In Times of Fading Light

from foot to foot. The music to which they are dancing comes from a loudspeaker box like those that the subway CD sellers sling around their necks, they have just bought their feather ornaments in the souvenir shop, and instead of knives they are holding little black obsidian tortoises.

He lies sick in bed for two days. Once he gets up and makes his difficult way, bent double by the fever, to a supermarket to buy drinking water. On the third day he packs his things, orders a taxi at reception, and, without asking for the return any of his advance payment for the room, has himself driven to the bus station and says he wants a ticket to the Pacific. The man in the ticket office puts an A5-sized map in front of him, at random Alexander taps a place on the other ocean, lying on the opposite side of Mexico, the still, the peaceful.

“Pochutla,” says the man.

“Pochutla,” repeats Alexander—a place-name that he is sure he has never heard in his life before.

The bus leaves at seven in the evening. It is a deluxe bus, there are seats that will tilt right back to a lying position—and it is quiet. The sound of the video system comes only over headphones, as in an aircraft. Alexander manages to sleep for a few hours.

In the morning the sky is blue again—insanely blue. Colors in general seem to him more intense here than on the east coast. The hovels at the roadside shine red and green in the morning sun, hand-painted advertising signs greet him as he passes by, and it does not seem to him at all strange to see a man sweeping sand away from in front of his tiny restaurant. Something or other—the air, the sky, the frail architecture of corrugated iron and piles—speaks of the proximity of the Pacific.

Then he is in Pochutla. The regular bus to which he has changed drops him off at a garage converted into a cafe. His knees are still a little weak as he gets out. He feels light. He feels as if he has shed his skin. When the morning air touches him it is like a revelation. His skin tingles in the sun. He asks the owner of the garage-cafe, who is just scrubbing the sidewalk outside her place, which way to go for the sea—and learns that the sea is still fifteen kilometers away. You can only get there by taxi, he learns, but a friend of the owner of the garage-cafe, he also learns, is a taxi driver, and the owner of the garage-cafe will tell her friend. Wouldn’t Alexander like some breakfast meanwhile?

Alexander says he would, and the woman—who in spite of the Indian in her genetic makeup somehow looks like the Prenzlauer Berg mothers before the fall of the Wall who used to set out early on their bicycles with two children, making their way through the rush hour traffic—the woman hurries over to the baker opposite to get him a few freshly baked rolls.

Good decision. He drinks coffee. He eats a delicious roll and jam. He sees the cracks in the curb opposite, sees the glittering of the sidewalk just scoured by the owner of the garage-cafe. He sees a man waving and running after a taxi. He sees another man who looks like a blue elephant. He sees the man’s female companion, a white elephant. A child comes into the picture and stops, and smiles.

The drive will cost fifty pesos; they agree on the price in advance. The road winds gradually downhill through a landscape so expressionless that it can only be the outskirts of whatever comes next.

The place is called Puerto Angel, if he understood correctly. There is no sign with its name when they get there. To the left, already in sight, is the beach. To the right, in front of a slope, a few modest houses standing wall to wall and with the usual tangle of cables. A vegetable shop. A ferreteria. A bank branch obviously being renovated.

Without being asked, the driver recommends a hotel to Alexander, or more precisely a casa de huespedes, a guesthouse, indeed he recommends it as pressingly as if he would get a commission. It is called Eva & Tom. Alexander fears that there may be Germans behind those names, but the taxi driver vigorously denies that, so Alexander, with knees still a little weak, climbs the steep path that ends after a while in a flight of steps leading up to Eva & Tom.

In a kind of reception area under palm fronds he is met, after someone has called her, by a corpulent woman, no longer young, who might in fact be taken for an American Indian because of her copper-colored skin and long gray hair, severely plaited into a braid. She wears flip-flops and a washed-out dress, leafs unobtrusively through a large appointments book, and then without transition addresses Alexander in German, although with a heavy south German or possibly Austrian accent. Then she takes him up the flight of steps made of coarse planks that links the various levels of the guesthouse.

The highest level is right on top of the hill. Hibiscus flowers and palms. From the terrace, you look down into a bay surrounded by mighty rocks, the color of its water as insanely blue as the blue of the sky above.

The guestrooms themselves are in a single-story, walled part of the complex, painted in a determined if slipshod manner with typical Frida Kahlo colors (red, blue, green), and even before the Austrian-speaking woman shows him the small room (no window, the light comes in from above, and in one place the roof tiles visibly resting on the rafters have been replaced by a piece of corrugated plastic), even before his glance moves over the sparse furnishings, consisting of only a bed, a mosquito net, a table, and a chest, even before he asks the price (fifty pesos, five dollars a night), he has fallen in love with the idea of lying in the hammock fixed just outside the door of his room on hot afternoons, in the shade of the palm-thatched roof, looking out over the insane blue of the Pacific.

“And mind you shake the blankets out,” says the Austrian. “We get scorpions around here.”

1 October 1989

It was really only a stone’s throw away—but Nadyeshda Ivanovna, walking beside him, moved so slowly on her poor old feet that it seemed as if they had to cover an impossible distance to reach his mother’s house. Kurt felt as if he were running on the spot. His urge for movement grew with every step. The beautiful weather seemed to him intolerable. The tugging sensation in his stomach grew stronger. He was sorry, now, that he hadn’t simply closed the door behind him that morning and gone out into the Wildpark to walk among the trees for an hour or so at a steady pace.

It was useless to argue with Irina. These days she stayed upstairs in her room, listening to Vysotzky. The whole house echoed with his songs. Kurt thought he could still hear that penetrating roar through doors and windows. As if someone were roaring for all he was worth. Unhappy music, thought Kurt. Music—if you were going to call it music at all—that helped Irina to work herself ever further into her unhappiness, that was what Kurt didn’t like about it: the urge to work herself into a state of unhappiness that brought her into contact with her Roooshian soul, after years and years when she hadn’t even wanted to think about her Russian roots.

In addition there was the alcohol, and a Roooshian soul seemed to be particularly drawn to that substance anyway. It was a fact that, unlike him, Irina had always drunk a good deal anyway, but until now it had always been a kind of “social drinking.” For her to retreat into her room and get drunk all by herself, listening to Vysotzky, was a fairly new development. You couldn’t say she was an alcoholic: sometimes she didn’t drink at all for days or even weeks. Yet Kurt worried when he thought of the uncontrollable chain reaction that just one cognac could set off in her.

Kurt had not been able to refuse her just one cognac—not after the news of Sasha’s flight to the West. But no sooner had she drunk just one cognac than she was vehemently demanding a second (and last) cognac. After that she had begun pulling Catrin’s character to pieces in language that was almost obscene, suspecting her (perhaps not entirely without foundation) of having persuaded Sasha to flee. She poured her own third cognac, and it almost looked as if they might come to blows when Kurt tried to take the bottle away from her. Now all she needed was for Kurt, hoping to mitigate her despair, to remind her cautiously that she too, now she was over sixty and thus of pensionable age, had a right to visit her son in the West—and her anger was turned on him, Kurt, for expecting her to set foot over that woman’s threshold, and finally, after her fourth cognac, even on Sasha, with whom she was never usually ready to find fault: My son has let me down was the way she finally expressed her disappointment, and although Kurt felt just a little satisfaction to think that Sasha was getting it in the neck as well, he bravely objected and tried to defend at least one simple fact from Irina’s devastating and, even considering her