In Times of Fading Light

suitcases and one rucksack—in the end he had brought even less out of the Soviet Union than he took into it twenty years before, aged fifteen.

He had been thirty-five when he came back, and although, as reparations of a kind, he immediately got a post at the Academy of Sciences (the “real” academy, as Kurt liked to emphasize, clearly distinguishing it from the Neuendorf Academy), his new start had been anything but easy. He was probably the oldest candidate for a doctoral degree the Institute of History there had ever had. After twenty years in Russia, his German had something of a foreign accent. He didn’t know what was permissible or when you could laugh. Coming from a world where people greeted one another with an amicable “Morning, motherfucker!” he had no instinctive sense of the way to approach distinguished personages, let alone of the fine web of alliances and animosities in socialist academia. For a whole year a colleague of longer standing thought it best to keep Kurt occupied translating texts from Russian. And even three years later, he had still gone to Moscow with his boss chiefly as the latter’s interpreter.

Well, he had been back to Moscow again now. And although the city had never seemed to him so dirty, rough, and stressful as this time—the long journeys, the drunks, the ever-present “duty officers” with their morose expressions, even the famous Metro, of which he had always been a little proud because, as a young man, he had worked on building it when he did subbotniks, days of voluntary labor, even that had gotten on his nerves, what with the cramped spaces, the noise, the guillotine-like action of the automatic doors as they snapped shut (and why was the damn Metro almost a hundred meters underground, and why, even more surprising, had he not asked himself that question at the time?), while he had dropped his camera on the ground in Red Square, and in Novodevichy cemetery, which he had visited out of a sense of duty because he had once been there with Irina to bow before the tombs of Chekhov and Mayakovsky, a cold rain had fallen on him, April rain such as fell only in Moscow, enough to kill you—well, although all that had been unpleasant and repellent, he couldn’t deny the satisfaction that he had felt in the respect suddenly shown to him in this country, ten years later: an ex-convict, sentenced to “eternal exile.”

Last time he had still had to share his hotel room with a Romanian colleague. This time he had actually been met at the airport, he had a double room in the Hotel Peking all to himself although, idiotically, it had no bathroom (typical of the grand hotels of the Stalin era). The famous Yerusalimsky had shown enthusiasm for his new book, had introduced him everywhere as the expert in his field, and finally even took him personally on a tour of the city, and Kurt had taken a mischievous pleasure in not showing how well he knew it all: Manezhnaya Square, the Hotel Metropol, and oh yes, just fancy that, the Lubyanka…

It was only that hanky-panky over the woman doctoral student that he ought to have avoided, thought Kurt as the Trabi made its way with a melodious murmur through a nondescript little town (since Kurt usually traveled by rail, he still couldn’t tell the places on the southern bypass of Berlin apart very well). It was stupid, he thought, indulging in such things among colleagues. What was more, it wasn’t as if the woman had been particularly attractive, she was even—by comparison with Irina—humiliatingly unattractive, but she had that certain look about her, that wide-eyed glance, and Kurt was bowled over; he simply couldn’t help it. Kurt wondered, not for the first time, whether his weakness for women was to be explained by circumstances, i.e., the fact that he had spent most of his youth in the camp—this was the view that, as a Marxist, he was more inclined to take—or whether it was congenital, and he had in fact inherited it from his birth father, whom Charlotte described as a terrible womanizer.

“Now then, tell me,” Irina demanded. “What was it like?”

“Strenuous,” said Kurt.

Which was the truth.

It was also true that he had worked in the archives every day. And that he had had to deliver a lecture off the cuff at the symposium. That the publishing firm had paid him an advance, and the editorial office of the magazines had asked him for an article. That Yerusalimsky had invited him to dinner and taken him on a tour of the city—all that was also the truth, and as he described it he almost began to persuade himself that with so much else going on there hadn’t been time for any hanky-panky at all.

It was true, as well, that he had felt yearnings. And that he had been lonely among all the well-disposed people, none of whom he knew well enough even to venture on alluding to the questions that troubled him—for instance, how far, in the opinion of his colleagues, re-Stalinization threatened the Soviet Union now that the buffoonish yet somehow likeable reformer Nikita Khrushchev (without whom he, Kurt, would still be at the back of beyond in the Urals, an eternal exile) had been replaced as head of the Party.

“And I went to the Novodevichy convent,” he said.

And Irina said, in her still strong Russian accent, “Light me a cigarette, will you?” To which Kurt replied, imitating it, “Right you are, a ssigaryayte.”

He lit two cigarettes, one for Irina, one for himself. Inhaling the smoke, he now really did feel the exhaustion that he had conjured up in telling the tale of his strenuous visit to Moscow. It even made him shiver. Already slightly aroused, he looked at his humiliatingly attractive wife, and thought of the evening ahead of him.

Sasha had preferred to stay at home. Once he’d have missed no opportunity of a drive to the airport, but his phase of wanting to be an aircraft builder was over. Instead, he was now tape-recording newfangled music broadcast by the American radio station in Berlin and hanging around until dusk fell with dubious friends, including a precocious girl from the parallel class, some of whose family were social misfits, and who already, at the age of twelve, had quite a pair of breasts under her grubby blue sweater.

Similarly, Sasha reacted with only qualified pleasure to the little present that Kurt had brought him back from Moscow—it was Yuri Gagarin’s Moya doroga v kosmos, “My Way to the Cosmos.”

“Thank you very much,” he said indifferently, without even looking at the book.

He would give the boy more of his attention, Kurt decided. His Russian was increasingly rusty these days, and his schoolwork also left much to be desired. Recently he had brought home the low mark of a three—a three! Only “satisfactory.” Kurt couldn’t remember ever having had a three himself. A three, thought Kurt, verged on the improper.

He had looked in vain for a present for Irina in Moscow. What could anyone bring her back? She was as good as allergic to anything associated with Russian folklore, and anyway, as Kurt had discovered, there was really nothing nice to be had in the land of the Great Socialist October Revolution, so at the last moment he had bought a bottle of Sovietskoye Shampanskoye, which he unpacked, with profuse apologies, when Sasha was in bed. Then he took a hot bath, Irina opened the Shampanskoye, and once they were slightly tipsy revealed her surprise: the bedroom was finished. He had guessed it already, but it amazed him, and yet again he felt indebted to Irina. It was a mystery: for five years he had been convinced that she was going too far with her conversion of the house; for five years he had tried to restrict it to the necessities, and to be perfectly honest he would really have liked just to paint the whole place and stop at that. He was a man in a hurry! Time was running away from him, and his life had been late getting started. He’d had panic attacks at night. It had frightened him when Irina simply had walls demolished, when he saw the pipes and the wiring hanging out, all the stuff that had to go back inside the walls again somehow. He had also been known to march out of the house slamming the door behind him when he found that Irina had been spending vast sums because she had to have this door, this wood, this shade of red, but in the end, he had to admit, Irina had somehow been right after all, even if, and this was the real mystery, she had always been wrong on the details.

It was a wonderful, beautiful bedroom. Basically quite plain: nothing in it but the bed, a simple undivided double bed, the kind of thing that wasn’t to be had in the whole of the GDR, and the old wardrobe, which had just made Kurt laugh at first. The carpeted floor was white, and so were the walls, except for the carmine wall at the head of the bed, and on this wall, flanked by two lights, hung a huge oval mirror in a broad, ornate gilt frame. The steep angle at which it was tilted over the bed could leave no one in any doubt of its purpose.

“What do you suppose the workmen thought?” murmured Kurt.

“They’ll have thought correctly,” said Irina, guiding his hand under her skirt, where Kurt felt, between her panties and her stockings, bare skin rising in a plump curve.

“Crazy,” said Kurt later, when they were lying on the bed side by side. Just now when, pleasantly tipsy from the champagne, they had somehow been intertwined on top of and inside each other, he had felt for moments that