In Times of Fading Light

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 “?” character. She thought of whoever would reap the benefit of those fifty cans of Nescafe. 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 Angel 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 cafes 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.

1 October 1989

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