under his arm, will suggest a game, and Alexander will agree, although afternoon drowsiness is already beginning to weigh his eyelids down.
As usual when they play chess and do not want to be disturbed, they will sit on the bench behind the Frida Kahlo guestrooms, where at other times Alexander reads the newspaper dated 12 September, turning sideways to each other and with the chess board between them at a slight incline, like the seat of the bench.
Alexander’s opening gambit will be f2–f3, an aggressive and rather reckless variant that he often played against Kurt—with success, at first. The biker, impassive, will counter it with d7–d5, and Alexander, for one reason to avoid exposing his queen on h4 later, will move his knight, carved from Siberian cedar by a camp inmate over half a century ago and missing its nose ever since Alexander can remember, to f3.
The chickens kept by the Mexican staff will peck about in the unproductive sand beyond the wire netting fence.
Alexander’s thoughts, as he automatically moves 2…. c5, 3. e3 e6, 4. b3 K6, 5. Bb2 Kf6 and 6. Bd3 will go back again to that distant winter’s day: to the icy sidewalks on Schonhauser Allee, to the curious, aimless walk they took, to the quarrel about Africa… but suddenly the film will go on: Alexanderplatz, a cold wind. The old self- service restaurant, no longer extant, to the left by the clock showing world time—is that possible?
The biker, whose name is Xaver, will bend low over the board when they have both made their castling moves, so that his head covers half the playing surface, and so as not to have to look at his reddened skin, which appears where the light falls on it, Alexander will turn his eyes on the distance, and while the biker begins thoughtfully nodding his head over the present positions will suddenly remember more details: the laminate- topped tables, modern at the time but already shabby, where you stood to eat; the metal counters; the smell of —was it goulash? He will see Kurt in his lambskin coat and fur cap standing at one of those tables, spooning in his goulash; he will see himself from the outside: head shaven, in his shabby parka, and—incredible, he still remembers this!—the blue pullover, darned several times in a color that didn’t quite match it, that he thought it necessary to wear at the time because he felt an inexplicable need to appear repellent.
The biker will move his queen to b6, and at the moment when the biker has made his move, Alexander will realize that he isn’t concentrating hard enough to counter this blatantly awkward attack, hardly to be taken seriously, on the easily exposed position of his king that he allowed by opening with f2–f4.
After the game of chess, which he will have given up after the seventeenth move, he will lie in the hammock outside the door of his room. He will push himself off from the terrace parapet with his fingertips, will feel his sinews and muscles, weary from his run, and while the force of gravity takes him in its arms, all kinds of thoughts will be racing around in his head, out of control; he will think of Columbus, who brought the hammock to Europe, and for a moment it will appear to Alexander, briefly, as a great discovery that when, at the sight of the Indian hanging bed, Columbus saw it as nothing but an efficient way of stacking up sailors on board ship, that might be one of the greatest of all misunderstandings between the two cultures; he will also wonder whether he ought to have moved his bishop to d5 at once; yet again he will think of the ugly pullover, darned several times in a color that didn’t quite match, and he will wonder why it is so good, even comforting, to remember it.
Then the palm fronds will have stopped rustling. The shouting and laughter from the village and the clattering in the guesthouse kitchen will have died down. Car engines will be silent, and so will the voices coming from the radio that otherwise waft up here at all times of day from the loudspeakers in the branch of a bank that has just been opened here.
Only the creaking of the hemp ropes will still be audible. And the indifferent, distant roar of the sea.
About the Author
Eugen Ruge was born in the Urals, studied mathematics in Berlin, and became a member of the research staff at the Central Institute for Geophysics in Potsdam. Before leaving the GDR for the West in 1988 he was a writer, contributing to documentaries made at the state-owned DEFA Studios. Since 1989 he has been writing and translating for theaters and broadcasters, and he teaches periodically at the Berlin University of the Arts. He was honored with the Alfred Doblin Prize in 2009 for his then still unpublished first work of prose,
Anthea Bell is a freelance translator from German and French. Her translations include works of fiction and general nonfiction, books for young people, and classics by E. T. A. Hoffmann, Freud, Kafka, and Stefan Zweig. She has won a number of translation awards in the United Kingdom and the United States.
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