In Times of Fading Light

men and 66 percent of women. These figures represent average values. They include very many patients who have survived for ten years or longer. There is no point, therefore, in trying to draw conclusions about individual survival rates from the average values. The chances of survival for as long as possible rise if patients take care to adopt a healthy lifestyle.

Alexander rides five floors down in the elevator. He has taken to breakfasting in the hotel. Instead of eating the rich, unidentifiable mush in the cafe opposite, he mixes himself a bowl of muesli; they have yogurt and fruit and several kinds of cornflakes, although all of those are toasted or candied. There is even whole-wheat bread, almost like the bread you could get in a European hotel. Alexander helps himself to some of everything, determined not to tolerate any loss of appetite.

He sits down by the big window. After a while the two young Swiss women arrive—he met them here in the hotel. He doesn’t really know whether he wants them to come and share his table, but the question was decided before he had made up his mind. Three days of a fleeting acquaintance without any further prospects are obviously enough to create a social obligation.

Not that he has any objection to either of them. Their names are Kati and Nadya. They are still under thirty. They wear flip-flops, and they are in the middle of a trip around the world. It has turned out that they have already spent two months in Africa, going on to Brazil, Argentina, Tierra del Fuego, Chile, Peru, Ecuador, and somewhere else as well. Now they are here for a week, in Mexico City, or DF, as they knowledgeably call it, they have taken a language course somewhere along the way. From DF they are going by bus to Oaxaca, from there on to San Cristobal de las Casas or Palenque (he has forgotten the precise sequence of places). Anyway, once they are through with Mexico they’re going to fly to Sydney, to honor the southeast—or was it the northwest?—of Australia with their presence, as they jokingly put it, touring in a van, then on to New Zealand to meet the Kiwis, and finally to Bangkok, from where—if they don’t take a side trip to the Mekong Delta, as recommended by their Backpackers’ Guide—they will return to Europe.

They have a Round the World Backpacker, with everything in it. They use it every morning to plan the day’s trip. Yesterday they went to see Chapultepec Park and the Anthropological Museum, and Alexander let them persuade him to join them because, as the Backpacker assured readers, the Anthropological Museum is one of the best museums in the world, but perhaps also because he feels attracted by the women—and at the same time repelled.

There is, as already mentioned, nothing in the two of them to object to. Kati, who now comes to his table first, is a pleasant, intelligent person, any man in this hotel would probably call her beautiful, and in fact it would not sound convincing to offer the white brilliance of her smile, revealing just a little too much of the gum area, as evidence to the contrary, or the well-oiled gleam of her scrupulously depilated and, well, slightly bandy legs appearing under her brown, bell-shaped skirt.

“Hello,” says Kati, sitting down to his left at the square table with its white tablecloth.

She speaks in a loud voice, opening her eyes wide as soon as she sees Alexander. She wears a white hoop around her forehead in her curly, just-washed black hair—it looks like some hygienic device to keep hairs out of her breakfast. The sun oil that she uses to anoint herself lavishly has not quite sunk in, and from the slight scab just above her nose you can tell that she forgot to rub sun cream into the place between her plucked eyebrows.

“So where’s it to be today?” asks Alexander, but he instantly fears that his question suggests he wants to go with them again today.

“Probably the Frida Kahlo Museum,” says Kati. “Have you been there?”

“No,” says Alexander, trying to sound uninterested.

“And the Trotsky Museum is somewhere not far off,” says Kati.

Now Nadya joins them at the table. Nadya is a little smaller than her friend, and indeed seems a little “less” in every way, with teeth not quite so white but, on the other hand, probably genuine, and a less striking hair color. She wears a pink top with a very low neckline and a strappy construction that catches the eye and suggests bondage. In spite of these noticeable features, however, she is somehow blurred, her movements are slinky, she slips between the chair and the table without a sound, her “Good morning” is breathed rather than spoken, and her eyes pass quickly over Alexander, whether ignoring him or looking at him surreptitiously is hard to tell. He is rather surprised that one of Nadya’s subjects is communication studies. She is also studying German language and literature, psychology, Indology, and a little singing (he doesn’t know just where that fits in), while Kati is studying, or rather has studied, “only” law, politics, and the Swiss tourist industry.

“What do you think, how about the Frida Kahlo Museum today?” Kati asks, turning to Nadya.

Nadya tugs at the strappy top that is always slipping as she performs something like a shrug of the shoulders.

“And the Trotsky Museum is quite close to it.”

“Trotsky?” Nadya curls her top lip.

An idea occurs to Kati. “Trotsky was a Communist too. Like your grandmother.”

Unfortunately Alexander has told the two of them about Charlotte. Kati responded to hearing that his grandparents were Communists with an expressionless “Oh,” as if she had entered an occupied cubicle in the toilets by mistake. However, now she finds it interesting. “Maybe they knew each other?”

“Hardly likely,” says Alexander.

He could tell them about Wilhelm now. And the speculations about Wilhelm’s secret service work, which Wilhelm always denied, although at the same time he knew just how to fan the flames of curiosity if, for instance, the conversation turned to Trotsky, by making a face as if there were some secret to be kept, although he had probably not arrived in Mexico until just before the assassination of Trotsky, if not indeed after it. But even here no certain facts were known. He could also tell them that once he, Alexander, had met one of Trotsky’s would-be assassins in person—and oddly enough that was true, although he had learned only twenty years after the Mexican painter Alfaro Siqueiros visited the GDR that the latter had been imprisoned in Mexico not only for his “committed art” and his “active support for the working class,” but also for attempting to kill Leon Trotsky with a machine pistol, incomprehensibly missing his intended victim although he was in the middle of Trotsky’s bedroom at the time.

He could say that, but he doesn’t. He get himself more toast and coffee, and decides on a breakfast egg after all. Senses, as he returns to the table, that the two young women have decided on the program of their day—and doesn’t ask what it is. Doesn’t ask, and is not asked to join them. His feelings are little hurt after all. He is annoyed with himself for that.

An hour later he is sitting in the Metro. By his reckoning of time it is Sunday, but there is no Sunday calm in the air: the Metro seems even more crowded than usual, the passengers are in high spirits, many of them wearing colorful costumes and carrying Mexican flags. Is that usual on a Sunday in Mexico? He has to change once for Indios Verdes. Here, on the outskirts of a gigantic bus terminal, stands a ramshackle bus with a national flag that, in view of its size, must be suspect from the viewpoint of road safety, and a hand-painted destination sign saying Teotihuacan.

The driver waits until the bus is full. Then, during the ride, a young man walks down the aisle collecting thirty pesos from each passenger, without issuing any tickets.

The bus drives through suburbs, or the suburbs of suburbs, which must be called prosperous by comparison with the part of the city where the boys took his wallet: anthills, gray boxes stacked on top of each other. There is barbed wire between the residential area and the main road, whether to keep people from going in or coming out he doesn’t understand.

It is farther than he imagined. What did he imagine? The bus is passing through a steppelike landscape now. The garbage of civilization. Cacti with colored plastic bags caught on them.

He remembers a tiny black-and-white photograph: his grandmother in front of the Pyramid of the Sun in Teotihuacan. There wasn’t really much he could make out in it. He thinks there was a cactus in the picture. His grandmother, he thinks, was standing beside it wearing pale clothes, a full skirt, a blouse buttoned up to the throat, very demure, civilized, a little like the white woman in King Kong, and behind her, black, like a silhouette, the pyramid. Back when his grandmother told him about the deserted city with the pyramid in the middle of it, he thinks he imagined the city resembling his way to kindergarten in the morning: empty