Before the Feast (2 page)

“Sure.”

“Good.”

Suzi had a fish on his hook. It put up a bit of resistance. A small carp. Suzi threw it back in the water again.

Lada got up. “Off we go to Ulli's, you guys. Suzi will stand us a drink.” And that's what they did, because Lada is someone who keeps his word.

A CARP CAN FEEL ENVY FOR FOOD. WHEN THE
other fish come to feed, it joins in. But from autumn onward, as the water temperature drops, it needs less and less nourishment.

Male hornets copulate with the young queens and then promptly die. The young queens settle down to wait for spring under moss, in rotten wood, in the dragonfly's nightmares.

In the Kiecker Forest, the old woods, the woodpecker chisels out the milliseconds of our mortality.

For autumn is here.

The wolf-pack is awake.

IT WAS EXACTLY A YEAR AGO, ON THE DAY BEFORE
the last Feast, that Ulli cleared out his garage, put in some seating and five tables and a stove, hung a red and yellow tulle curtain over the only window and nailed a calendar with pictures of Polish girls leaning on motorbikes to the wall, partly for the ironic effect, partly for the aesthetics of it. A Sterni beer costs you eighty cents, a Stieri ninety, a beer with cherry juice is one euro fifty, and you can watch football on the weekend. The guys think well of Ulli because of all this, even if they don't say so.

We drink in Ulli's garage because you don't get a place to sit and tell tall tales and a fridge all together like that anywhere else, which makes it a good spot for guys to be at ease with each other over a drink, but at the same time not
too
much at ease. Nowhere else, unless you're at home, do you get a roof over your head, and Pils, and Bundesliga on Sky, and smoking and company.

We do have a restaurant too, Platform One, and it's not at all bad. Still, you don't want to get drunk in Platform One. You want to have dinner, maybe celebrate an anniversary, but try to get well tanked up while plastic flowers and tourists who come on bicycles are watching you. Now and then Veronika brings real tulips in. Try to get well tanked up while real tulips are watching.

Ulli's garage has a good smell of engine oil. Motorbike badges and beer ads adorn the door, and there's a shield with the imperial eagle on it and the words
German Empire
. It's a fact that almost no one but men come from the new prefabricated buildings. Sometimes there's trouble, nothing too bad. Nothing really nasty. Sometimes you can't make out what you're saying. In retrospect you're glad of that. Sometimes someone tells a story and everyone listens. This evening, it will be old Imboden telling the story over the last round. Imboden is usually a quiet but fierce drinker. His wife died three years ago, and it was only then that he began coming here. Ulli says he has to catch up after all those years of sobriety.

In the garage, and because of the Feast tomorrow, the talk was about earlier feasts, and how feasts in the old days were better than now. For instance, no one could remember a good, really satisfying brawl among grown men in the last couple of years. They used to be the norm. These days only the young lads fight. “Badly, at that,” said Lada, laughing, but no one else laughed.

So now Imboden stands up to go and take a piss, but before he leaves the room—the garage doesn't have a toilet, but there's something like a tree in front of the prefab—he says, “Just a moment. This won't do.”

For several weeks there's been a color photo stuck to the fridge. Ulli's granddaughter Rike is going through a phase. The picture shows Rike and her grandpa in a little rectangle, which is the garage. When Ulli put up that picture he took
the naked Polish girls down. As a result the men called Ulli Gramps for a few days, but then they forgot about it and called him Ulli again.

Everyone can drink at Ulli's, even drink more than he can take on board. But when a guest can't lie down without holding on to something, Ulli gives Lada a nod, and Lada escorts or carries that guy out.

Everyone can talk at Ulli's and say more than anywhere else. But if he goes on talking and saying more, and Ulli has had enough of it, Ulli gives Lada the nod.

You pay less at Ulli's than anywhere else. But if anyone hasn't paid in full after a month, then Ulli gives Lada the nod.

Everyone can weep at Ulli's, out loud at that. But no one does weep at Ulli's.

Everyone can tell a joke at Ulli's that we don't all think is funny. But when a guy means something seriously that we don't all think is funny, Ulli gives Lada the nod.

Everyone can tell a story about the old days at Ulli's, and usually the others listen.

Old Imboden came back from having a piss, and Imboden told his story.

THE VIXEN LIES QUIETLY ON DAMP LEAVES, UNDER
a beech tree on the outskirts of the old forest. From where the forest meets the fields—fields of wheat, barley, rapeseed—she looks at the little group of human houses, standing on such a narrow strip of land between two lakes that you might think human beings, in their unbridled wish to grab the most comfortable possible place as their own, had cut one lake into two, making room right between them for themselves and their young, in a fertile, practical place on two banks at once. Room for the paved roads that they seldom leave, room for the places where they hide their food, their stones and metals, and all the huge quantities of other things that they hoard.

The vixen senses the time when the lakes did not yet exist, and no humans had their game preserves here. She senses ice that the earth had to carry all the way along the horizon. Ice that pushed land on ahead of it, brought stones with it, hollowed out the earth, raised it to form hills that still undulate today, tens of thousands of fox years later. The two lakes rock in the lap of the land, in the breast of the land grow the roots of the ancient forest where the vixen has her earth, a tunnel, not very deep but safe from the badger, with the vixen's two cubs in it now—or so she hopes—not waiting accusingly outside like last time, when all she brought home was beetles again. The hawk was already circling.

She would smell the earthy honey on the pelts of her cubs among a thousand other aromas, even now, in spite of the false wind, she is sure of its sweetness in the depths of the forest. She is sure of their hunger, too, their stern and constant hunger. One of the cubs came into the world ailing and has already died. The other two are playing skillfully with the beetles and vermin. But rising almost vertically in the air from a stationary position and coming down on a mouse is still too much like play. Their games often make them forget about the prey.

The vixen raises her head. She is scenting the air for humankind. There are none of them close. A warmth that reminds her of wood rises from their buildings. The vixen tastes dead plants there, too; well-nourished dogs and cats; birds gone wrong, and a lot of other things that she can't easily classify. She is afraid of much of what she senses. She is indifferent to most of it. Then there's dung, clods of earth, then there's fermentation and chicken and death.

Chicken!

Behind twisted metal wires in wooden sheds: chicken! The vixen is going to get into those chickens tonight.

Her cubs are staying away from the earth longer and longer. The vixen guesses that tonight's hunt will be her last for her hungry young. Soon they will be striking out and finding preserves of their own. She would like to bring them something good, something really special when she and they part. Not beetles or worms, not the remains of fruit half-eaten by humans—she will bring them eggs! Nothing has a better
aroma than the thin, delicate eggshells, because nothing tastes as good as the gooey, sweet yolks inside those shells.

It is never easy to get inside a henhouse. Even if no dog is guarding it, and the humans are asleep. She isn't afraid of the fowls' claws. But carrying eggs is all but impossible. Her previous attempts were failures, if delicious failures. This time she will close her mouth as carefully as she closes it on the cubs in play. This time she won't take two eggs at once but come back for the second.

A female badger slips out of the wood. The vixen picks up the scents of bracken and fear on her. What is she afraid of? Bats fly past overhead. Taciturn creatures, moving too fast for any joking, fluttering nervously away. On the outskirts of the forest a herd of wild pigs is holding a council of war. They are unpredictable neighbors, easily provoked but considerate. Their scent is good, they smell of swampiness, sulfur, grass and obstinacy. Just now they are deep in discussion, uttering shrill grunts in their edgy language, butting one another, scraping the ground with their hooves.

Their restlessness gets the vixen going. She trots off so as to leave those tricky creatures behind quickly.

The Up Above, roaring, brings thunder. It doesn't like to see the vixen out and about. It is threatening her. Warning her.

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 watching the sports clips on the
Sport 1
channel. Martina (aged nineteen, Czech Republic) is playing billiards. Herr Schramm is a critical man. He has objections to the program, he doesn't think Martina plays billiards properly. She sends her shots all over the place. They never go into the pockets, and that bothers Herr Schramm. Martina dances round her cue, and that's not right: it's not right for her to dance, it's not right for her to sit on the table and wiggle the billiard balls with her bottom, it's not right for her to be playing by herself. Because if you are playing by yourself it should be with the clear intention of sinking the balls in the pockets. The opponent you best like to beat, so Herr Schramm firmly believes, is yourself.

Of course, after every shot Martina has to remove an item of clothing, nothing wrong with that. But she could have done it somewhere else.
Sport 1
shouldn't have made a billiard table available to her, it should have been somewhere Martina knows her way around. Herr Schramm believes that everyone is good at something, and he tries to guess what that something might be in Martina's case. Clues are thin on the ground: she has full breasts, short fingers, shiny fingernails. Herr Schramm believes
in talent, and Herr Schramm likes talent. He likes to watch people exercising their talents: he's an upright military man with poor posture and an empty pack of nicotine chewing gum.

He doesn't like to watch Martina. Martina still has her knickers on; they are black with a number 8 in a white circle at the front. Herr Schramm thinks that is witty. But it's not about her knickers now, it's about the fact that Martina plays so badly, as if she didn't even know the rules. And rules are the first thing you teach someone who doesn't really belong in a place.

Herr Schramm is a man who avoids conversations with strangers, and even with acquaintances prefers to talk about anti-aircraft missiles, bats and the former ski jumper Jens Weissflog, the most talented ski jumper of all time.

He thinks Martina has good calves when she bends low over the table. But when she takes off her knickers, drapes them over her cue, misses the white at her next shot and has to laugh at that into the bargain, Herr Schramm has had enough.

“I ask you!” says Herr Schramm. He switches the TV set off.

In German households, on average, there are more germs on the remote control than on the lavatory seat. Herr Schramm thinks about that “on average.” It's all relative. Lavatory seats are larger than remote controls.

In his own household, thinks Herr Schramm, there are more disappointments about himself, on average, than about the world. With a sigh, he gets off the sofa and in the same
movement pulls up his underpants from round his ankles. The rest of his clothes are in the bathroom. He searches their pockets to see if he has enough change for a packet of cigarettes. He does.

Herr Schramm sits in his Golf for a little while first. A tall, upright man with poor posture, thinking: on average. Martina (aged nineteen, Czech Republic). Bats hang upside down because their legs are too weak. They can't take a run and then fly away, like a goose, for instance.

His pistol is in the glove compartment.

Much that Herr Schramm regrets today was done of his own accord. Pressure is what Herr Schramm was good at. Standing up to pressure and exerting it.

He drives away. Maybe to the cigarette vending machine, maybe to the abandoned anti-aircraft missile department at number 123 Wegnitz, where he was stationed for seventeen years. A few cigarette ends or a shot in the head, he hasn't made up his mind yet which.

Maybe Martina has a talent for fingernails. What would that be called?

In Wilfried Schramm's household there are more reasons against life, on average, than against smoking.

WE ARE GLAD. ANNA IS GOING TO BE BURNT. THE
sentence will be carried out at the Feast tomorrow evening. The children are put to bed in the hay with the calves, but they don't sleep, they peep through the boards at what they'd like to be scared of in their sleep, and when there's no more boiling and hissing and crying in the flames the baker connects up his fiddle to his portable amplifier and then there's fiddling, then there's dancing, predatory fish are grilled until they're cooked and soft. Anna is going to be burnt, and on such a night many couples find their way to each other, they dance among sparks and stars and security precautions, making sure nothing that doesn't gain by the flames catches fire.

Autumn is here now. Ravens peck the winter seed corn out of the body of the fields. They come down to settle on scarecrows, they preen their plumage.

There's still time to pass before the Feast. We have to get through the night, and the final preparations will be made in the morning. The village cooks, the village sprays window cleaner on glass, the village decorates its lampposts. Our carpenter, who is dead now, spent a long time making sure that the bonfire would stand steady. An interior designer brought in from Berlin has offered his services instead, but if we let him get at it, so the village thought, there'll be nothing but problems; it's not just a case of where to put your sofa for a
good view, we have to make sure we don't have another disaster like the one in 1599, when four houses caught fire, and in all the commotion two notorious robbers escaped being burnt to death, so now a scaffolding company from Templin does the job.