Kruso Read online

  ‘This is the only genuine map of our world, Ed, the Map of Truth you might say.’

  Kruso looked at him. He paused meaningfully and gave Ed, who had been standing without moving since entering the room, a chance to look at the paper more closely. It was covered with water spotting and staining, a stylised sunset perhaps, Ed thought, a kind of Hiddensee Expressionism. Above the black section, there was a red one, and above that a yellow section. Yellow-red-black: only then did Ed recognised the upside-down flag. A light crackle — Kruso held a bottle in his hands. Very slowly, almost ceremoniously, he unscrewed the cap. From the blue label, Ed recognised the cheap brand they called Blue Strangler.

  Independent of the three colours, there were lines, extremely fine lines that corresponded exactly to the edges of the water stains in some places, and Ed quickly recognised the country’s borders: the outlines of Rügen, Usedom, then Darß, and very faintly, almost invisible, the slender shape of their own island, the seahorse with the sledgehammer muzzle. The animal floated upright, its swollen head turned to the east — half in black, half in red. Now it was easy to make out the outlines of the Kingdoms of Denmark and Sweden. The red between the southern and northern shores was covered with a network of barely discernible geometric links, dotted and continuous lines that intersected wildly. The whole looked like the knitting or sewing patterns Ed had once seen as a child on his aunt’s living-room table. At first, it had seemed utterly incomprehensible to him — how could his aunt have anything to do with drawings like this, completely encrypted and so like a secret plan … ?

  Kruso cleared his throat. Ed had to take a deep breath to tear his eyes away from the map. He felt the bottle against his upper arm: it was cool, and he wanted to grab it, as if following an automatic gesture among drinking buddies, but Kruso held on tight and looked him in the eye.

  ‘Please listen closely, Ed.’

  With the devout and solemn look that always accompanied his instructions, Kruso pressed the bottle against Ed’s chest and motioned towards the bed against the wall. The Strangler dissolved the dusty feeling in Ed’s mouth, and, for some reason, he could now, sitting on the bed, see the lines on the flag much more clearly.

  Kruso glanced at the map, then at Ed. Then he approached Ed again and took the bottle from his hand.

  ‘On this island —’ Kruso pointed at Hiddensee, nodded a few times and shook his head simultaneously, which made his head move in circles ‘— I mean, in this country —’ He crossed the black section with the bottom of the bottle, which made a sound of high, cheerful gurgling ‘— there isn’t a single real map. In this country, my friend, not only are rivers, roads, and mountains shifted until no one knows where exactly they are, no, even the coastline drifts, back and forth, like waves …

  ‘Don’t object!’ Kruso shouted with the bottle raised. ‘I had them all here, geodesists, surveyors, even cartographers — through some people with security clearance, here, with the castaways and outcasts … I’ve read their reports, Ed, appalling reports.’ He took a swig and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.

  ‘It’s the intervals that are never right, the falsified size of the sea, phony distances, the false horizon. From coast to coast —’ Kruso tapped the bottle first on the black then on the yellow section, skipping over the red-coloured expanse of the sea ‘— it is absolutely not this far! If these maps were correct, my dear Ed, never in your life would you have seen Møn with its otherworldly chalk cliffs, that innocent white shimmer, from your lovely attic room when you sit up in bed in the morning and ask yourself what you’re doing here, why you landed here, of all places …’

  ‘Not why,’ Ed protested, but Kruso handed him the bottle with an expression of pure benevolence.

  ‘This map, my friend, is true, as true as “amen” in church, amen.’

  Ed drank and handed back the bottle.

  ‘Møn, Møns Klint, Gedser …’ Kruso lost himself in his enumeration of places marked only with tiny crosses or numbers.

  ‘But what’s with the lines?’ Ed tried to ignore the slight. On the waiters’ beach, he had already heard the strangest stories. A man from the district town of Plauen had placed a real flag with an emblem of a hammer, compass, and garland of rye on the ground in front of his door, and had been taken off the island and imprisoned, for years it was said … But what was such a doormat compared to the Map of Truth?

  ‘What do these lines mean, Losh? This pattern in red between the coasts?’ Ed asked again.

  ‘Those are the routes of the dead.’

  Kruso’s answer came as if from far away. He was sunk in his drawing.

  ‘Those are their routes over the sea.’

  Kruso pressed his hand on the paper, on a spot that was worn away and torn, as if he wanted to cover a wound.

  ‘At first, they keep swimming. Or they paddle a bit. Or they sit in tiny diving machines, or they hang onto motors that pull them through the surf. But they don’t make it. Somewhere out there, water gets into the carburettor, or they die of exposure, or their strength fails … Some wash up over there. Some are pulled out of the sea with the day’s catch. The fishermen radio the dead over the sea, and talk about them later in their bars — “another one who tried to make it, well, cheers,” and so on …’

  Sounds came from below. Kruso woke from his trance and took a long drink from the Strangler.

  ‘The fishermen know the currents here. They know them exactly. They know just how long the dead can be in transit.’

  Kruso slowly traced a dotted line. ‘They know how long they stayed underwater and when the sea brought them up again and what they look like at that point and how they look at you with their rotten eyes …’ He seemed nervous now, and lowered his head to the embrasure.

  ‘But no one, I repeat, no one over there knows who the dead are. That is, they’re kept on ice, on the kingdom’s good, cold ice, and they wait until someone comes to claim them. But no one ever comes. No one. Not ever.’

  It had got louder below, and Kruso started putting the bricks back in the wall.

  ‘How do you know all this?’

  ‘The dead whisper to me. The dead are waiting for us, Ed. What do you say to that?’

  ‘I had no idea, I mean …’

  ‘What I meant to say, Ed: it’s the wrong way. Completely wrong. Or to put it differently: the maps simply don’t lie enough! Starting with that damn, hopeful shade of light blue in the school atlases, that goddamn, deceiving light blue, it makes all the kids soft in the head. Why don’t they make the sea black, Ed, like the eyes of the dead, or red like blood?’ He pointed at his own map.

  ‘Why not keep Sweden completely secret? A clever division of the pages would be enough. And what about Denmark, Scandinavia, the entire rest of the pointless world? Sure, Møn is a problem, but only because we can see Møn, get it, Ed?’

  Kruso was obviously drunk. Without bothering to aim, he tossed the Strangler onto Ed’s lap.

  ‘Forget it Ed, you hear me, forgetit, getit … But don’t ever forget one thing: there is such a thing as freedom. It’s right here, on the island. Because this island exists, doesn’t it?’

  Kruso stared at Ed with fierce determination, and Ed nodded obediently.

  ‘And you heard its siren call, too, right? Yes, it calls, dammit, it calls like a goddamn siren … And everyone hears something. Deliverance from a job. From a husband. From pressure. From the state. From the past, isn’t that right, Ed? It sounds like a promise, and they all come here, and this is where our duty, the gravity of it all, begins. Which means: three days and they’re initiated. We give each of them three or four days, each one, and with that we create a large community, a community of the initiated. And that’s only the beginning. Three days here and they can go back to the mainland, no one has to escape, Ed! No one has to drown. Because then, they’ve got it in their heads, in their hearts, wherever …’ Kruso w
aved one arm in the air, and, half-turned towards the map, he pointed at different parts of his body.

  ‘The measure of freedom.’

  Ed flinched. The last sentence did not come from Kruso. A cat sat on the bed next to Ed, looking at him. Its head was enormous and round, and its paws as wide as a child’s feet.

  It had grown dark, and the rain was coming down in sheets. Santiago was waiting at the institute’s fence; Kruso scolded him in a whisper. Ed stood to the side. His friend’s state had him worried. Something had shifted. For the first time, Ed felt responsible.

  The entire time, he had wanted to say: you’re getting into a mess, Losh.

  And you, what do you want to do with your life, Ed? What are you prepared to do?

  Only then did Ed notice the castaways crouching by the embankment, motionless, drenched, like rabbits ready to jump. It was a small group, two men and two women who followed all of Kruso’s instructions gratefully and unquestioningly. One after another, they crawled under the fence and disappeared into the darkness.

  ‘I can’t blame him,’ Santiago explained.

  ‘What?’ Ed asked.

  ‘They both grew up here, Kruso and his drowned sister.’ Santiago touched the wet wire fence as if it were a precious object. ‘They grew up here, right here on the Rommstedt hill.’

  CLANDESTINE QUARTERS

  Kruso’s organisation — or what should it be called? Lifeguards, caretakers, waiters, bartenders, bird banders, assistant chefs, dishwashers, kitchen help — they all seemed to be connected to each other. The decision to live on the island (or at least to estivate here, as Cavallo put it) told them what was most important to know, and functioned like an invisible bond: whoever was here had left the country without crossing the border.

  Their support for Krusowitsch initially meant nothing more than one of their cheerful givens — like skinny-dipping at the waiters’ beach, midnight fires (although forbidden), or the discotheque at the Dornbusch Apartments, for which you paid two marks seventy-five (not much more than an hour’s wage) to be able to dance all night long between two bars on opposite sides of the room. The bars were named after their bartenders. On the so-called sweet side of the Dornbusch (the Heinz bar), green, brown, and red liqueurs were poured non-stop; on the sour side of the room (the Heiner bar), wine, vodka, and the Strangler flowed, along with Stralsunder beer and, once in a while, a homemade sea-buckthorn brew with a ‘Strangler base’, as they put it. Even this ‘Opposition of the Bars’ (Rimbaud’s phrase), which the esskays celebrated five times a week, was a concept of political significance. The Heinz bar was sweet, the Heiner bar sour, that much was certain, and life was played out between the Heinz and Heiner bars. Heinz or Heiner. No one would have seen an irreconcilable contradiction in it. There was no antagonism on the island, certainly none that couldn’t be resolved. From sweet to sour, from sour to sweet, the evening swayed between the two, far beyond the Dornbusch’s main room, over the fields and dunes to the beach, over the sea to the horizon, the border, invisible in the darkness.

  Ten per cent land, ninety per cent sky: it was enough that they were here on the island. Certainly enough for their pride. The island ennobled their existence. Its beauty was simply indescribable and powerful. The magic of its creation. The mainland was nothing more than a backdrop that slowly blurred and faded away in the sea’s continuous roar. What, then, was the state? Every sunset blotted out its stony image, every wave washed the grim outline of that worn hand axe from the surface of their consciousness. They were the riders of the seahorse with the sledgehammer muzzle; they were dancing over the hand axe, on their way between sour and sweet.

  The esskays were not particularly interested in leading the castaways or homeless, as Kruso called them, to some new freedom. Yet they sensed Kruso’s will, his strength. He gave off a sense of otherness that was charming. Above all, it was his seriousness and determination that made all the difference. Whatever he said was completely free of cynicism or irony, and his suggestions embodied the opposite of that old island habit of handling things more or less playfully. Secretly (and none of them would have wanted to admit it), their island existence was missing this substance, it lacked a duty, an idea, something higher than the daily sweet and sour.

  And yet, Kruso never came off as a ringleader, though he did organise initiatives; he planned, gathered, created, and kept up ties between the circles of esskays spread out around the island. These consisted chiefly of circles that could be easily connected to particular bars, like the group that gathered at the Island Bar, several of whom slept at the Wollner house, next to the island museum. Kruso maintained the best relations with them, including men like Santiago, Tille, Peter, and Spurtefix or women like Janina, Sylke, and Antilopé. Then there were also those esskays who saw themselves as belonging to particular campfires, where at night they grilled, drank, and regularly shouted ‘Free Republic of Hiddensee’, including the Enddorn fire, for example, with A.K., Ines, Torsten, Christine, and Jule. Beyond that, there was a group of older esskays who had applied for exit visas and occasionally formed their own circle at the Heiner bar. They had detached themselves and were already deeply immersed, perhaps too deeply, in a state of waiting, although Ed often had the impression that they had forgotten they were waiting, as if their lives already lay in the beyond, not just outside the country, but outside time, whose measurable passing was made irrelevant by the island and its magic, as if their state of waiting had condensed into an edenic beyond. Kruso judged it a form of self-immunisation at least partially intended to counteract the island’s contagious sense of liberation — which he was in no way judging, he emphasised; on the contrary. In these circumstances, it seemed that being granted an exit visa struck one or two of them like a blow. They had drifted far out on the island and were suddenly told to resurface and paddle back to the official passage of time — often with only a few days’ notice.

  More open-minded were the circles of the very young esskays, some of them punks, who had decided on their eighteenth birthday to spend their lives on the island and nowhere else. Because they weren’t presentable, they were never hired into service and almost always ended up in the dishwashing stations, where they accomplished extraordinary feats. In fact, the punks were considered the best dishwashers on the island. They were renowned for their diligence and reliability. ‘They work like devils,’ Kruso explained. Ata in the Norderende or Dirty in Hitthim were names everyone knew and respected. There was also an alliance between the punks and the long-hairs, who improved their situation and offered a certain protection when necessary. ‘I don’t care what anyone looks like, as long as they work,’ the boss at the Island Bar announced.

  ‘Hiddensee is also a gay paradise,’ Kruso mentioned softly as they were standing at the Heinz bar, which, to be precise, was the Heinz-and-Uli bar on the sweet side of the Dornbusch, where Losh and now Ed got their drinks for a modest fee. Without a doubt, Heinz and Uli considered themselves a couple, which didn’t seem to bother Kruso much. The Dornbusch (and not just the gays there) was the Klausner’s main rival at the annual football tournament, organised by none other than Kruso. The tournament was considered the high point of the Island Day, an island-wide festival for the esskays, also supported by the locals and bar managers like Willi Schmietendorf, who ran the Dornbusch and gave the winners a keg of beer, whereas Krombach left everything up to his head dishwasher, Alexander Krusowitsch.

  Through Kruso, a network of contacts and activities was formed, and this suited the esskays because it emphasised their uniqueness and gave them a sense of their special status, the peculiar and not easily understandable form of legal illegality in a country that either had declared them unfit and spat them out or to which they simply no longer felt they belonged. Rimbaud applied the idea of inner emigration to esskays, although each of them had to work hard every day for their right to stay on the island.

  The majority of the esskays were unmoved by Rimba
ud’s talk, but they showed Kruso respect. He was the man in golden armour, and they offered him protection with their fellowship, along with a few things he asked or demanded of them, though nothing that would have caused them any real hardship. However, very few of them understood his philosophy of freedom. They did not feel that they were part of the resistance, and hardly any of them would have considered themselves members of a conspiracy. They were interested in the venture (its hint of the forbidden) and especially in the bacchanalian celebrations at the allocations, the open bar on the terrace of the Klausner, and last but not least in the unfamiliar guests who arrived night after night — their foreignness, their charm, and their pleasant odour, which was strangely accentuated by the odd designation Kruso had given them: castaways.

  Initially, it was only a question of the nights, of finding accommodation for the castaways for at least three or four days in the so-called clandestine quarters. It was an ambitious goal because their numbers increased continuously, a pilgrimage unlike any other in the entire country. Disoriented and reckless, the pilgrims were drawn by the siren call of the island over the moraines and along the beaches in search of a place to sleep, without a billet or residency permit — in a border area.

  At some point, the ‘eternal soup’ was added to the mix. ‘They just need something warm in their stomachs, at least once a day,’ was Kruso’s simple reasoning. The ‘good scraps’ Ed picked from the plates each day in the dishwashing station were cut up small, then mixed with the freedom-granting herbs and mushrooms from the ‘sacred vegetable beds’ and fertilised with slime from the drain (‘the amphibian is nutritious and full of vitamins’) before ending up in a cast-iron pot, for which Chef Mike always kept a burner in reserve. Ed had often seen how two castaways would deliver the pot of soup, or at least what was left of it, to the ramp, where Kruso would take it and offer them a few instructions before returning the pot to the stove without washing it. The eternal flame, the eternal soup. For Kruso, it was a kind of biological cycle, a closed circuit of nourishment — and enlightenment. And this, as he put it, was all ‘just the beginning’.