Kruso Page 3

  ‘I beg your pardon, this is my first time,’ Ed said.

  ‘What?’ asked the concierge.

  Ed raised his head and tried to smile, but his attempt to bridge the gap fell flat. He was given a key from which a varnished wooden cube dangled on a short string. He closed his fist around the cube and knew his room number. The number was neatly burnt into the wood. He briefly pictured the hotel caretaker in his basement workroom, bent over an endless row of little blocks sawed to the proper size and sanded, onto which he placed the glowing rod of his soldering iron — number after number, room by room. Ed had once been a labourer, too, and part of him was still at home in workshops, in the caves of the working class, those side rooms of the world, in which things asserted their definite, tangible outlines.

  ‘Second floor, stairs on the left, young man.’

  The word Moccastube shimmered above a brass-studded door next to the staircase. On the first landing, Ed looked back again; two of the three women’s heads had disappeared, while the third woman was speaking on the telephone and following him with her eyes.

  When he woke, it was already after four in the afternoon. A wardrobe stood at the foot of the double bed. In the corner, a television stood on a chrome-plated stand. Above the toilet hung a cast-iron flushing tank, coated with a film of condensation. The tank must have dated from a much earlier era. The lever for the flushing mechanism imitated two leaping dolphins. While the animals sedately returned to their initial position, an endless stream of water gushed out. Ed liked the sound of the water, and felt like the dolphins were his friends.

  That you could go into a hotel, ask for a room, and get one (rather straightforwardly) had to be counted as one of the few wonders of the world that had survived — ‘for a’ that an’ a’ that,’ Ed gurgled into the stream of water from the showerhead. Over time, you simply forgot that such things still existed; fundamentally, you didn’t believe in them anymore, yes, you forgot what life could be good for. Ed’s thoughts ran along those lines. He wanted to masturbate, but couldn’t muster enough concentration.

  To the right of the hotel was a lake with a fountain that regularly rose into the sky, collapsed in on itself, and disappeared for several seconds. A couple in a pedal boat glided slowly up to the water feature. Ed was suddenly overcome with a good feeling as he crossed the road towards the lake. All this was the beginning of something. Someone who’d been through a fair amount showed himself capable of … With that, his sentence ended. It was clear to him that his departure was overdue. He felt the pain, as if he were only now awakening from anaesthesia, millimetre by millimetre.

  A cobblestone street that turned off to the left was named An den Bleichen. He passed a few run-down villas with conservatories, courtyards, and garages. He walked up to the nameplate near the door of one to have a look at the house’s travel itinerary until now. The small, brave lighted doorbell plate also preserved the legibility of some of the names that had been pasted for some time, perhaps for years now. As he passed, Ed tried to capture their rhythm: Schiele, Dahme, Glambeck, Krieger … His muttering formed a bridge across the lake, and his steps on the wood were a kind of metronome. ‘All-of-those-who-died-al-ready …’ whispered Ed, and he automatically covered his face with his hands, ‘see everything in a new way?’ The old city wall appeared, then an archway and a café called ‘Torschliesserhaus’, The Gatekeeper’s House.

  He crossed the old city to the port and checked the ferry departure times. In the kiosk of the White Fleet, he bought a crossing for the following day. The sight of the boat put him in a euphoric mood. The steps to the dock, of light-grey cement, and then: the sea.

  To eat cheaply, Ed returned to the train station. He felt rested, and gauged his chances. A hide-out in the sea, hidden sea, Hiddensee … He knew the stories. Continuous whispers washed around the island.

  Ed chewed deliberately and drank his coffee in tiny sips. First, it wouldn’t be easy getting onto one of the boats. Then it would be almost impossible to find a place to stay, but another goal was not conceivable inside the border. Certainly, he had heard the experts who claimed that Hiddensee actually lay outside the border, that it was exterritorial, an island of the blessed, of dreamers and idealists, of failures and rejects. Others called it the Capri of the North, booked-up for decades.

  In Halle, Ed had met a historian who’d worked winters as a waiter in the Offenbach Stuben, a wine restaurant where he and G. had occasionally sat at the bar. Every spring, at the opening of the season, the historian (that’s what everyone called him, after all) returned to the island. ‘At last, at last!’ he liked to call out to his customers, who nodded indulgently when he started in on one of his eulogies, which he usually began by addressing his audience in the Offenbach Stuben with ‘Dear friends!’ ‘The island, dear friends, has all I need, all I’ve ever searched for. As soon as it surfaces on the horizon, seen from the deck of the steamboat, its slender, delicate form, its fine outline, and behind it, the mainland’s last grey cockscomb, Stralsund with its towers, the entire hinterland with its filth, you know what I mean, dear friends, the island appears and suddenly you forget it all, because now, before you, something new is beginning, yes, dear friends, right there on the steamboat!’ the man rhapsodised. Grey-haired and in his mid-forties, he had left his position at the university — voluntarily, it was said — and was therefore all the more deeply immersed in dreams. As many of the country’s thinkers did, he wore a beard like Marx’s. ‘Freedom, dear friends, is essentially a matter of writing one’s own laws within the framework of existing laws, of being simultaneously the object and the subject of legislation, that is an essential characteristic of life up there, in the north.’ That’s how the historian of the Offenbach Stuben summed it up, holding a tray as round as a bass drum and full of bottles in front of his chest.

  For Ed, the most important piece of information was that places could suddenly free-up even in season. From one day to the next, waiters were needed, or dishwashers, kitchen-help. There were seasonal workers who disappeared overnight for a wide variety of reasons. Usually, those telling such stories would stop abruptly at that point and throw a glance at the listener — and then, depending on the situation, would continue in one of the possible or impossible directions: ‘Of course, there are people who give up and return to the mainland, who just aren’t cut out for it.’ Or: ‘You know, an exit visa is suddenly authorised, in the middle of the summer …’ Or: ‘Sure, it’s hard to believe, fifty kilometres, but there have always been strong swimmers …’ After every conversation, Hiddensee seemed like a narrow strip of land of mythical splendour, the last, the only place, an island that was constantly floating away, always outside the field of vision — you’d have to hurry if you wanted to reach it.

  After eating, Ed returned to the hotel. Someone had been through his things, but nothing was missing. He stood at the window and looked across at the train station. In bed, he began to call for Matthew — a regression. But he only called quietly, and really just to hear his voice again before going to sleep. No, he had not jumped.

  THE ISLAND

  Most often he was turned down immediately. Someone passing would call out: ‘We’re all full!’ A few heads were raised when Ed whispered ‘thank you’ and left as quickly as he could, clutching the sweaty straps of his fake leather bag in his fist.

  He had landed on the northern end and walked south, about six kilometres, which he then covered again in the opposite direction. The island was so narrow at some points that you could see the water on either side. To the left, the sea was silver; to the right of the land, a dark-blue glass, almost black. The clouds seemed to drift lower than usual, and Ed mused for a while on their curiously elongated shapes. While the horizon expanded, the distance between it and the sky shrank, one dimension displacing the other. At the end of the day, when he had just begun to lose hope, the question left him all but indifferent: ‘Would you happen to have any work for me? Howev
er, I’d also need a room.’

  In a guesthouse called Norderende, he was offered one mark forty an hour for all manner of jobs, as they put it, ‘but without accommodation’. A few discarded roofed beach chairs stood a short distance away. Ed liked their canopies’ faded blue. It was the colour of idleness, of July, of sun on one’s face. While the surly waiter exchanged a few words with him (Ed’s first conversation on the island), two employees scurried past, their heads lowered, as if worried about losing their jobs. Ed paused for a moment between the garbage bins and the beverage crates. Without being aware of it, he had adopted a beggar’s humble demeanour.

  As Ed walked away, one of the employees called to him through the almost closed door of the storage shed, so that Ed could not understand the man clearly. All that he caught was the word ‘hermit’ and then ‘Crusoe, Crusoe —’ as if the man were delivering a secret message. It was far more likely that the man wanted to mock him with the old story of the shipwreck.

  Night was falling and lights were going on in the houses. The weight of his bag made Ed walk a bit crookedly. The straps were much too narrow and cut into his shoulder; the imitation leather had turned brittle. Ed wondered if it would have been better to have left the bag somewhere, or, even better, to have hidden it in a sea buckthorn bush on the way. He had surely phrased his request for work wrongly, wrongly and stupidly, as if he himself weren’t part of the same society. Here, one simply had work; no one needed to go around asking for a job, especially not the way he did, going from house to house with a ratty bag on his shoulder. Work was like a pass: you had to be able to show it. Not having work was against the law and a punishable offence. Ed sensed that, the way he had asked it, the question couldn’t even be answered; in fact, it was like a provocation. And as he plodded along with his much-too-heavy bag, he reformulated it:

  ‘Might you possibly need additional help this season?’

  He had found the right words.

  On his way through Kloster, the northernmost village on the island, he met a few holiday-makers. He asked them unceremoniously for a place to stay. They laughed as if he had cracked a hilarious joke and wished him ‘all the luck in the world’. He passed a row of beautiful old wood houses. A man his father’s age scolded from his balcony and repeatedly thrust his beer bottle jerkily in the air. He was obviously drunk enough to recognise someone from who-knows-where at first sight.

  ‘Do you need another pair of hands in your kitchen? I happen to have some time at the moment.’

  From the bartender in the Offenbach (Ed was always on the lookout for the Karl-Marx-type beard), he knew that sleeping on the beach was risky. Something about the border patrols. They would find him with one of their long torchlights; they would shine a light in his face right in the middle of a dream and ask him about his escape plans. Without a permit or accommodation, any stay in the border area was forbidden. The inspectors on the ferry had not been particularly interested: they assumed that passengers on the early ferry were day tourists. What was important was to have some kind of story to tell if asked, a name, an address of any kind. The Naturalist writer Gerhart Hauptmann had claimed that everyone on the island was named Schluck or Jau — in fact, those were the only two families on the island: Schluck and Jau. Ed found the two names suspect. They didn’t sound convincing, they sounded made-up. Yes, that was possible in fiction, but not in real life. In the Stralsund port, he had looked in the telephone book and chosen the name Weidner. He wrote down on a piece of notepaper he kept on him, folded up tight: the Weidner family, Kloster, number 42.

  ‘Do you happen to need any help in your restaurant establishment?’

  A sentence made of wood.

  And they could probably see that he just wanted to get away, simply disappear, that he was, fundamentally, a failure, washed-up, a wreck, only twenty-four years old and already a complete wreck.

  The beach was out of the question, as were the rest of the shelters along the shoreline. His fears were childish: someone might step on his head by mistake when he was asleep. The water might rise suddenly and drown him. There might be rats in the bunker.

  As darkness fell, Ed reached the northern tip of the island. He had crossed all three villages twice: Neuendorf, Vitte, and Kloster. In the port (it was strange to arrive once again at the place he had landed that afternoon, though it seemed years earlier to him), he saw on a signboard that the area behind the town was called Bessiner Haken and was a bird sanctuary.

  A night under the stars was now going to be part of his life, Ed was convinced of this, and it was right that things should start off this way, despite his fears. At the edge of the village, he saw a weathered signpost with the inscription: ‘Radiation Institute’. On a distant hill, behind poplar trees, he could see the outline of a large building. He passed a large barn, and several fences coated with waste oil. The reeds lining the path rustled. They were taller than he was and blocked his view of the water; the evening cries of some kind of goose resounded in the air. The last house, its thatched roof covered with moss. The vegetable garden reminded Ed of his grandmother’s garden: potatoes, kohlrabi, and asters. The path, carelessly paved with slabs of concrete, petered out in a swamp.

  The first raised hide looked rather like a cabin, a tree house, an extremely good hideout, but unfortunately it was locked. The second, smaller raised hide was open, and swayed so much that Ed wondered if it was even used anymore. With an effort, he heaved his bag up. He tried to arrange things as quietly as he could. He gathered some wood to provisionally barricade the entrance to the tower and the top of ladder. When he dragged a few rotten branches to the top of the ladder, a beam of light hit him. He threw himself to the floor, knocking his head on a bench. He lay without moving. He breathed heavily, he could smell the wood, his forehead burned. The hide’s tight floor space did not leave him enough room to stretch out his feet. He thought of Klondike Fever, of the man in the snowy wasteland who managed at the very last second to light a fire with his last match, but then … After a time, the beam of light returned. Ed got up slowly and greeted the lighthouse like an old friend he had lost sight of temporarily.

  ‘And would you happen to need more help?’

  The beacon fitfully fanned out and narrowed in turn — that probably meant ‘no’. Strange how the prismatic finger of light would shoot out in sections, only to freeze in the next instant, as if it had hit something and that was more important than continuing to revolve endlessly in a circle.

  ‘I mean, just some help for this season?’ Ed murmured.

  He had given up his plan to return to the small town and eat in one of the inns. He hadn’t even been to the beach yet. But just the fact that he was here, on the island … He kept listening in the dark to the sounds of the jungle around him, then he pulled on his sweater and put on his jacket. He spread the rest of his things as best he could out on the wooden floor of the hide. It was cold that night.

  ZUM KLAUSNER

  13 June. Ed’s raised hide was still submerged in darkness when a deafening noise broke out. The birds in the sanctuary woke and clamoured for the day, their din filled with reluctance and continual, protracted complaint. Ed left his quarters well before sunrise and trotted inland, his face full of insect bites, his forehead on fire.

  His first task would be to explore the area and, above all, to find a better hideaway or at least to sniff out a place he could safely hide his bag and his things (his heavy Thälmann jacket, his sweater). Apart from the myths and legends he had heard on the mainland, Ed didn’t know much about the island, either about its geography or the cycles of surveillance and border patrols. At first, it all seemed easy to survey: meadows, grasslands, and a few streets, partly paved with slabs of concrete. This was no landscape for hideouts. In contrast, the woods and the highlands to the north were inviting.

  The following night, Ed crept into one of the high inlets at the base of the coastline. His cave resembled a broad and
recent rift; the bluff had opened itself for him. There were no mosquitos, but water dripped from the loam onto the back of his neck. The sea was black and almost silent, except for the regularly recurring sizzling sound in the pebbles between the rocks on the shore — as if someone were pouring water onto a glowing hotplate. There were a multitude of noises in his cave that Ed couldn’t identify. Something rustled above him and something rustled within the loam. And, sometimes, there was a sound of breathing or soft groaning. A few verses rose, murmurs from the hoard of lines he had learned by heart, verses comparing the little lapping Baltic waves to the whispers of the dead. These insinuations annoyed Ed; if he were serious about his departure (and fresh start), he would have to fight against them, which is why he tried again to form his own thoughts.

  He closed his eyes and, after a while, pictured the Man of the Baltic Waves. He was tall and stooped: it was the caretaker at the Institute. He scooped water from the sea and poured it over his fire pit on the beach. The water turned to steam, smoke rose, and the man himself grew thinner and more transparent each time. At last, all that remained was his face. The face smiled at Ed from the sand, exposing its rotten teeth, a mess of mussels, tar, and algae; it said, ‘My presence is spent.’

  In the morning, Ed’s things were drenched and a thin delta had formed on the beach. The spring water turned the loam into shining blocks that were perfect for walking on. The water pooled here and there. Kneeling properly at first (like an animal with its hindquarters raised and head reaching forwards) and then lying flat on the ground, Ed tried to drink. Although no one would be on the beach before sunrise, Ed felt he was being watched. With one hand, he pushed his hair back towards his nape; with the other, he pushed against the stones that wanted to press in between his ribs. ‘Nature’s no picnic, no, indeed,’ Ed murmured; he imitated his father’s voice and couldn’t help snickering. He had made it through the second night.