In Times of Fading Light

odors, their bad breath (caused by hunger), the stink of the rags around their feet, their nocturnal sweat, their piss… hard to believe that he had known all that, had known and survived it. He thought of Krikhatzky’s Latin primer again, the little book that he had carried in his breast pocket to his work shift—his last private possession, apart from his spoon. The last evidence that another world still existed somewhere out there. That was why he had not exchanged the pages of Krikhatzky (to be used as cigarette papers) for bread, had taken it with him into that winter, the worst one, 1942–43, when there was nothing left to barter, no bread because everyone ate his own. You got six hundred grams to fulfill your norm, meaning that— factoring in all the coefficients of severe weather, eight cubic meters of timber in pairs, fourteen trees a day, all chopped by hand into one-meter planks and stripped of branches—meaning that if you fulfilled ninety percent of the norm you got five hundred grams of poor-quality, slimy bread. Less than that and you starved to death. On only four hundred grams of bread you couldn’t fulfill the four-hundred-gram norm, and so on down, until a time came when you got that look men get before they’re found lying dead on their mattresses in the morning, then you were carried out the way you’d carried others out, past the guard, where they stopped for a moment, and the man on duty stubbed out his machorka, picked up the hammer, rules are rules, and smashed your dead skull in with it…

Kurt had been leaning against a tree—a pine, he knew it by its smell. He had closed his eyes, his forehead was touching the bark. Isolated images were still flashing through his mind, but gradually he calmed down. Another sound followed the images, a kind of grunt or groan. An animal, a large one? Kurt knew the rules in that case: play dead. Lie on your stomach, and if it turns you over (because bears did exactly that), then hold your breath. Stop breathing.

Kurt stopped breathing, turned his head to the right, and looked past the pine tree into a small clearing, where a blue Trabi stood ten or fifteen meters away. It was bouncing up and down in a fast, regular rhythm.

Trakhayutzya, thought Kurt: they’re fucking.

He put on his glasses and checked the license plate—not Irina. Not the Indian chief. He breathed a sigh of relief. His own breath tickled his throat, and his sigh turned into a soft gurgle of laughter. Then he skirted the bouncing car at a tactful distance and walked away.

It was drizzling slightly now, but not really raining. Obviously a storm was caught up somewhere over the River Havel. Kurt’s sense of direction was back, he strode out at a regular pace now. No, he was not in the taiga. There was no labor camp here, there were no brown bears; instead, blue Trabis stood about in the woods with people fucking inside them. If that’s not progress, Kurt asked himself, what is? And wasn’t it also progress if, instead of shooting people, you expelled them from the Party? What did he expect? Had he forgotten how laboriously history moved forward? Even the French Revolution had brought endless confusion in its wake. Heads had rolled. A self-crowned revolutionary general had overrun all Europe, bringing war. It had taken that revolution (incidentally, a bourgeois revolution) decades to achieve its aims. Why would the socialist revolution fare any better? Khrushchev had been replaced. Someday there would be another Khrushchev. Someday there would be socialism deserving of that name—if not in his lifetime, in that tiny segment of the history of the world that he happened be witnessing and that, damn it, he intended to use to good effect. Or anyway what he had left of it, after ten years in the camp and five years in exile.

There was a clattering behind him: the Trabi was on the move. Kurt stepped aside and, contrary to anything he would normally do, raised a hand in greeting, dazzled by the headlamps. Although he couldn’t see them, he felt a happy complicity with the strangers in the car who—very probably—had just been cheating on someone.

Now it was really raining. The air smelled of rain and woodland, with a slight note of two-stroke exhaust fumes. Kurt took a deep breath, inhaled it all, breathed in the traces left by the Trabi, and the sweetish odor seemed to him like the smell of sin. It was wonderful to be alive—and also surprising. And as so often at those moments when he could hardly believe that he really was alive, he thought at the same time that Werner was not alive: his big little brother, always the stronger and better looking of the two of them… But while the thought of Werner was normally linked to a certain sense of guilt, this time Kurt felt something new and different, something that did not, like a guilty conscience, lie in his belly but higher up, in his chest, in his throat. It constricted his throat and swelled his chest, and after a little while Kurt identified it as grief. It wasn’t as bad as he had thought. And nor, strangely, could it be separated from the happiness he felt; it mingled with it in an exalted sensation embracing the world. What hurt him was not so much Werner’s death as the life he had not lived. But at the same time he suddenly found it a comfort that he could think of Werner, remember him, that as long as he, Kurt, lived his brother would not have disappeared entirely, that—unlike his mother, who refused to listen to anything about Werner—he preserved his brother from final annihilation in himself, and as rainwater ran down his face he was carried away into imagining (admittedly unscientifically) that he could live for his brother, breathe for him, smell for him, even—and now he remembered his strange duplication—even fuck for him, thought Kurt, and Vera’s things appeared in an entirely new light: he could fuck, thought Kurt, in the name of his murdered brother.

1 October 1989

Sometimes he forgot what he had to do.

He felt as if he had petrified overnight.

Experimentally, he rolled his eyes.

His left hand twitched.

He turned his head first right, then left.

He saw something grinning at him in the dim light.

Wilhelm took his dentures out of their glass of water and stood up.

He went into the bathroom. He ran bathwater. He turned on the big sunlamp, the Sonya model, and sat down in the tub, equipped with a pair of dark glasses.

His head was empty. Nothing in it but the gurgling of the bathwater. The gurgling bathwater was playing a tune. A tune he knew. A kind of battle song, although at the same time it sounded sad. Sad and belligerent. Unfortunately he couldn’t think of the words of the song.

What a mess. That was the first thought to occur to Wilhelm today.

He nodded. A mess—that was it. He ground his People’s Own Teeth, as he called them, to dispel his sudden melancholy. He went on sitting there until the water came up to his navel.

The fact that his back always stayed white with this method of tanning didn’t bother him. No one saw his back.

After his bath he shaved, holding his mustache down with two fingers. He had cataracts, and they were getting worse and worse. He had often shaved off a piece of mustache by mistake, until he finally adopted the two-finger method so as to preserve at least what was left of his mustache. He put on his long johns over his short underpants, inserting a layer of toilet paper folded several times. He put on his socks and fastened them to his sock suspenders. Regrettably, the diameter of his calves was less than the diameter of the sock suspenders, so there was nothing Wilhelm could do except stuff the sock suspenders inside the socks to keep them from slipping down.

He went downstairs. The tune started up in his head again, sad and belligerent. He ground his teeth. His knee joints hurt as he went downstairs. His feet couldn’t keep time with the tune.

When he saw all the empty vases for flowers in the hall, he remembered that it was his birthday. Instead of going to the mailbox first, as usual, he marched into the kitchen—before he forgot his question.

“Are the vases for the flowers labeled?”

“Many happy returns,” said Charlotte.

She looked at him, hands on her hips, head to one side in her typical way. She looked like a bird.

“I know it’s my birthday,” said Wilhelm.

He sat down and spooned up his porridge. It tasted of nothing. He pushed the plate away and reached for his coffee.

“Don’t forget to take your tablets,” said Charlotte.

“I’m not taking any tablets,” said Wilhelm.