In Times of Fading Light

check that the aminophylline drops were where they ought to be: they were. Charlotte clenched her fist firmly around the little bottle. Sometimes it helped just to clench her fist around the bottle and count up to ten.

She counted up to ten. Then she went around the kitchen table, which was piled high with unwashed coffee cups and saucers, and sank down on the stool. Tomorrow, she decided, she would call Dr. Suss and make an appointment. Tangible evidence!

Not that she hadn’t already given him any amount of tangible evidence! Weren’t the locksmith’s bills—was it ten or was it twelve of them?—tangible evidence? They arrived because Wilhelm kept having safety locks installed and then lost the keys, or rather he hid them and couldn’t find them again… didn’t that mean anything? Or the ND, in which he had recently taken to crossing out every report in red pencil so that he wouldn’t forget what he had read already. Or the letters he sent to all manner of institutions… well, to be honest, she didn’t have the letters themselves. But she had the answers: an answer from GDR Television when Wilhelm complained of a program it had transmitted. Only it turned out to have been a program from the West. And what did Wilhelm do next? Wilhelm wrote to State Security. In his red scrawl that no one could read anyway. Wrote to State Security because he suspected that the Sony color sets, a few thousand of which the GDR had imported, contained an enemy mechanism that kept secretly retuning them to the West…

And what did Suss say?

“Comrade Powileit, we can’t consign him to the madhouse for something like that!”

Madhouse! Who said anything about a madhouse? But surely somewhere could be found for Wilhelm in a proper care facility. After all, Wilhelm had been a Party member for seventy years! Was decorated with the Order of Merit of the Fatherland in gold! What more did anyone want?

Suss was useless. And to think he called himself a district medical officer. A blind man could see what kind of state Wilhelm was in. They’d all seen him again today: I have enough tin in my box! How would you describe that? He’s being decorated with the Fatherland Order of Merit in gold—she didn’t even have it in silver!—and he says: I have enough tin in my box! A good thing the district secretary wasn’t there. What a disgrace. And then striking up a song. She’d expressly told Lisbeth not to let Wilhelm have any more alcohol. He was hard enough to bear when he was sober. And the way he spoke to people! Take those vegetables to the graveyard. What did he mean, anyway, take those vegetables to the graveyard?

Charlotte had not switched on the light in the kitchen, but the bluish beam of the streetlamp outside filled the room, and through the door to the servants’ corridor, which was ajar, she could see the one at the other end of it leading directly to his room, the door that Wilhelm had walled up thirty-five years ago. Only now, while she thought about what Wilhelm meant by graveyard, did she realize that she had been staring at that walled-up doorway all this time. The sight of the walled-up doorway annoyed her. She stood up and closed the door to the former servants’ corridor. Dropped on the stool again.

Once Wilhelm is out of the house, she thought, I’ll have that door opened up again. Always having to go the long way around, by way of the hall, it was idiotic. All that chasing about, as if she didn’t have enough to do. Every time she wanted something from the kitchen she chased around the place. If she was looking for Lisbeth, she had to chase all over the place. Think of all the chasing around she’d had to do only today! Tangible evidence! And another piece of tangible evidence was the way Wilhelm was gradually ruining the house, bit by bit. Tangible evidence wherever you looked!

Maybe, thought Charlotte, I ought to have it all photographed. Unfortunately she had no camera. Kurt owned one, but of course Kurt wouldn’t do it. Did Weihe have a camera? With a flash? That was important! The ceiling light in the hall didn’t work. Furthermore, Wilhelm had blacked out the windows in the upstairs corridor so that the neighbors couldn’t spy on him when he was going to bed. Now the only electric light on in the hall, day and night, came from the shell that they had once brought back from Pachutla. And in a way it was a good thing that the only light came from the shell, so at least you didn’t see what Wilhelm had done here: oh, the paint on the floor! Wasn’t that “tangible evidence”? The cloakroom alcove, the stairs, and the banisters… and now he was painting all the doors upstairs! Wilhelm was painting everything made of wood with red-brown floor paint, and if you asked him why he was painting it all with red-brown floor paint, he said: because red-brown floor paint lasts longest!

What had come over the district medical officer? Or was his title area medical officer?

Then there was the bathroom. That ought to be photographed as well. Everything broken. He had hammered it all to pieces with the electric hammer. Mosaic tiles, you’d never find replacements. And why? Because he’d had to build in a floor drainage system. Floor drainage! It was since then that the light in the hall didn’t work. Yes, and that was dangerous, too! Electricity and water didn’t mix! Tangible evidence…

Wilhelm did nothing all day but produce tangible evidence. Come to that, he did nothing else at all. Made a mess of meddling with things he didn’t understand. Repaired household items that were broken by the time he’d finished with them. And if she didn’t give him something to calm him down now and then, for instance, a couple of spoonfuls of valerian drops in his tea, who knew whether this house wouldn’t have burned down or collapsed long ago, or she might already be dead of gas poisoning?

Then there was what he did to the terrace. That was worst of all. Why hadn’t she done something? Called the police? Only to a depth of two centimeters, he said… God knows why. Because he didn’t like the moss growing between the natural stone slabs! So he laid concrete over the terrace! That’s to say, Schlinger and Mahlich laid the concrete. Wilhelm was in command. Stretched cords of some kind, fiddled around with a folding rule. And what was the result? Now the rainwater ran into her conservatory. The flooring had come away. The door to the terrace had swelled, the glass in it was broken…

And what did Suss say?

“Regrettable,” said Suss.

Regrettable! It was everything to her! Her study and bedroom! Her retreat! Her little bit of Mexico, preserved over all these years—destroyed. Now, several times a day, she climbed the forty-four stairs to the tower room, where wind blew through the cracks, where she had to sit at the desk wrapped in blankets. Where it smelled of dust and the roof rafters on hot days—a smell that, humiliatingly, reminded her of the smell in the room where her mother used to shut her up as a punishment.

The mere thought of it made her breath come in fits and starts. She wondered whether to take another ten drops of aminophylline. However, she had taken aminophylline twice already today, and since Dr. Suss had told her that an overdose could lead to paralysis of the muscles of her respiratory passages she was always afraid her breath might just stop; suddenly, in the night, she might give up breathing. She might give up living without noticing it herself… no, she wasn’t about to do Wilhelm that favor. She was still alive, and alive she was determined to stay. She still had things to do—once Wilhelm was out of the house. All the things that Wilhelm kept her from doing: living, working, traveling! One more journey to Mexico… to see the Queen of the Night in flower, just once…

Now she thought there was something scratching at the door. Or was it the rattling of her breath? Charlotte didn’t move from the spot. She looked to see whether the handle of the kitchen door was moving, but instead… she shuddered: slowly, very slowly the door into the servants’ corridor that she had just closed was opened, and something appeared, faintly illuminated by the light on the cellar stairs… something terrible… bent crooked… with hair standing out in all directions…

“Nadyeshda Ivanovna,” cried Charlotte. “Goodness, what a fright you gave me!”

It turned out that Nadyeshda Ivanovna was looking for her coat, had lost her way, and found herself in the cellar. In fact, Charlotte had given instructions for the coats to be taken down to the cellar, because the cloakroom alcove was full of flower vases. However, Lisbeth had brought the coats up again when the guests were leaving. Only Nadyeshda Ivanovna didn’t get her coat back, so she supposed it must still be in the cellar, but it wasn’t in the cellar, or so said Nadyeshda Ivanovna, anyway, and all this was beginning to get on Charlotte’s nerves. She really had more important things to do than bother about Nadyeshda Ivanovna’s coat!

But then the coat was suddenly back hanging in the cloakroom. For a moment Charlotte wondered whether to call Lisbeth to account: How did this get into the cloakroom? Instead, she took the coat off the hook and held it out to Nadyeshda Ivanovna.

“Where’s Kurt?” she asked, as it suddenly occurred to her. “Why didn’t he take you home with him?”

“Ne snayu,” said Nadyeshda Ivanovna. Don’t know.

Then she got her arms into the sleeves of her coat, first one, then the other, adjusted her scarf, and while Charlotte was shifting impatiently from foot to foot buttoned up her coat, button by button, checked twice to see