In Times of Fading Light

between them—although Charlotte had already given them one a week ago.

Irina looked at Kurt. Kurt looked back—with his scampish expression.

And then, at last, after Charlotte had filled her man-made fiber bag with the presents she had been given in return, after Wilhelm had found his hat and Charlotte her handbag, after Charlotte had assured them once more how delightful it had all been, after the others had escorted them to the foot of the steps, waved them good-bye, and someone had run after them quickly with the umbrella they had forgotten—then at last the door closed, and Irina, whether or not she meant to, fell into a fit of silent, hysterical, but liberating laughter. Couldn’t even stop laughing when Kurt took her in his arms to comfort her, had to move away because she was doubled up with laughter. But then, when there was a sudden smell of burning and Sasha swore in the living room, she stopped laughing. Saw Sasha break a cup putting out the table decoration, which was on fire— and began laughing again when Sasha held a singed soft toy rabbit in front of her face: You didn’t even unpack it, Mama. She laughed until she cried, and it was a long time before she calmed down.

“There, now I need a cognac.”

Kurt opened the window, the smoke drifted out. They were all heated, their faces flushed. They sat down in the comfortable chairs. Irina was still shaken by spasms of laughter like the aftershocks of an earthquake.

“Well, that was quite something,” said Sasha.

“They’re getting old,” said Kurt.

He stood up again, fetched the cognac from the large compartment in the fitted wall units where he kept bottles of alcohol, poured a drink for Irina, poured one for himself, and Sasha said he would like a cognac as well.

“Come along, Melitta, have a cognac with us,” said Irina.

But Melitta didn’t want a cognac. She would rather just have water, please. And now that she had begun to warm slightly to the new girlfriend, Irina was offended. What sort of behavior was that? Or was she a teetotaler? A vegetarian and a teetotaler!

“Well, then, we’ll just drink on our own,” said Irina.

The two young people exchanged glances—and suddenly Irina realized.

She realized that this young woman, this unspectacular young woman with short legs and piercing eyes, with her not particularly well-tended fingernails and her disaster of a hairstyle—that this woman was about to make her, Irina Petrovna, real age not yet fifty, a grandmother.

“I don’t believe it,” said Irina.

“Mama,” said Sasha, “the way you act, anyone would think it was something terrible.”

“What’s happened?” asked Kurt.

1 October 1989

He didn’t like it: Muddel standing in front of the bathroom mirror plucking her eyebrows. He’d already been watching for some time while she dolled herself up; normally she went about all day in a checked shirt (preferably one of Jurgen’s, while Jurgen was still around), and now here she was in stiletto-heeled shoes all of a sudden, he hadn’t even known that she owned a pair of stiletto-heeled shoes, she had already removed her leg hair with that wax stuff (instruments of torture, all of them), now she was plucking her eyebrows leaning far forward over the washbasin, you could see her pantyline under her skirt, dreadful, you could see just about everything, so she really was dressing up like this to go to the birthday party where, as he knew—and of course so did she—his father would be a guest. Only there was also something that she didn’t know.

Should he have told her? She hadn’t actually asked him, she had avoided a direct question, but he’d known what she was getting at: Did he cook for you both, questions like that. Did you both go to the cinema? Yes, we did go to the cinema, but there were three of us. With his new woman. He hadn’t said that. With his latest girlfriend.

“Go and change,” Muddel told him.

Markus didn’t move. He watched her begin to put mascara on her lashes, rolling her eyes until only their whites showed, blinking when tears came into them until she could see again, and he marveled at the routine way she did all this, the expertise as she painted her lips, the way she then—making exactly the same face as the new girlfriend—pressed them together and formed them into a pout, the way she put gel on her fingertips and rubbed it into her freshly washed hair, the way she finally disheveled it a bit and looked up from under her eyelids at the mirror, just like the new girlfriend—and although he was surprised to find that Muddel had mastered these things, although it even impressed him just a little, he didn’t like to think of the two of them meeting this afternoon at the birthday party: the new girlfriend and Muddel.

“Do go and put your shirt on,” said Muddel. “Or we’ll miss the bus.”

“I’m not putting any shirt on,” said Markus.

“Okay,” said Muddel. “Then I’ll just go on my own.”

She dabbed the plucked eyebrows with a cotton pad; Markus turned away and went to his room.

The shortest way was across the interior courtyard, where Muddel’s exhibition pieces stood among tall hollyhocks. His room was in the middle of the four-sided courtyard, which really had only three sides, directly opposite the workshop; sometimes he could still hear the potter’s wheel murmuring away there in the evening. He took the twelve steps in five well-practiced leaps, and flung himself on his bed: on the lower bed, it was a bunk bed for two, and Jurgen had made it so that Frickel could sleep over with Markus, but Frickel had gone, gone to the West with his parents, and since Frickel left life was dead boring in Grosskrienitz. The best girls in the class lived in Schulzendorf, and you needed a moped to get there. He might get a moped when he was fourteen, if they had the money for it, said Muddel, but now she had to save up for a kiln, and then, said Muddel, she’d really be earning money. However, she’d already said that quite often, she’d really be earning money, and now Jurgen had taken the car with him, and always having to walk made him want to puke, too. Grosskrienitz really was the pits, and you had to change twice to get to Neuendorf.

He listened for Muddel’s footsteps; could he hear them on the stairs yet? Suppose she really went on her own?

What made his determination waver was the thought of all the things to be seen in his great-grandparents’ house. He remembered, only too well, the big shell in the hall, the cobra skin in the conservatory (which his great-grandmother, wrongly, thought was a rattlesnake), the sawlike snout of the sawfish (really a kind of ray), the stuffed catshark, and especially, of course, the not quite fully grown black iguana on Wilhelm’s shelves—it was a bit like going to the Natural History Museum in Berlin, where you couldn’t touch anything either.

Apart from that, his great-grandparents were funny people. Sometime or other, ages ago, they’d fought Hitler, illegally, it was the Nazi period—they’d had that in school, Wilhelm had once even come to talk to his class about Karl Liebknecht, and how they sat on the balcony together founding the GDR or something like that. No one understood it, but they’d all admired him for having such a famous great-grandfather, even Frickel. Otherwise he was rather odd. Ombre, he was always saying, ombre, what did all that shit mean? And Great-Granny said do weewee instead of take a pee, treated him like a kid of three, but was surprised when he didn’t know the capital of Honduras. Hey, man, what’s Honduras? A make of motorbike?

Now he could hear footsteps coming; he’d guessed it was an empty threat.

“Markus, it’s his ninetieth birthday. It could be his last.”

“Who cares?” said Markus, blowing on the dreamcatcher hanging from the slatted frame of the upper bunk to set it moving.

“It makes me a little sad to hear you talk like that,” said Muddel.

“I don’t have a present for him anyway,” shouted Markus.

“That doesn’t matter,” said Muddel.

“Oh yes, it does matter!”

Muddel thought for a moment and, as usual, came up with a solution at once.