Before the Feast (18 page)

One day it gets too much for Zieschke, who asks him a question. He wants to know something about the young man's past history, maybe a name, a place. The Adidas man reads from the board, hesitantly, like a child.

“We bake. With. Natural. Sourdough.”

He divides his filled pastry into small pieces with his fork. He closes his eyes as he chews.

We don't know where he comes from.

We don't know where he's going.

We know what he likes to eat.

After a while the injury to his shoulder has healed up.

BEFORE THE ANNA FEAST IN THE YEAR 1722 A MOST
terrible tragedy occurred. The people feared that flax put out to dry would be stolen, so the unwise custom prevailed of shutting up servants or children in the ovens, which still contained the warm flax, and letting them sleep there overnight. That was done with the Geher children, Anna and Andreas. Of the pair, the girl was found dead in the morning, the boy severely injured. The matter was all the more tragic in that the same girl had warned us, the evening before, of vagabonds seeking to steal our bread.

The mother wanted all to be summoned nonetheless to the Feast. It was, however, the saddest we ever held, full of mourning and wrong and not dancing and song.

All honor was paid to the girl.

O mighty and terrible God.

O foolish, foolish Man.

AND HERR SCHRAMM, FORMER (ETC.)—THEN
(etc.)—now (etc.)—and also, because he can't make ends meet by (etc.)—is standing in front of the cigarette machine for the second time tonight. On average, ex-smokers are slimmer than smokers. The opposite is commonly assumed. You get fatter if you stop smoking, that's what is commonly assumed. Sigmund Freud's nephew thought up that notion, and you know how good the Freuds are at influencing people. But it's a fact that smokers are more inclined to stop smoking later in life if their bodies stop keeping naturally slim. That undermines the statistics. Getting fat, then, has nothing to do with not smoking, it's a case of an exhausted metabolism. Herr Schramm was never slim and never
very
slim. Herr Schramm was always the sturdy sort.

Coins in one hand, Anna's identity card in the other, Herr Schramm is thinking about those common assumptions.

“What do you think?” he asks, putting the first coin in the slot. “Do people put on weight when they stop smoking?”

“Smoking is good for the digestion, isn't it?” Anna holds the umbrella over Schramm.

“That's commonly assumed,” says Herr Schramm, pressing the button for Pall Mall Red. “In reality it makes no difference. In reality you're fat because you eat a lot, not because you don't smoke much. Or else it's genetic.” He hesitates with the ID card, scratches the back of his neck with it.

Anna puts her finger to the “In” slot on the machine. Herr Schramm puts the card through the slot intended for it. Nothing happens.

Herr Schramm thinks of things intended to work other things. He thinks of the duty crew of his rocket unit. The man responsible for firing was intended to give the command to fire the rocket. The crew responsible for servicing the starting ramp were intended to service the starting ramp. The C item was part of the A item. The personnel took up their firing positions in the place intended for them. The command to stand down from attention was intended for the close of the maneuver. “Class solidarity and military alliance with the Soviet Army. . . protection of the air space of the GDR. . . the utmost discipline and initiative. . . at the word, stand down!” Everyone was in the clear about his intended task at any time. The wives of the personnel cannot be praised too highly. In the mid-1980s the regiment was severely cut. Lieutenant-Colonel Schramm protested, but what can you do? Rocket technology was mothballed. The main task now was guard duty. My God, guard duty. If Schramm wanted to do it himself, all the same he didn't have to. The last parade on the parade ground was in 1990.

Herr Schramm presses the Lucky Strike button. No result.

Herr Schramm wonders how he is going to get rid of the girl if this cigarette business fails to work again. He presses the West button. No result.

“Why did you want to kill yourself?”

Herr Schramm presses the Camel button. He grits his teeth, his jaw muscles stand out. Still no result.

“I ask you,” says Herr Schramm.

Herr Schramm presses all the buttons, one after another. The opponent you best like to beat, so Herr Schramm firmly believes, is yourself. He clenches his fist. Anna's raised eyebrows express alarmed curiosity. He strikes out, stopping a millimeter before he hits the metal of the machine.

When he was in the army, Herr Schramm often went swimming. Early in the morning, over to the Güldenstein and back. On the way out, swimming fast and furiously. Touch the Güldenstein, breathe deeply. On the way back, swimming slowly and thoughtfully.

“Have you done something bad?”

“Seems to me I've never done anything, ever, but get hold of cigarettes.”

The machine shows the amount of money fed into it. Maybe the bullet harmed the electronics. It's always the electronics. Herr Schramm presses the button to get his money back. No result.

“You were a soldier, weren't you?”

“I never led anyone into battle. Did marksmanship only in Kazakhstan, for practice. What we were doing here was to keep the skies safe.”

“The skies?”

“And there was always technical stuff to be serviced and something to be cleaned. Think of that. Think of cleaning anti-aircraft rockets.”

Anna stares at him. Searchingly. Yes, you could say that Anna looks at Herr Schramm searchingly. She stared searchingly at him in his car, and when she fetched her ID from the farm, and when he asked if she knew that the Russians had shot dozens of people in the field under her window.

“Belorussians,” Anna had replied, staring searchingly at him, and she does it again now as he leans his head against the vending machine. If someone intends to kill himself, you keep staring at him.

“Don't do that,” says Herr Schramm without looking up.

Anna goes on staring. She fetched her asthma spray from home, for emergencies, and also her phone, just in case. She doesn't want to use it yet. The rain is slackening.

Herr Schramm walks away. At the graveyard, he turns down to the lake. The path is steep and muddy. Anna tries to keep up. Herr Schramm doesn't mind about the ground and the weather. The name of his father is one of the names on the war memorial in the graveyard.

There's something unusual just past the graveyard: the bells on the promenade. “Well, I ask you!” says Herr Schramm. “What's all this, then?” He looks at the bells. The falling raindrops make them ping softly. Anna still has eyes only for him.

“Do you keep having memories tonight too?” she asks.

“I,” says Herr Schramm, “always keep having memories.”

Since Anna found Herr Schramm in his car, they haven't met anyone. Now she can guess at the painter's light some
way off, against the background of the otherwise dark lake. Only Anna doesn't want to share Herr Schramm with anyone else now.

“Why do you ask?”

“I won't be here any more on Monday.”

“Going away. Mhm.”

“I keep remembering my time here and wondering what I'll miss. I think what I'll miss most is not spending my youth somewhere else.”

Schramm taps the bells. Puts his large hand on the curved casing of the Old Lady. “We once,” he says, stroking the bell, “had an Uzbek general visiting.”

“Visiting the rockets?”

“Visiting the rockets. He stayed for five days, and after that the unit was never the same again. Everything was going downhill anyway, the economy and so forth, but that wasn't it. That man, Trunov was his name, spent those five days living with us the way every one of us would have liked to live. When he had gone, everyone fell back into the same old rut, and our morale went off with the General to Uzbekistan or somewhere else.”

“I'd like to understand that if I could.”

“Yes, but I don't know what it will sound like. . .” Schramm smells his hand. “Right, listen. You can't say that a place or a general is—” Schramm shakes his head. “Trunov told us to lay out a kitchen garden. We didn't have to do as he said, but we did. We even gave it a name.”

“The Trunov Garden?”

“The Kitchen Garden of Comrade General PaÅ¡a Trunov. It grew wonderful peppers year after year. My word, it did.”

Herr Schramm coughs, but it could have been a laugh. He crouches down. “Hey, come here. See that?” He points to the ground near the bells. “Someone got stuck here. Those are the tracks of tires.”

“So?”

“Put two and two together.”

Anna isn't feeling in the mood for riddles. Only now does she seem to see the bells. She doesn't think them very interesting. Herr Schramm turns away too. He wants to show Anna something, and gets her to climb the wall.

“So now?” says Anna, from on top of the wall.

“Story time,” says Herr Schramm.

THE VIXEN FOLLOWS THE SCENT OF CHICKEN
down the lighted stone path between the human earths. There could be danger lurking anywhere here. One is already lurking. A human male. The vixen catches the scent of his shoulder: the injured flesh. He is standing still in front of an earth that she likes to visit herself. Inside it humans do what humans most like doing: they make one thing into other things. They make large, firm, crisp things out of wheat dust. And sometimes, not often, but they are delicious, those things are put out behind the earth, where the vixen waits for them, not often, but they are worth the wait.

She makes a small detour round the human male. This time the makers of things out of wheat dust haven't left anything out. But the vixen catches the soft scent of chicken feathers behind a row of boards by the next-door earth. She investigates the boards until she finds one slightly raised from the ground. She slips through. A spacious place with the wooden henhouse in a corner. The hens are dreaming. Their sleep is mild with rain.