Kruso Page 2

  In the morning, he went to the Institute, crossing Rannischer Platz and continuing on to the Markt Platz, then along Barfüsserstrasse towards the university. In the dark, narrow street was the Merseburger Hof restaurant, where Ed always stopped to drink a cup of coffee before his lectures. The greasy print on the back of the menu (perhaps an excerpt from an older chronicle) revealed that Barfüsserstrasse, the Street of the Discalced, used to be called ‘Bei den Brüdern’, Friars’ Way, then ‘Bei den geringeren Brüdern’, Lesser Brothers’ Way, and finally ‘Bei den Barfüssern’, Barefoot Brothers’ Way — a strange descent that inspired in Ed a feeling of solidarity with the street.

  In the afternoon, Matthew was still missing and Ed began to call him. First down in the courtyard, then from the apartment window, but the faint, reproachful cry with which the cat usually answered did not come.

  ‘Matthew!’

  The smell of the courtyard: it was like inhaling an old, already-mildewed heartache. A sorrow made of mould and coal that lived in the row of rundown sheds across the way; a sorrow constantly exuded by the things that had been trapped in the sheds and were now buried forever. The house was mostly occupied by Bunesians, workers at the Buna Chemical plant that lay south of the city. Bunesians — Ed remembered that the workers referred to themselves that way. They used the word matter-of-factly and not without a hint of pride, the way you emphasise the fact that you belong to a tribe whose history is well known, a clan into which you are born and which you can be sure will exist for a long, long time.

  ‘Matthew!’

  Ed stood at the open window for a while and listened to the rats. He thought, ‘birthday, my birthday,’ and began calling again: ‘Matthew!’ He had turned the light out so he couldn’t be seen. Across the way, on the hill that rose above the trees, was the long, flat brick building of the nursing home. Since he’d started calling, the barracks’ windows had filled with people. He saw the faded colours of the shirts and cardigans, and the grey pates gleaming in the neon light — the elderly were interested in everything that happened in the courtyard, especially at night. It often took a few seconds before they turned their ceiling lights off again. Ed looked at the lavender afterglow of the neon, and imagined them standing there in the darkness, pressing together, with those further away from the window exhaling their putrid breath onto the napes of those standing in front. Maybe one of them had seen Matthew? And they were now debating softly (softly at first, then louder, then more quietly again so as not to alarm the staff) whether and how they should send their secret messages.

  Two days later, he was still calling. In the beginning, he’d found his loud calls unpleasant, but now he couldn’t stop. Every hour, he called down into the courtyard for a time, mechanically, almost unconsciously, his face chilled by the night air, becoming a mask that grew all the way to the ends of his hair.

  The sense of sympathy in the house had been exhausted. Windows were thrown open and slammed shut; there was cursing, in the Halle dialect or that of the Bunesians. Neighbours rang his doorbell or pounded on his door.

  ‘Matthew! Sausage, tasty milk!’

  ‘You know where you can shove your sausage, you punk, then maybe we could get some sleep!’

  The June night was cool, but Ed left the window open. Without noticing, he had begun to lean over the windowsill, which was built up with an iron bar for security; he leaned only slightly at first, then further and further out. As if it were a gymnastics apparatus, he grasped the rusty bar with both hands and extended his upper body slowly towards the courtyard:

  ‘Matthew!’

  The volume of his voice increased; it grew clearer and stronger, a dark, cleanly resounding ‘ew’:

  ‘Matth — ew!’

  Inside, somewhere far behind him, the tips of his toes skittered over the linoleum, and, round about the tip of his spine, the stuff of pilots began to flow with a completely unexpected and unparalleled intensity. He stiffened with a pleasant sense of desire. No, it was much more than that; it was a wave of lust that made him go rigid, from head to toe —

  ‘Matth — — ew!’

  His body was swimming or floating. He relished the warm, velvety hue underlying the echo; all foreignness had disappeared. Once more, cautiously, he drew a breath and began to call, immediately striking the tone that bound the courtyard, the darkness, and the surrounding world of Halle an der Saale to a single soft, swaying oneness into which he was inclined to plunge. Now, finally, he was completely prepared to —

  ‘Matthew!’

  Ed shot back into the room as if he had been struck. He managed to take only two steps before he doubled up and fell to the floor. It was Matthew, Matthew’s cry. An indignant, offended mewing or squealing, the noise of an unoiled hinge, a door between the here and now and the hereafter that was slammed shut with a bang, flinging him back from his fall — second, third, fourth floor. He started to faint; he had to inhale deeply and exhale again, inconspicuously, as if he weren’t really breathing, as if he actually weren’t breathing at all anymore.

  After a while, he was able to take his hands from his face. His gaze fell on the open window.

  The cat was very quiet.

  It wasn’t there at all.

  As he fell asleep, G. bent over him. She was very close to him and pointed a finger at her half-closed mouth. She stretched her lips wide and pressed the tip of her small, gleaming tongue behind her front teeth, which were set at a slight slant to each other, like the blades of a snowplough: ‘Matthew, try saying Ma-tth-hew.’

  He tried to get out of it, and asked if all English-language teachers had the same small snowploughs in their mouths into which their tongues could nestle so perfectly.

  G. shook her head and stuck her index finger in his mouth.

  ‘Edgar Bendler, is that your name? Edgar Bendler, twenty-four years old? What is it you’re missing then, Ed? You think your handicap is inborn? Then try to say thanks.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘Try to say both of us.’

  ‘Both of us.’

  The finger in his mouth moved and made everything clear to him. Everything he was missing.

  ‘And now, one more time, both of us, and then please go on as long as you can.’

  ‘Both, both …’

  As stiff as a small black sphinx, Matthew sat next to the bed to watch for a while as Ed penetrated slowly, very slowly into G., the way she liked best, millimetre by millimetre.

  WOLFSTRASSE

  Strictly speaking, Ed’s residence at 18 Wolfstrasse, in the brick building turned grey by the daily emissions of the two large chemical plants, was not quite legal. He was subletting his place from a subtenant, and so was a kind of sub-subtenant. There had surely been other subleases in the at least one hundred years long rental history of this building, arrangements loosely bound through informal, often merely handwritten, contracts and inventory lists, or verbal agreements about the use of the cellar, and binding agreements concerning the use of the toilets, none of which a single soul could recall. Over the years, entire genealogical trees of subtenant relations had expanded far beyond the housing authorities and their procedures of central allocation, and yet, after just two generations of subtenants, previous occupants were lost from view. Soon only their names were remembered, names that collected on mailboxes and doors, like the faded and scratched crests of distant cities on a well-travelled suitcase. Yes, that’s how it is, Ed thought to himself: you travel the world in apartments like ageing baggage.

  The entire day, he had wandered, half-conscious, through the city. Fear still thundered in his head, and he felt a sense of shame that was somehow connected to the question of whether he had jumped or not.

  He was still standing in front of his door with its small flock of plastic and brass nameplates crowded together on the grey-painted wood surface. He thought of his grandfather’s walking stick, covered from the hand
le to the tip with gleaming silver and gold badges of foreign places. Later, the stick had served as a cane. As a child, before he had begun school — that is, at the time of his grandfather’s great expeditions — it was pure joy for Ed to run his finger over the small shiny-metal plates from the tip of the stick to the handle and back again, over and over, back and forth. He could feel the coolness of the crests and as he stroked the foreign places; he spelled them out as best he could, and his grandfather corrected him.

  ‘A-a-sh-chn. Aschn!’

  ‘M-mm-me-met-tss, Mee-tz.’

  ‘Ss-ss-sht-ssshhtuuu, sshtuutt, shtutt …’

  ‘C-C-Co-o-op-en, Coopeen …’

  Aachen or Copenhagen, the words resounded for places that seemed to lie in a kind of faraway realm, or at least in strange, distant lands, and their existence was doubtful at best. Peculiarly, Ed still found them dubious, although he knew better. In the end, the badges had made the familiar figure of his grandfather seem strange, and set the old man at a certain distance, in a prehistoric era — its connection with the present could no longer be established. It was the same with Stengel, Kolpacki, Augenlos, and Rust — the names on Ed’s door that were still legible. His own name was on a label above the doorknob. The name underneath was neatly crossed out, but for him was still visible, even in complete darkness, even without the nameplate or the door. He had written his own name in pencil at the time he moved in and had carefully glued on the paper label, which had in the meantime begun to warp and turn yellow at the edges.

  ‘My well-travelled door,’ Ed whispered and turned his key in the lock.

  On the one hand, there was the omnipotence of the officials and the sharp tool of the Central Housing Authority; on the other hand, no one in the building knew where Stengel, Kolpacki, Augenlos, and Rust could have gone or even if they were still alive — Ed began to feel this was a good omen.

  He opened the kitchen cupboard and looked over his meagre stores. He threw most of them away. Following an inspiration, he unscrewed the oven damper. He grabbed the notebook with his seminar notes from the previous weeks, stuck it in the oven, and set it on fire. It burned well. He took another notebook and then another, grabbing them at random. The room soon grew warm, the fire-clay bricks made clicking sounds. He pulled the grey marbled folder with his first attempts at writing off the shelf and laid it on the baking tray. After a while, he put it back and opened the window. It was an experiment.

  He spent the whole day cleaning up his apartment, sorting books, notebooks, and papers, and putting everything in some kind of order, as if they were his literary remains. Of course, he also noticed he was attached to certain things, ‘but only because you want to leave,’ Ed whispered. It did him good now and then to stick a twig of a softly uttered half-sentence in the embers, so that the feeble hearth of his presence didn’t completely expire.

  Matthew was missing.

  Matthew.

  The next morning, Ed removed the ash pan from the oven and carried it to the bucket covered with a cloth so the fine, flaky black ash would not drift about, as his father had taught him. Ed had been a latchkey child since his tenth birthday, and therefore responsible for heating the tile stove when he came home alone from school in the early afternoon. Along with cleaning the cellar and drying the dishes, stoking the oven was one of his ‘little chores’ — his mother’s expression. She used diminutives for almost everything related to him: ‘little chores’, ‘little hobbies’, ‘you and your little friend’. Such things lurked in Ed’s mind (and he felt the heat of confusion warm his forehead) when he decided not to tell anyone of his plans. Edgar Bendler had decided to disappear — a sentence that could have come from a novel.

  He knelt down and swept around the oven. He mopped the floor until it glowed a dull reddish brown. The blunted edges of the doorsill and the bare, worn patches turned black. The black patches had questions for him. Why hadn’t he jumped? What else had he lost here? Hmm? Hmm? Ed tried not to bump into anything, and set the bucket down carefully. He already felt like an interloper, a stranger in an old, former life, a man without a country. He heard steps outside the door and held his breath. He tiptoed into the kitchen, took the bottle of Megalac out of the cupboard, and drank. It was a kind of liquid calcium that coated his mucous membranes; since early adolescence, he had simply had too much stomach acid.

  It was late afternoon before he could begin packing his bag. He chose a few books and added the oversized brown notebook he had sporadically used as a kind of journal. It was bulky and impractical, but it was a gift from G. He carried Matthew’s blanket and his smelly litter box down to the courtyard. A broken window, a moment’s hesitation, then he tossed it all into the darkness of the sorrowful shed.

  In a shoebox filled with postcards and street maps, he found an old map of the Baltic coast. Someone had underlined the names of several places using a ruler and traced the coastline with blue ink. ‘It’s possible, very possible, that you did this, Ed,’ Ed murmured. As a matter of fact, he couldn’t say how the map had ended up among his things; maybe it had been his father’s.

  In farewell, he wanted to play some music: soft, very soft music. He stood mindlessly in front of the stove for a time, until he realised he could not play the record on the burner, that the burner wasn’t a turntable.

  Finally, before Ed left his apartment on Wolfstrasse, he unscrewed the fuses in the fuse box and set them in a row on the meter: an expensive automatic fuse with a switch, and two older, discoloured ceramic fuses. He concentrated on the blank counter for a few seconds. Because of the faint, hypnotic fluting on the small disc, it was hard to tell if it was actually immobile. Ed remembered the time, when he was thirteen or fourteen, that his mother had sent him into the stairwell to change the fuses by himself for the first time. The noises of the house and their muffled echo, the voices from the neighbour’s apartment, a cough from upstairs, the clattering of dishes — that world was aeons away when he put aside the old fuse and accepted his fear as a form of boundless temptation. He watched himself as he slowly, but irresistibly, stretched out his index finger, and began to stick it in the empty, gleaming fuse socket. It was the first time he had experienced it so clearly and distinctly: under the surface of life, to a certain extent behind life, there reigned a perpetual allure, a proposition without equal. It took a firm resolve to turn away, and that is exactly what Ed did that day.

  He put his key under the mat; the door on his mailbox, he simply pushed closed: the Bunesians could be depended on in case of an emergency.

  THE STATION HOTEL

  He smelled the sea even before he got off the train. From his childhood (memories of their only trip to the Baltic Sea), he remembered the Hotel am Bahnhof. It lay directly across from the station, a big, beautiful attraction with oriels built as round towers, and weather vanes in which the numerals of the years crumbled.

  He let a few cars pass and hesitated. It wouldn’t be wise, he thought, especially as far as money was concerned. On the other hand, there was no point in arriving on the island in the afternoon, since there probably wouldn’t be enough time left to find a place to stay — if he could find one at all. He had about 150 marks on him; if he were careful, he could make it last for three, maybe even four weeks. He had left ninety marks in his bank account for rent transfers, enough until September. If he were lucky, no one would take exception to his disappearance. He could have fallen ill. Summer holidays would begin in three weeks. He had written his parents a card. They believed he was in Poland, in Katowice, for the so-called International Student Summer, as he had been the year before.

  The reception desk was built unusually high and looked as if it had been swept clean, no papers, no keys; but what did Ed know about hotels? At the very last moment, the heads of three women appeared, rising like the pistons of a four-stroke motor in which the fourth spark plug has failed to ignite. Impossible to discern from exactly which depths the receptionists had
suddenly surfaced; maybe the high shelf of the desk was connected to a back room, or maybe over the years the women had simply got used to staying under cover as long as possible, quiet and still, behind their dark veneered barrier.

  ‘Good afternoon, I …’

  His voice sounded weary. Alone in the compartment, he had once again been unable to sleep. A military patrol, probably some kind of advance border security, had confiscated his map of the Baltic coast. The train had stopped for a long time in Anklam: the patrol must have got on there. He regretted that nothing more intelligent had occurred to him than claiming that it wasn’t actually his own map … As a result, he had no way of knowing why particular places were underlined and particular sections of the coast line were traced in ink … His voice had suddenly failed, and in its place was the murmuring in his brain — Brockes, Eichendorff, and, as always, Trakl, who echoed most relentlessly with his verses of foliage and brown — that made Ed grab his head. A sudden move: in reflex, one of the soldiers raised his machine gun.

  In the end, Ed could consider himself lucky that they left him alone. ‘Odd duck,’ the Kalashnikov-wielding soldier murmured out in the corridor. Ed’s forehead was covered with sweat. Fields flashed by, black grass along the railroad embankment.

  ‘Do you have a reservation?’

  Ed was taking a room for the first time in his life. The amazing thing was, it was working. They gave him a long form on dull paper and asked for identification. As he lifted his elbows onto the high surface of the desk with some effort and filled out the form with a stiff wrist, the receptionists took turns leafing through his pass booklet. For one absurd instant, Ed feared his secret departure might have automatically been registered in one of the very last, empty pages in his pass, under ‘Visa and Travel’. Unauthorised displacement — from the days of his military, he remembered this fateful stamp that incurred a wide variety of penalties.