In Times of Fading Light (23 page)

So far Irina did not know much about the new girlfriend, except that her name was Melitta (like those coffee filters on Western TV), and that, like Sasha, she was studying at the Humboldt University of Berlin. And that she was
the woman of his life,
as Sasha claimed to have found out after only three months. Perhaps because of that, or perhaps because of the coffee filter ads, Irina had formed some kind of imaginary picture of her, but as she realized the moment she set eyes on the new girlfriend, vague as her picture had been, this was not what she had expected.

The young woman who offered Irina her not particularly well manicured hand was small and unspectacular, her hair was a dull blonde, her lips were pale, and the only striking thing about her was a pair of watchful green eyes.

“Shoes off?” inquired the new girlfriend.

“People do not take their shoes off in this house,” said Irina, with unconcealed disapproval, because she thought it a terrible thing to insist on visitors removing their shoes. It was petty and provincial, and if anyone asked her, Irina, to take off the shoes that she had carefully chosen to suit her outfit, and go around a stranger’s home in her stocking feet or a borrowed pair of slippers, she drew her own conclusions and never went there again.

Although in fact there was little difference between slippers and the flat shoes, rather like cucumbers in appearance, that the new girlfriend was wearing.

“People do not take their shoes off in this house,” repeated Irina.

But the new girlfriend, eager to oblige, took them off anyway. It was such filthy weather outside, she explained. Now even Sasha was wondering whether to take his own shoes off.

“
Nu eshtshyo by,”
hissed Irina. This was the last straw.

Sasha looked at the new girlfriend, looked at Irina. Shrugged his shoulders, kept his shoes on.

The new girlfriend had brought Irina flowers, a few straggly, pathetic chrysanthemums, but all the same she’d brought flowers. Irina thanked her nicely, and while the others were still in the hall quietly removed her lavish arrangement of asters from the dining table, and fetched another vase. As she came back into the living room with the chrysanthemums, Kurt was already holding forth on the subject of his Christmas tree. While he almost never talked about his work, he was in the habit of delivering an extensive, literally blow-by-blow account of every nail that he knocked into the wall.

Sasha thought the Christmas tree was “perfectly okay,” while the new girlfriend stared at the tree incredulously.

Kurt suggested a toast to the fact that they were all meeting at last, and asked the children what they would like to drink. The new girlfriend said she would like “just a glass of water.”

“You can’t drink a toast with water,” said Kurt.

The two young people glanced at one another before, almost in chorus, they decided on “A sip of red wine, please.”

“Here’s to Christmas,” said Kurt.

“Here’s to the Holy Ghost,” said Sasha.

“Thank you for your kind invitation, Frau Umnitzer,” said the new girlfriend.

And Irina said, “Cheers, I’m Irina, and in this house we use first names. ”

Irina always worked with the kitchen door open. If the fat wasn’t sizzling in the pan or a machine running, she could hear voices from the living room, mostly the voices of the men—two Umnitzers at the same time, it wasn’t so easy for anyone else to get a word in edgeways, they always started talking to each other right away in loud voices, they had important news to exchange, in this case, among other things, about Wolf Biermann’s concert in Cologne. Meanwhile Irina, who was getting sick and tired of all this fuss over Biermann, put the green cabbage through the meat grinder and thought about the new girlfriend’s clothes, her long, brown corduroy skirt, her brown woolen pantyhose—and what kind of top was that thing she was wearing? Something shapeless in a neutral color. And why on earth, if she had short legs to begin with, didn’t she at least wear heels? Did Sasha like her the way she was? Was that to the taste of the younger generation? Irina softened onions in butter, added the cabbage, filled the pan with water to blanch it, and turned her attention to the dumplings.

She had never yet, thought Irina as she began grating raw potatoes—for real Thuringian dumplings you needed both raw and boiled potato, half and half, or more precisely a little more raw potato than boiled—she had never yet known a man who fancied thick woolen pantyhose and earth colors. Men liked colors of a very different kind! Men liked intricate lacy underwear, not woolen pantyhose! Was Sasha any different? Different from Kurt? Even at the age of fifty-five Kurt was still the same, still eyeing up other women all the time ...

She sipped her beer, but suddenly the beer tasted stale. Irina tipped the end of it down the sink, and fetched her glass of red wine from the living room. They were just talking about Christa Wolf, wonderful book, Irina put in, although she hadn’t finished reading it yet, but she had heard it discussed so much that she was beginning to forget how trying she had found the elaborate style. Why, Irina had asked herself as she read the book, why did the woman write like that? What was the matter with her, when she had everything, even a husband—so she’d heard it said—who did the housework for her?

“Wonderful book,” said Irina, taking two puffs of Sasha’s cigarette, and then she went back to the kitchen and set to work.

She squeezed the liquid out of the grated potato, put it in a bowl, and scalded it with hot milk. Then she cut a few thumb-sized cubes of white bread and fried them crisp. While they were frying she began to grate long shavings off the winter radish—her fingers were getting stiff with all this grating. But she had ruined her hands converting the house anyway, hauling stones about, unloading cement—you wouldn’t believe how much cement went into a house like this. She took a sip of red wine, shook her hands to loosen them up, and just as she picked up the grater again the new girlfriend appeared in the kitchen. Was there anything she could do to help?

However, Irina was almost through, there was just the boiled potato still to grate for the dumpling mixture—but that was easy, and anyway she had only one grater.

“Oh, dumplings!”

“Thuringian dumplings,” specified Irina.

“I just love dumplings,” said the new girlfriend, beaming at Irina.

Maybe she wasn’t as unattractive as all that. In fact her face was really pretty. And if you looked closely, you could even see something like a bosom under the neutral colors of her shapeless garments. Someone ought to have a word with her sometime; why go disfiguring herself like that?

Only when the new girlfriend had left the kitchen again did Irina add another dessertspoon of butter to both the red and the green cabbage—and in addition a spoonful of mustard to the green cabbage; that was the secret ingredient. You didn’t have to give all your secrets away.

The doorbell rang at two on the dot: Charlotte and Wilhelm were at the door—with their man-made fiber shopping bags. What would be in them this time? A wipe-clean tablecloth? Some kind of Cuban calendar?

Wilhelm came in, taciturn and stiff as ever; so did Charlotte, talkative and vivacious as ever, and full of praise for everything Irina did. It was really odd, the older she grew, the more she praised Irina, and in such a ridiculous, effusive way. Even as she came in she was gushing about the delicious smells coming from the kitchen, she swore, still with one arm in her raccoon coat as Kurt helped her out of it, that she hadn’t eaten a thing all day except an egg for breakfast (as if she were doing Irina a favor by going hungry), she asked (for the second or third time) whether the not entirely genuine art nouveau coat stand that Irina had painted white was new, marveled at this house, always so light even in midwinter, and finally lapsed into her recurrent complaints of the darkness in their own home—subtext, you two live in a palace, and I have to make do with a hole in the ground!

A dramatic change of tone as she greeted the new girlfriend. Theatrical, meaningful. “We’ve heard so much about you!”

“I haven’t,” said Wilhelm.

Charlotte laughed; she always laughed at Wilhelm’s jokes, or more precisely she laughed at his morose comments as if they were jokes. But Wilhelm was probably only telling the truth. What could Charlotte have heard about the new girlfriend already?

At this point Nadyeshda Ivanovna came out of her room to join them. Charlotte spread her arms wide: “Nadyeshda Ivanovna!” The two of them had met only once before in their lives, when Nadyeshda Ivanovna came here on a visit four years ago. All the same, Nadyeshda Ivanovna also spread her arms wide, grabbed Charlotte with her gnarled hands, which were strong from the sawmill and from harvesting potatoes, and planted kisses firmly on her cheeks, left, right, and then left again. A misunderstanding, of course. You could actually see Charlotte’s breath taken away by the smell of mothballs clinging to Nadyeshda Ivanovna’s clothes. She swiftly wriggled out of the other woman’s embrace, swallowed, pulled herself together, and brought out a few standard polite remarks in a Russian that was reasonably correct, if not entirely accent free—while Wilhelm made a decent stab at saying
Dobry dyeny,
but failed to understand Nadyeshda Ivanovna’s response.

“
Posdravlyayu roshdestvom
—happy Christmas!” she said.

Wilhelm replied,
“Garosh, garosh!”
which, in return, Nadyeshda Ivanovna also failed to understand. Obviously Wilhelm had meant to say
good, good,
but what he really said sounded more like
peas, peas.

Nadyeshda Ivanovna’s “Happy Christmas” was provocative insofar as Wilhelm utterly rejected Christmas in principle. Christmas, according to Wilhelm, was a religious festival; religion, being the work of the class enemy, served to befuddle the brains of the working classes; such nonsense, and Wilhelm was therefore unable to reconcile all this fuss and bother about Christmas with his conscience. As usual, he sat down with his back to the Christmas tree.

Charlotte, on the other hand, was
delighted
by the Christmas tree, and to show that she did not agree with Wilhelm she rolled her eyes behind his back; she was
delighted
by the table decorations,
delighted
by the lovely flowers (meaning the chrysanthemums); in fact, she was
delighted
by everything in general, and to all the family’s surprise allowed herself to drink a small liqueur. She had earned it, declared Charlotte, she’d been positively working herself
to death
recently, she was
totally overworked,
on the brink of a
nervous breakdown ...

Irina slipped away to the kitchen.

Now and then she heard Charlotte’s fluting tones mingling with the Umnitzer voices. Good heavens, she’d survived that, too, thought Irina as she peeled the extra potatoes for Kurt, she’d escaped that misery as well, and maybe that was what she liked about Christmas, once it was over she could close the door behind Charlotte, her own door, the door of her own house. How she’d admired Charlotte’s house when she first arrived from Russia! And now Charlotte admired her house. Sometimes, to be honest, when Irina walked around the rooms looking at her handiwork, she herself was surprised to see how successful it was. Almost all the thousands of decisions that had to be made when you were renovating a house like this—and that she had made by herself, because Kurt was always in favor of the simplest, cheapest solution, the solution entailing the least trouble and expense—all those decisions had turned out to be right in the end: the walls that she had taken out, the walls that she had put in, the conservatory extension, and God knows that cost a lot, the design of the annex into which Nadyeshda Ivanovna had recently moved, the size of the bathtub, the height of the tiles, the location of water pipes and radiators, power outlets and light switches, the place for the stove—all of it, in the end, had been sensible and right, except that she ought to have ignored Kurt’s advice not to take out the useless stove that they never lit in the living room (Kurt had fantasies about the end of the world; who knew, bad times might come and then they’d need that stove again). And she ought to have gone right ahead with the loft extension instead of leaving it until later, at Kurt’s urging; it was so difficult to start again after a break.

Irina washed the potatoes, peeled them but left them whole (she liked potatoes to be left whole), poured away the water for washing them, salted the potatoes and shook the pan with its lid on to distribute the salt. Then she carefully poured in a cupful of water, holding the pan at an angle so as not to wash the salt off again. Only one cupful; if potatoes were to taste like potatoes, they had to be simmered rather than boiled fast.

She put on the water for the dumplings, and was beginning to grate the other potatoes for the Thuringian dumplings, the ones she had already cooked and cooled, when the children came in.

“We’ll set the table,” said the new girlfriend.

“We’ll set the table,” said Sasha.

“You don’t know where the crockery and cutlery are kept.”

“I do,” said Sasha.

“Alexander will set the table,” said the new girlfriend, “and I can shape the dumplings.”

“I’ll do that myself,” said Irina.

But Sasha was already busy with the box of cutlery, of course taking out the wrong set, and as Irina handed him the right cutlery the new girlfriend was already shaping the dumplings—with her not particularly well-manicured fingernails.

“But the fried bread cubes have to go in,” said Irina.

“I know,” said the new girlfriend. “My granny is from Thuringia!” Irina had no choice but to turn to her radish salad, chopping walnuts, mixing it all with cream, tasting it.

“Is there already salt in the water for the dumplings?” asked the new girlfriend.

Good heavens, she’d almost forgotten that. And the goose had to be basted, damn it, she was thrown right off her stride!

She quickly picked up the oven mitt, took the goose out of the oven, tilting the pan so as to get all the bubbling meat juices up from the bottom of it.