Kruso Read online

  ‘Plates, you dogs, I need plates, plates — spiders and spoonbills!’ It was Chef Mike, his strident, raspy voice from the kitchen. When they were almost out of silverware and his Roman had slipped and fallen on the greasy floor and Ed didn’t know where to begin, Kruso reappeared.

  He stayed at Ed’s side for a whole hour without a break. Ed admired the calm symmetry of Kruso’s movements. Kruso worked in a different and — Ed could find no better term for it — a locally unusual way. Everything he did emphasised his seriousness. It was not so much his stamina or speed, it was more a kind of rhythm and inner tension — as if his entire existence were part of something greater or as if his work washing dishes were simply an expression of something else, something all his own, that had to be handled with care.

  Rimbaud joked with Kruso, but Ed didn’t understand either of them. Even the short waiter (his name was Chris) had increased the pace of his odd, woodcut-like hobble, which may have been caused by his bowlegs. His greasy, curly black hair moved mechanically forward and back — his hair hobbled along with him.

  They were quickly gaining ground, and the calls for plates from the kitchen trailed off. Rimbaud stood at Kruso’s side, speaking to him quietly. They were both looking in a book at the photograph of a man, as far as Ed could tell. The book was wrapped in brown paper, and, if Ed were not mistaken, it had come from the basin Kruso called ‘our nest’, a blue-green plastic basin filled with dishcloths. Rimbaud leafed through the book and began to read aloud. He recited into Kruso’s ear. He stood stiffly, leaning forward slightly, as immobile as a drawing. When he finished, Kruso hugged him to his chest. In the middle of the embrace, a scream rang out in the hallway behind Ed — with a powerful leap, Kruso dove past him to catch a slowly but inexorably toppling mountain of plates. The hobbling Chris had loaded his right arm past his shoulder and almost up onto his head with dirty dishes. Everyone laughed. Rimbaud clapped the book shut and slipped it back into the nest between the cloths. Ed heard Chris calling him ‘onion’ behind his back, but maybe he was mistaken. The dishwashing-station echo chamber swallowed every word. For two people to be able to talk, they had to stand close to each other. Still, there was a lot that Ed did not understand, as if some of the crew were speaking a foreign language. The term ‘allocate’ or ‘exonerate’, for example, kept surfacing — whatever they meant remained a mystery to Ed.

  I will learn, Ed thought.

  For the first time since he had made his break, he felt forlorn. He scraped the streaks of vegetable remains into the bin and let the plate slide into his sink. Once again, a few verses from The Drunken Boat echoed in his mind; the murmur of the hoard.

  Shortly before the end of the shift, mute Rolf came in and carried the bowl with the good scraps into the kitchen. A small pile of coffee sets slipped from Ed’s hands and shattered. No one said a word. Chef Mike pushed open the swinging door to the kitchen and handed him a hand broom and a dustpan. A cloud of steam billowed over the floor. Ed had ducked immediately to pick up the biggest shards. He sensed Kruso’s silhouette behind him, then felt a hand on the back of his neck, fleetingly, the way you touch a child doing homework.

  TO THE SEA

  Captivated by the sight of topographies that seemed to roam under the water’s surface, Ed almost tripped. The descent to the beach led over several tableaux of loam and sand bound by flights of steps which, going by their construction, must have dated from different centuries and were in a terrible state. With each step, a new panorama was revealed. The sight of the sea! Ed felt the promise. And he longed for nothing else, a kind of beyond, vast, perfect, overpowering.

  Halfway down the bluff, the view to the north opened up, onto the uppermost section of coastline. There, in the scrub on the cliff, lay the army compound of the observation company. ‘No heavy armaments,’ according to legends from the mainland. Others whispered of an extremely precise cannon with an almost unimaginable range.

  Ed was the only one who took advantage of the midday break to go down to the water. At that time, life in the house was at a standstill. After the chaos of the lunch shift with boatloads of day tourists, sleep settled over the clearing. It reminded Ed of the midday nap time of his primary-school years, when they took the mats from the back wall of the classroom after lunch and fell into heavy dreams as if on command. Rimbaud collapsed onto the battered chaise longue in the dining room, placed to extend the so-called reading corner with its small round table full of magazines, the TV guide FF-Dabei, the magazine You and Your Garden, and the monthly Good Advice. He let his feet in his run-down waiter’s shoes dangle over the backrest, and covered his face with a newspaper, Ostsee-Zeitung, which was delivered daily on the post boat. The locals called all the ferries that ran between the islands ‘post boats’. Ships from the mainland that docked at the island were called ‘steamers’. ‘Are you coming by post boat or by steamer?’ was one of the first, crucial questions … Now and again, Rimbaud stretched out on the grassy embankment on the edge of the forest, not far from the spot where the path to the lighthouse began. On some days, Ed could see all three waiters lying next to each other, their white shirts unbuttoned, immobile, as if shot down in a bloodbath from the era of Prohibition — three dead friends with arms akimbo on one of the Romans’ sheets.

  ‘What did you do all those years?’

  ‘I went to sleep early.’

  Only Kruso never rested. And he never seemed tired. He often worked in the cellar under the dishwashing station, which housed the boiler to heat the water as well as a workshop. Or he gathered dead wood and carried it to the splitting block. With his apron made from a red-checked dishcloth, his bare torso, and hair in a plait, Kruso actually looked like an American Indian making necessary arrangements with resolution, yes, with strength and elegance, though Ed could not say what the arrangements were for. It was surely something important.

  Every day they made wood, as Kruso called it, cutting driftwood or deadwood into oven-sized pieces with the axe. Once in a while, he worked on his barrier, which enclosed the Klausner in a half-circle, for which he skilfully wove together the lower quality, thin underbrush branches, using the trunks of the smaller, densely growing spruce trees as pickets. He called the fence the ‘outer palisade’, although it was not clear where the ‘inner palisade’ was meant to be. The palisade was a natural barrier that turned green over time and seemed to grow of its own accord.

  When Kruso was splitting wood, the water in the sinks trembled. Once, Ed had watched him split wood, almost transfixed by the rhythm of the axe and the smooth, powerful movement of his flawless body. Logs were diligently reduced to smaller pieces. Ed knew he couldn’t be seen through the dirt-encrusted window of the dishwashing station, but Kruso had suddenly stopped chopping and waved. Moments later, he was standing at Ed’s side, the axe still in his hand. Smiling gravely (that irritating combination of two expressions in his large, oval face), Kruso once again took Ed by the arm and led him around the courtyard.

  ‘The garden has to be protected, the wild boars root everything up with their snouts,’ he said, pointing at an enclosure near the edge of the forest, where, with a fair amount of good will, a few vegetable beds could be made out. Half-buried schnapps bottles encircled the plantings. It looked to Ed like the garden of a drunk who longed to be reconciled with the world.

  Kruso knelt down and laid his hand on the vegetable bed.

  ‘The only reason they come here is that they catch the scent of freedom — they’re like humans.’

  For a moment, he looked into Ed’s eyes.

  ‘Last year, they destroyed the entire garden, all the mushrooms and the sacred herbs. The dose was too high, of course. After that, the pigs felt completely free, free from all constraints. They swam around the island a few times and set off a Battle Stations alarm. Have you ever seen pigs swim, Ed? Father, mother, baby, they move through the water all in a row, much faster than you’d think possible, their snouts st
icking high up out of the water. And that’s how they were shot down, father, mother, baby — bam, bam, bam. The soldiers thought what they were supposed to think: fugitives, seasoned border violators, who don’t react to shouts or even warning shots. For a while, the sand down there was red. It took hours before they recognised their mistake and dragged the cadavers from the water. Naturally, Chef Mike tried to scrounge up some fresh meat for the Klausner, but there was nothing doing, fugitives are treated as fugitives: there’s no such thing and therefore there are no corpses — they simply don’t exist.’

  Kruso looked at the ground. His lips were bloodless, his eyes almost closed. This man was a stranger to Ed, but Ed also felt they were close. And yet, not truly close — it was more the kind of closeness one longs for.

  Kruso plucked something from the garden bed. Ed couldn’t tell the difference between herbs and weeds. He tried to make sense of the story and wanted to ask Kruso about the herbs.

  ‘The wild pigs had too much freedom in their blood, you understand, Ed? This freedom …’ He gestured at the herb garden and at the Klausner, and fell silent.

  Because the beach was rocky at the foot of the stairs, Ed headed north to the first promontory where there were a few sandy stretches. He had brought along the bulky notebook with G.’s dedication on the cover. He hid it in his towel. He treasured the thought that he could find himself somehow during this break, that he could breathe in the sea, think things over, but he was much too exhausted. So he just sat there and looked out into the distance. Despite the cream, his hands seemed waterlogged, the skin porous, pale, and wrinkled. The hands of a drowned corpse, Ed thought. His fingernails wiggled in the nail beds as if loose, and, if he’d wanted to, he could have pulled them easily from his flesh. He turned his palms towards the sun, rested his hands in his lap, and looked out over the water.

  At least his eyes felt better. In the putrid, soapy haze of the dishwashing station, the contours of the fear that still throbbed in the marrow of his bones had softened (hadn’t jumped!). Ed’s exhaustion reminded him of his stint as an apprentice on the construction site, of the nearly forgotten exhaustion of his younger years (he referred to them that way again, as if he had grown old since then), and he felt a kind of homesickness for the work. A physical, almost inborn longing he hadn’t thought of in a long time or, rather, hadn’t completely shaken off. His studies had made him vague and arbitrary. When he was working, he became like himself again: work returned him tangibly to his own likeness. Werther’s ‘weariness’ came droning from his verse hoard, whereupon Ed started throwing stones into the water. He wondered if he’d passed the test, if he was now the Klausner’s dishwasher.

  He gathered driftwood on the way back. Roots, pieces of boards, perhaps the remains of ships. In the end, he carried a considerable bundle in front of his chest. On the stairs up the bluffs, the mussel- and algae-covered wood almost slipped from his grasp, but he wouldn’t let it: he was determined to pass this test no matter what. The stairs were steep and sweat ran into his eyes. He imagined Kruso noticing him. His grave smile. Seeing Ed, the savage, who caught on quickly and proved himself useful from the very first day. When Ed got to the woodlot, he let the bundle fall with as much noise as possible. In his life’s confusion, he had found himself an incomparable teacher.

  THE BREAKFAST

  21 June. Breakfast was the only time the Klausner’s crew all gathered together, and Ed quickly understood that it was impossible not to be punctual. Every morning at seven, the table was fully set. Twelve plates, five on each side, one on each end. Ed’s acceptance lasted only a few minutes — no wonder he would picture it again so often.

  After Kruso and Chef Mike took their seats, Ed chose a place on the far side of the table, the one nearest the wall. It was a good choice. He had, in fact, chosen the place where his predecessor, a man named Speiche, had sat. Speiche was still mentioned now and again in conversation, but only when they wanted to make fun of someone who had obviously not passed at the Klausner and was ‘unsuitable above and beyond that as well’. That’s how Kruso put it, as if, Ed assumed, he were referring to a binding set of rules, a codex for the esskays.

  Ed, in the meantime, had understood that ‘esskay’ was simply the acronym ‘SK’ for Saisonkraft, seasonal worker. SK reminded Ed of the term EK for Entlassungskandidaten, discharge candidates in the army, and he reasoned that, just as at the time of his military service there had been an EK culture — a conglomeration of crude to deadly jokes combined with an implicit desire for submission (all in all, a kind of martial anticipation of the day of ‘freedom’, of their discharge) — there surely must also be an SK culture, with its own, entirely different set of rules. In that case, it would serve him well to master this codex as quickly as he could. And Ed recalled a particular soldier who, like himself, had been what they called a ‘fresh one’, a ‘smooth one’, that is, a soldier in his first six months of service. For a game called ‘Turtle’, the EKs had strapped steel helmets onto the soldier’s elbows and knees and then hurtled him along the linoleum floor of the corridor in their barracks, which was smooth as glass since the soldier himself had waxed and polished it for hours on end. His trajectory was tremendous — all the way to the wall at the end of the corridor, against which the soldier broke his neck.

  Kruso never laughed at the jokes about the vanished dishwasher being a flunky or a work-shirking loser. Speiche, the Orphan Child … At first, Ed thought the nickname was a rude joke. He found out later that his predecessor actually had been an orphan who had left the orphanage as soon as he came of age and gone straight to the island. No one seemed particularly interested in where Speiche, alone and without any family, could have vanished to so suddenly. The thought that here, on the doorstep of disappearance, no one asks where others might be headed, flitted pointlessly through Ed’s mind. There actually did seem to be cases of emigration in other establishments on the island, establishments with better terms and conditions. The Wieseneck Pension or the Dornbusch Apartments offered higher hourly wages as well as a premium on days off. There was even talk of a ‘weekend bonus’, and in the Island Bar the waiters were required to polish the silverware or to pay the dishwasher an extra five marks to do it for them, or at least that’s what he’d been told by mute Rolf, who could, in fact, speak, if the topic was money. But in the end, for Ed, it wasn’t about money. It never had been.

  Speiche had not only left behind his sour smell, his toothbrush, his glasses, and the cockroaches in the room. He had also left a bag at the bottom of the wardrobe, with a warm, hand-knitted sweater and a pair of leather shoes. With their thin, flat soles, these shoes — called hitchhikers — were in high demand and difficult to find, which made it all the stranger that he’d left them behind. Maybe Speiche would appear some day to reclaim his belongings, Ed thought, and so did not touch the bag.

  The breakfast table, the so-called personnel table (or perso-table for short), was in the back third of the bar room, in a niche with a door to Krombach’s cubbyhole. Once everyone was seated, the door opened and Krombach walked behind his chair in a cloud of Exlepäng. He rubbed his hands as if everything had succeeded, at least for the moment. Kruso then rose quickly and carried the steaming, brown-grained metal coffeepot from the counter to the table, where he served Krombach, himself, and Chef Mike before setting the pot down in the middle of the table. Ed saw that Kruso concentrated intently on each of his movements, adopting an attitude that suited the particular pride he displayed washing dishes or chopping wood. Both Krombach and Chef Mike thanked Kruso with discreet gestures that looked bashful to Ed, but maybe he was mistaken.

  Krombach murmured a few trivial remarks about the weather the previous night, the currents, the swell, and the wind that morning, as if they were about to set out fishing. Then he bemoaned another collapse on the coastline ‘between Signalmasthuk and Toter Kerl’; he must have been down by the water right at the time. Then silence fell over the table — perhaps a
moment of silence for the steady dwindling of the island. The silence was pleasant. For a time, there were only breakfast sounds and the scornful cries of seagulls out over the cliff. The French doors to the terrace were open wide, and the sea breeze flowed in and washed away the smell of the previous evening. Ed closed his eyes for a second and pictured the bear-horse’s head; no more tears.

  There were rolls, bread, liverwurst, Teewurst, spreadable wedge cheese, some salami, sliced cheese, and a trembling, glutinous slab of mixed-fruit jam on a plate — ‘two perso-platters for a twelve-man perso-breakfast’ in the words of Chef Mike, who brought his own extra-large cup to the table. Ed hacked at jam. After a few minutes, the manager began gently scattering his assignments among the group in a barely audible voice. All their knives froze in the air for a moment, and Ed could feel the tension. ‘One thing I don’t want to forget …’ Krombach murmured; it concerned the gas cylinders and the ramshackle line to the valve. Kruso had the answer. Basically, Krombach spoke only to Krusowitsch or Chef Mike. Kruso stroked his muscular arms pensively and lowered his head, holding it slightly aslant. It was only June, but his skin was already deeply tanned, the complexion of a Sioux. Ed studied his large, slightly hooked nose. Now and again, Kruso shook his head a little; it was an expression of his unflagging attention, certainly not one of denial.

  Chef Mike took notes on a scrap of old wrapping paper he had torn off in a shapeless piece the size of his palm. He revised the kitchen order list for the next few days with a grease pencil. He broke into a sweat, and the list became illegible. Evidently, the Klausner’s cook considered it his natural obligation to find a solution for all shortages of provisions. He sat at the far end of the table, opposite the manager. The two men’s sentences sped back and forth between the lines of esskays as if up and down a narrow alley.