Kruso Read online

  KRUSO

  LUTZ SEILER was born in 1963 in Gera, Thuringia, and today lives in Wilhelmshorst, near Berlin, and Stockholm. Since 1997, he has been the literary director and custodian of the Peter Huchel Museum. His many prizes include the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize, the Bremen Prize for Literature, the Fontane Prize, the Uwe Johnson Literary Prize 2014, and the German Book Prize 2014.

  TESS LEWIS is a writer and translator from French and German. Her translations include works by Peter Handke, Anselm Kiefer, and Philippe Jaccottet. She has won a number of awards, including the 2015 ACFNY Translation Prize and a Guggenheim Fellowship. She is an advisory editor for The Hudson Review.

  For Charlotta

  Scribe Publications

  18–20 Edward St, Brunswick, Victoria 3056, Australia

  2 John Street, Clerkenwell, London, WC1N 2ES, United Kingdom

  Originally published in German as Kruso by Suhrkamp Verlag Berlin in 2014

  First published in English by Scribe in 2017

  Text copyright © Suhrkamp Verlag Berlin 2014

  All rights reserved by and controlled through Suhrkamp Verlag Berlin

  Translation copyright © Tess Lewis 2017

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publishers of this book.

  The moral rights of the author and translator have been asserted.

  9781925321845 (Australian edition)

  9781911344001 (UK edition)

  9781925307955 (e-book)

  CiP entries for this title are available from the National Library of Australia and the British Library.

  scribepublications.com.au

  scribepublications.co.uk

  But to return to my new companion. I was greatly delighted with him.

  DANIEL DEFOE, ROBINSON CRUSOE

  SMALL, UNFAMILIAR MOON

  From the moment he took off, Ed had been in a state of exaggerated alertness that kept him from sleeping on the train. Outside the Ostbahnhof, renamed Hauptbahnhof on the new timetable, there were two lamps, one diagonally opposite on the post office and another over the main entrance where a delivery van waited, its motor idling. The night’s emptiness contradicted Ed’s idea of Berlin — but what did he know about Berlin anyway? He went back into the ticket hall and retreated to one of the broad windowsills. It was so quiet in the hall that, from his spot by the window, he could hear the rattle of the delivery van out front as it drove away.

  He dreamt of a desert. On the horizon, a camel was approaching. It was floating in the air, and four or five Bedouins held onto it with more than a little difficulty. The Bedouins wore sunglasses, and paid no attention to him.

  When Ed opened his eyes, he saw a man’s face, shiny with lotion, so close that at first he couldn’t take it all in. The man was old, and his lips were pursed as if he were about to whistle — or had just given someone a kiss. Ed recoiled and the man raised his arms.

  ‘Oh, I do beg your pardon, I’m very sorry, I just … I really don’t want to disturb you, young man.’

  Ed rubbed his forehead, which felt damp to the touch, and gathered up his things. The old man smelled of Florena skin cream, and his brown hair was swept back in a stiff, shiny pompadour.

  ‘It’s just that I’m in the middle of a move,’ the man warbled, ‘a major move, and now it’s already night, midnight, much too late, stupidly, and I’ve still got one armoire left — a very good, very large armoire — out on the footpath.’

  As Ed rose to his feet, the man pointed to the station exit. ‘It’s very close, not far at all, where I live, don’t worry, just four, five minutes from here, please, thank you, young man.’

  For a moment, Ed took his request seriously. The old man’s hand plucked at the extra-long sleeve of Ed’s jumper as if he wanted to lead him. ‘Do come, please!’ As he spoke, the man began ruffling the wool upwards, imperceptibly, with circular motions no larger than the radius of his fingertips, soft as gelatine, until Ed felt a gentle, elliptical caress on his pulse. ‘You know you’d like to come with me …’

  Ed rammed the old man aside, much too roughly, almost knocking him down.

  ‘There’s no harm in asking!’ the old man screeched, but it was more of a hiss, almost inaudible. Even his lurching seemed put-on, like a short, rehearsed dance. The old man’s hair had slipped down to the nape of his neck, and Ed could not figure out at first how that was possible; he was appalled at the sight of the bare cranium floating like a small, unfamiliar moon in the semi-darkness of the ticket hall.

  ‘I’m sorry, I … have no time right now,’ Ed said, then repeated, ‘No time.’ As he hastily crossed the hall, he noticed there were timid figures in every corner trying to draw Ed’s attention with tiny gestures — yet, at the same time, they seemed anxious to hide their presence. One raised a brown Dederon shopping bag and pointed at it, nodding at Ed. The expression on his face was as warm-hearted as Santa Claus’s on Christmas Eve.

  The station’s Mitropa restaurant smelled of scorched fat. A faint humming noise came from the neon lights in the display case, empty but for a couple of bowls of solyanka on a hot plate. A few oily sausages and chunks of pickled cucumber protruded like rocks from the pale grey membrane that had formed on the soup’s surface, bobbing slightly in the relentless stream of heat, like the workings of some inner organ — or the throbbing pulse of life just before it ends, Ed thought. He instinctively put his hand to his forehead: maybe he really had jumped, and all this was his final second.

  The transit police entered the dining area. The short, semi-circular visors on their peaked caps gleamed, as did the cornflower blue of their uniforms. With them was a dog, which kept its head lowered as if ashamed of its role. ‘Ticket, please. Identification, please.’ Those unable to show any travel documents had to leave the restaurant immediately. A shuffling of feet, a scraping of chairs, and a few acquiescent drinkers staggered out without a word, as if their duty had been to wait for this last order. By two a.m., the Mitropa had lost almost all of its guests.

  Ed knew it was one of those things that was simply not done, but he got up and grabbed one of the half-empty glasses. Still standing, he drained it in one gulp. Satisfied, he returned to his table. It’s the first step, Ed thought; being on the road is doing me good. He cradled his head in his arms, in the musty smell of old leather, and fell asleep in an instant. The Bedouins were still busy with the camel, but they were not all pulling in one direction; instead, they tugged from all sides. They did not seem to be remotely in agreement.

  The raised Dederon bag — Ed had not understood what it was supposed to mean, but, then again, it was the first time he had spent the night in a train station. Although he was by now almost certain that there had never been any armoire, Ed pictured the old man’s furniture in the middle of the street and felt sorry — not for the old man, actually, but for the associations that would stick with him from now on: the smell of Florena cream and a small, hairless moon. He imagined the old man groping his way back to the armoire, opening the doors, and crawling inside to sleep, and for a moment Ed felt the movement the old man made to curl up and turn away from the world with such intensity that he would have liked to curl up with him.

  ‘Your ticket, please.’

  They were checking him a second time. Maybe because of the length of his hair or because of his clothes: the heavy leather jacket Ed had inherited from his uncle, a motorcycle jacket from the Fifties, an impressive coat with an enormous collar, soft lining, and bi
g leather buttons, one that connoisseurs traded as a Thälmann jacket — the term was not used in a derogatory way, quite the contrary, it was used mythologically, if anything — perhaps because the working-class leader wore a very similar jacket in all the historical footage of him. Ed remembered the strangely jolting masses, and Thälmann on the podium, his upper body jerking back and forth, his twitching fist held high. Ed couldn’t help it; every time he saw the old footage, his tears began to flow …

  Awkwardly, he pulled out the small, creased piece of paper. Under the heading DEUTSCHE REICHSBAHN, the destination, date, price, and distance in kilometres were printed in thinly outlined boxes. His train left at three twenty-eight a.m.

  ‘Why are you headed to the Baltic Sea?’

  ‘Visiting a friend,’ Ed repeated. ‘On holiday,’ he added because this time the transit officer did not answer. At least he had spoken in a confident tone (a Thälmann-tone), although his ‘on holiday’ immediately struck him as inadequate and implausible, almost inept.

  ‘Holiday, holiday,’ the transit officer repeated.

  He spoke as if giving dictation, and at once the boxy grey two-way radio attached to the left side of his chest with a leather strap began to crackle softly.

  ‘Holiday, holiday.’

  Evidently, the word was sufficient; it contained everything anyone needed to know about Ed. Everything about his weaknesses and dishonesty. Everything about G., his fear and his unhappiness, everything about his twenty wooden poems from thirteen attempts at writing over a hundred years, and everything about the actual reasons for his trip, which even Ed himself had not fully understood until now. He saw the control centre, the transit-police office, somewhere high above the iron structure of the June night, a cornflower-blue capsule, glassed-in and neatly lined with linoleum, criss-crossing the endless space of his guilty conscience.

  Ed was very tired now, and for the first time in his life he had the feeling he was on the run.

  TRAKL

  Only three weeks had passed since Dr Z. had asked if it might not be agreeable to Ed (he used this expression) to write his final thesis on the Expressionist poet Georg Trakl. ‘Perhaps it will even lend itself to a more substantial work,’ Z. had added, proud of his offer’s attractiveness, which apparently had no other requirements. Furthermore, there was not the slightest overtone in his voice, not one of the displays of pity that had rendered Ed speechless more than once in the past.

  For Dr Z., Ed was, first and foremost, the student who could recite by heart whichever text was being discussed. Even when Ed retreated to the back of the classroom and hid behind the curtain of his dark, shoulder-length hair, he eventually spoke at one point or another, hastily and at length and in well-formulated sentences.

  For two nights, Ed barely slept so he could read everything on Trakl that was available in the Institute library. The Trakl literature was shelved in the last in a series of access rooms, where, as a rule, he was alone and undisturbed. A small desk stood under a window with a view of the shapeless, cobweb-shrouded hut in the tiny garden where the caretaker of the German Studies Institute would retreat during the day. He probably even lived there — any number of rumours about the man were making the rounds.

  The books stood on one of the highest shelves, almost directly beneath the ceiling; you needed a ladder. Ed climbed up without first sliding the ladder closer to T and Tr. He awkwardly leaned sideways and pulled one book after another from the shelf. The ladder started to wobble; its steel hooks stuttered a warning against the rails on which they were hung. This didn’t make Ed any more cautious, quite the contrary. He leaned his torso even further towards Trakl, then further still, and yet a fraction more. It was the moment he had felt it the first time.

  That evening, when he was sitting at his desk, he recited the poems softly to himself. The sound of each word became associated with the image of a vast, cool landscape that completely captivated Ed; white, brown, blue, an utter mystery. The writing and life of Georg Trakl — pharmacy student, military pharmacist, morphine addict, and opium-eater. Next to Ed, on an armchair he kept covered with a sheet, Matthew lay sleeping. Now and then, the cat would swivel an ear in Ed’s direction. Occasionally, its ear would twitch repeatedly and vigorously as if the chair were electrified.

  Matthew — G. had chosen the name. She had found the cat, tiny, mewling, a bit of fluff hardly bigger than a tennis ball, in a light well in the courtyard. She had crouched near the well for two or three hours until she finally lured the kitten out and carried it upstairs. To this day, Ed had no idea why G. had chosen that name, and he never would find out unless the cat were to tell him at some point.

  Ed had declined all offers of help. He attended his seminars and took the exams that Professor H., the Department Head, would have gladly exempted him from: the sympathetic bend of his large skull, the benevolently wavy hair, white and lustrous, and the hand on Ed’s arm when H. took him aside in the Institute stairwell, but, above all, the velvety voice to which Ed longed to abandon himself … But knowledge was not Ed’s problem. Nor were exams.

  Everything Ed read at the time imprinted itself in him, almost automatically and literally, word for word, every poem and every commentary, whatever he cast his eyes on when he sat alone at home or at his desk in the last room of the library, gazing at the caretaker’s hut. His existence without G. — it was almost a kind of hypnosis. When he resurfaced some time later, what he had read still buzzed in his head. Studying was a drug that calmed him. He read, he wrote, he cited and recited, and at some point the expressions of condolences dwindled, the offers of help trailed off, the concerned glances subsided. And yet, Ed had never spoken with anyone about G. or about his situation. He only spoke when he was at home: he prattled on endlessly to himself and, of course, he spoke to Matthew.

  After his first days with Trakl, Ed had attended only Dr Z.’s lectures. Poetry of the Baroque, of the Romantic period, Expressionism. According to the curriculum, this was not allowed. There were attendance lists and entries in one’s transcript. Facts that even Dr Z. could not avoid in the long run. To some extent, Ed still seemed to be protected. His fellow students rarely tried to take the floor when he was speaking. They preferred to listen to him, intimidated and impressed at the same time, as if Ed were some exotic creature from the zoo of human unhappiness, surrounded by a moat of timorous esteem.

  After four years in the same course of studies, they all had the relevant images in mind: G. and Ed hand in hand every morning in the Institute car park; G. and Ed’s long, tender, untiring embrace as the lecture room slowly filled; G. and Ed and their evening scenes in the Café Corso (initially about nothing, then about everything); and then, late at night, the effusive reconciliations, out on the street, at the tram stop. But only after the last tram was gone and they had to run to get home, three stations to Rannischer Platz and, from there, another stretch on foot to their door; as the tram rounded the last curve on its final run through the city and the infernal screeching and whining of the steel chassis pervaded the night like a harbinger of the Final Judgement.

  Ed, that’s what G. had called him, and sometimes Edge or Eddie.

  Now and then (more and more frequently), Ed would climb the ladder to feel it. He called it the stuff of pilots. First, the hooks’ stuttering beat. Then the beguiling surge, a shudder that reached his very core, his loins — after which, the tension eased. He closed his eyes and breathed deeply. He was a pilot in his space capsule, floating in the air on silken strings.

  Lilacs had bloomed for a few days in the dooryard of the caretaker’s hut. An elderberry bush swelled from under the threshold. The spider webs in the doorframe were torn, and the loose ends dangled in the wind. The man must be at home, Ed thought. Sometimes Ed saw him slinking through the overgrown garden, or standing motionless as if he were listening for something. When he went into his hut, he did so very gingerly, with arms outstretched. Nevertheless, clinking re
sounded from his very first step; a sea of bottles covered the floor.

  According to one of the rumours, the caretaker had been a university professor and had even worked abroad, in ‘non-socialist economic territory’ no less. Now he belonged to the class of outcasts who lived their own lives — the garden and the hut belonged to another world. Ed tried to imagine what the man ate for breakfast. He simply could not picture it, but then the image of a small camembert came to him (the ‘Rügener Bade Junge’ brand), which the caretaker divided into four small, bite-sized pieces on a worn wooden cutting board. The man pricked the triangular pieces of cheese onto the point of his knife and slipped them into his mouth, one after the other. Hard for others to imagine that loners ever eat anything, Ed thought. For Ed, however, the caretaker was the only truly real person in that period of his life, as lonely and forlorn as he was. For a brief, bewildering moment, it wasn’t clear if Ed would have preferred to consign himself to the custodian’s care rather than remain under Dr Z.’s wing.

  The Institute library closed at seven p.m. As soon as he got home, Ed would feed Matthew. He gave him bread, a slice of cold cuts, and some milk. It had been G.’s job. As reliably as Ed cared for Matthew, he still did not understand that cats don’t need milk but water to survive. That’s why he was puzzled when the animal dug around the lemon geranium in the hydroponic pot as soon as he left the room. Ed stood as if rooted in the kitchen and listened to the noise. The clicking of the little pebbles as they rained out of the pot onto the cupboard and from there onto the floorboards. He couldn’t do anything but listen. He couldn’t believe that these things were part of his life — that he was the one to whom all this was happening.

  MATTHEW

  Then, on the evening before Ed’s twenty-fourth birthday, Matthew disappeared. Ed was up half the night reading for Dr Z.’s seminar on Barthold Heinrich Brockes: ‘As I walked back and forth / In this tree’s shadow …’ At some point, he fell asleep at his desk.