In Times of Fading Light (20 page)

For the first time he was given not just a gun but two full rounds of ammunition, thirty bullets in each. At roll call the company commander, a short-legged man with a sharp voice, explained that they were going to operate in border area so-and-so in order to secure the hinterland, that what was known as a “situation” had occurred: a Soviet Army soldier was on the move with an Ikarus bus, a Kalashnikov, and six rounds of ammunition, probably making for the state border between Stapelburg and the Brocken.

They drove for rather more than an hour and a half, and then, in groups of three, were dropped off somewhere in the forest. Alexander was with Kalle Schmidt, whose hands were shaking, and Behringer, who had already announced, back in the dormitory, “If those assholes are really going to leave me on the border, I’m making off!”

Then they were lying on the ground at a place in the forest where the path forked. They didn’t know exactly where the border was. Dogs barked in the distance. Soon it was so dark that they couldn’t see each other. There were cracking, squealing noises in the forest. They thought they heard footsteps everywhere, Kalle cocked the trigger of his gun and ordered invisible figures to give the password of the day, Alexander cocked the trigger of his own weapon, saw ghosts if he stared at the faintly discernible path for long enough, listened for every word, every sound that came from Behringer’s direction.

They had been dropped off at four in the afternoon. Around midnight they heard the typical screech of the engine of a cross-country truck with an air-cooled engine turning over at high speed, bringing their relief. Eight hours, the normal length of a shift on the border—that was what awaited them when, after training, they were transferred to a border company, eight hours a day in alternating shifts, for a whole year. Alexander had no idea how he was going to stick it out, he didn’t even have any idea how he was going to stick it out
until Christmas,
stick it out until he next saw Christina.

The idea came to him at the moment when the officer cadet forgot to check the safety catch on his gun. With the other two, Kalle Schmidt and Behringer, who had climbed up on the payload area before Alexander, he had checked their weapons in accordance with regulations, but then the truck had rolled a little way back, almost making the cadet fall over, and while he was cursing the driver Alexander had crawled into the payload area and was now sitting in silence with the others—and with a gun cocked ready to fire between his knees. After the incident, he foresaw, it would be easy for them to work out that the cadet had forgotten to check his Kalashnikov because of the driver’s mistake, and that he, Alexander, could easily have overlooked the fact that the safety catch wasn’t on yet and the gun was still set for
single fire.
It was also conceivable that some part of his equipment could have been caught on the trigger, that the gun would go off and injure him in a place of his own choice, say his left arm, which “entirely by chance” was resting on the muzzle of the Kalashnikov. Only millimeters lay between him and a state of long-term unfitness for army service, his thumb was on the trigger now, a bump in the ground would be enough, the entrance to the barracks would be enough, only suddenly Alexander wasn’t sure whether the gun was really set for
single fire
or
sustained fire,
so that if he pulled the trigger it might fire two or three shots—and then the question was how much of his arm would be left.

Only when he handed in the weapon did anyone notice that the full magazine was still in the gun, and also that the trigger was still cocked, and when Alexander was summoned to see the company commander he was expecting to be bawled out, was ready for anything, even spending the rest of the night with his face on those steel springs. But to his surprise the company commander invited him to sit down, and the jovial tone in which he began speaking almost led Alexander to correct him:
step
-grandfather—he had never called Wilhelm Grandfather, not even Step-Grandfather, maybe that was why he didn’t set the company commander straight, luckily, because what the company commander had to tell him was that his grandfather, Comrade Wilhelm Powileit, was sick in hospital, a severe case of pneumonia, and he was in such a serious condition that Alexander must be “prepared for the worst.”

Alexander nodded, and assumed a grave expression, while with inner jubilation he took the leave pass.

“I hope you arrive in time.”

In the morning Alexander was in the train. He was tired and chilled, but he didn’t want to sleep. He looked through the window, the landscape, even in late fall, seemed to him colorful and luxuriant, there was something to be seen everywhere, villages, cattle, trees, people walking along a road at their leisure. He was touched by the friendliness of the conductor, who didn’t bawl him out, but simply asked to see his ticket, by the friendliness of the passengers who even, whether or not out of absentmindedness, let him go first, who spoke to him as if he were a perfectly ordinary human being.

The rail journey was a long one, and he had to change trains twice. At Potsdam Central Station you then boarded a tram and rode for another twenty minutes to the baroque Old Town of Potsdam, whose main thorough fare (named for Klement Gottwald, the murderer of Slánský) had been renovated over the years. But you had only to go a few steps from the main thoroughfare, and you were in a perfectly normal, meaning dilapidated, street of what had originally been pretty two-story apartment buildings, their facades now gray and black and stained by rainwater dripping from leaky gutters. Here and there in the plaster, so far as it was still extant, you could even find the marks left by artillery fire during the last days of the war.

Number 16 Gutenbergstrasse. The bell didn’t work. The front door of the building, as so often, was locked: Frau Pawlowski feared for the safety of her cats. Luckily she appeared at the window at that very moment, complete with cats, recognized Alexander after a brief scrutiny, and although she had always regarded him as an intruder against whom she must wage war, now that he stood at the door of the building in his uniform she took pity on him, pointed up toward the top floor, and behind the window panes formed a sentence that he could easily lip-read:

“I’ll tell her you’re here!”

A few moments later the key turned in the lock and Christina appeared, hair slightly untidy, sleeves pushed up, and a bibbed apron around her neck.

“Oh,” she said. Just, “Oh.” And invited him in with a movement of her head.

He trotted after her, sniffing the familiar smell of the front hall (half mold, half cats’ pee), looked reverently at the semicircular enamel basin on the upper landing from which they took their water, and followed Christina up the creaking, crooked stairs to the attic floor from which, by means of two half-timbered walls, a few cubic meters had been partitioned off: the attic room, Christina’s attic room, but also
his
attic room, his “home address” since he moved in here almost a year ago (when he was still in school, and against the protests of his parents), and now it was Christina’s room again: from the first moment he felt like a visitor. Instead of tearing off his uniform and throwing it into a corner before doing anything else, as he had planned, he sat down in one of the two swivel chairs, the only seating in the room, watched Christina standing by the fridge doing dishes, with her sleeves pushed up and her apron strings tied firmly around her waist, tried to guess her mood, watched, fascinated, as she put plates to drain and stacked cups on top of each other, as she filled the tall aluminum pan and plugged in the portable immersion heater to get clean water for rinsing the dishes, and every one of her movements seemed to him almost unbearably sensuous.

“Want coffee?” asked Christina.

Alexander did not want coffee.

After he had changed (he took it as a good sign that his clothes were still here in Gutenbergstrasse), they took the tramcar to Neuendorf and visited his parents. Irina, on finding to her slight disappointment that they were not going to stay all evening, but wanted to go to the dance hall known as the Berg (that is to say, Christina wanted to go to the Berg; Alexander would rather have spent a comfortable evening at Christina’s place, but took it as another good sign that she was so keen on going out to dance again; she had been sitting at home for two months on her own)—Irina then improvised what she called a little supper. They ate together, or rather Alexander was the only one who really ate. Irina, although she was always complaining that she never heard about anything, disappeared straight into the kitchen, hurrying back in again only from time to time, smoking cigarettes, to deliver herself of cryptic comments; it was still too early for Kurt to eat supper (my stomach, you know!), and Christina toyed with the onion soup that Irina had swiftly conjured up—so only Alexander, who had nothing inside him but a mortadella sandwich, stuffed himself with smoked pork fillet and Bulgarian cheese, and in the end finished up Christina’s onion soup, while he listened to the conversation around the table, which meandered from subject to subject, beginning with the omnipresent shortages in the GDR, in this case the shortage of onions, moving on to the oil crisis in the West (where, thank God, all was not well either), and from there, by way of the Yom Kippur War and the former Nazis in Nasser’s army, to
The War between Men and Women
(a film that had recently been shown on TV in the West), only to jump back to the real world, more specifically the library where Christina worked (and where a new appointment to the staff was a Chilean exile who had witnessed the murder of Víctor Jara), and finally, after the inevitable complaints of the stupidity of readers, to some political handbook or other that greatly amused both Christina and Kurt because, in the new edition, the name of Honecker’s predecessor had been
entirely eliminated,
whereas it had originally been mentioned on almost every page. As in George Orwell, remarked Christina, who was reading George Orwell at the moment, and as she said that she twisted her mouth, or to be precise one side of it, so that the corner of her mouth (and only the corner) gaped open, revealing much of both rows of teeth, which gave her an ironic, cold expression—as always when she was talking about books that Alexander didn’t know. Then they decided that they had spent quite enough time chatting, Irina said that—
just this once
—she would pay for a taxi, and only when the taxi had arrived, Christina and Alexander had gone down the stone steps, and Irina and Kurt, arm in arm, were standing on the step outside the front door and waving to them with their other, free arms—only then did anyone remember Wilhelm, and it was arranged that Alexander’s parents would pick them as well as Granny Charlotte up at about eleven in the morning, to go and visit him in the hospital.

“Oh, and wear your uniform,” Kurt called after Alexander.

Alexander stopped.

“Uniform?”

“Well, Wilhelm would like to see you in it.”

“You can’t be serious,” said Alexander.

He looked at Kurt. Then at Irina. Then at Christina. For a few seconds no one said anything. Then Alexander said:

“You surely none of you seriously expect me to wear my uniform tomorrow morning.”

“Come on, it’s not that bad,” said Christina.

“Could be the last time,” said Irina.

“I do understand you,” said Kurt. But Alexander might remember, he added, that otherwise (unless Wilhelm died) he wouldn’t have been given leave at all. And after all, he could change in the car. And Granny herself had sent a telegram to his regimental commander. And for God’s sake, yes, it was crazy, but Alexander knew what Wilhelm was like.

“Are we going anywhere or stopping here for a picnic?” asked the taxi driver.

They got in.

As usual, there was a crowd of people outside the Berg, none of them with tickets. A bottle of vodka was being handed around. They rocked back and forth to the music coming through the walls and windows, breaking slightly, and just as Alexander and Christina arrived, the two-part guitar riff “No One to Depend On” began, sad, biting, beautiful, a Santana song that the Delfine band, as the fans expected, imitated bar by bar, note by note, sigh by sigh, as if Carlos Santana himself were standing onstage. Equally faithful to the original was “Fools,” by Deep Purple, and even “Hey, Joe” in the arrangement by Jimi Hendrix, and in the first interval the door opened, the doorman stood on tiptoe and, with an inscrutable expression, performed the ritual that consisted simply of letting his forefinger circle in the air above the crowd and, with a brief
you, you,
and
you
picked out three or four lucky people—a selection process that every visitor to the Berg knew and accepted, even though, or perhaps because, the criteria were indistinct.

Christina had never had any difficulty with this selection process. She obviously had everything that would make the doorman’s forefinger point to her: her pale blonde hair, her clear blue eyes, her chic, smoky blue leather coat that, like the strikingly short acrylic dress that she was wearing under the coat, itself intentionally left open, came from her sister who lived in the West (both garments being immediate consequences of the Basic Treaty between the GDR and the Federal Republic)—so Christina was chosen at once, and as Alexander followed in her wake he had always, so far, slipped through the door with her easily.

But this time the doorman put his arm between Christina and Alexander and said, “Stop.”

“He’s with me,” said Christina.

However, instead of waiting for the doorman’s decision—which, after all, might have been in his favor—Alexander turned around and walked away.

Well, now that he had
gone and spoiled everything again,
Christina insisted on at least going to the Café Hertz to drink a glass of wine. They did get a table there, although in the worst place, in the aisle directly opposite the cake display counter, where they drank a bottle of Rosenthaler Kadarka in the glaring light, while Christina greeted old acquaintances from a distance, and now and then someone came over to their table, to make sarcastic remarks about Alexander’s haircut, or inquire politely or maliciously or sympathetically how he was doing, before being asked by an irritated waiter please not to block the aisle—and Alexander somehow managed to take all this as equably as possible, trying to preserve his self-control, not to complain, not to lose his temper, not to feel jealous (or at least not to show it) and whatever happened not to start on the uniform question—because now he had just one aim in view, and in no circumstances did he want to endanger it.