In Times of Fading Light (22 page)

Body chemistry? Downright lunacy? Or a moment of enlightenment? For days after that, he had gone around the streets with a deranged smile, every rusty streetlamp had looked to him miraculous, the mere sight of the yellow trains rattling their way along the stretch of overhead track above Schönhauser Allee set off feelings of happiness, and in the eyes of the children who surrounded him, the smiling man, looking into his face without inhibition, he had seen it more than once: something for which he, brought up an atheist, had no term available to him.

Is his sin pride? Is it that he really believed he was now, once and for all, proof against anything? Or is it to have suppressed and denied all this at some point? Is repentance demanded of him? Must he learn to acknowledge the message at last? To name the name that so easily passed the lips of the two Swiss women?

In the parking lot outside the city of Teotihuacán there are more cars and buses than Alexander expects, more than he feared. The new arrivals walk in batches past the souvenir shops to the entrance. Tickets are on sale. It is hot and dusty. The caravan of tourists moves slowly along the Avenue of the Dead—the main road of the former city. A road with steps in it; the Aztecs were unacquainted with the wheel. As a result, to this day nothing with wheels travels on the broad, smoothly paved Magistrale. Even the souvenir sellers standing to left and right in the strong sunlight carry their few wares here, offer them for sale on lightweight folding tables, drape them over themselves, or convey them on small vendors’ trays slung in front of them.

One of the souvenir sellers addresses Alexander, accompanies him for a few steps. The man is small and no longer young. His fingernails are as black as the little obsidian tortoises he is selling. Obsidian—the material used by priests for the knives with which they cut their victims’ hearts from their living bodies, ripping them out through the ribs. Alexander picks up a tortoise, not to examine it but to find out what obsidian feels like. The man talks, assures him that he made the tortoise with his own hands, lowers the price—from fifty to forty pesos, four dollars. Alexander buys the tortoise.

Then he is standing in front of the Pyramid of the Sun, quite close to the place where his grandmother must have stood sixty years ago, wondering what he was really expecting. Is he really stupid enough to have expected it to be empty up there at the very top? Did he think anyone could be alone with these stones, if only for a moment? He doesn’t remember. He stands there, stares at the pyramid. His hand closes around the shell of the tortoise as if it were the handle of a knife. Then, before desperation overcomes him, he sets off. His brown walking shoes come alternately before his eyes, one dusty, one polished ... it’s two hundred and forty-eight steps, that, he thinks, is what it said in the
Backpackers’ Guide,
the third largest pyramid in the world. He counts only the steps taken by his polished shoe. He must make it to the top without giving up, at least that. But clearly the steps built by the Indians do not conform to the industrial norm in Germany. He senses that he is going too fast. He knows what’s happening in his body: a point will come when the concentration of lactate in his muscles rises. The pain in his thighs is getting worse at the same time as his weariness increases. He fights it for a while, as if he could outwit his body chemistry. He slows down. His head is ringing with his heartbeat. The volume of his lungs no longer seems adequate. He has counted his polished shoe ninety-six times. When he starts coughing he gives up and has to sit down.

Head propped on his hands, he examines the porous gray stone blocks used to build the steps. People whom he overtook just now are climbing past him to left and right. Women in flip-flops. One woman in platform soles, one who is even wearing red high heels. Then flip-flops again, two pairs ominously making for him: one pair black, the other pair pink ...

Black flip-flops stop first, carefully depilated legs, gleaming with oil, slightly bandy.

“You’re in amazing condition,” says Kati.

“I thought you two were going to the Trotsky Museum,” said Alexander.

“The city’s too full,” says Kati. “It’s the national festival today.”

However, both of them, even Nadya, seem pleased to meet him by chance. Obviously they now expect Alexander to go on to the top with them, and they are surprised, almost hurt, and then slightly concerned when he declines.

“Aren’t you feeling well, do you have a problem?”

“No,” says Alexander. “I’ll wait here.”

He stays sitting on the steps, watching. Watching people climb up to him: people in baseball caps, people in newly bought sombreros, people in shorts. People with backpacks and cameras, fat people in garish T-shirts, people on all fours, sweating, people with children carrying little Mexican flags (for the national festival), men wearing gold chains, an elderly gentleman with a walking stick, people talking in loud American voices, people with nothing in particular to be said about them, pale young men with three days’ growth of beard, men as brown as cocoa in flowered shirts, a woman with a scarf, a young man with dreadlocks and a pine apple, a group of Japanese men in suits, slender girls in skimpy tops showing a glimpse of their stomachs, fat girls in skimpy tops showing a glimpse of their stomachs, they are all climbing, tottering, crawling, climbing, marching, tripping, clambering up to
the place where you become a god,
Teotihuacán, and then they come down again, outwardly the same as before.

“How was it?” asks Alexander.

“Amazing,” says Kati. “The view.”

They climb down together. They walk along the Avenue of the Dead to its end. Nadya reads from the
Backpackers’ Guide
(abbreviated, and in English, it is the story of the god who sacrifices himself to rise again as the sun of the fifth world), and she buys a black obsidian mask of terrifying appearance in one of the big souvenir shops at the exit. It reminds her of Haitian voodoo masks.

Kati buys an obsidian necklace that suits her dark hair.

Obsidian tortoises are on sale as well. Unobtrusively, so that the women don’t see him, Alexander puts his tortoise down with the others, the hundreds of them lying here on offer on the tables.

They cost twenty-five pesos.

If anyone had asked Irina about the source of the apricots she was cutting into small cubes on Christmas morning, before adding them to other fruits to make the stuffing for her Monastery Goose, she would have had to go right back to the beginning of the story.

Kurt had told that story often enough—these days Irina hardly remembered when she had first heard it—the tale of how his foot was crushed by the branch of a tree in the fall of 1943, and how young Lieutenant Sobakin had saved his life by fixing it for Kurt, whose strength was exhausted anyway, to avoid the sick bay (where bread rations were even smaller than outside it), and work instead for a while as night watchman near the tar kilns that were kept heated around the clock—a doubly rewarding occupation because they were very close to a potato field. Later, after Kurt’s sentence was commuted to “eternal exile,” he and Sobakin, by now a captain, played chess in one of the camp administration offices, had what by Kurt’s account of it were unusually frank discussions of justice and socialism, made friends—and quarreled with each other when they both fell in love with the same woman, herself, Irina Petrovna.

When they moved to the GDR they lost sight of Sobakin. He turned into an anecdotal figure, someone from a separate, distant world now becoming unreal—until one hot day this year Kurt had a phone call from the State Security Ministry around three thirty in the afternoon, and was asked by the excited caller whether he was the same Kurt Umnitzer who had lived in Slava in the north Urals from 1941 to 1956, because a Soviet general wanted to speak to him.

Sobakin had put on about a hundred kilos, his bear hug almost crushed Irina when they met again, he was so glad to see her, and he was as happy as a child about Kurt’s scholarly career; hadn’t he always called Kurt
umniza,
meaning more or less “wise guy” in Russian? He tipped a bottle of vodka down his throat while sitting, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, in what was of course the wrong armchair, Kurt’s favorite, he told a whole series of amazing tales about the imminent Third World War, which he seemed to consider a done deal, and as they were saying good-bye he accidentally left a plate-sized dent in the roof of their still nearly new Lada.

Whether because of that dent in the roof of the still nearly new Lada, or because of the question of justice and socialism, or for some other reason—two months later the postman delivered a large package to the Am Fuchsbau house, heavy as a brick, its contents consisting entirely of black Russian caviar.

Kurt and Irina ate very little of that caviar themselves; their appetite for caviar was only moderate, for although there had hardly been enough of anything to eat in Slava, a whole goods truck loaded with black caviar had arrived there the summer after the death of Stalin “for distribution” among the locals, they were told, and Kurt and Irina had overeaten the delicacy to such an extent that Irina suffered a kind of anaphylactic shock, and then for months lived in fear that her excessive consumption of caviar might have harmed the baby they had started directly after Stalin’s death. So they ate Sobakin’s caviar sparingly. They served some of it to friends at champagne breakfasts, usually after riotous parties, but most of the caviar went, in the form of bribes and as a kind of currency, into the undercover circulation of goods traded beneath shop counters and in back rooms.

In the Galerie am Stern, Irina acquired several items from the much-coveted Waldenburg ceramics range, kiln-fired with a brownish fly ash residue, which she then used as bribes to obtain skylights; she put some of the skylights, those that she didn’t need herself, into a trailer fixed to the car and drove them to Finsterwalde, where she exchanged them for a rather larger skylight (the 100 cm size), which Eberling the fisherman from Grosszicker on the island of Rügen immediately took off her hands, leaving in exchange a crate of eels, which he had smoked—illegally, of course—in a smokehouse hidden behind his garage.

Irina’s mother, Nadyeshda Ivanovna, ate two of those eels. She had only recently arrived in the GDR and was anxious to show how little of a burden on them she meant to be (no, no, you two eat the good bread, those snaky things will do for me). Irina kept three eels for Sasha, although it turned out that he didn’t want to eat them “out of respect for the eels’ will to live,” as he put it (he’d always eaten eel in the past!); three smoked eels went to the butcher, who provided Irina with those famous “grab-bag packages,” containing delicacies like rump steak, smoked pork fillet, or boiled ham that were not on offer to other customers. Three eels went to the motor mechanic; one to the bookseller; and finally two to a former colleague. It was from this lady’s father’s allotment garden that the dried apricots came, as well as quinces and thick-skinned winter pears, which Irina peeled and diced and mixed with the soaked apricots, together with halved figs from the Russian Store, raisins (she added those instead of grapes), sweet chestnuts that she had collected with her own hands on the Caputh hills, and some Cuban oranges, rather fibrous, so she had cut them up very small. She put all these ingredients in a pan, cooked them lightly in plenty of butter, added Armenian cognac, and used them as stuffing for the Christmas goose that she was preparing from a recipe three hundred years old, apparently originating with some Burgundian monks, and therefore known as Burgundian Monastery Goose.

Although the goose weighed a good five kilos, as Irina put the bird in the oven drawn, washed, salted, pricked all over with a skewer, and stuffed, terrible doubts assailed her: would there be enough for everyone? She counted up the company coming to dinner; there would be seven of them. Besides Charlotte and Wilhelm, her own mother was here this year, too, and Sasha was bringing his new girlfriend.

Irina decided to fry the giblets as well, the heart, gizzard, and liver. Usually she didn’t fry them until next day, and she ate them with the warmed-up remains of the goose through the remaining days of the Christmas festival—delicious! Irina loved the firm gizzard and the sweetish taste of liver, whereas Kurt hated offal. He didn’t like to see people gnaw the bones, either, and he thought little of reheated food, even if he didn’t admit it. But she knew him: he just didn’t like to eat the same thing two days running.

Irina cut the giblets up small, seasoned them well with pepper, put them in a pan with hot coconut fat, and let them sizzle over low heat while she prepared the stock for the roast goose. This was the essence, the most important part of the Monastery Goose recipe: a mixture of cognac, honey, and port wine to give the bird a sweet black glaze that was half honey, half fructose. Those monks in that place Burgundy did themselves proud. Where was Burgundy, anyway?

Apart from the Burgundian goose, the cooking for Christmas Day was all German. There was red cabbage and green cabbage, as well as Thuringian dumplings (the most complicated of all kinds of dumplings to make), potatoes for Kurt who didn’t like dumplings, as well as a good hearty radish salad for a starter, red fruit pudding for dessert, and homemade Christmas stollen to go with coffee at the end of the meal—and plenty of everything, because there was nothing Irina hated more than wondering
whether there would be enough.
All through her childhood she had eaten half-rotten potatoes (because you ate the half-rotten potatoes first, with the result that in the end you were
always
eating half-rotten potatoes); at the onset of winter, all through her childhood, she had looked forward to the first hard frosts, because only then was the thin pig that Granny Marfa had been feeding all year on kitchen scraps slaughtered—and then it was done in a hurry, because at outdoor temperatures of minus fifty degrees its trotters would have frozen in its sty, which was knocked together out of thin boards.

Poor pig, thought Irina.

She pulled off the outer leaves of the red cabbage, picked up the big knife, sliced the cabbage in half, pressing down firmly on the back of the knife, and once again experienced a brief moment of satisfaction as she reflected that she, Irina Petrovna, had escaped all that, Irina with the black curls for which the other kids teased her, because they showed
what kind of girl
she was.

The door of Nadyeshda Ivanovna’s room opened with a long-drawn-out creak. Her mother appeared in the kitchen.

“
Pomotch tebye?”

Could she help? But Irina didn’t need any help, on the contrary; it annoyed her to have her mother looking into the pans.

“You can leave the giblets for me,” said Nadyeshda Ivanovna, in a tone of voice that wasn’t far from being an order.

“Mama,” said Irina. “I do wish you’d realize that here with us, you don’t have to eat leftovers.”

Nadyeshda Ivanovna went away. Her door creaked—she really must tell the carpenter sometime, thought Irina, because she knew it wasn’t just that the hinges needed oiling, it was the lower hinge scraping against the door frame.

She took the giblets off the heat, seasoned them again with paprika (you always added paprika at the end of cooking, or it lost its aroma), browned the finely chopped red cabbage lightly, added grated apple, a little salt and a pinch of sugar, put the onion spiked with cloves into the pan, added red wine, and topped it up with hot water. Then she poured herself a beer—she liked drinking beer best while she was cooking—and tasted a little of the giblets, still too hot but delicious ... no, it wasn’t that she grudged them to her mother. The fact was that her mother saw eating the giblets as a sacrifice—and it was a sacrifice that Irina wasn’t about to accept.
You are going to eat that Christmas goose with us today,
she thought—and caught herself out imagining what it would be like to stuff a slice of goose down her mother’s throat ...

Kurt appeared in his work shirt—as if decorating the Christmas tree could be described as
work.
He wanted her to go and look at it.

Kurt had been decorating the Christmas tree for the last three years. He had really wanted to give up having a tree after Sasha moved out, but Irina had insisted on keeping the tradition going. What an idea! What would Christmas be without a tree? The tree and the Monastery Goose were part of Christmas, that was that, and even if Irina shrank slightly from the thought of the annual visit from her in-laws, even if she could already sense the laboriously harmonious atmosphere that set in every year around the festive table: the stilted conversations, the elaborate opening of presents, the pretended delight of one and all (apart from Wilhelm, who protested vigorously every year against being given presents, but still received an annual bottle of Stolichnaya and a can of Eberswalde sausages, which he finally accepted, or rather had Charlotte accept on his behalf, half reluctantly, half patronizingly)—even if all that was basically embarrassing and stressful and to a certain extent idiotic, Irina insisted on keeping the ritual going, and in a way actually enjoyed it, if only for the relief after her in-laws had gone, for the moment when Kurt opened the window, and they sank into comfortable chairs to smoke cigarettes, drink cognac, and amuse themselves together at the expense of Charlotte and Wilhelm.

“Is it too kitschy?” asked Kurt.

“It’s not quite straight,” said Irina.

“Yes, but don’t you think I’ve rather overdone the decorations?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” said Irina, looking at the not-quite-straight tree with her own head tilted to one side. Its branches were thickly laden with tinsel, and white cotton for snow, and had colored baubles hanging from them in the traditional way, and although the tree that Kurt had chosen was no beauty, once darkness fell and the Christmas lights were switched on, none of the company would notice.

“The tinsel,” said Irina. “It’s too lumpy, drape it a bit more.”

“Right,” said Kurt. “Drape the tinsel a bit more.”

“What else do you think is wrong about it?”

“Nothing,” said Kurt, and smiled, which always gave him a slightly mischievous look, in fact almost—did the word exist?—a scampish look, because then his blind eye slipped just a tad out of true. Back when she first met him, in his well-worn pants and padded jacket, she would never for a moment have thought that this scamp would be her husband someday.

Irina washed the green cabbage and blanched it briefly, so that it would stay green. She must be more patient with her mother, she thought, as she nibbled a little more of the giblet mixture. There was no point in getting angry with her. After living in Slava Nadyeshda Ivanovna was set in her ways, and really it was a miracle that she was still alive. Irina thought of her last trip back to Slava a few weeks ago, when she went to fetch Nadyeshda Ivanovna: Slava—fame—what a name for a place populated mainly by exiles and old convicts who had served their sentences! Nothing there had changed. The same gravel roads, the same potholes capable of tipping a car right over; the same bad manners, the same slacking; the same drunks sitting on the wooden sidewalk outside the store passing snide remarks about Irina and her clothes.

In March her last distant relation, Petya Shyshkin, had been robbed when he was out one night. At minus forty-six degrees, he had been stripped to his undershorts, and Petya, who of course was roaring drunk, had knocked at the doors of the surrounding houses to no avail, and froze to death on his way home.

That was Slava. That was her homeland.

And as she drained the green cabbage over the sink, she felt it was like a bad dream to remember that she really had once been deluded enough to want to die for that homeland as soon as possible.
For the homeland, for Stalin! Hurrah!

Irina assembled the meat grinder and was beginning to put the green cabbage through it when Kurt announced that the children had arrived.

She wiped her hands on her apron and went into the hall. Kurt had already opened the front door. Sasha was the first to appear. In his lambskin coat, thought Irina, the distinguished pallor of his face made him look like a Russian prince, and his black curls had had time to grow back since his discharge—those gypsy curls that Irina had thought for so long were a blemish in herself, appreciating them only when it was too late, and her hair was beginning to go gray. Sasha stood in the doorway, waited for a moment, and then guided her—
the new girlfriend
—into the house ahead of him.