Kruso

by Lutz Seiler

  ‘Alexander Krusowitsch is my brother.’

  That isn’t exactly what he had wanted to say.

  Not exactly what he had prepared.

  But it was his sentence. A pretty good one.

  He was still looking out the window.

  His second good sentence was already circling over the tyre tracks in the courtyard.

  ‘Aren’t we all Slavs, up to the Elbe, Mr Rebhuhn?’

  A second later, he was no longer sure if he had said ‘Slavs’ or ‘slaves’.

  The sanitation inspector stared at him, then at his notebook, as if he had to force himself to turn away from Ed’s appearance in all its repulsiveness. A dirty, little seasonal worker, fickle, unstable, difficult to assess. Dropped his studies despite good prospects and hasn’t learned anything in life yet aside from a few poems full of dull, incestuous lines.

  They left the registration office, but they weren’t finished. Rebhuhn led the way. The idea of being seen with him was unbearable. Two cyclists, some people out walking, tourists on their evening stroll to dinner, often served as early as six o’clock in the vacation homes. They entered a building diagonally opposite the registration office. A small, shadowy hallway with a flight of stairs to the basement at the end. First, a low-ceilinged, neon-lit room that looked like a classroom with its benches and chairs. It smelled of disinfectant or maybe it was rat poison. Ed felt a slight vibration and then he heard the humming noise. The inspector went to the front of the classroom and pulled a rod from under the teacher’s desk. He stared at the rod’s red lacquered tip, spun it gently, and brought it to his lips as if he wanted to kiss it. Finally, he pursed his lips and blew an imaginary bit of dust or chalk from the lacquer, which then seemed to shine or glow, but it was just a reflection of the neon light. Each movement of his hand seemed casual and confident, unlike his movements in the registration office. Only then did Rebhuhn seem to come into his own. He perched on the table, his posture nonchalant and superior. The handle of the rod beat lightly and almost impatiently against metal. Ed had stopped in the doorway to the classroom, a student waiting for his punishment. The chalkboard was pristine, as if nothing had ever been written on it.

  Ed regretted having come. He could have refused. (Couldn’t he?) He could have forgotten, unintentionally, but he had been afraid and had the feeling he just had to get through it. He simply needed to take this step to prove that he didn’t feel contempt for the inspector (which he, in fact, did) and by showing him this bare minimum of respect (consoled him, Ed thought, consoled him for all the deceitfulness and ugliness in his appearance). He would open a way for his retreat and reveal his complete ineptitude for conspiracy. A refusal at the outset, however, would have been impossible, unacceptable. First, you have to respect the deadline, then you have to pull your head (carefully, slowly) out of the noose. But Ed’s fear had returned. Abject fear, beyond thought.

  The inspector approached Ed with little rhythmic double beats, first against the benches, then against the wall. A previously invisible door opened, Sesame opened. All routine, Ed thought, the usual routine. The only thing odd, was that he was experiencing it, now, at this moment.

  The humming noise swelled, grew loud, a breath-taking stench hit him. They entered the machine room. Rebhuhn stood to Ed’s right and greeted the machinist. The machine consisted of a steel frame in the centre of the room with a bulky cover that gave off a milky glow. It had a head, but no face. In any case, no lips and no ears, just teeth. It had hair, clotted with sand and algae, parts of limbs on every side, translucent and grey or green like a film drawn over moss, a swollen foot. Something like a foot. It wasn’t the machine that was humming, it wasn’t humming …

  Ed stepped back, looking for the door out, but the machinist blocked his way and pushed a white enamel pail against his chest. At first, Ed thought the man wanted to put the pail on his head, but he was just trying to pull the handle over the crown of Ed’s head. The handle seemed to be an extra-large one. There was no doubt: the pail was designed for this purpose. Still, a few of Ed’s hairs were pulled out. The sanitation inspector began talking before Ed was done vomiting.

  ‘This body was in the water for three, or at the very least two, weeks … Mr Bendler, are you listening to what I’m saying?’

  Ed spat.

  ‘Good, that’s better. Mr Bendler, can you confirm that this dead man is René Salzlach, ice-cream seller at the company vacation home Zum Klausner in Kloster, Hiddensee?’

  The machine. A clump of putrid jelly.

  The inspector tried to maintain his didactic demeanour, explaining the condition of the corpse and repeatedly looking at Ed as if he had to monitor his attentiveness.

  ‘René Salzlach is a typical case, a typical border violator, I’d say. Key characteristic: these people overestimate themselves, it’s part of their personality, isn’t that right, Mr Bendler? That’s why they underestimate the distance, the cold, and the sea. And then it’s up to us to rescue them, but of course we can’t be everywhere at once. We can’t always be in the right place at the right time.’

  The unit’s hum thundered in Ed’s ears — it turned out to be a cooling unit. He wrapped his arms around the bucket and held it tight against his chest. He was now the camel, the camel in his dream with a feeding bowl around his neck. The red tip of the billiard cue circled, swung in a few arcs, as if it were writing in the air. The milky remains of René now formed a surface of glass or ice, on which the balls rolled back and forth, disappearing one after the other into the dark, decaying opening of the machine without a sound.

  ‘Yet where, we must ask, did these injuries come from, Mr Bendler?’ The writing stopped abruptly, and the red tip sank towards the milky grey being. Ed’s eyes were filled with tears from gagging. He felt dizzy. He was freezing.

  ‘This haematoma, for example. There isn’t the slightest doubt that the victim suffered it before he entered the water. For lay persons, it may be difficult to recognise, even for me, but we have experts, Mr Bendler. We have laboratories, boats, divers, we have a 32-bit, if you understand my meaning!’

  First the touch, then the thin streak that bound the pointer to the machine. He thought he was going to faint. His knees started to buckle. He wanted to drop into a crouch, but the machinist grabbed him from behind and held him upright. The handle on his pail made a long squeaking noise.

  ‘So, Mr Bendler, what do you think? Maybe you don’t remember, at least not clearly? Don’t worry — that happens to everyone. At first. But once you start talking to them, you find they usually have a lot to say.’

  There were papers for Ed to sign on a small metal table with wheels that was rolled up like a serving cart. There were four or five pages. As he bent forward, the pail handle squeaked.

  EXODUS

  On the fifth of September, Chef Mike was missing at breakfast. Krombach appeared, cleared his throat, and read a goodbye letter scrawled in grease pencil on a piece of wrapping paper in capital letters. The letter mentioned a wife and child who lived in the hills on Rügen, Chef Mike’s wife, Chef Mike’s child. It mentioned a family trip, the opportunity for a new beginning after so many years and so on. It closed with a sentence that used the phrase ‘in these difficult times’, along with a request to be forgiven ‘for everything’. Until that point, Ed had never heard a single word about a family. He pictured Chef Mike with sweat running from every pore as he wrote his goodbye letter ‘To the crew’, as laboriously as one of his supply orders.

  ‘As you all know, Chef Mike was reliability personified and …’ Krombach had started in on a kind of eulogy but broke off and limited himself to the observation that ‘under the present circumstances’ it would be nearly impossible to find a new cook.

  ‘And what for, really?’ Kruso whispered. He was sitting ramrod straight, as usual. His hands lay to the left and right of his plate as if he wanted to soothe the table.

  ‘Rol
f, what do you think?’ Kruso waited until the assistant chef looked at him.

  ‘First: the menu,’ Kruso continued. ‘From today on, short and simple. Only what you can manage, straightforward, easy dishes. Second: during peak hours, you, Werner, can give a hand in the kitchen now and then.’

  Krombach remained silent. From Viola came the news report, incomprehensible, then a traffic report, incomprehensible, then ‘the morning prayer will be given by Pastor Thomä from Darmstadt.’ It was the first time that Kruso had openly taken command.

  After the end of the holidays, the stream of holiday-makers dropped noticeably, especially the number of day tourists. The ferry schedule was changed. The crew worked hard, and with great effort they were able to keep the Klausner above water. Ed enjoyed feeling exhausted at night. The sweet rest and lack of any consideration greater than a last drink so he could sit unthinking for a while longer outside on the terrace. It soon turned chilly, and at midnight the moon poured its light onto the tips of the pine trees.

  Ed forgot his dream about the rotting camel the way you block out nightmares that are too bloody. Actually, it was more abrupt than what is usually called forgetting, as if something had been hacked off and had fallen into the cell’s darkness — still there, but invisible. What remained was a sensation of an even closer bond with Losh and a vague but rampant sense of guilt in connection with René. Even without Ed saying anything, word had got out that René had been found and pulled from the water in several pieces with a fishing net. If Ed were near, conversation seemed muted, conjectures were offered in a lower, more questioning tone. People were willing to make allowances for his somehow direct involvement with this fatality, the most decisive departure of those days.

  The small, simple dishes were popular, and Rolf fought his solitary battle in the kitchen. People accepted the reduction of the menu as they accepted everything on the island. In fact, they didn’t just accept it, they embraced it as a sign of good fortune. The red shandy was flat, but it was served on the island. The thin coffee tasted exceptionally good because it was proof that one had made it all the way here, to this terrace high above the sea with the most enchanting view in the country, a day they would never forget.

  On the other hand, it seemed as if the guests in the late season were draining the contents of the glasses and cups more and more quickly, as if they wanted to drink this strange summer rapidly to an end. Orders piled up at the bar. Kruso swore, so Ed stopped washing dishes and hurried to help his friend. It was their daily battle, and Ed sensed the depths of their bond in the struggle, the few words, the accidental contact (like the most tender caresses), an almost blind understanding when they proved, together, that the Klausner was unsinkable.

  19 September. Two weeks had passed since Chef Mike’s departure when Rimbaud did not appear at breakfast. Rolf poured the coffee and offered to check the bee house and wake his colleague who had probably ‘tipped back a few’ until his eyes closed the night before. Kruso gestured towards the door with his head, looking at Ed all the while as if he were Kruso’s man for such things.

  A despairing sound filled the entire clearing; it seemed to come from the ground and not from the hives. A dead queen, Ed thought without knowing why. Ed called Rimbaud’s name. He slowly opened the door, and a sweetish haze hit him. The bed was unmade. The room smelled of sleep and food scraps. Ed went to the bookshelves as if that were the reason he had come, and only then did he notice it. Bits of honeycomb lay on every shelf, dripping honey onto the books. Rimbaud’s little library (no more than two hundred volumes) looked like a soft, flowing golden block and in it a living being, tough, organic, the outer shell of a fantastical embryo. The nectar dripped constantly, unimpeded, as if the honeycomb held a boundless supply or as if it were flowing from the books themselves. The books looked very content under the sweet, murky, meandering flow, as if pensive or meditative. ‘In consolation,’ Ed murmured because the honey seemed to be consoling the books. Yes, honey and books belonged together, books and honey, a peculiar ambrosia. But it was deceptive, of course. In truth, the books were as sad as spilled honey. From now on, the books were thinking, there will be no more waiter to carry us into the dishwashing station and read aloud to the dishwashers, and there will be no more dishwashers who know how to respond with poems, that is, the dishwashers’ poems will no longer be found anywhere in this world, and hence there will be no hope for their books, thus is the circle broken. ‘No, not yet, there is still time,’ Ed whispered, ‘I promise you.’

  The honey library. Ed could not have said how long he remained sunk in this slow trickling, this most gentle demise. Because he didn’t want to return yet, he sat at the small table under the window on which a pencil and a few runes lay, perhaps left over from the Island Day or from allocations in earlier times. His foot knocked against a coal bucket for which there was no actual use in the bee house given that it had no oven. Ed pulled a few crumpled sheets of paper from the bucket and smoothed them out. Most of them only held a single line, a kind of heading, and nothing more. ‘For here we have no lasting city, but we seek the city that is to come’, Hebrews 13:14. Ed recognised the quote. It was the motto on the mortuary in the island cemetery. On another page, there was a short treatise on bees. Under it, the signature of a bee-like man whose chest was covered with fine hairs; his bee face wore an expression of bitterness or at least aggravation. His two limbs ended in feet he held pressed together in front of his genitals (or the place where his genitals presumably were). He looked like he was rubbing the soles of his feet together. He could have been taken for a Buddha, if anything, an allusion to the bacchanalian cult of the esskays around the Buddha tree, but thin, twisting claws grew from his toes and his beard ended in a trident — without a doubt this was the strangest being Ed ever laid eyes on.

  Without a word, Ed laid the sheet of paper with the bee treatise and the drawing next to Krombach’s plate (laid it there unintentionally — out of residual respect for the director), but Krombach handed the sheet without a glance to Chris, who pushed it towards Kruso’s end of the table. Kruso thanked him with a strange formality, like someone who had to remind himself of his own dignity. He tentatively raised the paper to the light, threw it a glance, and set it back down. He chewed with his head lowered, swallowed, picked the paper up again and began to read out loud.

  ‘The reproductive caste of honeybees …’ Kruso swallowed and began again. ‘The reproductive caste of honeybees — queens and drones — will travel great distances to mate. A queen will let several drones mate with her in flight. In order to facilitate mating of creatures with superior characteristics, areas must be found which impede the arrival of undesired drones, such as islands. The goal of breeding is a subspecies that is industrious with a gentle nature and limited propensity to swarm — characteristics of the Apis mellifera carnica, the Hiddensee subspecies.’

  The refrigerator at the bar shuddered on and drowned out the sound of the wind in the pines. The first autumn storms would soon come.

  ‘This message is proof,’ Kruso explained, ‘that Rimbaud will return sooner or later.’

  It was too late to point out that the message came from the coal bucket. At the same time, Ed had to wonder why he had smoothed the paper out so carefully and brought it back like a petition from the bee house.

  ‘Some are leaving us now,’ Kruso began softly. He stood up, and his face disappeared in the darkness above the lamp. ‘More than a few of whom we could use, yes, we urgently need them here.’ He leaned his hands on the table and his large, vulnerable cheeks returned to the lamplight.

  ‘Some will return, in fact, many will. They abandoned the island, but soon they’ll realise that even with valuta …’

  Even in Kruso’s speech, the word shimmered like a piece of gold in the dark. It gleamed and jingled stealthily and it smelled good, valuta, western currency, what a lush, dignified sound. Eastern currency on the other hand was recycled food scraps and alumi
nium cutlery …

  As if he had divined these thoughts, Kruso paused and looked down at Ed. ‘Only the illusions of freedom have a price. Freedom itself is priceless. And it consists first and foremost of duties, dammit, not privileges.’ He had dropped his ‘it-can-hardly-be-expressed-with-words’ tone.

  ‘A better way to put it might be: those who leave us now are denying the responsibility they have to this place. They are thinking only of themselves. And now you’re the ones who are left carrying the burden, you, with your work, each in his place …’

  ‘All right, it’s fine,’ Chris murmured, and poured schnapps in their coffee cups. Rolf gazed at the floor and looked pale. He had pushed his chair back from the table.

  ‘… not least for the castaways and the homeless, who will be around for a long, long time, washed up on these shores from a sea of hardship, a sea in which you can suffocate without dying.’

  For a moment, Ed had the feeling he should offer Kruso his condolences. He felt pity for some reason and was immediately ashamed. After all, it was his brother who was speaking, full of passion, and wasn’t he right in the deepest sense? Nonetheless, he felt as if he were standing on a large ice floe that was floating further and further away as Kruso listed the instruments of liberty (the Klausner, the island, the sea) and the instruments of slavery (valuta).

  ‘I would just like to say this: our herbs are thriving. The mushrooms are growing, the soup is simmering, the rooms are ready — we now have a very nice number of sleeping quarters, more than ever before. Isn’t that right, Werner? And soon the whole dormitory will be free. That’s how we should see it. Everything will cool down. Autumn is here, winter is coming, and you are ready. I thank you for that!’

  Something was underway. Continents were shifting. It would be almost impossible to run the Klausner with just the five of them. The mention of winter depressed Ed. Christmas, presents, cold, some great regret, a deep sadness — as if he were supposed to make provisions and now it was too late. Kruso’s ice floe, in the meantime, had moved far off, so they could no longer understand him. All that was left was his silhouette on the horizon, his cheeks’ pale glow, his mouth opening and closing.