In Times of Fading Light (21 page)

On the way home he even managed to pretend reasonably well to be in a good mood, he reminded Christina of the first time they went out dancing—at Kellermann’s on that occasion—how he had taken her home later, and then she had taken him to the tram, he had taken her home again and she had taken him to the tram again, and Christina let him put his hand on her hip, just as he did in the past, and when he felt her hips moving he even thought he could feel the excitingly coarse texture of the acrylic dress under her coat, and as the air he was breathing grew thicker and thicker he imagined all kinds of things, scenes beside the fridge, her dress pushed up, or in less of a hurry to music on the record player, with dimmed lighting—but when they got home the slow-burning stove had gone out hours ago, the room temperature had sunk almost to the temperature outside, Christina undressed quickly and without fuss, and crawled under the covers, Alexander lay beside her, feeling as awkward as the first time, trying mechanically and with increasing desperation to warm Christina up, and finally, almost as soon as he had penetrated her, had a lengthy but not entirely satisfactory ejaculation.

In the morning he tried again, still drowsy and with the aftertaste of alcohol and cigarettes in his mouth; they caressed without looking at each other and somehow, at least, managed to come at more or less the same time.

Alexander lit the slow-burning stove, went down two flights of stairs to the toilet, brought water up with him on the way back, and then, while Christina was making breakfast, went off again to fetch rolls from Braune the baker. They ate their breakfast eggs, drank coffee from their “Bonny” cups, without once using those pet names for each other, and Alexander asked Christina whether she still loved him.

Instead of answering, she asked him whether
he
still loved
her.
And she twisted her mouth the way she twisted it when she was talking about books that he hadn’t read, and it occurred to Alexander that maybe Christina wasn’t as beautiful as he had always thought. It occurred to him—and didn’t even horrify him.

At eleven, without a word, he put the uniform on, and they stood outside the front door. Kurt and Irina drove up in their new Lada, with Granny Charlotte in the back.

“My boy,” said Granny.

“There, you see,” said Kurt.

“He looks like a German soldier,” said Irina, wiping away a tear before she stepped on the gas.

The car smelled of artificial leather straight from the factory.

The clock on the dashboard of the Lada 1300 said four minutes after eleven.

It was 2 December 1973.

Alexander had another five hundred and thirteen days of military service ahead of him.

He has slept well. He would like to tell Marion—she was right again, he thinks, without being quite sure what she was right about, but she’s probably still asleep, he doesn’t want to wake her. He turns over on his side again to face Marion, glad that she’s there. Except that when he opens his eyes, the other side of the huge double bed is empty.

He pulls the pristine pillow toward him, crumples it.

At least he didn’t sweat in the night, he’s not running a temperature, he isn’t suffering from pain or nausea; he has now studied the symptoms in an Internet café, all of them rather vague,
nonspecific,
as they call it, but one thing can’t be denied: the lymph nodes, when his right hand feels for them, are still swollen.

He takes the plugs out of his ears. Following a stupid impulse, puts them under the pristine but now crumpled pillow. Stands up.

Checks to see whether the dogs are really still there (answer in the affirmative).

Brushes his teeth—using mineral water these days, since he read on the Internet that there is a link between Hodgkin’s nonspecific lymphoma and greater susceptibility to infections. And then, like a morning prayer, the passage about a sufferer’s expectation of life that he also found on the Internet runs almost word for word past his drowsy consciousness:

Alexander rides five floors down in the elevator. He has taken to breakfasting in the hotel. Instead of eating the rich, unidentifiable mush in the café opposite, he mixes himself a bowl of muesli; they have yogurt and fruit and several kinds of cornflakes, although all of those are toasted or candied. There is even whole-wheat bread, almost like the bread you could get in a European hotel. Alexander helps himself to some of everything, determined not to tolerate any loss of appetite.

He sits down by the big window. After a while the two young Swiss women arrive—he met them here in the hotel. He doesn’t really know whether he wants them to come and share his table, but the question was decided before he had made up his mind. Three days of a fleeting acquaintance without any further prospects are obviously enough to create a social obligation.

Not that he has any objection to either of them. Their names are Kati and Nadya. They are still under thirty. They wear flip-flops, and they are in the middle of a trip around the world. It has turned out that they have already spent two months in Africa, going on to Brazil, Argentina, Tierra del Fuego, Chile, Peru, Ecuador, and somewhere else as well. Now they are here for a week, in Mexico City, or DF, as they knowledgeably call it, they have taken a language course somewhere along the way. From DF they are going by bus to Oaxaca, from there on to San Cristóbal de las Casas or Palenque (he has forgotten the precise sequence of places). Anyway, once they are through with Mexico they’re going to fly to Sydney, to honor the southeast—or was it the northwest?—of Australia with their presence, as they jokingly put it, touring in a van, then on to New Zealand to meet the Kiwis, and finally to Bangkok, from where—if they don’t take a side trip to the Mekong Delta, as recommended by their
Backpackers’ Guide
—they will return to Europe.

They have a
Round the World Backpacker,
with everything in it. They use it every morning to plan the day’s trip. Yesterday they went to see Chapultepec Park and the Anthropological Museum, and Alexander let them persuade him to join them because, as the
Backpacker
assured readers, the Anthropological Museum is one of the best museums in the world, but perhaps also because he feels attracted by the women—and at the same time repelled.

There is, as already mentioned, nothing in the two of them to object to. Kati, who now comes to his table first, is a pleasant, intelligent person, any man in this hotel would probably call her beautiful, and in fact it would not sound convincing to offer the white brilliance of her smile, revealing just a little too much of the gum area, as evidence to the contrary, or the well-oiled gleam of her scrupulously depilated and, well, slightly bandy legs appearing under her brown, bell-shaped skirt.

“Hello,” says Kati, sitting down to his left at the square table with its white tablecloth.

She speaks in a loud voice, opening her eyes wide as soon as she sees Alexander. She wears a white hoop around her forehead in her curly, just-washed black hair—it looks like some hygienic device to keep hairs out of her breakfast. The sun oil that she uses to anoint herself lavishly has not quite sunk in, and from the slight scab just above her nose you can tell that she forgot to rub sun cream into the place between her plucked eyebrows.

“So where’s it to be today?” asks Alexander, but he instantly fears that his question suggests he wants to go with them again today.

“Probably the Frida Kahlo Museum,” says Kati. “Have you been there?”

“No,” says Alexander, trying to sound uninterested.

“And the Trotsky Museum is somewhere not far off,” says Kati.

Now Nadya joins them at the table. Nadya is a little smaller than her friend, and indeed seems a little “less” in every way, with teeth not quite so white but, on the other hand, probably genuine, and a less striking hair color. She wears a pink top with a very low neckline and a strappy construction that catches the eye and suggests bondage. In spite of these noticeable features, however, she is somehow blurred, her movements are slinky, she slips between the chair and the table without a sound, her “Good morning” is breathed rather than spoken, and her eyes pass quickly over Alexander, whether ignoring him or looking at him surreptitiously is hard to tell. He is rather surprised that one of Nadya’s subjects is communication studies. She is also studying German language and literature, psychology, Indology, and a little singing (he doesn’t know just where that fits in), while Kati is studying, or rather has studied, “only” law, politics, and the Swiss tourist industry.

“What do you think, how about the Frida Kahlo Museum today?” Kati asks, turning to Nadya.

Nadya tugs at the strappy top that is always slipping as she performs something like a shrug of the shoulders.

“And the Trotsky Museum is quite close to it.”

“Trotsky?” Nadya curls her top lip.

An idea occurs to Kati. “Trotsky was a Communist too. Like your grandmother.”

Unfortunately Alexander has told the two of them about Charlotte. Kati responded to hearing that his grandparents were Communists with an expressionless “Oh,” as if she had entered an occupied cubicle in the toilets by mistake. However, now she finds it interesting. “Maybe they knew each other?”

“Hardly likely,” says Alexander.

He could tell them about Wilhelm now. And the speculations about Wilhelm’s secret service work, which Wilhelm always denied, although at the same time he knew just how to fan the flames of curiosity if, for instance, the conversation turned to Trotsky, by making a face as if there were some secret to be kept, although he had probably not arrived in Mexico until just before the assassination of Trotsky, if not indeed after it. But even here no certain facts were known. He could also tell them that once he, Alexander, had met one of Trotsky’s would-be assassins in person—and oddly enough that was true, although he had learned only twenty years after the Mexican painter Alfaro Siqueiros visited the GDR that the latter had been imprisoned in Mexico not only for his “committed art” and his “active support for the working class,” but also for attempting to kill Leon Trotsky with a machine pistol, incomprehensibly missing his intended victim although he was in the middle of Trotsky’s bedroom at the time.

He could say that, but he doesn’t. He get himself more toast and coffee, and decides on a breakfast egg after all. Senses, as he returns to the table, that the two young women have decided on the program of their day—and doesn’t ask what it is. Doesn’t ask, and is not asked to join them. His feelings are little hurt after all. He is annoyed with himself for that.

An hour later he is sitting in the Metro. By his reckoning of time it is Sunday, but there is no Sunday calm in the air: the Metro seems even more crowded than usual, the passengers are in high spirits, many of them wearing colorful costumes and carrying Mexican flags. Is that usual on a Sunday in Mexico? He has to change once for Indios Verdes. Here, on the outskirts of a gigantic bus terminal, stands a ramshackle bus with a national flag that, in view of its size, must be suspect from the viewpoint of road safety, and a hand-painted destination sign saying Teotihuacán.

The driver waits until the bus is full. Then, during the ride, a young man walks down the aisle collecting thirty pesos from each passenger, without issuing any tickets.

The bus drives through suburbs, or the suburbs of suburbs, which must be called prosperous by comparison with the part of the city where the boys took his wallet: anthills, gray boxes stacked on top of each other. There is barbed wire between the residential area and the main road, whether to keep people from going in or coming out he doesn’t understand.

It is farther than he imagined. What
did
he imagine? The bus is passing through a steppelike landscape now. The garbage of civilization. Cacti with colored plastic bags caught on them.

He remembers a tiny black-and-white photograph: his grandmother in front of the Pyramid of the Sun in Teotihuacán. There wasn’t really much he could make out in it. He thinks there was a cactus in the picture. His grandmother, he thinks, was standing beside it wearing pale clothes, a full skirt, a blouse buttoned up to the throat, very demure, civilized, a little like the white woman in
King Kong,
and behind her, black, like a silhouette, the pyramid. Back when his grandmother told him about the deserted city with the pyramid in the middle of it, he thinks he imagined the city resembling his way to kindergarten in the morning: empty streets, darkness, the gas lamps still on, and the slightly built man who went about Neuendorf on his bicycle morning and evening, lighting or extinguishing the gas lamps with a hook on the end of a long staff, was mysteriously connected with the ugly little god on top of the pyramid who casts himself into the fire to rise above the earth again, a new sun.

He is glad now to be alone on this expedition. The museum yesterday was oppressive. Obviously, he think, he doesn’t tolerate museums, even the best in the world. Maybe it’s time to admit that. The abundance of items in a museum overwhelms him, the sheer number and quantity of them. He doesn’t know whether he ought to admire the patience of the two Swiss girls. He too borrowed an audio guide yesterday, following their example, and tried following the information and instructions for a while, but then, irritated, switched the device off to spend two hours wandering around in a state of total disorientation, among masses of exhibits and crowds of visitors. Not even the Aztec calendar stone that he knew from Wilhelm’s silver cufflinks, and now saw suddenly rising before him, stony and gigantic, could rouse him from that state.

After that they spent an hour in Chapultepec Park. Alexander sat on a bench, and the two women, who had been whispering together in a way that infuriated him while they were in the museum, finding something that amused them, lay down on the grass and fell asleep at once. Later, when they were in a café, Alexander tried to bring the conversation back to the museum, just to show them but most of all himself that none of what they had seen and heard had stayed with them, that within twenty minutes, he was sure, they would have slept it all off like a hangover—but the question that occurred to him, of whether the Aztecs had believed in any kind of Paradise, was one that the women could partly answer after all: the Aztecs, so the audio guide had said, definitely believed in a Paradise, and entry into it was gained by those who fell in battle, those who were sacrificed on the altar, and—was the third category children, as Kati thought? Or as Nadya had an idea she remembered, women who died in childbirth?

The question of Paradise had led to a conversation about the similarities and differences between ideas of the next world and finally of religions in general, during which it turned out that not only did Kati and Nadya know a little about almost all the religions in the world, they even followed, or had followed, some kinds of religion themselves. Kati had spent weeks in an ashram, regularly went to a school of Tibetan Buddhism in Switzerland, but also carried a little picture of the Virgin Mary around in her travel bag; Nadya, like Kati, revered the Dalai Lama, had taken an interest in voodoo magic in Haiti, and in addition went to lectures on the Tantra, believed in the healing power of rock crystals, and also like Kati thought it not impossible that she was really the ambassador of an extraterrestrial civilization.

Amazing how easily all this passed their lips, how naturally and effortlessly they reconciled it, how airy and weightless this new world religion of theirs was, like a watercolor hastily dashed off, thinks Alexander, remembering, as he sits in the bus to Teotlihuacán, his own difficult, crazy, violent confrontation with that very subject the winter before, the winter of the millennium year, when everything broke apart for him and the birds—literally—fell from heaven. He tries to remember it: the moment when
it
—and yes,
what
exactly?—touched him or turned to him or made itself known? He doesn’t know now. The moment eludes memory, he recollects only time before and after it, he remembers how for days (days?) he lay on the floorboards of some derelict house, helplessly following the way the pain ate at him from inside; he remembers the darkness, his sore hip bones—and he remembers, after it, the sense of release, of insight, he remembers how one morning he came out into the backyard with the warm ash-can in his hand, how he stood there and looked up, and how he saw it: up there in the black branches of a backyard poplar.