In Times of Fading Light (35 page)

All the same, he ought not to have said that. Tell the truth ... but if you really did tell the truth for once, Muddel started shouting, or rather tried to shout with a voice that never came out sounding right, and after she had shouted for a bit (the content of her remarks was of no interest), she took careful aim and slammed down a tiny plastic bag on the table:

Dope. Grass. A substance that, as Markus was convinced, was a thousand times less dangerous than alcohol, nothing to get worked up about—but Muddel was worked up. Okay, so he had promised not to smoke any more of it, well, what else could he do? And the mere existence of the plastic bag didn’t prove that he had actually been smoking it. Look at it properly, and the fact that the bag was still there, thought Markus, proved the opposite. But logic wasn’t about to get him anywhere now.

“That’s enough,” said Muddel. “I’ve had it up to here! Understand, right up to here!” And she pointed to a place just under her nose.

The pastor’s voice started up again.

“If you don’t change your ways here and now, Markus, then there’ll be a time when we have to ...”

“Oh, wow!” said Markus.

“Listen to him, will you?” shouted Muddel.

“That jerk’s not telling me anything,” Markus shouted back.

And then, at last, the jerk was shouting, too.

“Get out of here!” shouted the jerk. “Out!”

Markus packed his things and went to Cottbus.

He spent Sunday evening on his own in front of the TV in his shared apartment, zapped his way through
White Men Can’t Jump
and a feeble crime-scene drama, ended up with the sex channel giving nine hundred phone numbers, and jerked off.

On Monday morning he turned up punctually for work. This week he had been assigned to the customers’ technical service department, and went out with an experienced colleague: data lines, dealing with interference. The colleague’s name was Ralf. He was at least forty. It was raining outside, a cold November rain, and your fingers got clammy. They stopped once at a snack bar, and Ralf bought him a curry sausage and some hot tea. They sat in the car with the engine running, it was nice and warm, and the only trouble was that Ralf listened to such stupid music.

On Tuesday evening the others who shared the apartment were all there. They laid in a few bottles of beer and told each other what sort of girls they’d picked up on the weekend. It soon began getting Markus down, and he went to bed early and jerked off again (this time thinking of the off-blond with the athlete’s tits).

On Wednesday after his shift he hung around in what they called the city center, watched two drivers bawling each other out over a dent. Then went to the only club that was open on weekdays. Stood in the corner for a while, gawking at girls.

On Thursday he tried to learn a bit of math.

On Friday morning he told Ralf he had to go to his granny’s funeral. Ralf drove him to the rail station.

He was at the Goethestrasse cemetery around eleven. He had sometimes passed it with his grandparents in the old days, had seen the gravestones or old grannies with watering cans from outside, but it had never occurred to him that what lay behind the crumbling wall, beyond the gate hanging askew between its gateposts, could have anything at all to do with him. It had always struck him as a self-contained place, outside time, outside the world, and although of course it was a cemetery, as he arrived he was overcome by doubts that his grandmother was really going to be buried there today. But sure enough, in a weather-beaten glazed display box for notices at the entrance, a funeral was announced for today at twelve noon.

Although the temperature was not below freezing, it was very cold. Damp clung to the branches of trees, penetrating everything, the ground, the air, and soon the old Swedish army surplus coat that he had bought in a Berlin store where they sold clothes by weight, at so much per kilo. Markus walked up and down outside the cemetery for a little while. The store opposite was boarded up. There was only a florist’s open, a tumbledown flat-roofed GDR building, with the area around the display window halfheartedly sprayed with graffiti. Markus went in. It was warm there, but the saleswoman asked him at once what he would like, and for a little while Markus acted as if he were looking for flowers. It did actually occur to him to buy some for Granny Irina. But he couldn’t scrape up more than ten marks, and he decided it would be a better idea to buy a hot drink in the nearest bar.

Five hundred meters farther on he found a basement corner bar, the Friedensburg. He was the only customer. An old boxer dog with terrible cancerous swellings lay snoring quiet beside the counter. A waiter with thin, combed-back hair and a stained napkin over his arm dragged himself very slowly, almost in slow motion, through the room and, with the words, “Your good health, sir!” put a small tray down in front of him. On the tray were a cup of tea, a little glass of rum, and a sugar bowl. Markus poured the rum into the tea and added two spoonfuls of sugar, assuming that the sugar was part of it. The drink went to his head at once, and for the first time since he had known about Granny Irina’s death he was overcome by something like sadness and was relieved, was almost glad of it. He imagined them—Grandpa Kurt, his father, he himself—standing by Granny Irina’s grave, a silent and emotional scene. Or was there a pastor involved, too? With an umbrella, like in the film he’d once seen? And where was the grave itself? Or would he see it only when he went in?

When he went back to the cemetery—just before twelve, to be on the safe side—the brief high that the tea with rum had given him was dying down. Suddenly the bumpy road had cars parked all along it, people were arriving from all sides. They carried wreaths and flowers. Markus followed them down an avenue leading to a small building. There was a crowd like rush hour on the suburban railroad outside it. The room inside was crammed. The double doors were opened so that those left outside could see something, and more and more people kept coming, couples, little groups, single figures. Markus looked at their faces—were these the “old comrades” Klaus had mentioned? The woman with dyed hair, the actor he’d once seen on TV, that incredibly fat man with hair bristling chaotically ... and the one with the big, purplish face, wasn’t that the guy who had been bellowing something about
more democracy
at Wilhelm’s birthday party?

Looking over heads and shoulders, he cast a glance at the inside of the building. Right at the far end was a big black cross. On each side of it were potted palms, looking artificial even from a distance. A little farther forward there was a wooden speaker’s lectern covered with black fabric—not very neatly covered; one thumbtack was missing, and the material sagged on that side. Then he saw Grandpa Kurt in the front row on the right, a gray head with a bald spot in the middle of it, and there beside Grandpa Kurt, on his right,
he
was.

Music began to play, classical music, squawking slightly because the loudspeakers were too small. The crowd settled down. People bowed their heads. Then a woman went up to the unevenly covered lectern, not a pastor, he could tell that at once, and began speaking:

Irina, dear Irina,
said the woman, as if speaking to Granny Irina,
we say there’s still plenty of time before we part—an idea that always fools us ...
But where was Granny Irina?

Markus craned his neck. The people had put their flowers and wreaths down at the other end of the room, a huge pile of them around a knee-high black stool with something like a vase standing on it—but where was the casket? It seemed all the stranger to him that this woman kept speaking directly to Granny Irina, as if she were sitting in the middle of the room with the rest of them ...
Other people were always welcome to you, we all came knocking at your door ...
And silly as it was, just to make sure he looked to see whether he hadn’t maybe misunderstood somehow, whether Granny Irina wasn’t sitting there next to Grandpa Kurt in the front row, or next to
him,
his father, but of course she wasn’t. Instead, his father’s new girlfriend was sitting there. He swallowed with disappointment.

I used to call you Nausicaa,
said the woman at the lectern ... Who was Nausicaa? No idea ...
a woman come to us from the days of classical antiquity ...
He looked cautiously around: did the guy with the purple face know what she was talking about? ...
a survivor of war, exile, emigration, a woman who made it possible to live this impossible life ...
The head with the purple face attached to it nodded ...
you were like that, Irina. You did that ...
The head with the purple face nodded again—and Markus imagined himself taking out a shotgun and blasting that silly, nodding head off its body.

Then the woman was suddenly talking about cooking ...
And the hospitality of your wonderful cuisine was unstinting,
said the woman. At first Markus couldn’t quite make this out, but she suddenly turned out to be talking about cooking, or at least setting a dining table:
The table you set before us was a work of art,
said the woman, and added, sounding a bit crazy again:
Your table invited guests to sit down to talk.

A pause.

Did you know how precious that was?

Another pause.

Did we tell you?

Once, he remembered, a long time ago, Granny sometimes used to make pelmeni and he was allowed to help. To this day he knew how it went: how you prepared the dough and rolled it into a sausage shape. How you cut slices off the sausage, dusted them with flour (so that they wouldn’t stick) but not too much flour (so that you could go on working the dough), and rolled them out into thin circles about the size of a saucer. And then came the most difficult part ... As the high voice of the woman who wasn’t a pastor flew past him through the open double doors and out into the open air, he was back for a few moments in Granny Irina’s kitchen, with the unmistakable smell of dough and onions and chopped meat in his nostrils, and his thumbs and forefingers remembered exactly how the fiddly procedure went: you put a teaspoon of chopped meat on each little circle, you folded the circle over to make a half-moon, you pressed it together all the way around, and finally you pulled the two corners of the half-moon together and connected them to each other, so that it made a kind of little hat, as Granny Irina said, with the Russian accent that she had never shaken off, however often she was told how to say things properly, and although Frickel had never been there to hear it, Markus had always felt slightly ashamed that his granny spoke with such a Russian accent.

Your chair will be left empty now,
he heard the woman who wasn’t a pastor say. For a moment he had a lump in his throat, maybe because he was reminded of the shabby old kitchen chair that he had knelt on to make pelmeni. Then he heard someone beside him sob, and he was back in the present.

Looking at the plastic potted palms.

Looking at the lectern untidily covered with black fabric.

Feeling his feet hurt with the cold.

And we must bear it,
said the woman who wasn’t a pastor.

She paused.

The hour has come.

The sobbing got louder. The man with the purple face was wiping a tear from his eye now. But the more sobbing went on around Markus, the less he felt.

We must say good-bye.

The squawking music started again. Suddenly a little man appeared—where from?—a little man who looked like a shrunken fish in an old-fashioned railroad uniform. It was topped off by a railroad worker’s cap fastened under his chin with a strap. The little man took the
something-like-a-vase
off its plinth and carried it ahead of him like a special cake, or a silver cup, very slowly, and behind the little man walked the other people, led by his father and Grandpa Kurt. The people outside the door automatically formed a kind of honor guard, and all of a sudden he, Markus, was standing at the front of the honor guard. He could have touched his father. He almost did touch him! But his father passed by without noticing him.

Markus stayed standing by the door, watching the procession getting longer and longer. It moved along the avenue, turned right, when the last people had gone around the bend it turned right again, and then, led by the little man in the railroad worker’s cap, crawled slowly back in the opposite direction, until the little man stopped. The turf had been freshly dug up here, a broad strip of it like a vegetable bed, divided into lots of smaller beds. There were flowers lying on the first little bed already, and where the flowers stopped there was a hole in the earth, just large enough for that
something-like-a-vase
to fit into it, and at the moment when the little man bent down to lower the
something-like-a-vase
into the hole, Markus realized two things.

First, he realized why the little man had fastened his railroad worker’s cap under his chin with a strap.

Second, he realized that
that,
that
something-like-a-vase,
was Granny Irina.

On the way back it began to rain. His old army surplus coat was heavy. It took forever for his feet to warm up.

She was still feeling stunned. With difficulty, she had seen people off; had shaken hands, smiling; had listened to Bunke’s tipsy nattering; had nodded to Anita, who kept on and on assuring her that in spite of everything, it had been a
lovely
birthday party ... Had apologized to Zenk yet again.

Now she was standing in the salon, inspecting the chaos caused by Wilhelm. The extending table looked like a bird that had suffered a nasty accident. Its two side panels were sticking up in the air at an angle. The stuff on the floor resembled the guts of a defunct animal.

She felt like phoning Dr. Süss right away: tangible evidence—wasn’t that what he’d said?

“Comrade Powileit, you’d need tangible evidence for that!”

Well, there was his “tangible evidence” for him.

She took a step forward, felt the point of the nail sticking in the tabletop ... knocked on the wood as an experiment. To find out whether it made the same gruesome sound as the tabletop when it hit Zenk’s head, as he supported himself with one hand on the cold buffet to fish for a pickle on the other side ... Zenk, of all people! She could still see him standing there, his broken glasses in his hands. Trembling. His big eyes swimming helplessly in his face ...

Who was going to pay for those glasses of his?

“I’ll get started now,” said Lisbeth.

Suddenly, she was there beside her.

“Well, that’s just great,” said Charlotte. “And there was I thinking you’d gone on vacation.”

She turned and left the room. Briefly, she thought of retreating to the tower room for a moment, to calm down. It was the only room she could still call her own in this house. But the forty-four steps up to it deterred her, and she decided to make do with the kitchen.

In the hall, she collided with Wilhelm. Charlotte flung up her arms, the breath knocked out of her. Wilhelm said something, but Charlotte didn’t hear it, didn’t look at him. She made a wide detour around him and went quickly into the kitchen. Shut the door. Turned the key in the lock, to be on the safe side, strained her ears ...

Nothing. Only the suspect, rattling sound of her own breath. She put her right hand in her trouser pocket to check that the aminophylline drops were where they ought to be: they were. Charlotte clenched her fist firmly around the little bottle. Sometimes it helped just to clench her fist around the bottle and count up to ten.

She counted up to ten. Then she went around the kitchen table, which was piled high with unwashed coffee cups and saucers, and sank down on the stool. Tomorrow, she decided, she would call Dr. Süss and make an appointment. Tangible evidence!

Not that she hadn’t already given him any amount of tangible evidence! Weren’t the locksmith’s bills—was it ten or was it twelve of them?—tangible evidence? They arrived because Wilhelm kept having safety locks installed and then lost the keys, or rather he hid them and couldn’t find them again ... didn’t that mean anything? Or the
ND,
in which he had recently taken to crossing out every report in red pencil so that he wouldn’t forget what he had read already. Or the letters he sent to all manner of institutions ... well, to be honest, she didn’t have the letters themselves. But she had the answers: an answer from GDR Television when Wilhelm complained of a program it had transmitted. Only it turned out to have been a program from the West. And what did Wilhelm do next? Wilhelm wrote to State Security. In his red scrawl that no one could read anyway. Wrote to State Security because he suspected that the Sony color sets, a few thousand of which the GDR had imported, contained an enemy mechanism that kept secretly retuning them to the West ...

And what did Süss say?

“Comrade Powileit, we can’t consign him to the madhouse for something like that!”

Madhouse! Who said anything about a madhouse? But surely somewhere could be found for Wilhelm in a proper care facility. After all, Wilhelm had been a Party member for seventy years! Was decorated with the Order of Merit of the Fatherland in gold! What more did anyone want?

Süss was useless. And to think he called himself a district medical officer. A blind man could see what kind of state Wilhelm was in. They’d all seen him again today: I have enough tin in my box! How would you describe
that?
He’s being decorated with the Fatherland Order of Merit in gold—she didn’t even have it in silver!—and he says: I have enough tin in my box! A good thing the district secretary wasn’t there. What a disgrace. And then striking up a song. She’d expressly told Lisbeth not to let Wilhelm have any more alcohol. He was hard enough to bear when he was sober. And the way he spoke to people! Take those vegetables to the graveyard. What did he mean, anyway, take those vegetables to the graveyard?

Charlotte had not switched on the light in the kitchen, but the bluish beam of the streetlamp outside filled the room, and through the door to the servants’ corridor, which was ajar, she could see the one at the other end of it leading directly to his room, the door that Wilhelm had walled up thirty-five years ago. Only now, while she thought about what Wilhelm meant by
graveyard,
did she realize that she had been staring at that walled-up doorway all this time. The sight of the walled-up doorway annoyed her. She stood up and closed the door to the former servants’ corridor. Dropped on the stool again.

Once Wilhelm is out of the house, she thought, I’ll have that door opened up again. Always having to go the long way around, by way of the hall, it was idiotic. All that chasing about, as if she didn’t have enough to do. Every time she wanted something from the kitchen she chased around the place. If she was looking for Lisbeth, she had to chase all over the place. Think of all the chasing around she’d had to do only today! Tangible evidence! And another piece of tangible evidence was the way Wilhelm was gradually ruining the house, bit by bit. Tangible evidence wherever you looked!

Maybe, thought Charlotte, I ought to have it all photographed. Unfortunately she had no camera. Kurt owned one, but of course Kurt wouldn’t do it. Did Weihe have a camera? With a flash? That was important! The ceiling light in the hall didn’t work. Furthermore, Wilhelm had blacked out the windows in the upstairs corridor so that the neighbors couldn’t spy on him when he was going to bed. Now the only electric light on in the hall, day and night, came from the shell that they had once brought back from Pachutla. And in a way it was a good thing that the only light came from the shell, so at least you didn’t see what Wilhelm had done here: oh, the paint on the floor! Wasn’t that “tangible evidence”? The cloakroom alcove, the stairs, and the banisters ... and now he was painting all the doors upstairs! Wilhelm was painting everything made of wood with red-brown floor paint, and if you asked him why he was painting it all with red-brown floor paint, he said: because red-brown floor paint lasts longest!

What had come over the district medical officer? Or was his title area medical officer?

Then there was the bathroom. That ought to be photographed as well. Everything broken. He had hammered it all to pieces with the electric hammer. Mosaic tiles, you’d never find replacements. And why? Because he’d had to build in a floor drainage system. Floor drainage! It was since then that the light in the hall didn’t work. Yes, and that was dangerous, too! Electricity and water didn’t mix! Tangible evidence ...

Wilhelm did nothing all day but produce tangible evidence. Come to that, he did nothing else at all. Made a mess of meddling with things he didn’t understand. Repaired household items that were broken by the time he’d finished with them. And if she didn’t give him something to calm him down now and then, for instance, a couple of spoonfuls of valerian drops in his tea, who knew whether this house wouldn’t have burned down or collapsed long ago, or she might already be dead of gas poisoning?

Then there was what he did to the terrace. That was worst of all. Why hadn’t she done something? Called the police? Only to a depth of two centimeters, he said ... God knows why. Because he didn’t like the moss growing between the natural stone slabs! So he laid concrete over the terrace! That’s to say, Schlinger and Mählich laid the concrete. Wilhelm was in command. Stretched cords of some kind, fiddled around with a folding rule. And what was the result? Now the rainwater ran into her conservatory. The flooring had come away. The door to the terrace had swelled, the glass in it was broken ...

And what did Süss say?

“Regrettable,” said Süss.

Regrettable! It was everything to her! Her study and bedroom! Her retreat! Her little bit of Mexico, preserved over all these years—destroyed. Now, several times a day, she climbed the forty-four stairs to the tower room, where wind blew through the cracks, where she had to sit at the desk wrapped in blankets. Where it smelled of dust and the roof rafters on hot days—a smell that, humiliatingly, reminded her of the smell in the room where her mother used to shut her up as a punishment.

The mere thought of it made her breath come in fits and starts. She wondered whether to take another ten drops of aminophylline. However, she had taken aminophylline twice already today, and since Dr. Süss had told her that an overdose could lead to paralysis of the muscles of her respiratory passages she was always afraid her breath might just stop; suddenly, in the night, she might give up breathing. She might give up living without noticing it herself ... no, she wasn’t about to do Wilhelm that favor. She was still alive, and alive she was determined to stay. She still had things to do—once Wilhelm was out of the house. All the things that Wilhelm kept her from doing: living, working, traveling! One more journey to Mexico ... to see the Queen of the Night in flower, just once ...

Now she thought there was something scratching at the door. Or was it the rattling of her breath? Charlotte didn’t move from the spot. She looked to see whether the handle of the kitchen door was moving, but instead ... she shuddered: slowly, very slowly the door into the servants’ corridor that she had just closed was opened, and something appeared, faintly illuminated by the light on the cellar stairs ... something terrible ... bent crooked ... with hair standing out in all directions ...

“Nadyeshda Ivanovna,” cried Charlotte. “Goodness, what a fright you gave me!”

It turned out that Nadyeshda Ivanovna was looking for her coat, had lost her way, and found herself in the cellar. In fact, Charlotte had given instructions for the coats to be taken down to the cellar, because the cloakroom alcove was full of flower vases. However, Lisbeth had brought the coats up again when the guests were leaving. Only Nadyeshda Ivanovna didn’t get her coat back, so she supposed it must still be in the cellar, but it wasn’t in the cellar, or so said Nadyeshda Ivanovna, anyway, and all this was beginning to get on Charlotte’s nerves. She really had more important things to do than bother about Nadyeshda Ivanovna’s coat!

But then the coat was suddenly back hanging in the cloakroom. For a moment Charlotte wondered whether to call Lisbeth to account:
How did this get into the cloakroom?
Instead, she took the coat off the hook and held it out to Nadyeshda Ivanovna.

“Where’s Kurt?” she asked, as it suddenly occurred to her. “Why didn’t he take you home with him?”

“
Ne snayu,”
said Nadyeshda Ivanovna. Don’t know.

Then she got her arms into the sleeves of her coat, first one, then the other, adjusted her scarf, and while Charlotte was shifting impatiently from foot to foot buttoned up her coat, button by button, checked twice to see that her door key was still around her neck, looked for her handbag, and finally said, once she had remembered that she hadn’t brought a handbag:

“
Nu vsyo, poyedu.”
I’m going.

“Going
how?
” inquired Charlotte. “
Peshkóm,
on foot!”

“
Nyet, poyedu,”
insisted Nadyeshda Ivanovna.
“Domoi!”
Going home!

Probably, thought Charlotte, she wouldn’t want to walk home alone in the dark. She hurried into the salon and phoned Kurt to come and fetch her—but no one answered the phone. Incredible! Simply abandoning the old lady here! She thought for a moment, and called a taxi.

“
Sadityes,”
she told Nadyeshda Ivanovna.
“Seytshas budyet taxí!”
Sit down. The taxi will soon be here.

“
Nyet, nye nada taxí,”
said Nadyeshda Ivanovna. No, I don’t need any taxi.

“Nadyeshda Ivanovna,” said Charlotte.
“Ya otsheny sanyata
—I have a lot to do! Please sit down and wait for the taxi.”

But the old lady didn’t want a taxi. Didn’t want to walk, either. Such indecision infuriated Charlotte.

“
Spasiba sa vsyo,”
said Nadyeshda Ivanovna. Thank you for everything.

And before Charlotte knew it, the old lady had flung her scrawny monkey arms around her neck and was clutching her tightly. Charlotte tried in vain to keep her nose out of Nadyeshda Ivanovna’s scarf, with its odor of naphthalene and Russian perfume—a mixture reminiscent of an armaments laboratory.

Then Nadyeshda Ivanovna tripped out into the dark. Charlotte stood in the fresh air for a moment, watching the old lady, bent over, take tiny steps to the garden gate—and disappear. A leaf sailed silently through the beam of light from the streetlamp, and Charlotte hurried indoors again before she was overcome by the melancholy of fall.

She stood in the hall for a moment, undecided. There was any amount still to be done, she didn’t know where to begin. Everything seemed more or less straight in the hall, only the flowers had to be disposed of, but of course there was time for that. The annoying thing, however, was that yet again her plan to label the vases hadn’t worked, thought Charlotte at the sight of the labels that Irina—typical of her!—had found only at the very last place she tried, too late to write on them. Because once all the vases were here, it stood to reason that no one would know who was the owner of which vase—a fact that anyone could understand, except of course Lisbeth, who had stuck the labels on them regardless. There stood the vases, with labels innocent of any writing ... although what was this?