his shoe. “I make verry gutt price,” says the man in English as he cleans the shoe, smiling at Alexander. “Verry gutt price.” Alexander stands up; the man is still hanging on to his shoe. Alexander walks away, the man throws himself in his path, pestering him, a blowfly. “Verry gutt quallty,” says the blowfly, leaving it open to doubt whether he means his own work or the shoe itself; Alexander tries to shake off the blowfly and go on. Now, however, the blowfly plants himself in front of Alexander, shorter than he is by two heads, but sturdy.
“You have to pay my work,” says the blowfly.
A small circle of interested onlookers has already gathered. Alexander turns around, tries to get away in the opposite direction.
“You have to pay my work,” repeats the blowfly.
The blowfly has spread its wings, barring his way, footstool in one hand, case of cleaning materials in the other. Alexander makes for him, ready to strike. But he doesn’t strike, he shouts. Shouts at the top of his voice, shouts into the middle of the man’s face:
“I have no money!” he shouts in English.
The blowfly flinches back in surprise.
“I have no money!” shouts Alexander again. “I have no money!”
And then the Spanish for it comes to him.
“
Raises his hands in the air and shouts.
“
Shouts into the onlookers’ faces:
“
Turns in all directions, shouts:
“
The people turn away, and he shouts after them. They scatter like chickens. Seconds later the place is empty, except for the shoeblack, still standing there with the footstool in one hand, his little case in the other—he stands there in silence, staring at the stupid white man who has just lost his wits.
1961
As usual on a Friday, she was the last.
She had been on her feet since five in the morning. Before the mailbox was emptied for the first time, she had read once more, one last time, through the article that Comrade Hager had told her to write. Two two-hour Spanish lessons to be given in the morning. After midday, the seminar on realism: progressive literature of North America. Suddenly, as she was speaking, she realized that she had just mixed James Baldwin up with John Dos Passos.
Autodidact. The word came into her mind now, at four fifteen, while she was tidying up her desk.
As an autodidact, she ought not to venture into subject areas unfamiliar to her—so Harry Zenk had said at the big staff meeting six months ago when she, Charlotte, had offered to give a seminar on the fiftieth anniversary of the Mexican Revolution.
She packed up the tests that she had given the students in the morning, spent some time looking around vaguely for her pen (she had hundreds of pens, but this pen, this particular pen was her favorite), finally gave up in annoyance. She took the used tea glasses to the secretariat and—for the fifth time today—washed her hands, but without entirely ridding herself of the feeling that she had chalk from the blackboard between her fingers. Finally she closed the filing cabinet that Lissi, her secretary, had forgotten to lock—Lissi too, of course, had gone home ages ago. Unfortunately the wooden rolltop of the cabinet jammed. Charlotte pressed against its handle with all her might. The handle came off. She went into the front room and slammed the handle down on Lissi’s desk, with a note saying: JANITOR. And an exclamation mark.
At the same moment, however, she remembered that the janitor had only just—well, a few days ago—run off to the West. She slowly crumpled the note and threw it in the wastebasket. She slipped into the chair at Lissi’s desk and propped her head in her hands. Stared for a long time at the portrait of Walter Ulbricht, which was still surrounded by a faint pale mark left on the wall by another, larger portrait.
Harry Zenk was to be assistant president of the academy.
The flavor of fish came up as she burped. She hated fish, she ate it only for the fish oils.
“As a woman,” Gertrud Stiller had said at lunch today, “you have to do twice as much to get anywhere.”
Twice or three times as much.
Charlotte stood up, took the documents labeled “For official use only” out of the rolltop cabinet that couldn’t be locked now, as well as—you never knew—a few Western newspapers that had accumulated there in the course of time, stuffed it all into her briefcase, and left.
Out in the corridor, a faulty neon tube was fizzing.
You could still see the marks on the doors that had been burnt into them after the war by the Russians with their
The wall newspaper announced the latest triumph of Soviet technology and science: the day before yesterday a Soviet citizen called Yuri Gagarin had become the first man to fly in space.
It was warm outside. Spring had suddenly come, and Charlotte hadn’t noticed. She decided to walk the two kilometers, taking the path through the trees on the strip of ground along the railroad embankment, relax a little, enjoy the fine weather. She began to sweat after only a few hundred meters. Her briefcase was heavy. She was still wearing her thick cardigan under her coat. Images of her childhood suddenly came into her mind: a hot day, the white woolen dress that—as she now remembered—she’d always had to wear when her mother took her to the Tiergarten park on Sundays, to see the Kaiser pass by and “pay her respects,” that was how you put it. And then Charlotte had sneezed at the Kaiser. All of a sudden she saw the whole scene before her eyes again: the Kaiser himself, approaching at a brisk pace, in the middle of a wide row of his sons and his aides-de-camp; the woolen dress, much too warm and horribly scratchy on her bare skin; her mother’s rough hand hitting her full force while her eyes were still closed in the sneeze.
As a punishment, she had spent the rest of the day in her room, where she almost died of asthma, but her mother wouldn’t let her leave it—whether because she thought Charlotte was malingering, or because secretly she really wished her daughter dead. I wouldn’t mind doing without Lotte, her mother had once told their neighbor, and Charlotte remembered her martyred expression and the cross she wore over her high collar—I wouldn’t mind doing without Lotte if only Carl-Gustav were “normal.”
The school of life. If she hadn’t been through that school—would she be what she was today? Madame Look-Sharp, that was the students’ nickname for her. They thought it annoyed her. Far from it! Charlotte gripped her briefcase in both hands… no, she thought, Madame Look-Sharp wasn’t one to give up. Madame Look-Sharp would fight. Harry Zenk as vice-president! Well, we’ll see about that.
Of course Wilhelm was down in the cellar, in his “headquarters,” as he called the old wine cellar that he had converted into a kind of meeting room. It was dark in the house, especially when you came in from the dazzling late afternoon sunlight. Only the shell, into which Wilhelm had omitted to fit a switch as well as the lightbulb, shone day and night—a waste of energy for which Charlotte tried to compensate by not switching the light on as she took off her coat and shoes. Groping about in the dim light, she found her house slippers and hurried upstairs: Alexander would be arriving at six for his Spanish lesson.
She fetched clean underwear from the bedroom, then went into the bathroom and showered at length. Since Dr. Suss had diagnosed her asthma as the result of a household dust allergy, Charlotte considered showering a medical treatment, and had no more scruples about allowing herself that luxury several times a day —a cold shower in the morning, of course, but a hot shower in the afternoon and the evening, when she washed her hair and let the water stream over her face and eyes at length, cleaned her nostrils and mouth cavity with a sense of well-being. There was at least that advantage to the fact that Kurt and Irina had moved out: there wasn’t
