In Times of Fading Light

“It’s a mess,” said Wilhelm.

“Something has happened,” said Charlotte.

“I’m going to extend the extending table,” said Wilhelm.

“You are not going to extend anything, you’re going to leave me in peace to think for once.”

“Stuff and nonsense,” said Wilhelm. “So who is going to extend the extending table?”

“You for one are not going to extend the extending table,” said Charlotte. “You’ve already wrecked enough of this house.”

An outrageous claim that Wilhelm could easily have refuted by enumerating all the repairs he had carried out over almost forty years, all the electrical items he had put right, all the alterations he had made, all the technical household improvements he had introduced—so many difficult words, too difficult, too elaborate, too long, and so Wilhelm just took a step toward Charlotte, stood impressively before her, making play with all his physical height, and said:

“I am a metalworker. I’ve been a Party member for seventy years. How long have you been a Party member?”

Charlotte was silenced. Silenced!

Wilhelm turned and left the room, so as not to spoil his little victory. Two men were standing in the hall.

“Delegation,” said Lisbeth.

“Ah!” Wilhelm shook hands with both of them.

“Your… your…” said one of the men, pointing to Lisbeth.

“Household help,” supplied Lisbeth.

“Your house whole help let us in,” said the man.

“Nice fish,” said the other man, pointing to the shell into which Wilhelm had fitted a lightbulb.

They were standing close together, both of them stocky, almost stooped, both wearing coats that were a little too pale and too clean. The man who had said house whole help was holding a plate.

He cleared his throat and began to speak. He spoke softly and laboriously, the words slowly making their way out of him, so slowly that Wilhelm had forgotten his last word before the man got the next one out.

“Come to the point, comrades,” Wilhelm urged them. “I’m busy.”

“In short,” said the man, “you will remember, Comrade Powileit, keyword Cuba, our campaign, at that time, for donations, and we thought it would be to your way of thinking if we were to represent the subject thematically here, that is to say, er, represented as an, er, a vehicle, that being the object of our campaign.”

He held the plate in front of Wilhelm’s nose. Ah, thought Wilhelm, so that’s it. He took a hundred-mark note out of his wallet and slapped it down on the plate.

How they stared at him. But he wasn’t going to be stingy, he’d splash out on his birthday.

Then Mahlich arrived on the dot of eleven.

“Wilhelm,” said Mahlich, shaking hands with him.

That was what he liked about Mahlich: he didn’t use many words. “Take those vegetables to the graveyard,” said Wilhelm. “We’ll extend the extending table.”

They went into the salon and moved the table over to the window. “But Alexander ought to be here any moment,” protested Charlotte. “Stuff and nonsense!” said Wilhelm. “Stuff and nonsense!”

Charlotte left the room.

They pulled out the side panels as far as they would go. Mahlich asked: “Wilhelm, what do you think of the political situation?”

He was looking at Wilhelm. Looking at him from under his mighty brows as if looking out of a cave. That was what he liked about Mahlich.

He was a serious man. Wilhelm felt encouraged to offer an analysis.

“The problem is,” he said, “that the problem is the problem.”

He folded a central section down. Mahlich did the same on his side of the table. Surprisingly, the central sections did not stay put, but gave way and fell right through the frame.

“I don’t understand it,” said Mahlich.

“Hammer and nails,” said Wilhelm. “You know where they are.”

Mahlich went down to the cellar and came back with a hammer and nails. Wilhelm picked up the central section, measuring the gap between it and the frame with his thumb and forefinger. That was where he placed the nail. Then he removed the nail again, because he felt that his analysis had not convinced Mahlich one hundred percent, and said, “The problem is the Chevs, do you see? Chev-Chev.”

Very slowly, Mahlich nodded. Wilhelm hit the nail with the hammer.

“Upstarts,” he said.

He hit the nail with the hammer again.

“Defeatists.”

He paused for a moment, and said:

“In the old days we knew what to do with that sort.”

Next nail. Charlotte came in.

“What on earth are you two doing?”

“Extending the extending table.”

“But you can’t go knocking nails into it.”

“Why can’t we?” said Wilhelm.

With his next blow he rammed the nail into the tabletop.

“Oh, my word,” said Mahlich.

And Wilhelm said, “We live and learn.”

The big sliding door between the rooms was opened at three thirty, and the party began. In the meantime Wilhelm had had lunch and a little rest. Lisbeth had made him more coffee; she had trimmed the hairs in his nostrils and ears, nudging his shoulders with her swimming-pool breasts several times in the process.

The cold buffet had arrived, and was set out on the extending table. Alexander, on the other hand, still wasn’t there—a fact that delighted Wilhelm. He asked Charlotte several times about her grandson, whom he regarded chiefly as her grandson, just as he regarded the whole family chiefly as her family. A family of defeatists. Except for Irina. She had at least been in the war. Unlike Kurt, who had been in the labor camp—and now acted as if he’d been a victim. He ought to be glad he’d been in the labor camp! He’d never have survived at the front, half-blind as he was.

Now the bell never stopped ringing. Charlotte was running back and forth like a headless chicken, while Wilhelm sat in his wing chair, sipped cognac from his shiny green aluminum goblet now and then, and took a grim pleasure in embarrassing the guests who lined up in front of his chair to wish him a happy birthday by uttering the same remark over and over again.

“Take those vegetables to the graveyard!”

The Weihes arrived, tripping along in time with each other, speaking in unctuous voices.

Mahlich came back with his wife, silly cow, a bottle blonde who was always complaining of her rheumatism although she wasn’t sixty yet.

Steffi, always dolled up these days now that her husband was underground.

“Take those vegetables to the graveyard!”

Bunke arrived, as disheveled as his bouquet of flowers, tie at half-mast, one side of his shirt collar overlapping his lapel. Even as he entered the room he was mopping sweat from his brow. To think that a man like that was a colonel in State Security now—while long ago they had declined to take him, Wilhelm, on the grounds of his being an immigrant from the West! That rankled to this day. He, too, would rather have stayed in Moscow. But the Party had sent him to Germany, and he had done what the Party wanted him to do. All his life he had done what the Party wanted him to do—and then, to be described as an immigrant from the West!