In Times of Fading Light

stank, a certain slightly sweetish smell that made him retch, so that he tried to get away as soon as he had done his duty, but by then the trap had snapped shut—hands like pincers, the old lady had, she grabbed him, jabbered at him in Russian, and as his breath began to run out made him sit on the bed, and her pincerlike claws didn’t open until he had eaten one of her disgusting chocolates.

She meant well, that was obvious, and Markus didn’t let any of that show now as he offered her his hand, instinctively breathing through his mouth, and assumed a friendly expression, determined to let the torrent of incomprehensible sounds pass him by—but to his surprise Baba Nadya said just one thing, with the stress in the wrong place, on the last syllable), but comprehensible all the same.

“Affeederseyn,” she said.

“Auf Wiedersehen,” said Markus, relieved, and he set off.

First he went to look at the iguana that was now his property: a magnificent specimen, no damage to it at all aside from one missing claw. The scaly crest was a little dusty, and he was already looking forward to cleaning it with a fine brush at home. Maybe he ought to put the iguana somewhere safe right away—who knew, Wilhelm might forget about giving it to him later. But where? And anyway, there were witnesses to the making of the gift. He decided to go on viewing the items on display, ignoring Muddel’s unspoken wish for him to sit down at the coffee table with her.

Wilhelm’s room was less interesting than the conservatory, aside from the iguana and maybe the big sombrero, and the lasso, and the embroidered leather belt (with a revolver holster!) all of them hanging in a built- in alcove. Nonetheless, Markus took his time inspecting everything thoroughly again: the silver items, dishes and ashtrays, but also things made of gold or blue crystal, probably very valuable, standing around carefully arranged in special compartments among the books. There was also a Russian section, with wooden dolls nesting inside each other, painted wooden spoons, and a kind of glass thing. If you shook it, snow fell inside, and in the middle of the thing stood a tiny Kremlin. And there was a plaster bust of Lenin with a damaged ear.

More interesting were the photographs standing on the half-height display cabinet in small steel frames: Wilhelm on a prehistoric motorbike in what might or might not be a uniform, wearing a leather cap and glasses (you could recognize him only by his nose), and beside him, in a sidecar, a man in a suit, maybe Karl Liebknecht. But the photo was a poor one, and all men probably had mustaches in those days.

A photograph of a ship: was it the one that had brought his great-grandparents back from Mexico or the one that had taken them there? How had they escaped from Germany at that time?

There was also the photo of a beautiful young woman with bright black eyes, and only the way she still wore her hair showed that she was the same person who was now fluttering about telling her guests in a whisper what not to say.

“Please, children, I beg you!”

And the bell rang again. Great-Grandmother disappeared into the hall, and the volume of the dinosaurs’ palavering, which had decreased briefly after the warning, swelled again; once more, despite her prohibition, they were talking about the political situation and Hungary and all that, and Markus registered, to his surprise, that the dinosaurs were of the same opinion as Pastor Klaus in Grosskrienitz.

“More democracy!” shouted the fat man with the red face in his heavy accent. “Of course we need more democracy!”

But Great-Grandmother was intervening again, clapping her hands. “Comrades!” cried Great-Grandmother. “Comrades, can we have silence, please?”

A man in a brown suit had come in. He looked like Principal Brietzke at the school Markus attended, and he was holding a red folder, someone struck a glass to make it ring, apparently there was going to be a speech, now came the official part, thought Markus. Where was his father?

“Dear comrades, dear and honored Comrade Powileit,” began the man like the school principal, and even in those first words his tone of voice was so tedious, so typical of a speech, that Markus wondered whether to make use of the last of the restlessness to try escaping into the conservatory, but too late, he had no option but to wait until it was over. He was now standing by the window, in front of Wilhelm’s desk—itself fit for a museum, along with all the old-fashioned utensils lying on it: letter openers (several), wooden pencils (red), a large magnifying glass—and remembered, while the school principal droned on about Wilhelm’s career, that on the occasion when Wilhelm had spoken to his class he, too, had talked about the “Kapp Putsch,” and how he had been wounded at the time. The word Kapp made Markus think of the motorbike photo and the leather cap that might be part of a uniform, and he imagined his great-grandfather riding his motorbike full tilt at the enemy in that cap with his revolver ready to fire, and then—bang!—falling off the bike. But it can’t really have been like that, thought Markus, maybe it was just that one of the leaders of the putsch was called Kapp? Maybe he was the man in the sidecar? Were they just off to the putsch? Or did the photo date from the Nazi period, when Wilhelm, as the school principal was now telling everyone, had been active illegally, and Wilhelm had disguised himself as an SA man? Later, said the school principal, Wilhelm had to flee from Germany—only the school principal didn’t say just how he had fled, and Markus wondered yet again, hadn’t there been a border in Germany then? And wasn’t it guarded? And where had Great-Grandmother Charlotte been all that time?

“…in awarding you, dear Comrade Powileit, the Order of Merit of the Fatherland in gold,” Markus heard the school principal saying. It sounded pompous, Order of Merit of the Fatherland, a bit like the Kaiser and the war, and in gold at that, now everyone was applauding, the school principal went over to Wilhelm holding the Order of Merit of the Fatherland, but Wilhelm didn’t stand up, he only raised his hand and said:

“I have enough tin in my box already.”

Everyone laughed except for Great-Grandmother, who shook her head, then the school principal pinned the order on Wilhelm, and everyone clapped again and stood up, and suddenly they didn’t know how they were ever going to stop clapping, and they were still clapping when Great-Grandmother finally interrupted by calling in a shrill voice:

“The buffet is open!”

The buffet was set out in the next room. Markus quickly grabbed himself a sausage and marched off in the direction of the conservatory. He already had its characteristic smell in his nostrils, his fingertips could already feel the roughness of the catshark’s skin which, like the skin of all sharks, consisted of tiny little teeth that were always regenerating themselves, he had even, with forethought, begun working it out that he must hold the sausage in one hand, his right hand, so as to keep his left hand clean for touching the catshark—when he realized that the conservatory was locked. Stuck on the sliding door, like a seal on the join between its two halves, was a note saying No entry! Markus peered through the glass in the door. It was all as he remembered it, he could see the cobra skin and the snout of the sawfish, the catshark between the leaves of the rubber plant, only the little indoor fountain wasn’t running, and if you leaned right over you could see that the wooden flooring by the door leading out to the terrace was swollen and damaged by water, there were even some floorboards missing. What a pity, thought Markus, not about the floor but about the lovely things that suddenly seemed to him neglected and abandoned—and he wondered, now that the idea had entered his mind, whether he might not also inherit the cobra skin and the snout of the sawfish and the catshark, but probably, when Great- Grandmother died, they would be inherited first by Grandpa Kurt, and when Grandpa Kurt died by his father, a long sequence, too long, and his only hope was probably to be given one or another of these treasures in advance. Maybe he could negotiate with his father? Where was his father anyway? Markus looked around, but of course his father wasn’t there. He was never there when you needed him: now, for instance, to ask his loopy great- grandmother if he could go into the conservatory. Enough to make you puke, having a father who was never there. Other fathers stayed around, only he, Markus Umnitzer, had a shitty father like that who was never around. Asshole.

He went back to the cold buffet and grabbed another sausage. Muddel was in the other room sitting next to Grandpa Kurt, and as she didn’t necessarily like to see him eating sausages he hung around for a while in the buffet room, looked in a bored way at the American Indian art that his great-grandmother was always praising to the skies and that stood and hung around everywhere, and when the doorbell rang again he unobtrusively looked to see if his father had finally arrived. And when he had finished his sausage, and the asshole still hadn’t arrived, he decided to ask his great-grandmother himself whether she would make an exception for him and let him into the conservatory to look around—but when he had wiped his fingers on his pants, and was looking for his great- grandmother, silence suddenly fell in the next room, and a moment later a voice was raised, a soft, high singing