In Times of Fading Light (36 page)

One of the labels did have something written on it. Charlotte went closer. Red lettering, Wilhelm’s scrawl:

CHEV, it said. That was all, merely: CHEV.

Tangible evidence. Charlotte took the label off the vase so that she could put it in the metal box where, for a long time now, she had been keeping all important documents: Lisbeth was not to be trusted. She spied for Wilhelm. However, the metal box was forty-four stairs away. She couldn’t keep the sticky thing in her trouser pocket ... so for now she parked it on her cardigan.

She went into the salon and phoned Weihe: did he have a camera?

“I do,” said Weihe.

“I’ll call again soon,” said Charlotte, hanging up.

At the same moment it occurred to her that she hadn’t asked about the flash. She called Weihe again and asked whether he had a flash.

“I do,” said Weihe.

“I’ll call again soon,” said Charlotte, hanging up.

He was a wonderful guy, Weihe. Both of them, Rosi too, although she was so sick. You could rely on them. Charlotte wondered whether she had thanked the Weihes for collecting the flower vases. To be on the safe side, she called again and thanked them for collecting the flower vases.

“But you thanked us already, Frau Powileit,” said Weihe.

“I’ll call again soon,” said Charlotte, hanging up.

Then she turned to her chores. There was still a lot to do, and now, as she gradually got into her stride, it made her nervous to see Lisbeth still under the extending table. Only her bottom was showing.

“What are you doing there?” asked Charlotte.

Without answering her question, Lisbeth said, “Listen, Lotti, don’t we have any more plastic containers in the kitchen?”

“Plastic containers? What for?” said Charlotte. “All this is going in the garbage.”

“On the garbage?”

“
In
the garbage,” said Charlotte. “We still speak correctly in this house.”

“Oh, but what a shame, Lotti! I’ll take it home with me if you don’t want it.”

“Yes, sure, take it home,” said Charlotte, and at the same moment it occurred to her that it might be a better idea to photograph the ruins of the buffet before Lisbeth cleared the evidence away.

However, now the doorbell rang. Who would be ringing the bell at this time of night? Annoying, thought Charlotte, how can I get anything done? Furiously, she marched through the hall and flung the front door open.

“Taxi,” said the man outside.

“Thank you, we don’t need one now,” said Charlotte, and she was about to close the door again, but the taxi driver insisted on a call-out fare.

Call-out fare, thought Charlotte. What nerve!

But she had more important things to do than quarrel with the taxi driver. She handed him ten marks, and before he could get out the change she lost patience and closed the front door.

She hurried back into the salon and told Lisbeth, “Stop that!”

There was still nothing to be seen of Lisbeth but her bottom. Charlotte began to feel that she was conducting a conversation with Lisbeth’s rear end.

“Lotti, that won’t do,” said Lisbeth. “We can’t simply leave it all lying here!”

“We really do have more important matters at hand,” said Charlotte. “There are all the dishes still to be done in the kitchen. And Wilhelm’s evening tea to be made, or he’ll be complaining that it’s too hot again.”

“I’ll do the dishes afterward,” said Lisbeth, “and you can make his tea quickly before I finish in here.”

“Of course,” said Charlotte. “Do forgive me! I was forgetting that you’re the mistress in this house!”

She marched furiously into the kitchen, closed the door. Turned the key in the lock to be on the safe side.

Her breath was wheezing.

She ought never, thought Charlotte, to have let that woman address her on such familiar terms. No respect, nothing. Playing her up. Doing as she liked ... once Wilhelm is out of the house, she thought, I’m firing Lisbeth.

She clutched the little bottle in her trouser pocket firmly in her fist and counted to ten. Then she filled the whistling kettle and put it on the gas stove.

Oddly enough, the door to the former servants’ corridor was open again. And someone had forgotten to switch off the light on the cellar stairs. A faint light showed the contours of the bricks in the doorway that Wilhelm had bricked up thirty-five years ago ... she quickly switched off the light on the cellar stairs and closed the door to the former servants’ corridor.

Once Wilhelm is out of the house, she thought, I’m having that doorway opened up. Ridiculous, all of it! The very first thing he did, back then, was to remove the bell for the domestic staff as well, because it offended his proletarian honor! But she could shout herself hoarse if Lisbeth was wandering around the house somewhere. That didn’t offend his proletarian honor. After all, she was eighty-six now! Didn’t that count for anything? She had also been a Party member for sixty-two years! She had been director of the institute, with four years in domestic science college behind her! Did none of that count for anything? Did nothing count but Wilhelm’s proletarian honor?

She dropped on the stool, and leaned the back of her head against the wall. The whistling kettle began to murmur.

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
Señora.
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.

So Charlotte thought. And wasn’t sure whether she merely thought so in the dream. Whether she always thought so in the dream, or only this time. Or whether she thought, every time, that it was only this time she thought so.

The door was open. Charlotte went through the doorway. Now Adrian was there again, smiling. Touched her gently, turned her around—and Charlotte felt the hairs on the back of her neck stand up: Coatlicue, goddess of life and death. With her necklace of hearts torn from living bodies.

And one of them, she knew,
that
one, was Werner’s.

He is rocking gently, pushing himself off from the terrace parapet now and then. The South German sounds heard sporadically around the large table have died away. So have the shouting and laughter that sometimes come up from the village, the drone of car engines, the ghostly radio voices wafting this way from somewhere or other now and then, and the busy banging and clattering from the guesthouse kitchen. Even the palm fronds have stopped rustling. For a moment, when the afternoon heat is at its greatest, the world seems to stand still.

Only the regular creaking of the hemp ropes is still audible. And the distant, undemanding roar of the sea.

A state of stasis. Embryonic passivity.

Later, when he has woken from his light sleep, when he has brought himself to overcome the force of gravity that presses him gently but irresistibly down in the hammock, after he has gone to get a cup of coffee and in passing, briefly looking up from his cup, has greeted the two tourist backpackers who have just arrived and, as he did on his own arrival, are standing on the terrace marveling at the view—later he will sit on the bench behind the Frida Kahlo part of the guesthouse, as he does every day, looking out over the corrugated iron roofs of the huts where the Mexican employees of Eva & Tom live, and read the newspaper.

It is always the same newspaper. Always the one with the airplane flying into a skyscraper. He reads slowly. He reads the articles again and again, until to some extent he understands them.

He doesn’t understand everything.

He understands that the U.S. president has said a monumental war against evil is being waged, and that the United States is the brightest beacon of liberty.

He understands that part of the Latin American population still goes hungry, and some of them pick through garbage to feed themselves.

He understands that the introduction of the euro as a currency is in full swing, and stock exchanges all over the world are suffering catastrophic losses.

What he doesn’t understand is why the stock exchanges are suffering catastrophic losses. How is the value of, say, shares in the post office affected by the collapse of two buildings in America? Are people sending fewer letters now?

What he also doesn’t understand, and will not understand even this afternoon when he reads the article about poverty in Latin America for the third or fourth time—at least, what he will have understood will sound so outrageous that he will doubt whether he really
does
under stand it—is that a special race of stunted human beings has developed on the garbage dumps of the big Latin American cities, people who apparently are better suited to surviving the conditions of a garbage dump.

After reading the newspaper he will go down to the beach again, will sit in the wooden deck chair with the blue sun umbrella beside it which he hired for a considerable sum on his first day (it has been lying around in the sand oblivious of all else since then), and he will watch the sun setting.

The sunset will be the same as usual. All Pacific sunsets, he has found out, are the same: large and red and indifferent to the world—whether that indifference is reassuring or disturbing he doesn’t yet know.

Dear Marion. Recently I’ve often been thinking of you. And often for tiny and, I have to admit, sometimes inexplicable reasons. I think of you when I see the sun going down, that’s fair enough. But why do I think of you at the sight of a blue sun umbrella when you don’t like the color blue? Why do I think of you when a flock of birds takes off from a power line overhead? Why do I think of you when I put my hand on the lukewarm sand?

When the sun has sunk irrevocably into the sea, he will be the only customer to sit down at one of the white plastic tables of the Al Mar and eat fish. He will drink a glass of white wine. He will look at the mother-of-pearl afterglow in the sky, which is almost exactly the same color as the inside of Granny Charlotte’s big, shining seashell.

He will be surprised to see the crescent moon hanging askew. He will look (usually without success) for constellations of stars tilted sideways.

When it is fully dark he will climb the steps to Eva & Tom at his leisure, to where the usual company, whose conversation is dominated by South German sounds, are sitting at the table on the terrace. They are all acquaintances of Eva the Indian, and they assemble here every year at this season: a gray-haired, chain-smoking man in a loose flowered shirt; a rather younger man with a bald head, who shares a room with the chain-smoker; a woman with a missing tooth in a dress printed with a homemade batik pattern; another man whom Alexander thinks of as Straw Hat, because he wears a decrepit straw hat at all times of the day, to suit his shabby, formerly white linen clothes; and a motorcyclist with several rings in one ear.

The biker (who will turn out later to be a staff council representative from a large German city hospital) has told Alexander that all of them except the bald man met here in the seventies, that Eva and Tom stayed on and gradually turned what had been a down-at-heel hotel for all comers into this guesthouse, and before he discovered from the biker that Tom died long ago, Alexander thought Tom was the man in the straw hat—maybe because he talks louder than anyone else, always about repairs and rebuilding of some kind, and regularly complains of the unreliability and indolence of the Mexicans.

“The only good Mexican is a dead Mexican,” he will say when Alexander comes up the steps to the terrace this evening, and the man in the loose flowered shirt will chuckle the way you chuckle at a joke that you could have told yourself, because you know it already, and his paunch will bob up and down under the loose flowered shirt.

It’s worst of all—worst of all?—at night, when I lie under my mosquito net and hear the voices of the aging hippies through the flimsy walls of my room as they sit outside telling each other their stories. I think of you then, in particular. Why just then ? Because I feel excluded? Because I have a sense of not belonging? But always, all my life, I’ve had a sense of not belonging. Although all my life I’d have liked to belong somewhere, I have never found out what I’d have liked to belong to. Is that sick? Do I lack some kind of gene? Or is it to do with my story? The history of my family? If I’m to be honest, when I’m lying under my mosquito net nothing makes me want to go out to that table. And yet, when I hear them laughing, I feel an almost painful longing.

He will shake out his bedclothes, as advised by Eva. As he does so he will think of the scorpion that he saw on the terrace a few days ago. The scorpions here are not deadly, but almost the size of saucers—and astonishingly beautiful. He was so moved by its fragile structure that he was unable to tread on the creature. Eva did it, in her flip-flops. Since then, he thinks, she has despised him.

The voices will be audible for a long time this evening. The man in the loose flowered shirt will chuckle to his paunch. The straw hat will talk about the unreliability and indolence of the Mexicans. And sometime or other the woman with a missing tooth will take out a guitar and sing Joan Baez songs, and the others will join in, with genuine but destructive fervor.

Then at some point, late at night, there will be nothing to be heard but an occasional coughing fit from the man in the flowered shirt, and the chirping of a cricket, sounding like an alarm, and Alexander will lie under his mosquito net and write letters to Marion in his head:

Sometimes I think I ought not to write to you at all. That I ought simply to disappear from your life. That having made my own bed I must lie on it alone. Now that sickness has caught up with me, how can I want to get into bed with you? How can I think of longing for you now? And yet I do long for you, and the odd thing is that it’s not bad. I mean, yes, it is bad, but comforting at the same time. It’s comforting that you exist. It’s comforting to think of your thick black hair. Of the smell of the nape of your neck when I lie against your back. Or of the way you whimper with contentment when you’re half asleep.

Around seven thirty he will get up and ask the Mexican girl who is the only one scurrying around the kitchen at this time of day for coffee. He will sit on the terrace for a while, with the rather too hot cup in his hands, looking out at the new day and listening to his own breath, whispering back at him out of the hollow of the cup.

Or of the rustle of your underclothes when you are changing behind the wardrobe door. Or the way your mouth opens when you are excited.

A hummingbird will hover among the hibiscus flowers for a while, like a large insect. And farther up, in the morning sky, the black birds like vultures will circle.

Or of your muscles (which put mine to shame at first). Or of your stomach. Or of the palms of your hands, always slightly roughened from your work.

Then the first fishermen will appear on the huge, concrete surface of the landing stage, and for a moment Alexander’s mind will dwell on the question of why no one ever lands on that landing stage. As if, he will think, the little place wanted to defy its nickname of Puerto with this structure. As if it had hoped to lure the oceangoing ships with that grand name.

Or to think of fetching you from work. You in dungarees among the knee-high greenery, mopping the sweat from your brow with the back of your hand. Or your slow way of moving—did I ever tell you that?

Or the way you wrinkle your nose, going “Hmm.”

Or that sly gleam in your eyes.

Or—is it all right to say a thing like this?—or your face when you cry.

For a moment he will be tempted to write down what he is thinking—just in case he ever really writes that letter. But even going to find a pen and paper, even less than that, he will fear, might drive the mood away.

Yes, it’s comforting to be able to think of you like this, and sometimes I ask myself: is that, perhaps, enough? On the one hand it hurts to think that when you were close enough for me to touch, I neglected all of this. On the other hand I am making the strange discovery that one does not necessarily have to possess what one loves. On the one hand I am drawn to you to make up for what I failed to give. On the other hand, I am afraid that—after all I learn from medicine about my prognosis—I would still be only the taker, even more so than before. On the one hand I would like to write and tell you all this. On the other hand, I am afraid you will take it as a kind of proposal of marriage—and so it is.

When he has drunk his coffee, he will put on his running shoes and run a couple of kilometers. He bought the running shoes in Pochutla. At first he tried walking: like Kurt—he laughed when he caught himself thinking that his sickness might, like Kurt’s, become operable if he imitated Kurt’s lifestyle. But it soon turned out that this was not a great place for walking. The hinterland, as he had already seen from the taxi, was not alluring. Only the beach would have invited people to walk on it, if the separate bays were not divided from one another by impassable rocks. You can go from bay to bay only by road, and the road is boring. So he runs.

Today, as always, he will jog northward along the narrow, winding asphalt road, will take the rises at a leisurely pace so as not to drive his pulse too high, just enough to give him a feeling that he could run on like this forever.

Now and then cars will drive past. People sharing taxis will turn their heads to look at him. There are few pedestrians around here, and when he sees two men in the distance, coming toward him, he will instinctively wonder how, if they try mugging him, he can make them understand that he carries no more than twenty pesos on him.

They are, it soon turns out, two middle-aged men, sinewy, dark-complexioned creatures, looking just like the laborers who assembled outside the Puerto Ángel municipal offices a few days ago to complain of the poor quality of the drinking water. They will give him a silent but friendly greeting, in the way that only men can greet other men, and he doesn’t know why, but Alexander will be moved to tears by their greeting.

Then Zipolite comes in sight. The owner of the kiosk there will signal to him from afar by means of exaggerated (and in fact totally incomprehensible) gestures that he has water ready: with time, Alexander has fallen into the habit of buying water here on the way back, rather than running through the area with a half-liter bottle in his hand. But first, on the outward run, he will turn left before the kiosk and down to the sea.

After a few hundred meters, he will reach the bay of Zipolite. This is where the hippies go. It is about two kilometers long, and unlike the smaller bay of Puerto Ángel, where the local people bathe, it is almost entirely populated by young foreign tourists who really could pass as hippies, with their hairstyles and the chains around their necks—if they weren’t all a little too well formed, a little too elegant.

Around now they are still lying in their hammocks; they sleep out on the beach under structures on posts covered with palm leaves and called
palapas,
which the many small bars and beach hotels—so he assumes—rent out cheap. One of them, however, a well-formed and elegant young man, will suddenly join him, and in spite of all his good resolutions, Alexander will almost imperceptibly lengthen his stride.

“Hi,” the well-formed young man will say. “Where’re you just coming from?”

“Puerto Ángel,” Alexander will reply, and the well-formed young man will say:

“Wow, great!”

After a few hundred meters, the well-formed young man will begin panting. He will give up even before they reach the end of the bay.

“Wow, great,” he will repeat, raising a hand in farewell, and Alexander will feel so elated by this unexpectedly easy knockout victory that he decides to run to Mazunte.

He has been in Mazunte before in a shared taxi. He visited the turtle center. Turtles do not interest him in the slightest, but the biker recommended the museum to him so strongly that it would be tantamount to an insult not to take his advice. Once, so the biker told him, there was a factory in Mazunte where the sea turtles who come up at the same time every year to lay their eggs on Mazunte beach—and only there—were brutally slaughtered and made into canned soup. Now the slaughter has finally been forbidden, said the biker, and instead the place devotes itself to the breeding and conservation of turtles. Alexander did indeed spend an hour studying the developmental cycle of the water turtles, looked at the specimens large and small in the tanks at the center, and was touched by the careful way the keepers look after the turtles, cure them when they are sick, and then let them go again, even collecting their eggs if one of the creatures has failed to bury them properly on the beach, and bringing them back to the center to hatch them. He decided to classify this place as one of the few experiences he has had to suggest, in defiance of the many indicating the opposite, that mankind is gradually improving.