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Sport 40: 2012

from What Darkness Was

page 287

from What Darkness Was

The night seemed endless. The old man felt wide awake. He tried to understand what darkness was, how merciless and absolute it was; nothing could chase it away. You could only ever light up tiny parts of a darkness like that, every light source ridiculous in comparison to the sun. Lamps, even very strong ones, had a light that was limited, its end foreseeable with the naked eye.

He was thirsty now. Another tram passed outside; he heard it rumbling around the corner at the place where the road took a curve outside the house, a single carriage heading for the depot. There was a gap of a hand’s width between the bedside table and his bed, into which he slipped his shoulder. He stretched out his arm, pushed it along the wall behind the bedside table and grasped hold of the side edge of the washbasin. The loud ringing with which the tram always announced its arrival before it turned the corner during the daytime was missing, and the screech of the brakes was weak too. He stretched a little further, extending his arm as far as he could, and felt his jaw crack with the effort. The tram turned the corner outside the house unspeakably slowly. The carriage must be empty; he thought he could tell by the type of tremors it went through as it turned, a hollow, tinny rattle.

He clenched his teeth more firmly and felt the spindle top of the tap on one of his fingers, but he could not manage to move it. There was an empty water glass by the side of the basin, still stained from the previous morning. He breathed out, got a hold on the tap, swayed it in his direction, turned the tap and listened for a while to the water flowing down the plughole and the tram moving off.

And then he suddenly thought, I can’t have seen the stranger in the morning, hotel guests don’t arrive until the afternoon and then leave page 288 the next day. Rödelheim is just a suburb between motorway bridges and allotment gardens, nobody stays here voluntarily.

He coughed.

He thought.

What about him, was he here voluntarily?

He thought about what voluntariness was. He came to no conclusion. Was it a series of circumstances? Something that gave you the possibility to apply your own will, your own judgement, without the compulsion coming about to take a false action or, even worse, a pointless action? Or was it the opposite, the inner freedom to take your own decision at any moment, even in situations in which you seemed to have no choice at all?

The former owner had left the house to him at her husband’s request. His name had been Müller, forename Karl; he had gone missing in action on the eastern front in ’43.

Now he drank, at last. The water trickled between his fingers, ran along his neck, seeped into his shirt.

It made no sense that he was the beneficiary. He had no successors and he would soon be dead himself.

And Müller of all names; there were thousands of them. He had only the faintest idea of who the man was, but he was not sure even of that.

Receiving the will had torn a hole in his life. Sometimes it seemed like an opening that he could see into, but only ever for a brief moment. Only to guess at the unfathomable depths that it held for him.

The weeks that followed had been a phase of incredible retardation. He had spent hours sitting in his flat, on the edge of a kitchen chair, incapable of moving a muscle. He had understood for the first time what the expression stiff with fear really meant, that stiffness was the nature of fear, a feeling of inner acceleration, to be precise, while all else around him passed slowly, unbearably slowly.

He had gone to a Wehrmacht archive. He had laboriously paced long rows of hanging registers, papers documenting places, deployments and men’s actual or presumed causes of death, all bearing the name it said on the will, but that had brought him no confirmation. Only further speculations and unanswerable questions.

page 289

He had looked at pictorial lists of men missing in action, thinking that a photo might jog his memory, but that had not been the case; he had not recognised anybody.

If you looked at too many of these pictures the impressions began to overlap. After a while all he noticed was the details in which one picture resembled others that he had looked at before.

He screwed his eyes up and tried to keep them that way for a while: not properly closed and not open.

He remembered the village he did not know the name of. He wanted to keep thinking of the previous day, forced himself to think of the previous day, but he could not. He saw himself walking along a path with a switch of cable in his hand. Behind him, a truck was on fire. The cable beat against his knee, cold wind blowing the smoke at his rear.

What’s that supposed to mean, you don’t know what the village was called, said a voice. You can’t fool me. You always remember things like that.

He jerked in astonishment. As his sleep had grown lighter over the years he had heard all sorts of things in his flat in Berlin: the creaking of the floorboards, the old metal windowsills, the humming of the electricity meter and the distant shouts of every drunk outside. But it was different here. Here he sometimes heard things that his right mind knew could not exist. Strange murmuring and other sounds from the deep crack across the wall in the hallway. An ugly, arch- shaped gap. When he took possession of the property the lawyer had told him it ran all the way down from the top floor and came from previous inhabitants’ attempt to dig an air raid cellar under the actual basement after the last severe raid on Frankfurt, disregarding the building’s construction. And sometimes he heard the woman who had lived here before him for thirty-five years. When he thought of the worn-down thresholds or the stain on the living room floor where her sofa had once stood, he saw her sitting there and heard her footsteps as she walked from the living room into the kitchen and into the bedroom and the bathroom and back again, always alone.

Now he looked around. His eyes alighted on a large trunk, mute and black and blocking a third of the small room where he slept, but the voice was not coming from there. And he turned his head page 290 slightly and looked at the mess between the trunk and the small wooden bench he put everything on: a little sun lamp, a pile of recipe magazines, a shoebox he kept old medicines in. Why had he brought these things here with him when he moved? He stared at them; they exuded dust and indifference. And then he looked over at the door, thinking about how he had pushed it open a few hours ago, only half open, to crawl into the room. He desperately wished for a gust of wind that might move it—the window was open. But no wind came. And he was overcome by fear that he would never see the door any other way than this, half-open.

His gaze moved onwards to the small chest of drawers to the left of the door, on top of it brushes and a folder where he kept old documents. The voice had not come from there either. From the washbasin, his eyes wandered down to the outflow pipe beneath it, getting caught on the pipe for some reason he did not understand. He listened—yes, he had heard something, he was quite sure now, a hollow, splashing sound. The tap was dripping. It was a perfectly normal old metal tap, covered in soap stains. He focused on the tap’s opening, waiting for the next drip; it took an eternity to come. And then when it dropped down it sounded quite different this time, a loud, booming sound, in a metallic space that got larger and larger, was much larger now than the pipe, a cave in which the drip weltered heavily and noisily downwards like a huge mass, until the echo disappeared into the depths somewhere at the bottom, at the end of that pipe, that endlessly long pipe.

I left school at fourteen, he called out, they didn’t teach us any foreign languages. I could never remember those foreign place names.

He was not quite sure whether sounds even came out of his mouth. If so, they crumbled away in the silence of the room.

And anyway, the main thing—he continued—was the atrociousness of perhaps dying at any moment, having to live with that!

He cast a glance towards the grey door; it had still not moved. He suddenly had the feeling something was not right about those words.

He stared into nothingness.

He saw eight houses, all of them empty, and a barn. No, it was not a barn, it just looked like it at first glance; it was a long, low wooden building with a flat roof and very small windows. He saw himself opening a bolt, taking a step back with his gun in his hand.

page 291

Eight times; the ninth time, the door was only pushed to. He saw tree trunks with planks nailed across them, in front of them a path, a pile of sand. He saw the mark left by part of the door in the sand, clear and not blown away.

In the corridor was a large chest, on the chest a petroleum lamp. Next to the lamp was a pile of something, something soft, cold and damp, wrapped in cloth. He laid his hand on it for a moment as he passed.

Then he heard something. It was a strange sound, an insistently unremarkable, rusty noise in the silence. He looked around. Saw small desks, a bundle of willow rods leaned carefully against the wall, a stove made out of a metal drum, huge. Above the large blackboard at the front of the room, half the paint peeled off it, was a white square framed with dust. Below it lay a bullet-ridden Stalin portrait.

He was freezing cold. But he was always freezing cold, the cold had never gone away again despite the heaters after the war, the coke glowing white and later central heating. Despite the many summers he had had, something had remained. An ice-cold core, concealed unassailably inside him.

He thought for a moment. Turned his head to the stove, tracking the sound. The stove door swung on its hinge. He saw a knee, an arm. He remembered he ought to have a dictionary. He felt for where his chest pocket had once been, almost terrified by the touch of his own hand.

Come out!

He shouted it. Deeply frightened by the now so brittle, old-manlike note in his voice.

A hand appeared in the stove opening and someone coughed, an agonised sound. For a brief moment he saw sunlight seeping into the room, through it the outlines of a rifle barrel as if from nowhere, a shadow on the wall. In the next second it had vanished again, just as spectrally.

A man crawled out of the stove.

It was someone of his age, strangely close as he stood there before him, with thin, fair receding hair. His padded jacket was smeared over and over with soot.

The old man felt something running along his legs, warm at first, page 292 wetting the fabric of his pyjamas. Our fault, it hammered in his head. Our guilt, our fault.

He looked past the man, through a window. It had started to snow. Tiny, whirling flakes still faltering undecidedly above the roofs of the abandoned houses. There was a shed behind the house. The door hung open, tools on the wall, empty grain sacks piled neatly in front of them. The trenches next to it: short, very short, exact, square. As if cut out with scissors. There was a spade in the last hole, which was not yet deep enough. He was absent now, so absent. Why am I still here? he thought, or perhaps he called it out. It sounded like an echo, like something he had already heard. Why am I still here? He opened his eyes wide, incredulous, feeling things once driven back now creeping up again.

There had been something there, in that corridor, he knew it, he had walked past it. He did not want to see it again. He did not even want to think of it.

The light in the yard went on.

He started, raised his head and listened. But he heard nothing, no footsteps. Only the sound of the water from the tap, running endlessly into the sink.

At one o’clock, he thought now, the man from Meals on Wheels had come with his lunch, as usual. He had treated him to a schnapps.

At half past two he had gone downstairs; that was his usual routine too. His crutches had been leaning on the window to the butcher’s processing room. Behind a barred pane of glass he could see into a short hall, and behind it came the windowless, brown-tiled room where the butcher worked on the meat. The blood had evaporated by that time, the machines were at rest. He saw the freestanding polished table with the empty drainage groove in his mind’s eye now, in the middle of the room on rollers like a mortuary slab or a stretcher, saw the hose hanging up with water creeping out of it in greasy, branching lines towards the plughole, the large meat vat and long black salamis hanging on hooks, crowded together like time made durable. As he went to turn away he spotted something moving in the shade of the shiny chrome vacuum-packing machine. It was the butcher’s daughter, leaning over the mirror-like metal of the machine’s casing, turning her page 293 head, combing her hair. She applied lipstick to her cheeks and then smudged it with spit to a grotesque, very heated red, and then she extracted something white and crumpled from her pocket and held it aloft. His eyes widened incredulously: a condom. She gazed at it like a rare find. Deliberately, she turned on the tap, washed it, turned to the machine, placed it in the middle and pulled the lever.

He held his breath. No, he was wrong, there were footsteps after all. They did not seem to come from any particular direction. A car door slammed, another opened with a quiet squeak. The rain had set in again and filled the air. It fell on all the surfaces in the night- time yard, sounding different on each one. It drummed on the car roofs, slapped onto the bicycles and tin drums and bins, moistened the weather-beaten rush matting on the balcony of a vacant flat. It was probably spraying underneath the roofing opposite, gathering in puddles on the old table the men had used as a workbench and then put under the canopy. He imagined the rain dissolving the fine, almost white shavings they had left behind as they worked, thin shreds of wood that had stuck fast in a couple of corners and the drains and could not be swept away.

In his last year in Berlin he had met a man: Heinz. They had used to sit on a park bench together sometimes. Heinz had told him that rain was a catastrophe for the blind; they could not make anything out when it rained. That made sense to him. It was impossible to place the footsteps he heard any more precisely, but there were footsteps. Crazy how the rain blocked his hearing—Heinz was right. A blurred shuffling, breaking off abruptly and then setting in again, was all he could hear, and he could hardly make out where exactly it came from in this tapestry of water sounds, but it was definitely footsteps.

Why did they unsettle him so? He was used to noises like that; there was a lot of traffic through the yard, children played there, there was always something going on at the rear exits from the shops during the day. It took a while for him to realise what it was. They were the footsteps of someone who did not want to be heard. He gripped the handle on the window and pulled himself up by it. Almost a reflex, he executed the movement without thinking, feeling no pain at all.

He felt himself trembling.

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Something appeared before his mind’s eye—the spectrally clear cutting from a picture, a very small section; he would have to take a step back, mentally, and turn around, walk around it, to see the whole thing but there was no time for that now. He tried to push the impression away again but failed. He saw the skeleton of a wooden observation platform, nailed together on tree-trunk stilts, intersected struts, crosspieces above wet ground. And he saw a man walking, with swaying, ungainly movements because he was so thin; it looked different to a normal person walking. I recognised him, he thought, but he did not know why; he was not supposed to know the men there. The bark had not been stripped from the wood for the watchtower—the trees had been hastily and messily felled. Torn white fibres protruded from the ends of the trunks, and at the point where the stilts entered the forest floor the snow was dirty, criss-crossed by tyre prints from trucks. He shouted out, shook himself, ran his hands across his shoulders, head and arms, but he knew it was useless. The dust of the past was invisible. There was no hope of shaking it off.

Cautiously, he stretched his head forwards. He could not see anything outside in the yard at first glance, only the building as usual, leaning silent and grey. A gust of wind at the entrance had loosened the rope that linked the two posts marking the beginning of the plot like posts for a toll bar. The brown noose had soaked up moisture and rolled through a succession of shallow, roundish puddles, driven by the wind. Faded traces of a hopscotch game blurred on the black goose pimples of the tar. He heard the squeaking, lurching sound of a window shutter and saw a shadow detaching itself awkwardly and reluctantly from the opposite entrance. Two thin bare legs appeared in the light: dirty feet in brown men’s sandals. The boy from the house opposite took a step, contorted his long back towards the shutter and grabbed at the wood. Everything about him seemed too long: his arms, his legs and even his fingers, which got a poor grip and slipped off the shutter.

A picture occurred to him that he had seen outside a church a few years after the war. It had consisted of two parts, a charcoal drawing. Two men sat facing each other on chairs, in the background a table laid with steaming bowls and dishes. The two figures held glasses in their hands from which they could not drink. It was only clear why at page 295 second glance: their lower arms were too long. You could see clearly that they would be unable to eat either. The second part of the picture showed them feeding one another. He had found it repulsive and ugly, but from time to time he remembered the drawing. Were they even men in the first place? The question arose again now at the sight of the picture in his memory. They were such crippled figures and they had something neither male nor female about them.

Young Dörr had retreated to the shadows again. He was sitting across the entrance step, his legs propped against the doorframe, and lighting a cigarette. His torso was slouched forward, his head drawn in, his chin pressed to his chest. The hand holding the glowing tip of the cigarette was resting on the top of his head.

The old man tried to stay calm. But he could feel tension building up beneath the enforced calm. He thought of things he had been taught in the war that he had never forgotten, the implementation of minor strategic plans, the ability to get an overview of bare or complex terrain, to distrust apparent calm and motionlessness. You could shield individual actions from several viewpoints by drawing mental lines from the starting point of their movements to points that were dangerous or hard to see. The lad in the entryway gave a loud belch. His body had concealed a beer bottle, only now becoming visible as he swung his legs forward away from the wall. At almost the same moment the bottle fell over, a loud, hard thud. The old man felt his head jerking forwards, his eyes drawing together, scanning the section of the yard in two semi-circles. Behind the parked car, a head had been visible for an instant, quickly withdrawing again. The boy had not noticed anything. He was drunk and he swayed in his movements. He had put the bottle upright again, wiping it off on his shirt and licking spilt beer off his fingers. Then he reached into his trouser pocket and fetched something out, something the old man could not make out. The figure came out from behind the car and took a step into the long shadow cast on the cobbles by the car in the light from the opposite house entry. It was definitely the stranger. A harried-looking man walking bent forwards, steeped in darkness up to his chest, he was carrying a cardboard pallet.

The old man heard the hard, echoing clack of the timer switch in the opposite stairwell. The light at the entrance was just about to page 296 switch itself off. He looked over at the dim oval lamp above the door, on which someone had mounted the house number in black adhesive strips. A narrow, crooked sixteen. The curves of the six consisted of crinkled lengths of tape bunched up against themselves. Then the light switched off. He was confused, having stared too intently at the light. For a moment everything outside lost its contours. He closed his eyes. The number flickered behind his closed lids in bright white fragments, and behind it the darkness continued, a spaceless, brown-black fabric, cold energy from weakly glimmering dots.

The stranger was climbing the stairs now. He heard his soles scraping on the stone steps and he heard him passing his own front door, resting his burden on the banisters. The fire door was pushed open, giving a quiet squeak, the handle twice hitting the wall.

I should have locked up right away, thought the old man, speaking it out loud into his cold bedroom. He saw little clouds of steam in front of his face, although he knew that could not be; it was only September. He put a hand to his mouth, blew out his cheeks, blew on his cold fingers until the insides, even his bones, seemed to get warm, and then he quickly removed his hands from his face to stare at his receding breath for a while. He repeated the process a few times but there was no more steam to be seen. His fingers felt colder than before now, and his breath, which had been warm and damp, dried on his skin to leave a clammy feeling.

The lad stuck his cigarette in one corner of his mouth. He was sitting with his back to the side wall of the entrance again. The cigarette lit up his lips, only weakly. He took the lighter out of his shirt pocket again, shook it, and then he shoved his thumb over the side edge to make it spark. There was a dart of flame. A silver necklace with a pendant dangled from his hand; a tiny heart, it reflected the fire’s shine, a teardrop-shaped glow. The boy looked at it for a few moments, let go of the lighter and tugged at the chain. The rip was not audible but the old man could see the lad draw back his arm and hurl it away, and then a weak, very hesitant scratching at the rear of the car.

From What Darkness Was © Seagull Books, forthcoming 2012. English translation © Katy Derbyshire, 2012.