Kruso Page 13

  ‘I’m sure you still have — things to do out there,’ Ed whispered.

  ‘It’s just so you can sleep,’ Kruso repeated, and laid the photograph on the bedside cabinet.

  Lindenblatt: before Ed sank into sleep, he pictured the way Kruso, with his outstretched index finger, had repeatedly stroked the bottle’s damp label, which showed a Hungarian landscape, a bit of the Puszta, some shrubbery, two knights on watch.

  It was a tender gesture. What his finger was pointing at as the condensation on the bottle cooled — I don’t know, Ed thought, I really don’t know, I simply have no idea. The only thing that’s important is that you understand the signal, and what to do then.

  THE GRAIL

  When he came back from the beach, a page with typewriting lay on the foot of his bed — he was being given notice, the thought shot through Ed’s mind, finito.

  It was a sheet of the old Klausner letterhead from the thirties or forties that was stacked in the Black Hole, in the so-called archive. ‘Mountain Forest Hotel Zum Klausner — The Highlight of the Island,’ Ed read. Under it, in script with entwined upstrokes, was a list of services offered, like ‘Valet on the Steamboat’ or ‘Daily Postal Boat’. Beneath excessively stylised windswept trees stood three words in capital letters: Alexander Dmitriewitsch Krusowitsch.

  Ed was strangely moved at the sight of the full name, as if it referred to another person, who Kruso had been keeping secret. Just as people forgot his full name, they forgot also that he was ‘the son of a Russian’, a fact the coachman Mäcki stressed now and again. ‘You’re probably Russian like him?’ was Mäcki’s question after he had seen Ed peeling onions a few days in a row. It had been the opening of their first and only conversation. In a sudden fit of schnapps-fuelled openness, Mäcki bemoaned the ‘German-Russians’ (‘what all you don’t see’) and warned Ed about that ‘unlucky Russian’ and his, as he said, ‘swimming sister’ (‘she swam and swam, I’m telling you’), an endless stream of gibberish. Although it was not long before he had stopped talking to Ed, and had turned to his bear-horse, which looked at him calmly and sympathetically. ‘Keep yer mouth shut, you old nag.’

  Under the name, without a space or a heading, began the poem — or what Ed had to think of as Kruso’s poem. Each of the verses seemed scattered onto the page, offset to the left or right, and the capital letters were coloured red on their upper edges. Ed stared at the red, and the murmuring in his head began to swell. He did not want to read any more poems. Ed had torn himself away from that particular drug — that much he could claim after twenty-one good, clear days as a dishwasher on Hiddensee.

  He scanned the first line and suddenly he knew: he had recited Trakl. On the evening of the allocation, he had started to declaim poems by Trakl and made a fool of himself. Ed slowly sank onto the stool next to his table, which still gave off the sorrowful smell of the black hole. Until that moment, his excitement had suspended his memory. All at once, everything reappeared right before his eyes. Kruso’s talk, his drinking, Dr Z.’s apparition: Ed had failed. He had recited Trakl. And by doing so, he had distanced himself from the castaways, withdrawn from their sweet, needy type, from their scent of sun and driftwood. Ed grabbed his crotch and pressed it; it was a disaster.

  Since the first of May over a year ago, he hadn’t touched anyone, hadn’t even thought of it — it was taboo. It dishonoured the maimed body, it injured the wounded, it touched her wounds, and that is exactly where he penetrated, and he naturally knew it was crazy, but it was impossible, simply impossible …

  It was already dusk when Kruso entered Ed’s room again, cautiously but without actually hesitating. His knocking signalled he was opening the door, as if he didn’t think he really needed permission and Ed felt the same way. He sat at his stinking table, leaning stiffly on the low surface, on which the photograph lay next to the small diary (ready for the daily entry) and the poem, lit by the cone of light from the lamp. A fluid movement of two, three steps and Kruso sat on Ed’s bed.

  ‘You did some work.’

  ‘Just some reading.’

  ‘You did some work, and I — once again, I didn’t do anything right.’

  ‘I wouldn’t say that,’ Ed countered, and put his hand down next to the poem. Kruso was silent, which made Ed feel embarrassed. He stared at the windswept trees on the letterhead with their extravagantly illustrated attempt to evade a storm that seemed to be blowing hard from the first line.

  The poem was about a general who was departing, who had to leave his family in the middle of a feast, probably a wake. His belt buckle knocked against a half-empty glass; the poem tried to mimic the motion of the general rising from the table. In Kruso’s language, the cup was a goblet, a kind of grail, if Ed understood correctly, and the belt buckle a steel band. When the band touched the grail, it made the grail vibrate, and filled it with a farewell melody. Every verse was borne by this music and thus was, to a certain extent, its purest expression. For the rest, Ed found the poem contrived and old-fashioned. The magniloquent style irritated him, as did the antiquated diction. He was alienated and revolted from the start. The perfect structure seemed grotesque, ridiculous. It was magnificent in a way, but a failure. Near the end, it was about the two children the general leaves behind, a brother and sister, clearly very close. Finally, the sister’s image hovers like an icon over the scene. Obviously, the poem alluded to the obduracy of power (and that is how it would be read — as critical of the system, dangerous, banned), but at the same time it was filled with a strange melancholy that seemed to Ed to express the opposite: a longing for the general.

  ‘I envy you your peace and quiet here, Ed, while I …’

  Kruso leaned back and crossed his legs as if he wanted to wait for the end of his own sentences more comfortably. His tall, lean body; his clear, Amerindian features. From the corner of his eye, Ed observed Kruso’s face, or at least tried to. Ed’s thoughts and feelings were partly occupied by Kruso’s proximity, so that Ed could not quite grasp it. The king of the Klausner (and maybe of the entire island) had placed a typed poem, just for him, on his bed.

  Kruso took a deep breath and began to apologise, in a roundabout way that was so elaborate as to be implausible, for not staying in his room the entire night. First and foremost to ‘finally finish the collection’. Instead, he had only ‘wandered around aimlessly’. Then he began his depiction of nocturnal life on the island: simple anecdotes of forbidden campfires, bad guitar music, sex in the dunes with the underage daughters of holiday-makers (‘too sheltered, if you know what I mean’), and various amorous rivalries between the esskays and the tourists — in strangely heavy-handed prose that did not square with the admittedly old-fashioned, but genteel, almost aristocratic language of the poem that lay on the table in front of Ed.

  The ‘colourful life of the island’ was the expression Kruso used, in a tone of barely restrained contempt. From the ‘adipose, elderly juvenility of the temporary and seasonal workers’ and their ‘inane cheerful prattle about the sea’, he moved on to their ‘naivety and inability to think even a single step ahead’, his gaze fixed on the door as if he were about to bolt out into night and onto the beach in order to take to task a few of ‘these simpletons’, as he called them.

  Confused, Ed picked up the poem and opened with a few cautious questions about the paper and the typewriter. Typical questions between men accustomed to using a typewriter. Kruso woke from his tirade and apologised for the colour ribbon he had had to use (‘colour ribbons are in short supply, you know …’), which is why certain letters wore ‘bloody caps’. Ed described a technique — an admittedly complicated one — with which you could make the thin colour ribbon used in portable typewriters wider with an iron. Kruso nodded. They each named a few periodicals that would be suitable for, as Ed put it, ‘this kind of text’, sheets of the so-called samizdats that for years had been popping up like mushrooms in larger cities.

  ‘I
still want to wait a bit, to finish the collection first,’ Kruso said. It gradually became clear that he hadn’t seriously tried to have anything published yet and, yes, Ed was actually the first person to whom he had revealed anything about it.

  ‘That’s what struck me first …’

  Ed was touched by Kruso’s trust in him, and he was not certain in which direction he should take his comments. A few phrases from his seminars flitted through his mind, drivel about special musicality, the inimitable sound of the grail, and so on.

  ‘I’d like to read it,’ Kruso interrupted him.

  Kruso took the sheet in both hands, carefully and thoughtfully, as if its weight were still uncertain. His back straightened and his shoulders broadened, as if he were about to perform one of his Klausner tasks with the seemingly untroubled concentration that expressed an appreciation of things and was suitable for making the world as a concrete duty intelligible to a floundering dishwasher like Ed.

  Softly and in a monotone, with a slight drawl that accented certain syllables in an exaggerated way, he declaimed line after line. He recited the poem with the odd accent that Ed had most recently noticed when they were burying the amphibian. At the end of each line, there was a longish pause — an excessive pause, actually — in which nothing was audible but the noise of the distant surf, yet so clearly that Ed could discern single waves crashing onto the shore. Kruso, too, listened to the sound of the breakers at the end of each line. Then he started again, but without really moving forward — what became clear was that everything was in suspension, caught in the tension of his broad, hairy torso and fixed by the point of his chin, which he held slightly forward.

  Three stanzas later, Ed was mesmerised by the beam of Kruso’s delivery. The same exemplary force emitted by Kruso when he rinsed out the drains or carried driftwood to the woodpile now took hold of the poem and transformed it, and in the end it was the only possible … — yes, the poem was right. It was perfectly in tune with Kruso himself, that is, it was said with his words, it had that particular tone. It was the only possible poem.

  It was as if Ed’s sense of distance had been blown away. His reservations now seemed ridiculous, and there was a sense of redemption. He momentarily felt a desire to offer something of his own in return. He began to speak, but immediately paused and remained silent, while Kruso sat next to him, sunk deep within himself; his left eyelid was half closed. Ed began again, reached awkwardly for his notebook, which seemed ludicrous given its size. He awkwardly picked up the plastic envelope with the photograph, and finally escaped his speechlessness with the question: ‘Is that your sister in the picture?’

  Kruso’s eyelid rose fully again. He looked at the photograph. The photo: when he had first looked at it, Ed thought he was looking into G.’s eyes. But it was just a resemblance of the gaze and demeanour with which the thin girl in the grotesquely frilly dress was looking at the photographer, her head of blonde curls lightly tilted to the side, with a smile that seemed glued to the corners of her mouth. The plastic was dull and the face beneath it looked as if it were enveloped in fog. Ed recognised the straight eyebrows, the flat cheeks, Kruso’s cheeks …

  ‘Why do you think that?’

  ‘Because of the poem. I thought it was about her … about her and you maybe, I mean … It’s truly excellent, Losh.’

  The first time he had called Kruso by this nickname, it just happened of its own accord.

  Because Kruso did not answer, Ed stammered something like, ‘But that, for example, I don’t know yet …’ and gave a pained laugh. Kruso lifted his head and looked past him into the night. Their legs almost bumped. Ed sat the entire time on the stool at his desk, a half-metre higher than his cherished guest. He talked directly to the wall; he talked to the crushed insects.

  The wind rose, and a faint rumble of thunder, as if from distant cannons, crept over the bluff. Kruso rose with a jerk, and, before Ed realised what was happening, he grabbed Ed by the shoulders and leaned him backwards over the table and out the open window — yes, he had failed, failed completely, and so there was no other possibility …

  Kruso had in fact stood up and leaned out the window. He was almost leaning right over Ed, who had to lean far to the side so that Kruso wouldn’t be lying on top of him.

  The smell of his armpits; sweetish, as if fermented. Like old, sun-dried pine bark.

  ‘A patrol boat.’

  Kruso’s face looked stony and almost white in the lamplight.

  ‘It’s sitting very high in the water.’

  As if this fact were significant, Kruso grabbed his poem and went to the door.

  ‘Thanks for yesterday, Ed, I mean — for your recitation. I wanted to ask you if you could lend me the book?’

  As if someone had spoken in a dream.

  ‘I haven’t got the book with me — unfortunately.’

  ‘I’d really be very happy if you’d write some of it down for me — I want to ask that favour. Maybe the three, four poems from yesterday?’

  With that, Kruso disappeared from his room, almost without any movement. The last words had erased his figure.

  ‘That’s fine, Losh,’ Ed whispered.

  It was just before midnight. The clamour in the hall had set in. Ed held the photograph in his hand.

  KAMIKAZE

  7 JULY

  Everything at work is going well, apart from René. Rimbaud put a new book in our nest. And Cavallo talked to me about Rome! As if he’d been there. Thanks to Losh, I don’t have to go to the allocations anymore. He introduced me to one of the island warriors, who was just coming out of the Black Hole, his helmet full of beer. Kruso called him the ‘good soldier’. It was the naked man from the beach. I recognised him right away, but of course I didn’t say anything. Rick claimed he’d seen a green moon from the counter. I help him with the kegs in the cellar now and then. He’s the only one who can operate the tap. I like being down there. At eight o’clock, I check the temperature in the furnace (80 degrees is ideal), and at eleven I add fuel again. Enormous waves yesterday.

  Because Ed didn’t write regularly, he could let some entries cover several days. Of course, as a whole, it seemed more like a report, but that’s what he found helpful about it. A report of his arrival and how he gradually became part of the crew. And now? How he had made a friend. Would make one.

  With his oversized notebook under his arm, and a new piece of soap, Ed balanced his way over the stones along the beach. For the past few days, he visited his fox every free evening. Of course, it was … A wave washed, chilly, over his right foot and cut short his train of thought. Ed had to smile. Perhaps for the first time since he arrived on the island … Or perhaps the first time since then. He had reached a state of mind in which the division of the world into categories like ‘alive / lifeless’ or ‘speaking / mute’ had lost significance. As if something becomes a being only through proximity. Just as the new friend enters the room as if through a mirror. Ed didn’t know where to begin with this sentence. He found it hard to think this close to the sea. You lost your boundaries; you gladly let go. Letting go, trusting, Ed thought — you open yourself up and become part of it all.

  In any case, it was his fox.

  When he got to the fox’s den, he first washed the grease from the Klausner off of his skin. In a spot where there was a bit of sand between the rocks, he went into the water, and the cool edge wrapped around his feet: the best moment. Then he stood up to his knees in the waves that rolled sluggishly into the cove. He soaped himself up, dove underwater, and swam out a short distance. He had hung his things on the branches of an uprooted tree that had fallen down the bluff. The entire cove was cluttered with these skeletons. Their strange contortions gave the beach the feeling of an abandoned battlefield. A few had slipped into the water, bare and gleaming like bones in the desert. Some were still sprouting. Their roots hung in the air, and yet they still somehow managed to
sustain their plant existence, not as a whole, but in several branches. Ed marvelled at the fight.

  ‘Good evening, gaffer!’

  As Ed stretched out on the sand to dry in the sun, their conversation began. At first, it was about simple things: broken dishes, odd guests, Rimbaud’s ecstatic scenes in the dishwashing station. Then it was about Kruso’s speech, Kruso’s poem. Dumb, but dangerous. Ed agreed. He opened his notebook and propped it up on a rock.

  ‘Well, gaffer, where have you got to?’

  A damp buzzing flew in Ed’s face. He tumbled backwards and spat out a gold-green insect and immediately stepped on it. Without hesitating, he went back up to the den and cleared his companion’s fur with a few strokes of his hand. In the meantime, its fur had turned completely grey, and its body seemed flattened, as if it wanted to disappear into the loam. The eyes in the fuzzy pelt were empty, but the ears were still pointed, and framed with a wreath of fine white fringes.

  ‘Hello, gaffer, you old rascal,’ Ed repeated with pinched lips. Then he spoke rapidly, the words almost tumbling over each other: ‘You know, first there was the tram, but I don’t always want to start with the tram, after all I wasn’t there, will never have been there, not at the tram stop, but someone says she had been shouting for a while, “Be careful, look out, be careful” or whatever you’re supposed to yell, across the tracks, and someone else says she was lying there under the tram, up to her stomach, he says, she was lying under the tram up to her stomach, you understand, her stomach, her bare legs sticking out, so warm for early May, but completely uninjured, her short skirt hadn’t even ridden up, her bare legs, but another says that someone pulled the skirt back down, old rascal, straightened the skirt back down and she just lay there as if she were repairing the tram …’