In the evening there was a visitor: Pavel Avgustovitch, who wore a suit and tie. A strange man, thin and old-fashioned. He kissed Mama’s hand.
“Such a shame,” said Mama to Baba Nadya. “Pavel Avgustovitch studied at the conservatory.”
“What can any of us do?” replied Baba Nadya. “It was God’s will.”
The next day some old women wearing headscarves came visiting. They sang until late into the night. First they sang funny songs. As they sang they clapped their hands; some of them even danced. Then they sang sad songs. Then they cried. At the end everyone hugged everyone else and wiped the tears away.
“What a pity,” said Alexander, “that we don’t all live in one room at home.”
Back home again. This time he had a story of his own to tell at Granny’s on Second Friday. “We rode in a train for five days!”
“That’s very interesting,” said Granny. “But wouldn’t you like to tell me about it later, over supper? Then Wilhelm can hear it, too. It will all be very interesting for Wilhelm as well.”
He didn’t feel too happy about that. Granny encouraged him.
“We’ll do it this way: I’ll give you a cue, and then you begin your story.”
Cue?
“For instance, ‘Soviet Union,’” explained Granny. “I’ll say, for instance, I’d love to go on vacation to the So- viet U-nion! And that’s your cue.”
Wilhelm slapped butter down on his bread.
“The Indians,” he told Alexander, “are the poorest of the poor today. Oppressed, exploited, robbed of their land.”
Granny said, “There’s no exploitation and no oppression in the Soviet Union.”
“I should think not,” said Wilhelm.
Granny looked at Alexander and repeated, “There’s no exploitation and no oppression in the So-viet U- nion.”
“Oh yes,” said Wilhelm. “You’ve just been to the Soviet Union. Tell us about it!”
Suddenly Alexander’s head was empty.
“Come on,” said Wilhelm. “Don’t you talk to ordinary people?”
“At Baba Nadya’s,” said Alexander, “the water comes out of a well.”
Wilhelm cleared his throat.
“Hmm, yes,” he said. “That may be so. When we were in the Soviet Union, there were still wells even in Moscow, do you remember, Lotti? In Moscow, imagine that! And today? You were in Moscow, weren’t you?”
Alexander nodded.
“Well, there you are,” said Wilhelm. “And when you’re grown up, no one will still have to draw water from a well anywhere in the Soviet Union. Long before you’re as big as your father, communism will have spread all over the Soviet Union—maybe all over the world.”
Alexander didn’t like the idea that all the wells would be gone, but he didn’t want to disappoint Wilhelm again. So he said, “The Soviet Union is the biggest and greatest country in the world.”
Wilhelm nodded, pleased. Looked at him expectantly. Granny was also looking at him expectantly. So Alexander added:
“But Achim Schliepner is silly. He says America is bigger and greater.”
“Ah,” said Wilhelm. “Interesting.” And he said to Granny: “As usual, those Schliepners didn’t turn out to vote. But we’ll nail them yet.”
Back at kindergarten. Now he was one of the larger kids. Achim Schliepner had gone on to big school. So Alexander was the cleverest now. He had evidence of the fact.
“I’ve been to Moscow.”
Not even Frau Remschel had been there.
“And when I’m grown up I’m going to Mexico.”
Because when he’s grown up, componism will have spread everywhere. The Indians won’t be exploited and oppressed anymore then. No one will have to sacrifice himself. Only of course there’ll still be rattlesnakes. And scorpions getting into your shoes, but he knows what to do about those: you shake out your shoes first thing in the morning—it’s a simple trick. Granny told him about it.
It’s Sunday. Alexander is going down the street with his parents. The street is Thalmannstrasse. The trees have brightly colored leaves. The air smells of smoke. People are raking up the leaves into little heaps and burning them. You can throw sweet chestnuts into the embers, and after a while they go pop.
They’re walking down the middle of the street, hand in hand: Mama on the left, Papa on the right, and Alexander is explaining how he sees things.
“I’ll get big, then you two will get little again. And then you’ll get big again and I’ll get little again. And so on.”
“No,” says his father. “It’s not exactly like that. We’ll get rather smaller as time goes on, but we won’t get any younger. We’ll get older, and one day we’ll die.”
“Does everyone die?”
“Yes, Sasha.”
“Will I die, too?”
“Yes, you will die someday, too, but that time is still far, far, far away—so
Another of those amazing discoveries.
Infinity: over there, where everything was lost in smoke, where the trees were gradually getting smaller, that’s where it must be. That’s where they’re going, he and his parents. The cool air caressed his cheeks. They walked and walked, with such alarmingly light steps, yet almost without moving from the spot.
If he was smiling, it was out of embarrassment, because his ideas of getting big and getting small had turned out to be silly.
2001
The airport looked like an overnight hostel for the homeless. Sleeping bags, people standing in line at the check-in counter. The announcement boards were teeming with canceled flights. All the passengers seemed to be reading the same newspaper, with a picture on the front page of an airplane flying into a skyscraper. Or was it a cruise missile? A rocket?
The flight to Mexico was one of those delayed.
Alexander bought a travel guide (one of the famous Backpackers’ Guide series, tourism lite), a German- Spanish dictionary, an inflatable neck support pillow, and—for the sake of atmosphere—a Spanish newspaper. One word in it he could understand even without a dictionary:
Then, at long last, he did reach the check-in. On the way to boarding he went through the security ballet performed by the flight attendants. Those young women smiled unwaveringly, if you could call it smiling. He tried to imagine their faces at the moment of a crash.
A thought as they took off: there were still quite a number of alternative ways for him to lose his life. Oddly enough, that was reassuring.
He settled into his seat as well as he could, wedged between an overweight man sporting gold chains and a wan-faced mother trying to keep her cola-swigging child under control. He didn’t read, at first didn’t try to sleep. Followed the course of the plane on the little screen in front of his nose, as the aircraft gained height and the temperature outside dropped.
He accepted everything he was offered: coffee, headphones, sleep mask. Ate everything served for lunch, even the mysterious dessert in its plastic pot.
