In Times of Fading Light (15 page)

She saw Markus giving his great-grandfather a present, they said something to each other, then the boy began saying hello to the people at the table, and as he came gradually closer Nadyeshda Ivanovna summoned up all her linguistic knowledge so that she could at least greet her great-grandson in German, for safety’s sake she said the word to herself a few times before he was finally beside her, offering his hand like a good boy, it was a fragile and delicate hand, its pressure was weak, but he had a fine face, his forehead was high, and his dark curls reminded Nadyeshda Ivanovna very much of Sasha.

“Affeederseyn,”
said Nadyeshda Ivanovna.

Her great-grandson looked at her in surprise, then looked at his mother and laughed.

“Auf Wiedersehen,”
said Markus.

And then he was gone. Removed his delicate hand cautiously but firmly from hers, and disappeared.

Nadyeshda Ivanovna looked at her hand, it suddenly seemed to her as if she’d hurt him with that coarse, worn-out, potato-harvesting hand, that sawmill hand, she looked at the alarming veins standing out on the back of her hand, the wrinkled skin on the knuckles, the fingernails left all knobbly by injuries large and small, the scars and pores and folds and the palm of her hand furrowed by hundreds of lines. In a way, she could even understand that he didn’t want a hand like that taking hold of him.

Then the rasping German sounds died down. Nadyeshda Ivanovna looked up; a man with a red folder appeared, she knew at once that he was the man who’d come to give Wilhelm his order, he got an order almost every year, it was an act of state, and there was a paper with it saying what he was being awarded the order for. The man now read it out from the red folder that he was holding open in his hand, Nadyeshda Ivanovna listened reverently, even if she couldn’t understand the details she got the general drift, she knew this was about important things, she leaned back in her armchair, her eyes wandering to the big window while the speaker told the story of Wilhelm’s life, dusk was falling, the only daylight left was in the treetops, the leaves in the crowns of the trees danced soundlessly around one another, and Nadyeshda Ivanovna thought she caught a breath of evening air, the coolness on her face that you feel when you had raked up the embers, turned away, and trudged home over the suddenly dark potato field... Soon, after the harvest, it was Nina’s birthday, in mid-October, sometimes snow had already fallen, but it wasn’t cold yet and there was a good atmosphere, they’d all brought in their potatoes, it was time to celebrate, the day before they’d made pelmeni together, and then there was singing and dancing and then singing again when everyone had had a little drink, they sang the sad songs, then they all shed tears and fell into each other’s arms, ah well, and then there was more dancing, it was like that in Slava, thought Nadyeshda Ivanovna, and she almost forgot to clap when the speech was over and the man giving the order pinned it on Wilhelm.

Then those German sounds were rasping away again, they rasped and jabbered past her ears, but that didn’t bother her now, the schnapps had settled, her body felt warm and her heart felt light, and in her mind she was in Slava, in her mind she was walking along Bolshaya Lesnaya and saw it all very clearly: the iron-ore red of the straight gravel road that, when you looked along the road, ended in the pale yellow of a grove of birch trees far away in the distance; the ditches beside the road where pigs wallowed; the well and the wooden sidewalks; the fences as tall as a man, with single-story wooden houses concealed behind them, and one of those houses had once been hers. Oh yes, a long time ago, she remembered, when her hand had still been young and delicate, as young and delicate as the hand of her great-grandson Markus, and a wise woman had read her future in that delicate and barely legible hand and foretold prosperity and good luck for her—and that was how it had turned out. She had had a house of her own, a little farm of her own, even a cow in the end, a cow with a coat patched brown and white, and she had called the cow Marfa in honor of her mother, who hadn’t lived to see it.

Yes, it was all perfectly simple. She’d go to Slava for Nina’s birthday, she had the visa. She’d sit in the kitchen with Nina, spooning up curdled milk. They’d make pelmeni together, and then they would celebrate, all of them who were still left. And then she’d die, just like that, it was perfectly simple. She would die there in her native land, she would be buried there, where else, how lucky, she thought as the German noises jabbered in her ears, how lucky that it had occurred to her here and now, at Wilhelm’s birthday party, but she didn’t tell anyone, she wasn’t that stupid, and she would change the money she kept in her pillow into rubles.

“
Nu davai,”
she said to the man with the sad eyes, pushing her little green metal cup over to him.

The man with the sad eyes poured Nadyeshda Ivanovna another nip, and laughed.

“Nadyeshda Ivanovna,” said the man.

“
Da zdravstvuyet,”
cried the moist-handed man.

“
Bogh s toboyu,”
said Nadyeshda Ivanovna, and she tossed the nip of schnapps down her throat in a single draft.

They had come out of Russia ten years ago to the month. The same milky white sky had covered the fields, here and there, if you looked closely, buds were already sprouting, but from a distance the landscape had been just as colorless as it was today, the towns and villages just as sparsely populated, and Kurt remembered staring through the window of the minibus at
that out there,
allegedly his native land.

They had had gold teeth made for them with the last of their money, one incisor each, so as to look right in Germany. They had packed their best clothes in an extra case, planning to change into them, after days of rail travel, only just before they arrived, but even as Kurt got out of the train and saw Charlotte and Wilhelm standing on the platform, he struck himself as a shabby sight in his carefully mended jacket and wide-legged pants, the garments that he had thought perfectly all right just a moment ago. Wilhelm had booked a minibus, obviously expecting them to bring vast quantities of baggage, but when they had sorted out their things back in Slava almost nothing seemed suitable for life in Germany, and their goods and chattels shrank to the contents of two small suitcases and one rucksack—in the end he had brought even less out of the Soviet Union than he took into it twenty years before, aged fifteen.

He had been thirty-five when he came back, and although, as reparations of a kind, he immediately got a post at the Academy of Sciences (the “real” academy, as Kurt liked to emphasize, clearly distinguishing it from the Neuendorf Academy), his new start had been anything but easy. He was probably the oldest candidate for a doctoral degree the Institute of History there had ever had. After twenty years in Russia, his German had something of a foreign accent. He didn’t know what was permissible or when you could laugh. Coming from a world where people greeted one another with an amicable “Morning, motherfucker!” he had no instinctive sense of the way to approach distinguished personages, let alone of the fine web of alliances and animosities in socialist academia. For a whole year a colleague of longer standing thought it best to keep Kurt occupied translating texts from Russian. And even three years later, he had still gone to Moscow with his boss chiefly as the latter’s interpreter.

Well, he had been back to Moscow again now. And although the city had never seemed to him so dirty, rough, and stressful as this time—the long journeys, the drunks, the ever-present “duty officers” with their morose expressions, even the famous Metro, of which he had always been a little proud because, as a young man, he had worked on building it when he did
subbotniks,
days of voluntary labor, even that had gotten on his nerves, what with the cramped spaces, the noise, the guillotine-like action of the automatic doors as they snapped shut (and why was the damn Metro almost
a hundred meters
underground, and why, even more surprising, had he not asked himself that question at the time?), while he had dropped his camera on the ground in Red Square, and in Novodevichy cemetery, which he had visited out of a sense of duty because he had once been there with Irina to bow before the tombs of Chekhov and Mayakovsky, a cold rain had fallen on him, April rain such as fell only in Moscow, enough to kill you—well, although all that had been unpleasant and repellent, he couldn’t deny the satisfaction that he had felt in the respect suddenly shown to him in this country, ten years later: an ex-convict, sentenced to “eternal exile.”

Last time he had still had to share his hotel room with a Romanian colleague. This time he had actually been met at the airport, he had a double room in the Hotel Peking all to himself although, idiotically, it had no bathroom (typical of the grand hotels of the Stalin era). The famous Yerusalimsky had shown enthusiasm for his new book, had introduced him everywhere as
the
expert in his field, and finally even took him personally on a tour of the city, and Kurt had taken a mischievous pleasure in not showing how well he knew it all: Manezhnaya Square, the Hotel Metropol, and oh yes, just fancy that, the Lubyanka ...

It was only that hanky-panky over the woman doctoral student that he ought to have avoided, thought Kurt as the Trabi made its way with a melodious murmur through a nondescript little town (since Kurt usually traveled by rail, he still couldn’t tell the places on the southern bypass of Berlin apart very well). It was stupid, he thought, indulging in such things among colleagues. What was more, it wasn’t as if the woman had been particularly attractive, she was even—by comparison with Irina—humiliatingly unattractive, but she had that certain look about her, that wide-eyed glance, and Kurt was bowled over; he simply couldn’t help it. Kurt wondered, not for the first time, whether his weakness for women was to be explained by
circumstances,
i.e., the fact that he had spent most of his youth in the camp—this was the view that, as a Marxist, he was more inclined to take—or whether it was
congenital,
and he had in fact inherited it from his birth father, whom Charlotte described as a terrible womanizer.

“Now then, tell me,” Irina demanded. “What was it like?”

“Strenuous,” said Kurt.

Which was the truth.

It was also true that he had worked in the archives every day. And that he had had to deliver a lecture off the cuff at the symposium. That the publishing firm had paid him an advance, and the editorial office of the magazines had asked him for an article. That Yerusalimsky had invited him to dinner and taken him on a tour of the city—all that was also the truth, and as he described it he almost began to persuade himself that with so much else going on there hadn’t been time for any hanky-panky at all.

It was true, as well, that he had felt yearnings. And that he had been lonely among all the well-disposed people, none of whom he knew well enough even to venture on alluding to the questions that troubled him—for instance, how far, in the opinion of his colleagues, re-Stalinization threatened the Soviet Union now that the buffoonish yet somehow likeable reformer Nikita Khrushchev (without whom he, Kurt, would still be at the back of beyond in the Urals, an eternal exile) had been replaced as head of the Party.

“And I went to the Novodevichy convent,” he said.

And Irina said, in her still strong Russian accent, “Light me a cigarette, will you?” To which Kurt replied, imitating it, “Right you are, a ssigaryayte.”

He lit two cigarettes, one for Irina, one for himself. Inhaling the smoke, he now really did feel the exhaustion that he had conjured up in telling the tale of his strenuous visit to Moscow. It even made him shiver. Already slightly aroused, he looked at his humiliatingly attractive wife, and thought of the evening ahead of him.

Sasha had preferred to stay at home. Once he’d have missed no opportunity of a drive to the airport, but his phase of wanting to be an aircraft builder was over. Instead, he was now tape-recording newfangled music broadcast by the American radio station in Berlin and hanging around until dusk fell with dubious friends, including a precocious girl from the parallel class, some of whose family were social misfits, and who already, at the age of twelve, had quite a pair of breasts under her grubby blue sweater.

Similarly, Sasha reacted with only qualified pleasure to the little present that Kurt had brought him back from Moscow—it was Yuri Gagarin’s
Moya doroga v kosmos,
“My Way to the Cosmos.”

“Thank you very much,” he said indifferently, without even looking at the book.

He would give the boy more of his attention, Kurt decided. His Russian was increasingly rusty these days, and his schoolwork also left much to be desired. Recently he had brought home the low mark of a three—a three! Only “satisfactory.” Kurt couldn’t remember ever having had a three himself. A three, thought Kurt, verged on the improper.

He had looked in vain for a present for Irina in Moscow. What could anyone bring her back? She was as good as allergic to anything associated with Russian folklore, and anyway, as Kurt had discovered, there was really nothing nice to be had in the land of the Great Socialist October Revolution, so at the last moment he had bought a bottle of Sovietskoye Shampanskoye, which he unpacked, with profuse apologies, when Sasha was in bed. Then he took a hot bath, Irina opened the Shampanskoye, and once they were slightly tipsy revealed her surprise: the bedroom was finished. He had guessed it already, but it amazed him, and yet again he felt indebted to Irina. It was a mystery: for five years he had been convinced that she was going too far with her conversion of the house; for five years he had tried to restrict it to the necessities, and to be perfectly honest he would really have liked just to paint the whole place and stop at that. He was a man in a hurry! Time was running away from him, and his life had been late getting started. He’d had panic attacks at night. It had frightened him when Irina simply had walls demolished, when he saw the pipes and the wiring hanging out, all the stuff that had to go back inside the walls again somehow. He had also been known to march out of the house slamming the door behind him when he found that Irina had been spending vast sums because she had to have
this
door,
this
wood,
this
shade of red, but in the end, he had to admit, Irina had somehow been right after all, even if, and this was the real mystery, she had always been wrong on the details.

It was a wonderful, beautiful bedroom. Basically quite plain: nothing in it but the bed, a simple undivided double bed, the kind of thing that wasn’t to be had in the whole of the GDR, and the old wardrobe, which had just made Kurt laugh at first. The carpeted floor was white, and so were the walls, except for the carmine wall at the head of the bed, and on this wall, flanked by two lights, hung a huge oval mirror in a broad, ornate gilt frame. The steep angle at which it was tilted over the bed could leave no one in any doubt of its purpose.

“What do you suppose the workmen thought?” murmured Kurt.

“They’ll have thought correctly,” said Irina, guiding his hand under her skirt, where Kurt felt, between her panties and her stockings, bare skin rising in a plump curve.

“Crazy,” said Kurt later, when they were lying on the bed side by side. Just now when, pleasantly tipsy from the champagne, they had somehow been intertwined on top of and inside each other, he had felt for moments that he was double—not merely seeing himself double,
really
double. For moments, he told Irina, he had seemed to have more than two arms and two legs, and more than only one
khui
—for talking sexy they spoke Russian.

And Irina, as her orgasm was still ebbing away, wound her legs around him and whispered in his ear, “I think I ought to ask my friend Vera along sometime ...”

Next morning Kurt was late getting up, not until eight. It was Sunday, and Kurt—bringing all his powers of self-discipline to bear—had accustomed himself over the years to
not
working on a Sunday. He had even learned to look forward to Sundays without work.

He entered the kitchen in pajamas and bathrobe, stood there and declaimed, with great feeling, the quatrain that he always used to compose while shaving on a Sunday to amuse his family. Today’s ran:

Sasha made a face. Irina smiled in silence as she poured Kurt a cup of chamomile tea. She insisted on his having a cup of tea to settle his stomach, before he drank any coffee, and Kurt went along with that.

Over breakfast Irina told him she’d have to go out today: Gojkovic, the Yugoslavian actor who took the leading part in the Western movie that DEFA Studios was making, was coming to Berlin.

Kurt swallowed. Crumbs of white toast scratched his throat. Ever since Irina had started working at DEFA—as
what
he had no real idea—she had taken to disappointing him like this quite often. Apparently hers was a part-time job, but in fact she frequently worked into the night or on weekends, and all for nothing, because ultimately she frittered away more money than she earned, thought Kurt. But he didn’t say so. Took a mouthful of coffee to wash the crumbs down. Yes, of course Irina had a right to work. Although it was highly unusual work, sitting around in the DEFA guesthouse with actors of some kind, drinking vodka, or driving about town with that Indian chief. Kurt had seen a photo of him: a muscleman. Got himself photographed bare to the waist, would you believe it?

“Lunch is on the stove,” said Irina. “I’ll be home at four.”

After Irina had gone, Kurt went into his study, still in his pajamas and bathrobe. He turned up the heating and sat on the radiator. As he felt the increasing heat on his buttocks (yes, the gas-fired heating had been another good idea!) he looked at the imported Swedish built-in wall unit, with its bookshelves, which Irina had obtained for him by dint of some unfathomable and, he only hoped, not criminal transactions. For five years he had dragged his books from room to room in crates. Now they stood there in perfect order, a sight that always gratified Kurt, only all of a sudden it was not clear to Kurt why he had put Krikhatzky’s Latin primer next to his own works—shabby little volume that it was, he had taken it around with him in the camp for ten years. He took the book out, but then didn’t know where to put it (couldn’t be classified with any reference subject or any period), so he put it back again.

Then he took out the lectures and journals of his colleagues in Moscow, the notes of phone numbers and addresses, the usual stuff you brought back from a trip of that kind, most of it naturally garbage, and although he had conscientiously entered most of the phone numbers in his own telephone book he would never call them; most of the typescripts of lectures would lie around his study for a while until, after giving them a stay of execution for the sake of appearances, he threw them away. Kurt put aside the photocopies he had had made for him in the archives—and threw all the rest into the wastebasket. Picked the note of addresses and phone numbers out again, began sorting them. Suddenly found himself holding a number with no name beside it, it took him a few seconds to realize whose number it was ... and was tempted for a moment to call it in revenge for Gojkovic—but then he remembered yesterday evening, the gilt-framed mirror, his wonderful self-duplication, and the promise that Irina had breathed into his ear, immediately associating itself with an image that now rose before his mind’s eye again—just at the moment when the doorbell rang.