Before the Feast (25 page)

The only person who can use the machinery is probably someone about as old as Eddie. The joiner was still sitting at
those machines until the end, the joiner was a real glutton for work. Many of us lie in his coffins, they were good value, sometimes the base of the coffin was part of a cupboard, while for Herr Geels, our trained angler, his old boat was just the thing, it looked great, not a classic form, but it looked like a boat. Well, not really so great, but that's how Geels had ordered it, and he had no objection; he should know, because he'd be lying in it himself in the end.

Of course there were some complaints as well, there's always a bit of shrinkage. As they say elsewhere. We don't say so. We say: anyone too mean to go to a trained joiner can't complain if something doesn't quite fit later.

But anyway, the joiner was a glutton for work. You could call him in the middle of the night and he'd come round, repair your TV set and watch Breakfast TV with you, or take the set away if he thought it was no more use. Our joiner was also an electrician. Many say he was a better electrician than a joiner.

And in retrospect maybe he wasn't such a good electrician either, if you take the Archivarium as an example. It was Eddie who installed the electronic lock, and then the code sometimes didn't work, or the door hummed so that Frau Schwermuth complained she couldn't concentrate, or it was left open, like tonight.

A glutton for work, our Eddie was. When he was dying he made his own coffin, a nice one, cherry-wood, he liked the smell, that's one of the little things that we all know about him. Another is that our joiner kept everything, as Lada and silent
Suzi are now realizing. Not because he was a sentimental man, indeed the joiner was exactly the opposite, he was an optimist. He thought he'd be able to use it all sometime, down to the last nail. His three daughters are none of them sentimental; they none of them stuck it out here, and we know we ought to put that more positively. The three of them thought their future chances would be better somewhere else, and now one of them is divorced, one is working in a
dm
drugstore, one has a son with learning difficulties, and we don't feel glad or anything nasty like that. Well, maybe we do a little, because they never came back to see their father's house, the house of their childhood, after his death, and because they told Lada everything could go, just get rid of it. Get rid of it! We didn't like their way of sticking to their point for no good reason. We didn't like their wholesale refusal to separate what was important from what wasn't important, because yes, we're sentimental, we are. The joiner had kept all that stuff for us. Materials that he was planning to make into things sometime and sell them to us, or things intended for us although so far no one wanted them, and finally things we'd broken that had ended up with him. Sometimes Eddie brought us back our own radio sets decades later, with a serious expression and not without pride. Of course we didn't want them any more, so he kept them. And were the old radios just to be thrown away now? The workshop was full of radios up to the ceiling, along with electrical goods and parts of electrical goods, plus music cassettes and video cassettes, toasters, hair dryers, old
issues of
Playboy
. Silent Suzi is astonished, his entire head plus the back of his neck, where the dragon keeps watch to make sure no harm comes to Suzi, is rigid before this infinity of raw materials, implements, tools, dust and history, our own history included, wood in all phases of its aging, cast iron, aluminium, rust, yes, there's a lot of rust. Eddie always had something better to do than tidy up. When we shot down the Yank aircraft in '45, Eddie was first on the scene, clambering up on it to pick up what he could carry—from the depths of the shed, Suzi salvages the propeller. A hundred and seventy euros per ton of mixed scrap?

No, Eddie wasn't sentimental, but we are, we're sentimental, and the Feast is a kind of deadline; our joiner liked to be active then, to the last he built the bonfire, letting him do it was something of a risk, but nothing too bad ever happened. He also had a little stall for the children, and spent all day burning their names or whatever they wanted into wood. Often they wanted an animal, and it didn't look particularly good now, but you could tell roughly what family of animal it was, usually a fish, a catfish with whiskers. Lada has a piece of wood like that at home, with
Robert likes horses
on it, which had been the case at the time. Lada remembers the tool Eddie used, if he can find it Lada has plans for the tool.

We carry Eddie's workshop round in us. In our lips when we open and close them, with its pincers. Our hearts throb to the hammer blows coming down on thousands upon thousands of nails. So much that was mended didn't stay mended.
We keep the broken bits in us, the useless things, the things that have served their purpose.

Lada and Suzi are in the house now. Plastic window frames. Man-made fabric wallpaper. Extremely colorful plush sofa. Massive farmhouse table. Homemade furniture stands next to wooden paneling from the GDR, and stuff from the cheap furnishing stores of the post-unification period. The carpets stick to the floorboards, and you can follow exactly the route the joiner and his wife and their three daughters took round the carpets in the house over the last thirty or forty years: kitchen—front hall—sofa—corridor—bedroom. The carpets smell.

The daughters are coming in the afternoon. They're staying the night in Carwitz. People say it's lovely there. They say: Hans Fallada. We say, Carwitz is in Mecklenburg, and Hans Fallada treated his wife badly.

Lada would have liked to open the workshop today for people who felt curious or sentimental, and clear it only after the Feast. The daughters wouldn't agree. Either all the stuff is gone by the weekend, they said, or we'll give someone else the job. They didn't even sound annoyed any more.

Eddie could watch Western TV before most of us had a TV set at all, but he had better things to do. Eddie was a jack of all trades. We'll be bumping into him at the Feast. Someone will say: you don't see the likes of Eddie any more these days. Of course that's not right. It's only that we won't be seeing that particular Eddie any more.

Lada and Suzi assess Eddie, figure Eddie out. Muster their arguments for negotiating with the daughters. Judge how much of Eddie can be broken up, and what they will buy from the daughters for how much. Let the Homeland House have a few things? Suzi agrees.

They put gloves on. Lada and Suzi break up Eddie. A hundred and seventy euros per ton of mixed scrap. No more sentimentality when Lada takes the first door off its hinges. He'll rope in Rico and Mustard-Micha later for the heavy things. The skip fills up, the skip may wake the neighbors or it may not. We want to see it, we won't get sentimental when Lada runs his fingers over the door to the workshop. Eddie made it himself, of course, curved sections of tropical wood, where did he get it? Probably straight from the jungle. And Lada nods, because he knows it is extremely good work, good enough for him to wonder briefly whether the door would fit into his own leisure-time cellar.

Lada measures it.

Lada and Suzi are a good team. After three hours of taking things apart and dragging them away, however, they know the job won't be done as quickly as they thought. And Suzi will soon have to go off to do one or two other things, seeing to Gölow's pigs, for instance, so they slow down, smoke outside the workshop, eat jelly bears, drink
Unforgiving
. The sun rises in the mist, Lada's angular, shaven skull is shiny with sweat. Lada stubs out his cigarette and sets off in search of the drawers containing Eddie's tools, Eddie's materials. He
finds what he needs: a tool like a soldering iron, a saw and a piece of wood, it may be maple, from which he saws a small plaque, 30 x 30 cm. Lada writes on the plaque. The point of the tool is glowing. He calls Suzi, come here a moment, holds the tip of the tool out to him, touch that. Suzi shows Lada his middle finger. Lada burns what he wrote into the wood with the tool. Suzi reads what it says and is pleased. When Suzi is pleased it looks splendid, Suzi's impressive black eyes shine, the dragon stretches in satisfaction.

The trace of the burning is dark brown on the light wood.

Lada's underarm musculature.

Lada's many talents. He could be an Eddie one of these days.

Lada's words, the words that Lada thought up.

AND HERR SCHRAMM, FORMER LIEUTENANT
-Colonel in the National People's Army, then a forester, now a pensioner and also, because the pension doesn't go far enough, moonlighting for Von Blankenburg Agricultural Machinery, is driving the Mammoth 6800 silage chopper through the village, where the majority of inhabitants are asleep, and he is driving at 40 k.p.h., and the Mammoth 6800 silage chopper isn't the quietest of machines. The Mammoth 6800 silage chopper is 350 horsepower, and that, thinks Herr Schramm, is quite enough to answer all the questions that a silage chopper can be asked in the course of its life.

The silage chopper is Herr Schramm's favorite agricultural machine. At Von Blankenburg's he was all for it from the first, you might say responsible for it. It had been Schramm who collected it from its previous owner, and the journey was a special one too. From Schwerin to Fürstenfelde, along country roads all the way on a mild spring afternoon, rapeseed in flower, insects coming to life, and Herr Schramm up in the cab, his cigarette packet almost full, maybe he'd have a beer, two at the most. Herr Schramm doesn't drink and drive.

Nice country roads, a nice speed of 30, in fact the Mammoth can easily do 50, but there's no need to go so fast on a fine spring day, it would just be gaining time.

Herr Schramm is an upright military man with poor posture. On that spring day Herr Schramm has responsibility and a purpose and in addition a talent for steering wide vehicles which he had to use often enough in his days of army service in Wegnitz, and he liked doing it when the bright young sparks of the motor division criticized the big, broad SIL truck, saying that pig of a SIL would never go through the gap. Lieutenant-Colonel Schramm would get into it, and the pig of a SIL passed neatly through the gap, even after Schramm had spent an eventful evening dancing in the barracks.

Herr Schramm smoked and looked at the fields of rapeseed, and beyond the rapeseed at the wind turbines. Wind turbines infuriated Wilfried Schramm. Not for the aesthetic reasons held by many others; aesthetic reasons are not good reasons at all. But because the rotor blades kill bats. Quarter of a million bats a year. Twelve of them per turbine.

His anger didn't last long. Herr Schramm had cigarettes and a road three meters wide, he blinked the indicator when the road ahead was clear for drivers to overtake him.

Built in the year 1994. Four-wheel drive. Air conditioning. Kemper chopper head. Herr Schramm helped to get the Mammoth into shape. Helped? Initiated the process, delegated some of it, lent a hand himself. Overhauled the electrics of the reversing and grinding units. Carefully repainted the flaking paint, sky-blue. Built in a radio. But you can't do anything about 4,000 working hours on the clock. There were newer,
better, more sophisticated models than the Mammoth 6800 now. No buyer was found, even after the price was cut.

Herr Schramm is a loyal man, but not clingy. What you have you have, what you can't have, you can't have. But when he had heard the day before yesterday that there was a buyer after all, and he of all people was delivering the Mammoth to the buyer in Neubrandenburg on Monday, it cannot be said that Herr Schramm exactly jumped for joy.

Herr Schramm sits in the sky-blue cab of his Mammoth 6800 thinking, what do I mean, why am I calling it
my
Mammoth? The Mammoth rattles and bleats its way along the roads at the end of the night. Anna is sitting beside the tall man, bobbing about like a Christmas tree decoration.

Herr Schramm is a critical man. He has objections to easy access to such things as weapons, pornography, political parties and cigarette machines. Herr Schramm thinks of Martina (nineteen, Czech Republic). Manicure! That's what it's called, that's the word. Martina had well-manicured fingernails.

With a skillful turn, Herr Schramm brings the Mammoth to a halt beside the cigarette vending machine. The Mammoth and Anna breathe a sigh of relief. Anna asks what is going to happen now, but she has a good idea what will happen now. They have hardly spoken since leaving the Schwermuths, Schramm gave monosyllabic answers to Anna's questions, so after a while Anna stopped asking them and just trotted along with him to the place where the agricultural machinery was
parked, feeling helpless yet somehow not helpless, because she was still with him and he was still with her.

“Right,” says Herr Schramm. He makes the 350 horsepower engine roar. It wasn't really necessary, but it sounds good if you like the noise. “Here we go.”

Herr Schramm rams the cigarette machine.

Anna squeals a little, but just because of the jolt.

Herr Schramm goes into reverse. When the Mammoth 6800 is reversing, you usually hear that beep-beep sound. He has disabled it, he doesn't want to warn anyone. “Right,” says Herr Schramm, and he rams the cigarette machine again, and this time the bar in front of it gradually gives way, bending, and Anna screams but also laughs a little, because how could you not laugh?

Herr Schramm rams the cigarette machine, and it's not just the horsepower, although of course that does its bit, but also—one would have to reckon on that—several tons of weight exerting persuasive influence on that little bar, and if one thing is clear, then this is it: in the long run a cigarette machine like that doesn't have a chance against Herr Schramm and a silage chopper with a Kemper chopper head, and the fifth or sixth time that metal meets metal it works. The bar breaks like a bar breaking, and the machine falls to the ground like a machine falling to the ground. Well, there aren't many similes available; it doesn't happen very often.