In Times of Fading Light

streets, darkness, the gas lamps still on, and the slightly built man who went about Neuendorf on his bicycle morning and evening, lighting or extinguishing the gas lamps with a hook on the end of a long staff, was mysteriously connected with the ugly little god on top of the pyramid who casts himself into the fire to rise above the earth again, a new sun.

He is glad now to be alone on this expedition. The museum yesterday was oppressive. Obviously, he think, he doesn’t tolerate museums, even the best in the world. Maybe it’s time to admit that. The abundance of items in a museum overwhelms him, the sheer number and quantity of them. He doesn’t know whether he ought to admire the patience of the two Swiss girls. He too borrowed an audio guide yesterday, following their example, and tried following the information and instructions for a while, but then, irritated, switched the device off to spend two hours wandering around in a state of total disorientation, among masses of exhibits and crowds of visitors. Not even the Aztec calendar stone that he knew from Wilhelm’s silver cufflinks, and now saw suddenly rising before him, stony and gigantic, could rouse him from that state.

After that they spent an hour in Chapultepec Park. Alexander sat on a bench, and the two women, who had been whispering together in a way that infuriated him while they were in the museum, finding something that amused them, lay down on the grass and fell asleep at once. Later, when they were in a cafe, Alexander tried to bring the conversation back to the museum, just to show them but most of all himself that none of what they had seen and heard had stayed with them, that within twenty minutes, he was sure, they would have slept it all off like a hangover—but the question that occurred to him, of whether the Aztecs had believed in any kind of Paradise, was one that the women could partly answer after all: the Aztecs, so the audio guide had said, definitely believed in a Paradise, and entry into it was gained by those who fell in battle, those who were sacrificed on the altar, and—was the third category children, as Kati thought? Or as Nadya had an idea she remembered, women who died in childbirth?

The question of Paradise had led to a conversation about the similarities and differences between ideas of the next world and finally of religions in general, during which it turned out that not only did Kati and Nadya know a little about almost all the religions in the world, they even followed, or had followed, some kinds of religion themselves. Kati had spent weeks in an ashram, regularly went to a school of Tibetan Buddhism in Switzerland, but also carried a little picture of the Virgin Mary around in her travel bag; Nadya, like Kati, revered the Dalai Lama, had taken an interest in voodoo magic in Haiti, and in addition went to lectures on the Tantra, believed in the healing power of rock crystals, and also like Kati thought it not impossible that she was really the ambassador of an extraterrestrial civilization.

Amazing how easily all this passed their lips, how naturally and effortlessly they reconciled it, how airy and weightless this new world religion of theirs was, like a watercolor hastily dashed off, thinks Alexander, remembering, as he sits in the bus to Teotlihuacan, his own difficult, crazy, violent confrontation with that very subject the winter before, the winter of the millennium year, when everything broke apart for him and the birds— literally—fell from heaven. He tries to remember it: the moment when it—and yes, what exactly?—touched him or turned to him or made itself known? He doesn’t know now. The moment eludes memory, he recollects only time before and after it, he remembers how for days (days?) he lay on the floorboards of some derelict house, helplessly following the way the pain ate at him from inside; he remembers the darkness, his sore hip bones—and he remembers, after it, the sense of release, of insight, he remembers how one morning he came out into the backyard with the warm ash-can in his hand, how he stood there and looked up, and how he saw it: up there in the black branches of a backyard poplar.

Body chemistry? Downright lunacy? Or a moment of enlightenment? For days after that, he had gone around the streets with a deranged smile, every rusty streetlamp had looked to him miraculous, the mere sight of the yellow trains rattling their way along the stretch of overhead track above Schonhauser Allee set off feelings of happiness, and in the eyes of the children who surrounded him, the smiling man, looking into his face without inhibition, he had seen it more than once: something for which he, brought up an atheist, had no term available to him.

Is his sin pride? Is it that he really believed he was now, once and for all, proof against anything? Or is it to have suppressed and denied all this at some point? Is repentance demanded of him? Must he learn to acknowledge the message at last? To name the name that so easily passed the lips of the two Swiss women?

In the parking lot outside the city of Teotihuacan there are more cars and buses than Alexander expects, more than he feared. The new arrivals walk in batches past the souvenir shops to the entrance. Tickets are on sale. It is hot and dusty. The caravan of tourists moves slowly along the Avenue of the Dead—the main road of the former city. A road with steps in it; the Aztecs were unacquainted with the wheel. As a result, to this day nothing with wheels travels on the broad, smoothly paved Magistrale. Even the souvenir sellers standing to left and right in the strong sunlight carry their few wares here, offer them for sale on lightweight folding tables, drape them over themselves, or convey them on small vendors’ trays slung in front of them.

One of the souvenir sellers addresses Alexander, accompanies him for a few steps. The man is small and no longer young. His fingernails are as black as the little obsidian tortoises he is selling. Obsidian—the material used by priests for the knives with which they cut their victims’ hearts from their living bodies, ripping them out through the ribs. Alexander picks up a tortoise, not to examine it but to find out what obsidian feels like. The man talks, assures him that he made the tortoise with his own hands, lowers the price—from fifty to forty pesos, four dollars. Alexander buys the tortoise.

Then he is standing in front of the Pyramid of the Sun, quite close to the place where his grandmother must have stood sixty years ago, wondering what he was really expecting. Is he really stupid enough to have expected it to be empty up there at the very top? Did he think anyone could be alone with these stones, if only for a moment? He doesn’t remember. He stands there, stares at the pyramid. His hand closes around the shell of the tortoise as if it were the handle of a knife. Then, before desperation overcomes him, he sets off. His brown walking shoes come alternately before his eyes, one dusty, one polished… it’s two hundred and forty-eight steps, that, he thinks, is what it said in the Backpackers’ Guide, the third largest pyramid in the world. He counts only the steps taken by his polished shoe. He must make it to the top without giving up, at least that. But clearly the steps built by the Indians do not conform to the industrial norm in Germany. He senses that he is going too fast. He knows what’s happening in his body: a point will come when the concentration of lactate in his muscles rises. The pain in his thighs is getting worse at the same time as his weariness increases. He fights it for a while, as if he could outwit his body chemistry. He slows down. His head is ringing with his heartbeat. The volume of his lungs no longer seems adequate. He has counted his polished shoe ninety-six times. When he starts coughing he gives up and has to sit down.

Head propped on his hands, he examines the porous gray stone blocks used to build the steps. People whom he overtook just now are climbing past him to left and right. Women in flip-flops. One woman in platform soles, one who is even wearing red high heels. Then flip-flops again, two pairs ominously making for him: one pair black, the other pair pink…

Black flip-flops stop first, carefully depilated legs, gleaming with oil, slightly bandy.

“You’re in amazing condition,” says Kati.

“I thought you two were going to the Trotsky Museum,” said Alexander.

“The city’s too full,” says Kati. “It’s the national festival today.”

However, both of them, even Nadya, seem pleased to meet him by chance. Obviously they now expect Alexander to go on to the top with them, and they are surprised, almost hurt, and then slightly concerned when he declines.

“Aren’t you feeling well, do you have a problem?”

“No,” says Alexander. “I’ll wait here.”

He stays sitting on the steps, watching. Watching people climb up to him: people in baseball caps, people in newly bought sombreros, people in shorts. People with backpacks and cameras, fat people in garish T-shirts, people on all fours, sweating, people with children carrying little Mexican flags (for the national festival), men wearing gold chains, an elderly gentleman with a walking stick, people talking in loud American voices, people with nothing in particular to be said about them, pale young men with three days’ growth of beard, men as brown as cocoa in flowered shirts, a woman with a scarf, a young man with dreadlocks and a pine apple, a group of Japanese men in suits, slender girls in skimpy tops showing a glimpse of their stomachs, fat girls in skimpy tops showing a glimpse of their stomachs, they are all climbing, tottering, crawling, climbing, marching, tripping,