In Times of Fading Light

All of a sudden she felt very weak.

She closed her eyes. The water in the kettle began to whisper, to bubble softly… any moment there would be a faint hiss, she knew just how the sequence of sounds went. Hundreds, thousands of times she had sat beside the whistling kettle, listening to the whisper of the water, and her mother had hit her on the back of her head with the bread board if so much as the beginning of a whistle was heard: they had to save on gas so that her brother could study. That was why she had watched the whistling kettle, and the funny thing was that she was eighty-six now, her brother had died long ago, and she still sat here watching a whistling kettle… Why, she thought, while the hissing gradually rose to a regular, louder bubbling sound, why was she the one who always watched the whistling kettle… while other people could study… while other people got Orders of Merit of the Fatherland…

The bubbling stopped, passing into a low simmer, Charlotte stood up and turned off the gas just at the moment when the whistling kettle was about to whistle. Mechanically, she made Wilhelm’s evening tea, took the valerian drops out of the cupboard of cleaning materials under the sink. Put a dessertspoon of valerian into the tea. Put the valerian drops in her pants pocket… and stopped dead. Suddenly she had two little bottles in her hand: both the same size, you could hardly tell them apart…

An outrageous idea. Charlotte took the valerian drops out of her trouser pocket, put them back in the cupboard, and set to work again.

Lisbeth was still under the table.

“You’re still under the table,” Charlotte pointed out.

Lisbeth’s behind, at a snail’s pace, moved slowly out from that position. She was dragging a bucket full of broken china after her, as well as various containers in which she had collected remains of food that could still be eaten.

“Did you bring a few more plastic containers?” she asked. She was holding a little sausage in her hand.

“Never mind plastic containers,” said Charlotte. “That’s going in the garbage.”

“It’s not going on the garbage,” said Lisbeth, biting into the sausage.

Charlotte looked at Lisbeth’s munching face. Lisbeth’s lower jaw moved partly sideways, grinding like the jaw of a ruminant… for a while Charlotte watched the way Lisbeth’s lower jaw moved. Then she snatched the sausage from her hand and threw it on the heap of ruins representing all that was left of the cold buffet. She took two of the containers in which Lisbeth had been collecting remains of food and threw them after it.

“What are you doing?” cried Lisbeth, holding her hands protectively over the remaining containers.

Charlotte picked up the bucket of broken china and tipped it out as well.

“What are you doing?” This time it was Wilhelm’s voice.

“You keep out of this,” said Charlotte. “You’ve done enough damage today.”

“What do you mean, me?” said Wilhelm. “It was Zenk.”

“Oh, so it was Zenk, was it?” Charlotte laughed furiously. “So now it was Zenk! I told you to keep your hands off the extending table!”

“Oh, yes, so you did,” said Wilhelm. “Alexander was going to do it. So where is your precious Alexander?”

“Alexander is sick.”

“Stuff and nonsense,” said Wilhelm. “Politically unreliable.”

“Don’t talk such garbage,” said Charlotte.

“Politically unreliable,” repeated Wilhelm. “The whole family! Upstarts! Defeatists!”

“That’s enough,” said Charlotte. But there was no stopping Wilhelm now.

“There!” He laughed, pointing at the label stuck to her cardigan. “There we have it!” he crowed. “Look at you, going about advertising the traitor!” And suddenly he barked. Put his head back and barked at the ceiling. “Chev,” barked Wilhelm, “chev-chev,” and at the moment when Charlotte decided that she really did think he was deranged, he looked at her with a perfectly lucid gaze and said:

“They knew best why.”

“Knew best why what?” asked Charlotte.

“Why they locked up people like that,” said Wilhelm, and after a pause he added, “people like your sons.”

Charlotte took a deep breath, and suddenly couldn’t let it out… looked at Wilhelm. His skull was shiny, his eyes flashed in his face, browned by the sunlamp. The mustache—had it always been so small?—was hopping about on Wilhelm’s upper lip, a tiny mustache not much bigger than an insect. It hopped, circled, hummed before her eyes… Then Wilhelm had disappeared. Only his words were left hanging in the air, or to be precise his last words.

Or to be even more precise, the last word.

“So what do I do now?” Lisbeth’s voice. “Do I clear all that stuff up again?”

“Now you go home,” said Charlotte.

Lisbeth didn’t seem to understand. Charlotte tried raising her voice: “I said, now you go home.”

“But Lotti, what’s the idea? I mean, I can’t—”

“You’re fired,” said Charlotte. “You will leave this house in three minutes’ time.”

“But Lotti…”

“And none of that Lotti stuff,” said Charlotte. “Or I’m calling the police.” She went into the hall, sat down on the chair where she usually changed her shoes, and waited until Lisbeth had gone.

Then she waited until her hands had stopped shaking.

Then she went into the kitchen and closed the door. Turned the key in the lock, listened intently.

Her breathing was even.

She poured Wilhelm’s evening tea into his evening teacup. Took the drops out of her pants pocket. Added two dessertspoons to the tea. Climbed eighteen steps to the corridor on the upper floor, and put the teacup on Wilhelm’s bedside table.

Then she went into the bathroom and brushed her teeth.

She climbed another twenty-six steps to the tower room. She undressed, folded her clothes one by one, and put them on the chair. Removed the sticky label from her cardigan, tore it up and threw it in the wastebasket.

She tucked her socks into her shoes.

She slipped into her white cotton nightdress and lay down in bed. For a while she read some of Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist. Of course she knew the book already, had read it forty years ago, but these days Charlotte preferred books that she knew and had liked before, and best of all those that she knew and liked but had forgotten again, so that she could enjoy them without any diminished suspense.

When Oliver Twist was lying injured and unconscious in the ditch, she closed the book, keeping the rest of the story for tomorrow morning.

She switched off the light. The sky tonight was clear, with a narrow crescent moon. Once again she thought of Lisbeth’s munching face. She thought of the maid she had had in Mexico, a delicately built, quiet creature, who had always—of course—addressed Charlotte as Senora. Unfortunately she couldn’t remember her name right away, but then she did: Gloria! What had become of her? Gloria. Charlotte wondered whether she was still alive.

She lay with her eyes open for a while, thinking of Gloria. And the roof garden. And the Mexican crescent moon, which always lay on its side… more of a ship, she thought, than a crescent. Then Adrian was there.

Of course she knew it was a dream. All the same, she tried talking to him. Tried winning him over to her way of thinking, although at the same time she realized that all that, too, was part of the dream—the dream she had been dreaming ever since the voyage back to Europe. Adrian looked at her. Light fell on his face like the reflections of moving liquid. He was a pleasant sight, if a little ghostly. All the same, she followed him. They climbed down into the engine room. They passed through a labyrinth of corridors and stairways. It took forever, and the longer it took the eerier it felt. She was running after him, but although he strode on at a leisurely pace, she had difficulty keeping up. Adrian was far ahead of her now. She saw him turn off down a corridor. He always turned off down a corridor. And she always followed him, although the door at the end of the corridor was walled up.