In Times of Fading Light (32 page)

When her warm face lay on his stomach later, and he felt her breath in his pubic hair, he was slightly embarrassed about that touch of brutality. He spent a long time stroking Vera’s back and wondering about her puzzling readiness, over so many years, to be available to him now and then. For some reason he seemed to have a meal ticket with Vera—an expression that reminded him of his Egg Disaster with the fried potatoes sticking to the pan before the party, and of Irina’s disinclination ever to cook him fried potatoes. Well, if his meal ticket with Vera was also a literal one, why not? He was hungry now.

“Could you cook me some fried potatoes?” he asked.

“Sure,” Vera had said, and she had gotten out of bed and gone into the kitchen.

Now there was a smell of fried potatoes: a childhood smell. Kurt closed his eyes, and within fractions of a second the smell catapulted him back to his parents’ bedroom, where (although it wasn’t allowed) he had hidden under the quilt. He almost thought he could hear his mother’s voice.

“Are you coming, Kurt?”

He opened his eyes. Spent a second thinking in amazement of the curious situations in which he found himself after nearly seventy years of life. Sat on the edge of the bed. Put on his underpants. Pulled a black and no longer very clean sock over his left foot. And suddenly knew, indeed knew at the very moment when he was looking vaguely for the other sock, the one for his right foot,
that the time had come.

There was no reason to hold back now. No reason to waste his time on matters of minor importance: reviews for the
Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft,
articles in
Neues Deutschland
when some historic jubilee or other came up ... he would even back down from his work for the anthology which, as it was to contain contributions from both East and West Germany, came with the distinctly enticing prospect of a conference in Saarbrücken—he’d cite health reasons for backing out, that would be best—and sit down at his desk first thing tomorrow to begin writing his memoirs, beginning (and he knew that at once, too) with the August day in 1936 when, standing beside Werner on the deck of the ferry, he watched the Warnemünde lighthouse pale in the early morning mist.

“Are you coming?” called Vera.

“Yes,” said Kurt.

The damp air made him shiver ... And he could still feel the tape keeping the Soviet entry visa, folded very small, stuck to the inside of his right thigh.

If anyone had asked Irina about the source of the apricots that she needed for stuffing her Monastery Goose, she could have answered in one short sentence: the apricots came from the supermarket.

The grapes also came from the supermarket. The figs came from the supermarket. The pears, the quinces, everything came from the supermarket. In those circumstances, thought Irina, no skill at all was required to cook a Monastery Goose. You could even get sweet chestnuts in the supermarket, peeled and cooked and ready to use, and although last year she had still resisted the very idea of buying sweet chestnuts, this time she had resorted to them—why give herself unnecessary work? Yet it was a small detail that put Irina off her stroke for a split second, because normally the first thing she did was to turn the oven on for the chestnuts, and while she waited for it to heat up, she made crosswise slits in their shells ... A mistake. She turned the oven off again and began preparing the fruit for the stuffing.

It was just after two. Melted snow dripped with a regular tick-tick sound on the zinc-clad window sills. The news from German Radio was coming over the radio set in the kitchen. They were talking about the imminent dissolution of the Soviet Union.

Irina peeled the quinces thinly and then cut them into cubes about a centimeter square. The quinces were hard, her fingers hurt. It was in weather like this that her joints were always most painful: her back, her hands ... And who knew, thought Irina, as the talking heads on the radio went on again about the mountainous Karabakh region of Azerbaijan, where the Armenians (whom Irina regarded as a great cultural people, not only because of their excellent cognac) had killed twenty civilians last night, who knew what other damage she had suffered: think of the timber preservative she had breathed in. The dust from insulation, they said these days, was carcinogenic ... and it had all been for nothing.

Irina spread her fingers out a couple of times and reminded herself of her resolution not to think of any of that today—a resolution that wasn’t easy to keep when you’d gone to open the mailbox in the morning with a queasy sensation in your stomach, checking through the mail at once to see if anything in it looked like a letter from the courthouse ... stupid, yes, of course. And it had been stupid not to buy the house outright. On the other hand, would the municipal housing administration authority have sold it anyway? Should she have asked? No one had asked. All the houses around here had belonged to the municipal housing administration, and no one (apart from that oddity Harry Zenk) had thought of buying the house where he already lived: why bother, when you were paying a mere hundred and twenty marks or so in rent?

And there she went again, launched on her game of
if:
if I had, if I were to have, if only I’d done this, that, or the other. A cognac would do me good, thought Irina, while the Bundestag decided on a law to introduce maternal allowances into what they called the
new Federal provinces
—that meant them, here in the East, a strange form of words that had only recently surfaced. As if those “new” parts of Germany had just been discovered, like Columbus discovering a New World in America ... yes, a cognac would do me good now, she thought, to keep her mind from dwelling on the same ideas ... but she had made a resolution not to drink today, and not just because of Charlotte, whom she would have to fetch from the nursing home later. And after that the children were coming, Sasha with that girl Catrin. So she’d have to be sober, if she wanted to avoid another argument.

As a substitute, she lit a cigarette. The familiar sound of the beeps came over the radio, and Irina stopped to listen ... silly habit. Like any normal person, she used to ignore the traffic bulletins. But since Sasha had been living in that place Moers—a name that in Irina’s ears sounded like
myoers,
meaning “froze” in Russian—since he had been living in that place Moers she had begun listening to the traffic news, because to her surprise, that place Moers did get a mention in the bulletins now and then:
On the A57 from Nijmegen to Cologne: a five-kilometer backup between Kamp-Lintfort and the Moers autobahn interchange
—such bulletins made her feel that Sasha still existed. And even today, when Sasha was on his way here, driving to Neuendorf, she tried to work out from the place-names how late he would be, and sent tiny prayers up to heaven whenever an accident somewhere was mentioned.

She had really hoped that the fall of the Wall would bring Sasha back somewhere close to her again. That had been her first thought when she saw the people weeping in each other’s arms on TV, and she had been annoyed with Kurt, who sat looking at the screen in silence the whole time, filling pipe after pipe with tobacco. She had shed tears, fighting off the idiotic idea that all this was happening just for her benefit.

But instead of coming back, Sasha had moved even farther away. Instead of returning to Berlin, where incredible things were going on, instead of taking part in them, instead of seizing his chance, he moved to Moers ... imagine what he might have become in Berlin, thought Irina. It hurt her to see the pitiful figures who appeared on TV these days, while Sasha was in that place Moers somewhere on the Dutch border. A place that even Kurt didn’t know... and why? Because Catrin had an engagement at the theater in Moers! What a flimsy reason, thought Irina.

But after the argument when they last visited, in the summer, she was determined to say no more on that subject. The short time that Sasha would spend in Neuendorf was too precious to be wasted quarreling. These days she should be glad he was coming at all. Last year, just before Christmas, the two of them had said they wouldn’t be here, they were flying to the Canaries for the holiday season—what an odd notion—and Irina had spent Christmas alone with Kurt and Charlotte. This year, however, she was determined to have a proper Christmas Day again. Who knew, it might be for the last time in this house. But she wasn’t going to say anything about that, she had resolved, not this evening.

She would cook her Monastery Goose, the same as ever. There would be homemade stollen with the coffee. And when the Christmas goose was all gone, and the stollen was eaten, thought Irina as she cut up the dried figs and apricots, when the political discussions had died down, and the unwrapping of presents was over, when she had put the china in water to soak and taken Charlotte back to the nursing home, then, thought Irina, she would allow herself a cognac—just one!—and enjoy the hour that was always the best part of Christmas, the hour when it was all over, when they sank into the comfortable chairs in the seating corner, and Kurt began puffing away at his vanilla-scented tobacco, when they had amused themselves sufficiently over the evening’s catastrophes both large and small, and the men finally rolled up their sleeves and played a game or two of chess ...

Dismal church music began droning away on the radio. Irina turned the volume down, but didn’t switch the radio off to be on the safe side, although of course it was pure superstition to fear that something might happen to Sasha if she stopped listening to the traffic bulletins. She drew deeply a couple of times on her cigarette, which was only just glowing in the ashtray, then carefully stubbed it out. Then she melted some butter in a medium-sized pan, tossed in the chopped fruit, and added a shot of cognac. A waft of sweet aroma rose to her nostrils, and it was the smell of—
whisky. Tchyort poberí!

Baffled, Irina looked at the bottle. She had bought it specially for Christmas evening, standing for a good ten minutes in front of the shelf. She still wasn’t accustomed to the confusing array of different brands on offer. The one thing you couldn’t get these days—and this, too, was strange—was Armenian cognac. Although you could get French cognac, and Greek, Spanish, Italian, and Austrian cognac, and cognac from heaven knows where else. After much wavering, she had finally decided on a particularly expensive Indian cognac, something special, she had thought, for the holiday season—and now it turned out to be whisky!

She tasted the fruit and whisky mixture—the flavor was not bad, but peculiar. All she could do was pour the delicious liquid, made particularly fruity by the halved fresh grapes, carefully into a jar (there wasn’t all that much of it, but it might come in useful for something) and toss the fruits in the pan again—but what with? Rum might do, thought Irina. At least for the stuffing of the goose. She would get by with port wine and honey for the decoction.

She let the fruits steep in rum for five minutes. Now she turned to the goose: took out the giblets, placed them in a bowl, washed the goose, patted it dry with paper towels—ah, paper towels, the invention that made the fall of the Wall worthwhile, was Kurt’s little joke these days. She cut off the superfluous fat, removed the sebaceous gland, pierced the goose under the wings with a skewer and rubbed it with salt, inside and out. Then she stuffed it and sewed the bird up, a performance that for some time now, or to be precise since her hysterectomy, had unfortunate associations for her ... but she wasn’t going to think about that, either.

Now she had forgotten to preheat the oven. She lit the gas, put more water on to heat, using the same match, and burnt her fingers slightly when, still with the same match, she lit herself a cigarette. Then, at her leisure, she examined the bottle that she had bought by mistake:
Single Malt,
said the label, not a word about whisky—or at least, the lettering was so small that she couldn’t read it without glasses. Well, she must at least find out what the stuff tasted like neat. Just as she was raising the bottle to her lips, she saw Kurt in the doorway.

“I’m only tasting it,” said Irina.

By way of proof she held up the bottle, but as she had already used some for the stuffing a fair amount was missing.

“Oh, wonderful.” said Kurt. “Then I suppose I’ll have to go and fetch Charlotte now.”

“Wait a minute, I’ll just put the goose in the oven and then I’ll drive down to collect her,” said Irina.

Kurt held up one hand, dismissing the idea. “I’ll take a taxi.”

“I haven’t been drinking,” Irina said again.

“We won’t have any argument about it,” said Kurt. “I’m going to fetch her now. Just one thing I’d like to ask you, Irushka: please stop drinking. The children are coming today ...”

“I am not drinking!”

“Good,” said Kurt. “Then that’s all right!” And he left the kitchen.

Irina poured hot water to two fingers’ height into the roasting dish, put the goose into it, covered the dish with its lid and put it in the oven, setting the kitchen timer to an hour and a half. Then she stripped the outer leaves off the red cabbage, took the big knife, and cut it in half with a mighty blow. And then she picked up the mixture of fruit juice and whisky—and drank it. First, it wasn’t really alcohol. And second, she was cross.

She picked up the big knife again and began slicing the red cabbage thinly... oh yes, she was cross! Not just because he implied that she was drinking—that too, of course. But also because of that reproachful, hurt tone of voice ... as if it were some kind of imposition for him to go and collect his mother. And she, Irina, had a guilty conscience herself! But Charlotte was
his
mother! Why was it taken for granted that
she
would drive to the nursing home? Just because Kurt couldn’t drive a car? If you took that line of reasoning, he couldn’t do anything ... and that was a fact.

Kurt didn’t bother about anything, thought Irina, cutting up red cabbage. Of course, it had been the same in the past, but it was worse these days. She could understand that everything agitated him. He was fighting against the “liquidation” as they called it now, of his institute. He was always out and about. Went to Berlin more often than before, he had even been to Moscow once because an archive of some kind was suddenly accessible. He wrote letters and articles all the time. Had bought himself a new typewriter specially: an electric typewriter! Four hundred marks! Kurt, who had to be forced to buy himself a pair of shoes, had spent
four hundred Western marks
on a typewriter—while she still felt bad about paying with this valuable new money for things like butter and rolls ...

And yet it wasn’t even clear how much of a pension Kurt would get now, after the changeover. Not to mention her own pension. All of a sudden she was supposed to produce records of her employment from Slava: talk about bureaucracy! And she had always thought the GDR was bureaucratic ... Presumably she wouldn’t get her supplementary pension now, either (the GDR had granted her a pension as what they called a victim of Nazi persecution, to make up for the honorary pension she would have received in the Soviet Union as a “war veteran”). She could hardly suppose that the West German authorities would reward her for having fought against Germany in the Red Army ... and if they lost the house now, too, that was it. Even if they were allowed to go on living here after the “reassignment”—another of those words that had come into use with the fall of the Wall—they would hardly be able to pay the rent indefinitely. And the irony of it was that she herself, by extending the attic and building on the room for Nadyeshda Ivanovna, had almost doubled the living space of the house—and thus the rent that could be expected for it.

She poured herself another tiny sip. The alcohol would have worked its way through her system long before she had to take Charlotte back to the nursing home. Just one sip more! Then she would put the bottle back in the pantry—promise! But she needed that one more sip now: the idea of strange people moving in here sometime, maybe soon, ate away at her guts. And almost worse than the idea that they would be shameless enough to take over everything, just as it was, was the thought that the new owners might tear it all down, because East German stuff wasn’t good enough for them. She saw her kitchen tiles already lying on the scrap heap ... oh, how well she remembered picking up those tiles in her trailer in a backyard somewhere, in the pouring rain ... She remembered the sly face of the janitor who had “appropriated” the mixer faucets from some quota supplied to the district authorities ... she remembered everything, and she remembered, as she took what was really going to be her very last sip from the bottle, what Kurt had said to her two weeks ago: