In Times of Fading Light (3 page)

Then they had rolled her in. A curtain was drawn. He was standing beside a corpse, not particularly neatly laid out, that admittedly did bear some resemblance to his mother (apart from the face, which was too small, and the little pursed concertina-like folds of skin on the upper lip), he was standing beside her and didn’t dare to speak to her, not in front of the two assistant undertakers waiting behind the curtain, so close that he could see their shoes below its hem. He touched her hand, just so that he’d know he had tried something—and found it cold, cold as a piece of chicken when you take it out of the refrigerator.

No, they had not all been wrong. There was an x-ray picture. There was a CT scan. There were laboratory tests. It was clear: non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, the slow-growing type. For which—how tactfully they put it!—there was as yet no effective treatment.

“So what does that mean, in terms of years?”

And then the man had rocked back and forth forever in his chair, looking as if it were unreasonable to expect him to answer such a question, and said, “You won’t get any prognosis from me.”

And his voice had rasped, like the sound of the old man’s oxygen apparatus in his room.

Measurements of time. Twelve years ago, the fall of the Wall. Inaccessibly far away now. All the same, he tried to trace the course of those years—what did twelve years amount to?

Of course the twelve years before the Wall came down seemed to him disproportionately longer than the twelve years after it. 1977—an eternity ago! Whereas since 1989—oh, it was like going down a slide, like a ride in a tramcar. And yet certain things had happened in that time, hadn’t they?

He had gone away and come back again (even if the country to which he came back had disappeared). He had taken a properly paid job with a martial arts magazine (and handed in his notice). Had run up debts (and paid them off). Had thought up a project for a film (forget it).

Irina had died:
six years ago.

He had directed twelve or fifteen stage plays (in theaters of ever-decreasing importance). Had been to Spain. Italy, the Netherlands, the United States, Sweden, and Egypt (but not Mexico). Had fucked he couldn’t remember just how many women, or what their names were. And after a time of sleeping around had entered into something like an established relationship again...

Had met Marion:
three years ago.

But now that didn’t seem to him like such a short time.

It occurred to him that he ought to have told her. After all, she was the only person who had visited him—although he had expressly asked her not to. And he had to admit that it hadn’t been so bad. She had not, as he’d feared, been excessively concerned for him. Had brought him not flowers but tomato salad. How did she know what he would like to eat at that moment? How did she know that he was terrified of being given flowers in hospital?

Or to put it another way: Why was he unable to love Marion? Was she too old? His own age. Was it because of the two or three little blue veins showing on her thighs? Was it something to do with him?

“My dearest, darling Irina ... My sun, light of my life!”

He had never written to a woman like that. Was it just the old-fashioned thing to say, or had Kurt truly loved Irina? Had that pedantic old bastard, had Kurt Umnitzer the human machine actually managed to
love
someone?

The mere idea of it made Alexander feel so bad that he had to stand up.

It was just after two thirty when he went downstairs again. Kurt was still asleep. He knew that Marion was at the garden center; too early to call her, then. Instead, he called directory information. He had really meant to go straight to the airport, but now he called directory information, was given another number to call, finally got the right one, yet he still hesitated when it turned out that yes, he could book a flight for tomorrow, no problem. So long as he had a credit card.

He did.

“Well, would you like me to book it now or not?” asked the lady at the other end of the line, not discourteously but in a tone conveying that she didn’t have all day to spend on this trifling matter.

“Yes,” he said, and gave her his credit card number.

When he hung up, it was 14:46 hours. He stood in the dim light for a moment, waiting for some kind of feeling to follow—but it didn’t. All that came into his mind was a tune—one of Granny Charlotte’s ancient shellac records that had fallen on the sidewalk during their move and broken into a thousand pieces.

The “hungry ’gator.” How did it go? He couldn’t remember. Could you still get a record like that in Mexico? After half a century?

He went into the “blue casket,” picked up his coffee cup, and took it to the kitchen. Stood by the kitchen window for a little while looking out at the garden. Searching, as if he owed her at least this moment of memory, for the place in the tall, golden grass where Baba Nadya used to stand for hours with her back bent, tending her cucumber bed ... but he couldn’t find it. Baba Nadya was gone without a trace.

He fetched the toolbox and went into Kurt’s study.

First he took out the old chessboard that stood to Lenin’s left and folded back its flap. Opened the folder labeled PERSONAL. Took out a sheaf of papers, as many as would fit into the folding chessboard. Put them in it. Found a large, white plastic bag in the kitchen. Put the chessboard in the bag. Automatically, calmly, confidently, as if he had planned it all well in advance.

He would also put the money in the plastic bag later.

Then he unearthed the broad-bladed chisel from the toolbox—it had often been misused for such purposes before—and jammed the blade between the security lock on the door of the desk and its frame. There was a crack, wood splintered. Trickier than he had expected. He had to take all the drawers out of the other side of the space below the desk before the partition between the two halves would give way far enough for the door to open. Photographs spilled out. A pack of cards with erotic pictures. Videos. A few so-called adult magazines ... and there it was, he had not been wrong: the long, red plastic box of slides. He had opened the box only once, had held the first slide that came to hand up to the light, recognized his mother, half naked, in an unambiguous pose—and put the slide back in the box in a hurry.

He fetched the laundry basket from the bathroom and placed all these things in it.

The only stove still in this house stood in the living room. It hadn’t been lit for years. Alexander found newspaper, two wooden bookends from Kurt’s Swedish wall unit—the owl-shaped bookends—and cooking oil from the kitchen. Soaked the newspaper in oil. Lit the whole thing...

Suddenly, there was Kurt in the doorway. Looking amiable and well rested. His thin little legs stuck out from his padded undershorts. His hair was all over the place, like the branches of the apple tree outside. Curious to see what he was doing, Kurt came closer.

“I’m burning your photos,” said Alexander.

“Yes,” said Kurt.

“Listen, Father. I’m going away. Do you understand? I’m going away and I don’t know how long for. Do you understand?”

“Yes,” said Kurt.

“That’s why I’m burning these. So that no one will find them here.”

Kurt didn’t seem to think there was anything unusual about that. He squatted down with Alexander beside the basket, looked into it. The fire was going well now, and Alexander began throwing the playing cards into it one by one. Then the photographs, the magazines ... as for the videos, he thought, he’d put them in the garbage later, but the slides had to be burned. Only where was the box?

He looked up. Kurt was holding the box. Handed it to him.

“Well? What should I do with that?” asked Alexander.

“Yes,” said Kurt.

“Do you know what’s in there?” asked Alexander.

Kurt thought hard, rubbed his temples as he used to when he was searching for the right words. As if creating one last impulse of electrical energy in his brain by rubbing his forehead.

Then he suddenly said, “Irina.”

Alexander looked at Kurt, looked into his eyes. He had blue eyes. Bright blue. And young. Much too young for the wrinkled face.

He took the box from him, tipped the slides out. Threw them into the stove, a handful at a time. They burned silently and fast.

He dressed Kurt, combed his hair, quickly shaved the patches of stubble that the home health aide had missed. Then he made coffee (in the coffee machine for Kurt). Didn’t ask whether Kurt wanted any coffee. Then came the walk. Kurt was already hurrying to the door like a dog who knows the rules and is demanding its rights.

They went Kurt’s usual round:
to the post office,
as he used to say, although the way to the post office was only a fraction of Kurt’s daily constitutional, but Kurt always used to start out on his walk by saying,
I’m just going to the post office
—and even long after he had anything to post, he went on
going to the post office.
However, the presence of those twenty-seven thousand marks in the wall safe was the result of this pedantry on Kurt’s part. For a while he could still remember his PIN, so he had been able to take money out of cash machines, and having nothing else to do at the post office, he withdrew cash. Always in thousands. He once came home with eight thousand marks in his wallet. Alexander had taken the money and put it in the safe. So he was the only person who knew about it.

They went along the Fuchsbau and past the neighboring houses, whose inhabitants Alexander had once known only too well in person. This house belonged to Horst Mählich, who had believed all his life that Wilhelm was a Soviet master spy, and to the very last had defended the theory that Wilhelm had been murdered; that one was the home of Bunke, a former Stasi man who, after the fall of the Wall, spent a few more years growing vegetables in his garden, and always said a friendly “Good morning,” until he quietly disappeared; Schröter the sports teacher had lived in that house; the doctor who came from the West lived over there; and there, finally, at the end of the street was his grand parents’ house. It had already been “transferred back” to the rightful claimants, and was now the home of the grandchildren of the former owner, a middle-ranking Nazi who had made his fortune manufacturing binocular telescopes for the Wehrmacht. His heirs had renovated and repainted the house. They had restored the magnificent natural stone terrace over which Wilhelm had laid so much concrete that it collapsed. And the conservatory, reglazed and with all kinds of decorative motifs added to the windows, looked so strange that Alexander found it hard to believe he ever really used to sit there with his grandmother Charlotte, listening to her Mexican stories.

Then they turned into Steinweg, Kurt snuffling and leaning forward, but keeping up. The kids used to roller-skate on the smooth tarmac here, and they had drawn chalk circles on the street. That was where the butcher had been, the one who sold Irina “grab bag” packages put together discreetly in his back room. And that had been the People’s Bookshop, now a travel agency. That was the site of the former state cooperative store, the Konsum, emphasis on the first syllable (and sure enough, it didn’t have much to do with genuine con
sump
tion), where very long ago—Alexander couldn’t quite remember it now—milk had been available in exchange for ration coupons.

And there was the post office.

“The post office,” said Alexander.

“Yes,” said Kurt.

After that they said no more.

They climbed the hill to the old water tower. There was a fine view down to the River Havel from here. They sat on the bench and spent a long time watching the sunset sky as it slowly turned red.

They had gone to spend a few days on the Pacific coast at New Year. A truck carrying coffee took them from the little airfield to Puerto Ángel. An acquaintance had recommended the place: romantic village, picturesque bay with rocks and fishing boats.

The bay was indeed picturesque. Apart from the concrete loading ramp for coffee.

The village itself: twenty or twenty-five little houses, a sleepy post office, and a kiosk selling alcoholic beverages.

The only place available to rent was a tiny hut (which the landlady, a woman of Spanish origin, called a “bungalow”). At least it had a tiled roof. It contained an iron bedstead under a mosquito net (which the landlady called a “pavilion”) hanging from the ceiling. Two bedside tables. Coat hangers on nails knocked into the posts here and there.

Outside the bungalow there was a roofed terrace with two rickety deck chairs and a table.

“Oh, how lovely,” said Charlotte.

She ignored the bats hanging upside down from the eaves of the roof, and thus in effect right inside the room, since as usual in these parts there was a gap as wide as a hand between wall and roof. She overlooked the large, blotched pig wandering through the garden, churning up earth around the shed that the landlady called a bathroom.

“Oh, how lovely,” she said. “We’ll have a nice, refreshing rest here.”

Wilhelm nodded, and dropped into one of the deck chairs, exhausted. The legs of his pants rode up, partly exposing his thin, pale calves. Skinny enough to start with, he had lost another five kilos in the last few weeks. His angular limbs resembled the deck chair in which he was sitting.

“We’ll have some lovely excursions into the nearby countryside,” Charlotte predicted.

However, there turned out to be practically no countryside at all near Puerto Ángel.

They did once go to nearby Pochutla—in another truck carrying coffee—and visited the Chinese store there. Wilhelm stalked abstractedly through the store, which was stuffed to bursting with wares, and stopped in front of a large, polished, spiral seashell.

“Twenty-five pesos,” said the Chinese salesman.

A steep price tag.

“Oh, you’ve always wanted one of those,” said Charlotte.

Wilhelm shrugged his shoulders.

“We’ll buy it,” said Charlotte.

She paid without haggling over the price.

Another time they went to Mazunte on foot. The beaches were all much the same, with the sole difference that the beach in Mazunte was covered with dark patches. They found out why when they saw fishermen removing the shell from a huge turtle while the creature was still alive.

They didn’t go to Mazunte again, and they stopped eating turtle soup.

Then, at last, New Year’s Eve came. The men of the village had been loading coffee all day, with much shouting and noise. Now they had been paid their wages. By three in the afternoon they were all drunk, and by six they were senseless. All was quiet in the village. Nothing stirred, there was no one in sight. Charlotte and Wilhelm had lit a little fire, as they did every evening, using the wood that the
mozo
gathered for them for a few pesos.

Darkness fell early; the evenings were long.

Wilhelm smoked.

The fire crackled.

Charlotte pretended to show an interest in the bats swooping past like shooting stars in the firelight.

At midnight they drank champagne out of water tumblers, and they both ate their grapes: it was a local custom to eat twelve grapes as the New Year came in. Twelve wishes—one for each month.

Wilhelm ate all his grapes at once.

Charlotte wished, first of all, for Werner to be still alive. She used up three grapes on that wish alone. Kurt was alive, she knew; she had heard from him by mail. For reasons that he didn’t mention in his letter, he had ended up in the Urals somewhere, and now he was married and still living there. But there was no news of Werner. In spite of Dretzky’s efforts. In spite of Werner being reported missing to the Red Cross. In spite of her petitions to the Soviet consulate—the first of them had been made six years ago.

“Keep calm, citizen. Everything will take its course.”

“Comrade, I am a member of the Communist Party, and all I want is to find out whether my son is alive.”

“You may be a member of the Communist Party, but that doesn’t give you special privileges.”

Pig-faced bastard. I hope they shoot you. And she bit on another grape.

And I hope they shoot Ewert and Radovan as well, why not? One grape each.

Another grape was used to convert their fate into typhoid fever. The kind that can be cured. Another grape to have Ewert’s wife, Inge, who had recently become editor in chief, infected by the typhoid fever too.

Suddenly there were only three grapes left. She must go carefully with them now.

The tenth: good health for all her friends—who exactly were they? The eleventh: for all who were still missing. She wished them well every year.

And as for the twelfth grape ... she simply ate it. Without wishing for anything. Suddenly it was gone.

Anyway, this was pointless. She’d wished five times already for them to go home to Germany in the coming year, and it had done no good. They were still here.

Still here—while back there in the new state, positions were being handed out.

Two days later they flew back to Mexico City. The editorial meeting was on Wednesday, as usual. It was true that Wilhelm had not been reelected to the management committee, but he retained his old functions on the
Demokratische Post;
he drew up the balance sheet, managed expenses, helped with the makeup of the journal and the distribution of the print run, which had shrunk to a few hundred copies.

Charlotte, however, also felt it her duty to take part. The editorial meeting was once a week, and you never knew if it wasn’t a Party meeting at the same time. The smaller the group, the more intricately mingled it all was: Party cell, editorial committee, management committee.

There were still seven of them. Three of those were managers. Well, two—since Wilhelm had not been reelected.

Charlotte found it difficult to get through the meeting, sitting bent double at the end of the table, barely able to look Radovan in the eye. Inge Ewert was talking nonsense, didn’t even know how wide the print area was, confused a column with a signature, but Charlotte suppressed any urge to intervene or make a suggestion, and she deliberately overlooked printer’s errors in the article she had been given to proofread, so that the comrades in Berlin would see for themselves how low the journal had sunk since she had been removed from the post of editor in chief.

Removed for “infringement of Party discipline.” So Charlotte could see no alternative to sending a report of her own to Dretzky. Her “infringement of Party discipline” had consisted mainly in her publishing an appreciation of the new GDR law on equal rights for women, which she did on 8 March, Women’s Day, although the idea had been turned down by the majority of the editorial committee as “of no interest.”
That
was the real scandal.

She added that Ewert took a “defeatist attitude” to the question of peace, and that Radovan contravened the policy established by Dretzky while he was here in Mexico on the Jewish question, which was a particularly sensitive one for political work in Mexico (the
Demokratische Post
still had many bourgeois Jewish readers).

That was unfair, and she knew it. But was it fair to accuse her of infringing Party discipline?

“Can you write us something for the cultural page by the beginning of February?”

Radovan’s voice.

“One and a half standard pages, local references.”

Charlotte nodded and scribbled something in her diary. Did that mean she wasn’t reliable enough for the political pages these days?

In the evening she took a bath—it had become almost a habit on the day of the editorial meeting.

On Thursdays and Fridays she coached pupils in English and French, three hours each (earning more in two days than Wilhelm did in a week on the
Demokratische Post
).

She spent the rest of the time before Wilhelm came home lying in the hammock on the roof garden, having the housemaid bring her nuts and mango juice, and immersing herself in books about pre-Columbian history. She was reading them for the article for the cultural page, or that was the excuse that no one asked her to give.

Over the weekend Wilhelm read
Neues Deutschland,
as usual. It always arrived from Germany in packages, at fourteen-day intervals. As he didn’t know either English or Spanish,
ND
was the only reading matter he had. He read every line of the newspaper, and it kept him occupied until late in the evening, with the exception of two half-hour walks that he took with the dog.

Charlotte saw to the housekeeping; she discussed menus for the coming week with Gloria the housemaid, looked through invoices, and watered her flowers. She had been raising a Queen of the Night flowering cactus on the roof terrace for a long time; she’d bought it years ago, even though she never expected to see it in flower.

On Monday Wilhelm went off to the printing works early, and Charlotte phoned Adrian and fixed to meet him at midday.

Adrian had been wanting to show her the colossal statue of Coatlicue for a long time. He had often told her about the Aztec earth goddess, and she had seen a photograph of the terrible figure. Coatlicue’s face was strange, consisting of two snakes’ heads facing one another and seen in profile, so that each snake had one eye and two teeth. The skull-like head of the goddess’s son Huitzilopochtli looked out of her womb. Around her neck, she wore a necklace of chopped-off hands and hearts ripped from bodies, a symbol of the sacrificial rites of the ancient Aztecs.

She had been found over a hundred and fifty years ago under the paving of the Zócalo, said Adrian as he sipped his coffee, looking at Charlotte as if there was an exam looming ahead.

This was her first visit to the university. Everything, even the coffee cups in Adrian’s office, seemed to her sacred. And Adrian himself looked even more imposing than usual, with his intellectual brow and his fine hands.

“She was dug up in 1790 and taken to the university,” said Adrian. “But the president at that time decided to have her buried in the Zócalo again. Her face was thought so appallingly hideous that she was reburied three times. Even after that, she stood behind a screen for decades, and was shown to visitors only as a kind of abstruse symbol.”

She followed Adrian through a labyrinth of passages and stairways, and then they reached the inner courtyard. Adrian turned Charlotte gently around—and she was looking at Coatlicue’s feet. She had expected a man-sized statue. Cautiously, her gaze moved up the figure, which was four meters high. She closed her eyes and turned away.

“Her beauty,” said Adrian, “lies in the way that horror is spellbound in aesthetic form.”

In January Charlotte wrote two standard pages on the dialectic of the concept of beauty in the art of the ancient Aztecs.

In February her article was rejected by the entire editorial committee, Wilhelm included, as
too theoretical.

In March, entirely unexpectedly, it began to rain, and Adrian made her a proposal of marriage.

She wasn’t sleeping with Adrian. However, nor was she sleeping with Wilhelm, who had been sexually inactive since his exclusion from the Party leadership here.

They were sitting on the steps of the Pyramid of the Sun in Teotihuacán, where she and Adrian had gone together, and not for the first time. Charlotte looked out over the dead city at the wide, hilly landscape known as the Valley of Mexico, although in reality it was two thousand meters above sea level, and suddenly thought that she was now in a position to throw up
the whole damn thing.

Instead, for once in her lifetime she could see the Queen of the Night flower.

But when she came home that evening and saw Wilhelm sitting on the floor beside the dog, she knew she couldn’t do it.

Even apart from that: would she ever see her sons again if she stayed in Mexico?

And apart from that again: did she really intend to spend the rest of her life teaching rich people’s children? Or ordering around the domestic staff of a widowed university professor?

And apart from all
that:
at the age of forty-nine?

In April a letter arrived from Dretzky, curiously enough dated April the first. As she concluded from the letterhead, Dretzky was now a state secretary in the Education Ministry. He said not a word about Charlotte’s report. Instead, he told them that two entry visas were waiting for them at the Soviet consulate, and asked them to set out on the return journey at once, so that they would be available to take up their new positions. Charlotte was to be head of the Institute for Literature and Languages at the Academy of Political Science and Jurisprudence, soon to be founded, and Wilhelm, whose wish to join the new Secret Service had not been approved because he was an immigrant from the West—Wilhelm was to be administrative director of the academy.

That evening they walked in Almeda Park, letting themselves drift with the flow of humanity. The music of a mariachi band came from far away, and they ate tortillas with gourd flowers just as they used to.

But it wasn’t the way it used to be.

Three mounted policemen moved slowly through the crowd, as if in slow motion. They all sported large, heavy sombreros, so large and heavy that they were not so much wearing them as balancing them on their heads. Their hats made the three mounted men look dignified and ridiculous at the same time. Representatives of the governmental power that had saved their lives twelve years ago ... it was outlandish to think of the summons home as merely an April Fools’ trick. But wasn’t it also ridiculous, thought Charlotte, to think of Dretzky planning to make Wilhelm administrative director of an academy? Wilhelm hadn’t the faintest idea about administration. Basically, Wilhelm hadn’t the faintest idea about anything. Wilhelm was a mechanic, that was all.