In Times of Fading Light

He tipped it down his throat and put the goblet on the nearest shelf. Then his feet began to move, took him out of the room, he crossed the front hall, passed the little room by the door and stepped out into the fresh air.

He walked a little too fast, as if someone might summon him back at the last minute. When he felt that he was reasonably well out of earshot a sense of unholy joy went to his head. Kurt told himself to exercise restraint. Kept the joy inside him. Let it out only in dribs and drabs.

Only when he had gone three hundred meters did it occur to him that he had forgotten Nadyeshda Ivanovna. He slowed his pace, he even thought of turning back—but why should he? She’d find her way home without him… Kurt walked faster again and went on. Went along Fuchsbau. Went up to number 7, where Irina was presumably lying on her sofa, drunk…

Went past number 7.

He went to the end of the road, turned into Seeweg. Followed Seeweg, where the houses became less ornate the farther they were from the lake. Heinestrasse took him right out of the villa quarter and into the former weavers’ quarter, the oldest part of Neuendorf. Here the houses were so low-built you could reach the roof gutters with your hand. Kurt followed the zigzag of the short streets, paved with cobblestones, which in this area, where the smells of cooking and alcohol wafted out of open windows, were named for literary figures: Klopstockstrasse, Uhlandstrasse, Lessingstrasse. Goethestrasse was longer; it led past the graveyard to Karl-Liebknecht-Strasse, which in turn was longer than Goethestrasse. Kurt could have boarded a tramcar at Neuendorf town hall—he heard it taking the right-hand bend with a barbaric squeal of tires, but he walked on. He reached Friedrich- Engels-Strasse, a good deal longer again, linking Neuendorf to the city, and just as the tramcar overtook him, rattling and rumbling, he was going down the narrow bottleneck where traffic accidents were always happening, and at the end of which, above the wall of the Reich Railroads Repair Shed, armed as it was with barbed wire, a pale red banner bearing the words Socialism Will Win the Day! had been quietly rotting away for years, or was it decades?

Fallen leaves rustled under his feet as he walked down the long stretch of road past the Reich Railroads Repair Shed. He crossed the Lange Brucke, as it was called, passed the carriageway and the railroad tracks, turned off by the Interhotel, and by way of Wilhelm-Kulz-Strasse reached Leninallee, Potsdam’s longest if by no means most beautiful street. He followed it for two or three kilometers out of town, while the street seemed to get darker and darker, and turned right where there was hardly a streetlight on.

Gartenstrasse. Second house on the left. Kurt rang the bell twice, and waited until a window opened on the third floor.

“It’s me,” he said.

Then a light came on in the hall downstairs, and he heard steps on the stairway. The key crunched in the old-fashioned lock.

“Well, what a surprise,” said Vera.

An hour later Kurt was lying in Vera’s bed on his back, still in the same position in which Vera had pleasured him “orally,” as he put it, noticing the unmistakable smell of fried bacon that clung to the apartment. He felt relief but also slight disappointment, without being sure whether that was ordinary postcoital disillusion or whether he should admit that it hadn’t been quite as he had expected: Vera’s bedroom (which he had last seen three years ago) seemed to him even untidier and mustier than he remembered it. Her bedside light was bright, and had shown him an unflattering view of the little blue veins on her things—he still had no other word for them. But he had been particularly troubled by the lines of stress that formed on her forehead as she attended to him. Suddenly he had thought, and did not like the thought, that he was doing this with an old woman, and he had been able to overcome that only by taking her head in his hands and forcing—a little brutally —his rhythm and his depth on her.

When her warm face lay on his stomach later, and he felt her breath in his pubic hair, he was slightly embarrassed about that touch of brutality. He spent a long time stroking Vera’s back and wondering about her puzzling readiness, over so many years, to be available to him now and then. For some reason he seemed to have a meal ticket with Vera—an expression that reminded him of his Egg Disaster with the fried potatoes sticking to the pan before the party, and of Irina’s disinclination ever to cook him fried potatoes. Well, if his meal ticket with Vera was also a literal one, why not? He was hungry now.

“Could you cook me some fried potatoes?” he asked.

“Sure,” Vera had said, and she had gotten out of bed and gone into the kitchen.

Now there was a smell of fried potatoes: a childhood smell. Kurt closed his eyes, and within fractions of a second the smell catapulted him back to his parents’ bedroom, where (although it wasn’t allowed) he had hidden under the quilt. He almost thought he could hear his mother’s voice.

“Are you coming, Kurt?”

He opened his eyes. Spent a second thinking in amazement of the curious situations in which he found himself after nearly seventy years of life. Sat on the edge of the bed. Put on his underpants. Pulled a black and no longer very clean sock over his left foot. And suddenly knew, indeed knew at the very moment when he was looking vaguely for the other sock, the one for his right foot, that the time had come.

There was no reason to hold back now. No reason to waste his time on matters of minor importance: reviews for the Zeitschrift fur Geschichtswissenschaft, articles in Neues Deutschland when some historic jubilee or other came up… he would even back down from his work for the anthology which, as it was to contain contributions from both East and West Germany, came with the distinctly enticing prospect of a conference in Saarbrucken—he’d cite health reasons for backing out, that would be best—and sit down at his desk first thing tomorrow to begin writing his memoirs, beginning (and he knew that at once, too) with the August day in 1936 when, standing beside Werner on the deck of the ferry, he watched the Warnemunde lighthouse pale in the early morning mist.

“Are you coming?” called Vera.

“Yes,” said Kurt.

The damp air made him shiver… And he could still feel the tape keeping the Soviet entry visa, folded very small, stuck to the inside of his right thigh.

1991

If anyone had asked Irina about the source of the apricots that she needed for stuffing her Monastery Goose, she could have answered in one short sentence: the apricots came from the supermarket.

The grapes also came from the supermarket. The figs came from the supermarket. The pears, the quinces, everything came from the supermarket. In those circumstances, thought Irina, no skill at all was required to cook a Monastery Goose. You could even get sweet chestnuts in the supermarket, peeled and cooked and ready to use, and although last year she had still resisted the very idea of buying sweet chestnuts, this time she had resorted to them—why give herself unnecessary work? Yet it was a small detail that put Irina off her stroke for a split second, because normally the first thing she did was to turn the oven on for the chestnuts, and while she waited for it to heat up, she made crosswise slits in their shells… A mistake. She turned the oven off again and began preparing the fruit for the stuffing.

It was just after two. Melted snow dripped with a regular tick-tick sound on the zinc-clad window sills. The news from German Radio was coming over the radio set in the kitchen. They were talking about the imminent dissolution of the Soviet Union.

Irina peeled the quinces thinly and then cut them into cubes about a centimeter square. The quinces were hard, her fingers hurt. It was in weather like this that her joints were always most painful: her back, her hands… And who knew, thought Irina, as the talking heads on the radio went on again about the mountainous Karabakh region of Azerbaijan, where the Armenians (whom Irina regarded as a great cultural people, not only because of their excellent cognac) had killed twenty civilians last night, who knew what other damage she had suffered: think of the timber preservative she had breathed in. The dust from insulation, they said these days, was carcinogenic…