by Lutz Seiler
The bowl stank. From its depths rose the picture of a punter from back then, complete punter, about whom all the bluesers agreed, Steffen Eismann, his best, his only friend. What if he came in now, into this horrible room, and stretched out his bloody hand, what if … Ed broke into a cold sweat. He tried to stop the image, and hugged the bowl even tighter. Behind him, a man pissed his endless stream into the newly tarred latrine, which probably drained directly into the port. His pissing thundered in Ed’s ears and disco music thundered from the toilet bowl. It smelled of urine and shit, and he tried to chase Steffen Eismann away. But all the tables were watching as Ed gently pulled out one shard after another. The back of Steffen’s large hand on the cool, beer-soaked tablecloth. After each shard, a look in each other’s eyes. It was about honour and some girl, probably (Kerstin or Andrea), it was about music and the feeling of being in rhythm, in the rhythm of this separate, other existence on this separate, other earth. ‘Freedom …’ Ed whispered into the toilet bowl, ‘freedom is always also …’ No, that was wrong, ‘freedom is different …’ No. ‘The freedom of others is — freedom?’
It was pathetic. Ed couldn’t finish the sentence, the sentence that probably everyone here knew, had to know, Luxembourg, London, deportation, emigration, that endless series of offenses and outcasts, the caretaker in Halle with his bottles, the man without hair in his armoire on the street in the centre of Berlin, and all the castaways here, and all the esskays, my esskays, Ed sighed, I’ve taken them into my heart, Rolf, Rimbaud, Cavallo, large-hearted Rick, generous Karola, and Chris, her severe Harlequin — but what about Ed? The thought was painful. What or who could he be in it all?
‘I’m putting myself forward. I’m coming up from behind and putting myself forward,’ Ed whispered in the toilet bowl’s suffocating stench, and it finally burst out of him: a sustained howl, ignited again and again in the depths of his intestines, ‘Kru-sooooo, Kruuu-soooo,’ as full of despair and longing as any final cry, alone on the high seas.
‘The stupid pig!’
Strange — they were suddenly in the narrow doorway to the bar room, and yet they managed to push past each other, Ed and the ice-cream man, the ice-cream man and Ed. But then Ed let out the yell, loud and resounding over the harbour, the boats, the bodden: ‘The stupid pig!’
René was immediately at Ed’s side. He tried straightaway to pull him to the ground. In his surprise, Ed was almost overcome with fear, a fear that coursed through him like elation: yes, he wanted to fight, no matter what the cost, he wanted to beat the stupid pig!
The first blows — an enormous relief. Then the pain, searing, first under his eye. After each hit, Ed had the face of a child, undisguised, helpless, but mostly astonished. Something was being pounded to pieces and from the midst of it all, the child Edgar B. looked out at the world: Why am I here? And why alone?
What happened next was no longer comprehensible. René grabbed him by the hair. Pulled far forward, almost to the ground, Ed tried to stay on his feet. He tried to get away. René’s fist in his hair negated everything Ed had believed about the world and his place in it. A blow landed every second, unchecked, unpredictable. Pain from his right eye socket stabbed him to the centre of his head. With a powerful jerk, the ice-cream man forced him to his knees, but Ed reared up …
A moment of astonishment.
Ed put his hands to his head, as if he had to examine himself first: here’s my head, there’s my hair. My hair, Ed thought. His hair in René’s fist.
Maybe the lapdog wanted to — wash himself a little? Lapdogs know all about that, from dishwashing and the entire hocus-pocus. Wouldn’t that be best for little lapdog? Ed heard the questions. They came from far away even though René was standing right next to him and trying to wipe away the blood-smeared tuft.
Here’s my hair, there’s my head …
Faster than Ed could comprehend, the ice-cream man had grabbed him and shoved him down the incline to the dock. High season, Ed thought nonsensically, but the water was ice-cold and his cuts burned. He felt his contours; he was trapped in his body. He managed to push away from the dock. He made it to the first cutter, and felt his way along the planks. The wood, the algae, the moss — he felt gratitude and, at the same time, something hard, a force that wanted to push him down, under the water. He sank into the mire, surfaced again. His legs felt like lead, and he gasped for air.
René was now above him, far above with a rescue pole in his hands. His aim improved with each blow. He pushed Ed through the harbour basin like a billiard ball. Ed swallowed water. A rusted ladder floated past. He tried to yell, but it was no more than a thin, feeble howl.
‘Hey, little lapdog.’
Someone on the dock laughed. The crazy boy.
Before Ed lost consciousness, he saw his father. When he resurfaced and took a breath, he felt a cool breeze on his face, the chill night air over the bodden. He saw the outlines of the buildings along the harbour, the bulwark, the Hitthim, streaked, blurred; a few of the windows in the hotel were illuminated. He saw a man walk up to the window. The man was his father, there wasn’t any doubt. His father, who very soon would open the window and stop everything with a single command. But then the man just drew the curtains, and his shadow faded.
HIS FIRST ROOM
His first room. It has no windows and no door, just an opening. It’s a passageway, and some light shines into this passageway. All this dates from a time before language, and so Ed can’t answer the calls from outside. It’s strange enough, being there with someone calling him. No one could have said what purpose the windowless chamber behind the bedroom had been meant to serve. Storeroom, broom closet, later a space to store a knitting machine neatly wrapped in brown oilpaper. It’s on the damp, mildewed back of the house, facing the creek, the saltpetre side. He hears the flowing water. He hears the stamping of the animals who come to the edge of the creek to graze. He hears it all without knowing that the creek, its borders, and the animals exist. Sometimes, one of them will rub its flank against the timbers and lean with his breath against the wall. His first space. His first room.
Those who are outside the room, calling to him, are basically happy for his earth-deep sleep and the silence he emits. He is the only possible child, who unfortunately still gives trouble. Everything the old woman does far above him is accompanied by a soft, sweet, strange sound. It is a sigh, his first noise. Everything must be accompanied by a sigh. Boiling the diapers, getting the wet nurse’s milk from the community nurse, the long walk to the neighbouring village, there and back with a little aluminium pitcher, step by step. The dark plop or boop when she removes the black rubber lid with the initials ‘E.B.’ written in chalk, and then the sigh — from deep within her soul. Things are counted with sighs and put in the proper order, one after the other. Hours are sighed into days, and days to weeks and years. A deep and ancient lament has become her own. She shines over little Edgar’s crib. Her face is a bright spot in the electric light, and smells as old and mouldy as the house.
‘Edgar!’
Edgar — yes. There in the chamber, that’s what he must become, he has to get used to being that, little by little: Edgar, Ede, Ed. Until the words ‘knitting machine’ arrive and step into his consciousness, the silent brown mass next to the wall across the room is a small horse wrapped in cloth. His horse, it talks to him when darkness falls. They resemble each other in their cocooning: Ed in his capsule under the covers and the horse in its cloth. Winter sleep. It is his best, his only friend, with those agreements, unspoken, that are only possible between best friends. If, for example, by chance he didn’t wake up one morning, his horse would chew through the tether with its strong white teeth. As soon as its strong, dark horse head had shaken off its bridle, it would go to Ed in his bed. It would only have to turn, carefully: then it would wake Ed with just its horse’s breath, it would breathe new life into him.
‘Edgar, Ed! He moved, didn’t he?’
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br /> Everything can evolve from sighs and a horse’s breath: a name, a language, a song, an individual existence perhaps. But at some point, his mother returns from the hospital and the sighing woman disappears forever. He continues to listen for her for a very long time — Nothing. Instead: soft, cheerful talk, a new odour, a new face, and boundless love. He still doesn’t know her. He tries to sense her. A sigh is his first word. His mother cannot understand him.
‘Edgar, can you hear me?’
Yes, but his eyelids are very heavy. It’s better to keep them closed. The capsule that contains him ends with the cover that is pleasantly soft and protects him up to his chin. But from there downwards, its space seems to extend far, through his bed and the floor, into the cellar, and on into the depths, to the ore, his native ore, which radiates and draws him gently and benevolently in.
‘Hello, Edgar, can you hear me?’
‘Uranium, pitchblende, isotope 235U! Neurosis that penetrates to the core!’
‘What was that? Did anyone catch that?’
His verse hoard had spoken.
Someone shakes him.
Someone pinches his arm.
Underwater, I’m still underwater, Ed thinks, and wants to say it.
Three saints emerge from the mist.
Krombach, a stranger, and the island police officer.
COLD HANDS
He could not find his face. When he raised his hand to feel it, he touched something unfamiliar. A mask, perhaps, Ed thought. He tried again but fell asleep during the attempt.
Kruso bent over him. His large, dark horse head. His large white teeth. Ed could not feel the kiss.
I’m sorry.
When he woke again, he tried to smile, but it didn’t work. His eyebrows jutted out like a small balcony. His nose, too, protruded into the room like a shadow. He looked into the room through a kind of tunnel. At the end of the tunnel: sink and armoire. He thought of Speiche: some day, he’ll come to collect everything, his toothbrush, his shoes, his sweater, and glasses. Maybe I won’t be here anymore when he does, Ed thought.
From this point on, there was always someone in his room, a gallery of guests, endless, dreamlike: the island police officer, the island doctor, Krombach, Cavallo, Rimbaud, the entire crew, and a strange man with photosensitive glasses, who said he was an inspector from the sanitation department. And above all, Monika, Mona, the laundry fairy, every day. She was suddenly no longer invisible, and Ed’s room was filled with the scent of this change.
‘It’s good that you’re awake again, Ed. You should drink, drink lots of water.’
She lifted a cup to the level of the tunnel and touched it to his lips. He took a deep breath and the underwater noise returned, the ugly snorkelling in his head.
‘Where is Kruso?’
‘You have to drink, Ed.’
‘What happened?’
‘He disappeared. They grilled each of us, for hours. They turned his room upside down, but my father …’ She looked him in the eye and nodded.
‘Where could he possibly be?’
‘The island people say that a few men in civilian clothes tried to encircle him after your last match, and since then no one has lain eyes on him. How stupid of you, Ed, the whole thing. Completely senseless. By the way, René is missing, too.’
When Ed woke at midnight, his door was ajar. A cool draft on his forehead. His head was heavy, and it took him a lot of effort to lift it. What Viola had been talking about in her newscaster voice gradually dawned on him. Once again, there had been refugees; in fact, there had been talk of a veritable flood of refugees, slipping through the fence, over the border in double-time.
Ed tried, repeatedly, to imagine the fence.
He saw people running. He saw rusted old wire mesh and a landscape that looked like the steppes. The fence remained a mystery. The Hungarian border mystery. Suddenly dated, suddenly open. And no one fired a shot. How was that possible?
‘It is now eleven fifty-seven p.m. To close the day, we’ll hear the national anthem.’
Ed’s heart began to race. He cowered in the middle of a grandiose desolation. Strangely, he thought of the movie Spare Parts, a West German film, if he remembered rightly, that nonetheless made it into the cinemas. No other portrayal of an escape had imprinted itself on him so clearly. A man jumps out of a motel building and flees into the desert, chased by an all-terrain vehicle. Those chasing him are hunters of men. They want to butcher him and sell his organs. Ed had seen the movie as a fifteen-year-old in his local cinema, still called the ‘Moving Picture House’. The words were engraved on a wooden sign, the way you’d have seen ‘Saloon’ on a sign over the door to a Western bar. The sign hung over the concrete slab path that led from the main street into the back courtyard, where the small room was. No thought was given to how the room could have ended up there, and with it the movie Spare Parts. Ed listened to Haydn and watched people running, running for their lives.
With her arm outstretched, the island doctor held the photograph against the window pane. Holding a pen in her other hand, she circled his right eye socket. His skull peered into the room.
‘A small fracture, probably sustained earlier. No idea how often this happens to you.’
‘What?’
‘Fighting, drowning, getting beaten up?’
She was slim. Her dark hair was pulled back severely into a ponytail. She waved the X-ray in the air as if she wanted to brush Ed away with a large gesture. She looked paled and haggard; it was difficult to pinpoint her age.
‘Your nose is broken. At first, it was hard to catch because of all the swelling.’
Never happened before, Ed wanted to answer, but the doctor spoke quickly as if she had no time to lose.
‘A transport would have been too dangerous because I couldn’t judge your head injuries.’ She was sitting on his bed, and fell silent, as if she had momentarily lost the thread. ‘Besides, we had level-eight winds during the night.’
‘It was calm in the port,’ Ed murmured to show he was paying attention. His voice sounded strange, and it took effort to speak. His upper jaw hurt. Once again, the doctor circled his fractured eye socket with her pen. The X-rays gave off a grey light.
‘In your case, we were able to use the X-ray machine. Strictly speaking, it’s not a medical instrument, but the images are better than anything we …’ She became lost in studying the photograph. The ballpoint pen traced a fine line, barely perceptible under the eye socket. A small, almost invisible fissure in the large, smooth Gulf of Mexico. She looked at him thoughtfully for a moment, as if she wanted to hear his opinion. Then she let the image flutter onto his bedspread.
‘Please keep this very carefully. I will come and collect you in a few days. I believe we need a second X-ray, Mr Bendler.’
‘Thank you, thank you very much.’ Ed managed to feign the trust that could be expected of a good patient.
‘You should thank your friends here.’ She waved her hand to include all of the Klausner, and vanished.
Ed pulled his knees into his chest, slipped his hands between his thighs. Realisation slowly seeped into him. Tears stung his cheeks. He felt his golem head; at night, his head became so large that he was afraid to move it on his pillows.
‘Losh?’
It was dark. Ed had heard footsteps. The soft crunch of tar paper, steps along the roof over the dining room and up to his window.
Losh.
He climbed over Ed’s typewriter and the oversize notebook. He stepped on Speiche’s eyeglasses and knocked the small kidney dish with the cotton wool that Monika used to dab Ed’s face off the table.
For a brief moment, silence.
Only the heavy breathing of Ed’s friend on the tiny table, his sweat, his stink. For an instant, he was the nightmare that perched at night on every writing table around the globe, whistling softly, an infernally good son
g, its own sound, whistling until the words under its claws decided they would rather die than mean anything.
‘Losh!’
‘Quiet, Ed, quiet.’
‘What happened,’ Ed whispered, ‘where were you?’
‘You’re my only friend, Ed.’
‘I looked for you everywhere, but in Hitthim …’
‘I know, Ed, I know. Where’s the photograph?’
‘There.’
The nightmare slowly floated down from the table onto the bed. He took Ed’s notebook and leafed through it until his sister’s picture fell into his hands.
‘Did you see her?’ He studied the photograph.
Ed sat up. It was too dark. Losh’s face was a pale spot, nothing but a faint outline of what had been lost. In the last weeks, Ed had begun to understand. He had begun to remember. He felt the despair and the loss. It was the same each time, as if he were hearing it for the first time: a tram, the final stretch, just before the last stop …
‘Of course, Losh. I look at her photograph every day. You know how much they look alike, Sonya and G.’
‘No, I mean, did you see her out there, in the parade, on one of the boats?’
Kruso’s words were rushed, and Ed did not understand the question. He probably misheard it.
‘Why did you come in through the window, Losh?’
‘I just need to rest for a while, that’s all, a week or two. I have to think, Ed. I want to try to move the allocations north. Somewhere on the beach that can’t be seen from the observation tower. A lot of things need to be improved. The herb beds, the mushroom cultivation, the whole process, especially the distribution, and new, more secure quarters, really good hiding places.’
‘Losh …’
‘In the winter, we’re going to work on the bunker, you know, the underground connection between the Klausner and the old anti-aircraft battery. Shaft, tunnel, all buried. We’ll dig it out, we have time. We have provisions. Seclusion, everything. November to April, six months. Then we can put up half the country down there, can you picture it, Ed? We’ll hide them all. Until there’s no one left over there. Hundreds will sit here, at long tables, on fixed benches, underground, hidden. Hiddensee! Here on the island, there will be more free people than …’