Kruso

by Lutz Seiler

  ‘Losh!’

  The two remained silent for a while. Just the sound of breathing, the smell of sweat.

  ‘I’m sorry I wasn’t there.’

  ‘What do they all want from you?’

  ‘Me, you, everything.’

  He was silent.

  ‘Where’s Heike? And what about René? Is he here in the Klausner?’

  ‘He’s no longer one of us.’

  ‘What does that mean, Losh?’

  ‘Don’t worry about it.’ And then: ‘You can stand in this part of the harbour. No one drowns there, Ed.’

  Kruso’s hand on his face, as if he wanted to close Ed’s eyes. It hurt, but it also felt good. Maybe I only imagined him, Ed thought. Maybe it was all just a dream. Speaking tired him out.

  ‘Did you see her, out there on the ships?’

  Kruso carefully felt the part in Ed’s hair. He carefully bent Ed’s ear. His hands were cold. He had seen Ed coming. He knew everything. He knew there was nothing better than cold hands on your skin.

  ‘Why do the moon and the man …’

  ‘… slide together so submissively to sea?’

  TCHAIKOVSKY

  All afternoon, the sun shone on the gable. Its light lay on his bed, and he could feel its warmth. As soon as it became light, the swallows began their flights. They lived in a row of shrivelled little igloos they had painstakingly built over the course of weeks on the beam above his window. Not very professionally, in Ed’s opinion, rather as if they had not got used to the drooping building. Occasionally, some mud would crumble onto the window sill, the table, the notebook.

  Around eleven, the noise of the holiday-makers started up. Single voices, crystal clear, and short, sharp cries of madness, like those that children give when playing. Karola’s laugh like a caesura, a break in the drama of sound. Chris’s ‘solyanka!’ and ‘schnitzel!’, the Klausner at lunch hour. Only a few metres away, there were hundreds of people who moved over the island as through a good life. People who hadn’t done anything wrong, for the most part, anyway. They arrived on boats in the morning and they disappeared again in the evening. Lunch at the Klausner, coffee at the Enddorn, or vice versa, seven hours on the island.

  For the time being, he could not go anywhere, that much was certain. He was an elephant man, hidden away, frightening to look at. He had looked in the mirror once and decided not to do so again. He had to keep calm.

  He waited for his meals. He waited for the next questioning. It was either the island police officer or the man from the sanitation department. And maybe René would even come by again, a tuft of hair in hand. I’m very sorry, but you know … Ed got up and paced around the room. He pictured it to himself. He could only picture things. He looked out of the window now and then, but was careful to make sure no one could see him. Speiche’s glasses were broken. Not the frame, just one of the lenses.

  At night, the Klausner lay as still as a ship on the bottom of the sea. There were no more castaways; no feet on the stairs, no sound of rushing water from the dishwashing station. Viola was the only sound. Ed opened his door a crack to hear her better. Then he sat on his bed and dreamt. He no longer knew if he had wanted to sleep or had just slept.

  The puzzle of the Hungarian border recurred every day now. Every day around one hundred, it was said, the numbers remained constant. Ed listened and shook his head involuntarily. It made him dizzy.

  This time it was rolling hills — Hungary, as pictured on the Lindenblatt label, Kruso’s favourite drink. The label showed hills and a copse. A copse in Hungary, behind which the refugees crouched before leaping up and running, running for their lives.

  Kruso had disappeared and the ice-cream man was missing as well. ‘I think you know what that means,’ the island police officer had said. Ed closed his eyes and fell asleep immediately. He had learned to use his swollen face as a mask: I’m still too weak, too tired, in no condition. The island police officer touched his shoulder hesitantly: ‘Mr Bendler.’ The questioning, the third session in two days, was not finished yet. ‘Mr Bendler, finally, I must ask once again what injuries you inflicted on the ice-cream man René Salzlach or might have inflicted on him in the harbour on the evening in question during your confrontation.’ Ed was not incensed by the question. The evening in question lay years in the past, in some darkness or other, in the harbour water, which tasted of oil and algae. At a loss and apparently exhausted, he moved his head back and forth on the pillow; he let his face speak for him.

  On the following day, he felt better, and on the subsequent evening his appetite returned, for the first time since the fight. He had specifically thought of it as a fight, as if the whole event could still be removed from the contours of its senselessness, as resistance or loyalty or courage. ‘I also did it for you,’ Ed murmured, and pulled himself together.

  Kruso had invented the Island Day, but at the critical moment he had disappeared. It was childish to think this way, unfair, maybe stupid, but the disappointment stung deep. The esskays had also let him down. And evidently, there were things that Losh had kept from him; maybe Losh didn’t trust him. For a moment, Ed longed to have their evenings together back, their promise. It was more than mere disappointment. There had been a — how should he put it — revelation. As if he had grown very close to Losh on those evenings. And as if Losh had not noticed at all.

  The dishwashing station was neat and cleaned. He left the light off. In the kitchen, Viola’s magic eye was enough of a guide for him. He moved quietly. He took two slices of bread and an onion, and sat on the chair under the radio. His life was no longer in the present. He remembered the portable radios from his childhood, which he held on his lap during family outings as he sat in the handcart. He began trembling, inexplicably, from grief and joy at the same time, if that was possible. Probably just an effect of my injuries, Ed thought, a small fissure in the Gulf of Mexico. He chewed his bread gingerly and gnawed at his onion. The pain was gone, actually, only a light stabbing in his upper jaw remained.

  ‘To mark the end of the day, the national anthem.’

  Ed thought of the man from the sanitation committee. Initially, he had commented on the working conditions, disappointed and full of empathy, but then he had only asked questions about Kruso and his role in the ‘company vacation home collective’. Although it was hot in the room — so hot that Ed had begun, as if under some compulsion, to spy for cockroaches — the sanitation inspector wore a black leather jacket, with a large number of very practical pockets. The jacket made a soft chewing sound when the man straightened up or lifted his arm to brush his straight black hair from his forehead. His photosensitive glasses gradually cleared. Eventually, Ed could see his eyes: a dull, light blue.

  No, this man was certainly no outcast. He had his proper place, he was an integral part of the generally accepted circumstances, and yet he also gave off a sense of desolation. It was a coarse, extensive desolation, with none of the fascinating details that Ed admired in the caretaker of the German Studies Institute and had, to a certain extent, also recognised in Krombach or Rimbaud, although they lived in completely different circumstances — indeed, they had settled in an almost completely contrary world. Perhaps there was an invisible, underlying mycelium of futility in which they were all rooted, from which they all originated and grew? A rootedness that extended deep, very far down, yes, even to the other side of history, where the continuum of emptiness reigned, that powerfully alluring void, which Ed had turned away from with such difficulty before the beginning of his journey.

  He had not jumped.

  When the man mentioned in passing that Ed’s papers — he actually used the words ‘personal file’, although Ed was just a seasonal employee, a casual dishwasher, a scullion, plongeur, without a shred of ambition to rise to the position of kitchen hand or even counterman, in any case Ed had never considered anything from the perspective of a gastronome (cosmodrome),
he had ultimately been busy with other matters and circumstances — in short: when the heliomatic man mentioned that although there was no registration form for the island or a certificate of health in Ed’s personal file (at first, Ed thought he had said ‘parasitical’), the situation could surely be resolved along with the problem — then Ed no longer had any doubt about who was sitting on his bed.

  ‘So, Mr Bendler, tell me a bit about yourself, for example, about your wonderful friendship with Mr Krusowitsch, about whom, believe me, we’ve already heard quite a bit on the island.’ He pursed his broad, ugly mouth as if for a kiss, and Ed blushed.

  Ed recovered slowly. The swelling subsided, the wounds healed, but he still felt weak and rarely left his room. He often slept during the day and spent his evenings with Viola, sitting under the radio’s shelf. He liked the emergency broadcasts for motorists best. One night, Cavallo came into the kitchen, turned on the light, and waved at Ed as if he hadn’t expected to find him anywhere else.

  ‘Enemy station?’

  ‘As always.’

  While Viola played Tchaikovsky, Cavallo buttered bread, cooked eggs, and washed apples. Ed marvelled again at this slender, reserved figure. He admired the way Cavallo moved his hands, his confident, smooth handling of the knife, as if Tchaikovsky had composed his movements. In the end, he packed everything into a small box.

  ‘Right then!’

  ‘Very hungry.’

  ‘Endlessly. And you, Edgardo? You’re holed up here with Viola, but you don’t catch much, do you?’

  ‘Exactly.’

  Ed knew that Cavallo was wrong, wrong in every case. Cavallo went over to Ed and hugged him, but the dishwasher remained seated, since he hadn’t understood until just then that this was a final goodbye.

  Ed listened to the concerto until the end. Vladimir Horowitz on the piano. Then the program preview, then the anthem, then the midnight news and an emergency bulletin: ‘Mr Dorgelow, presumed travelling in the vicinity of Hamburg in a green VW Beetle, licence number HH PN 365, is urgently requested to call home.’ As Ed fell asleep, he heard Monika’s voice in the corridor.

  TRAVELLING THROUGH THE REGION OF LONGING

  They were going to try through Hungary, Karola told him, her voice filled with respect. She’d brought two bottles of Lindenblatt on a tray, already uncorked, along with several glasses. Ed learned that Mona had never really been married to René, and therefore could not officially be prevented from leaving. Ed had his doubts. Everyone was gathered around him except for Krombach and Chef Mike, who had gone to the harbour for a late delivery. As if his room were the appropriate place to toast the departure, which had come about so abruptly and without any ceremony at all.

  Some sat on Ed’s bed, some squatted on the floor. Rolf sat on the stool near the table and looked out the window without speaking. Him, too, Ed thought, they’re all waiting. Alexander Krusowitsch, travelling through the region of longing with a great, glowing annunciation, licence number unknown, is requested to contact his family immediately. I repeat …

  After two weeks of the indefinable vacuum that had followed the Island Day, the day of the esskays, the ultimate day off, things happened very quickly. Cavallo and Monika left the island early in the morning on the first ferry. Monika of all people … How could she leave as long as René was still missing? A small, senseless ember of jealousy pulsed in Ed’s chest. Not Tchaikovsky, but Mona, the little invisible one, had determined the number of sandwiches.

  Following a kind of last will and testament Cavallo had written in ballpoint pen on a receipt, Rimbaud distributed his friend’s books. Ed was given a brochure about the history of the Naples Stazione Zoologica. On the cover was a picture of a villa on the Gulf of Naples with canals that flowed directly from the sea into the building’s underground vault — as if invented by Jules Verne. He also received an essay on Faust in Italy by Paola Del Zoppo, and Goethe’s Italian Journey. Ed opened the latter to an underlined passage: ‘Old horses. Here, these valuable animals stand around like sheep that have lost their shepherd.’

  Around nine, Chef Mike entered the room and immediately filled it. It was a strange, disconcerting moment that stayed in Ed’s memory for the rest of his life. They learned that Kruso had been arrested. Arrested and taken to Rostock for questioning, it was said. Illegal border crossing, resistance against military bodies, suspicion of subversive organisations — suddenly everything seemed possible. They had apprehended him in a cave in the boscage on the Bessiner Haken in the bird sanctuary. The crazy boy in port had spoken of handcuffs. Kruso had been led through town in handcuffs. There had almost been a riot in front of the Island Bar, not just esskays, but the regulars, too, had all stormed outside, and Mother Mete had lain down in the road like a corpse, and that sight was the final straw for everyone. ‘In any case, they ended up taking Kruso down to the harbour without handcuffs, and he boarded the ship without handcuffs!’ Chef Mike roared as if he were announcing a victory.

  Ed stared at the Lindenblatt label. It was misted over. He saw Kruso’s finger, the way Kruso gently rubbed it over the label, pointing at something, giving some kind of sign, for him, for his life.

  On the following afternoon, Krombach entered his room. He still smelled of Exlepäng. His face was pale but shining, freshly lotioned. Ed expected a short talk. His dismissal, perhaps. The manager pressed his hands flat on Ed’s table and looked out at the sea for a while.

  ‘The swallows, eh?’

  ‘Yes, since the baby birds hatched …’

  ‘They can’t withstand much, these bird nests.’

  Krombach took a deep breath, wiped a few flakes of mud from the table, and closed the window. Only then did Ed understand that Krombach had just lost his daughter, or at least he wouldn’t see her again for a long time, if ever.

  ‘You know Alyosha. You two were close.’

  Ed was silent.

  ‘He was a poor lad when he started here. He developed really well, astonishingly well. Those who came later hardly know anything about him, about his story and what happened back then. But he showed you everything, the hiding places, the Map of Truth, even his poems, from what I know.’ He turned to face the bed and looked Ed in the eye.

  ‘I mean his own poems, which he typed on our old Klausner typewriter.’

  ROMMSTEDT

  Ed almost fell on the stairs down the bluff. Holding a piece of ember with coal tongs, he had burned off a section of the shower curtain and wrapped the map in it. He turned on his flashlight and listened. He had decided that from now on he would do everything very calmly, one step at a time. He had never understood the expression as advice, simply as a saying: one step at a time — he had more than enough time before the midnight patrol.

  There was still light over the water. A bright, almost white band, surrounded by darkness.

  ‘It’s already late.’

  ‘I’m sorry, it’s probably the very last time.’

  ‘Maybe, maybe not. If you run into difficulties, you’ll let me know, right?’

  ‘I had bad luck, old gaffer, just bad luck,’ Ed murmured, and felt around the cave. All that was left of his fox was a hard, bristly piece of leather. He carefully pushed the carcass aside and started to dig a deep enough hollow.

  A week before the Island Day, Losh had hidden the map and his poems in the cellar, as a precaution, he’d said. There were forty, maybe fifty poems — Kruso’s volume.

  Ed carefully levelled the dirt and pulled the carcass back in its spot. Again, the flashlight. His fox was nothing more than the sole of a boot.

  ‘And the map, you hero?’

  Ed stared into the cave.

  ‘What are a handful of poems compared to the map, the Map of Truth?’

  It took Ed almost an hour to reach the Radiation Institute. He was not strong enough yet for the walk, but it did him good to be outside, to move, to walk in the open air with the co
ol night air on his face. He had to return along the top of the bluff and between the hills down to the bodden. The wound under his eye began to throb, but he was no longer afraid of being discovered. He now followed older rules: the first, fundamentally childish conviction of friendship and what that entailed when the friendship was real and singular.

  The door to the old transformer house that Kruso had called the tower was unlocked. Ed tried to keep the draped wool blankets off his face, and finally found the way up. A few drawers hung open. The map had disappeared.

  ‘Too late, too late!’

  Ed almost sank to his knees.

  ‘Don’t be afraid, young man. I’m just sitting here.’

  The figure in the easy chair warded off the beam of Ed’s light.

  ‘Please …’

  A cat was perched on the stranger’s lap. Its head was as large and heavy as a child’s. Kruso’s cat. Its flat, broad paws clasped the man’s knee.

  ‘You did a lot of sighing when I saw you last. How is your face?’

  ‘Fine,’ Ed answered automatically. He could not manage more. His eyes gradually got used to the darkness. He understood that it was Professor Rommstedt sitting across from him, Kruso’s uncle, director of the Radiation Institute.

  ‘I took a few X-rays of you, as you probably know.’

  Ed tried to collect himself. The professor offered Ed his hand. Ed went over to him quickly. The man was tall, even seated. The cat opened its jaws.

  ‘The picture, I mean the shot, was meant to have been very good, the island doctor told me.’ The professor in his chair fell silent, and the half-stuttered sentence echoed until its triviality was evident.