In Times of Fading Light

how he was going to stick it out, he didn’t even have any idea how he was going to stick it out until Christmas, stick it out until he next saw Christina.

The idea came to him at the moment when the officer cadet forgot to check the safety catch on his gun. With the other two, Kalle Schmidt and Behringer, who had climbed up on the payload area before Alexander, he had checked their weapons in accordance with regulations, but then the truck had rolled a little way back, almost making the cadet fall over, and while he was cursing the driver Alexander had crawled into the payload area and was now sitting in silence with the others—and with a gun cocked ready to fire between his knees. After the incident, he foresaw, it would be easy for them to work out that the cadet had forgotten to check his Kalashnikov because of the driver’s mistake, and that he, Alexander, could easily have overlooked the fact that the safety catch wasn’t on yet and the gun was still set for single fire. It was also conceivable that some part of his equipment could have been caught on the trigger, that the gun would go off and injure him in a place of his own choice, say his left arm, which “entirely by chance” was resting on the muzzle of the Kalashnikov. Only millimeters lay between him and a state of long-term unfitness for army service, his thumb was on the trigger now, a bump in the ground would be enough, the entrance to the barracks would be enough, only suddenly Alexander wasn’t sure whether the gun was really set for single fire or sustained fire, so that if he pulled the trigger it might fire two or three shots—and then the question was how much of his arm would be left.

Only when he handed in the weapon did anyone notice that the full magazine was still in the gun, and also that the trigger was still cocked, and when Alexander was summoned to see the company commander he was expecting to be bawled out, was ready for anything, even spending the rest of the night with his face on those steel springs. But to his surprise the company commander invited him to sit down, and the jovial tone in which he began speaking almost led Alexander to correct him: step-grandfather—he had never called Wilhelm Grandfather, not even Step-Grandfather, maybe that was why he didn’t set the company commander straight, luckily, because what the company commander had to tell him was that his grandfather, Comrade Wilhelm Powileit, was sick in hospital, a severe case of pneumonia, and he was in such a serious condition that Alexander must be “prepared for the worst.”

Alexander nodded, and assumed a grave expression, while with inner jubilation he took the leave pass.

“I hope you arrive in time.”

In the morning Alexander was in the train. He was tired and chilled, but he didn’t want to sleep. He looked through the window, the landscape, even in late fall, seemed to him colorful and luxuriant, there was something to be seen everywhere, villages, cattle, trees, people walking along a road at their leisure. He was touched by the friendliness of the conductor, who didn’t bawl him out, but simply asked to see his ticket, by the friendliness of the passengers who even, whether or not out of absentmindedness, let him go first, who spoke to him as if he were a perfectly ordinary human being.

The rail journey was a long one, and he had to change trains twice. At Potsdam Central Station you then boarded a tram and rode for another twenty minutes to the baroque Old Town of Potsdam, whose main thorough fare (named for Klement Gottwald, the murderer of Slansky) had been renovated over the years. But you had only to go a few steps from the main thoroughfare, and you were in a perfectly normal, meaning dilapidated, street of what had originally been pretty two-story apartment buildings, their facades now gray and black and stained by rainwater dripping from leaky gutters. Here and there in the plaster, so far as it was still extant, you could even find the marks left by artillery fire during the last days of the war.

Number 16 Gutenbergstrasse. The bell didn’t work. The front door of the building, as so often, was locked: Frau Pawlowski feared for the safety of her cats. Luckily she appeared at the window at that very moment, complete with cats, recognized Alexander after a brief scrutiny, and although she had always regarded him as an intruder against whom she must wage war, now that he stood at the door of the building in his uniform she took pity on him, pointed up toward the top floor, and behind the window panes formed a sentence that he could easily lip-read:

“I’ll tell her you’re here!”

A few moments later the key turned in the lock and Christina appeared, hair slightly untidy, sleeves pushed up, and a bibbed apron around her neck.

“Oh,” she said. Just, “Oh.” And invited him in with a movement of her head.

He trotted after her, sniffing the familiar smell of the front hall (half mold, half cats’ pee), looked reverently at the semicircular enamel basin on the upper landing from which they took their water, and followed Christina up the creaking, crooked stairs to the attic floor from which, by means of two half-timbered walls, a few cubic meters had been partitioned off: the attic room, Christina’s attic room, but also his attic room, his “home address” since he moved in here almost a year ago (when he was still in school, and against the protests of his parents), and now it was Christina’s room again: from the first moment he felt like a visitor. Instead of tearing off his uniform and throwing it into a corner before doing anything else, as he had planned, he sat down in one of the two swivel chairs, the only seating in the room, watched Christina standing by the fridge doing dishes, with her sleeves pushed up and her apron strings tied firmly around her waist, tried to guess her mood, watched, fascinated, as she put plates to drain and stacked cups on top of each other, as she filled the tall aluminum pan and plugged in the portable immersion heater to get clean water for rinsing the dishes, and every one of her movements seemed to him almost unbearably sensuous.

“Want coffee?” asked Christina.

Alexander did not want coffee.

After he had changed (he took it as a good sign that his clothes were still here in Gutenbergstrasse), they took the tramcar to Neuendorf and visited his parents. Irina, on finding to her slight disappointment that they were not going to stay all evening, but wanted to go to the dance hall known as the Berg (that is to say, Christina wanted to go to the Berg; Alexander would rather have spent a comfortable evening at Christina’s place, but took it as another good sign that she was so keen on going out to dance again; she had been sitting at home for two months on her own)—Irina then improvised what she called a little supper. They ate together, or rather Alexander was the only one who really ate. Irina, although she was always complaining that she never heard about anything, disappeared straight into the kitchen, hurrying back in again only from time to time, smoking cigarettes, to deliver herself of cryptic comments; it was still too early for Kurt to eat supper (my stomach, you know!), and Christina toyed with the onion soup that Irina had swiftly conjured up—so only Alexander, who had nothing inside him but a mortadella sandwich, stuffed himself with smoked pork fillet and Bulgarian cheese, and in the end finished up Christina’s onion soup, while he listened to the conversation around the table, which meandered from subject to subject, beginning with the omnipresent shortages in the GDR, in this case the shortage of onions, moving on to the oil crisis in the West (where, thank God, all was not well either), and from there, by way of the Yom Kippur War and the former Nazis in Nasser’s army, to The War between Men and Women (a film that had recently been shown on TV in the West), only to jump back to the real world, more specifically the library where Christina worked (and where a new appointment to the staff was a Chilean exile who had witnessed the murder of Victor Jara), and finally, after the inevitable complaints of the stupidity of readers, to some political handbook or other that greatly amused both Christina and Kurt because, in the new edition, the name of Honecker’s predecessor had been entirely eliminated, whereas it had originally been mentioned on almost every page. As in George Orwell, remarked Christina, who was reading George Orwell at the moment, and as she said that she twisted her mouth, or to be precise one side of it, so that the corner of her mouth (and only the corner) gaped open, revealing much of both rows of teeth, which gave her an ironic, cold expression—as always when she was talking about books that Alexander didn’t know. Then they decided that they had spent quite enough time chatting, Irina said that—just this once—she would pay for a taxi, and only when the taxi had arrived, Christina and Alexander had gone down the stone steps, and Irina and Kurt, arm in arm, were standing on the step outside the front door and waving to them with their other, free arms—only then did anyone remember Wilhelm, and it was arranged that Alexander’s parents would pick them as well as Granny Charlotte up at about eleven in the morning, to go and visit him in the hospital.

“Oh, and wear your uniform,” Kurt called after Alexander.

Alexander stopped.

“Uniform?”