In Times of Fading Light (28 page)

“I don’t know,” said Sasha. “But I know what I
don’t
want: I don’t want to be lying all my life.”

“Nonsense,” said Kurt. “Are you saying that I’ve been lying all my life?”

Again, Sasha did not reply.

“You chose your subject for yourself,” said Kurt. “No one forced you to study history, on the contrary. . .”

“You advised me against it, yes, I know. You’ve always advised me against things. Everything! I suppose I ought to be glad you didn’t advise me against existing.”

“Don’t talk such garbage,” said Kurt.

However, the idea seemed to amuse Sasha.

“But I do exist,” he cried. “I exist!”

Kurt stopped. He tried to keep his voice as calm as possible.

“I beg you, just for once in your life listen to my advice. Right now you’re in an unstable frame of mind. You ought not to be making decisions in a state like that.”

“My mind is perfectly clear,” said Sasha. “It’s never been clearer.”

His breath rose in vapor. He looked at Kurt. There it was again: that crazy expression.

“Right,” said Kurt. “Do as you like. But then ...”

“Then what?” said Sasha.

All Kurt could think of to say was, “Then it’s all over.”

“Oh, is it, though?” said Sasha.

“You’re out of your mind,” said Kurt.

His words were drowned out by the roar of approaching traffic, and Kurt said it again, shouted it again:

“You are right out of your mind!”

“And you,” shouted Sasha, pointing at Kurt, “you advise me not to study history when you’re a historian yourself! So who’s out of his mind now?”

“Oh,” shouted Kurt. “So now you’re telling me how to live my life? That really is the limit! If you’d lived my life, you’d be dead!”

“Here we go again,” said Sasha, perfectly calm all of a sudden.

“Yes, here we go again,” shouted Kurt. And although the noise of the traffic had ebbed again, he went on shouting. “Living in clover! Your mother gets you an apartment! Your father pays your car insurance ...” Sasha took a key off his key ring and held it in front of Kurt’s face. “Here you are, the car key.”

“For heaven’s sake, in other places people are starving to death,” shouted Kurt.

Sasha dropped the key on the ground, turned, and walked on. “That’s right,” shouted Kurt. “Starving to death.”

The wind whistled.

A woman coming toward Kurt made a wide detour around him.

Another subway train passed, this time going in the direction of Alex. The people inside it were sitting motionless—like cardboard cutouts. The train gradually came down from the overhead track and disappeared underground. Cardboard cutouts and all. Going to hell, thought Kurt, not quite sure what he meant by that.

The car key that Sasha had thrown at his feet had disappeared in the snow. Kurt put on his glasses. The snow was dirty and yellowish. Kurt shrank from putting his hand into it. He felt around for the key with his foot, but couldn’t find it. At last he groped in the snow with his hands after all—but the key was gone. Gone to hell.

Kurt went on. Followed his son. He walked fast, but he did not run. From the place where the subway trains disappeared underground, Schönhauser Allee turned into bleak terrain. No more bars. No display windows. No people. Only up ahead, fifty or sixty meters in front of Kurt, a thin figure with its hair shorn: his son.

Not turning around, simply walking on.

To the left the Jewish cemetery appeared: the long wall bordering the cemetery itself. Kurt had never set foot in it, and had never wanted to. To be honest, he hated cemeteries. Although it was odd that you never saw anyone going in or coming out. It was also odd that the subway ran so close to the cemetery, taking its passengers underground on a trial run—so to speak eyeball to eyeball with the dead.

Something now occurred to Kurt: Melitta had said that Sasha had taken to reading the Bible recently. That he even, so Melitta claimed, kind of believed in God ...

Was that it—the crazed expression in his eyes?

Opposite, Kurt saw the strange, ruinous arcades of whose origin and purpose he knew nothing at all, except that beyond them, somewhere on the other side of the yard, the printing works of
Neues Deutschland
lay, he knew that, and the fact that ideas of his went through a printing press there now and then rather pleased him, even if his articles for
ND,
which he was usually asked to write for the celebration of some historical anniversary, were certainly not among the best of his work as a historian.

Once you’ve read everything I’ve written ... he thought.

But no, that was no good. Second attempt:

At least read what I’ve written before you judge it.

Commit that to memory. Use it when the right occasion came.

The traffic lights on Wilhelm-Pieck-Strasse changed to red—Sasha waited. Amazing that he still observed the rules of the road.

While the lights changed, Kurt had caught up. They crossed the street together. For a moment Kurt wondered whether to broach the subject of God—but what for? And how? Did he seriously mean to ask Sasha if he believed in God? Even the word, if he really meant God, sounded crazy.

They passed the Volksbühne, the “People’s Theater,” where a production of
The Idiot
was being staged.

They went on in silence. Construction work was still in progress on Alex. The wind rattled the scaffolding. The earpieces of Kurt’s glasses were so cold they hurt his temples. He took the glasses off, covered his nose with his scarf, and wondered how he had ever survived the camp; thirty-five degrees below zero—they had been sent out to work in the taiga until the temperature sank as low as that.

If there was wind as well, only until it was thirty degrees.

They passed the roofed passageway between the big hotel and the department store, and then, Kurt could not have said why and on their way to what destination, crossed the square, where the wind attacked them, whirling around, buffeting them, bringing tears to their eyes. Kurt tried to shield his eyes with his hand, braced himself against the gusts, swayed blindly forward on icy, uneven ground, and couldn’t have said whether his son was still beside him, didn’t turn around to look for him, heard nothing, felt the dull pain gradually creeping into his fingertips in spite of his sheepskin gloves, and imagined getting home and having to confess that he had lost Alexander on Alexanderplatz, of all places, as if he could have foreseen that the square would swallow him up, that Sasha would dissolve into thin air here, or sink into the bowels of the earth—confused stuff, thought Kurt. The kind of thing that shot through your mind if you didn’t watch out.

“Where are we going?” asked Sasha.

They were standing in front of the clock telling world time. In New York it was twelve thirty, in Rio it was three thirty. A few frozen figures stood around, people who had unthinkingly arranged to meet here in spite of the cold; the clock telling world time was a favorite meeting place, as if you sensed something of the great wide world here.

“The hell with this,” said Kurt.

“Look, they’re open over there,” said Sasha. “Let’s go in, or my ass will freeze off.”

Sasha meant the self-service restaurant on the first floor of the Alexanderhaus. Kurt had been there only once. Ten years ago, when the restaurant was opened, it had been the latest thing. By now a rancid patina had settled over the whole place. The figures washed up here by the cold evening weather were rough and coarse-faced, and it seemed to Kurt as if they were all handicapped in some way.

You could get cold food from a row of vending machines. Hot goulash soup stood on a metal counter, eighty-five pfennigs a serving. It didn’t take Kurt long to make up his mind and take a bowl. Since the operation in which part of his stomach had been removed, he had stopped cautiously testing dishes for strong flavors or the amount of onion in them; he ate anything—and he could easily digest it. Sasha helped himself to goulash soup as well. They stood at one of the tall tables to drink their soup. It didn’t taste bad. Kurt’s mood immediately improved; he was on the point of getting a second serving, but he disciplined himself to follow his doctor’s advice: eat little but often.

After their goulash they stood at the table a little longer. Kurt watched the traffic rushing past beyond the big glazed windows on the side of the building turned to Alexanderplatz, and the tempting idea of taking a taxi back occurred to him—at least as far as Karlshorst? Then he remembered the money that he had counted out and was still carrying in his coat pocket. He produced the bills—they came to two hundred marks—and tried handing them to Sasha under the table.

“This is for you,” he said.

“No need for that,” said Sasha.

“Don’t make a fuss,” said Kurt.

“I have all I need to live on,” replied Sasha.

Kurt wondered whether he should simply stick the money under the goulash bowl and walk away, but then he put it back in his pocket.

They said good-bye outside the restaurant, hugged each other as they always did on parting, nodded to one another. Then Sasha set off back the way they had come, while Kurt turned in the direction of the rail station. On the steps to the suburban trains he stopped; the hell with it, thought Kurt,
I will take a taxi!
He turned and went down the steps again.

Sure enough, there was a free taxi at the rank near the station. Kurt got into the back of the car. It was a Volga, a broad vehicle with soft seats, and like all Russian cars it smelled of Russian car—a smell that always reminded him slightly of Moscow. Even the old Pobeda taxis used to smell the same.

“Neuendorf, number seven Am Fuchsbau,” said Kurt, expecting to be asked where that was. Neuendorf? Am Fuchsbau?

Instead the driver folded his newspaper and drove off.

It was warm in the car. Kurt took off his coat, took the two hundred marks (which now felt to him as if he had found them in the street) out of his coat pocket—and put them back in his wallet ... What was he going to tell Irina?

The Volga was humming its way along the Adlergestell slightly too fast. In his mind, Kurt went over the story of this unedifying afternoon. Wondered whether to play down particularly unedifying details, or leave them out, without actually falsifying his account. Could hear himself speaking to Irina in an artificial, soothing voice ...

Saw her face. Saw the lipstick left on the filter tip of her cigarette. Saw her upper lip, which she didn’t always pluck so scrupulously these days, begin to tremble before she launched into another anti-Melitta tirade ...

Kurt did some calculations. Taking the taxi was saving him an hour. It would be difficult for her to check how much time he had spent with Sasha. It was seven in the evening now ... What the hell, thought Kurt, damn it all, what the hell ...

“Do you know the Gartenstrasse in Potsdam?” he asked the driver. “Off Leninallee?” asked the man.

“That’s it,” said Kurt. “Take me to the Gartenstrasse,”

“Not the Fuchsbau?” asked the man.

“No,” said Kurt. “Number twenty-seven Gartenstrasse.”

A frightful idea occurs to him just before the bus leaves: his neighbor in the seat beside him might be
that
man—a sturdy mestizo of rustic appearance who keeps cleaning his gappy teeth with a toothpick while constantly making sucking, lip-smacking sounds. Sure enough, when Alexander is already in his seat the man comes closer and closer, comparing every seat number at length with the number on his ticket, until at last another passenger comes to his aid and discovers that he passed his own seat way back in the bus.

The seat next to Alexander remains empty. However, another mode of torture sets in. As soon as the bus is on the road, the driver switches on the video system, and after a few minutes of advertising its own merits it starts showing a film in which the principal part is played by an outsized pink rabbit with a penetrating synthesized voice.

The drive is expected to take six hours. After the first hour, Alexander’s dislike of being pestered by this noise has grown to positive hatred: hatred chiefly of the bus driver, whom he holds responsible, but also of his fellow passengers, who ignore the film entirely and continue their conversations at double the previous volume, at least those of them who are not half approvingly, half drowsily nodding their heads as they stare at the screen, or who are, incredibly, asleep.

Alexander has had hardly any sleep. The earplugs he put under the untouched pillow that he then crumpled up had disappeared when he got back from Teotihuacán. The chambermaid must have taken them away when she changed the sheets. He looked in vain for their little yellow plastic cylindrical container on the bedside table, in the bathroom, finally even in the wastebasket—they had gone for good. With his nerves frayed by the yapping and howling of the two dogs on the roof, he got up early in the morning, and when the smooth-faced young Mexican at reception claimed to have no other room available he decided to leave at once. He breakfasted before the Swiss women appeared, packed his things, and, to the sound of loud music coming over the portable loudspeakers carried by CD sellers peddling their wares, went by Metro to the central bus station, known as TAPO, where he bought a ticket for the next bus to Veracruz.

Veracruz: he knows nothing about the city except that his grandmother must have arrived here on the ship from Europe. And he knows the story of the man who jumped into the harbor. He also thinks he recollects that Hernán Cortés landed at the same place, with two hundred men or slightly more, to conquer the land of the Mexica. But that is the sum total of his knowledge.

He could look it up in the
Backpacker
—if he still had the guidebook. But he doesn’t. He left it on the bedside table in his hotel room, on purpose.

After two hours on the road, the pink rabbit film comes to an end—and a new film begins. After a time Alexander gives up not looking at
any
of the four screens within his field of vision, and indeed aiming straight at him, and while he mentally puts together the Spanish sentences he will need in Veracruz to ask the bus company to refund part of his fare (at least the part that makes his a first-class seat—or does the first-class element actually consist of this inconsiderate bombardment, is that the “comfort” which accounts for the price difference?)—while he is arguing in his mind with a uniformed clerk, already aware that he will get nowhere, a scenario with ideas of its own is running its course on one of the four screens turned his way. It begins with a young soldier meeting a girl on a train; only a few minutes later, surprisingly, he is slipping on to her finger an engagement ring that he just happens to be carrying about in a box of chocolates. At almost the same moment a man appears behind some vines and shoots them both; he turns out to be the girl’s father. The rest of the film takes place in a vineyard, and deals with complicated family matters: the soldier loves the girl, her father disapproves, now and then chocolates are handed out to large numbers of uncles and aunts; we see what a merry event the vintage is, and when the plot calls for it, a wide-ranging landscape appears onscreen, or there is music intended to show what the protagonists are feeling at a given moment. Then the girl’s father accidentally sets fire to the grape vines, which surprisingly burn like napalm ... and then the bus driver switches off the video and stops for a toilet break.

He gets a taxi from the Veracruz bus station. He doesn’t ask the taxi driver to take him to a hotel, but to be on the safe side asks for a street name that he found in the bus station on an ad for a hotel in the
centro histórico.

“Miguel Lerdo.”

“The Hotel Imperial?” asks the taxi driver.

“No,” says Alexander.

His manner is severe. He is prepared for anything. They drive down a broad avenue lined with palm trees until there is a traffic jam, and then the driver tries following a frantic zigzag course through the Old Town. Plain, three-story buildings, most of them pastel-colored, bleached by the sun. The place is teeming with pedestrians. It is hot and humid, and on their way down the narrow streets all kinds of smells waft in through the open window: cooking oil, sewage, scents from barbershops with their doors open, exhaust gases, freshly baked tortillas, and in one place—they have to wait because plastic sacks are being unloaded from a truck—it really does smell like the nitrate fertilizers in Granny’s conservatory.

Alexander pays, ostentatiously stows his wallet away, waits until the taxi driver is out of sight. Right beside the Imperial there is a smaller, more modest hotel. It costs two hundred pesos a night. He pays in advance for a week, and gets a second-floor room with a view of a pretty square containing a campanile and some palm trees, all surrounded by pastel-colored buildings in what Alexander thinks is the colonial style, perhaps because of the arcades with many cafés and bars nestling in their shadow. Then he fears that noise from the bars, and particularly from the hotel restaurant with its tables and chairs set out below his window, might keep him awake at night, and he asks the two girls at reception for a quieter, more remote room. They assure him unanimously, and with mathematical gravity, that the square is quiet by night, but Alexander insists on changing. Instead of the light, spacious room with a view of the square he is given a small one without a window, getting what little daylight comes in through a glass brick in a narrow slit, while its air comes from an air-conditioning unit. He is probably paying too much for this room, but his sleep matters to him more than an attractive view.

He eats in a
restaurante familiar,
whatever that means. The waiter, a young man of about twenty-five in a baby-blue polo shirt, puts his notepad down on the table so that Alexander himself can write down the number of the dish he wants to order, and then takes it to a counter where the order is deciphered by a busy young woman and passed on to two older women, who prepare dishes quickly and in public view. Alexander’s shrimp and herb salad is fresh and tastes wonderful, and in spite of the colorful PVC tablecloths, in spite of the white plastic chairs and the doors left wide open, even in spite of the neon lighting in the ceiling, switched on even in broad daylight, there is almost a comfortable feel about the restaurant, a warm and homely feeling, and maybe that is what makes Alexander pause for a moment, what briefly causes him difficulty in swallowing. Maybe it is the busy harmony behind the counter, where the two women, one middle-aged and one ancient, are now preparing his fish. Or the tiny gesture of the waiter who, after carefully carrying the shrimp salad across the room to him on a flat plate, and putting it down in front of him without dipping his thumb in the dressing, gives him an encouraging nod and places a hand, almost affectionately, on his shoulder.

Darkness falls suddenly, and more or less on the stroke of six. Alexander goes for another stroll to the brightly illuminated harbor promenade. Temperatures are bearable now, a breeze off the ocean meets his nostrils, but here, too, the air seems drenched in melancholy. Alexander keeps his breathing cautious and shallow, so as not to let too much of it into his body.

By the quay wall, where a group of heavily armed police officers are loafing around like a gang of youths, he turns and looks back at the city of Veracruz, seeing the side of it that is turned to the sea. Apart from the new multistory building on the quayside, it must have looked something like this to the Europeans arriving here. Night after night, on board their ship, they may well have gazed at the harbor promenade, far into the country that was the last hope for many of them. For years, so Alexander works out the prehistory of the story that his grandmother once told him—for years these people had been in flight, had escaped by the skin of their teeth from French internment camps and from the German troops advancing on Marseille, had obtained transit visas or extensions of residence permits in wearisome negotiations with civil servants, had waited for weeks or months, indigent as they were, in some bleak North African town until a ship arrived that would take them across the ocean as third-class passengers, and then, on arriving at the port of Veracruz, had been denied permission to land because not all the formalities had been cleared up, not all the permits had been given out. In this situation a passenger waiting there had lost his nerve, and one night he had jumped into the harbor, hoping to swim to Mexico. The man, said his grandmother, had disappeared into the water and never came up again. Soon the tips of black dorsal fins gently parting the water were moving in rhythmic circles above the place where the man went down.

When he gets back, the square in front of the hotel is only moderately busy, it is not as bad as he feared, but there is enough of a crowd for his move to the smaller room to seem justified in retrospect. However, in the stuffy, windowless space he has no option but to switch on the air-conditioning, which now turns out to be fitted to a light shaft and sends old cigarette smoke wafting through the air. The unit also rattles, and it takes him a long time to realize what this rattling reminds him of—but then the memory is like a déjà vu, and he has to put the light on to reassure himself that he is not back in the hospital.

In the morning he has a headache, feels unwell. He avoids feeling for his lymph nodes, he avoids anything that might irritate or upset him. He doesn’t take the cold shower that has been his habit in the morning for years, but goes downstairs feeling slightly dizzy. When he comes out into the square, the Mexican sky that has been blue every day until now is suddenly overcast. If he didn’t know that the rainy season in Mexico does not begin until May, he would say it looks like rain.

He soon finds a
farmacia,
and for a moment has no qualms about appreciating the omnipresence of multinational groups, since as a result he has only to breathe the word
aspirin
to get what he wants. However, it proves difficult to convey the idea of the other purchase he hopes to make to the pharmacist. He tries:

“
Quiero algo para tapar las orejas.”

The pharmacist moves his head back and forth, with an air of great meaning, and then begins asking Alexander insistent but incomprehensible questions, until finally, although Alexander can hardly utter any articulate sounds, he has an inspiration that is expressed in the emphatic repetition of the word
ferretería,
and now Alexander also has to stand and listen to a difficult account of the way he must go to get there, although by now he is sure he has been misunderstood. On no account does he want to put something made of iron in his ears.

He finds a large café on the square. There are a great many waiters in chocolate-brown outfits here, but because of the complex system putting them in charge of separate operations it takes him an eternity to order coffee, a glass of water, and a croissant, each from a different waiter, and then another eternity for all of those to arrive, and finally it takes him forever to identify the waiter responsible for taking his money, whereupon he can finally go to his table. His head is threatening to explode when he leaves the café. Out in the square, he already feels breathless. He walks on without thinking, without knowing where he is going, and a few minutes later finds himself on the harbor promenade again, where he now breathes the wind coming in from the sea deeply, through distended nostrils, although it still smells as heavy, as moist, as dangerous as yesterday.

He goes south, along the quay wall. The wind turns to squalls, swirling up sand. Almost in passing. Alexander notices that several Mexican boys of about twelve are bathing in the harbor. They jump in from the quay wall, shrieking, and it seems that the sharks are not bothered about them, nor is anyone else ... A little farther on there is even a stretch of beach, although there is no one on it. But now it is beginning to drizzle, while the wind is still swirling up sand; there is a strange, turbulent atmosphere. Cars are driving much too fast, a fire engine sounds its siren. And suddenly there is no one left in the street whom Alexander could ask to tell him the way—the way to where, come to think of it?

After twenty minutes the rain has overcome the sand, as well as Alexander’s belief that it can’t rain seriously in Mexico at this time of year. His shirt and thighs are wet. Suddenly there are no available taxis around, and he realizes why when he has turned in the direction of the city center: no buses are running either, or not the one he would need. Detour, says a sign. But he waits for a bus in vain on the road that is supposed to be part of the detour. No taxi in sight. He is beginning to freeze, and decides to walk on.

On the way, coming to a pharmacy, he tries to solve the earplug problem again. But as soon as he walks in with his wet shoes and his dripping hat, he senses the reluctance of the pharmacist looking up from his cash book to serve him.
A drowned rat,
those are the words that run through his head, he looks like a drowned rat as he faces the old man and brings out his request—without any noticeable effect. For a few seconds he stands there, watching raindrops fall from the brim of his hat, while the old man immerses himself in his papers again—or is he thinking about the question that Alexander asked? Alexander leaves the pharmacy without waiting to find out.