In Times of Fading Light (26 page)

“Comrade ... er ... ?” said the man.

“Umnitzer,” said Muddel, and she pointed to Markus. “The great-grandson.”

“The great-grandson!” cried the man.

He seized Markus’s hand and shook it.

“My word,” said the man. “My word!”

The odd thing was that the sausage-shaped folds on his forehead stayed put even when he laughed. He told Muddel:

“Comrade, it’s my job to relieve you of the paper wrapping your flowers.”

Muddel gave him the paper wrapping the flowers, without correcting his form of address to her.

The big seashell was shining in the hall just the way he remembered it, except that the room seemed to him even darker than last time. They stood around at a loss for a few seconds, and then Great-Grandmother appeared right in front of them, materializing like a ghost. She looked inquiringly at them, and Markus was beginning to fear that she wouldn’t recognize them when she said:

“Wonderful that you could come. I’m so glad!”

A woman scurrying past took Muddel’s coat.

“If there’s no more room in the back entrance then take the coat down to the cellar,” Great-Grandmother called to the woman in a penetrating voice. Then she turned back to them again.

“Terrible,” she said.

Markus had no idea what she meant.

“I’m exhausted,” said Great-Grandmother. “I am truly exhausted.”

She clapped her hands over her face and stayed in that position for a few moments, until Markus began to feel uncomfortable. Suddenly she said:

“Not a word! Is that clear?”

Her voice sounded sharp and penetrating again.

“Not a word about Hungary! Not a word about anything! This has to work one hundred percent! Is that clear?”

“Perfectly clear,” said Muddel.

Great-Grandmother leaned forward, almost whispering now. “He couldn’t take it anymore.”

“Don’t worry,” said Muddel.

“Wonderful,” fluted Great-Grandmother, stroking Markus’s hair. “How you’ve grown!”

“He’s twelve now,” said Muddel.

Great-Grandmother nodded.

“Melitta, am I right? You’re Melitta?”

“Yes,” said Muddel. “Quite right.”

Great-Grandmother stroked Markus’s hair again, looked at him with a smile, only to change her tone again abruptly, sounding almost a little crazy.

“
Vamos,”
she said. “One hundred percent! I’m relying on you.”

As soon as he entered the room he was reminded of the Natural History Museum again, with all the things in it so like exhibits, kind of prehistoric, and it smelled that way too: dusty and stern and very serious; all around it stood black, glass-fronted shelves, and by peering through the big sliding door, which when open made the two rooms into a positive exhibition hall, you could see the conservatory, in which, as it now occurred to him, most of the treasures were stored.

In the middle of the room where he now was, there was a table made of several small tables (and of several different heights) pushed together, with a crowd of people already sitting at it. His father wasn’t there. At first glance he couldn’t see Granny Irina either; mostly it was ancient old people sitting at the table talking, a party of dinosaurs consuming coffee and cakes, thought Markus, but croaking at each other with great animation, as if they had all just been awoken from their fossilized prehistoric rigidity and were catching up with everything they had failed to say for millions of years.

Only one of them was sitting to one side of the big table, on the left in the corner, in the shadow of the light falling in through the door to the terrace: a dinosaur who hadn’t quite made it to resurrection—and indeed the hunched, bony figure with its knees coming up to its ears, its winglike arms hanging over the arms of the chair, and its huge, long, beaky nose was reminiscent of the fossil imprint of the extinct reptile that had always fascinated Markus most of all: the pterodactyl, a flying dinosaur.

“Here’s Markus,” Great-Grandmother told the pterodactyl. “Your great-grandson.”

“Happy birthday,” murmured Markus, offering his great-grandfather the picture.

The pterodactyl put its head on one side, its beaky nose circling. “He’s hard of hearing these days,” whispered Great-Grandmother. “An iguana,” croaked the pterodactyl.

“It’s a turtle,” said Markus in a loud voice—he refrained from defining the subject of his picture more precisely as a hawksbill sea turtle. “He doesn’t see too well either,” whispered Great-Grandmother. “Markus is interested in the animal kingdom,” said Muddel.

For a moment the pterodactyl sat there without moving. Then it said, “When I am dead, Markus, you’ll inherit the iguana on the shelf there.”

“Cool,” said Markus.

He had never been told he would inherit something from anyone before, and he wasn’t sure if he ought to say thank you for it, if he ought to show pleasure at all. That would mean showing pleasure at the thought of Wilhelm’s death. But suddenly Wilhelm said, “No, you’d better take it home with you now.”

“Right this minute?”

“Take it with you,” said Wilhelm. “I don’t have much longer left anyway.”

“But you must say hello to everyone first,” Muddel called after him. Markus went obediently from one to another of the guests, letting the often-repeated murmur of
The great-grandson, the great-grandson!
wash over him. It was embarrassing, of course, but somehow he also felt flattered.

“Ah, young people!” fluted an elderly bottle blonde.

“
Da zdravstvuyet,”
bellowed a fat, sweating man whose face was already red with talking.

They all raised their glasses and drank to young people.

Grandpa Kurt even gave him a hug, not at all usual, normally Grandpa Kurt was one of those who avoided unnecessary physical contact, which Markus greatly appreciated, and indeed he liked his grandpa, and was always a little sorry when, on his visits to his grandparents, Grandpa went to great pains to teach him games of some kind,
games from which you’ll learn things that will come in useful in life.
That was Grandpa Kurt: kindly but demanding.

“Where’s Granny Ira?” asked Markus.

“Granny’s not feeling too good,” said Grandpa Kurt.

“Is she sick?”

“Yes,” said Grandpa Kurt. “That’s the best way to put it.”

Finally it was Baba Nadya’s turn. He disliked the thought of her hand pressing his. Baba Nadya lived over there with Granny Ira, and when he visited he always had to go into her room and say hello, and the room really stank, a certain slightly sweetish smell that made him retch, so that he tried to get away as soon as he had done his duty, but by then the trap had snapped shut—hands like pincers, the old lady had, she grabbed him, jabbered at him in Russian, and as his breath began to run out made him sit on the bed, and her pincerlike claws didn’t open until he had eaten one of her disgusting chocolates.

She meant well, that was obvious, and Markus didn’t let any of that show now as he offered her his hand, instinctively breathing through his mouth, and assumed a friendly expression, determined to let the torrent of incomprehensible sounds pass him by—but to his surprise Baba Nadya said just one thing, with the stress in the wrong place, on the last syllable), but comprehensible all the same.

“Affeederseyn,”
she said.

“Auf Wiedersehen,”
said Markus, relieved, and he set off.

First he went to look at the iguana that was now his property: a magnificent specimen, no damage to it at all aside from one missing claw. The scaly crest was a little dusty, and he was already looking forward to cleaning it with a fine brush at home. Maybe he ought to put the iguana somewhere safe right away—who knew, Wilhelm might forget about giving it to him later. But where? And anyway, there were witnesses to the making of the gift. He decided to go on viewing the items on display, ignoring Muddel’s unspoken wish for him to sit down at the coffee table with her.

Wilhelm’s room was less interesting than the conservatory, aside from the iguana and maybe the big sombrero, and the lasso, and the embroidered leather belt (with a revolver holster!) all of them hanging in a built-in alcove. Nonetheless, Markus took his time inspecting everything thoroughly again: the silver items, dishes and ashtrays, but also things made of gold or blue crystal, probably very valuable, standing around carefully arranged in special compartments among the books. There was also a Russian section, with wooden dolls nesting inside each other, painted wooden spoons, and a kind of glass thing. If you shook it, snow fell inside, and in the middle of the thing stood a tiny Kremlin. And there was a plaster bust of Lenin with a damaged ear.

More interesting were the photographs standing on the half-height display cabinet in small steel frames: Wilhelm on a prehistoric motorbike in what might or might not be a uniform, wearing a leather cap and glasses (you could recognize him only by his nose), and beside him, in a sidecar, a man in a suit, maybe Karl Liebknecht. But the photo was a poor one, and all men probably had mustaches in those days.

A photograph of a ship: was it the one that had brought his great-grandparents back from Mexico or the one that had taken them there? How had they escaped from Germany at that time?

There was also the photo of a beautiful young woman with bright black eyes, and only the way she still wore her hair showed that she was the same person who was now fluttering about telling her guests in a whisper what not to say.

“Please, children, I beg you!”

And the bell rang again. Great-Grandmother disappeared into the hall, and the volume of the dinosaurs’ palavering, which had decreased briefly after the warning, swelled again; once more, despite her prohibition, they were talking about
the political situation
and Hungary and all that, and Markus registered, to his surprise, that the dinosaurs were of the same opinion as Pastor Klaus in Grosskrienitz.

“More democracy!” shouted the fat man with the red face in his heavy accent. “Of course we need more democracy!”

But Great-Grandmother was intervening again, clapping her hands. “Comrades!” cried Great-Grandmother. “Comrades, can we have silence, please?”

A man in a brown suit had come in. He looked like Principal Brietzke at the school Markus attended, and he was holding a red folder, someone struck a glass to make it ring, apparently there was going to be a speech, now came the official part, thought Markus. Where was his father?

“Dear comrades, dear and honored Comrade Powileit,” began the man like the school principal, and even in those first words his tone of voice was so tedious, so typical of a speech, that Markus wondered whether to make use of the last of the restlessness to try escaping into the conservatory, but too late, he had no option but to wait until it was over. He was now standing by the window, in front of Wilhelm’s desk—itself fit for a museum, along with all the old-fashioned utensils lying on it: letter openers (several), wooden pencils (red), a large magnifying glass—and remembered, while the school principal droned on about Wilhelm’s career, that on the occasion when Wilhelm had spoken to his class he, too, had talked about the “Kapp Putsch,” and how he had been wounded at the time. The word
Kapp
made Markus think of the motorbike photo and the leather cap that might be part of a uniform, and he imagined his great-grandfather riding his motorbike full tilt at the enemy in that cap with his revolver ready to fire, and then—bang!—falling off the bike. But it can’t really have been like that, thought Markus, maybe it was just that one of the leaders of the putsch was called Kapp? Maybe he was the man in the sidecar? Were they just off to the putsch? Or did the photo date from the Nazi period, when Wilhelm, as the school principal was now telling everyone, had been
active illegally,
and Wilhelm had disguised himself as an SA man? Later, said the school principal, Wilhelm had to flee from Germany—only the school principal didn’t say just
how
he had fled, and Markus wondered yet again, hadn’t there been a border in Germany then? And wasn’t it guarded? And where had Great-Grandmother Charlotte been all that time?

“... in awarding you, dear Comrade Powileit, the Order of Merit of the Fatherland in gold,” Markus heard the school principal saying. It sounded pompous, Order of Merit of the Fatherland, a bit like the Kaiser and the war, and in gold at that, now everyone was applauding, the school principal went over to Wilhelm holding the Order of Merit of the Fatherland, but Wilhelm didn’t stand up, he only raised his hand and said:

“I have enough tin in my box already.”

Everyone laughed except for Great-Grandmother, who shook her head, then the school principal pinned the order on Wilhelm, and everyone clapped again and stood up, and suddenly they didn’t know how they were ever going to stop clapping, and they were still clapping when Great-Grandmother finally interrupted by calling in a shrill voice:

“The buffet is open!”

The buffet was set out in the next room. Markus quickly grabbed himself a sausage and marched off in the direction of the conservatory. He already had its characteristic smell in his nostrils, his fingertips could already feel the roughness of the catshark’s skin which, like the skin of all sharks, consisted of tiny little teeth that were always regenerating themselves, he had even, with forethought, begun working it out that he must hold the sausage in one hand, his right hand, so as to keep his left hand clean for touching the catshark—when he realized that the conservatory was locked. Stuck on the sliding door, like a seal on the join between its two halves, was a note saying
No entry!
Markus peered through the glass in the door. It was all as he remembered it, he could see the cobra skin and the snout of the sawfish, the catshark between the leaves of the rubber plant, only the little indoor fountain wasn’t running, and if you leaned right over you could see that the wooden flooring by the door leading out to the terrace was swollen and damaged by water, there were even some floorboards missing. What a pity, thought Markus, not about the floor but about the lovely things that suddenly seemed to him neglected and abandoned—and he wondered, now that the idea had entered his mind, whether he might not also inherit the cobra skin and the snout of the sawfish and the catshark, but probably, when Great-Grandmother died, they would be inherited first by Grandpa Kurt, and when Grandpa Kurt died by his father, a long sequence, too long, and his only hope was probably to be given one or another of these treasures in advance. Maybe he could negotiate with his father? Where was his father anyway? Markus looked around, but of course his father wasn’t there. He was never there when you needed him: now, for instance, to ask his loopy great-grandmother if he could go into the conservatory. Enough to make you puke, having a father who was never there. Other fathers stayed around, only he, Markus Umnitzer, had a shitty father like that who was never around. Asshole.