In Times of Fading Light

Alexander assumed that Wilhelm was so funny because he wasn’t his real grandpa. That was why he was just called Wilhelm. If you accidentally said “Grandpa Wilhelm,” he popped his dentures out, which terrified Alexander.

They ate supper to the sound of music from the record player. It was a dark box with a semicircular lid that opened upward.

Wilhelm was against music. “You and that eternal stuff of yours,” he said.

But he was the only one who could work the record player, so Granny begged. “Wilhelm dear, do put on a record for us. Alexander loves listening to Jorge Negrete.”

Finally Wilhelm took a record out of the bottom of the box, slipped it out of its sleeve, picked up a brush, and then, holding the record so that he touched only the edges and the center, ran the brush over the grooves with slightly exaggerated circular movements, holding the record up to the light again and again. Then he spent a little while searching for the little spindly thing that had to go through the hole in the middle of the record—you couldn’t see it while you were busy above the circular plate on which the record would lie, so it was a tricky process. Once he had done it successfully, Wilhelm set the speed, bent down, twisting his neck so that Alexander could see the top of his bald patch, and cautiously lowered the needle until the mysterious crackling sound was heard. Then came the music.

Hungry ’gator. Alexander could easily imagine a hungry alligator, but he wasn’t sure what it had to do with the music. As his parents had no record player at home, the hungry ’gator song was about the only music he knew. But he knew it very well:

Mexico lindo y querido
si muero lejos de ti
que digan que estoy dormido
y que me traigan aqui

He didn’t understand a word of it, although he could have sung along with the refrain.

“Know why the Indians are called Indians?” asked Wilhelm, slapping a slice of bread down on his wooden plate.

Alexander did know why the Indians were called Indians, because Wilhelm had already told him twice. For that very reason, he hesitated.

“Aha,” said Wilhelm. “He doesn’t know. Young people these days—they don’t know anything!”

He deposited a helping of butter on his bread and spread it in a single movement.

“Columbus,” said Wilhelm, “called the Indians Indians because he thought he was in India. Comprende? And we still call them by the same name. Nonsense, eh?”

He spread a thick layer of liver sausage on the bread and butter.

“The Indians,” said Wilhelm, “are the original inhabitants of the American continent. America belongs to them. But instead…”

He placed a pickle on top of the bread and liver sausage, or more precisely he threw it at the bread and liver sausage, but the pickle fell off again and landed on the tablecloth.

“Instead,” he said, “today they are the poorest of the poor. Dispossessed, exploited, oppressed.”

Then he cut the pickle in half, pressed the halves deep into the liver sausage, and began munching noisily.

“That,” said Wilhelm, “is capitalism.”

After supper Granny and Alexander went into the conservatory. It was warm and damp in the conservatory, and there was a sweetish but also salty smell, almost like in the zoo. The indoor fountain hummed quietly. Among cacti and rubber plants, things that Granny had brought back from Mexico stood or lay around: coral, shells, items made of genuine silver, the skin of a rattlesnake that Wilhelm personally had killed with a machete. On the wall hung the sawlike snout of a real sawfish, almost two meters long and as improbable as a unicorn’s horn. But best of all was the stuffed baby shark. Its rough skin gave Alexander the creeps.

They sat on the bed (Granny’s bed was in the conservatory because it was the only room where she could sleep easily), and Granny began telling stories. She told him about her travels: horse-riding trips that went on for days; voyages in a canoe; piranhas that ate whole cows; scorpions that got into your shoes; raindrops as big as coconuts; and a jungle so dense that you had to cut yourself a way through it with a machete, and on your way back you found the path already overgrown again.

Today Granny told him about the Aztecs. Last time she had told the tale of how the Aztecs wandered through the desert. Now he heard the story of when they found the deserted city, and because there was no one living there, the Aztecs thought it had been the home of the gods and called it Teotihuacan—the place where you become God.

“But Granny, there isn’t really any God.”

“No, there really isn’t any God,” said Granny, and she told him how the gods founded the fifth world. “Because the world,” said Granny, “had come to an end four times already, and it was dark and cold, with no sun left in the sky. A single flame still burned on the Great Pyramid of Teotihuacan, that was all, and the gods assembled to take counsel. They came to the conclusion that only if one of them sacrificed himself would a new sun be born.”

“Granny, what does sacrifice mean?”

“It means that one of them had to throw himself into the fire so that he could rise again in the sky as a new sun.”

“Why?”

“One god had to sacrifice himself so that the lives of the others could go on.”

An amazing discovery.

Mama put him to bed.

“Will you come into bed with me?”

“Not tonight,” said Mama. “I’ve only just done my hair.”

Her dress rustled as she left.

This evening he felt particularly uneasy. Pictures haunted him in the dark. He thought of God having to throw himself into the fire. A word came into his head: kipitalism. It sounded like heat; in Russian kipit means “it’s boiling.” Piranhas swam around in bubbling broth. Don’t put your finger in there, said his father. Aztecs danced barefoot in the desert sand, their faces twisted with pain. Wilhelm, Wilhelm, shouted Granny. Wilhelm came and put everything out with the brine from the pickles. Mama, in her chic dress, distributed shoes to the Aztecs. They were ladies’ shoes that had gone out of fashion. The Aztecs looked at them in great surprise, but all the same they put them on. Then they went on wandering through the desert, which was now drenched in brine. The heels of their shoes sank in yellow mud.

Alexander woke and threw up; it tasted of lemon cream. After that he ran a high temperature for three days.

In April it was his birthday. He got a scooter (with rubber tires), a swimming ring, and a electric caterpillar tractor.

Peter Hofmann, Matze Schoneberg, Katrin Mahlich, and quiet Renate came to his party. Peter Hofmann ate three slices of cake. They played Hit the Pan, taking turns being blindfolded and then trying to locate the pan and hit it with a wooden spoon, when they would find a little present under it.

Now that he was five, the question came up again.

“Mama, when are we going to see Baba Nadya?”