Kruso

by Lutz Seiler

  When Edgar awoke (usually he woke with a start, drenched in sweat, with an erection so hard it was painful; sometimes he tried to stroke himself the way you calm a child, but he encountered only an alien, uncomprehending limb that stuck straight up and seemed to have begun leading its own life, independent of Ed and far beyond his efforts to maintain — how to put it — his dignity) and heard the breathing, the breathing of others as well as his own, lurking and circling, a conversation of air. It went on until he recognised the rhythm and adapted to it and could sink back into sleep, descending into crazy dreams.

  Not all qualities were swallowed by the darkness. Some of the castaways radiated a strong sense of self-assuredness and self-confidence. They were proud, not at all bitter, yet full of dreams and plans (one of the island’s main effects). Some of them spoke with Ed, quietly; they whispered in the darkness of his room, told him their names, gave information freely, and were grateful. He never met any who just wanted to pump him for information, which was no doubt due to Kruso’s selection, his carefulness, and his criteria, of which Ed had still not managed to form any clear idea. A few of them seemed to be embarked on a listless shipwreck that did not interrupt their life of boredom. It was as if they were simply following some duty (to be happy, perhaps), an idea of longing, that had reached their ears along with the reputation of the island, but nothing meant anything to them. With them, it was as if a lull in the wind had entered the room. They were mockers, nothing more. Others seemed to Ed like fallen existences, their movements slowed and inhibited by the anticipation of the next defeat. Some just stood there for a long time in darkness on the doorstep and did not move. Like timid, frightened animals who had reached their refuge but still couldn’t trust it. As if they had to preserve a difficult fear, Ed thought.

  When he pretended to be asleep, he was sometimes overcome with a profound sense of pity. He saw his own flight, the search for a place to sleep. He could read his own desperate thoughts in the clandestine sleepers’ breathing. Some of them talked in their sleep, with their faces to the wall: they were suddenly loud, voiced complaints of two or three words, and quieted down again. Some wept, held their breath for a long time, and gulped so as not to sob. Ed never knew if their eyes were open, if they were looking at him in the dark … No, he’d managed it better, and now he almost felt ashamed of that, and these were the moments when it didn’t seem wrong to him to take these night beings into his warm arms.

  He had not needed an alarm clock for a long time. He had internalised the time to light the oven, even when its measure slipped away overnight. He reached for the doorknob and felt his way downstairs, down the servants’ staircase, across the courtyard, down the crumbling stairs — and only then, in front of the oven, in the Black Hole, did he take a breath, a deep breath, and pull on his clothes.

  In the evenings, Ed stayed on the beach for a long time to discuss a few things that had happened to him in his fox’s cave — to pour out his heart, as they say. Before sunset, he took rushed, nervous walks across the hills and the highland forests. For hours, he strayed here and there under the lighthouse’s circling limb of light and hoped he wouldn’t meet any one.

  It wasn’t the castaways, no; he was the one who abased himself. He felt disgusted, and tears filled his eyes. He picked up the photograph of Sonya to remember G. (as he had begun to do more and more frequently), but what he felt was pure longing. Suddenly, G. seemed to escape him again completely. He compared it to the smell of a food that was long withheld, and he was hungry, completely starved, or even more: he was addicted. His abstinence reversed; even his pain was pervaded with lust. It was a kind of suffering, on the flip-side of which an incomprehensible glee intoned obscene, avid songs.

  At ten o’clock, the bicycle patrol. The incessant rattling (like mocking, artificial applause), with the two soldiers on bikes rolling down the concrete paved path towards the village. The sound of their voices on the wind, the gentle shimmer of their machine guns in the fading daylight. On this path, the pair of sentries would cross the entire island, all the way to Hassenort, a spit of sand jutting into the sea on which a watchtower had been built and supplied with the latest technology, according to Kruso, binoculars with which you could see every single pubic hair on the beach — and every refugee for three nautical miles. There was also a light machine gun and ‘enough ammunition for us all’, as Kruso put it.

  Ed leaned his shoulder blades against the base of the lighthouse. The lights of Rügen, so close, as if you could wade across to them with a few steps, knock on the window, and say: I’m here. He felt the old longing for a dwelling, a cave for his almost incomprehensible desolation. From island to island, and on and on … Ed listened to the voice that had said this, and wanted to ask if it was referring to his entire life.

  The sun-warmed stone against his back. First, it was a shudder; he could feel the roots of his hair. Then it was nothing more than a gentle, utterly pleasant pressure; it began beneath his eyelids and moved from there to his very core.

  It was in him; it was there.

  GRIT

  They’re all just pretending, Ed thought. He spread his legs to stand a bit lower. He had to bend far forward, brace himself, and push his member downwards to get an angle at which he wouldn’t aim over the toilet bowl, over the Klausner, into outer space.

  It was a reflex, primitive and powerful. A kind of cannibalism, Ed thought. Since C. disappeared (C., easy-going, happy, dancing, the number one on his list), he was wallowing in a maelstrom of desire. There was an expression for it. ‘Screwing your brains out’, for example, one of the few captions under a drawing scratched into the grey-green paint on the toilet tank. A wild doodle, mostly a heartily laughing penis, covered with flakes of paint. Who knows which season it dates from, Ed thought, and remembered the photograph. He was thinking of the crew of 68 at the moment they were being photographed, all the women and men with bottles to their lips; they were all just pretending.

  It was painful.

  He looked impaired.

  He raised his head (as much as he could) and looked at the drawing. Maybe Rimbaud had done it — ‘your brains out’ — maybe it was a quote from Artaud. The grinning member, now right in front of his eyes, looked livelier than the limb between his legs; its features were mocking, and Ed felt the old sense of inferiority. As if C. were merely a ghost and the laughter was never on his side. And he was still sitting up in the tree of truth in the middle of a burned-down forest, in a charred clearing, a fourteen-year-old boy speaking openly but shyly to his friend Hagen of ‘boinking’ (Claudia Cardinale’s lips and Hagen, who says, ‘I’m getting a hard-on,’ and Ed, who softly answers, ‘Yeah, she makes you want to boink her’; it was probably the first time he’d said it, the first time he’d seriously talked about that), instead of using harsher words, which seemed inconceivable, far removed from him along with expressions of an unvarnished, ruthless world, a world that got down to the nitty-gritty, as they say, and one he would probably never be able to cope with.

  The cascading noise of flushing behind him (shameless, endless) on the way back down the corridor. Kruso’s door, Chef Mike’s door, the door of his neighbour, Cavallo, who rarely, almost never, made any noise.

  Ed cautiously opened his door. A draft of air and a movement in the room.

  ‘My name is Grit.’

  The scent of the Palace Hotel. He could smell the dampness of her hair. With wet hair, she felt her way towards him and offered her hand as she had once and forever been taught to do. Ed had to feel around for her hand, and when he found it he found it was small, smaller than Grit’s smell.

  ‘Hello.’

  Grit explained very softly that she wanted to lie down on the floor, which Ed wouldn’t allow. She was agitated. She seemed nervous, and started speaking right away.

  ‘Thanks for taking me in, I mean, Kruso, I mean Kruso says that all of us here are … companions in misfortune, but this is m
y first time on the island and …’

  ‘Hello. My name’s Edgar.’

  ‘I know. Kruso told me your name, and he described everything very well, told me how to get to the dishwashing station, which sink, which room …’

  They talked.

  Her whispering was like a rustling from some unknown corner of his room. The nights also served as a way for them to assure themselves — Ed had in the meantime come to understand this from what the castaways had intimated, in a whisper, quietly, often in half sentences and barely comprehensible. They needed to assure themselves after the experiences during the day, their education on the beach, and the incomparable, drastic effect of the island — exactly as Kruso had predicted.

  Yes, Kruso was his friend.

  Yes, a real friend and a close one. His friend and master.

  They laughed a little. Ed talked this way for the first time. He was able to express his admiration undiminished, without embarrassment. He admitted his reverence. He found an echo in Grit. Or maybe he was the echo. Grit took him much more seriously than he had ever taken himself — as a dishwasher in the Klausner. Through Grit, Ed understood his role; he was a crew member on Kruso’s legendary ark, which had taken Grit in. For Grit, Ed was proof. He was an example of what freedom looked like for anyone who cared to learn.

  Grit recounted what the master had explained to them on the beach. Ed felt like he hadn’t seen his friend for a long time and as if Kruso had returned to his room with Grit and sat in his traditional place at the head of bed …

  ‘He says that we, I mean us here,’ she touched Ed’s chest and perhaps touched herself somewhere as well, ‘build the smallest cell. That’s the first and sometimes also the only possibility of immediate community that replaces deformed relations. He says that freedom is actually already present, within us, like a profound inheritance. He says that, these days, it’s particularly difficult to assume this inheritance. And it’s essentially demanding almost too much. But here on the island, it’s possible, here by the sea, and whoever isn’t afraid will feel its innermost heartbeat.’

  She kept talking.

  He had asked her to.

  No one turned on the lamp.

  The illuminated don’t need light. Only shady characters do.

  Would she repeat what she just said? She did without hesitation, as if it were nothing more than another precious opportunity to accept the teachings.

  And suddenly everything fit together. Ed began to understand Losh. First shoulders, then hips. He shifted her slightly to the side, gently, then with more force and determination. She lay on her stomach. He held her by the waist, like a vase. He waited and listened. He closed his eyes and covered her body with his. She kept talking when he was inside her. It was as if he were repeating after her, in that tone, with those words.

  ‘Please one more time, one-more-time …’

  ‘Yes,’ Grit whispered, ‘yes.’

  When Grit, unknown but strangely familiar, made no other sound than the deep breathing of sleep (her arms crossed in front of her chest), Ed felt his way down to the cellar and took his usual place in front of the furnace. He slowly unscrewed the furnace hatch and looked at the remains. Cinders, dirt, and ash encrusted in complicated geometric shapes. In the centre, a blue-grey pile full of rusty, mostly hand-wrought nails or studs burned out of the driftwood, remains of ships that had been bound somewhere and maybe were stranded by a war or a storm … His face grew warm. His eyelids drooped — the open oven warmed him to the base of his eye sockets. For one crystal-clear moment that would never return, he felt as if he knew all the fates of this country. Their number was limited, five or six kinds of fate, his own among them.

  DOSTOEVSKY

  When Ed returned from the sea to the dishwashing station, there was ringing in his ears. It was like having a small siren right in his head, but he remained calm and set to work again; he countered the ringing by making noise with the plates and cutlery, and after a while it stopped.

  Even more than the pans, Ed hated the big ladles. He could not have explained why, but his dislike had grown into a full-blown antagonism. He tossed them contemptuously into the sink and rammed his fist into their empty bowls, hectically, much too roughly, and without looking at what he was doing. As a rule, it was simply a question of time until the ladle managed, using the full extent of its malice (and the law of the lever), to hit Ed in the face with the ugly little hook at the end of its metre-long handle. Like a prehistoric reptile that had been declared extinct centuries earlier, the ladle shot out of the dishwater with its thin coating of greasy suds, splashing the caustic swill in Ed’s eyes. Blinded and swearing, he waved his hands in the air — and was hit full force by the hook at the ladle’s other end.

  ‘The stupid pig!’ Ed roared. It was an insult beyond compare.

  The outsides of the ladles’ bowls were often blackened, as if they’d been held in the fire to brew some concoction, perhaps one of Kruso’s magic poisons for the holy soup — ‘goddamn shaman,’ Ed muttered, scrubbing at the aluminium.

  The temperature had risen in the meantime, and the air in the dishwashing station had become heavier and stickier. A sharp vapour rose from the sinks in which he swirled his hands: the detergent was making his mucous membranes smoulder. ‘Goddamn shaman, goddamn creatures of the night here …’ Ed was afraid he would faint in the fog of vapours. Since his room had been put on Kruso’s distribution list, he was numb with exhaustion. ‘Sidle, ladle, collapse,’ hummed in Ed’s head. Ed swore under his breath. He was festering and burning inside. He felt imperious and angry, eager for a long-overdue confrontation: ‘What kind of goddamn herbs, Losh, and anyway, what’s the point of this stinking soup, why the toga-clad spectres in the dishwashing station …’ Inspired by the detergent, his temple branded with the impression of the ugly little hook (the ladle, that pig, had put its stamp on Ed), he announced that he had reached his limit, and absolutely. Ed stared, unthinking, into his sink. A plate spiralled down to settle on the bottom of the sink, and he briefly pictured C. as silverware — round, gleaming, he saw her forehead covered with foam, a light, damp something that trickled through her hair and into her eyes and had to be wiped away.

  After the shift, it could take hours for his vertigo to pass.

  Ed wondered how the others did it. Chris or Cavallo, how they managed to sit unaffected at the breakfast table while he stared dully at his toast with marmalade or tried to catch Kruso’s eye. Ed found it hard to resist the temptation to rest his head on the personnel table. There could only be one explanation: the others slept. They had all adapted long ago to Kruso’s system. Aside from Rolf, Ed was the youngest in the Klausner, not a greenhorn anymore, but a beginner in every respect. His sexual experience was limited and, yes, rather superficial, as he himself had to admit. C. was the exception, a beginning, a fall.

  Ed was not alone in his exhaustion. The high season demanded its tribute. In the midday chase through the small approach lane between the bar room and the dishwashing station, there were more and more collisions. Dishes splintering; sauces, schnitzels, and roulades spraying onto the floor. On top of that, cursing, jostling, even wrestling, and finally one giant commotion. Then the counter-couple had to make the circuit and, like mother and father, calm the situation. At once comforting and strict, they talked to Chris or Cavallo and brandished small glasses of bright-coloured, high-proof liquid, as if they were using hypnosis. In the rush-hour surge, the counter-couple’s parental function became indispensable and more important every day.

  According to tradition, each waiter had his own glass. These drinking vessels, given the alluring name of ‘end-of-shift glasses’, were kept in a special compartment in the bar, which Rick had labelled ‘Private’ in blue pen on white tape, the so-called goosebump-tape. For Rimbaud, it was a tumbler that had a heavy base with bubbles in it; for Cavallo, a small goblet of pressed glass, but neatly cut; and for Chris, a repl
ica of the half-litre boot with the inscription, ‘Glückauf Sulzbach-Rosenberg’, a gift from a Bavarian tourist in gratitude for the zeal with which an East German had served him, as the man had ceremoniously declared. The exoticism of the story was still tangible. Indeed, very few guests from the West strayed onto the island. From their perspective, the eastern island seemed just as distant as the West did to the esskays; in other words, infinitely far away. That may have been the reason no one really reacted to Viola’s news broadcasts, which for days had been playing reports of refugees heading west. These broadcasts seemed of no real importance (and were scarcely believable) compared to the story of the boot from Glückauf Sulzbach-Rosenberg.

  As the season progressed, it was more and more often necessary to have a drink before the end of the shift, and by July schnapps at breakfast was no longer an exception. Ed had seen how Rimbaud let Rick prepare his morning drink in a coffee cup, a dose of Korn and peppermint schnapps that Rimbaud called ‘meadow pipit’. Rick considered it his duty to have on hand plenty of the crew’s favourite drinks, as he put it, which is why Lindenblatt (‘Debroer Lindenblatt’) and apple brandy (Mona’s favourite drink) were only served to the crew — ‘goods received in kind,’ Rick explained. Consumption was recorded and deducted monthly from their salary. Often earnings and expenditures were evenly matched. Chef Mike drank a mixture of kiwi (short for the Kirsch-Whisky, the cherry brandy) and Korn; once in a while, he also drank Soviet champagne with canned pineapple juice. René and Cavallo drank kiwi with kali (coffee brandy); the ice-cream man now and then drank Rosenthaler Kadarka, a wine imported from Bulgaria that was popular everywhere for being extremely sweet. Ed drank kali straight or the Wurzelpeter, herbal bitters he knew from his time in the army. It wasn’t easy to get hold of, but Rick had registered Ed’s preference indulgently. Karola drank Gotano (a vermouth) or beer punch, her own specialty: a mixture of fruit juice, brandy, wine, and beer that she mixed herself in ten-litre buckets and left to steep in the cellar. The beer punch was in great demand; along with the shandy Rick called ‘Potsdamer’, it was one of the Klausner’s legendary specialties, and a new batch was mixed every three days. Krombach drank Goldkrone, a brandy Rick considered white lightning. Chris was often seen with egg liqueur in his cocoa mug. Rolf drank vodka and coke, a mixture that had just come into fashion in the dance halls. They all drank Stralsunder.