Kruso Page 5

  ‘You’ll stay until Crusoe gets back. Get a hang of the work and then we’ll see. Lodging, free board. You’ll get two marks seventy an hour. How do you feel about washing dishes? According to one’s aptitudes, as they say. Everything else … everything else will come later.’

  Ed nodded and lowered his gaze. Krombach’s loafer was resting on the grate cover of a portable heater. Suddenly Ed recognised the smell; it was the cologne his father used every morning, every evening — Exlepäng.

  THE ROOM

  The room Ed moved into that morning looked lived in. A toothbrush with a crust of dried toothpaste lay on the sink. A pair of glasses stood in the toothbrush mug. The bed linens were not fresh. The sheets were crumpled in bulging wrinkles, a greyish ridge of folds that gave off a sour smell … Ed leaned over the bed and listened; there was a hellish song of curving, very light, very far away. G. waved, the train made its final run, a few verses rumbled in his brain.

  At first, it was hard for Ed to grasp the Klausner’s layout, its internal coherences, and the various connections between one room and the next. The number and configuration of the rooms remained a mystery to him for a long time; it basically didn’t seem possible for them all to fit into the two-storey building that looked rather modest on the postcards made from real photographs printed by the nationally owned postcard publisher Bild und Heimat (twenty-five pfennigs a piece at the counter) — it was, at any rate, no ship, no Mississippi steamboat. It was more of a mountain hut with wood-panelled gables and extensions on all sides instead of paddlewheels. Nevertheless, in Ed’s mind’s eye, all the rooms faced the sea. This was perhaps due to the fact that, day and night, the Klausner was bathed on all sides by the roar of the waves; one’s sense of sight was constantly flooded, sharpened, transformed by one’s sense of hearing. Trapped by sound, one’s thoughts adapted to the noise of the surf, the movement of the tides.

  Krombach had first led Ed to the back of the house. The door was low and narrow. A separate entrance, behind which a flight of steps rose abruptly, the stairs up to the rooms. It reminded Ed of the servants’ staircase in his childhood home, and so he looked around for bellpulls like the ones that had run from his grandparents’ bedroom to the servants’ quarters. The rooms had stood empty for decades, but his grandfather took care of the mechanism nonetheless and liked to operate it every once in a while, especially to show Ed. As a child, Ed was certain the servants would hear it, that the ringing of the small, rusted bells at the end of the pulls would somehow summon up the long dead servants again; as soon as the light was turned off, a bony shuffling would sound in the corridor, then the rap of bare bones on the bedroom door, and finally the call, ‘Yes, Master, yes?’

  There was no need for a key, Krombach had explained: the door was left unlocked at night, too, unlocked at all times, and that, incidentally, was one of the important things for the Klausner and for its atmosphere. Ed once again had the feeling he had not understood something, that he’d missed some particular meaning or proviso, perhaps, hidden in the words ‘esskay’ or ‘Crusoe’.

  There was a spring that made the door swing shut behind them as they climbed the stairs. Krombach opened the door to Ed’s room, and they were immediately swamped by a stream of stale air, sweetish, oily air you could feel on your skin. The manager swore softly, crossed the room in two strides, tore open the curtains, and opened the window. For a moment, light flooded in; a silver glittering that calmed to a clean shade of blue. Outside the window lay the sea’s body, overwhelming and auspicious.

  ‘One of our best,’ Krombach said.

  It was one of the gable rooms, right at the top of the stairs. From the landing, the corridor stretched out into the depths of the attic floor with further doors to the left and right. There was a wardrobe to the right of the door, and behind it a sink, wide, bulky, with two grey plastic taps. Under the window, a night table with a lamp. No table, no chair. The bed under the sloping roof.

  ‘Bed linens are at the end of the corridor, with Monika. And in the morning, you will report to Chef Mike, eight o’clock, in the kitchen,’ Krombach instructed Ed softly, and disappeared.

  Ed only learned days later that Monika, or Mona as she was also called, was Krombach’s daughter. Her perfume started in the last third of the corridor, at the very end of which was the door to her small apartment. Among themselves, the staff referred to her as ‘the little invisible one’. She held the position of chambermaid, but hardly ever cleaned the rooms. Instead, she washed everything that needed laundering and transferred her lovely smell to the bedsheets, dishcloths, and tablecloths, which is why people often thought she was close by.

  Ed’s door also could not be locked, but he thought no more about it. He was sure there was no better place for him to be this summer (and perhaps all autumn and winter, too); only then did he remember his bag.

  A small group of holiday-makers had gathered on the terrace. They were drinking coffee or beer, and looking out over the sea. Someone had turned Ed’s books over and pushed them out a bit into the sunlight to dry. Nothing was missing. A large breakfast had been set down at his place: mortadella, a chunk of cheese, and a blob of fruit preserves that appeared to be glowing from within. Ed looked around. The waiter who had been called Rimbaud nodded at him. Ed was missing a cup of coffee, but he didn’t dare ask for some. When he returned to his room, he found fresh bedsheets on the pillow — the old ones had disappeared. He called out a soft ‘thank you’ into the corridor, and listened. He tried to imagine what Monika looked like. He pictured a tiny woman with black hair, a braid, maybe. As soon as he made his bed, Ed sank on to it and fell asleep.

  The Bedouins were now pulling so hard at the animal (bulges of camel skin in their hands) that it stretched out flat, wide, like the desert’s horizon. It was a way of using the animal as a flying carpet. ‘The Bedouins had readied camel,’ the narrator whispered. ‘A blast of sand hit their sunglasses, but that was only the beginning of a long journey.’

  It was evening when Ed awoke. The wallpaper above his head was peeling away like burned skin. The entire slope of the roof was covered with the remains of smashed insects. Some spots had small streaks of blood, like the tail of a comet. Sometimes the blood had just spattered around the spot, like a tiny explosion. Ed thought of his first room, with the moon over his bed, along with stars and the sandman who cycled over the hills of a dark blue night on a beautiful and clean Diamant bicycle with his bag of sand laced up tight. Ed, himself, had later only had a Mifa bicycle, a so-called folding bicycle, which you could fold up and fit in the boot of your car or some other small space. Everything in his childhood had been practical. ‘How practical!’ was the highest compliment: a folding bike, a folding bed (which you could fold up during the day against the wall, where it turned into a kind of closet), and clothing of almost unlimited durability.

  Despite the dirt and the smell, Ed felt secure in his new abode. A room like this might have disheartened others, Ed thought, but for me it’s exactly right. He felt a kind of joyful anticipation, but also a fear of failure.

  The bed frame consisted of a heavy case covered with light wood veneer. The mattress had a hollow, in which Ed could feel his predecessor’s sleep — he didn’t find this uncomfortable. Only the pillow was unusable, a solid lump. He would use his sweater as a substitute, as he had on the previous nights. Ed was proud of those nights. He stood up and threw the stony pillow towards the wardrobe; dust rose in the air.

  When he opened the wardrobe door, it began to melt from the inside in dark waves. Initially, it was like a dream, but Ed immediately began pounding on the door — hammering hard, almost splintering the thin wood. At some point, it passed, and he stopped, breathless, his heart racing. On the soul of his shoe was one single strike. Half an insect, the tail end, to be precise, was squashed, while the front end still struggled to get away. Of the nearly fifty cockroaches, he had only got one. Just one, Ed thought.

 
THE ONION

  15 June. Ed was unfamiliar with the work, and went about it clumsily. But no one came to demonstrate or explain anything to him as he delved, bucket by bucket, into the onions’ mystery. On probation, Ed thought, in this place, on this island. He tried to picture the movement of his mothers’ hands, the way she wielded, as fast as lightning, little pointy, as she called the razor-sharp knife with a bleached wood handle, its blade ground down to just a few millimetres; he tried to imitate her — she was his mother — as best he could, her posture, her movements.

  His spot was outside, behind the Klausner, at one of the manger-tables. He sat right under the spider-web- and grease-encrusted windows of the dishwashing station. The dishwashing station was an elongated grey plastered extension, with a back door that opened onto a small, square ramp. Now and again, Ed heard voices from within and a kind of singsong he couldn’t interpret; there was an almost uninterrupted clattering of plates interspersed by a dull underwater rumbling, cutlery, no doubt, being rolled around on the bottom of some sink. When it was quiet, they may have been watching him, the motionless outline of his stiff back, a no longer exactly young adventurer in knee-length cut-off jeans and a red undershirt cut wide at the armpits, and maybe the sight of him amused them. Ed’s hair was held back by a fraying bandanna that constantly slipped down; the sun stung his face. No one had explained to him that it would be better to sit in the shade, in any rate not in the courtyard, but under one of the pine trees near the shore where there was always enough breeze to help your eyes. Regardless, he would never have dared leave the courtyard on his own initiative. He wanted to be part of the crew without being relegated to some outpost. Most of all, he wanted to show that he knew how to work with stamina and discipline. Seven buckets on the first day.

  ‘So, I’m Chef Mike,’ the heavyset man in the black-and-white-chequered clown pants had said to Ed. Beads of sweat coated his broad, bald head and glittered like jewels. A dishtowel was tucked into the strip of fabric that held his stained chef’s jacket closed over his belly, and he used it periodically to wipe his forehead and the back of his neck. The towel was so large that he didn’t even have to take it from his belt. It dangled between his legs like an enormous member, and he occasionally draped it over his shoulder. The few times that Chef Mike spoke, gave orders, or cursed, he was difficult to understand because he used the pauses to wipe his face with his tail. Ed had never met anyone for whom the expression ‘a workhorse’ was more fitting. Almost ashamed at the good opportunity to hand off an unpleasant task, Chef Mike carried the onions out of the cold storage into the courtyard and set one bucket after another down on the ramp. The expression ‘penal labour’ occurred to Ed, but he didn’t feel offended. He didn’t feel anything at all.

  At times, a warm breeze blew in to the courtyard from the shore — it was enough. But when the air was still, tears inevitably filled his eyes. It was an endless, inexorable weeping that began somewhere behind his eyeballs and compelled him to furrow his brow. Ed stretched his chin towards the heavens like a helpless animal, or he tilted his head to the side, but that didn’t help. In the beginning, he would still wipe his face with the back of his hand, but then he gave up; he let his tears flow. Flecks of light and swarms of floating spots settled onto the landscape, swirling like snowflakes. It was the first time he had cried since that day.

  That morning, around eleven, the delivery arrived. The coachman Mäcki approached the Klausner. Mäcki, a short, stocky islander with hair like a hedgehog that had probably played a part in his getting his nickname, used the narrow concrete paved road that led from the port to the military barracks in broad, sweeping curves over the hilly landscape; a hundred metres before the base, a forest road forked off to the Klausner. At first, there was the dull thump of hooves, but then, in the courtyard, the rubber-wheeled cart floated in almost soundlessly. Mäcki never had to tie up his horse. He had a cast iron anchor behind the coach box, which he shoved into the sand wherever he wanted to stop. Ed, who wanted to show that he was someone who saw work (‘now that is someone who can see work’ was his father’s praise for people who ‘didn’t need to have everything explained to them’), helped the coachman unload. When they were done, Mäcki disappeared through the dishwashing station into the kitchen without a thank-you or a goodbye.

  After three days, Ed was sure enough of himself. His back hurt, but the peeling proceeded almost of its own accord. Apart from a few holiday-makers who crossed the courtyard obliviously on their way to the dining room (guests lodged in the building behind the Klausner), no one was near when the tears flowed from his eyes. No one except for the coachman’s horse, which now and again quietly turned its soft black nostrils towards Ed, so close that he could feel the horse’s warm breath on his face, reddened by the constant wiping and rubbing. With its shaggy appearance and its rolling gait (thick hair and short legs; the fringes hung down to the heavy, unbelievably broad hooves), the horse looked like a bear. It was a kind of bear-horse, who watched Ed weeping and when Ed raised his eyes. He also wept to the trees on the bluffs, those wind-evading cripples on the cliff that looked warped even when his eyes weren’t brimming with tears — or as if they were ducking away from something flying furiously at them from the sea that very instant.

  Slowly, space returned behind his eyes. He felt a pleasant emptiness in his head. He was amazed at the satisfaction the work gave him. He did not have to think or talk about anything, only enjoy the sun and the sea’s blurry presence. Looking at the horizon, the expanse he had crossed to get here seemed much greater, the distance he had travelled much longer; the sea stretched time out and the wind cooled his cheeks.

  With the exception of Krombach and Chef Mike, Ed had not spoken with anyone since his arrival. The bedrooms were all on the same floor, off the same corridor, and they shared one toilet, so there were encounters, but these didn’t lead to any conversations. The Klausner’s crew remained under cover, as if Ed should learn as little as possible about the ship he wanted to sign on to until a final decision had been reached. Ed liked thinking in Krombach’s nautical terms. You just needed to change a few words and it all turned into a fairytale, hardly any less adventurous than a journey on the Ghost or the Hispaniola. Curiously, the thought soothed him. Fifteen men on a dead man’s chest … Why couldn’t he just continue his life from this point, where it had ended in his childhood? Barely ten years ago. Why shouldn’t he — in a certain, more intellectual way — pick up where the four-part series on Crusoe and The Sea-Wolf had ended, back then? Before he had read and reread his way through Treasure Island and the stories of Alexander Selkirk and Peter Serrano, about Mosquito-William and The River Pirates of the Mississippi, along with all the other legends of his childhood, for the last time, and lugged the books tightly bound in bundles (he remembered the cheap, fraying string) to the junk shop. Once again he felt ashamed — although he hardly needed to be embarrassed about it, since junk shops were, without a doubt, among the highest authorities in the land in those days: ‘Bottles and glasses for Angela Davis’ or ‘Rags for Luis Corvalán’. Second-hand goods and international solidarity went together, were inextricably bound. The phrase ‘forever united’ wafted through Ed’s mind, empties and America, rags and Chile, a bundle of old issues of the People’s Watch in the fight for Unidad Popular, and a crate of empty pickle jars against racism … With the second-hand shop as his guide, Ed freed himself from literature. In any case, it was certain that his future (some cold, woodcut-like construct) lay in building, that he would go into building and begin an apprenticeship as a skilled construction worker. Ever since the eighth grade and a half-hour appointment in the career-guidance centre at the foot of the women’s prison in Gera, his future had been considered decided. He remembered how, sitting next to his mother and infinitely relieved, he had managed to conclude the conversation satisfactorily (feigning interest, he had followed all the suggestions and then ‘decided’), and when he left the guidance centre, his gaze had fallen
on the women’s prison that towered above the slope in warning. And now, from his spot in the Klausner’s courtyard, with a little pointy in his hand and a bucket of onions between his legs, once again it struck him as very puzzling that after only a few years (years on construction sites, in site huts), he had found his way back to books, just not to Selkirk and Mosquito-William, not to the adventures of his childhood, the Mississippi river pirates … A slight vertigo came over Ed, and fresh tears streamed down his cheeks.

  Every day, Chef Mike’s assistant brought Ed food in the courtyard. His name was Rolf. Rolf balanced his way down the ramp, set the tray on the table, and disappeared again immediately without a word. He wore a stiff, roomy chef’s jacket; it resembled a casing into which he could retreat when necessary, like a tortoise into its shell.

  Ed’s breakfast came right after the workday started, but he had to wait for lunch; it mostly came well after two o’clock. Usually, meat and potatoes with mixed vegetables. Ed often felt undeniable hunger before noon. At some point, he would take an onion and eat it like an apple, without stopping. Onions had been the only thing (aside from blood sausage) that Ed would not eat, or only reluctantly — now he liked the taste. And suddenly, he seemed to have got over his sensitive stomach as well. From then on, every day at noon on the dot, Ed would take one of the large onions he had peeled, and later a slice of brown bread filched from the breadbaskets intended for guests on company holiday. It was a kind of second breakfast; the first habit of his very own.

  THE JOURNAL

  When Ed sat up in bed in the morning, he saw the sea, and that was enough. Even so, he could not relate this happiness directly to himself. It remained inaccessible in some way, either in his chest or in the sight of the sea, even with the lights of the ocean liner on it, or it was hidden in the twilight that did not actually exist; there was only the golden light that slowly crept up the stained walls and flooded the room, and then, after sunset, the long finger of the search light that groped over the surface of the water and glowed each time it hit the crest of a wave as if there were something there.