving across the exercise ground with individuals lunging out of line, would strum the guitar a little and note down a few ideas, or have himself driven to the studio in a weird limousine to record a new song that he would then present to the international public on his next tour, a tour where he, Alexander, would not be in the audience, the way he had never been in the audience for any Rolling Stones tour and never would be, thought Alexander, as he stood on the Katzenkopf in a steel helmet with both parts of his combat pack on his back, staring at the red ears of the man in front of him, he would never hear the Rolling Stones live, he would never see Paris or Rome or Mexico, would never see Woodstock, never even see West Berlin with its nude demos and student riots, its free love and its Extraparliamentary Opposition, none of that, thought Alexander, while some corporal holding the service regulations explained what position a marksman was to adopt when firing from a prone position, namely,
keep your body straight, take diagonal aim,
he would never see any of it, never know it live, because between here and there, between one world and another, between the small, narrow world where he would have to spend his life and the other big, wide world where real, true life was lived—because between those two worlds there was a border, and it was one that he, Alexander Umnitzer, would soon have to
guard.

That was on the seventh day.

On the twenty-fifth day they were sworn in. The ceremony took place in a square somewhere outside the barracks. Speechifying, banners, kettledrums, trumpets. Then they took the oath that they had had to learn by heart in political instruction. Their superiors went along the rows checking that everyone was really saying the words of the oath.

After the swearing-in they were allowed out for the first time. Christina and his parents had come to the ceremony. His mother cried at the sight of him in uniform. Alexander made haste to reassure her: he was doing fine, he said, there was no war on, even the food was acceptable.

Embracing Christina after almost a month was strange. She was smaller and more delicate than he remembered, surrounded by an overwhelmingly feminine aura. Alexander breathed in the air that she stirred up as she moved, feeling clumsy and ridiculous in his coarse, ill-fitting uniform, with his bowl cut and his silly cap. For a second he thought he saw horror at the sight of him in Christina’s face, but then she fell into an inappropriately cheerful mood.

They walked through a town unknown to them, Halberstadt by name, which was swarming with soldiers and their families. The restaurants were overcrowded. Christina had the idea of looking for a place to eat a little way outside the town, but Alexander’s few hours of leave were—of course—confined to Halberstadt. So they ate in one of the overcrowded restaurants, where there was nothing left on the menu but lecsó stew made with tomatoes and peppers. Lecsó. Irina didn’t eat anything, but smoked. They talked about this and that as they waited for their food; Kurt was working on his book about Lenin’s exile in Switzerland, hoping that now Honecker was in office it might be published after all; Wilhelm was very sick again—Alexander caught himself thinking that he might get special leave for Wilhelm’s funeral. Baba Nadya had decided to move to the GDR, but as the bureaucratic process would take months, if not years, they wondered whether the old lady would survive the waiting time in Slava. Then Kurt and Irina left so that
the children
could have a little time on their own.

They had four hours. Alexander decided to show Christina the barracks. They went along the hilly road, down the street paved with concrete slabs that led straight to the tank exercise ground, and Alexander began telling her about it. He told her about forced marches carrying a combat pack. About the blisters you got on your feet, the handles on ammunition crates that cut into your fingers, the dangerous practice grenades, the radioactivity; even, and almost with pride, of how someone in the neighboring company had died after vomiting into his gas mask, unnoticed by the trainers, and as Christina commented on his tale now and then with an appreciative
I see
or a sympathetic
My God,
he felt that somehow it was all wrong, and not because of his occasional exaggerations, not because of the little points that he was instinctively beginning to make, but that this was simply the wrong thing, it was not what it was all about.

On the left, behind tall wooden fencing, the Russian barracks rose, comparatively brightly colored, oriental in appearance (the fence was green, the building yellow, the curbs whitewashed, the red star on the gate freshly painted), and on the right, visible from a considerable distance behind the barbed wire fence, was the regimental border training building (flat, rectangular, gray). In silence, Alexander counted the windows, meaning to show Christina where “his” room was, but then changed his mind. What did the sight of a window say? What did the sight of a newly built block say about the omnipresent idiocy, about the sense of being shut up, about the petty little details that filled and made up a day here: the constant physical proximity of the others in the dormitory, their dirty jokes in the evening before going to sleep, the socks they stretched over their boots for the odor to wear off, or standing at the urinals in the morning to piss along with a hundred other men, an involuntary witness as they shook and knocked and milked off the last little drop of their pee.

Christina said she thought the barracks “didn’t exactly look nice,” but added that presumably a “modern building” like that had its advantages, for instance, in respect of cleanliness and hygiene.

Alexander said nothing. He said nothing all the way back, he preserved an iron silence, although Christina didn’t seem to notice, he firmly resolved not to say another word—and then, in the restaurant where (unnecessarily) they had another coffee, he did start talking again. Talked, and was angry with himself for not keeping his mouth shut, for talking about socks and urinals after all, despised himself for it, and at the same time was cross with Christina who, as he talked, was beginning to look at her watch, and who finally—sounding partly annoyed, partly well meaning—silenced him at last.

“Think of your father. I’m sure he went through worse.”

He took Christina to the rail station. Their time was up. Christina walked along beside him, with her aura and her angelic hair, her hand was cold and she took small steps, and suddenly Alexander hated her. And at the same time longed for her. But she shook loose and was leaving him there, a pathetic sniveler with his bowl cut and his uniform, he had to hold on to her, forced her into the entrance of a building, thought she must be infected by his own desire, thought when she resisted that he would have to use force, tried to turn her around, tore at her pantyhose, but Christina defended herself with surprising strength, making an odd whimpering sound, and then they were standing there facing each other, both of them breathing fast, and Alexander turned and walked away.

It wasn’t yet nine. Alexander went back into the restaurant, sat down, ordered beer, ordered schnapps, then another beer, watched the waitress, looked at her thighs, only just covered by a black skirt, saw how their plump insides rubbed against each other as she walked through the bar (unlike Christina’s thighs, which always had a finger’s breadth of space between them), and without stopping to think about it Alexander would have given a conscript’s entire monthly wage, eighty marks plus forty marks border allowance, minus the bill for beer and schnapps that he had run up, to be able to put his hand between the plump thighs of the waitress at the Harzfeuer restaurant in Halberstadt. He ordered another beer before finishing the one he already had, asked the waitress’s name, which was Bärbel, told her with vague hope in his voice that he had leave to stay out until midnight. She smiled, shook her chestnut hair back from her face, cleared away ashtrays, collected glasses, brought new, full glasses, moving lithe as a fish between the tables, most of them occupied by soldiers, disappeared, reappeared, cast him what he thought were brief, meaningful glances, showed her incisors as she smiled, and finally brought him not another schnapps but his bill, refused his generous tip, and warned him sternly that he’d better get moving if he was going to be back in the barracks on time.

Then he went down the concrete-surfaced road, above him a huge, starry sky that was inclined to fall on him all the time, inside him lecsó stew that was inclined to rush out of him, otherwise nothing mattered, he was only surprised to find that he actually was going in the direction of the barracks, was going back in there of his own free will, assuming he wasn’t run down by a car on the way, but for unfathomable reasons that didn’t happen. When he was in bed everything, although it couldn’t be seen in the dark, began going around and around, the lecsó stew couldn’t be kept down any longer, and landed not in the toilet but in one of the twenty basins in the company washroom. Now the duty NCO appeared and told Alexander to put on his field service uniform (a very difficult task), then they went over the barracks terrain together, while Alexander explained to the duty NCO that he loved Christina and they called each other Bonny, no, not Pony, Bonny like in the song, then they reached the guardhouse, where Alexander’s belt was removed, they took him to a small room where there was nothing but a bedstead without even a mattress on its network of steel springs, and when Alexander was fetched from the detention cell at six on Sunday morning, so that he could clean the basin in which he had vomited before the company got up, he had, as he saw in one of the twenty mirrors in the washroom, the imprint of the steel springs on the right-hand side of his face.

He wrote Christina a remorseful letter that very Sunday. However, Christina did not write back, although she had written him every day so far, or at least there was no letter from her on Tuesday, or Wednesday either. On Thursday Alexander wrote threatening to dump her, and he would have taken the threat back on Friday if the combat alarm hadn’t intervened.