Kruso Page 8

  ‘Sailors, I’d like you to meet Edgar Bendler.’

  The manager rose from his chair. Ed was touched to hear his name pronounced out loud like this — complete, forceful, in a positive, almost cheerful tone. It was like a rare show of tenderness, and for a moment the bad feeling that he was simply there representing another person disappeared. Yes, it seemed he could now assume that he was the one sitting at the table and that he had arrived in the heart of the Klausner high above the sea and was indeed a member of this still incomprehensible group.

  ‘In a difficult situation and after a few nights of wandering about …’

  A short speech followed in which Krombach introduced Ed with a half-invented, half-true description of his ‘background to date’. Around the table, not a single expression changed. With the flat of his open hand, the manager finally gestured towards each single place at the table, although first at the one empty chair to his right:

  ‘My daughter, Monika — who is excused today.’

  His hand gestured towards the floor above before making the round of the table. ‘Chris, Mirko, and Rimbaud from the wait staff: excellent waiters, in fact, I’d call them unbeatable. Speed and stamina, cleverness and wisdom, as well as gastronomic and philosophical knowledge are perfectly united in them.’ Krombach smiled. There wasn’t the slightest trace of irony or cynicism in his smooth, shining face. ‘Mirko has a doctorate in sociology and comes, like you do, Edgar, from Halle an der Saale. We call him Cavallo. And here, of the same academic rank, his friend Rimbaud, our philosopher — I’ve almost forgotten what your real name is, my friend, what your real name used to be, I mean …’ His hand paused briefly in its round. ‘Kruso you’ve already met, Patron of our Island, one could say, and Chef Mike, from Samtens on Rügen Island, you worked with him on your first day, about which I’ve heard only good things. Rolf, our hardworking ship’s cook. And there, on your left, are Karo and Rick, that is Karola and Richard, our counter-couple, who really are married! The two of them and I have a shared past, if I may put it that way, a capital past, isn’t that right, we could even call it a palatial past! In any case, Rick is the one to ask if you have any questions. He is Head Bartender and Head of the Wait Staff. And to your right is René, our ice-cream man, my son-in-law.’

  Only the last part of the manager’s introduction struck Ed as forced. The back and forth motion of his soft white hand, raised to head height, and its movement in a half-circle from chair to chair reminded Ed of a benediction. Before the introductions were completed, the ice-cream man had turned away in disgust, which is why Ed had kept his head down at first, to avoid looking René in the eye.

  ‘Let’s not forget that we are all castaways in some sense …’ The manager raised both hands as if he wanted to include the entire globe in his blessing. His voice fell again. Then it looked like he was thrusting his hands through an invisible wall or into water or through something that had come between him and the rest of the world.

  Ed was nervous. Krombach’s oratorical efforts embarrassed him: they were excessive for a dishwasher, a newcomer at that, and he had trouble concentrating on Krombach’s sermon. In the corner, above Chef Mike’s sweaty walrus pate, were hung photographs of the personnel from previous years. Some had the date written on the frame in felt-tip pen: 1984, 1976, 1968. In one of the photographs, the one from 1968, every one of the men and women was holding a beer mug to his or her mouth. The shot looked obscene and made a deep impression on Ed. A second group of pictures, hung diagonally opposite from those of previous staffs, were framed photographs of famous guests, of whom Ed recognised only Billy Wilder and Thomas Mann immediately, then he noticed Lotte Lenya. Next to her was a tiny reproduction of Leonardo’s Last Supper. Under it was a stylised portrait of King Hedin from the Edda, as far as Ed could tell. The picture showed two men in battle, holding each other tightly, though it was impossible to tell if they were fighting for love or to the death or both. The caption read ‘Hedin on Hiddensee’. Celebrities and personnel were placed in such a way that they were practically looking each other in the eye. But over it all, hung just under the ceiling and like an icon on the top of an altar, ruled the photograph of Alexander Ettenburg in a monk’s cassock, accompanied by a donkey and a cat. (Krombach continued, ‘we recognise as the Ur-hermit’s legacy …’ — from this point on, Ed knew the speech.) The most recent photograph was not framed, just pinned up on the wall, a shot taken at the opening of the season in April. Ed spotted the man who had to be Speiche. He was tall and remarkably slender. His crooked smile offered a glimpse of a gap between his front teeth. Ed initially recognised him by his glasses; why had he left his glasses behind?

  ‘… and this island was our salvation when we’d been spat out, not by the sea or a fish, but by the land …’ While Krombach went on about ‘the Klausner’s further duties’ and called it once again ‘our ark’ (apparently the staff had decided to keep the hotel open at least until Christmas Eve and maybe even for the entire winter and to ‘stay up here amongst ourselves’ as Krombach put it, as if it were a matter of keeping a family together through difficult times), Ed daydreamed about being part of the obscene crew of 1968. He glanced furtively at Kruso to gauge if he had been a 68er.

  Kruso’s expression was now stone-faced, and he looked as if he were praying. Chef Mike wiped the sweat from his brow and kneaded the small towel into a pyramid. The waiter Krombach called Cavallo was breathing heavily and looking nervously out into the courtyard. The fan on the ceiling made a soft sound. Flakes of dirt stuck to the nicotine-yellow appliances, which were remnants from the 1920s, fixtures by Emil Hirsekorns, a Berlin dealer in fine wares, ‘the finest wares’, Krombach had emphasised in his summary of the house’s history, at least his account had sounded so when it reached Ed’s ears, or rather, when it flowed past Ed’s ears. The scraping of the fans removed the Klausner to more southern climes, yet ones that could still lie somewhat to the north or west, somewhere on the open sea. The constant whirling strengthened the drift; the fans lifted the perso-table and its breakfast crew out of the room, then further still, even more distant from mainland and country than they already seemed …

  When Ed surfaced from his daydream, he saw Krombach holding his hand of benediction out towards him, diagonally across the table. Ed leapt up and grabbed the hand in surprise, therefore rather too hastily. And Krombach shook it longer than was perhaps necessary. As Ed had been taught since he was a small child, he looked the manager in the eye while shaking his hand. Krombach looked at him, too, but Ed didn’t feel Krombach’s eyes on him. He saw only the skin that surrounded his eyes, gleaming as always with freshly applied cream, and then watery blue buttons with black spots in the centre. It seemed as if exhaustion or some illness had blunted the manager’s vision or as if sight no longer came out of his eyes properly. The manager had spoken so thoughtfully and seriously, just like a real captain. Still, those facing him had no sense they were being looked at. He seemed instead to be looking at nothing in particular or at everything — everything that concerned him and Ed and Kruso, even that which was still to come. Yes, Krombach was looking right through him. He could see that Ed did not meet the unspoken requirements, that he was fundamentally unsuitable.

  ‘All hands on deck!’ They all raised their coffee cups. Breakfast was over. ‘Cheers! Bon appétit!’ René banged his cup on the table and burped. Krombach turned without further ado and disappeared into his cubbyhole. Ed was part of the crew.

  THE CHRISTMAS PINE

  Sometime in the night, the roar fell silent. The surf was still. The forest was still. The foghorn blew.

  ‘At the sound of the beep …’

  Ed groped his way to the servants’ staircase. The sky was clear, an unfathomable vault. The pine trees were waiting for him. They were his friends; he could talk to them. Every twenty seconds, the beams from the lighthouse stroked their branches.

  There was one large, solitary tree very far forward,
almost at the edge of the cliff — for an instant, it was completely illuminated, as if it had been caught. The esskays called the tree ‘our Christmas pine’ or just the ‘pine of light’. Three days earlier, they had gathered around its trunk and toasted the horizon — merry Christmas and best wishes for the coming season. It was one of their customs. The reason they gave for it was that they wanted to celebrate with their nearest and dearest, with their ‘family’. In winter, they’d all be alone again, without each other. They’d also sung ‘Silent Night’ and ‘Oh, You Joyful’. ‘My third Christmas on the island,’ said Rimbaud, standing next to Ed on the terrace. A few esskays had dressed up; a couple of them wore candles on their heads. They celebrated the holiday on the summer solstice. Afterwards, they all went to eat at the Karl Krull, where duck and red cabbage were served. It all resembled some kind of provocation, ‘but that’s not how it’s meant,’ Rimbaud explained.

  Rimbaud lived in the bee house, a small hut in the forest, a side building not far from the Klausner. There he had his own realm, and he received a few guests. On alternating weeks, they were the beekeeper who brought fresh queens to the island and a man Rimbaud called the book dealer. In a special frame backpack that sat on his back like a coal carrier’s basket, the book dealer (he was a sales rep for an art-book publisher) carried his wares into the Dornbusch highland, expensive prints, rare editions, but also valuable titles from other, inaccessible publishers. Rimbaud paid for them with overnight stays.

  Ed shivered. He still had one hand on the Christmas pine. In the lighthouse’s beam, its trunk shimmered like the hide of a prehistoric beast. He went up to the very edge of the cliff and listened to the sounds far below. A soft, subtle sizzling. Water was being pushed through the pebbles and then drawn back out again — the Baltic Sea’s heavy, asthmatic breathing. He leaned forward slightly. The temptation to let himself fall was still in him, perhaps it always had been. Ed realised that you always had to defend your life against things that were constantly happening to you on the one hand, and on the other against your own self and the desire to simply give up.

  Among the staff, his favourites were Kruso, Chef Mike, and the counter-couple. Karola and Rick had welcomed him warmly from the start. The waiters formed a circle of their own. Chris seemed harmless and good-natured, but with Cavallo and Rimbaud things were different; he could sense their irritability. Rimbaud gave the impression of being well-groomed, with an almost old-fashioned concern for cultivating a masculine aura. He was the only one on whom the waiter’s tailcoat really sat well. A few silver strands gleamed in his thick, helmet-like mane of hair, as evenly distributed as if they had been carefully painted in.

  The guests often mixed up Cavallo and Rimbaud. Because there was no resemblance between them, this could only be explained by the fact they both had moustaches. Still, Cavallo’s moustache was much thinner, essentially just a fine line above his upper lip; Rimbaud’s, in contrast, was a thick, meticulously trimmed tuft on which he liked to lay his little finger while speaking or reciting. Nevertheless, customers regularly asked if they weren’t brothers ‘given the resemblance …’ It was like confusing Dalí with Nietzsche. Of course, these guests only wanted to be friendly and open (or to crown their holiday by having a conversation with one of the waiters in the legendary cliff-side restaurant on Hiddensee, something that would make a good story back home), but from that point on they got no more service, either from Cavallo or from Rimbaud. Under the circumstances, it was a good thing there was still Chris.

  Apart from that, Cavallo and Rimbaud were, in fact, good friends. During their shift, they played chess. Their board was always set up on the waiters’ small break table, right in front of the counter. If there was no time to sit at the break table, they would call out their moves to each other over the guests’ heads. To Ed, they were like old Tatars, who could play entire games while riding alongside each other over the steppe for hours, without chess pieces, simply by calling out their moves. Now and again, Ed saw René, the ice-cream man, at the break table, but he never played, only guarded the board. The ice-cream man talked a lot, cracked jokes, and laughed hollowly into his vat.

  Despite everything, Cavallo and Rimbaud often argued, either about philosophy or politics, occasionally about women. ‘It’s just about winning the day’s battle,’ Rick explained while preparing the drinks for their orders.

  In front of a central pillar, the cash register dominated the room. Whenever Rimbaud approached the unusually high stand, he studied the picture of his namesake and whispered the question, ‘Fame, when will you come?’

  The picture was a bad reproduction of an early photograph torn out of a newspaper and pasted onto cardboard. On the day of his first shift, Rimbaud had placed the picture next to the cash register and so earned his nickname. Ed had been prepared to take the alleged entreaties as just one more of the many stories about Rimbaud, but then he had seen for himself — Rimbaud’s raised head, the movement of his moustache.

  ‘Fame, when will you come?’

  WHY DO THE MOON AND THE MAN SLIDE?

  Even before noon, the terrace was awash with guests. Every morning, four boatloads of day tourists surged from the port up to the Dornbusch highland, as if there were nowhere else to go. The clearing and the surrounding woods up to the cliff edge were also filled with holiday-makers ready to pounce. A few tried to place orders from the edge of the terrace, and before long a few of the most brazen were standing between the tables, right in the waiters’ paths. They looked down at the tables around them and discussed the dishes, their hands stretched out to point at the food, almost touching it; or they tried to drive the seated guests away with hostile muttering. The waiters yelled ‘Careful!’ and ‘Look out!’ but even their sternest commands worked only for a short time, and sooner or later Krombach came out to patrol the beer garden. In a placating manner, he would lead the most impatient back to the edge of the terrace as if guiding them out of a labyrinth. He held them by the arm, sometimes walking them all the way to the bluff, up to the cliff edge — to rush them right over the edge, Ed thought, which would have been one solution and would have given the term ‘rush hour’ a new meaning …

  In fact, the rush brought out the best in everyone, and Ed soon began to understand what lay behind the elevated terminology of crew and staff. Krombach, who otherwise never left his office, would pull a short length of grey rope from his trouser pocket and begin to demonstrate sailors’ knots, holding his hands high. He tied various heart-shaped knots and raised them in the air to applause. The fact that someone was offering a demonstration immediately attracted attention, especially because it all seemed unplanned, spontaneous, without supervision or entry fee, and therefore amounted to a rare and exotic event, something you could only experience here, on this island.

  Ed never found out what Krombach was trying to make evident with his knot-tying. The grey hearts seemed to have the same hypnotic effect on the tourists as they did on him. After four or five hearts, the manager took a bow. Then he pulled more short pieces of rope from his trouser pockets and handed them out to the bystanders, who accepted them incredulously, as if receiving something extraordinarily precious. A few of them immediately began knotting the short ends, or at least they tried to, and for a while creating hearts of their own seemed more desirable than schnitzel or steak au four.

  Rimbaud and Cavallo soon fell into a continuous trot. Chris tried to maintain a walking pace but still had to move as quickly as possible and so fell into his characteristic hobble. The dishes now arrived at the sink in tall, swaying, food-encrusted stacks, and had to be washed, dried, and set out for use again immediately — there were simply never enough available. Chef Mike’s pale walrus skull appeared above the swinging door to the kitchen at regular intervals. His floods of verbal abuse weren’t mean-spirited or aggressive; instead, they were daily rush-hour arias of unsurpassable drama and urgency about missing plates, knives, and bowls and the inevitable consequence
s of these conditions: utter collapse, death. When the aria sounded, the time for niceties was past. Entire stacks of unscraped dishes were unceremoniously tossed into the sink, and the greasy scraps of schnitzel, potatoes, salad, or meatballs were swept from the surface of the water and onto the floor with a backhand stroke. With a bit of practice, Ed could clear the water with two or three strokes in quick succession. In a matter of seconds, his sink was cleared. He merely had to be careful not to dirty the cleaned dishes, and it was no small disadvantage that they then, until evening, had to wade through a revolting morass of trodden refuse, a swamp of leftovers that made obscene noises under the soles of their shoes, which is why Ed soon began gliding over the tiles as if on skis. Kruso regularly mopped and dried the waiters’ approach paths so they wouldn’t slip — even then, when hardly anyone knew whether they were coming or going, Kruso kept control, acting responsibly and thoughtfully. Ed could have embraced him for it.

  The Klausner’s thermometer read forty-three degrees Celsius. They worked like madmen but still always lagged behind. The sun bored through the window, and the dishwater exuded a corrosive mugginess. By the litre, they downed the tea Karola prepared at the bar and brought into the dishwashing station in a large brown earthenware pitcher. The pitcher’s usual spot was behind Ed in the opening to a dumb waiter that probably once went down to the cellar or up to the servants’ quarters, but was now used only for storage. Since there was no time to pour, Ed drank right from the spout. In his rush, the lukewarm tea spilled over the rim of the pitcher onto his face, which made no difference since he was bare chested and the drying towel around his hips was already soaked with dishwater and sweat. He was a galley slave. He felt naked — even his privates were damp, and itched between his legs.