In Times of Fading Light (6 page)

But then the telephone rang for the third time that morning. Before she knew it, Irina had jumped up and was holding the receiver.

“Can’t you leave us to have our breakfast in peace just for once?” she hissed, without even letting Charlotte get a word in.

She slammed the receiver down, stared at the telephone for a few moments as if it were an animal that she had just killed, and she might well have been capable of smashing it with a single blow next minute—but it didn’t ring again.

“You don’t have to get so upset,” said Kurt.

He was standing behind her with an eggcup (containing an egg!) in each hand.

“You always stick up for her,” spat Irina.

Kurt didn’t reply, but put the eggcups down and hugged Irina. It was a fatherly hug with no ulterior motive, a hug in which Kurt wrapped both arms around Irina’s body, and rocked her gently back and forth. At the same moment her mother’s door opened with a creak—which meant that Irina froze, waiting for the shuffling sound that would inevitably come a few seconds later. Instinctively, she saw in her mind’s eye the stooped figure wearing the nightcap that she had knitted for herself and that she wore year-round, and the key ring that she had hung on a chain around her neck, as if afraid that Irina might lock her out with malice aforethought, saw the wretched slippers, more reminiscent of rags than shoes, that her mother liked to wear because her feet hurt, disfigured as they were by bunions ... Nadyeshda Ivanovna, the ghost who presaged her own future.

The ghost shuffled closer, but stopped and stood invisible behind the half-open living room door, muttering something.

Irina flung the door open.

“What do you want?”

She spoke Russian to her mother; in the thirteen years that Nadyeshda Ivanovna had been living here, she hadn’t learned a word of German apart from
Guten Tag
and
Auf Wiedersehen
—and unfortunately she usually confused those two phrases.

“What time is Sasha coming today?” asked Nadyeshda Ivanovna. “How would I know what time Sasha’s coming?” snapped Irina. “Put your dentures in, why don’t you? And have some breakfast!”

“Don’t need any breakfast,” said Nadyeshda Ivanovna, shuffling off to the bathroom.

Irina sat down and fished a Club cigarette out of her pack.

“Have something to eat first,” said Kurt.

“I need a smoke first,” Irina insisted.

“Irushka, you mustn’t get so upset about everything,” said Kurt. “Look at the sun shining so beautifully.”

He made a hideous face to cheer Irina up.

“Don’t need any breakfast!” said Irina, mimicking her mother.

“She’s not about to starve to death,” said Kurt.

Irina dismissed this. It was all very well for Kurt to talk; he wasn’t the one looking after Nadyeshda Ivanovna. He didn’t know what her room was like: the moldy food that Irina kept finding there, because Nadyeshda Ivanovna was always taking something that was beginning to go bad into her room to eat it—in secret, because she wanted to prove at all costs that she wasn’t a burden on anyone. It wasn’t Kurt who had to do the dishes over again after Nadyeshda Ivanovna, renowned for her thriftiness, had washed them in lukewarm water without any detergent. It wasn’t Kurt who had to endure the epidemic of pickles that broke out every year at about this season because Nadyeshda Ivanovna insisted on making herself “useful” by occupying the kitchen for days and weeks on end, pickling the cucumbers that she personally had harvested—an activity that made some kind of sense in Russia, in the Urals, but here, where you could buy a jar of pickles for a few pfennigs in any store, it was totally pointless.

“It’s terrible,” said Irina, “to be entirely surrounded by old people.”

“Want me to move out?” asked Kurt.

Irina didn’t think that particularly funny, but when she looked across the table at Kurt, when she saw him sitting there with his face marked by life, his ever bushier eyebrows (he really must trim them before the birthday party!) and his blue eyes, one of which had been blind since his childhood and had gradually given up imitating the movements of the other (an oddity that Irina hardly noticed after forty years of marriage, although she liked to cite it in explanation of Kurt’s character defects, for instance, his boundless ambition and his notorious womanizing)—when she saw him sitting like that, grinning mischievously at his own joke, she felt a sudden surge of affection for the man. Even more, she felt a surprising temptation to forgive him everything—at least at this moment, when she realized that Kurt, too, was growing old. In that respect at least he wasn’t letting her down.

“Tell you what, Irushka,” said Kurt. “This is Sunday, who knows how long the fine weather will last? Let’s go out into the woods and look for mushrooms or something.”

“But you don’t like looking for mushrooms,” said Irina.

Not only did Kurt not like looking for mushrooms, he never found any. But Irina didn’t say so, because she connected it with the blind eye. “I like watching you look for mushrooms, though,” replied Kurt. “Kurtik, I have to make lunch, I have to get Wilhelm’s present. . .”

“What present?”

Irina rolled her eyes. “Wilhelm has had the same present for the last thirty years.”

The present was ten packs of Belomorkanal cigarettes, classic Russian
papirossy
that Irina bought for him in the store in the so-called Officers’ House—dreadful stuff really, and Wilhelm smoked them purely to show off, letting his comrades see that he knew how to crease the mouthpiece, which was made of cardboard, bringing out the few scraps of Russian he knew, and dropping vague hints about “the old days in Moscow.”

“Irushka,” Kurt objected. “Wilhelm gave up smoking two years ago.”

The stupid thing was, Kurt was right. After a severe attack of pneumonia (well, in fact he had had several severe attacks of pneumonia), Wilhelm had stopped smoking. On his last birthday he had even passed the Belomorkanal cigarettes straight on to Horst Mählich, who had the barefaced cheek to crease one of the
papirossy
at once and smoke it in front of the assembled male company.

“And who’ll cook lunch?”

“Make something simple,” said Kurt.

“Something simple!” Irina shook her head. “Sasha’s coming—and you tell me to make something simple!”

“Why not?”

“Because we always have pelmeni for lunch when Sasha comes on the first of October.”

“Oh, well,” said Kurt, “what difference does that make?”

He tapped the end of his breakfast egg and began peeling the bits of shell off and putting them in the eggcup, a method that Irina thought inconsiderate, because she didn’t like scraping them out of the eggcup again later.

But she didn’t say so. She took a deep breath, which made her feel slightly dizzy. Heard Nadyeshda Ivanovna coming out of the bathroom. “I’ll just go into the bathroom first,” said Irina.

When Irina came back from the bathroom, Kurt was leafing through the newspaper. His plate was still unused, with no crumbs on it.

“Why aren’t you having anything to eat?” asked Irina. “You’ll get that stomachache again.”

“Not a single word, there really isn’t,” said Kurt. “Not a word here about Hungary, nothing about refugees, nothing about the embassy in Prague ...”

He folded the newspaper and slammed it down on the table. The headline on the front page said, in large letters:

THE GDR AND THE PEOPLE’S REPUBLIC OF CHINA

STAND SHOULDER TO SHOULDER IN THE

CONFLICTS OF OUR TIME

Irina had seen this headline already, yesterday—it was the weekend edition of
ND,
and Kurt hadn’t read it yet because the
Literaturnaya Gazeta
had arrived from Moscow yesterday. Irina wondered why he still read such garbage at all: really,
Neues Deutschland!

Kurt tapped the paper with his finger. “Do you understand what they mean by that?”

Irina shrugged her shoulders. She had also seen the photograph already: VIPs of some kind standing in three rows, one behind another, so grainy that you could hardly tell the many Chinese from the Germans in the picture. A perfectly normal, typical, stupid
ND
picture, but particularly stupid in view of the fact that people were actually running away from the VIPs (a fact that filled Irina, unlike Kurt, with wicked glee rather than concern).

“It’s a warning,” Kurt informed her. “A warning to the people. It means: if there are demonstrations of any kind here we’ll do the same as the Chinese in the Square of Heavenly Peace. Good God—oh, really, concrete!” said Kurt. “Heads full of solid concrete!”

He took a white roll out of the breadbasket and began spreading it with butter.

The picture conjured up in Irina’s mind by the words “Square of Heavenly Peace” was of a thin student in a white shirt, bringing a column of four or five tanks to a halt. She remembered holding her breath in front of the TV set as the first tank, emitting clouds of fumes and rocking alarmingly, tried to maneuver its way past that small figure. She knew how you felt, up so close to a tank. She had been around them in the last two years of the war, if only as a paramedic. She knew a T-34 tank by the sound it made as it lumbered up.

“You’d better have a word with Sasha,” said Irina. “Tell him not to do anything silly.”

Kurt dismissed this idea. “As if Sasha would listen to me!”

“All the same, you must speak to him.”

“What do you want me to say? Here, look at this garbage”—Kurt tapped the
ND
with his finger so hard that it hurt Irina to watch—“lies and garbage, all of it!”

“Try telling that to your mother this afternoon.”

Irina fished a cigarette out of her pack. Kurt grabbed her hand. “Come on, Irina, have something to eat first.”

The clock in the living room began its nine o’clock whirring. For a couple of moments, as if by previous agreement, they both paused. You had to listen very hard if you wanted to tell the time by that toneless whirr. Then Kurt said, “Very well, I’ll speak to Sasha.”

He began eating his egg, stopped again, and added, “But after breakfast we’ll go for a little walk.”

Irina also took a roll from the breadbasket, spread it with butter and cheese, worked out how long she would have left for a walk if she didn’t go to the Russian Store. On the other hand, she didn’t want to go for a walk, certainly not with Kurt, who always strode on ahead. And she didn’t have any suitable shoes.

“Why don’t I call Vera?” asked Kurt. “Maybe she’d like to come with us.”

“Oh, I see,” said Irina. “So that’s what it’s all about!”

“What? What what’s all about?”

“You’re keen to see Vera, are you?”

“Vera is
your
friend,” said Kurt. “I thought you’d be bored with just me for company.”

“Vera was never any friend of mine,” said Irina.

“Wonderful,” said Kurt. “Then the two of us will go on our own.” Irina pushed the roll away and lit her cigarette.

“Ira, what’s the matter?”

“Nothing,” said Irina. “Go ahead, you can go for a walk with Vera.”

“I don’t want to go for a walk with Vera,” said Kurt.

“Excuse me,” said Irina, “you said just now you did want to go for a walk with Vera.”

For a moment all was still. Then a door creaked, and Nadyeshda Ivanovna’s shuffle was heard in the corridor, coming closer, hesitating ... Irina flung the door right open and held the plate with the cheese roll on it out to her mother.

“Here, eat that,” she commanded.

“What is it?” asked Nadyeshda Ivanovna, without taking the plate. “For God’s sake, it’s a roll! A cheese roll! Do you think I’m trying to poison you?”

“Cheese doesn’t agree with me,” said Nadyeshda Ivanovna.

Irina stood up, went into her mother’s room, and slammed the plate down on the table.

Only when she was back in the living room did the nature of the smell in Nadyeshda Ivanovna’s room make its way into her conscious mind—the mingled odors of moldy food and pungent but useless foot salves were dominated by the sweetish, mothball aroma of the Russian naphthalene powder that drowned out all else. Nadyeshda Ivanovna used the stuff in concentrations inimical to all forms of life.

Irina opened the door of her mother’s room again and shouted, “And could you please air this room!”

She sat down and buried her face in her hands.

“Like some more coffee?” asked Kurt.

Irina nodded. “Sorry,” she said.

Kurt poured her some coffee and then spread her a cheese roll just like the one she had taken into Nadyeshda Ivanovna’s room, carefully distributing the butter, which was slightly too hard, over the bread, and then handing it to her. “Irushka, I thought we had all that behind us.”

Yes, thought Irina, I thought we had all that behind us too. But instead she said, “Listen, Kurtik, you go for a walk on your own. I really do have a lot to do.”

“On my own?” said Kurt. “I go for a walk on my own every day.”

“Then go into the garden,” said Irina, “and prune the roses.”

“Prune the roses?”

Kurt sighed, and Irina added, “I’ll bring you out coffee later, and a roll and raspberry jam.”

Kurt nodded. “Rasp-bairy jam,” he repeated.

Because instead of “raspberry” Irina pronounced it “raspbairy.” She also said not “GDR” but
GairDairAir.
She had done the same for thirty years, persistently developing a dialect of her own, and for thirty years Kurt had teased her about it.

“What’s wrong now?” asked Irina.

“Nothing,” said Kurt, keeping a perfectly straight face. And after a little pause he added, “First the jam is in the bear, then it comes out of the bear, and then you bring the roll and raspbairy jam out to me in the garden.”

“Oh, you!” said Irina, hitting out at him. But she laughed.

Kurt pretended to be running away from her attack on him, and went to the study to find his pipe. At that moment the phone rang again.

“Wait, I’ll get it,” cried Kurt from his study.

He hurried back and put his pipe on the table. Went over to the phone, lifted the receiver.

“Yes?” said Kurt.

“Hello,” said Kurt, and from the way he said “Hello” Irina knew that it wasn’t his mother this time.