In Times of Fading Light

cheerful mood.

They walked through a town unknown to them, Halberstadt by name, which was swarming with soldiers and their families. The restaurants were overcrowded. Christina had the idea of looking for a place to eat a little way outside the town, but Alexander’s few hours of leave were—of course—confined to Halberstadt. So they ate in one of the overcrowded restaurants, where there was nothing left on the menu but lecso stew made with tomatoes and peppers. Lecso. Irina didn’t eat anything, but smoked. They talked about this and that as they waited for their food; Kurt was working on his book about Lenin’s exile in Switzerland, hoping that now Honecker was in office it might be published after all; Wilhelm was very sick again—Alexander caught himself thinking that he might get special leave for Wilhelm’s funeral. Baba Nadya had decided to move to the GDR, but as the bureaucratic process would take months, if not years, they wondered whether the old lady would survive the waiting time in Slava. Then Kurt and Irina left so that the children could have a little time on their own.

They had four hours. Alexander decided to show Christina the barracks. They went along the hilly road, down the street paved with concrete slabs that led straight to the tank exercise ground, and Alexander began telling her about it. He told her about forced marches carrying a combat pack. About the blisters you got on your feet, the handles on ammunition crates that cut into your fingers, the dangerous practice grenades, the radioactivity; even, and almost with pride, of how someone in the neighboring company had died after vomiting into his gas mask, unnoticed by the trainers, and as Christina commented on his tale now and then with an appreciative I see or a sympathetic My God, he felt that somehow it was all wrong, and not because of his occasional exaggerations, not because of the little points that he was instinctively beginning to make, but that this was simply the wrong thing, it was not what it was all about.

On the left, behind tall wooden fencing, the Russian barracks rose, comparatively brightly colored, oriental in appearance (the fence was green, the building yellow, the curbs whitewashed, the red star on the gate freshly painted), and on the right, visible from a considerable distance behind the barbed wire fence, was the regimental border training building (flat, rectangular, gray). In silence, Alexander counted the windows, meaning to show Christina where “his” room was, but then changed his mind. What did the sight of a window say? What did the sight of a newly built block say about the omnipresent idiocy, about the sense of being shut up, about the petty little details that filled and made up a day here: the constant physical proximity of the others in the dormitory, their dirty jokes in the evening before going to sleep, the socks they stretched over their boots for the odor to wear off, or standing at the urinals in the morning to piss along with a hundred other men, an involuntary witness as they shook and knocked and milked off the last little drop of their pee.

Christina said she thought the barracks “didn’t exactly look nice,” but added that presumably a “modern building” like that had its advantages, for instance, in respect of cleanliness and hygiene.

Alexander said nothing. He said nothing all the way back, he preserved an iron silence, although Christina didn’t seem to notice, he firmly resolved not to say another word—and then, in the restaurant where (unnecessarily) they had another coffee, he did start talking again. Talked, and was angry with himself for not keeping his mouth shut, for talking about socks and urinals after all, despised himself for it, and at the same time was cross with Christina who, as he talked, was beginning to look at her watch, and who finally—sounding partly annoyed, partly well meaning—silenced him at last.

“Think of your father. I’m sure he went through worse.”

He took Christina to the rail station. Their time was up. Christina walked along beside him, with her aura and her angelic hair, her hand was cold and she took small steps, and suddenly Alexander hated her. And at the same time longed for her. But she shook loose and was leaving him there, a pathetic sniveler with his bowl cut and his uniform, he had to hold on to her, forced her into the entrance of a building, thought she must be infected by his own desire, thought when she resisted that he would have to use force, tried to turn her around, tore at her pantyhose, but Christina defended herself with surprising strength, making an odd whimpering sound, and then they were standing there facing each other, both of them breathing fast, and Alexander turned and walked away.

It wasn’t yet nine. Alexander went back into the restaurant, sat down, ordered beer, ordered schnapps, then another beer, watched the waitress, looked at her thighs, only just covered by a black skirt, saw how their plump insides rubbed against each other as she walked through the bar (unlike Christina’s thighs, which always had a finger’s breadth of space between them), and without stopping to think about it Alexander would have given a conscript’s entire monthly wage, eighty marks plus forty marks border allowance, minus the bill for beer and schnapps that he had run up, to be able to put his hand between the plump thighs of the waitress at the Harzfeuer restaurant in Halberstadt. He ordered another beer before finishing the one he already had, asked the waitress’s name, which was Barbel, told her with vague hope in his voice that he had leave to stay out until midnight. She smiled, shook her chestnut hair back from her face, cleared away ashtrays, collected glasses, brought new, full glasses, moving lithe as a fish between the tables, most of them occupied by soldiers, disappeared, reappeared, cast him what he thought were brief, meaningful glances, showed her incisors as she smiled, and finally brought him not another schnapps but his bill, refused his generous tip, and warned him sternly that he’d better get moving if he was going to be back in the barracks on time.

Then he went down the concrete-surfaced road, above him a huge, starry sky that was inclined to fall on him all the time, inside him lecso stew that was inclined to rush out of him, otherwise nothing mattered, he was only surprised to find that he actually was going in the direction of the barracks, was going back in there of his own free will, assuming he wasn’t run down by a car on the way, but for unfathomable reasons that didn’t happen. When he was in bed everything, although it couldn’t be seen in the dark, began going around and around, the lecso stew couldn’t be kept down any longer, and landed not in the toilet but in one of the twenty basins in the company washroom. Now the duty NCO appeared and told Alexander to put on his field service uniform (a very difficult task), then they went over the barracks terrain together, while Alexander explained to the duty NCO that he loved Christina and they called each other Bonny, no, not Pony, Bonny like in the song, then they reached the guardhouse, where Alexander’s belt was removed, they took him to a small room where there was nothing but a bedstead without even a mattress on its network of steel springs, and when Alexander was fetched from the detention cell at six on Sunday morning, so that he could clean the basin in which he had vomited before the company got up, he had, as he saw in one of the twenty mirrors in the washroom, the imprint of the steel springs on the right-hand side of his face.

He wrote Christina a remorseful letter that very Sunday. However, Christina did not write back, although she had written him every day so far, or at least there was no letter from her on Tuesday, or Wednesday either. On Thursday Alexander wrote threatening to dump her, and he would have taken the threat back on Friday if the combat alarm hadn’t intervened.

For the first time he was given not just a gun but two full rounds of ammunition, thirty bullets in each. At roll call the company commander, a short-legged man with a sharp voice, explained that they were going to operate in border area so-and-so in order to secure the hinterland, that what was known as a “situation” had occurred: a Soviet Army soldier was on the move with an Ikarus bus, a Kalashnikov, and six rounds of ammunition, probably making for the state border between Stapelburg and the Brocken.

They drove for rather more than an hour and a half, and then, in groups of three, were dropped off somewhere in the forest. Alexander was with Kalle Schmidt, whose hands were shaking, and Behringer, who had already announced, back in the dormitory, “If those assholes are really going to leave me on the border, I’m making off!”

Then they were lying on the ground at a place in the forest where the path forked. They didn’t know exactly where the border was. Dogs barked in the distance. Soon it was so dark that they couldn’t see each other. There were cracking, squealing noises in the forest. They thought they heard footsteps everywhere, Kalle cocked the trigger of his gun and ordered invisible figures to give the password of the day, Alexander cocked the trigger of his own weapon, saw ghosts if he stared at the faintly discernible path for long enough, listened for every word, every sound that came from Behringer’s direction.

They had been dropped off at four in the afternoon. Around midnight they heard the typical screech of the engine of a cross-country truck with an air-cooled engine turning over at high speed, bringing their relief. Eight hours, the normal length of a shift on the border—that was what awaited them when, after training, they were transferred to a border company, eight hours a day in alternating shifts, for a whole year. Alexander had no idea