In Times of Fading Light

“Why, from the Central Committee,” he said.

“So how did the Central Committee know?”

Gunther rolled his eyes, raised his fat arms, and then said, “Oh, well.”

When Gunther had gone, Kurt put on his work clothes and went out into the garden. The weather was good, and you had to make use of good weather somehow. He got out the rake, but there were hardly any leaves lying around, so he wondered whether there was anything he could prune. However, he wasn’t sure; buds were already showing, maybe it was too late to prune. Although he had given up the idea of pruning, he went on looking for the shears for a while, but without finding them. Instead he found a few tulip bulbs and decided to plant them. He walked around the garden for some time, looking for a suitable place, but couldn’t make up his mind. His stomach spoke up: a rumbling that Kurt decided must be hunger. He put the tulip bulbs back in the shed.

When he entered the house, loud music was coming from Sasha’s room: the British Beat music that he listened to these days. Kurt knocked on the door of the room and went in. Sasha turned the volume down slightly. He was sitting at his desk with the tape recorder right in front of him, his textbook propped on it, and he was writing something in a school exercise book.

“You can’t do homework with that racket going on,” said Kurt.

“It’s only biology,” Sasha told him, as he played with a little silver cross that he was wearing on a chain around his neck.

“Well, well,” said Kurt. “Are you a Christian now?”

“Nope,” Sasha informed him. “It’s a hippie cross.”

Hippie. Kurt knew the word from TV—Western TV. They’d been talking about hippies more and more often on Western TV: long-haired figures whom Kurt somehow connected with this new kind of music, and who, this much was clear, on principle rejected any idea of working.

“Ah,” said Kurt. “Thinking of being a hippie, are you?”

Sasha grinned.

Kurt turned around and was leaving the room, but he suddenly stopped dead.

“All my life,” he said, “I’ve been trying to bring you up to work. And now…”

All at once he heard himself shouting.

“So now you’re going to be a hippie! My son the hippie!”

He snatched up the tape recorder, which fell silent after a plaintive belch, and strode away. Only when he reached his study did he notice that he had pulled out the cable.

As he showered—not that he was dirty, but you always showered after working in the garden—the scene was still running through his mind. He was annoyed, although really with himself, but he tried all the harder to justify his fit of rage. There was certainly no acute danger of Sasha’s becoming a hippie. But his feeble attitude, his laziness, his lack of interest in everything that he, Kurt, considered important and useful… how could he make his son understand what it was all about? The boy was intelligent, no doubt about that, but he lacked something, thought Kurt. Something inside him.

He thought of the Krikhatzky for the second time today: the little Latin primer that had gone through the camp with him, and for a moment he wondered how far the fact that even in the labor camp he had been preparing for the Latin exam that would admit him to further studies could be assessed in educational terms—something of that nature went through Kurt’s mind, but he had to admit that it was nonsense. He hadn’t been preparing for his Latin exam in the camp. He’d been going hungry. And the hunger had made him so dull witted that he had sometimes wondered whether the damage was irreparable. It had been a close shave, anyway, thought Kurt, and as he began working on his legs with the body brush he dimly remembered the strange, half-crazed states of mind that had afflicted him, remembered the voice in his mind that gradually took over giving him commands, detached, indifferent and always—how strange—in the third person. Now he’s freezing… now it hurts him… now he must get up…

Stop that. Wrong program. Using the body brush after the cold shower was part of his morning ritual, and he had inadvertently slipped into it. Kurt put the brush down, looked at himself in the mirror. Sometimes he found it hard to believe that he really still existed. And then the past seemed like a hole into which, if he wasn’t careful, he might fall again. Some day or other, he thought, he’d write all this down. When the time was ripe for it.

He dressed and set about warming up the lunch. It was beef goulash with red cabbage. Sasha came in— minus the hippie cross. Sat down at the table, stooping, eyes intently fixed on his plate. He pushed the red cabbage around with his fork, putting the sliced leaves in his mouth one by one. Even at the age of twelve, it was still his habit to eat everything separately, meat and then vegetables. But Kurt decided to overlook it this time. Instead he tried sweet reason again.

“I’ve always let you listen to your music,” said Kurt. “Haven’t I?” Sasha went on pushing red cabbage around.

“Haven’t I?” Kurt repeated.

“Yes,” said Sasha.

“But if your enthusiasm for that Beat music leads you to want to be a hippie, I must tell you that your teachers will be right if they tell you to steer clear of it. Do you wear that thing to school, by any chance?”

Sasha pushed the red cabbage about.

“I’m asking, do you wear that cross to school?”

“Yes,” said Sasha.

Kurt felt his anger rising again.

“Are you really such a fool?”

Kurt chewed thirty-two times, as the specialist in internal medicine had advised him, then put down his cutlery and observed his son, who was still pushing red cabbage around. Observed the slender wrists (or to be precise, the right wrist; Sasha’s left hand had disappeared below the tabletop), the long, curved eyelashes that he had inherited from Irina (they annoyed Sasha because he thought they made him look girlish), the uncontrollable curls that were like his own, Kurt’s (and that were always giving Sasha trouble at school because a school principal who toed the Party line one hundred percent detected the influence of decadent Western youth culture in every millimeter of hair that stuck out beyond the students’ ears). And suddenly he felt an uncontrolled, almost painful need to protect his son from all the uncertainties that were yet to come his way.

His stomach rumbled that night. In the morning Irina prescribed him bed rest with frequent changes of position. Kurt tried to do a little work on his new book on Hindenburg, with a heating pad under his sweater. Then, with nothing but chicken soup inside him, he set off.

The way to the institute—since the building of the Wall—was a long one. In the old days the suburban trains had run right through West Berlin, and for those who must not set foot in the western sectors there had been special trains that ran between Friedrichstrasse and Griebnitzsee without stopping. Now there was the Sputnik, describing a wide detour around West Berlin. To reach it Kurt first had to take the shuttle bus to Drewitz station, and from there go one station on to Bergholz, which was on the Sputnik ring. Boarding the Sputnik, he traveled, all being well, to Berlin East station, and finally he spent another fifteen minutes on the suburban train to Friedrichstrasse. Luckily he had to make this trek only on a few days, since one of the pleasing aspects of the notorious shortages in the GDR was a shortage of office space, and as a result those who taught at the Institute of History were urged to work from home. Kurt usually fixed the discussions of his study group for Monday, so it was an obligatory day for attendance in any case. He also shirked his duties whenever possible, declining to attend events of secondary importance on the grounds that, living in Neuendorf, he had farther than anyone else to come, even cutting meetings, on the pretext of buses running late—a difficult excuse to check up on, or pleading his poor health: the stomach problems that, without actually saying so, he managed to present as being caused by the labor camp, thus winning shamefaced understanding from his superiors, even if they guessed more about his experiences in the camp than they really knew—and he did all this without any guilty conscience at all. Far from it, he considered that every meeting he could avoid was working time gained. What counted for Kurt was the number of pages he wrote, and in that respect, so far as his number of academic publications was concerned, he held the undisputed record.

It was only five minutes’ walk from Friedrichstrasse. The institute was diagonally opposite the university on Clara-Zetkin-Strasse, in a former girls’ school built in the 1870s, sandstone facade now blackened by soot over the