In Times of Fading Light (5 page)

And the next words ought to have been: Karl-Heinz Dretzky.

But they weren’t.

The train was jolting over points. Charlotte staggered back and forth in the corridor, hardly aware of what she fell against. With difficulty, she reached the toilet, flung up the lid with her bare hands, and vomited what little breakfast she had eaten.

She closed the lid again, sat on it. The thud-thud of the train wheels was going straight into her teeth now, straight into her head. She still felt the cold, probing look that had been turned on her over the top of the news paper. Black leather coat—of all garments. It was all clear, it made sense.

Infiltrated, that was the word. The Party was supposed to have been infiltrated by the Zionist agent Dretzky.

There was a squealing and a creaking as if the train were about to fall apart. She held her head in both hands ... or was she losing her mind? No, she was in command of her reason. Her head was clearer than it had been for a long time ... If only the paper had said, the
new
state secretary ... She almost chuckled with pleasure to realize how well she had learned to distinguish these fine nuances. The new state secretary; that would imply that there was an old one around somewhere ... but there wasn’t any old one. He didn’t exist. They were the protégés of a man who didn’t exist. They were as good as nonexistent themselves. There’d be men in black leather coats standing at the Berlin East rail station, and Charlotte would follow them without resistance, making no fuss. Would sign confessions. Would disappear. Where to? She didn’t know. Where were the people whose names were never mentioned anymore? Who not only didn’t exist, but who had never existed?

She stood up, removed her hat. Rinsed out her mouth. Looked at herself in the mirror. Idiot.

Took the nail scissors out of her purse, cut the little veil off her hat. She would at least spare herself that.

The man was standing in the corridor, smoking. She squeezed past without touching him.

“Where’ve you been all this time?” asked Wilhelm.

Charlotte didn’t reply. She sat down, looked out the window. Saw the fields, the hills, saw them yet didn’t see them. Was surprised by her present thoughts. She thought she ought to be thinking of something important. But she thought of her Swiss typewriter without the “ß” character. She thought of whoever would reap the benefit of those fifty cans of Nescafé. She thought of the Queen of the Night that she had had to sell back to the flower shop (at rock-bottom price, too). And she thought, while outside the train a film without any plot was showing, while a tractor was crawling across a field ...

“A tractor,” said Wilhelm.

... while the train stopped at a small, grubby station ... “Neustrelitz,” said Wilhelm.

... while the landscape became flatter and bleaker, while monotonous rows of pine trees flew past, interspersed by bridges and roads and railroad crossings where there was never anyone waiting to cross, while telephone wires hopped from pole to pole in pointless haste and raindrops began to slant across the windowpane—she thought of Wilhelm sitting on the deck chair in Puerto Ángel almost a year ago, thought of his thin, pale calves sticking out of his trouser legs ...

“Oh, you’ve taken the veil off your hat,” said Wilhelm.

“Yes,” said Charlotte. “I’ve taken the veil off my hat.”

Wilhelm laughed. The whites of his eyes flashed in his sun-tanned face, and his angular skull shone like polished shoe leather.

Oranienburg: a signpost on the road. Memories of outings, of cafés where you could buy coffee for a few pfennigs, sit in the shade of a chestnut tree and eat the sandwiches you had brought with you; of bathing beaches, of people in their Sunday best, of the voices of street vendors with wooden trays slung in front of them, of the smell of hot bockwurst. Now, passing through it, she thought for a split second that this was another Oranienburg, a town unknown to her: a collection of buildings scattered pointlessly around the place, buildings that, if they had ever been fit to live in, all looked deserted now.

A broken telegraph pole. Military vehicles. The Russians.

A woman with a bicycle was waiting at a railroad crossing with a dog in her bicycle basket. Suddenly Charlotte knew that she couldn’t stand dogs.

Then Berlin. A broken bridge. Facades damaged by gunfire. Over there a bombed-out house with its interior life revealed: bedrooms, kitchen, bathroom. A broken mirror. She almost thought she could make out the mug for toothbrushes. The train rolled past the building—slowly, as if going on a tour around the city. Charlotte almost felt sorry for the people of this country. It would be so expensive!

Nothing looked familiar. Nothing was anything to do with the metropolis that she had left at the end of the thirties. Stores with makeshift, hand-painted signs. Empty streets. Hardly any cars, few passersby.

Then a crowd of people standing in line outside a building. Just standing there, apathetic, gray.

A few workmen amidst this hopelessness, mending a tiny section of the street.

Then the tracks began branching.

“Berlin East station,” said Wilhelm.

Weak at the knees, Charlotte stumbled along the corridor. The brakes of the train squealed. Wilhelm got out, retrieved their baggage. Charlotte got out. The canopy of the station roof—it was the first thing she recognized. The pigeons perching on the steel girders. Over on the suburban railroad platform, a loud announcement:

“Pleeeasemindthegap!”

Cautiously, Charlotte looked around her on the platform.

“You’re all yellow in the face,” said Wilhelm.

Insanity broke out shortly before eight in the morning.

It was Sunday.

All was silent.

Only the muted twittering of sparrows, if you listened for it, came through the half-open bedroom window, making you realize how silent it was. It was the silence of a remote place that had been drowsing away for over a quarter of a century in the shelter of the border constructions, no through traffic, no building noise, no modern garden machinery.

At intervals the shrill sound of the telephone maliciously broke that silence.

Sometimes Irina thought she knew it was Charlotte calling simply by the way the phone rang. She was lying on her back in bed with her legs drawn up, hearing sounds through the bedroom door as Kurt came out of the kitchen, the floorboards creaking under his feet while he walked the six meters down the length of the living room. Hearing him finally pick up the receiver and say, “Yes, Mutti?”

Irina closed her eyes, pursed her lips. Tried to suppress her irritation. “No, Mutti,” said Kurt. “Alexander isn’t here with us.”

When he was speaking to Charlotte he said Alexander, not Sasha, which sounded strange to Irina’s ears: a father calling his only son Alexander—in Russian you used the full name only if you were on formal terms.

“If you agreed on eleven o’clock,” said Kurt, “then I expect eleven o’clock is when Alexander will arrive ... Hello? ... Hello!”

Obviously Charlotte had hung up—her latest trick was simply to hang up when she lost interest in the conversation, or when she had the information she needed.

Kurt went back to the kitchen.

Irina heard him clattering crockery and cutlery as he made breakfast. Recently Kurt had taken it into his head that
he
would make breakfast on weekends—probably to show that he, too, was in favor of equal rights for women.

Irina made a face, and for a few seconds thought regretfully of her lost hour first thing in the morning, the only time that was really hers, when no one phoned, no one got on her nerves, she drank coffee at her leisure and smoked her first cigarette of the day before getting down to work—how she enjoyed it! Just as she enjoyed the tiny little morning nip of schnapps that she had recently taken to allowing herself now and then. Only one, that was an iron rule. To set her up for the day. To help her endure the insanity. Irina still said
insanity
with a Russian accent.

This had been going on for weeks. Charlotte rang every day to give orders, hand out jobs to be done, take charge of them again herself, switch them around, hand them out once more. Could Irina get some self-stick labels to put on the flower vases? Charlotte had borrowed flower vases from all over Neuendorf, as she did every year, and although there had never been any difficulty about returning them, Charlotte had suddenly taken it into her head that the flower vases ought to be labeled so that everyone got the right vase back.

Exactly why? Why, Irina asked herself, had she actually driven off to get hold of those damn labels? She had spent half a day making the rounds of all the stationers in town—easy enough to say, but it meant looking for parking spots, driving around building sites (always the same building sites, they never moved for years on end), waiting in line at the gas station (half an hour spent arguing with aggressive drivers), getting annoyed over useless journeys because, when she finally found a parking spot, there would be a notice on the store saying
Closed for Stocktaking—
and in the end, because of course there were no labels to be had, not in a single stationer’s, in the end going to the DEFA film studios, taking along a bottle of cognac, to ask the head of the enlargement laboratory to let her have a few of those damn labels ... Meanwhile, Wilhelm was entirely indifferent to the flowers anyway. Irina remembered how he had sat in his wing chair last year, dismissing every guest who arrived to wish him happy birthday with the same remark: “Just dump those vegetables in the flowerpot”—like a child repeating the same joke over and over again. And his sycophantic guests had roared with laughter every time, as if it were the wittiest remark they’d ever heard.

Wilhelm had been hard of hearing for some time. He was also half blind. He did nothing but sit in his wing chair, a skeleton with a mustache, but when he raised his hand and prepared to say something, everyone fell silent and waited patiently for him to utter a few croaking sounds, which all present then eagerly interpreted. Every year he was awarded some kind of medal. Every year a speech of some kind was made. Every year the same bad cognac was served in colored aluminum goblets. And every year, or so it seemed to Irina, Wilhelm was surrounded by even more sycophants; they increased and multiplied, a kind of dwarfish race, all of them small men whom Irina couldn’t tell apart, in greasy gray suits, laughing all the time and speaking a language that Irina really, with the best will in the world, couldn’t understand. If she closed her eyes she already knew how she would feel at the end of this day, she could sense her cheeks stiffening with all those false smiles, could smell the mayonnaise rising to her nostrils after, out of sheer boredom, she had tried the cold buffet, could taste the aluminum flavor of the cognac served in those colored goblets.

She didn’t like entering her in-laws’ house anyway; the mere thought of it was unwelcome to her. She hated the dark, heavy furniture, the doors, the carpets. Everything in that house was dark and heavy. Everything reminded her of past suffering. Even after thirty-three years she hadn’t forgotten what it was like to clean out the cracks in the wooden panels of the cloakroom alcove in the hall. How she had to make porridge for Wilhelm: had to stand on the stairs waiting to hear him come out of the bathroom, and then—quick!—into the kitchen to stir the oats so that they wouldn’t be glutinous when they were served ... never in her life had she been so helpless, she hadn’t mastered the language, she was like a deaf-mute desperately trying to take her guidelines from other people’s glances and gestures.

And how about Kurt?

While she, with the child clinging to her skirt, stood in the laundry room ironing Wilhelm’s shirts, Kurt had been sitting on the sofa with Charlotte, stuffing his face with grapes. That was how about Kurt. With that Frau Stiller beside him.

Oh, sorry. That
Dr.
Stiller.

She heard Kurt going into the living room, putting something down on the table, going back into the kitchen. It was coming up to eight thirty. She had to fetch the flowers by ten. Then she must pay a quick visit to the Russian Store to collect the Belomorkanal cigarettes. And if Alexander turned up at lunchtime she wanted to cook pelmeni.

But Kurt insisted on her staying in bed until he put his head around the door and, in a childlike voice, called her to breakfast. And Irina humored him. Why?

She looked at herself in the big oval mirror that hung at an angle above her over the head of the bed ... was it something to do with the light? Or the fact that you always saw yourself standing on your head in that damn mirror? We could take the mirror down, thought Irina, and remembered at the same moment that this idea had occurred to her quite often before; always on Sundays when Kurt was making breakfast and she lay here studying herself in the mirror.

The worst of it was that she was beginning to see her mother’s features in her own face. It was discouraging. Yes, she could still look pretty good. Horst Mählich, with his doggy eyes, would pay her his usual ardent compliments today, and even that eternally grinning new district secretary, a sexless creature who seemed to be made of plastic rather than flesh and blood—unlike his predecessor, who admittedly had been short and fat but was a man all the same, and could even bring himself to kiss a lady’s hand—even that new district secretary would bow once more than was necessary on greeting her, and there would be, if not admiration, then something like awkwardness in his glance as it slid just past her.

But none of that altered the fact that old age was perceptibly, irrevocably on its way, and ever since her mother had been living in their house (Irina had brought her here from Russia thirteen years ago in circumstances of unimaginable bureaucratic difficulty), ever since then she’d had the image of where that way was leading before her daily. Of course she’d always known that you grow old. But her mother’s presence made her constantly aware of the uselessness of her struggle against aging, it preyed on her mind, started heretical ideas going around in her head, whispered temptingly that one might as well give up—give up as a woman. Why bother with support stockings and gum treatments, hairpieces and beauty creams, why all the plucking, the application of concealer? To impress assorted boring old men with the hairstyles of functionaries? To have the petty annual pleasure of triumphing yet again over Frau Stiller, sorry,
Dr.
Stiller, whose figure was increasingly coming to resemble a sack of potatoes, and whose face was getting more and more flushed as the result of her high blood pressure?

The telephone rang.

Once again Kurt’s footsteps made the floorboards creak as he crossed those six meters of the living room. Past the sofa where you could lounge at your leisure. Right past the bedroom door, and then, at last, his voice.

“Yes, Mutti?”

Astonishing, thought Irina, how friendly, how patient Kurt was with Charlotte.

“No, Mutti,” said Kurt. “It’s eight thirty. If you fixed for him to arrive at eleven, then Alexander will be here in two and a half hours.”

At bottom, in the depths of her heart, it offended Irina. Indeed, she took it as an enduring, severe injustice; it was as if, to this day, Kurt refused to admit what Charlotte had done to her in the past.

“Mutti, how am I to know when you and Alexander fixed that he’d be here?” said Kurt.

Charlotte had treated her like dirt. Like a servant. Charlotte, thought Irina, would really have liked to send her right back to her Russian village—and marry Kurt off to Dr. Stiller.

She heard Kurt make his way back to the kitchen. Good heavens, how long did it take the man to unwrap a piece of cheese and put out two plates? And then he thought he was helping with the housework. He did more damage than his help was worth. Once he had forgotten to put the jug under the coffee machine. Another time there were raw eggs for breakfast—he had boiled the water for exactly three and a half minutes, without putting any eggs into it!

The only ray of light today was that Sasha would be here for lunch. That, thought Irina as she threw back the covers to do a few yoga exercises (or what she thought were yoga exercises), that was the only good thing about this birthday party.

For like everyone else, Sasha had his “special job”—Charlotte loved to hand out “special jobs” to everyone. Someone even had to be responsible for taking the gift wrapping off the flowers, and someone else responsible for wiping down the Vita Cola bottles, which were always sticky because of the malfunctioning soda-stream machine. Sasha was responsible for extending the extra leaves of the extending table. For some reason Charlotte had taken it into her head that only Sasha was capable of extending the extending table. Idiotic, but Irina was careful not to disabuse anyone of this mistake. Because when Sasha, his presence commanded for eleven, had finished extending the extending table, it wasn’t worth his while to go back to Berlin, and as a result he usually spent the time until the beginning of the birthday party in the Fuchsbau house, and then they would eat pelmeni together as they did every year. Pelmeni with sour cream and mustard, the way Sasha liked them.

Just so long as Catrin didn’t come with him.

She had nothing against Catrin with a “C” and without an “h” (and with the emphasis on the second syllable: Cat
reen
), apart from the fact that she didn’t see why Sasha had felt he had to move straight in with this woman. He always moved straight in with women, instead of waiting to get to know them a bit first. Waiting to see if it worked out. And he could have been so comfortable living here; Irina had extended the attic floor on purpose to make a self-contained apartment, very practical, with its own bathroom.

No, she had nothing against Catrin, thought Irina, managing a reasonably good shoulder stand, although to be honest what Sasha saw in the woman was a mystery to her ... none of her business, of course. And she wasn’t going to say a word about it. All the same, she did wonder why such a good-looking, intelligent young man couldn’t find a better woman. Allegedly, Catrin was an actress. Did he really not see that she was
ugly?
Unattractive knees, no waist, no bum. And a chin, to be honest, like a construction worker’s ... she did have lovely eyes, yes, you had to give her that. Although on the other hand, that fluttering glance, the restlessness in her eyes when you talked to her ... Irina never felt that she was getting really close to Catrin. The woman always seemed to be somewhere else, always thinking about something else—thinking feverishly about it—when she smiled at you there was always something else going on in her head.

Never mind, thought Irina, looking at her outstretched legs, which, to be honest, were still in pretty good shape, particularly compared to Catrin’s thin, stakelike limbs, and so she decided not to wear the long, backless dress that she’d worn last year, but her less festive sea-green skirt, even if it was a little short for a woman of her age—never mind, thought Irina, let them be happy together, or not, as the case may be, but just once a year, she thought, it ought to be possible for Sasha to come home on his own. Just once a year she wanted to eat pelmeni with Sasha, the way they used to. What was so bad about that? Seeing that Catrin didn’t like pelmeni anyway. And after lunch, Irina thought to herself, Sasha would go upstairs to lie down for a rest, and then later the menfolk would sit in Kurt’s study and play a game of chess, drinking little glasses of cognac, and when she had finished doing the dishes she too, Irina, would pour herself a little glass of cognac and sit with them in silence—promise!—at the most only surreptitiously kicking Sasha under the table if he failed to see that he was making a dangerous move. Then they would all go to the birthday party together—a tolerable, indeed almost pleasant idea, at least so far as the little walk through Neuendorf in the fall was concerned, an idea that could conjure up even more distant and even more improbable memories, memories of a time when dead leaves were still burned in Neuendorf, when Sasha still skipped along beside her, holding her hand...