Kruso Read online

  Fine gravel cushioned with algae covered the beach. The larger stones lay near the water, skulls with algae for hair, carefully and endlessly combed by the waves. There were extensive rockfalls, enormous slabs, and deep fissures along the coast. There were small, fresh glacier tongues of finest clay into which one could sink knee-deep. At the first step, they stretched like rubber under your foot, then suddenly gave way and swallowed your ankles — deep, gluey clay. Once you had sunk into the clay, there was nothing more pleasant than stomping around in it and feeling the slime ooze between your toes … Here and there, the loam and clay had washed up and formed gleaming terraces, small tableaux as smooth as glass, taut and out of reach. There were huge adder stones and poppy flowers scattered over the loam. The water was turquoise along the shore and grey further out. The sun rose and the horizon grew more distinct. The realisation that someone was looking down at him from the top of the cliff, fifty or sixty metres above him, was an unpleasant sensation for Ed. He lowered his eyes and tried to walk more quickly, which was difficult with the stones.

  Where the bluff began to level out, Ed happened on the remains of the bunker Kruso often mentioned. There was a gap that opened onto the depths between two concrete slabs that had been torn from their bracings, from which the sound of the surf rose like an oracle. It smelled of vomit. Behind the bunker rose the tourists’ sandcastles, elaborately constructed and inscribed with small black stones — arrival and departure dates, and names, Köhler, Müller, Schmidt. Some of the castles had roofs of driftwood and some had flags. They reminded Ed of dugouts or command centres in one moment, and in the next of birthday cakes decorated with all sorts of small objects, tin cans, old shoes, washed-up rubbish. Ed supposed the guards at the doors of these cakes wore aprons, grilling aprons, but were otherwise naked. In general, everyone seemed to be naked on the northern end of the island, so Ed turned eastward. Suddenly, he recognised his raised hide in the distance. Although no more than three weeks had passed, he was moved at the sight of the place where he’d spent his first night — ‘where I landed,’ Ed whispered to himself.

  The bird sanctuary was overgrown with thick underbrush, but a path led out onto the spit. He pushed his way forward and entered complete absence. A noise — Ed automatically stepped to the side and ducked. He was not alarmed; he had no fear. He noted that as he crouched, a fresh shade of green filled his field of vision. The green moved and whispered ‘grass’ as softly as if it were caressing the inner dome of his skull.

  ‘That this is the wilderness and this our creeping away into it, is something all of you out there will never understand,’ Ed murmured. He had put another fine log on the bonfire of his monologue. He thought, ‘Places where there is no one but me.’ Crouching, he listened to his heart’s hard beat and felt the familiar longing for a hiding place. And he realised this longing had increased and was now much stronger than it had been in his childhood.

  When Ed stood up, a swarm of birds shot into the sky, and for a moment he was not of this world.

  In the courtyard of the Hotel Enddorn, one of the few buildings in the village of Grieben, Ed ordered coffee and cake. In the shade of willow tree, he sat on one of the rickety chairs scattered randomly throughout the garden. As if something about him gave away the fact that he was a seasonal worker, he was received more warmly and above all served more quickly than the day tourists at his table. And even the day tourists treated him respectfully. His coffeepot was filled to the brim, almost three cups’ worth. At one point, the innkeeper stood in the doorway and called something to the waitress and then greeted Ed briefly — the innkeeper, no less! For a second, Ed was conscious of the unspoken requirements. Nonetheless, there was no doubt: he now belonged to the island, everyone could tell. He was an esskay on his day off.

  On the side facing the street, the Enddorn — a smaller ship than the Klausner — had a barracks-like extension. The door swung open once, and a gust of stale air swept over the tables. Ed glimpsed an iron bed frame, a pile of sleeping bags and maps on the floor. Only a moment later did Ed notice it was Kruso who had walked out of the Enddorn’s extension. Ed wanted to call out to him. He shot to his feet, raised his arm, but could not make a sound.

  Kruso’s upright gait was not athletic but not without power, as if he were propelled by some imbalance, Ed thought; a blow, perhaps, had struck his core and pushed him forward and now he was trying to regain his balance by rapidly thrusting his legs out in front, his hips rigid, his feet skimming the ground … Suddenly Ed felt a pang that Kruso had simply left without looking to the right or left. It was absurd, and Ed had to admit that there was more to it. Kruso touched something inside him that was lacking, something missing, an old emptiness that gnawed at him, a longing for — he didn’t know for what; it had no name. At first, Ed had found the way Krusowitsch had taken him on as an employee disconcerting — Kruso was direct, open, sincere, and yet much of what he said was puzzling. But ultimately, it was up to Ed to figure out, little by little, how things worked on the island. Despite the wretched conditions in the dishwashing station, which Rimbaud said were fit for galley slaves, Ed enjoyed working at Kruso’s side, enjoyed his presence even though the man also seemed so unapproachable. The work was something they accomplished together: it had an intimacy that nothing could supersede. Kruso assigned him tasks. He had brought clarity to Ed’s days, along with an irrefutable feeling that Ed, too, could rise above his hazy, muddled existence.

  The waitress at the Enddorn did not want a tip. Instead, she asked if he were planning to go to the waiters’ beach that night.

  ‘Yeah, maybe,’ Ed replied, hearing the term for the first time. The waitress was almost two heads taller than he and had a sturdy build. Ed found her round face astonishing, as if he had not seen a face for a very long time. When he rose, she took a step towards him and laid her cheek against his — ‘We don’t pay each other here, just so you know for next time,’ she whispered, her lips brushing his ear. It wasn’t a hug, yet Ed had distinctly felt her soft skin and her warmth.

  In front of the hill that rose from the landscape like a skull, a few horses stood as still as stones. With their hindquarters to the wind, they waited for the earth mother to come and make them fruitful. The bodden shone in the afternoon sun, and the port was calm. No tourists, just a boy in front of the board with the ferry schedule. For a while, he read the ships’ arrivals and departures out loud to himself, then he turned to the dock and shouted them out over the water. He did this fervently, with a kind of desperation, as if the boats could not possibly come in to port without him, as if the boats might forget the island. The boy wore a sailor’s jacket and a flat cap, and moved oddly. He ran so close to the edge of the dock that Ed had to look away.

  A framed poem hung in the case outside the Gerhart Hauptmann House. Next to it, a watercolour by Ivo Hauptmann. The surf was stronger than it had been in the morning. A few butterflies fluttered above the stones as if they were having trouble finding a place to land. ‘Where are you, gaffer?’ Ed muttered as he looked for the spring in the delta. He was afraid he wouldn’t be able to find his friend again. Nests of tiny creatures adhered to the algae. Ivory-coloured spiders and cuckoo wasps. Ed saw hordes of chiggers pass like miniscule white cockroaches, shimmering with damp. Squalls of fine sand swept in: Ed could see them come in from far off; they flew like silk scarves in the sun, barely brushing the ground.

  The cave was undamaged. His fox still seemed watchful somehow. Its coat appeared intact, but seemed to have lost some of its lustre, and its head had begun to grey, at least around the temples, if that can be said of a fox. All in all, the animal had shrunk slightly, its body was a bit shrivelled, ‘but otherwise completely unchanged,’ Ed murmured into the gap in the coastline.

  ‘What did you expect?’ the fox countered. ‘Fresh salt air, the cool loam all around, and solitude in freedom, the calm, and especially the sound of the surf — the surf is pure balm, you know what I mean. It�
��s just the wretched damp, it gets into your bones, and on top of that, the sewage, the effluence from the Klausner. Pestilence seeps past every day …’

  ‘Oh, gaffer,’ Ed murmured.

  The fox fell silent. As Ed followed the delta, he felt a small, surprising contentment. He held back his hair and drank from the spring. It tasted of lye. Repetition gave him confidence; he felt he was taking possession of a place, the very first place of his own.

  ‘You can do it, gaffer,’ Ed whispered, ‘one step at a time, that’s the only way, you know?’

  At night in his room, he heard the cries of the seagulls that flew inland from the sea and then out again — the screams had no particular rhythm, and the birds sounded like nervous dogs that had started barking for some reason and took a long time to calm down again. Ed stood at the window. The air was filled with the sound of panting dogs. He pulled out his diary to jot down his five-line diary entry, but the verse hoard murmured continuously in his head, and he could no longer come up with any words of his own. He lay in his bed and listened to the silence as it expanded its territory. Well before the Klausner’s midnight clamour set in, Ed had disappeared into his dream.

  THE CASTAWAYS I

  There was no light in the hallway. Past the turn towards Kruso’s room began Monika’s lovely fragrance, exactly what Ed imagined the smell of oranges to be. He had only met the little invisible one once. But then again, he had only ever eaten oranges once in his life, when he was a child, in 1971, when all of a sudden southern fruits were available in stores on account of changes in the power structure — ‘due to the transition’ as his father explained at the time. There had been no further transitions since then, and too much time had passed for Ed to remember exactly what oranges smelled like.

  Monika’s door at the end of the hallway was the only one with a doorbell. The button glowed orange, and its little thread of light flickered. It seemed alive but imprisoned (and pleading for help), so Ed found it hard to look away. He took a deep breath, inhaling the scent of the transition. He tried to imagine how René and Monika could have become a couple, and what bound them. Sex? What else could it be? René was an animal in bed, which made him self-confident, loud, and malicious.

  ‘Come in, already!’ The door was not latched.

  Kruso stood at the open window, leaning out over a cumbersome metal stand, a kind of tripod welded together from rusty, ridged steel rods. A battered pair of binoculars were fastened on top. Ed stood in the doorway, but Kruso waved him over.

  That evening, Ed saw Alexander Krusowitsch’s room for the first time. It wasn’t much bigger than his own, but it was at the front of the building, over the terrace. From here, it was possible to see the entire property: the first steps of the stairs on the bluff, half of the Svantovit Gorge along with the path to the barracks, and, above all, the sea that swelled along the horizon — ‘shallow as a dog’s palate’, Ed thought or heard whispered from his verse hoard. The tripod with the binoculars stood directly behind the curtains that reached to the floor and swayed slightly in the wind. They were the same coarse curtains that looked like fishing nets and also hung in the bar and the dining room, and they seemed, in fact, to give off an odour of the sea, a smell of fish and seaweed.

  ‘Do you recognise the spot?’ Kruso stepped carefully to the side and pushed Ed in front of the tripod. Ed saw algae, a section of the beach, a few small, silent waves. Then he recognised the delta and the hollow he had drunk from on the day he had arrived.

  ‘Good, good, now you’ve got it.’ Kruso laughed but only briefly. His laughter stuck in his throat and so perhaps was just a sigh. To avoid looking at him, Ed kept peering through the binoculars (he was disconcerted, what should he have said?). ‘Move a little,’ Kruso said softly, and touched the top of Ed’s head with his fingertips gently but firmly, the way hairdressers do when they want to move a customer’s head into a certain position without speaking. At the same time, he swung the binoculars slowly to the right. Roots, grass, pine trees, then barbed wire appeared, a double barbed-wire fence, blurred, then more distinct. Ed saw a grey steel frame, a tower built of steel with a cabin on a platform; next to it, a searchlight, antennae, and a radio. A soldier stood with his elbows propped on the railing, staring at the sea through binoculars. He was in uniform. A double-barrelled field gun stood to the right of the tower, covered with a tarpaulin. At the foot of the tower, the outline of a freshly tarred bunker was visible, and behind it two barracks and a garage, in front of which were parked a multicar and a motorcycle. Next to it were three kennels in a row. Kruso adjusted the position of the lenses right above Ed’s nose. Enquiringly, Ed turned his head slightly, but Kruso turned it back. Ed felt Kruso’s breath on the back of his neck. A man stepped onto the neatly raked strip of sand between the fences of barbed wire. Two dogs immediately lunged at him. The sound of their barking could not be heard, only the roar of the surf. The surf roared with teeth bared.

  ‘There — there’s someone there …’ Ed whispered and shrank back. He had broken into a sweat, and he felt the familiar burning sensation under his eyelids. Nothing more was evident in the room’s dim light. Between the two windows stood a dresser with open books lying crisscross on top along with newspapers, maps, pages of writing. A command post. Kruso bent unhurriedly over the tripod.

  ‘That’s Vosskamp. After dinner, the commander plays with the messenger dogs. He is commander of the island. The guardian of our fate, if you like, and even if you don’t. And here comes his staff sergeant. With a bottle. That’s good to know. Good for us this evening, Ed.’ Kruso fiddled with the worn binoculars as if he were calming a dog. Ed discreetly wiped a few tears from his face. The field glasses strained his eyes.

  ‘Whatever has three legs can stand,’ Kruso said. He was proud of his tripod. He pointed to the two small ridged wheels between the lenses that were marked with various colours. ‘Those are the focal settings I need. White for the observation company with their watchtower and the radar, red for the Svantovit Gorge, blue for the patrol boats and everything else that passes by out there. Identify the movement, identify what’s coming, and identify what’s disappearing. Identify the light signals at night. Vigilance, versatility, and above all secrecy — those are the three things that matter, Ed.’

  The terrace had begun to fill even though the Klausner was closed. Kruso opened the curtains a crack, careful not to bump the tripod. The floor paint was scraped away under the rough ends of the steel rods. Ed felt almost compelled to register this detail, yet at the same time, he didn’t want to see anything, to know anything. As if the simple fact that he saw what he saw were enough to make him a traitor. I’m not meeting the unspoken requirements — the sentence and its throbbing filled his head. All this was outside his world, light-years away. Then again, what was his world? The Klausner had taken him in. He had found work and a place to stay. And Ed felt safe in Kruso’s presence; the oddness of Kruso’s affairs didn’t need to worry him. In fact, they had nothing to do with him.

  For a while, they observed the guests Kruso sometimes referred to as our homeless, but usually as the castaways. Unlike Krombach, Kruso used the term with a hidden tenderness and respect. His gaze was watchful (like an Indian’s), and his attitude expressed affection and solicitude. Kruso pointed at this or that table, or at the tables without any canopies, or at the manger-like tables with their benches completely occupied and explained to Ed what he saw: drop-outs, adventurers, supplicants. He saw lovers, defectors, failures in one way or another, and ‘refugees in spe’, whom he called his problem children. He had categories, as Ed understood it, which created a certain hierarchy, levels of urgency.

  ‘None of them really belongs to this country anymore, they’ve lost the ground under their feet, you understand, Ed?’

  He referred to a few of the castaways by name; either he had already met them on the waiters’ beach, at one of the bonfires, or another of the esskays’ gatherings, or som
eone had told him about the new arrivals. Now and then, he paused as if he were waiting for Ed to make a suggestion or ask about someone by name.

  They stood by the window the entire time, hidden by the fishnet curtains. It was not important that their upper arms brushed against each other several times. Ed felt the small hairs on Kruso’s skin brush against his, faintly enough that it could count as not touching at all, when Kruso pointed down at the garden again and again and wondered aloud which ones might most urgently need ‘our help’, as he put it. He would hold his arm outstretched for a very long time as if he were selecting someone. He was not pointing, he was taking aim.

  ‘The castaways are like children,’ Kruso explained. ‘Every evening, after the last ferry has left, they fill the beach as if there were something there that would embrace them and sing them to sleep at the end of the day. Until just before nightfall, they believe, like the grasshoppers, in an endless summer. At sundown, the beach wardens start their rounds. Once twilight sets in, volunteers come out, people from the island, and, for money or some other reason, they comb the dunes and inspect the canopied beach chairs. They even shine their flashlights into the chairs when the canopies are closed, as if someone could have crawled through the framework. Of course, some of the castaways are thin, very thin, actually …’ Kruso smiled and took a deep breath.