In Times of Fading Light

Suddenly they were all looking at him: Anita with her sharp nose; Mahlich was beginning to nod before Kurt had so much as taken a deep breath; the tubby barrels with their heads bent at exactly the same angle… only Till, unmoved by any of this, was persistently trying to stuff a piece of cake into his half-paralyzed face.

“Prost,” said Kurt.

“Yes, prost,” said Bunke.

Kurt tipped back the contents of his goblet. The spirit burned his throat, slowly running down his gullet. Gradually burned its way through until it reached the spot where a pulling sensation had set in several hours ago. Not his stomach; something lower down… what kind of organ in the body reacted when your son fled from the Republic?

A Party organ, thought Kurt, but he was not in a mood to find that funny, and so as not to be drawn any further into the Gorbachev discussion he turned all his attention to his cake. Useless, he thought, to try conveying his opinion of Gorbachev to these people: that he thought Gorbachev didn’t go far enough… was haphazard, illogical… that his book about perestroika had no trace of any grounding in theory…

He was still eating his cake when someone whom he couldn’t place at first entered the room: a woman who was much too young and indeed much too attractive for this company. He didn’t recognize her until he saw the lanky twelve-year-old whom she was propelling in Wilhelm’s direction. She’d really been putting on the glitz, who’d have thought it? High heels, even. What did that mean?

Kurt watched the two of them station themselves in front of Wilhelm’s armchair, saw Melitta lean down to Wilhelm in her amazingly short skirt, Markus handed Wilhelm a picture, and Kurt remembered that Markus had once given him a picture for his own birthday. An animal of some kind, damn it, he ought to hang it on the wall sometime, thought Kurt, watching Markus going the rounds of the room, delicate and pale and slightly awkward, just like Sasha at his age, he thought, and suddenly he felt an urge to give Markus a hug. Merely shaking hands with him, like everyone else, didn’t seem enough. And all of a sudden he even had an urge to give Melitta a hug, although of course he didn’t, but after greeting her he moved pointedly slightly aside so that a chair could be fitted in for her next to him.

She was wearing patterned stockings. Unfortunately Kurt was sitting in a chair that was slightly lower than hers, so that as he was wondering what friendly remark he could make to her, his mind was taken off it by the sight of those patterned stockings. Any compliment that entered his head suddenly sounded as if he were trying to revise a previous prejudice, and it took him some time to get one out.

“You’re looking good.”

“So are you,” said Melitta, looking at him with big green eyes.

“Oh, well,” said Kurt, playing it down—although, to be honest, he wasn’t entirely averse to believing her.

“Where’s Irina?” asked Melitta.

“Irina isn’t feeling well,” said Kurt, expecting Melitta to ask after Sasha next.

She didn’t, but maybe only because Charlotte came into the room at this moment, clapping her hands energetically like a kindergarten teacher, trying to get her guests, whose voices were growing louder and louder, to calm down. Juhn’s deputy was here. Time for the presentation of the order!

Kurt put his cake fork down again and leaned back. The speaker began reading out the speech of commendation in a dry voice, adopting a monotonous tone remarkable even for a functionairry. With a few almost imperceptible deviations, it was of course the same speech of commendation that was always read when Wilhelm was presented with an order (which recently had been almost every year, obviously because he always gave the impression that this birthday might be his last—even in that he had developed a certain skill). The story of Wilhelm’s life as a socialist warrior, from which everything that might have been in the least interesting had disappeared over the years, was a fine specimen of unparalleled tedium. At least it had the advantage, now that Melitta had turned to the speaker, of allowing Kurt to look without any inhibitions at her patterned stockings. Or to be more precise, they were patterned pantyhose, and to narrow it down even further, he could look at the place just under the hem of her dress, he didn’t know the proper term for it, where the pattern met the smooth part of the pantyhose, and the fact that Melitta readjusted her skirt only made it more interesting, because the skirt immediately began slipping out of place again, while her thighs moved against each other with a barely audible rustling sound.

Kurt felt something move in his lower body, and he wondered whether he ought to feel bad about it, in view of the fact that this was his former daughter-in-law… no, you couldn’t call her a really beautiful woman, thought Kurt, as the speaker was telling them how Wilhelm had found his way to the party of the working class, but when he looked at her, to be honest, that was just what he liked. Looks that are less than beautiful, thought Kurt, also had their charm in a woman. Difficult to explain. Maybe you had to reach a certain age to understand it.

His gaze wandered over the excitingly coarse texture of her skirt, over the blouse that was almost see- through, moved over her muscular forearms, and while the speaker called to mind, as always, the injury that Wilhelm had suffered in the Kapp Putsch, lingered on the delicate structure of black straps crisscrossing Melitta’s broad back, checked the effect of her lipstick on her face, registered the carefully plucked eyebrows (and the slight pinkness left by the plucking), and—it made him sad. Suddenly the sight of the young woman moved him, suddenly he saw her as a woman spurned, the symbol of all that Sasha had rejected, abandoned, destroyed in his life, and from which now—typically!—he was simply walking away. Yet at the same time—and Kurt was surprised to find both reactions coexisting simultaneously in a single body—at the same time the sight of her also excited him, and it seemed to him that the very fact of her rejection and abandonment was what excited him, the spurned wish of this less than beautiful young woman to desire and be desired, which showed all the more plainly for being spurned— that in itself was what excited Kurt and even, because he perceived the risk this woman was taking by getting herself up like that, made him scent a point of departure for a little Theory of the Eroticism of the Less Than Beautiful, although he postponed working it out any further for now.

For a while it all balanced out: sadness and attraction, the tugging sensation within him and the excitement lower down, the Party Organ and the Opposition, thought Kurt, but when, in a long, clunky sentence (really imparting only the information that Wilhelm had been second in command of the Berlin Red Front Fighters’ League), the speaker ran through the 1920s, with logical consistency leaving out the league’s crushing defeat in the year 1933, the Opposition in Kurt’s pants gradually gained the ascendancy, and while the assembled company sat in rigid solemnity, while the two tubby barrels tilted their heads reverently to one side, while Till slept (unless he was rehearsing for his death mask), while Harry Zenk tried to yawn without opening his mouth, in his thoughts Kurt was down in Wilhelm’s Party cellar and had been there for some time. Anti-Fascist resistance, said the speaker, while Kurt engaged in some hasty activity in which the long table for meetings played a certain part; the images were blurred, he saw nothing really distinctly but the pattern of the pantyhose, or more precisely the smooth part above the pattern, he didn’t know its name. Illegality, said the speaker, and when, a little later, Kurt’s mind was back with the company sitting there stiff as a set of posts, the Opposition in his pants was so heroically, as the speaker was just saying, so heroically reinforced that he began to feel the folds of his underwear were too tight and pinching him.

The speaker ended his address with more paeans of praise to a man who had so tirelessly backed the cause. Kurt was trying in vain to adjust his pants under the table. Only when the applause broke out did his prick begin to shrink, at the moment when that bunch of stiff posts came to life again and began applauding the deputy’s address with disproportionate enthusiasm. Probably, thought Kurt, of necessity clapping with the best, none of those putting their hands together were sure what exactly they were applauding. Nothing in the address really corresponded to the facts, thought Kurt, still clapping; Wilhelm had not been a “founding member” of the Party (he was originally a member of the Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany, and didn’t join the Communist Party of Germany until the two united), nor was it true that he had been wounded during the Kapp Putsch (he had indeed been wounded, but not in 1920 during the putsch, in 1921 during the so-called March Action, a catastrophic failure, but of course that didn’t suit the biography of a class warrior so well). Worse than these little half-truths, however, was the large amount left out, worse was the egregious silence about what Wilhelm was doing in the twenties. At the time—as Kurt still remembered very well—Wilhelm had been a staunch champion of the United Front policy prescribed by the Soviet Union, which denigrated the Social Democrat leaders as “social fascists” and even presented them—by comparison with the Nazis—as the greater of two evils. In fact, thought Kurt,