Kruso Read online

  After an hour of rushing, Cavallo first began to whinny, leaping in small but unbridled hops, like a child pretending to gallop. He also gave light puffs and snorts that made his thin moustache vibrate. This performance was hard to square with Cavallo’s usual manner (his complete reserve). ‘Romacavalli,’ Rimbaud brayed through the Klausner, spurring them on. ‘Avanti, avanti, dilettanti!’ Ed marvelled at the way Rimbaud, his arms spread wide, twirled as if on tiptoe. Ed admired the way he ran the till with one hand, sorted receipts, then stood still for seconds at a time deciphering something on the tiny slips while reaching (with an arm that seemed to extend longer and longer) for the large tray full of beer and soda, lifting it from the counter in one fluid motion as if endowed with telescopic strength. He did all this while keeping an eye on the serving counter and making imperceptible gestures at Chris as he swept passed with his hobbling gait.

  ‘Fame, when will you come?’

  As the noon rush peaked, Rimbaud began reciting quotations with scatological or pornographic references that stood in complete contrast to his elegant demeanour and expressed, Ed thought, an indefinable hatred, an unfathomable contempt for everything in life, even for life itself, which Ed was sure Rimbaud could never have intended. Yet the euphoric, essentially combative tone of his voice spoke another language. Ed understood Rimbaud’s dirty jokes as an expression of the difficult synthesis of philosopher and head waiter this member of the crew — by far the most well-read of the lot — fulfilled as best and as proudly as he could every day. Sometimes Rimbaud suddenly started speaking French: ‘mon plongeur, mon ami’, and when he rushed past Krombach’s door on his way to the dishwashing station, he would berate the manager loudly, ‘Chef du personnel — une catastrophe!’ After his sortie onto the terrace, the manager remained unseen.

  Ed toiled and sweated away what remained of his thoughts and feelings. He worked his way to the solid foundation of true exhaustion, and, for those few hours, he felt purified, redeemed from himself and his unhappiness. He was nothing more or less than a dishwasher who held the fort tolerably well in the surrounding chaos.

  The first time he heard it, Ed thought Kruso was explaining something, offering more of his instructions, which were always worth paying attention to. Ed’s ears had grown accustomed to the echo chamber that was the dishwashing station, but he still understood only individual words that were repeated, the words ‘man’ and ‘sea’.

  ‘What?’ Ed hollered into the rush hour, too forcefully, perhaps, since Kruso immediately stopped moving his hands. The water slapped against the sides of the sink.

  ‘Past the high reeds, past the low meadow, the canoe slides to the sea.’

  It seemed to be a kind of magic spell because silence immediately fell over the room; even the kitchen radio fell silent. Kruso kept his head lowered, and Ed assumed the conversation was over before it had started. He plunged his hands into his sink to grab a plate when the chorus rose:

  ‘Past the high reeds, past the low meadow, the canoe slides to the sea. With the sliding moon, the canoe slides to the sea …’

  Ed registered the presence of Rimbaud and Cavallo behind him, singing, panting, heavily laden. Their outstretched arms loaded with dirty dishes, they seemed like extras in an absurdist play. Then, behind them in the semi-darkness, Karola’s wonderful dusky singing voice:

  ‘So to the sea they are companions, the canoe, the moon, and the man …’

  Now Kruso merely whispered, so the basses sounded that much stronger, the voices of Chef Mike and Rolf:

  ‘Why do the moon and the man slide together so submissively to sea, so submissively to sea!’

  Before Ed realised what was happening, the waiters’ plates crashed into his sink. Chris pushed past everyone, yelling ‘So submissively to sea!’ and hugged Kruso, who remained almost completely unmoved, which did not seem either dismissive or unnatural. It suited the dignity of the poem they had recited together, apparently a kind of hymn of the Klausner, ‘our sacred song’ as Kruso often explained later.

  Like Krombach’s knotted hearts or Cavallo’s whinnying, the chorus about the man and the sea was a part of the rush-hour ritual and its delirium: it was its climax. In the minutes that followed, Chef Mike bellowed his ‘finito’ from the kitchen, the end of à la carte orders. The menus were collected quickly: a few were torn right out of the hands of some particularly disappointed guests. Only two or three dishes remained available, mostly solyanka, jägerschnitzel, and roulade. The announcement of the back-up menu was left to Chris, the most popular waiter among the guests due to his boyish, affable manner. Our best man on the wait staff, Rimbaud, warbled and pursed his lips. Rimbaud and Cavallo liked to make fun of Chris, who had come to the island the year before, from Magdeburg, from his previous life as an electrician, as an electrical as he himself put it.

  After Chris had hobbled back and forth like a dervish for two hours (his greasy, black curls covering the nape of his neck like a sluggishly bouncing blanket), he stepped outside and took up position on the terrace steps like a royal herald. He waited until the din had subsided and all eyes were turned toward him. Then he called out ‘solyanka’, and those who wanted to order solyanka learned to answer loudly and clearly with ‘here’ and to stand up at the same time — ‘so I can keep an overview,’ as Chris would explain, logically and understandably. There was a similar procedure for serving the dishes. Chris often stormed out onto the terrace carrying six or seven plates on his arms and called ‘schnitzel’. Those who had ordered it rose and yelled ‘here’, often unnecessarily loud in the hopes of being among the first served. A few played it to the hilt and called out ‘Here, Sir!’ or clicked their heels, whereupon Chris would slide one plate or bowl after another onto the table while bellowing responses like ‘Drop and give me twenty!’ or ‘Fall out for squat thrusts!’ and throwing his head back with an expression that swung between contempt and insanity. Of course, it was all just a game.

  Nevertheless, some of the salutes were given with a serious expression, as if there actually were some higher power emanating from Chris, or as if he elicited from the guests something a few of them could not keep in check. There were guests who dropped into push-up position or extended their arms abruptly and, with their jumping jacks, scared away the scavenging birds hiding in the surrounding bushes. A few guests simply knew no bounds (as Ed’s mother would have put it); they obviously were not enjoying their holiday or were at the mercy of their utterly unfulfilled existences. Chris didn’t care. At the end of the rush, he left them to their fates. The kitchen closed at one thirty. The gate to the terrace was locked at two p.m. on the dot.

  After surviving the rush, Rimbaud and Cavallo threw off their jackets and shirts, bent over the dish sinks, and splashed their armpits with handfuls of cold water. When Ed stepped out onto the ramp to rinse the dishwashing vapours from his irritated lungs with fresh air; he felt encrusted, like a fossil not yet completely petrified. Whereas the skin on his face stretched like old leather, the skin on his hands disintegrated, pale shreds fraying around his fingertips. He felt unsteady on his feet, slightly dizzy from the syrupy detergent that barely produced any foam but emitted caustic fumes that upset his stomach.

  During the common meal at the staff table, Ed had a hard time separating the image of the stringy pork schnitzel on his plate from those he had just seen, carved up, chewed up, spat out, trodden flat, or swimming in the soapy water that filled his sink. In fact, he would have been satisfied with his daily onion. He didn’t need more than that. He was tired and didn’t want to move anymore, just lie down, stretch out, and sleep, but he held fast to his walks down to the sea.

  Before setting off, Ed lingered for a moment with the others at the table in the courtyard; at some point, he decided to eat something after all, then had a cigarette. He’d started smoking again — everyone smoked and hardly anyone spoke. He felt the same weighty satisfaction that had done him so much good on the cons
truction sites in the years before he began his studies, before he started getting lost in the history of language, its labyrinthine constructions of syntax, morphology, orthography, and lexicology, the whole idiotic merry-go-round, as the students called their first-year exams in these subjects, their voices full of loathing and respect. This was before their preliminary examination, consisting of sentences from Musil or Kleist, which caused more than a few to despair and fail.

  Ed enjoyed the satisfaction of the afternoon break. It was a kind of honour: for at this moment they were all united in their pride, a genuine pride that came perhaps less from the nature of their work (slave labour) as from the sense of having achieved the impossible, yes, of having withstood a storm. Nothing gave them as clear a sense of solidarity as the high-season rushes with their commotion and excessive demands. They belonged to a crew that would defend their ship to the very last, that much was certain, with every ounce of their ingenuity, gastronomic bravado, and the skills they had gained from their academic or artistic backgrounds. By achieving the impossible in their violent, chaotic campaign, they obviously fulfilled the honour code Kruso had mentioned, the code that united the esskays. Assisted by a special kind of lunacy, an essence of gastronomy and poetry, they kept their ark afloat, day after day. And saved the lurching island.

  THE AMPHIBIAN

  At three on the dot, Ed returned from the beach up the stairs on the bluff. As he climbed, sweat streamed from every pore; his body overheated from the sun. There was no shade on the beach. As always, he walked in a small arc, half in the woods, so he would be seen as little as possible when he passed the terrace, now filling with the first café guests.

  ‘Why else, why else, why else on earth are you here?’ he babbled softly to himself as he crouched, naked, on the greasy floor in the dishwashing station and let the wonderfully cool water run over his head and back. He stared at the row of vats: his silhouette was mirrored in the steel of the sink, in which the cutlery was still soaking — only then did he notice the feet. Feet and legs, protruding from under the basin, as immobile as a dead man’s limbs. Following the slope of the floor, the water Ed had cooled himself with flowed directly and inexorably straight towards them. Mortified, Ed apologised, that is, he stammered something at the feet, at Kruso’s feet, which Ed, in the meantime, thought he recognised. The basin’s drain ended about a hand’s breadth above the tiles and the water flowed in free fall onto the grate of the drain in the floor. To keep from having to wade through a putrid swill of old wash water while they worked, it was necessary to clear the constantly growing swamp of food scraps from the grates. Kruso called it ‘pulling the weeds’, a task that was even less popular than ‘going Roman’. Ed could not understand why Kruso was lying so still under the basin. Maybe Kruso hadn’t even noticed him and there was still a chance to escape unseen, Ed thought. Then came a crash. A second later, the man who belonged to the legs was standing in front of Ed, as naked as he was, a bushman, powerful and gleaming with streaks of moisture. In his right hand, he held his machete, a large kitchen knife. In his left hand, he held up the drain grate, from which dangled a metre-long clump of slime. A trickle of blood ran down his arm; a disgusting stench filled the room.

  ‘It’s already old, four months, maybe, that’s why it took some patience,’ Kruso explained, and looked at the plait of slime as if it were a living creature he had been hunting for a while. The creature was tapered towards its tail and ended in a thin grey rivulet. Kruso behaved like — how could Ed put it — a warrior. He was a warrior, a primeval hunter, a chiselled figure, impressively tall, hirsute.

  ‘You’re bleeding,’ Ed said, relieved to have found something to say.

  Kruso tossed the knife; there was a light splash and water spattered Ed’s face. The hunting knife spun towards the aluminium mass of forks and knives covering the bottom of the sink, shimmering dully like a treasure no one on earth was ready to raise. Then Kruso extended his bloody arm over the sink and looked Ed in the eye. It was a scout’s look, a look from another, earlier time when there were men who still lived in tents with Indians or planned ambushes as a member of an outlaw gang. It was a severe, secretive look, a confiding look.

  The cut wasn’t deep. While Ed carefully cleaned Kruso’s arm and wiped the blood from his skin and hair, cold drops of slime from the plait dripped between his toes, but he did not move. Ed was almost spellbound by the matter-of-factness with which Kruso expected his help. Something about this did him good, more deeply than he could understand. It had nothing to do with their being naked, nor, naturally, with the sight of Kruso’s genitals. It seemed to have more to do with what Kruso relied on him for, with the fact that he could use Ed for something.

  The plait creature must have been heavy; it trembled lightly at the end of Kruso’s raised arm. Kruso’s arm trembled. The thing looked like an amphibian, or rather an enormous tadpole that was about to turn into a toad so it could break through the grate with its slimy hunched back and bite their calves while they worked.

  ‘The spade is next to the cellar door,’ Kruso said. This time his voice was too close and the sentence a hiss, so Ed had to rearrange the words and recall them one by one.

  ‘The spade,’ Kruso repeated, his large teeth bared as if he were trying to articulate more clearly. But it sounded no different than if he had said ‘coffee’ or ‘saucer’. Kruso was no savage; he was the opposite of a brute, naked in the dishwashing station, with an unknown animal on a hook. Kruso was patient.

  ‘Next-to-the-cellar-door,’ Ed repeated, and quickly wrapped a dishcloth around his hips.

  They buried the amphibian near the edge of the property, but still on the grounds, in the area Kruso called his herb bed. Kruso, wrapped in one of the old, pinkish sheets, said it was the best spot for growing mushrooms in the world, ‘four varieties and eight different kinds of herbs’. Then he launched into his instructions: how to knock the amphibian off the grate with a branch; how to slam the grate against the tree — a particular tree, Ed could see from the injuries to the bark — until the last bits stuck in it have squirted out; and so on.

  For the first time, Ed noticed traces of a dialect in Kruso’s speech. It was partly a kind of Swabian, essentially an archaic mixture of different pronunciations. Kruso rarely spoke that way, only when he forgot to pay attention.

  Ed made an effort. As he dug, the dishcloth kept slipping off his hips. He shifted the cloth to the leg stretched out in the forest grass and kept working without interruption. He himself didn’t know why it had to be this way. He felt shame, but, at the moment, there was something more important. With bare feet, it was painful and almost impossible to force the blade into the sandy soil. Ed tried pushing with his heel and exerting pressure with sharp jabs; he knew how to use a spade. Even Kruso, who ripped up roots and pushed the sand aside with his hands, could not miss how hard it was. But for now, the only thing that mattered was to do what was necessary and not to show any weakness while he was at it. Ed’s penis was illuminated by the sun; his testicles imitated the digging motion in a way he found ridiculous.

  In the end, Kruso placed the amphibian into the hollow. Only then did Ed notice the myriad long, apparently human hairs that ran through the creature like veins, similar to the web of blood vessels on the surface of a newly exposed organ. There were blond hairs that shone white in afternoon sun, but also black and red hairs. Ed hesitated, as if he were being forced to bury a living being, a live creature (as his mother put it), but Kruso said ‘spade’ and Ed poured the sandy dirt onto the amphibian.

  There was a moment of silence, into which the roar of the surf swelled. Slowly at first, then lightning fast, deafening — a grey jet plane sped over the Dornbusch highland at low altitude. ‘This is where the cycle of freedom comes full circle,’ Kruso announced as if he were starting a eulogy, his voice enveloped in the thunder. ‘We lead the metabolic process of man and nature back to the roots of an earlier community.’ In his pink
sheet, he looked like the Ur-hermit in the photograph in the breakfast niche: only the cat and the donkey were missing. But still, Ed was there, and he bent quickly to pluck his apron from the ground, as quickly and discreetly as possible.

  On the way back to the Klausner, Kruso spoke of a megalithic tomb on the Dornbusch and of hearths, three thousand years old, but still recognisable, up on the Swantiberg, the sacred mountain. A king’s throne … He easily adapted his steps to the length of his sheet, and his pace had the dignity befitting a tribune, whereas Ed found he had to keep rearranging his sheet — his hips simply gave the cloth no purchase.

  ‘The Black Hole,’ Kruso explained, and climbed down an outdoor staircase near the Klausner’s foundation. Ed lost sight of him at first, then a light bulb flared in a porcelain socket mounted between two cast-iron boilers. The lamp’s glass was covered with coal dust; its beam of light illuminated a pile of broken briquettes. ‘There’s no light switch at the door, you have to cross the darkness to here, in front of the boiler.’ A soft laugh rang out, but maybe Ed’s ears deceived him. The MiG’s thunder was still ringing in his ears. He shivered.

  Across from the boiler stood a row of large, broken-down closets. ‘Our supply stores,’ Kruso called, ‘and here, the archive!’ He pressed a pair of checked trousers into Ed’s chest, thin and with a cloth belt, just like the ones mute Rolf and Chef Mike wore. Ed would rather not have tried on the trousers in front of Kruso, but he did. If he had any ability, then it was this: he could sense what was expected of him; he could perceive how the world others lived in was constituted. At such times, he had moments of utter clarity when he understood, and he could behave accordingly when he wished. Maybe it was a kind of compensation — for the fact that he was missing a particular trait, something that brought people closer, that bound them together.