In Times of Fading Light

Germany acting the part of his wife as camouflage. She had almost been glad—not that she could say so, of course—she had almost been glad when the whole thing was busted and they had to run for it in a great hurry. With Swiss passports—and there was Wilhelm with his Berlin accent. Some secret service! Couldn’t even get you proper passports.

These open sandwiches were pathetic; the new bread had torn apart as she spread it. Furiously, Charlotte distributed slices of pickle over them, although the closer she came to the end of the job, the more determined she was not to take them down to the cellar herself…

Now what? The academy phone extension occurred to her: only recently Wilhelm had had a connection made to what he called his academy extension down in the cellar—an internal telephone system that Wilhelm shamelessly went on using even though he’d not been part of the academy for the last six years. She went to her academy extension and called Wilhelm on his academy extension to let him know that the open sandwiches were on the kitchen table—and although at that very moment she suddenly felt ravenously hungry, she got out of the kitchen before Schlinger came to fetch the tray.

She ate a lot and then slept badly. Pressure on her bladder woke her at 2:30 a.m., and she tottered along the corridor like a child, fearful and thin-skinned. In the small hours, as her mother had called this time of night, she had always been exposed to all kinds of misgivings. Even the shell in the corridor looked to her uncanny; she looked neither right nor left, tried not to think of anything unpleasant. But when she was sitting on the lavatory, waiting for the last few drops to drain away, she suddenly suspected that her article might have displeased Comrade Hager; she could have been on entirely the wrong track, and maybe her article really was bad and petty and backward looking…

In the morning the idea was still there, although it was not so strong in the light of day. All the same, Charlotte resisted the temptation to run to the mailbox in her bathrobe and see whether Neues Deutschland had arrived yet. She got up as usual, took a cold shower, made herself a cup of ersatz coffee and a slice of buttered toast, and only then did she go to fetch the newspaper. She took it into the conservatory with her toast and coffee, even managed to skim the front page, which was all about the criminal machinations on the sector border, then leafed patiently on to the culture page—and there it was!

More Than a Question of Good Taste. Wolfgang Koppe’s novel Mexican Night, Mitteldeutscher Verlag. By Charlotte Powileit.

It wasn’t the first time the ND had printed something by her, but it was by no means a matter of routine either. Although she really knew the whole article by heart, she read every word once again, relishing it, along with the toast and coffee. Now it was printed it seemed even firmer and more conclusive than before.

Basically it was a review, but as it also dealt with questions of principle, Charlotte had been given half a page, all six columns. She was reviewing a book by a West German writer recently brought out by a GDR publishing firm. It was a bad, an irritating book. Charlotte had heartily disliked it from the very first page. The main character was a Jewish immigrant who returned to Germany—West Germany—to discover that Fascist ideology still lived on there. So far so good. But instead of going to the GDR—an alternative plan that he might have entertained, after all—he went back to Mexico, where he did a bit of philosophizing about life and death and finally took his own life. Agreed, it was full of tension and linguistically brilliant, and the author also adopted an anti- Fascist stance—but that was all.

In addition—a minor niggle—the picture of Mexico that the book presented was entirely wrong, as if the author had never been there.

Charlotte had no objection in principle to the central character’s homosexuality, even if, as she had to admit, it reminded her in an unwelcome way of her brother Carl-Gustav, but when the first-person narrator described his homoerotic adventures with underage Mexican rent boys it was long-winded, tedious, disgusting.

Her main criticism, however, was political in nature. The book was negative. Defeatist. It drew readers down into dark places, left them helpless in a bad, cruel world, showed no way out—because, thought the first- person narrator, there was no way out. Oddly enough, this conviction came over him when he was looking at the colossal statue of Coatlicue.

Instead of seeing the dialectic of life and death in the statue, instead of recognizing it as the creation of a heroic people, the first-person narrator saw it as one of the “boldest and coldest monuments to futility,” as “sheer acknowledgment of the ugliness of existence,” and from this view he drew the conclusion that his best course of action was to go into the jungle on his own—and disappear there.

No, this book, read Charlotte, feeling how right she was with every word, with every syllable, this book is not one that will educate young people into adopting humanist attitudes and opening their minds to the world. It is not a book to mobilize readers against the threat of a nuclear inferno. It is not a book to foster belief in human progress and the victory of socialism, and so it has no place on the shelves of bookshops in our Republic.

Period.

She had drunk her coffee, she had eaten her toast. She was left with an odd, pulling sensation in her stomach: somewhere or other in her papers there was a picture of Coatlicue, a cutting from the Siempre. Or was it a picture of Adrian?

She was tempted to see what Coatlicue could do—almost ten years later.

Noises started coming from the floor above: eight in the morning, Wilhelm was getting up. The sound of water running into the bath. It was Wilhelm’s habit to have a bath in the morning, together with fifteen minutes a day under the sunlamp as he sat in the tub. Charlotte put the newspaper back in the mailbox—rather silly of her, certainly, but she felt diffident about showing pride in her article, and wanted Wilhelm to find the paper where he always did and discover the review for himself.

At eight fifteen the porridge was ready. Wilhelm came downstairs in a good temper—she could tell by the sound of his footsteps—and already in suit and tie, both of which he wore even under a coverall. He marched straight off to the mailbox, fetched his ND, skimmed the front page as usual in order to comment on it as he spooned up his porridge. Today’s comment:

“Such farcical nonsense over West Berlin. We’ll just have to close the state border!”

Stupid thing to say, of course, but Charlotte wasn’t going to quarrel. She did not reply and ate her porridge. Wilhelm didn’t understand the first thing about foreign policy, four-power status, the Potsdam Agreement: they were all beyond his ken, thought Charlotte, but she said, “The janitor’s gone, too.”

“What, Wollmann?”

“That’s right, Wollmann,” said Charlotte.

“The hell with Wollmann,” said Wilhelm. “But all these young people! Can you understand it? Studying at our expense, and then they make off. We’ll have to bolt the door!”

Charlotte nodded, and cleared the plates away.

After breakfast Wilhelm went to read his ND. He did that at his desk. As he had done back in Mexico, he still read every single report.

Meanwhile Charlotte went about her housework, but she was really waiting for Wilhelm to find her article. She began tidying the kitchen, then decided to leave it to Lisbeth; wandered around the house thinking of what could be done with the room that Kurt and Irina had now vacated; felt annoyed all over again at the sight of the furniture that she, Charlotte, had bought for Kurt and Irina when they came back from the Soviet Union, and that Irina had ostentatiously left behind when they moved out—and her mind was suddenly back with Zenk. Or more precisely, she was wondering how she could put the Zenk problem to Hager, if Hager happened to phone in the next few days—or even more precisely how, without saying so directly, she could make it clear that, frankly, she thought she herself would be a more suitable vice-president.

When she came downstairs again, Wilhelm was already on his way around the house.

“Have you finished with the ND?” asked Charlotte with apparent innocence.

“Yes,” said Wilhelm. “Can we take this for the raffle?”

He held up a tablecloth in the Mexican colors, handwoven, with a pattern of snakes and eagles.