In Times of Fading Light (29 page)

He ventures into another pharmacy. This time he is served by a young woman who apparently even understands him, the word
tampón
is mentioned, that must be it: ear
tampón,
but the woman shakes her head.

“
No hay. No tenemos.”

We don’t have it. Don’t stock it. And why would they? What use would a nation of the noisy and the deaf have for earplugs? People who will sit through pink-rabbit films without complaining. People who will chain two dogs up on a roof where there’s no shade for the sole purpose of disturbing the sleep of insomniacs with their barking...

He gives up avoiding puddles and jumping over the little streams running over the sidewalk. His feet are wet anyway. Everything is wet, he is wet to the skin, to under the skin. Everything, it seems to him, is drenched with the sorrow that keeps blowing in from the ocean, flooding everything here in the city, sending people out of their minds, making new arrivals jump overboard and sink in the sea without trace. He buys two bottles of water in a
supermercado,
and suddenly suspects that even the mineral water sold here in the supermarkets of Veracruz might be contaminated by sorrow.

Then he lies in his windowless room. Feels his temperature rising. Takes tablets, drinks from the contaminated bottles. The air-conditioning rattles in his unprotected ears. He gets up and switches the air-conditioning off, but before long he feels that he is stifling. The headache gets worse. He hears voices in the hotel bar. He forces himself to get up again, switches the air-conditioning back on, puts scraps of toilet paper in his ears. Takes another tablet. Pulls the blanket over his head.

He lies on his right side, curling up small. Now shivers begin running through his body, only on one side at first, he follows them in the darkness of his cave under the covers. Coming from his kidneys, they make first for the left side of his pelvis, the side on top, from there they move to the area of his heart, crawl on over his back, and peter out on their way to the nape of his neck. Suppose his weakened immune system won’t stand up to an attack by some unknown infection? The oxygen device rattles in his head—and all of a sudden it is his own oxygen apparatus. All of a sudden he himself is the dying old man whose oxygen apparatus rattles. All of a sudden it seems only logical for him to die here, in this bunker in Veracruz, all by himself, with toilet paper in his ears. This is the way he wanted it. It is the logical, the inevitable outcome of his life.

He has to turn on his other side to shake off that idea. To rid himself of the images passing through his head. He looks for other images. He tries to remember something, anything. In the intervals between the shivers breaking against him like waves, he tries to conjure up something pleasant, but all he sees is one thing: he sees himself wandering through strange cities, and nothing but that, as if there were nothing else in his life, nothing but streets, nothing but buildings, faces dissolving when he tries to touch them, this is the film of my life, he thinks as his teeth chatter, although in a pitifully abbreviated version, he adds to himself, trying to suppress the chattering of his teeth so as not to make any more buildings fall. He will demand another version, he thinks, and damn it all, he’ll have the right to make the director’s cut himself, he thinks, gritting his teeth until his jaw hurts, and then it gets hot, he runs, everyone leaves the city, he runs through the desert, the air burning his throat, he runs, his heart beats at an incredible rate, it is trembling rather than beating, it is going steeply uphill, uphill all the time, and no peak ever comes into sight, the desert is on the skew, Alexander realizes, it goes uphill all the way to the horizon, it’s impossible to climb it in this heat and with his defective heart, inoperable, he knows that, he ought to stop, but the landscape behind him breaks away, falls in pieces into the chasm, or rather into the sky, the sky is everywhere, above and below, and through this omnipresent sky a crumbling crust barely a meter thick extends—the world; an amazing discovery. Then his parents are with him, holding both his hands, the hands of their son with the defective heart. They are wearing their Sunday best, his father in pants with turned-up cuffs like those worn in the fifties, his mother in high heels and the full skirt under which he always liked to hide, but they are taking no notice of their clothes, they are running, climbing, crawling up the thin crust of the earth rising at a slant into the omnipresent sky, they slip, fall, scramble up again, and haul him and his heart defect along after them, urging him to hurry, composed but unyielding, urging him in a tone as if he were late for kindergarten, telling him to go on, not keep looking around to see piece after piece breaking away but to look ahead, look up to where, in the heights at the end of the world, a little group of
indios
bedecked with feathers are trying to dance a new world into being: five or six men, small of stature with incipient paunches, stepping in time from foot to foot. The music to which they are dancing comes from a loudspeaker box like those that the subway CD sellers sling around their necks, they have just bought their feather ornaments in the souvenir shop, and instead of knives they are holding little black obsidian tortoises.

He lies sick in bed for two days. Once he gets up and makes his difficult way, bent double by the fever, to a supermarket to buy drinking water. On the third day he packs his things, orders a taxi at reception, and, without asking for the return any of his advance payment for the room, has himself driven to the bus station and says he wants a ticket to the Pacific. The man in the ticket office puts an A5-sized map in front of him, at random Alexander taps a place on the other ocean, lying on the opposite side of Mexico, the still, the peaceful.

“Pochutla,” says the man.

“Pochutla,” repeats Alexander—a place-name that he is sure he has never heard in his life before.

The bus leaves at seven in the evening. It is a deluxe bus, there are seats that will tilt right back to a lying position—and it is quiet. The sound of the video system comes only over headphones, as in an aircraft. Alexander manages to sleep for a few hours.

In the morning the sky is blue again—insanely blue. Colors in general seem to him more intense here than on the east coast. The hovels at the roadside shine red and green in the morning sun, hand-painted advertising signs greet him as he passes by, and it does not seem to him at all strange to see a man sweeping sand away from in front of his tiny restaurant. Something or other—the air, the sky, the frail architecture of corrugated iron and piles—speaks of the proximity of the Pacific.

Then he is in Pochutla. The regular bus to which he has changed drops him off at a garage converted into a café. His knees are still a little weak as he gets out. He feels light. He feels as if he has shed his skin. When the morning air touches him it is like a revelation. His skin tingles in the sun. He asks the owner of the garage-café, who is just scrubbing the sidewalk outside her place, which way to go for the sea—and learns that the sea is still fifteen kilometers away. You can only get there by taxi, he learns, but a friend of the owner of the garage-café, he also learns, is a taxi driver, and the owner of the garage-café will tell her friend. Wouldn’t Alexander like some breakfast meanwhile?

Alexander says he would, and the woman—who in spite of the Indian in her genetic makeup somehow looks like the Prenzlauer Berg mothers before the fall of the Wall who used to set out early on their bicycles with two children, making their way through the rush hour traffic—the woman hurries over to the baker opposite to get him a few freshly baked rolls.

Good decision. He drinks coffee. He eats a delicious roll and jam. He sees the cracks in the curb opposite, sees the glittering of the sidewalk just scoured by the owner of the garage-café. He sees a man waving and running after a taxi. He sees another man who looks like a blue elephant. He sees the man’s female companion, a white elephant. A child comes into the picture and stops, and smiles.

The drive will cost fifty pesos; they agree on the price in advance. The road winds gradually downhill through a landscape so expressionless that it can only be the outskirts of whatever comes next.

The place is called Puerto Ángel, if he understood correctly. There is no sign with its name when they get there. To the left, already in sight, is the beach. To the right, in front of a slope, a few modest houses standing wall to wall and with the usual tangle of cables. A vegetable shop. A
ferretería.
A bank branch obviously being renovated.

Without being asked, the driver recommends a hotel to Alexander, or more precisely a
casa de huéspedes,
a guesthouse, indeed he recommends it as pressingly as if he would get a commission. It is called Eva & Tom. Alexander fears that there may be Germans behind those names, but the taxi driver vigorously denies that, so Alexander, with knees still a little weak, climbs the steep path that ends after a while in a flight of steps leading up to Eva & Tom.

In a kind of reception area under palm fronds he is met, after someone has called her, by a corpulent woman, no longer young, who might in fact be taken for an American Indian because of her copper-colored skin and long gray hair, severely plaited into a braid. She wears flip-flops and a washed-out dress, leafs unobtrusively through a large appointments book, and then without transition addresses Alexander in German, although with a heavy south German or possibly Austrian accent. Then she takes him up the flight of steps made of coarse planks that links the various levels of the guesthouse.

The highest level is right on top of the hill. Hibiscus flowers and palms. From the terrace, you look down into a bay surrounded by mighty rocks, the color of its water as
insanely
blue as the blue of the sky above.

The guestrooms themselves are in a single-story, walled part of the complex, painted in a determined if slipshod manner with typical Frida Kahlo colors (red, blue, green), and even before the Austrian-speaking woman shows him the small room (no window, the light comes in from above, and in one place the roof tiles visibly resting on the rafters have been replaced by a piece of corrugated plastic), even before his glance moves over the sparse furnishings, consisting of only a bed, a mosquito net, a table, and a chest, even before he asks the price (fifty pesos, five dollars a night), he has fallen in love with the idea of lying in the hammock fixed just outside the door of his room on hot afternoons, in the shade of the palm-thatched roof, looking out over the insane blue of the Pacific.

“And mind you shake the blankets out,” says the Austrian. “We get scorpions around here.”

It was really only a stone’s throw away—but Nadyeshda Ivanovna, walking beside him, moved so slowly on her poor old feet that it seemed as if they had to cover an impossible distance to reach his mother’s house. Kurt felt as if he were running on the spot. His urge for movement grew with every step. The beautiful weather seemed to him intolerable. The tugging sensation in his stomach grew stronger. He was sorry, now, that he hadn’t simply closed the door behind him that morning and gone out into the Wildpark to walk among the trees for an hour or so at a steady pace.

It was useless to argue with Irina. These days she stayed upstairs in her room, listening to Vysotzky. The whole house echoed with his songs. Kurt thought he could still hear that penetrating roar through doors and windows. As if someone were roaring for all he was worth. Unhappy music, thought Kurt. Music—if you were going to call it music at all—that helped Irina to work herself ever further into her unhappiness, that was what Kurt didn’t like about it: the urge to work herself into a state of unhappiness that brought her into contact with her
Roooshian soul,
after years and years when she hadn’t even wanted to think about her Russian roots.

In addition there was the alcohol, and a
Roooshian soul
seemed to be particularly drawn to that substance anyway. It was a fact that, unlike him, Irina had always drunk a good deal anyway, but until now it had always been a kind of “social drinking.” For her to retreat into her room and get drunk all by herself, listening to Vysotzky, was a fairly new development. You couldn’t say she was an alcoholic: sometimes she didn’t drink at all for days or even weeks. Yet Kurt worried when he thought of the uncontrollable chain reaction that just one cognac could set off in her.

Kurt had not been able to refuse her
just one cognac
—not after the news of Sasha’s flight to the West. But no sooner had she drunk
just one cognac
than she was vehemently demanding a second (and last) cognac. After that she had begun pulling Catrin’s character to pieces in language that was almost obscene, suspecting her (perhaps not entirely without foundation) of having persuaded Sasha to flee. She poured her own third cognac, and it almost looked as if they might come to blows when Kurt tried to take the bottle away from her. Now all she needed was for Kurt, hoping to mitigate her despair, to remind her cautiously that she too, now she was over sixty and thus of pensionable age, had a right to visit her son in the West—and her anger was turned on him, Kurt, for expecting her to set foot over
that woman’s
threshold, and finally, after her fourth cognac, even on Sasha, with whom she was never usually ready to find fault:
My son has let me down
was the way she finally expressed her disappointment, and although Kurt felt just a little satisfaction to think that Sasha was getting it in the neck as well, he bravely objected and tried to defend at least one simple fact from Irina’s devastating and, even considering her condition, impressively irrational attacks: Sasha’s flight had nothing to do with her personally! Thereupon Irina had gone to her room with the rest of the bottle and the curious threat of getting a dog, and Kurt had made himself some fried potatoes.

That is to say, he had tried to make himself some fried potatoes. Stupidly, the sliced potatoes had stuck to the bottom of the pan and broke when he turned them, so that after a while the potato islands clinging to the pan began to give off smoke. To rescue the whole thing he had added two eggs: Egg Disaster, he called the dish. It tasted like that, too.

Why did Irina never make fried potatoes? With fried eggs. He’d liked the dish since his childhood. Was it too mundane for her? And why, Kurt wondered, while he had plenty of time to avoid the firebugs on the uneven walkway of Neuendorf, why, after thirty years in Germany and however often she was corrected, did she still talk about her
Rooshian
soul ... ?

“
He
wanted to marry me,” said Nadyeshda Ivanovna suddenly.

Kurt wasn’t sure at first whether she was talking to him or herself. It turned out that she meant Irina’s father who, so Irina claimed (although she had seen him just once in her life, and only from a distance), had been a gypsy. Which Nadyeshda Ivanovna, however, denied. Neither of them was a trustworthy source. Irina tended to see the world as she wanted to see it, while Nadyeshda Ivanovna, who was practically illiterate, had only the most fragmentary awareness of the events that had gone on around her: collectivization, the civil war, the revolution—Kurt had difficulty arranging her reminiscences according to reliable points of reference. And when she now, on their way to Wilhelm’s birthday party, began talking about a city it confused even him for a moment.

“What city do you mean?” he asked.

It turned out that she meant Slava.

In his mind’s eye, Kurt saw “the city”: the road with its gravel surface, the board fences, higher than a man, rising to left and right, with crooked, single-story houses huddling behind them—a settlement of just under nine thousand souls, built on the flat plain between the marshes: the back of beyond, thought Kurt. There could hardly be a place dirtier, uglier, more inhospitable than that godforsaken dump, where, after the end of his prison sentence, he had spent another seven years as what they called an eternal exile. Although if he ignored the way he had fallen into the deepest despair (once a month, as it happened, on a fairly regular basis) on realizing how time was passing without any prospect of his ever being able to begin living a proper, normal life again—if he ignored that, he had to admit that there had been good aspects even to the godforsaken dump.

For instance, the first time Irina had cooked him soup: pea soup made from a bag of dried peas, or more precisely a packet (there were no fresh peas available). Delicious! Even though later, when Irina brought another packet like that back from Slava, the soup had turned out to be almost inedible ...

Or swimming in the river in the morning.

Or the white nights, when you sat by the fire together until sunrise, gradually beginning to lose all sense of time ... They were all eternal exiles: a collection of eternities. How cheerful sheer despair could make you.

Or the first photographs that Irina and he had taken. Sobakin had brought them the camera from Sverdlovsk, they had mixed their own developing fluid from potash and—what was the stuff called?—sodium sulfite, using a homemade beam balance and several Russian kopeks to act as weights, because the proportions had to be kept exactly right. And now Kurt, who when he thought of those “first photos” was reminded mainly of certain photographs among them, the first that, how could he put it, were not intended for public consumption, when he recollected very clearly, walking arm in arm with Nadyeshda Ivanovna to Wilhelm’s birthday party, the moment when the outlines showed on the sheet of paper floating in their homemade developing fluid, vaguely at first, you could hardly make them out, you weren’t sure which was top and which was bottom, until suddenly—white and strong—Irina’s hips loomed out of the background as it darkened: such an exciting moment that they forgot to put the photograph in the fixing bath and fell on one another where they stood in the darkroom ... A pity, thought Kurt, that they’d had to destroy those photographs before emigrating from the Soviet Union.

On the other hand, who knew, maybe it would be like the first packet soup in Slava after ten years in the camp. Anyway, these days Irina didn’t want to know about
such things
(as she had taken to calling them). She was even beginning to find what had once seemed to her erotic and enjoyable increasingly repellent and vile: a kind of retrospective pessimism. Was that her
Rooshian soul
too? Or was it the operation on her ovaries? One way or another, life with Irina had suddenly become difficult. And Sasha’s defection to the West wasn’t about to make it any easier.

What was he going to say to Charlotte and Wilhelm?

The house was slowly coming closer. High above the treetops with their fall coloring you could already see the tower room with its battlements and arched windows, and although fundamentally the tower was the acme of a massive aberration of taste (the whole house was a rather badly designed and eclectic building, thought up by a Nazi who had made his fortune and put his dream into practice here in the last days of the war), all the same Kurt could not deny that he had always been fond of the little tower room. It was where he had begun his second life—or was it his third?—and he liked to remember the silence over Neuendorf when he used to open the window at six thirty in the morning and get out his typewriter ready for work, the tingle in the air, the yellow leaves outside the window, although it couldn’t always have been fall there, thought Kurt—but instead of stopping now to study the question of why the plane trees were always yellow in his memory, he had better, he thought, put his mind to answering the questions that he was about to face.

Not that there was really much to think about. What was the point of creating a sensation at this moment? What good would it do anyone? Wilhelm was an obstinate old idiot, and really, thought Kurt, it would only serve him right to hear the truth, retribution for his obstinacy. He really ought, he reflected as the gray facade came into view among speckled tree trunks, the massive door, the small barred windows in the hall that ultimately made the house a fortress, he really ought to be told, thought Kurt, trying to imagine Wilhelm’s face: today, on your birthday, he’d have to say, your grandson has decided he’s fed up with the whole gang of you, many happy returns, thought Kurt, suppressing his impulse to use one of those silly door knockers. The
Do Not Knock!
notice had always annoyed him. A ban like that—what a way to welcome visitors! Moreover, if the notice wasn’t there probably no one would think of knocking, in fact more than likely no one would even realize that those silly lions’ heads were knockers at all!

Kurt took a deep breath, as deep as if the air he was breathing in would have to last him for several hours, and pushed the bell.

The door opened, a face appeared: a round, stupid face—there was hardly anyone, thought Kurt, who could be so clearly identified at first sight as what he was, a
functionairry
—as Irina put it, scornfully rolling her “r’s.” It was one of her favorite terms of abuse. Kurt tried to push his way quickly past Schlinger, but once in possession of Kurt’s hand Schlinger wasn’t letting go of it in a hurry, he shook it, he nodded to Kurt in his typical and unpleasantly familiar way, and regrettably Kurt caught himself nodding back in the same way, if only to cut the whole thing short.

“Please wait for Comrade Powileit,” Schlinger called after him.

Kurt had no intention of waiting for
Comrade Powileit,
but just then, and before Nadyeshda Ivanovna had even taken off her coat,
Comrade Powileit
herself came tripping along—agile as a spider homing in on her prey.

“Hello, where’s Irina?”

“Irina’s sick,” said Kurt.

“Sick? What’s the matter with her?” inquired Charlotte.

“She isn’t feeling well,” said Kurt.

“And how about Alexander? Don’t tell me Alexander isn’t feeling well either!”

“Mutti, I’m sorry, but ...” Kurt began. However, Charlotte cut him short.

“What on earth are you thinking of, children? What am I supposed to tell Wilhelm? This is his ninetieth birthday!”

“Listen, would you, Mutti ...”

“Yes, sorry,” said Charlotte. “Sorry ... but I’m going out of my mind with all this. I can’t take much more!”

She groaned, and assumed her tragic expression.

“And Jühn isn’t coming either, imagine that! Sending a deputy—would you believe it? And Wilhelm is ninety today! He’s getting the Order of Merit of the Fatherland, in gold! But Jühn is sending a deputy! ... Where are your flowers?”

“Oh, shit,” said Kurt. “I forgot them. Left them at home.”

“Well, never mind,” said Charlotte. “Pick up some of the others. There’s plenty out there.”

Kurt glanced at the cloakroom alcove, where countless bouquets were already languishing in the dim light, while his mother’s voice reached him as if from afar ...

“... and please, Kurt, if you’re going in to see him now, not a word about any, well,
events.
You know what I mean: Hungary, Prague ... and nothing about the Soviet Union.”

“And nothing about Poland,” said Kurt.

“Exactly,” said Charlotte.

“And nothing about the universe, and nothing about the moon,” said Kurt.

“Kurt, I do beg you, he’s no longer ...” Charlotte rolled her eyes with a wealth of meaning. “He’s gone downhill recently.”

“I’ve gone downhill recently myself,” said Kurt.

He decided against the flowers.

When he entered the living room, Wilhelm was sitting in his arm-chair as usual, he looked the same as usual, and he was acting the same way, too. For years it had been his habit to receive birthday wishes sitting down, which in itself, thought Kurt, was ungracious to his guests, and when Wilhelm fired a question at him in his usual imperious manner as soon as he was in the room, he once again felt like telling the truth.

“Alexander is sick!”

Charlotte had intervened, getting her word in first. Wilhelm nodded, and beckoned Nadyeshda Ivanovna over to him. She gave him a jar of pickled gherkins that she had preserved herself, and Wilhelm, who lost no opportunity of showing off his knowledge of Russian, ventured on
garosh, garosh!
by way of response. He probably meant to say
kharascho
(meaning good), but he couldn’t manage even that. The fact was that Wilhelm knew no Russian, had never known any Russian. For although he liked to talk about his “Moscow years,” those Moscow years had never existed. It was true that he had gone to Moscow in 1936, in the company of Kurt and Werner (both of them had then stayed there “for reasons of safety”), in order, as Kurt suspected, to be trained in secret service work by Red Army Intelligence. However, his stay had lasted not years, but weeks at the most. Moreover, the strictly secret training center was somewhere well outside Moscow, so that in reality Wilhelm had seen the city little more than three times in his life.
Garosh, garosh!