In Times of Fading Light (34 page)

“I’ll do it,” said Irina. She didn’t add: they’re Thuringian dumplings. Better to avoid such difficult words. Instead, she said: “It’s half and half ... but a little more of one than ...”

“I know,” said Catrin. “How many raw potatoes did you put in it?” How many raw potatoes?

“It’ll be about five or six,” said Catrin, picking up the grater. “My word, but this is complicated ...”

Catrin spoke fast, much too fast, and it was a while before Irina could take in the soft, scurrying syllables and put them together again. When she had put them together again, they went like this:

“You know ... you can buy ready-to-use dumpling mix. Honestly ... it’s not so bad ... would you like me to write down the brand name?”

Irina snatched the grater out of Catrin’s hand.

“Sorry,” said Catrin. “I didn’t mean to ... I mean, just because of all the work.”

Irina said, “I. Will. Do. It.”

Only when Catrin had left the kitchen did Irina notice that she was still holding the big meat knife.

She put the knife away. Propped herself on the sink for a moment. If you breathed right in, it didn’t hurt so much. Irina breathed right in. But now she heard the men’s voices again.

You didn’t serve a long enough sentence, that’s what it is! They ought to have given you another ten years!

The giblets were beginning to dance before her eyes.

You haven’t the faintest idea what capitalism means!

Irina looked at the wall tiles, trying to concentrate on the joins where they met.

Capitalism is murderous,
shouted Kurt.
Capitalism is poisonous! Capitalism will consume the whole earth ...

Irina breathed out again. Sixteen hours, said the radio. This is German Radio, the time is sixteen hours. The Soviet Union was being dissolved for the third time. All the same, she wondered a bit. About the weather.

Eighty million dead,
shouted Sasha.
Eighty million!

Had that been her? Her hands? Her belly? For the homeland, for Stalin. Shit. If she could only ... breathe in all the time.

Two billion,
shouted Kurt.

First she tipped the stuff away in the garbage: the potatoes. Then she put the thingummy on. But the bottle was heavy ... pick it up in the oven mitt. To the homeland! To Stalin! To everyone who had let her down!

Yes, the children in Africa,
bellowed Kurt.
What’s so funny about that?

She took the goose out of the oven. Goose, silly goose. There it lay. The stitches had come open, there was a gaping hole. Hurt when she reached into it. Get the mushy stuff out, without oven mitt. The stuffing. Was hot. But never mind ... couldn’t be helped. She breathed in. But the giblets were perfectly cold. She took hold of it all. All at once. Stuffed it back in. Silly goose. And still had her hand in it, the cold stuff in her hand, hot outside, cold inside ... when everything began sliding. The whole kitchen. The tiles. And dancing. Only now it was the floor tiles.

Catrin took her under the armpits.

“Don’t touch me,” said Irina.

“Irina,” said Catrin.

And then it came out, the dregs. Came out of its own accord. An outcry coming out of its own accord. The tiny bit of dregs, sticking to what she shouted.

“Don’t touch me, you sow!”

Then the floor came closer again. The tiles. Dancing. But the goose lay still. After a while. Lay still on the tiles. Goose, silly goose. With a hole in the middle of it.

“Oh. So that’s it,” said Sasha.

Must stitch it up again, thought Irina.

As always when he came home on Friday at the end of the week, he was the first. As a result he was the one who found the letter with the black border in the post, addressed to Melitta and Markus Umnitzer, although Melitta’s surname had been Greve for the past three years (she had taken Klaus’s name, so Markus was the only Umnitzer in their new so-called family).

He noticed the letter at once because it had such a distinguished look. He didn’t know whether he would be justified in opening it, so he bent it in half and put it in the back pocket of his jeans. He had something more urgent to do first.

He flung his dirty washing down in the bathroom, raced up to his room and unpacked the sound card that he had bought at the computer store in Cottbus. To be on the safe side, he tore up the packaging right away and buried it in the bottom layers of his wastebasket (Muddel thought everything to do with computers was a silly waste of time). Then he opened up the side of his tower PC, which was held in place by a screw as a makeshift, pushed the card into the corresponding slot, linked it by cable (small plug, plugboard) to his stereo amplifier, booted up the computer, and tried the sound card out by playing a round of the DOOM game: wicked! The stertorous roar of the monsters was so real it was scary. You heard the sound of the shotgun being fired and reloaded, the gurgling as the monsters collapsed when they were hit. Markus went up to the next level and then failed several times in tackling a room full of demons from hell; you had to fetch a key from the room to get any further with the game.

All of a sudden it was five thirty. Muddel usually got back from Berlin around six. Now that you couldn’t earn anything with pottery, she was working as a psychiatrist again in the floristic psychology department or whatever it was called (something to do with loopy criminals), and Markus wanted to be gone before she came in. He found food to be warmed up in the fridge, but unfortunately there was also a note beside the stove with a whole list of chores that Muddel wanted him to do. He decided not to touch the food and not to have seen the note beside the stove. He cut two thick slices of bread, put cheese on them, and as he ate the bread and cheese searched his room in vain for the dope that he had stashed away somewhere in the chaos last weekend. Then it was getting dangerously close to six, so he put a bit of gel on his hair and left the house.

Since the fall of the Wall (or at the latest a year or so after it), Grosskrienitz suburban rail station had been brought back into working order. It was less than forty minutes to get to Berlin city center, and less than twenty to the Gropiusstadt district—and Frickel. The funny thing was that Gropiusstadt, which Markus had once admired from a distance, now suddenly turned out to be a rather down-market place to live, while Grosskrienitz had turned into a posh Berlin suburb, and the house that Muddel had once bought on the cheap with East German money had turned out to be a very profitable investment. When Klaus moved in here, they had had it entirely renovated, with a green roof and all the extras. Money was no object, because suddenly Klaus was a politician and sat in the Bundestag—Pastor Klaus, who used to hand out carbon copies of poems in the Grosskrienitz church, was a parliamentary deputy and heaven knows what else, flew to Bonn every Monday and earned pots of money. And Muddel was also earning, had bought herself a silver-gray Audi—while Frickel’s mother was now divorced and unemployed and lived with Frickel in a high-rise apartment building in the Gropiusstadt district.

There was nothing Markus could do about any of that. And personally he had no objection to his mother and stepfather suddenly having money. But Klaus, who had recently taken to being all paternal, was keen for Markus to manage on his apprenticeship allowance, and even docked him some of it if he happened to leave tools lying about in the garden or broke something accidentally, and Muddel thought everything Klaus said was right anyway. She even went to church on Sunday. And she would have liked to make him, Markus, go to church as well, but that could be avoided by referring to the freedom of belief guaranteed by the Basic Law of Germany. On the other hand, it was hard to avoid the “family day” on Sunday, sometimes all of them cooking and eating together, that kind of stuff, or (not so good) all going to an exhibition together—if it didn’t happen to be a day for what they called a family council, cover name for bawling him, Markus, out because he’d failed to do chores of some kind again, or because of the swastika in his room, which had nothing to do with Nazis anyway but came from India, it was Hinduism and so forth, but that sent them into downright hysterics. All of this really got you down, and yet he always had kind of a guilty conscience when he met Frickel, he seemed to himself spoilt and soft, and felt an urge to badmouth life in Grosskrienitz—but talking a lot wasn’t cool, either, so a summary of his week was usually short and pithy:

“Full of shit,” said Markus as they smoked their first cigarette spiked with grass in the old stone pavilion.

And Frickel said, “The hell with it,” and handed the joint to Markus.

Then they were joined by Klinke and Zeppelin, and Zeppelin had the idea of slashing the crappy tires on the Opel of some crappy Turk who’d been making up to someone’s fiancée from Zeppelin’s former class, but in the first place it was still too early for that, and in the second place the Opel wasn’t there, luckily, because although Markus had gone along with the others at once, so as not to seem soft, the idea—in the third place—was as good as suicidal.

They got to the Bunker club just before midnight. Zeppelin knew the doorman. They went down the steps. Even here the music was loud. The typical sourish, smoky, musty, grubby smell of cellar air came to meet them; it was so penetrating that Markus didn’t like to breathe in, but when the steel door opened the techno basses hammered on his body like a huge, invisible fist, and there was no more smell. There was only the sound, and the strobe light, and the swaying crowd, and the inaccessibly distant go-go girls gyrating on crates for platforms, flinging their hair around and circling their bellies and their asses and their cunts, wanting to be fucked and never, never, never getting fucked, at least not by him, not by Markus Umnitzer, and not by Frickel from the Gropiusstadt, and probably not by Klinke and Zeppelin, although they were two years older and had lewd tattoos on their upper arms.

Zeppelin pushed an Ecstasy tablet over, Markus paid, and washed it down with a large cola (Ecstasy didn’t mix well with alcohol for Markus). He stood around for a while longer, swaying slightly to the rhythm and keeping his eyes open for other, accessible women, and the closer he came to the dance floor the more superwomen there were on it. Gradually his shyness seeped out of his bones. He couldn’t dance, true, had never been able to dance, but he slowly loosened up, for a while he had a kind of invisible physical contact with a small, athletic woman with off-blond hair in a floppy top that kept slipping so that you could see her small, round, firm tits, he kept staring, and she let him. Hardly looked at him, but let him stare. It made him horny, although strictly speaking her breasts were so small that she could have been a man. Then he lost sight of the woman, danced on his own for a while, had a beer. Began dancing again, had eye-contact sex with a girl in torn pantyhose with black zombie eyes, and at some time it was all the same to him, he suddenly felt incredibly sexy, and then for a while felt nothing, there was only the music driving his breath out of his lungs. Then he found the off-blond with the athlete’s tits again, they agreed by eye contact to have a drink together, and sometime later, when both of them had drunk two Black Russians, they smooched in a corridor to the right of the toilets, he found out the real size of her breasts, fumbled a bit between her legs, but that was all there was to it.

All of a sudden someone had more pot. Markus smoked some to drive the disappointment out of his head. When they left he had entirely lost all sense of time. He didn’t understand why the others were laughing their heads off. They waited forever for a train. The cold gradually crept into their bodies, which had been danced to exhaustion, stimulated, and were now slackening again, and when he woke at some point on a bench everything about him hurt, his head, his hips, his crotch, he could hardly manage to get into the train that had just come in, and when he woke next time he found himself in a pad he didn’t know, his head on Zeppelin’s shoes. His throat was so dry it hurt. And his brain was swaying back and forth inside his skull so much that he almost lost his balance on the way to the bathroom.

That afternoon they went to McDonald’s. There were a few more of them now. Two hoolies had joined them, friends of Zeppelin’s, rather dopey characters who made an unnecessary amount of noise, so that after a while they were thrown out of McDonald’s and went to the next McDonald’s, until finally they went to the club again after hours, where in essence the same happened as the day before, except that this time, how he had no idea, Markus made it back to Grosskrienitz, where he woke on Sunday afternoon in his room, or more precisely was woken by Muddel just back from church.

He took a long shower and two aspirins, threw the sourish-smelling, sweaty, smoky, musty clothes in which he had slept into the laundry basket, and went down to the big kitchen cum living room, twice as large as before since the renovation, where Muddel and Klaus were cooking (that’s to say, Klaus was cooking, and she was allowed to chop something), and only then, when Muddel handed him two onions and a knife, did he remember the letter that was still in the back pocket of the jeans now in the laundry basket.

“I forgot something,” said Markus, and he went back to the bathroom to retrieve the letter, by this time rather battered and crumpled, from his jeans.

“This came,” he said, and gave Muddel the letter.

Muddel put her knife down and wiped her hands on her apron before opening the envelope.

“Oh my God,” she said.

Now Klaus, too, leaned over the letter. Muddel cast him an inquiring glance, which Klaus did not return. Suddenly Markus realized that someone had died.

Muddel gave him the letter, or rather the postcard, also with a black border, that had been inside the envelope, and there was nothing on the front of the card except the words:

Irina Umnitzer

7 August 1927–1 November 1995

Muddel looked at him; he didn’t know what she was expecting. It was ages since he had seen Granny Irina, and last time he had visited his grandparents she had been dead drunk, and spent the whole time crying and claiming that she wasn’t crying, she had thrown her arms around his neck and kept calling him “Sasha,” and after that he hadn’t been to see them again. And now ... Markus looked at the name printed there, half of which was his own name. He looked at the name, and for a few moments everything else around him kind of disappeared, and he was feeling rather queasy, but maybe that was from yesterday evening.

He gave the card back to Muddel. Muddel turned it over, sat down, read what was on the back and told Klaus:

“The funeral’s on Friday. Goethestrasse.”

She looked inquiringly at Klaus again.

“Well, I’m not going on any account,” said Klaus. “All those old Socialist Unity comrades will be there ...”

“She wasn’t in the Party,” said Muddel.

“You can go if you like,” said Klaus. And it sounded even less convincing when he added: “I’ve no objection.”

As they cooked, Klaus and Muddel talked a little more about Granny Irina (and her alcoholism), Grandpa Kurt (and whether he was still a Party member), and Wilhelm, whom Klaus had never met, but he spoke of him as if he were a criminal. It annoyed Markus that Muddel (as always) agreed with him. He remembered, as he folded the green napkins and put the green candles on the table, how when they had been to Wilhelm’s birthday party Muddel had told Klaus it was her mother’s birthday, and if he said nothing about that now, it was because he didn’t want to show Muddel up in front of Klaus.

Over the meal Klaus was boring on again about politics, or rather telling little anecdotes to make himself seem important. Who was interested in what Helmut Kohl had said at lunch last week, or in the theft of spoons from the Bundestag restaurant? Markus didn’t listen; suddenly he was ravenously hungry. There was roast pork fillet and spinach dumplings, but the fillet of pork was stuffed with Roquefort, and Markus ostentatiously scraped the Roquefort off, and Klaus was cross, you could see he was. But he said nothing.

And then, suddenly, a “family council” was announced.

It turned out that yet again a letter from his Telekom job had come. The usual: missed days at work there, bad marks, but now things were getting serious.

“It’s not about the fact that I got you the Telekom trainee post,” said Klaus—oh yes, it is, thought Markus, that was exactly what it was about.

He let the usual sermon wash over him: life, your profession, and if you don’t pull your socks up now ... And then he was asked to give his own views.

“It’s all crap anyway,” said Markus. “At the start the Telekom people said everyone would be taken on. And now, all of a sudden, it’s going to be just one of us!”

Klaus again: Markus could always apply somewhere else, and if he had good grades on his CV, and so forth, and Markus wondered what kind of amazing grades Klaus had on his own CV, had he studied how to be a member of the Bundestag, or what? And was Klaus in any position to solve the math problems in vocational school, sines, cosines and so on? He, Markus, rather doubted it! And then he had to yawn, just like that—the meal, the last two nights, for once it was
not
expressly intended to annoy Klaus, but Muddel suddenly got upset, couldn’t he put his hand in front of his mouth, she asked (as if putting your hand in front of your mouth was what mattered), and didn’t he know how
grateful
to Klaus he ought to be for getting him the trainee post, and blahblahblah.

“I never asked him to do it,” said Markus.

Which was one hundred percent true: he had never asked Klaus to get him a trainee position for the job of electronics communications technician (he would really have liked to be an animal keeper, and if that was not possible, because apparently there were no traineeships open to applicants from the general public, then he would have liked to be a cook, for which there
were
traineeships open to applicants, but no: electronic communications technician it had to be).