In Times of Fading Light

clambering up to the place where you become a god, Teotihuacan, and then they come down again, outwardly the same as before.

“How was it?” asks Alexander.

“Amazing,” says Kati. “The view.”

They climb down together. They walk along the Avenue of the Dead to its end. Nadya reads from the Backpackers’ Guide (abbreviated, and in English, it is the story of the god who sacrifices himself to rise again as the sun of the fifth world), and she buys a black obsidian mask of terrifying appearance in one of the big souvenir shops at the exit. It reminds her of Haitian voodoo masks.

Kati buys an obsidian necklace that suits her dark hair.

Obsidian tortoises are on sale as well. Unobtrusively, so that the women don’t see him, Alexander puts his tortoise down with the others, the hundreds of them lying here on offer on the tables.

They cost twenty-five pesos.

1976

If anyone had asked Irina about the source of the apricots she was cutting into small cubes on Christmas morning, before adding them to other fruits to make the stuffing for her Monastery Goose, she would have had to go right back to the beginning of the story.

Kurt had told that story often enough—these days Irina hardly remembered when she had first heard it—the tale of how his foot was crushed by the branch of a tree in the fall of 1943, and how young Lieutenant Sobakin had saved his life by fixing it for Kurt, whose strength was exhausted anyway, to avoid the sick bay (where bread rations were even smaller than outside it), and work instead for a while as night watchman near the tar kilns that were kept heated around the clock—a doubly rewarding occupation because they were very close to a potato field. Later, after Kurt’s sentence was commuted to “eternal exile,” he and Sobakin, by now a captain, played chess in one of the camp administration offices, had what by Kurt’s account of it were unusually frank discussions of justice and socialism, made friends—and quarreled with each other when they both fell in love with the same woman, herself, Irina Petrovna.

When they moved to the GDR they lost sight of Sobakin. He turned into an anecdotal figure, someone from a separate, distant world now becoming unreal—until one hot day this year Kurt had a phone call from the State Security Ministry around three thirty in the afternoon, and was asked by the excited caller whether he was the same Kurt Umnitzer who had lived in Slava in the north Urals from 1941 to 1956, because a Soviet general wanted to speak to him.

Sobakin had put on about a hundred kilos, his bear hug almost crushed Irina when they met again, he was so glad to see her, and he was as happy as a child about Kurt’s scholarly career; hadn’t he always called Kurt umniza, meaning more or less “wise guy” in Russian? He tipped a bottle of vodka down his throat while sitting, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, in what was of course the wrong armchair, Kurt’s favorite, he told a whole series of amazing tales about the imminent Third World War, which he seemed to consider a done deal, and as they were saying good-bye he accidentally left a plate-sized dent in the roof of their still nearly new Lada.

Whether because of that dent in the roof of the still nearly new Lada, or because of the question of justice and socialism, or for some other reason—two months later the postman delivered a large package to the Am Fuchsbau house, heavy as a brick, its contents consisting entirely of black Russian caviar.

Kurt and Irina ate very little of that caviar themselves; their appetite for caviar was only moderate, for although there had hardly been enough of anything to eat in Slava, a whole goods truck loaded with black caviar had arrived there the summer after the death of Stalin “for distribution” among the locals, they were told, and Kurt and Irina had overeaten the delicacy to such an extent that Irina suffered a kind of anaphylactic shock, and then for months lived in fear that her excessive consumption of caviar might have harmed the baby they had started directly after Stalin’s death. So they ate Sobakin’s caviar sparingly. They served some of it to friends at champagne breakfasts, usually after riotous parties, but most of the caviar went, in the form of bribes and as a kind of currency, into the undercover circulation of goods traded beneath shop counters and in back rooms.

In the Galerie am Stern, Irina acquired several items from the much-coveted Waldenburg ceramics range, kiln-fired with a brownish fly ash residue, which she then used as bribes to obtain skylights; she put some of the skylights, those that she didn’t need herself, into a trailer fixed to the car and drove them to Finsterwalde, where she exchanged them for a rather larger skylight (the 100 cm size), which Eberling the fisherman from Grosszicker on the island of Rugen immediately took off her hands, leaving in exchange a crate of eels, which he had smoked—illegally, of course—in a smokehouse hidden behind his garage.

Irina’s mother, Nadyeshda Ivanovna, ate two of those eels. She had only recently arrived in the GDR and was anxious to show how little of a burden on them she meant to be (no, no, you two eat the good bread, those snaky things will do for me). Irina kept three eels for Sasha, although it turned out that he didn’t want to eat them “out of respect for the eels’ will to live,” as he put it (he’d always eaten eel in the past!); three smoked eels went to the butcher, who provided Irina with those famous “grab-bag packages,” containing delicacies like rump steak, smoked pork fillet, or boiled ham that were not on offer to other customers. Three eels went to the motor mechanic; one to the bookseller; and finally two to a former colleague. It was from this lady’s father’s allotment garden that the dried apricots came, as well as quinces and thick-skinned winter pears, which Irina peeled and diced and mixed with the soaked apricots, together with halved figs from the Russian Store, raisins (she added those instead of grapes), sweet chestnuts that she had collected with her own hands on the Caputh hills, and some Cuban oranges, rather fibrous, so she had cut them up very small. She put all these ingredients in a pan, cooked them lightly in plenty of butter, added Armenian cognac, and used them as stuffing for the Christmas goose that she was preparing from a recipe three hundred years old, apparently originating with some Burgundian monks, and therefore known as Burgundian Monastery Goose.

Although the goose weighed a good five kilos, as Irina put the bird in the oven drawn, washed, salted, pricked all over with a skewer, and stuffed, terrible doubts assailed her: would there be enough for everyone? She counted up the company coming to dinner; there would be seven of them. Besides Charlotte and Wilhelm, her own mother was here this year, too, and Sasha was bringing his new girlfriend.

Irina decided to fry the giblets as well, the heart, gizzard, and liver. Usually she didn’t fry them until next day, and she ate them with the warmed-up remains of the goose through the remaining days of the Christmas festival—delicious! Irina loved the firm gizzard and the sweetish taste of liver, whereas Kurt hated offal. He didn’t like to see people gnaw the bones, either, and he thought little of reheated food, even if he didn’t admit it. But she knew him: he just didn’t like to eat the same thing two days running.

Irina cut the giblets up small, seasoned them well with pepper, put them in a pan with hot coconut fat, and let them sizzle over low heat while she prepared the stock for the roast goose. This was the essence, the most important part of the Monastery Goose recipe: a mixture of cognac, honey, and port wine to give the bird a sweet black glaze that was half honey, half fructose. Those monks in that place Burgundy did themselves proud. Where was Burgundy, anyway?

Apart from the Burgundian goose, the cooking for Christmas Day was all German. There was red cabbage and green cabbage, as well as Thuringian dumplings (the most complicated of all kinds of dumplings to make), potatoes for Kurt who didn’t like dumplings, as well as a good hearty radish salad for a starter, red fruit pudding for dessert, and homemade Christmas stollen to go with coffee at the end of the meal—and plenty of everything, because there was nothing Irina hated more than wondering whether there would be enough. All through her childhood she had eaten half-rotten potatoes (because you ate the half-rotten potatoes first, with the result that in the end you were always eating half-rotten potatoes); at the onset of winter, all through her childhood, she had looked forward to the first hard frosts, because only then was the thin pig that Granny Marfa had been feeding all year on kitchen scraps slaughtered— and then it was done in a hurry, because at outdoor temperatures of minus fifty degrees its trotters would have frozen in its sty, which was knocked together out of thin boards.

Poor pig, thought Irina.