Before the Feast (27 page)

Q takes off his coat and puts it round her shoulders. Henry walks over to the grave, rhythmically opening and closing the lower jaw of the skull he holds with a clatter, Q joins him, they are actors now, and this is the last act. Not Anna but the grave is their audience.

They speak in unison, thoughtfully: “We—we are what you would be: worldly-wise, carefree are we. Power, a dig at you as we're leaving, honest avengers wanted for thieving. We are the fury of ancient songs, wild as we go about righting wrongs.” Softly at the end: “We are two who will endeavor, with our necks in the noose, to sing for ever.”

Henry puts his cigarette between the jaws of the skull. The field crackles, as if familiar with fire.

The cigarette goes out. They put the skulls carefully back in the grave. Pile the earth over them with their bare hands. Anna takes Schramm's pistol out of the pocket of her jacket, and lays it in the grave too. Helps them.

They escort Anna to the farmhouse, take off their caps, bow politely to her; their farewells do not take long, and then they are off, two dissimilar figures going cross-country through the Uckermark, one tall and slender, the other short and strong.

WE ARE EXHAUSTED. THE BIRDS HAVE NO CONSIDERATION
for us. The dawn twilight, the tiles, the stones in the fields: all clammy. Suzi takes a detour along the side of the lake. Mist hovers over the water. Frau Kranz is packing up her things. Suzi offers to help her. No. The old woman wades through the reeds. She shows Suzi the painting. Her lips are bluish. His glance wanders from left to right. He goes closer. Frau Kranz wants to know his opinion.

Suzi points. “I—artist—not.” Suzi smiles.

Frau Kranz points to herself. “Artist—not.”

Suzi, slightly embarrassed, shakes his head.

Below the ruins of what was once Schielke's farmhouse there's a fridge stuck in the muddy ground, with a can of tuna still in it. Suzi smiles. Seen from here, no Fürstenfelde exists. Of course the mist will lift, the weather will be fine for the Feast, but at the moment there is no village, there are no stories, no wonders and marvels. There's Suzi and a path along the bank of the lake, lined with blackcurrant bushes.

That Suzi—blonde as a child, black-haired as a man. Back straight, Suzi. His father drank the bitter blackcurrant juice. Back straight, Father. His father's life before the new buildings went up: herding sheep. Many incomplete sentences at breakfast. We'll leave him out of it for now. Suzi smiles.

Magdalene von Blankenburg does yoga under the linden tree on the bank in the morning. It may be too wet today.
Yoga trousers, best trousers. Suzi can make out the hunting lodge behind the bushes, the little turrets rise into the mist like something in a fairy tale, that's what things look like when a blue-blooded aristocrat says what he wants. Suzi combs a strand of hair back from his forehead.

Suzi's father took him to work with him. They drove around. Father in uniform, a tank like a diver's on his back. Little Suzi waiting for his father in strangers' living rooms. His father always taking everything people offered.

Silent Suzi climbs the fence. He puts his arm cautiously into the bushes. Waits. Spider on the back of his hand, tiny spider. Suzi's father caught flies out of the air. Suzi pees in the lake. It is getting warmer under the blanket of mist.

Any good-looking woman looks even better with a Baroque hunting lodge behind her. The sight of Magdalene: compensation for dragging things about at Eddie's. Blonde, her eyes blue-gray. Could be one of us. The lake is buzzing. Insects guessing something. Guessing storm. Yoga mat. Yoga trousers. Yoga braid. Yoga book. Not a yoga book, but Hugo von Hofmannsthal.

Magdalene does the greeting to the sun. Suzi doesn't know that is what it's called. The mist disperses. The only complete sentence his father said to Suzi was: “Now, tell me the whole truth, Suleyman, no lying.” The last image: his father in a denim shirt, jeans and camouflage rucksack, with the bitter, loving smell of blackcurrants coming from his mouth. Money for maintenance arrives now and then, sometimes a letter. All okay. Suzi smiles; the sun is here.

Magdalene ripples softly in the sun. Suzi forgets his mother, forgets Gölow, Lada, Father, Suzi is the main owner of all the time in the world. Magdalene is reading now. Pretending to be reading. The air still isn't warm, but pleasant enough. Suzi takes off his sweater, sits on it. In his undershirt. Magdalene knows about Suzi. All those times he goes fishing here. When they once meet by chance in the ice cream parlor she says hello, but he does not reply.

Suzi is whistling, barely audibly. A mouse comes out of the reeds, nosing around. Suzi puts a jelly bear on the grass. The mouse snaps it up.

A minnow jumps in the lake. Something glittering lies in the reeds. Two mice scurry from there to here. Suzi smiles. Gives them another jelly bear. Whistles. They bring him the glittery thing. It is slightly bent, a little crown like those the beauty queens wear. Only prettier. Prettier, of course, because it is Magdalene's.

Good.

The mice have gone away.

Good.

Suzi goes over. Gives Magdalene the tiara. Magdalene reads aloud to him. Between sentences he feels her gaze on him, on his undershirt, his dragon, his hands, his cheeks and his temples. Now and then he closes his eyes to feel it on his eyelids too, along with the sun.

Hugo von Hofmannsthal smiles.

FRAU KRANZ WAS WELL EQUIPPED, BUT THE CHILL
of the lake and the cold wind have seeped into her old bones, slowly freezing her hands and her memories. Frau Kranz is frozen through, remembered through, and in a bad temper, and it is not surprising that she is dissatisfied with her picture.

And now here's Frau Zieschke into the bargain buttonholing her outside the bakery, in an elated mood. Lord almighty, it's much too early for cheerfulness, but Frau Zieschke is one of those whose emotional streaks reach out in all directions. She is waving the
Nordkurier
like a soldier with a banner after victory in a battle: Frau Kranz is in the paper, a whole page! With a photo! In the photo Frau Kranz is smiling, although now she can't remember any reason for smiling and surely Frau Zieschke isn't going to read it all out loud to her in the street! Frau Kranz pushes the baker's wife back into the bakery, and there a way to calm the woman down occurs to her: she shows Frau Zieschke last night's painting. Yes, that, she says, is how it will be for the auction. It works: Frau Zieschke's enthusiasm disappears.

“Oh,” she says.

Frau Kranz takes the newspaper and asks the baker's wife to make her a hot milk. She does feel a little curious. She skips the introduction with her biography and career, because she knows all that. She merely skims the central part, with the
description of her hairstyle and the way she smokes a cigar. She shakes her head over the lavish praise of a picture she can't even call to mind from its description. She reads only the conclusion properly.

Ana Kranz does not see herself as a painter of local scenes. She doesn't like to be linked with a particular countryside and its culture. However, her paintings do show local scenes—the countryside of our Uckermark. They show our memories, even those that we first know we have only through our image of them: our childhood, the young faces of our parents and grandparents, the work and everyday life of three generations in the eddies of time. Kranz's paintings are no less than journeys into the past
.

Ana Kranz is not a painter of local scenes. She is our painter, and a painter of this place. We wish her well on her ninetieth birthday, in deep gratitude for her work in our homeland
.

Slushy, but never mind, thinks Frau Kranz. You can forget the rest, and your birthday isn't until next Saturday.

She escapes the bakery with the arrival of the next customers. Frau Kranz can tell that the weather is changing from the pain in her joints, but above all from the blue sky. An old woman on her way home. She had made herself pretty for the memory, and it had been no use; you can't fool memories.

Frau Kranz has failed with her picture of the night. She is a little sorry for the sake of the village. Frau Schwermuth and Frau Zieschke and the Creative Committee were expecting something special for the auction. Hirtentäschel even wanted a preview of the picture so that he could say something about
it. There isn't much to say about this painting. Frau Kranz had seen that in Suzi's beautiful eyes, in Frau Zieschke's eyelashes that stopped applauding for a few seconds.

She had wanted to paint more than what she saw and knew, but she knew only the six women, and she saw only the gray of the night. On such a night, she had tried to imagine what the village would see if it were in her place, and she hadn't the faintest idea.

At home, Frau Kranz drinks elderberry juice, cleans her teeth and lies down in her bed, with the picture of the night leaning against it, and the picture of the night is gray and bleak. She closes her eyes. Through the window, the sun paints on her face what the sun sees and knows.

A sun like that also shines on Frau Kranz's favorite picture. Yes, we think she does have a favorite, although she denied it to the journalist when he asked her. The name of Frau Kranz's favorite picture is:

THE ROMANIAN OUTSIDE THE CARAVAN FOR
Romanian Harvest Workers
on the Country Road out at Kraatz.

The Romanians pick apples and strawberries for five euros an hour, they harvest lettuce, they cut asparagus. Some come back year after year; you might think they had made friends in the village. They eat ice cream at Manu's, one of them sometimes goes to Ulli's for a beer and might recite a poem in Romanian, but they marry elsewhere, in their towns with musical-sounding names, in Baia Mare and in Vi
eu de Sus.

A few years ago caravans for them to live in were placed on the country road out at Kraatz. Wheaten-yellow, a hotplate, a window with a wide view over their place of work, the fields; an estimated fifteen square meters, an estimated 240 euros, four beds for an estimated six persons, no smoking; they all smoke.

And last year: neo-Nazis from this area except for our own two, Rico and Luise, who had overslept and missed the gathering. Campfires, togetherness, barbecues near the caravans, music, pogo dancing and fun with the wobbly caravans, and at some point in the small hours of the morning the police.

Afterward the words
Rumänen raus
, Romanians Out, were to be seen in large, slanting letters on one of the caravans, but kind of in a quiet voice because they were sprayed in white on a yellow background, and because the exclamation mark was
missing, and it stayed like that for some time until one morning a sleepy Romanian climbed out of the caravan, looked at the slogan for the time it took him to smoke a cigarette, fetched sticky tape and toilet paper and made the “r” in
raus
into an “H,” adding a hyphen after
Rumänen
, so that it now read Romanian-House. It didn't take him a moment, he cleaned his nose, sat down on the little flight of steps in front of the caravan and ate a bread roll.

That is Frau Kranz's favorite picture. That is Frau Kranz's Romanian. A small man with a receding hairline, tracksuit trousers, undershirt, breakfasting in front of his house, the morning sun. A tattoo on his upper arm: the letters B and D in a heart, and the year 1977.

We think that is Frau Kranz's favorite picture because she dedicated it to the Romanian and gave it to him. She never usually dedicates pictures to anyone. And now it is hanging somewhere, maybe in Baia Mare, maybe in Vi
eu de Sus: a morning in the Uckermark in 2012.

ON THE MORNING BEFORE THE FEAST THE VILLAGE
does not walk three times round the field, reciting a secret saying; it does not sprinkle grain at every corner for the birds to eat, instead of stealing from the field; the village has forgotten the secret saying.

A troop of girls adorned with brightly colored silk ribbons do not pace out the fields, they do not shout and make a noise to tell field spirits and kobolds: we're here, keep away, even winter belongs to us. The girls are not accompanied by young men singing, and the old folk do not wait companionably at the village inn for the return of the young, ready to begin the Feast afterward with a dance round the bonfire.