by Lutz Seiler
‘Losh!’
The drums thundered, and Ed felt an old, almost forgotten sense of pride. He pictured his favourite players from childhood and imitated them. Kotte, the fighter, the striker that no shove or tripping could bring down. Hafner, the technician. Dörner, the sweeper. One day, Kotte had suddenly disappeared, at the height of his career. His only trace was in the small print of the games’ stenographic records in the Sportecho. No picture, no report, just his name listed as top scorer, repeatedly, constantly, Kotte, the future defector, exiled to a third-tier league. Ed had often daydreamed about him and wondered how Kotte could have kept on playing, how he was able to keep on shooting goals.
Not only the esskays, but also the inhabitants of the island, day tourists, and holiday-makers had gathered around the soccer field. A few were reported to be famous, among them a tall, thin man with glasses whom people called Lippi and recognised from television. Next to him was another man, who, despite the heat, wore a leather jacket with braided epaulettes and to whom fans enthusiastically called, ‘Hey, Quaster!’ Mostly, the conversations were about individual esskays, about their legendary work in the legendary establishments of Vitte, Kloster, or Neuendorf. The suntanned heroes of the season were held in unadulterated admiration for their island lives, outside the law and apparently completely free of commitment. Their solidarity, therefore, was all the more astonishing. In short, the tournament became a celebration of the esskays, a festival in recognition of their caste. Rather than misfits from the dregs of socialism, they were seen as the progeny of King Hedin of Hidensey’s brave hordes, just as Kruso must have planned.
Uniformed men appeared during the final match. Some of them gathered behind Chef Mike’s goal, as if they wanted to use the old fishnet hung between the goal posts as camouflage. Something happened, but during the game it wasn’t possible to follow very closely.
‘Losh! Losh!’
Ed had moved up and put himself forward.
I’m putting myself forward, Ed thought.
His friend looked up, and Ed saw rage in his eyes.
Glasses were handed round as soon as the final whistle blew. On the way to the beach, Ed heard the name ‘Willi Schmietendorf’ mentioned several times with great respect: Willi Schmietendorf, manager of the Dornbusch Apartments, who had donated a barrel of beer. ‘Beer from Willi Schmietendorf’s!’ was the fanfare that drew them to the sea, and it sounded like ‘Victory on all sides!’ Without a doubt, they had earned the admiration, without exception, and Ed was happy to belong to them, perhaps for the first time. Together, they raised the mugs that looked like they were made of small bullseye panes that had been pressed together and in which the sun was refracted. For a moment, a golden light hovered like a halo over their sweat-soaked heads. Anyone hit on the temple with one of these mugs would die immediately — Ed didn’t know where that thought came from, die immediately.
The castaway did not leave his side. Together, they scaled the dam with the narrow tarred promenade, half-covered in drifted sand. At first, Ed felt a warmth, as if he were being caressed, tenderly, unexpectedly, a warmth flooding over his face.
‘What’s that?’
Her thin voice vibrated in the wind, and Ed looked out to sea for the first time. A long row of grey patrol and torpedo boats were blocking the horizon. In the twilight, they looked like a floating wall, a steel boundary just a few hundred metres off shore. Either the gunboats had been decorated or the flags planted on them were part of their equipment, a kind of war finery perhaps, Ed thought. It was a grandiose, essentially irresistible view.
Like ants, the soldiers lugged in firewood. An enormous bonfire ate into the evening sky and divided the beach. The smell of burning blended with the iodine smell of the sea. On the left, various cautious groups of esskays lingered, huddling amid the remains of their adder stones, driftwood, and rubbish-strewn sandcastles. Some drank beer, other sipped schnapps from bottles. Trench warfare. It pained Ed to see the esskays’ heads sticking up helplessly from the hollows — bewildered, intimidated, like children forgotten on a beach, surrounded by a world that had suddenly become hostile and strange. They looked around searchingly, as if they were waiting for someone who could explain everything to them. Explain what they were to think of the things that happened here, on the day of their own celebration, on their own beach. ‘Shit on the soldiers!’ or ‘Brain them with your beer mug!’ — unrealistic, of course, but some sort of guidelines would have been vital, and if Kruso had offered one with his usual earnestness, who knows?
To the right of the fire, three officers from the observation company stood near a personnel carrier, its broad tyres half-buried in the sand. They were smoking cigarettes, and looked like they had little to do with the entire scene. Ed recognised Vosskamp, the commander of the island, and his staff sergeant. Evening was setting in.
Out in the grey wall, the motors sprang to life. The three mid-size ships spun their anti-aircraft cannons anticlockwise three times in sync. There were a few gutsy whistles and some booing from the dunes. Also one single, solitary cheer, the kind you hear in recordings of big rock concerts — a lone, lunatic hoot transformed in the recording into a second of enigmatic eternity. Whomever it escaped regretted it immediately: two of the three cannons spun again, but this time only ninety degrees. Their dark mouths, with their small, circular silence, were now aimed directly at the shore. Silence fell on the beach again.
Where was Kruso?
A sailor appeared on the deck of the middle gunboat and showed various flags. His movements were choppy, a kind of breakdance. He was lit up by the spotlights on deck. The man was very short, and only visible because of his vigorous movements. Although none of them understood his dance, the esskays did not take their eyes off the flag-waving dwarf.
There were different shapes and colours, a chaotic game of colourful crosses and squares. These signs could be read as either auspicious or ominous. The ship’s name, Vitte, was written on the prow. ‘They call it the sponsor ship,’ someone whispered close to Ed. It was Indian from the Island Bar. He should know after all these years.
‘Sponsor ship,’ Ed repeated softly. He, too, had found his sponsor. And today, he himself had become a kind of temporary sponsor. First baptism, then sponsorship. Fundamentally, everything here was based on sponsorship, Ed thought. It replaced friendship and was almost stronger than love. He was pierced by the offence the action on the beach must represent to Kruso.
A soldier whose torso protruded from the hatch of the personnel carrier answered the sailor’s flags with his own, which were handed to him swiftly, as if by magic. Someone who knew the answer in advance must have been sitting in the driver’s cab; someone who knew what should happen next. A salty spray mist wafted over the beach, and Ed rubbed his eyes.
When the centaur spoke, the dwarf on the ship kept his arms down, his hands crossed and against his upper thighs: this made him almost invisible. Without a doubt, the theatre with the flags signified danger. It was threatening, but to Ed it also seemed convoluted, fussy, toothless, and, yes, peculiarly intimate. An odd melancholy suffused the scene, as if one were accidentally witnessing the final conversation between the last practitioners of a dying art about the end of the world. However, it could only be about whether or not they should lay waste to the waiters’ beach, with its hills, cigarette butts, and condoms, its sandcastles and remains of camp fires, its bars made of fish crates and stashes of schnapps, and with it, of course, all the esskays, the whole pack of useless, superfluous drop-outs — reduced to dust, shot through Ed’s head.
The esskays gradually remembered that they were, at bottom, fearless companions, at least in relation to their countrymen. Bit by bit, they approached the fire, since it had got cold on the beach. The grey of the boats became blurred, and they seemed to have completely forgotten the cannons or simply didn’t care about them anymore. In the same way that they didn’t think much of anything that threat
ened them. It was a primitive but striking bit of wisdom, in which Ed suddenly recognised the secret precondition of their free existence.
Indeed, more and more of them arrived and settled down around the fire. Some hauled fresh wood. Openly and frankly, they drew the soldiers into conversation and embarrassed them with their boundless offers of alcohol. It seemed as if, in doing so, they were explaining why the origin of their freedom was sacrosanct, and in the reflection of the flames this message began to glow.
Ed and his castaway sat on the periphery in the dunes’ half-darkness. A couple of the soldiers couldn’t keep from staring at Heike’s legs, so he briefly pulled her close — after all, he was still responsible for her. He was immediately overcome with the longing to be her washer again. Even the driver of the personnel carrier was looking at her, but it was hard to confirm that exactly since the fire was reflected in the windshield. His face is burning, Ed thought.
A blond guitar player with combed-back hair, the ice-cream man at the Heiderose, sat down next to Heike and started playing ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’. Ed contemplated whether or not all ice-cream men were loathsome. Rimbaud came by and brought them schnapps. Ed wanted to ask him where Losh could have got to and what was going on here, what kind of rotten betrayal, but first he had to drink. Rimbaud spun stories of long-ago regattas and fleet reviews (‘when I was a child’), wonderful celebrations with speeches, parades, the Marine Corps ball, and the garrison band — he had trouble pronouncing the words ‘garrison band’. He pronounced them like two burps strung together, ‘garrri-son-barrrnd …’
‘Alright, I’m hungry!’ The castaway had jumped up. She cut Rimbaud off mid-sentence with her offer to get some soup. Soup against soup, Ed thought, and, although Kruso’s soup inspired only disgust, he felt the prick of betrayal again. ‘I’m putting myself forward …’ As if he had just now put the key to the black box named Edgar or Ed on the personnel table: ‘I’m putting myself forward …’
But Losh had disappeared.
On both sides of the field kitchen, soldiers watched over the serving. At the sight of the castaways, they stiffened like tin figures. Her heels shone as bright as taillights — she had a peculiar way of twisting her feet in the sand which made her hips move in a continuous, circular motion while she held her arms out stiffly, almost ceremoniously.
She’s marching, Ed thought, she’s marching.
‘Naturally not here,’ Rimbaud continued undeterred, ‘but in all the larger ports, Rostock, Greifswald, Stralsund.’ Several times, he mentioned the phrase ‘Baltic Sea Week’, ‘including a tour of the torpedo boat, including the flags of all the Baltic Sea States, the beautiful blue and yellow of Sweden everywhere, and Denmark’s red and white, and, interspersed among them, banners like “The Baltic — a sea of peace” or “The Mackerel — a fish of silent rapprochement”, and so on.’
Rimbaud was hitting his stride. Adrift, Ed careened through his wild ramblings. ‘Blow-wo-wo-wo-woing in the wind.’ A cloud-fish in the sky darkened. For a moment, Ed had to lie back: he was gasping for air. When he closed his eyes, he saw the photograph of Sonya, which in his imagination had become a picture of G. — he no longer fought against it. He felt longing. Longing for the dead, that’s how he referred to them now. Grief constricted his throat. He was drunk.
‘The freedom I mean,’ bubbled up from the noise of cutlery at his side and:
‘All streets lead into dark decay’ and ‘Warning, strong current, hold onto balls!’
The small circle slowly dissipated in silence. Ed imagined the gun barrels sinking thoughtfully in the dark, rising, and sinking again.
The surf’s applause.
AMBER LEGEND
He danced like a locomotive frozen onto its rails. Only his upper body moved. His legs were stiff, set slightly apart and his arms bent, left, right, back and forth, as when walking. No movement in his hips, no swaying, no turning, just now and again a sudden, completely unexpected bending forward, more precisely a catapulting of his body forward into the void combined with a violent, sustained circling, tossing, and shaking of his head, which was the real point, because dancing meant mixing air and hair …
It was Valhalla-style, invented and based in the Valhalla, the most important dance hall in his home town, where the blues bands played — Gypsy, Sit, Fusion, Passat, and the band with the drummer who jumped up in the middle of a song to bang his shaved head against the gold gong that hung above the stage like a giant halo.
At some point, during one of the band’s breaks, the first DJs had trickled into the room with their ridiculous hits. At first, they were still timid and holed up in some niche at the foot of the stage, but soon there were only discotheques left in the city, even the dance floor of the sacred Valhalla was overflowing with dancing kids, fourteen, fifteen years old, who followed stupid choreographies instead of jumping up and down like animals in a cage or at least swinging their heads around — which would have been pointless in any case because their hair was much too short. And on their faces there was no trace of that revolt, that longing, drunk with life, that drove the bluesers like a horde of dervishes over the dance floor, not in pairs, no, all of them, all together, their entire tribe filled the hall with their hair … And no, in those faces filling the discos there was nothing, or nothing other than makeup, no sign of the feeling, the rhythm that made circumstances dance, no battle and no utopia. They did not belong to the tribe before time, before society and its order, which was completely contaminated with banalities, constraints, rules, contaminated by their agony and which lacked the most important things: honesty, solidarity, perhaps love … No, nothing. Nothing but glitter-covered void, that’s what the faces in the discos were.
And suddenly they were old, the bluesers, who called themselves punters; only a few were in their early twenties, like Ed. In their early twenties and old. The disco had conquered their tribe and banished them to the villages where wooden steps led down to tiny rooms over smoke-filled bars where there were still bands, where glasses were still crushed with bare hands, and one punter would remove the shards of glass from another’s palm with the incomparable tenderness required for that operation. Driven out in the countryside in the evening on a decrepit Ikarus bus, they had to walk home, long tramps over the fields that were their steppe, their prairie, even in the coldest winter, from Trebnitz, Köstritz, Korbußen, or Weida, stumbling for hours with glassy eyes through the pitch-black darkness of the Osterland, with snow in their hair and ice in their beards. Those who were too weak fell and wanted only to lie there, but that wasn’t allowed, no punter ever abandoned another, never!
Ed lifted his head. In a moment of suddenly clarity, he recognised the small bits of mirror, and between the shards the outline of Africa. Faces sank into the crowd and emerged again, a painting of a battle. A few esskays, fleetingly, and in front of him the snow-white face of his castaway, with her round cheeks and half-closed eyelids. She had made the oddly reasonable suggestion of looking for Alexander Krusowitsch in Hitthim, where a disco for the esskays had been planned to the end the day. The night wind from the sea had cooled their temples. Walking in the sand had been tiring. They had ended up in the middle of a herd of sleeping canopied beach chairs. For a long time now, Ed’s head had been too heavy to bend and peer into each one of these enclosed beings with their freshly cooled odour of artificial leather and sun lotion.
‘Losh, goddamn it, Losh!’
They danced in small, dreamy arcs, with hands outstretched, insofar as possible, and upper bodies swaying. Little seagulls, Ed thought, because now they were in the forest. His arms were stiff with cold, and his neck was stiffening, too. I am the forest, Ed thought, the last harbour, first wash, then feed, the sleep, sleep, last harbour — but then the sea flooded the shore, the jealous sea … Ed slowly froze in his movement; either he was going crazy or he was already a part of the legend. He gasped for air. Tears shone on his cheeks like amber in the shabb
y light of the homemade disco ball that revolved like the globe it once was in an earlier, better life, without bits of glass but instead covered with Africa, Asia, and the Urals and with ‘name-the-industrial-conurbations-of-the-Soviet-Union!’ Situations, without splinters, but instead covered with Ed-the-schoolboy, almost blinded by the desert yellow of the drab economic map, while it showed Samara and Volgograd, full of the East, full of the West, oh planet earth full of sorrow (shards), oh you poor despoiled, mistreated world, oh world that spins, spins, and torments with its false reflections, but now Ed was simply standing there.
Weeping forest.
Amber legend.
With great effort, he raised his arm, touched the seagull, and pointed to the front of the room.
Best friends cause each other pain, Ed thought, it’s a sign. He fell to his knees and hugged the vomit-spattered toilet bowl.
‘I’m very sorry,’ the castaway said softly to his back. Her voice contained everything; above all, understanding. Things that Ed had never said, never even thought before marched like finished, typewritten sentences through his brain, with bloody caps, entire legions of his own words, like verse set to the right and left, in the shade of windswept trees, that’s how they passed; somewhere it was written: We kissed, understand?
‘Are you OK? I’d rather not stay too long, I mean, it’s the men’s toilet,’ Heike whispered.
Without looking around, Ed raised his arm and let it drop: Go ahead.