Kruso

by Lutz Seiler

  Voices came from the kitchen, and then the sound of a metal object skidding over the stone floor. Ed listened, as he always did, automatically, with no intentions, and not prepared to relinquish his cocoon of absence. C.’s face flashed before his eyes once again, her narrow eyebrows raised, her bright, clear forehead, and her attentive, curious gaze when she had taken Ed into her mouth and kept her eyes fixed on his face.

  Kruso!

  Kruso was shouting. Ed had only heard him beside himself like this once before, when they were drive fishing on the beach. There was a crash, something broke, and the swinging doors to the kitchen burst open. Someone was pushed, stumbled, dropped to his knees, and cried, gulped back a sob — it was René, the ice-cream man. Two esskays from the Hitthim stood behind him with their arms spread wide, as if they were forcing an animal to its place of slaughter, blocking the way back to its stall. After a while, René lifted his head, and Ed saw that he was laughing, that he could barely contain himself.

  ‘All because of that bitch, the whole …’

  One of the esskays kicked René in the kidneys, and he swallowed his words. It was not a particularly hard kick, but Ed flinched, and René noticed him. He turned around, bared his teeth, and padded towards Ed like a dog. Ed froze. He slowly pulled his hand, with which he had been trying to feel out his desire, away from the leather of the sofa.

  ‘The lapdog, the lapdog is here, too.’

  René started making a noise, and it took Ed a few seconds to realise he was yapping. Ed sprang up and rushed outside. ‘The lapdog, the lapdog …’ Ed heard René yap once more, then the barkeeper shut the door and it all disappeared.

  ‘I’m sorry, Ed. Did you already eat your roasted potatoes?’ Losh slowly rested his hand on Ed’s head as if he wanted to caress him, but it was just a gesture that fit his question, and Ed immediately forgot what his friend was apologising for.

  At first, Kruso had knelt between the plant beds and placed his hand (cautiously) on one of the molehills. Then he started giving instructions. Ed crouched next to him and felt a light tightness in his groin. He watched as Kruso stroked the earth several times, gently at first, the way one strokes a breast, absently, without thinking, just because of its incredible softness and smoothness, then even more gently, the way a child gives the final touches to a carefully build sandcastle — but then, almost without transition, he rammed his hand roughly into the mound.

  ‘The holes, it’s about the holes. First you expose a hole. Then you stick a bottle in it with its mouth facing north-west.’

  Only then did Ed notice that the sun hung, orange, in the sky like a strange moon although it was hardly evening. The small scar above his eye began to buzz. He heard the hoof beats of his bear-horse far in the distance, and the whine of a patrol boat’s diesel motor out on the sea, and he caught isolated sentences that were being spoken at the tables within the walls of the thatched houses. As if he were a part of this world for the very first time. The objects around him glowed in their crazy colours, and, eventually, blindsided by beauty, Ed pressed his ear to the ground and heard the note …

  Everything had changed overnight.

  They had lugged the empty bottles from the Hitthim in mildewed backpacks. The smell reminded Ed of his earlier days practising manoeuvres, of the rubber on his gas mask that became sticky with old sweat if he forgot to put it out to dry after the exercises.

  Each step was a light clinking. Backpack to backpack, walking as twins, Ed felt justified in acknowledging greetings from the locals on the way, and sometimes he returned a nod, although he knew that their pleasantries were not really directed at him — not yet, anyway, Ed thought, and for a moment he felt a spark of elusive brotherhood.

  Ed’s euphoria was transferred to his time with Kruso, and so it seemed fine, at first, not to say anything about C. He also didn’t want to jeopardise his delicate position at the allocations. And he secretly hoped the mistake that had been made in the latest distribution (what else could it be but a mistake) would not be discovered for another night or two, or even just one night — one single night, Ed thought. Oh, exquisite shipwreck!

  Yes, he was proud of Kruso and feared him at the same time, and these two emotions were of a pair. Kruso’s absoluteness frightened him, his illusions of resistance, the ‘Organisation’ — sheer insanity — and on top of that, his somberness, his fanatic determination. Still, what weighed more heavily on Ed was the openness with which Losh accepted him, the blazing honesty and the respect he accorded Ed, for the very areas that were Ed’s greatest weaknesses, where Ed’s own insanity was rooted — my own unhappiness flitted through Ed’s mind, and this thought almost made him feel happy. At the precise moment when his particular insanity had become clear to everyone, Losh had stood by him in a quiet, gentle way. Ed had no idea who Kruso was, but sometimes Ed felt he knew him as well as his own soul.

  A third backpack was ready for them at the Wieseneck, and Losh strapped it to his chest without hesitation. A two-wheeled metal cart, filled with bottles, gleamed in the sun outside the Island Bar. They were all Blue Strangler empties, the brand Ed had got to know in the tower, in front of the ‘Map of Truth’. The inn’s window was only knee-high above the ground, and offered a view of the area behind the bar. Kruso went up to the window, and a man leaned out. They stood for a moment, cheek to cheek, and then the man took Kruso’s hand and pressed it to his chest. Ed rushed to grab the drawbar of the cart; he pushed the vehicle over a hole in the sandy path, and the load rattled — an outcry.

  ‘Santiago,’ Kruso explained as they moved on.

  ‘I know,’ Ed replied.

  The act of digging, the cool, fresh dirt. Ed had become hard just from the contact. That he could possibly feel this way … There were a few remains, dregs, so now and again Kruso would raise a bottle to his lips before burying it. ‘It’s their ears, their sensitive ears, that make them crazy. It’s the only way, the only language they understand.’

  Glittering in the sun, the necks of the bottles looked freshly planted, the entire garden looked festive, as if decorated, glittering with glass tails.

  A thin, relentless whistling.

  After a while, Ed heard it. Like a kid gone wild, Kruso leapt here and there among the molehills and corrected the bottles’ position as the wind grew stronger, which made the whistling sound more hollow and threatening, like the fog horn of a ship. When the wind changed direction slightly, a fantastic singing arose, like a siren’s song. Almost hypnotised, with his hands in the damp earth, fingers slightly curled in a small, continuously searching motion, Ed stared at his companion, leaping hectically back and forth, gesturing wildly as he tuned his instrument, and suddenly, wondrously, laughing. Kruso laughed and leapt, leapt and laughed.

  ‘Time to leave, you little beasts, time to go, ahoy!’

  ‘Time to go, time to leave,’ Ed echoed, and threw his hands in the air.

  A ground-organ to chase away the moles had been the idea of Kruso’s grandfather, a scientist who had made much greater discoveries … This was the first time that Kruso had mentioned his family. Back then, too, they had only used Blue Strangler bottles: their shape seemed especially designed for the purposes; his grandfather had figured that out — ‘wetting your whistle, as they say, get it, Ed?’

  A short white-haired old woman was feeling her way along the fence. She held onto the fence with her left hand and kept her head facing slightly upward, as if she were searching for the sun — or the moon, Ed thought.

  ‘That toots, it does,’ the old woman muttered, ‘it toots them moles in the noggin.’

  Losh went over to her quickly and let her pat him. His neck pouch lay on her head like a small buckskin cap. He called her Mete, Mother Mete. As Kruso led the old woman through the garden, he gave Ed a sign, and Ed gathered up a few leftover Stranglers. Mother Mete wore a pair of huge light-brown plastic glasses and a cardigan, despite the day’s heat. K
ruso whispered something to her and she nodded.

  In all, they’d buried more than fifty bottles in the garden next to the parish house in Kloster, a garden that consisted of a few plant beds, fruit trees, and a hut with a wooden floor completely covered with sleeping bags. As they wheeled away their clattering cart, Mother Mete raised her head again and gave a random wave.

  ‘It toots, my boy, it toots.’

  In the harbour, on a small, half-withered patch of grass that served as a parking lot, Kruso tilted the cart up and placed it in a row with others. Strictly speaking, it was not a row, but a wild jumble of nearly thirty or forty of these battered metal carts with labels on their undersides. Each cart had a name, and Ed automatically set them to a rhythm (one of his mnemonic devices, part of his insuppressible mechanism for increasing his hoard of verses) so that the collection of names in black, blue, or red paint flashed before his eyes as a poem:

  Dornbusch, Hauptmann, Wieseneck

  Enddorn,Weidner,Witt

  Schluck, Mann, Schlieker

  Putbrese, Blume, Gau

  Kollwitz, Meding, NPA

  Holstein, Kasten, Striesow

  Pflugbeil, Rommstedt, Felsenstein

  It only took a few changes in a few of these names grouped from a solely metrical standpoint for a shimmer of semantics to shine through: Mann-Schluck-NPA (man-gulp-National People’s Army) or Kollwitz-Blume-Kasten (Kollwitz-flower-box) and so on. Kruso contemplated the rusty pile of upended carts as if he were surveying his realm. The crazy boy stood on the dock and shouted desperately at the sea. The last ferry had sailed.

  ‘I’d like stay, through the winter, too,’ Ed said.

  ‘That will require a lot,’ Kruso answered.

  ‘I believe I can do it.’

  ‘That you can, Ed.’

  Losh took Ed in his arms, in the middle of the harbour, and Ed gladly let him, just as he let everything happen. Even if they had been naked at that moment (why was he thinking this?), it wouldn’t have mattered to him.

  ‘I knew it, Ed. I knew it.’

  Ed had swept his room, even under the bed, and set a new candle in his adder stone. He didn’t want to read or think. He sat at the open window and stared out, listening to the surf. His right hand gripped the stool. Thus he experienced it for the first time. He had to breathe deeply several times, and for a moment his eyes filled with tears. At midnight, Viola: ‘To mark the end of the day, the national anthem.’ The noise on the stairs had faded. His door had remained closed.

  At some point, he heard the whistling. His eyes fell on the photograph on his table, on the face that seemed blurred, and for a long time he could not look away. A whistling and howling, all the way up to the Dornbusch highland. The wind blew over the Stranglers, the moles jumped ship, and the island set its course through the fog of his boundless, aching desire.

  THREE BEARS

  17 JULY

  Should ask at this point if C.’s allocation to me was just a mistake. Have to pull myself together. Chris helped me in the dishwashing station, just like that, and Cavallo left a book in the nest for me (Carlo Emilio Gadda), he has taken to calling me Edgardo. Losh is making preparations for the Island Day. He wants a huge celebration that will bring everyone together, esskays, islanders, castaways, almost sounds like a demonstration. It’s oppressively hot, the island is like a death ship, no wind, no waves, and even more cockroaches. With 2 shoes, killed 8 this morning, yesterday 9.

  Ed took a few steps backwards, and looked down at the beach for a while.

  No one.

  He didn’t want anyone to take him by surprise, and under no circumstances did he want to draw attention to the cave. He spread the towel in which he had hidden his notebook out on the sand, and neared the face of the bluff again, but more as if he were interested in the stratifications in the clay, the writing of the ice age.

  ‘It was — utterly unbelievable, you understand?’

  ‘Like winning the big lottery, without having drawn a ticket.’

  ‘Yes, yes.’ The sun was beating down on the back of his neck.

  ‘Maybe that’s the solution?’

  ‘This morning I could see G., I mean, really see her, without … Without the terrible images, just so, eating breakfast, playing chess, on the way home. The way she would walk, turn around, and run to me as fast as she could. She had this way of jumping on me, you know, she liked doing it, and she startled me every time. I could hear her laughing.’

  First the humming, then the tram.

  Ed opened his notebook; the sunlight on the page was so bright he had to close his eyes.

  Kruso came in the evening. In the silence, Ed formulated the question as neutrally as possible. Lust confused the words in his head, instead of a fluke, a fuck. It was tawdry.

  ‘I don’t think I … thanked you properly.’ Ed held the photograph in his hand.

  Kruso shook his head without a word. He poured some wine; he had brought glasses and a bottle of Lindenblatt, already half-empty. Ed thought about giving him the new poem, but he had not made a clean copy yet.

  ‘Why don’t you ever talk about your sister, Losh?’

  ‘Why me?’

  The answer was odd enough.

  After a while, Kruso stood up and walked out.

  ‘Losh …’

  In his military way, Kruso turned at the door and took a step into the twilit room. For a moment, he simply stood there, a few tightly folded sheets of paper in his hand. Ed recognised the quad-ruled paper.

  Three stanzas, then Ed realised: it wasn’t Trakl, it was Kruso. Kruso’s tone that turned Trakl’s verse into something of his own, his own words, his own thoughts, a dreadful transformation.

  His friend could not get past ‘Sonya’s white brow’. The sheet of paper began to tremble even before the ‘snow moistens her cheeks’, and he burst into tears, without restraint. He wept — he howled like an animal.

  ‘Losh!’

  Kruso was still standing upright. He shook his head violently, his hairband worked loose, and his long hair covered his face. Big Kruso, poor Kruso, stood in the middle of Ed’s room and gasped for air. With nothing but his voice, Ed’s companion had turned the world of memorised verse that filled Ed’s head like tinnitus into an abyss of sorrow, had turned Ed’s hard-baked hoard into his very own, unfathomable grief.

  ‘Thank you, in any case, thank you for this.’ Kruso held the sheet of paper out in front of him.

  Ed tried to put his arms around Kruso, but the man was so large and difficult to embrace that he gave up and stood next him like a helpless boy.

  ‘We didn’t always live here,’ Kruso began. He slowly composed himself but spoke so softly that Ed had to lean forward to be nearer to the voice that could mean everything.

  ‘When we were brought to this place, I was six years old. My sister was ten. One of my mother’s sisters had married a German physicist, an important man. They’d met in Moscow during the war, you saw the institute, the Radiation Institute …’

  Kruso’s rigidity relaxed, and they sat together on Ed’s bed. ‘When my father left us there, we didn’t know it would be forever, I mean, that it would turn into a story of step-parents … Rommstedt, my uncle, X-rayed everyone and everything in his institute, my sister and me as well. We were his favourite subjects, I think. We were nice and small, and fit easily in his equipment. When he could do his research on us, he was very happy, almost affectionate. He constantly stroked our heads, but only to make sure we kept still. I always had the feeling that he was wiping away my thoughts with his hand.

  ‘The time before Hiddensee is very distant, like a forgotten continent in another, an earlier century, in which I happened to be in the world, in a completely different world. We often sat in front of the fireplace. The first thing I see is always this fireplace in my father’s office. The hide of a camel was spread out on the floor. That was my
favourite place. “I rode on that camel, back then by the Aral Sea,” my father always told his guests, who then looked at me and nodded. And so it was if I had ridden as well. I was a great Tartar general, as big as my father, riding a camel on the steppe. There were always people who came to his office and spoke German, some of them threw me a suspicious glance mid-sentence, as if I might betray their crude, incomprehensible secrets. I rode and stared into the fire, because that’s where our country and foreign lands were; I was five years old, and the entire steppe lay before me, do you see, Ed?’ He held the page with the Trakl poem in front of him as if his own story were written on it.

  ‘The fireplace was painted light blue — that was the steppe. Inside it was black, that was the night we had to fight our way through, my troops and I. Constant darkness and enemy fire. One thing I remember clearly: on the mantel, a section of the light blue had been chipped off, and the broken spot glittered like ice, ice and snow — it was always cold on the steppe. My sister sat behind me on the camel, her name … right, well, you already know, her name is Sonya.’ The poem in his hand began trembling again, but he opened the sheet of paper and smoothed it out.

  ‘As we were riding over the steppe, my father, the general — I don’t know if he held that rank at the time, or ever, for that matter, but for all of us he was the general, he was wearing those wide epaulettes, you know, Russian epaulettes are almost as broad as your shoulder — so one time, right in the middle of a conversation, my father rushed to the window and shouted something down to the parade ground, to the soldiers. On that day, they were doing drills, the longest drills were on Sunday, and something usually displeased my father. I believe the drills were very difficult. They had to march in formation, following lines drawn on the asphalt, circles and rectangles, it looked like a dance. You couldn’t actually see much because the chimney of the boiler house right across from us had been built directly in front of his office window, maybe on purpose. But he could feel it. Two hundred boots, in time. The entire house shook, the floor where I was sitting shook. When something wasn’t quite right, I first saw it in his face, the way it tensed up. He could stand it for a moment but then enough was enough. Actually, I never saw him that way any other time, he was not an angry man, maybe for him it was like a violin playing the wrong note in a symphony.