Kruso Page 10

  The first pair was much too large, and, in the second and third pairs as well, Ed looked like a dwarf in a clown’s clothes. These steps were called fittings and dressings. Friday was given his goatskin. After they found the right pair of pants, Kruso draped a long white chef’s coat over Ed’s shoulders. Ed felt Kruso’s eyes on him, the pleasure.

  ‘I’d like to ask you something.’

  The clothes smelled of mould and had soot on the hems. Ed was not sure he wanted to wear them, yet he sensed the honour — for faithful service, or what should one call it? He had goosebumps under the jacket.

  ‘It’s very important for our duty here. The question is whether you want to take responsibility for one of the boilers. Lighting it early, at six in the morning, our caretaker forgets too often. You know how hard it is with cold water in the dishwashing station, basically impossible …’

  While Kruso explained the boiler and the set-up of the Black Hole, Ed pictured the caretaker of the German Studies Institute in his garden hut, the ground covered with bottles, and he pictured the caretaker of the Station Hotel in the basement cauterising numbers onto wooden blocks, and he saw Ebeling, the Klausner’s caretaker (he had not met him yet), lying in bed drunk in the house on the island he shared with his mother. And for a moment, Ed saw himself, too: as in a gym class, all the caretakers were lined up according to height, and he was the last in line, and above his head was written ‘6 A.M.’

  Over the following days, the cellar became his cave, his hide-out, quiet and isolated. In one corner, where old dining room furniture had been piled, he found a tiny table and a barstool. He had carried them outside, scrubbed off the mould, and left them in the sun for two days. The table fit well under the window in his room, although one drawback was that it smelled of misery (mildew and coal). Ed shortened the barstool’s legs with a saw; the tabletop was still too low.

  After the furnace was fired up (the wood had to be burning well before he could lay the damp coal on it), Ed made his round. One of the cabinets was filled with small bars of hotel soap, wrapped in once-white paper with ‘Palace Hotel’ in elegant, copperplate writing. Then the metal cabinet with files and account books. Behind the metal cabinet that was almost rusted through but immoveable, there was a niche. Through a gap as wide as an arm, you could see discarded lumber, prehistoric gymnastics apparatuses, rotting burlap, and a zinc tub. ‘Alexander Ettenburg called this tub his incinerator, his crematorium,’ Kruso had explained, as if it would be useful for Ed’s work. ‘There used to be an urn that went with it. The Ur-hermit had prepared everything. He was a man of nature, well ahead of his time. He named all the places here, the Svantovit Gorge, Flag Mountain, the Zeppelin Stone. In the end, the old man wanted nothing more than to be buried on the island, but they sprinkled his ashes over the sea. The island people didn’t want any foreigners in their land, and that’s still true today, with a few exceptions. Great men like Hauptmann or nameless drowned bodies.’

  When he finished his round, Ed lit the cellar candle. In a corner hung with plastic sheeting, there was a small, square shaft into which wooden steps led. He set the candle on the ground and started pulling snails off the walls. He was amazed how tenaciously they stuck to mould-darkened cement. Every morning, there were new black and brown specimens — there was no explanation for it. He picked them until his hands were full, then he climbed the stairs and tossed them into the fire.

  Ed discovered that the shaft had originally been a shower, and used his time in the cellar reconditioning it — he scraped the ancient sludge out of the drain and knocked the scale from the showerhead. The water was rusty and foul-smelling at first, but got better after a while. The fixtures squeaked and creaked pitifully, but they worked. For a while, Ed stood knee-deep in water, until a fill-level sensor started a pump. When he had lit the furnace and the water in the tank had been warmed, he could take a shower, an incomparable luxury. Aside from the onion, it was the only other thing of his very own.

  The snails glowed in the fire. They straightened out to their full length one last time, like newborns, before suddenly collapsing in on themselves with a short whistling sound, as if air were escaping from their bodies. ‘God knows how they keep coming back,’ Ed whispered into the furnace. A brief whistling from the embers, then he began loading the briquettes, piece by piece.

  VIOLA

  28 JUNE

  Today Rimbaud showed me a book and read out loud from it. It’s called The Theatre of Cruelty, a book from the West. Every week there’s a new title in the nest, sometimes several. Probably gets them from the book dealer. I’m allowed to use the nest, even by myself, when I have the time. They’re all a community here.

  Every day at noon, Ed ate his onion. Along with his silence, his onion ritual (as if it were even necessary) gave him an image of being a moderately odd duck, who was unlikely to cause trouble and whose hiring, yes, could hardly have been a mistake. In a certain sense, the onion established his position in the Klausner. Soon Ed was seen as an island of calm amid the galloping and reciting representatives of the wait staff, the irascible ice-cream man with his constantly rattling ice cubes, and Rick at the counter, who, with his stories and bits of wisdom, ran a kind of life-philosophy bar. Ed at his sink, in contrast, was a model of concentration and discretion. That was an obvious reason why he was close to Kruso, a Friday at Robinson’s side. There was no need for anyone to wonder much why the two were increasingly seen together, although as a rule it was simply Kruso’s daily briefing for Ed as the new dishwasher and boiler-man. Ed marvelled at the changes, and once again he wondered how it could all be happening to him. Now and then, he was overcome with a bashful joy that was reluctant to ally itself too closely to him, and sometimes, very suddenly, G. appeared to him — he had no control over that.

  Why did it do him so much good to talk so little?

  He hadn’t intended it, but then Ed realised that silence was the core feature of his flight — that’s what he had come to call it. He simply had to keep to himself, but he also knew he shouldn’t be alone at this time … In his mind, he had accidentally formulated it the other way around, and yet that’s exactly what he had meant: I’d like a place in this world that keeps me apart from everything. Later, he had walked along the beach and had spoken the sentence out over the water, like a plea, but the waves were too high, the sea too loud, and the wind pushed the words right back in his mouth.

  His reserve helped him avoid giving any signs of weakness or inexperience. He said, ‘Hello’ or ‘Yes’ and ‘Exactly’. He could use ‘exactly’ for any situation. ‘Exactly’ was the best possible answer if anyone presumed to joke with him or wanted to ridicule him, which happened often at the beginning and then less and less. Whatever happened to Ed was simply redoubled by his ‘exactly’, and, in this doubling, it was relieved of its weight and robbed of its magnitude. In this way, everything could be quickly accepted or deflected. He needed no defence, no trench. Everything that happened to him in this foreign place was nothing more than exactly that. ‘Exactly’ was the briefest and best description of the island. The island ‘exactly’ lay in the middle of his silence, impregnable.

  From the dishwashing station, Ed had discovered it at some point — a radio that Chef Mike called ‘my Viola’. It was a Violetta-brand valve radio, a dark wooden box on an inaccessibly high shelf above the refrigerators, right under the kitchen ceiling. Apparently, it could no longer be turned off. The shelf was supported by raw steel brackets and seemed more solid than the Klausner’s foundation walls. The cover on the speakers was coated with a hard layer of age-old grease, out of which flashed the flickering green lens of a magic eye. The silver of its name glittered above it like eyeliner in an old woman’s make-up. Viola winked at Ed. She winked at his back as he bent over the sink. Sometimes, she disappeared completely in the haze. In the layers of echoes that filled the kitchen, the radio’s voice was irritatingly difficult to place, and seemed to come right ou
t of the ghostly swirls that rose from the cooking pots. Viola, Chef Mike explained, belonged to his predecessor, who had drowned when out for a night swim in the summer of 1985. The station had already been set and the radio turned on when he and Rolf took over the Klausner’s kitchen not long after. As far as Chef Mike was concerned, there was nothing more to say about it.

  Ed was troubled by the thought that the radio had outlived its owner — without falling silent. In a certain way, it could be seen as the voice of the drowned former cook that had poured out for years over the pots and pans in the Klausner without interruption, covering the dishes he prepared in an endless stream. For an absurd moment, it appeared to Ed like an act of resistance, perhaps evidence of some injustice long past, surfacing like a hand reaching out of a grave again and again. Ed fantasised as the acrid fumes of the detergent went to his head and he channelled plate after plate through the stone sink for coarse cleaning. He worked hard to maintain his rhythm; he did not want to be slower than Kruso.

  The control dial was missing, and the ivory-coloured buttons that recalled an overbite were broken. Mangled as she was, Viola could only receive one West German station, but did so with the relentlessness attributed to soldiers wounded in battle who fight on and on despite their injuries. What Viola made of these broadcasts with her shaky reception, her sudden silences or obstinate humming, her rasping, gurgling, and coughing (her bronchial sounds were particularly bad) coalesced into a kind of undertone in the Klausner. Her constant broadcasting was like the house’s breathing, varying but continual, like the crash of the breakers and for the most part ignored … ‘Droning on and on, just droning …’ as Chef Mike said.

  In the dishwashing station, they could not hear much from Viola, often just a low roar with overtones. The time signal was the most distinct sound. Twelve o’clock. At the last pip, Ed lifted his hands out of the water. He pushed the swinging door to the kitchen open a crack and asked for an onion. Eventually, mute Rolf went over to prepare him a plate and set it on the shelf behind the swinging door on the right so that Ed only had to reach out and grab it: a large, gleaming onion sliced in half with a slice of brown bread. Ed paused for a moment, his back pushing against one wing of the swinging door, and before he could shout his thanks into the kitchen (he peered through the haze to catch sight of Rolf or Chef Mike), a few of Viola’s sentences reached him. Ed felt drawn to the monotony of her half-hourly stories, with contents that hardly changed for days. At the end, the weather, water conditions, wind speed. There were missing-person announcements and emergency broadcasts for motorists. Not even a storm advisory warranted a change in intonation. ‘Federal Minister of Economic Affairs Haussmann has repeated his advisory to reduce working hours. The people of the Federal Republic are to be relieved of low-altitude flights. And now the detailed news report.’

  To show Kruso that the onion would not interrupt his work, Ed ate it right at the sink like an apple, taking a bite now and then. In the beginning, Ed would wash his hands before each bite, but now that he had gradually become one with the dishwashing station and its toxic essences, he no longer took the trouble.

  Except for Viola, the refrigeration units, the coffee machine, and an electric potato peeler that could only be used by the caretaker who was rarely there, there was no machinery in the Klausner aside from Krombach’s grey telephone. Nevertheless, there were windows that could be opened a crack and, if possible, wide-open doors. The wind blew in from the sea through the front entrance, swept the dining room and kitchen clean, and wafted out the back door. As a result, Ed and Kruso were enveloped for hours in a warm, greasy current, a mix of vapours, a combination of tobacco, smoke, human smells, and alcohol fumes, musty and stifling. ‘Smoked, we’re being smoked,’ Kruso swore, ‘when the savages come, they’ll smell us first. We have to take precautions and wash thoroughly every evening. Wash and groom ourselves, put on moisturiser. Always be vigilant. Expand the caves, create more hideouts. Ed, the expectation of evil is more bitter than suffering it!’ The echo chamber that was the dishwashing station distorted his words, so Ed misunderstood them. It didn’t sound like Kruso was joking. He basically never did, especially not when talking about his namesake’s legendary story.

  At the end of the shift, the ice-cream man shoved his empty buckets between Ed’s legs.

  ‘My tidy friend!’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘That’s exactly what I mean.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘Don’t get cheeky, Onion.’

  The buckets stank. René’s cold, nasal tone of voice stuck to their insides. Ed scrubbed it away. René’s big-city arrogance (he was from Berlin, too) made an impression that was both asinine and intimidating. There was something in his intonation, something that seemed indomitable and that you did not hear in the Thuringian or Saxon dialects. His white shirt looked freshly ironed; he always smelled good, Ed thought. René wore real jeans and a comb sticking out of his back pocket. It was plastic and had a wide, lightly curved handle. Occasionally, in the middle of a conversation or even at the breakfast table, he would pull it out and comb his wavy hair.

  Ed dried the buckets carefully and put them back in the hutch under the ice-cream counter. Then he crept up to his room. He had learned early on that there was a hall that led from the dining room directly to the stairs; you didn’t have to circle the entire building to reach the stairs. In the depths of the small corridor between the dining room and the staircase, the second door was barely visible, although it usually stood open and connected the kitchen, bar, and dining room with the upper floor like a duct.

  This outer corridor complied with an old regulation that Krombach repeated whenever he hired new crew members. It all went back to complaints made by senior-level guests on their company holidays who were outraged when unhygienic, unattractive characters would suddenly appear next to their tables and, with a cloud of sweat, smoke, and alcohol, spoil the candlelit holiday existence the guests had dreamt of for so long and worked for so hard. Krombach was just a tenant and didn’t want any trouble with the so-called parent company. In any case, the manager made sure his crew did not come into close contact with the holiday guests, those official representatives of the working classes.

  That night, Ed experienced the beneficial isolation that was mentioned now and again in the calmest possible voice with the most soothing words, which hid the fact that no one actually knew if there was such a thing. He listened to the tattered melodies floating up from Viola. He dozed to the crashing of the waves or stared into the darkness over the water and saw the bear-horse. It was completely calm. He could look the animal fixedly in the eye.

  It was as if he had only started to think during that first afternoon in the courtyard of the Klausner with a horse in front of him and an onion in his hand. To think thoughts he knew had actually originated with him. It was thought beyond the powers of perception and somewhere deep within, beneath his memory hoard. The horse’s moist, velvety nostrils, the sound of its breathing, the stillness in its eyes. Ed was twenty-four years old. He had lost G. For the first time in his life, he could feel how he was starting to think. When he rubbed his face with the palm of his hand, he could smell the daily special. His skin was greasy, and shone.

  THE ENDDORN HOTEL

  A slight wind rose. Little lapping Baltic waves followed in quick succession; a short-winded sea. Sand martins flashed by, crisscrossing above Ed’s head as if they wanted to chase him away. He lay on the beach, on his back, lost in contemplation of the fist-sized caves sprinkled across the steep coast on the northern end of the island. They were high up, right under the cliff’s edge, in ten or fifteen levels on top of each other, and reminded Ed of the desert Indians’ cave dwellings he had seen in a Western or in an adventure movie. The birds appeared in their caves at intervals, then shot back out.

  ‘A giant cuckoo clock, old gaffer,’ Ed whispered, ‘can you hear the ticking in the clay? With their open beaks, th
ey catch mosquitoes like seconds. In flight, they digest time into a pap, and then at home they vomit it all up and stuff the mouths of their tiny sprogs — stuffed only with a brew of time, they learn how to fly, old rascal, did you know that?’

  Ed liked spinning yarns even if his fox was out of earshot. Still, it was his first free day, his first day off since he had arrived at the Klausner, and he had decided to walk around the northern tip of the island.

  Days off: there had been no instructions or explanations given, and why should there? No one thought of him, no one wanted anything from him. For Ed, they were an intermediate goal, a small triumph. ‘You made it this far,’ he whispered to the swallow-filled sky, and started on his way.

  Like a beached whale helplessly pushing its mouth into the waves and trying desperately to return to the water, the Dornbusch highland rose from the sea — a large, slowly crumbling animal. The storm tide constantly excised huge blocks from its Ice Age body — sandstone, shale, and Uppsala granite — from which its earlier home and the ten thousand years since its arrival could be deciphered. Its Scandinavian body was fraying, and little by little its corpse was returning to the sea. The current washed marl and clay back onto the north-east of the island and began rounding out the coastline. The area called the Bessin, whose shape led many to compare the island’s contour with a seahorse (and so to take the island even more deeply into their hearts), had become bloated over the last few decades — the seahorse grew extra muzzles, and its head expanded to monstrous proportions.

  After only a half-kilometre, the way was blocked. Part of the bluff had recently broken off and slid into the sea. Holding his bundle of things over his head, Ed made his way awkwardly around the landslide. The ground was stony; he could hardly stay upright. The water was above his waist. At one point, he thought he heard someone laughing, but it seemed to come from over the water. Apparently, there were no tourists on this part of the island. There was just one man sunbathing, probably younger than Ed. He was naked and lay half-hidden in one of the small bays. When Ed looked back again, the man was already tightening his belt over his jacket. He pulled his machine gun from an alcove and waved at Ed.