In Times of Fading Light (25 page)

“What’s happened?” asked Kurt.

He didn’t like it: Muddel standing in front of the bathroom mirror plucking her eyebrows. He’d already been watching for some time while she dolled herself up; normally she went about all day in a checked shirt (preferably one of Jürgen’s, while Jürgen was still around), and now here she was in stiletto-heeled shoes all of a sudden, he hadn’t even known that she owned a pair of stiletto-heeled shoes, she had already removed her leg hair with that wax stuff (instruments of torture, all of them), now she was plucking her eyebrows leaning far forward over the washbasin, you could see her pantyline under her skirt, dreadful, you could see just about
everything,
so she really was dressing up like this to go to the birthday party where, as he knew—and of course so did she—his father would be a guest. Only there was also something that she didn’t know.

Should he have told her? She hadn’t actually asked him, she had avoided a direct question, but he’d known what she was getting at:
Did he cook for you both,
questions like that.
Did you both go to the cinema?
Yes, we did go to the cinema, but there were three of us.
With his new woman.
He hadn’t said that.
With his latest girlfriend.

“Go and change,” Muddel told him.

Markus didn’t move. He watched her begin to put mascara on her lashes, rolling her eyes until only their whites showed, blinking when tears came into them until she could see again, and he marveled at the routine way she did all this, the expertise as she painted her lips, the way she then—making exactly the same face as the new girlfriend—pressed them together and formed them into a pout, the way she put gel on her fingertips and rubbed it into her freshly washed hair, the way she finally disheveled it a bit and looked up from under her eyelids at the mirror, just like the new girlfriend—and although he was surprised to find that Muddel had mastered these things, although it even impressed him just a little, he didn’t like to think of the two of them meeting this afternoon at the birthday party: the new girlfriend and Muddel.

“Do go and put your shirt on,” said Muddel. “Or we’ll miss the bus.”

“I’m not putting any shirt on,” said Markus.

“Okay,” said Muddel. “Then I’ll just go on my own.”

She dabbed the plucked eyebrows with a cotton pad; Markus turned away and went to his room.

The shortest way was across the interior courtyard, where Muddel’s exhibition pieces stood among tall hollyhocks. His room was in the middle of the four-sided courtyard, which really had only three sides, directly opposite the workshop; sometimes he could still hear the potter’s wheel murmuring away there in the evening. He took the twelve steps in five well-practiced leaps, and flung himself on his bed: on the lower bed, it was a bunk bed for two, and Jürgen had made it so that Frickel could sleep over with Markus, but Frickel had gone, gone to the West with his parents, and since Frickel left life was dead boring in Grosskrienitz. The best girls in the class lived in Schulzendorf, and you needed a moped to get there. He might get a moped when he was fourteen, if they had the money for it, said Muddel, but now she had to save up for a kiln, and then, said Muddel, she’d really be earning money. However, she’d already said that quite often, she’d really be earning money, and now Jürgen had taken the car with him, and always having to walk made him want to puke, too. Grosskrienitz really was the pits, and you had to change twice to get to Neuendorf.

He listened for Muddel’s footsteps; could he hear them on the stairs yet? Suppose she really went on her own?

What made his determination waver was the thought of all the things to be seen in his great-grandparents’ house. He remembered, only too well, the big shell in the hall, the cobra skin in the conservatory (which his great-grandmother, wrongly, thought was a rattlesnake), the sawlike snout of the sawfish (really a kind of ray), the stuffed catshark, and especially, of course, the not quite fully grown black iguana on Wilhelm’s shelves—it was a bit like going to the Natural History Museum in Berlin, where you couldn’t touch anything either.

Apart from that, his great-grandparents were funny people. Sometime or other, ages ago, they’d fought Hitler, illegally, it was the Nazi period—they’d had that in school, Wilhelm had once even come to talk to his class about Karl Liebknecht, and how they sat on the balcony together founding the GDR or something like that. No one understood it, but they’d all admired him for having such a famous great-grandfather, even Frickel. Otherwise he was rather odd.
Ombre,
he was always saying,
ombre,
what did all that shit mean? And Great-Granny said
do weewee
instead of take a pee, treated him like a kid of three, but was surprised when he didn’t know the capital of Honduras. Hey, man, what’s Honduras? A make of motorbike?

Now he could hear footsteps coming; he’d guessed it was an empty threat.

“Markus, it’s his ninetieth birthday. It could be his last.”

“Who cares?” said Markus, blowing on the dreamcatcher hanging from the slatted frame of the upper bunk to set it moving.

“It makes me a little sad to hear you talk like that,” said Muddel.

“I don’t have a present for him anyway,” shouted Markus.

“That doesn’t matter,” said Muddel.

“Oh yes, it does matter!”

Muddel thought for a moment and, as usual, came up with a solution at once.

“Give him one of your turtle pictures!”

Grosskrienitz Village Center was the name of the bus stop. Their farmhouse was on the edge of the village, indeed a little way outside it. He walked three meters behind Muddel, preserving a safe distance in case she tried taking his arm.

They crossed the disused railroad track, went past the former firefighting station, where something from the collective farm was stored these days, past the building site where the cement mixer churned away every weekend although there was never any visible change, past the village pond, all mucky with duck shit, past the cooperative store where Frickel and he used sometimes to buy ice cream after school, past the low-built old houses of Grosskrienitz, where you might have thought no one lived anymore except that now and then the net curtains at the windows moved. Of course it was all the same to him what those village idiots thought, but still, he was glad that Muddel was at least wearing a parka over her party outfit, even if the parka hardly covered her skirt. Farther down, her patterned calves flashed at intervals of a second, and you could see and hear her stiletto-heeled shoes on the steeply sloping sidewalk of Grosskrienitz.

If he succeeded in not treading on any of the joins between the stone slabs all the way to the bus stop, thought Markus, then the bus wouldn’t turn up. Buses quite often failed to turn up here; on this route they were still the old rear-engined Ikarus buses, and if this bus didn’t come that was that, because on a Sunday the next one wasn’t due for another two hours. However, he mustn’t step on any of the cracked slabs on the sidewalk, because the cracks counted as joins between the slabs, and observing that rule wasn’t so easy. Muddel quickened her pace, and Markus had to concentrate hard.

Even from a distance he heard the strumming of someone practicing the guitar coming from the church. He didn’t need to look up to see who was addressing Muddel.

“Hello there,” cried Klaus. “So where are you off to?”

Klaus was the pastor.

“To catch the bus,” Muddel replied. “It’s my mother’s birthday.” Markus looked up in surprise, just for a second, but it had happened. “Oh, hell,” said Markus.

“But you’ll be coming to the prayer service for peace this evening, won’t you?” said Klaus.

“We’ll have to see if we make it back in time,” said Muddel.

“Oh, what a pity!” Klaus called after them. “And today of all days!” The bus was arriving just as they reached the stop.

The rear engine clanked slightly as it started off. The old Ikarus accelerated lethargically. Outside, the scenes that he saw every morning, the stubble fields, the pine trees, the silvery silage towers in the background (which Frickel had always claimed were really firing ramps for Russian nuclear rockets).

He somehow had the feeling that he must give Muddel moral support. “I’m not going to see my father anymore,” he announced.

“What’s the matter now?” said Muddel.

He briefly weighed the side effects of this variant of events: no more Berlin, cinema, Natural History Museum—however, these things were such rare occurrences that all of a sudden (particularly in view of the fact that sometime, and soon too, he would be big enough to go to Berlin on his own) it did not seem at all impossible to dispense with the occasional favor of being fetched by his father for a visit.

“That asshole,” said Markus.

“Markus, please!”

“That asshole,” Markus repeated.

“Markus, I don’t like you to talk about your father that way.”

The bus stopped briefly, an old granny got on and sat down at the front. When the bus moved on again, Muddel said:

“I was married to your father, and we had you together because we loved each other. And the fact that we’re separated has nothing to do with you. Your father left
me,
not
you.
Okay?”

“Fucking hell,” said Markus.

It kind of made him really furious when Muddel defended his father. He had left them both—Markus as well! He had done things to his mother. It was true that he had still been too little to remember, claimed Muddel, but he did remember a little all the same. Being left. The horror. Things that hurt. He remembered Muddel’s whimpering, quiet so that he wouldn’t hear what his father was doing to her in the next room, it somehow had something to do with hair pulling, with being dragged over the floor,
women get carried away,
Muddel had once said, although now, of course, he realized that that meant something else—but he clearly remembered the whimpering in the next room, and how he lay there rigid with fright, and he had always been sick as a child, all that came of being left by a parent, as a psychologist Muddel ought to know that, after all, and the dream of the fish heads, before Muddel gave him a dreamcatcher he sometimes had it even in the middle of the day.

The collective farm came into sight, a dilapidated tract of land: rusty machinery in the tall grass everywhere. Then the concentration camp for pigs, a structure made of rough concrete blocks that always came into his mind when they had to sing the song that ran
Our homeland’s not only the towns and the cities,
and went on to talk about the beauties of Nature.

“Why did you say it was
your mother’s
birthday?”

“Oh, well, it just came into my head,” said Muddel.

But he knew it hadn’t just come into Muddel’s head. She felt embarrassed to tell Klaus that she was going to visit Wilhelm on his birthday. They somehow didn’t go together: Klaus meant the Church and Wilhelm meant the Party. Only Klaus didn’t know Wilhelm at all (or her mother either), so it was a totally unnecessary excuse. But instead of pointing that out to Muddel, he asked:

“Is Klaus really against the GDR?”

“Klaus is not against the GDR. Klaus is in favor of a better GDR, with more democracy.”

“Then why is he a pastor?”

“Why not?” said Muddel. “Anyone can be in favor of more democracy. As a pastor, for instance, he can organize prayer services for peace.”

Markus did not want to pursue this subject; he could already sense that Muddel was going to try to convince him of their merits again, but he thought the prayer services for peace were dreadful, all that holding hands and singing along together, all that fuss and bother, and afterward everyone would take a nap at home in the garden, get drunk, and go for a pee in the tomato plants: all for a better GDR. How it was to be achieved, however, was a mystery.

They could see West Berlin in the distance now: the tall white buildings that looked like the future. Frickel lived there.

“Why don’t we apply for an exit permit?” he asked.

“If we applied for an exit permit today,” said Muddel, “then it wouldn’t be granted—and then only maybe—until you’re eighteen. Or twenty.”

“Or we could simply go off,” said Markus.

“Not so loud,” said Muddel.

That suddenly struck him as a brilliant solution. Then they’d be rid of it all: Grosskrienitz, the pottery. And his father would be left with egg all over his face.

“And just how would you do that?” asked Muddel.

“Like everyone else—by way of Hungary.”

“It’s not that simple.” Muddel spoke softly, as if she suspected the old granny at the front of the bus of being a Stasi agent. “You need a visa for Hungary, but no one’s getting those anymore, and then remember: if we went to the West you’d never see your friends again.”

“Yes, I would. I’d see Frickel.”

“Okay then, Frickel. And how about the others?”

“Lars is already over there anyway.”

“And Granny? And Grandpa? And your father?”

“That asshole,” said Markus.

“Markus,” said Muddel, “has something gone wrong between you two? Do you want to talk about it?”

“Fucking hell,” said Markus, and watched the tall white buildings slowly gliding by.

When he was standing outside his great-grandfather’s house a good hour later, he remembered the brass knockers on the front door. They were in the shape of Chinese dragons, but their wide-open mouths suddenly looked like the fish heads in his dream. Luckily—it must be to avert evil—there was a little note under the fish heads:
Do not knock!
And now Markus remembered that there used to be little notes stuck all over the house:
Guests only,
or
Switch out of order,
or
Please leave key on inside of door,
one door was even labeled
Beware, cellar,
as if in that big house you might sometimes forget where the cellar was.

Even before they pressed the bell the door opened, and a man in a blue suit with fat folds shaped like sausages on his forehead was facing them.