In Times of Fading Light

Only the murmuring in his head, like the bath-water gurgling in the morning. And a tune came out of the murmuring. And out of the tune came—words. There they suddenly were, the words he had been looking for: simple and sad and clear, and so natural that at that same moment he forgot he had forgotten them.

He sang quietly, to himself, emphasizing every syllable. With a slightly dragging rhythm, he realized. With an unintentional tremolo in his voice:

The Party, the Party, is always right
Then as comrades let us arise
For the right if we fight
We will always be right
As we foil exploitation and lies.
If life we offend
We are stupid and vile
When mankind we defend
We rejoice and we smile.
Let Lenin’s spirit show
How in Stalin’s care would grow
The Party, the Party, the Party we know!

1973

Then the truck stopped, and the tailgate opened.

A head appeared. The head was wearing a uniform cap. The head began shouting. Little bubbles of saliva formed on its teeth, shining in the white glare of the lights before they burst.

As for what the head was shouting, you couldn’t make it out. A peculiar language that seemed to consist almost entirely of vowels.

A second head emerged, and then another. Next moment four or five uniformed men were standing beside the tailgate bawling, bawling all at once and in competition with each other.

There was movement under the tarpaulin. People grabbed their bags and jumped off the payload area one by one. Stumbled, got caught up somewhere. Alexander jumped, too. His hand touched the coarse surface of the parade ground, which felt like a cinder track.

On the second day he began to understand the bawling. Attaduble aaarch meant: at the double, march. And kumpny tenshun meant: company stand to attention. With individual variations.

On the third day he found that he could understand almost all the consecutive sentences containing the word “ass”: Move your ass, you loser, or, You’ll be cleaning the latrine floor with your toothbrush, asshole, or, instructively: When you run your ass is the highest part of your body.

On the fourth day they had political instruction for the first time: Neo-Fascism and Militarism in the Federal Republic. Anyone who fell asleep had to stand through the rest of the lecture.

On the fifth day his first letter from Christina arrived. He tore it open at once, read it on his way to the dormitory. Read it again more carefully, put it in his breast pocket, and then read it that evening in bed.

The sixth day was a Sunday. On Sundays you could go to the company’s formal common room, known as the Culture Room—if you put on your walking-out uniform. If you had brought coffee from home, you could drink it there.

Alexander had not brought any coffee from home. He stayed in the dormitory. Lying on his bed, he read Christina’s letter for the tenth or fifteenth time. Read, with relief, that after his departure she had been “sad all day long.” Read, uneasily, that this weekend she and a colleague from the library were going to the Scharmutzelsee holiday park to “take their minds off things.” Reproached her mildly for that in his answer. Struck out his reproaches. Started his letter again. Described the view from the window: a newly built block, a fence behind it. He could have added: a tank exercise ground behind it, but he wasn’t sure: was that one of the military matters about which they had been told to keep quiet. Would his letter be censored?

On the seventh day they were standing on the exercise ground, drawn up in rank and file (meaning in three rows), waiting for something to happen (Alexander had already discovered that standing around and waiting was among a soldier’s principal occupations). He still had slight headaches, caffeine withdrawal symptoms, head squeezed by his steel helmet, both parts of his combat pack on his back, gas mask container around his neck, Kalashnikov over his shoulder. His ears, still not used to exposure, began aching in the keen wind whistling by under the prominent rim of the National People’s Army helmet, but they were standing to attention, they weren’t allowed to move. Alexander looked at the neck of the man in front of him and his ears, which looked exactly the way his own ears felt, that is, bright red—and suddenly he thought of Mick Jagger, wondering as he stood here on this exercise ground, a hill known as the Katzenkopf, looking at the red ears of the man in front of him, what someone like Mick Jagger was doing now. He vaguely remembered a photograph from some Western magazine: Mick Jagger in his bedroom, in a fleecy pullover and leggings, a little effeminate, sleepy, obviously he had only just gotten out of bed, so maybe, Alexander imagined, next moment he would go into a large, sunny kitchen, make himself coffee, unless someone had already done it for him, he would eat a fresh cheese roll and grapes (or whatever it was people ate over there), and then, while Alexander was crawling over the Katzenkopf or doing shooting practice with blank cartridges or moving across the exercise ground with individuals lunging out of line, would strum the guitar a little and note down a few ideas, or have himself driven to the studio in a weird limousine to record a new song that he would then present to the international public on his next tour, a tour where he, Alexander, would not be in the audience, the way he had never been in the audience for any Rolling Stones tour and never would be, thought Alexander, as he stood on the Katzenkopf in a steel helmet with both parts of his combat pack on his back, staring at the red ears of the man in front of him, he would never hear the Rolling Stones live, he would never see Paris or Rome or Mexico, would never see Woodstock, never even see West Berlin with its nude demos and student riots, its free love and its Extraparliamentary Opposition, none of that, thought Alexander, while some corporal holding the service regulations explained what position a marksman was to adopt when firing from a prone position, namely, keep your body straight, take diagonal aim, he would never see any of it, never know it live, because between here and there, between one world and another, between the small, narrow world where he would have to spend his life and the other big, wide world where real, true life was lived—because between those two worlds there was a border, and it was one that he, Alexander Umnitzer, would soon have to guard.

That was on the seventh day.

On the twenty-fifth day they were sworn in. The ceremony took place in a square somewhere outside the barracks. Speechifying, banners, kettledrums, trumpets. Then they took the oath that they had had to learn by heart in political instruction. Their superiors went along the rows checking that everyone was really saying the words of the oath.

After the swearing-in they were allowed out for the first time. Christina and his parents had come to the ceremony. His mother cried at the sight of him in uniform. Alexander made haste to reassure her: he was doing fine, he said, there was no war on, even the food was acceptable.

Embracing Christina after almost a month was strange. She was smaller and more delicate than he remembered, surrounded by an overwhelmingly feminine aura. Alexander breathed in the air that she stirred up as she moved, feeling clumsy and ridiculous in his coarse, ill-fitting uniform, with his bowl cut and his silly cap. For a second he thought he saw horror at the sight of him in Christina’s face, but then she fell into an inappropriately