Kruso

by Lutz Seiler

  Ed wore Speiche’s sweater for the first time. He shook it out, felt it, and pressed his face into the wool. It smelled of tobacco, and for a moment Ed felt something like gratitude.

  ‘Closed for inventory’ — when he came back from the sea (a roaring, raging sea, at the sight of which you wanted to faint or at least to fall on your knees), he found the sign on the door. The bar room smelled of smoke.

  ‘Happy birthday, little one.’

  His face sprinkled with drops of wax.

  Ed paused indecisively. Then he picked up the photograph and took it back to his room. He slowly went down the hallway, opening all the doors. There was no one left.

  Kruso was sprawled on the bar asleep. His right hand hung in the sink, holding a glass. Ed pried it from Kruso’s fingers and placed his sodden hand on a dry surface.

  His friend had knocked over a few clean glasses with his elbow, and one had broken. Ed covered him with tablecloths and slipped a dry cloth under his head. Kruso’s cheek rested briefly in his hand.

  Ed started with the shards. Then he cleaned up the personnel table and, to be on the safe side, the bar as well. One thing led to another. Without hesitation, he threw the remains of the cake in the garbage. Chaos reigned in the kitchen. He went to the basement to check on the furnace. He spoke a few words into the embers, then put the cinders in the ashbin. He had spread a cloth over the ashbin to keep the wind from blowing the ash around. The work reminded him of his father, but this time it was his responsibility. He piled up the dirty pans in the sink and left them to soak. He waited until he could be certain there would be no tourists on the terrace (now and then, he heard voices, calls, the rattle of the doorknob), then went out and wiped the menu board clean. All of a sudden, he could no longer bear the thought of today’s special. There were too many false hopes in the world already. ‘Yet even the false ones are warranted, more than warranted, and therefore not at all false, neither true nor false, apparently, you have to admit it, just admit it for once,’ Ed whispered, and relaxed. He had begun talking to himself. He checked the supplies in the refrigerator. Working calmed him down. Haven’t seen my bear-horse for a long time, Ed thought and pictured the horse’s head. His thoughts slowly began to circle around the head’s contours, vague and still hesitant, but he could clearly feel that he himself was doing the thinking. They were his thoughts.

  ‘We have two hatches, Ed. One for drinks and one for ice-cream — the ice-cream hatch, we call it. That is, we’re going to close everything up, the terrace, the door, the bar, and the hatches out front. It’s war, Ed, the Klausner in a storm, on a difficult course, with a reduced crew.’ He pointed at Ed and at himself, nodded as if he were in agreement with himself and the plan, and finally made a random detour as if to imply that help was not precluded, but was not absolutely necessary either. He had come to only in the late afternoon. He had washed, shaved, and put on fresh work clothes. The trousers were too short and barely reached his ankles. Ed sat under the radio in the kitchen and listened to him with an onion and two slices of bread on his plate. He had thought Kruso would request his help in some way, maybe even beg him. Now he understood that it was completely self-evident to Kruso that Ed would stay, that they would keep going.

  ‘You know, Rick always called the hatches valves, and from now on I will, too, which has nothing to do with him. I’d like to propose we now call the hatches valves. Want to?’

  ‘Want to what?’

  ‘You’re not listening to me.’

  ‘Yes, I am, you’re talking about the hatches.’

  ‘Calling the hatches valves, I mean, starting immediately.’

  ‘Fine, Losh.’

  ‘OK then: two men — two valves, that is, when everything is going well. But more often it will be: one man — two valves, here and there, back and forth, you see, Ed? And the other will work on the ammunition, sausages, meatballs, and so on, small calibre. Always with lots of bread, lots of mustard — that calms tempers. Delivery straight to the ice-cream valve or, as always, to the serving counter. Either way, we’ll have to do some running, Ed, you or me, but that doesn’t matter, right? Right behind the drinks valve is the bar and the coffee machine. There’s not much distance to cover, no problem. There, things will go right out, all the liquids.’

  Almost every day and often before noon, Vosskamp now showed up on the terrace with a few of his soldiers. It wasn’t a real inspection. He ordered coffee, added a lot of sugar, and stirred for a long time. He leaned an elbow on the shelf in front of the drinks hatch, made a few comments about the weather, and asked after Krombach. The commander acted like an old neighbour, the officer of a friendly ship that lay just a few hundred metres to the north, just off the shore. For the manager, Kruso invented a business trip to the parent company in Berlin. Once again, Ed admired his companion, the way he was able to control himself and offer news with apparent willingness, despite Vosskamp’s arrival on Island Day. Maybe it had something to do with Kruso’s arrest (about which he never spoke) or with the presence of the good soldier, who sat on the terrace with a few others on Vosskamp’s sorties, looking nervously at Ed and Kruso the entire time. Their third brother.

  They had turned the Klausner into a fortress, that was obvious. The doors and windows were all locked, the curtains drawn. Everything was shut tight except for the two hatches — ‘two valves from which to shoot,’ Ed whispered.

  After a few days, the commander asked for a tour. He went through the empty rooms with apparent regret, ignored the dirt that had spread over the floor and the tables, and strode through the kitchen in his shiny boots, offering Ed his hand. Ed had no choice but to shake it. He spoke with Kruso in a muted, bland tone, as if he were talking about a bereavement they had both suffered, if not on the same level.

  The following evening, Kruso explained to his friend Ed why they had to remain on guard and why it all came down to holding on, especially now with the borders in a state of alert, when overreactions couldn’t be ruled out. For the first time, he mentioned Viola and her news from the mainland, from cities like Leipzig, Plauen, and Dresden. ‘We’ll give a sign through the valves.’

  They sat at the counter until late into the night and then, wrapped in quilts, they went out onto the terrace again. The weather had turned. The foghorn blew all night. The navigational beacon seemed to spin faster, and the Christmas pine moved its stiff limbs as if to express its fettered despair. At every noise, Losh raised his hand and stared into the darkness. He began to talk: about his sister and their time together in the Radiation Institute, their games, their hiding places, and how enormous the building had seemed then, how endlessly long and labyrinthine the corridors that had no windows, just frosted glass panes behind which lights burned day and night, and about the mysterious machines that could send rays through their heads and which made him think his uncle could read their thoughts. ‘I was sure that was the only reason he wanted us to come see him in his lab once a week. I was afraid of those appointments because of my bad thoughts, and tried to hide. That’s when I discovered the tower. It was full of rubbish, thousands of X-ray images in wooden crates, an army of skulls — at some point, they burned it all. Our own images hung in the laboratory hallways. I think he liked them especially. All I saw were skulls over which a ruler floated like a halo; the millimetre markings glowed white. When I stood in front of these pictures, I was afraid of myself. I mean, afraid of what was invisible inside me.’

  Kruso quietly lectured Ed about the asylum that the Klausner’s terrace could still represent. He talked about the returnees and claimed there would be more than a few of them as soon as they saw through the deceptions of the consumer world. ‘They can’t recognise it, Ed. But many who were born there and have never known anything else, who don’t sense their unhappiness anymore. The entertainment industry, the cars, single-family homes, fitted kitchens, why not? But for them it’s part of their bodies, a natural extension, the source of their thoughts
and feelings. Their souls are trapped in a dashboard, deafened by hi-fi or vaporised by a Bosch stove-top. They can’t feel their unhappiness anymore. They don’t hear the cynicism in the word consumer — in the word alone! Its animalistic sound, full of cowbells and herds driven over the hills of affluence, grazing, chewing, consumption, digestion, and more consumption — eating and shitting, that’s the life of a consumer. And everything is set up just for that, from the consumer’s birth to his death. Consumer protection functions like a fence, it’s the paddock on the pasture. The consumer-advice centre registers every movement within the herd and calculates average usage, not by kilometres as with motors, but by years, decades. How high is the use considered, for example, over a lifetime? And how long does it take before a consumer is consumed? The word alone, Ed, this cow-eyed word, would be proof enough — if people only had ears.’

  For a while, they remained silent and listened to the foghorn that blew every twenty seconds, ‘buh-buh-buh’, then a pause. ‘We’ve got an important after-season ahead of us. I think we start with the quarters again soon.’ Ed was sad that he couldn’t agree, and he avoided contradicting him. Ed’s duty was to stay at his companion’s side, to watch out for him, to protect him, if necessary, even from himself. At the same time, he enjoyed the idea that it was just the two of them who were holding down the fort: two best friends, running the Klausner on their own and therefore achieving something essentially impossible with their work, like heroes.

  Kruso had great hopes for the next scheduled allocation even though at the moment there was nothing to allocate. It would be more about maintaining contacts and the ‘Organisation’, the ‘Family’, or what used to go by those names. He drank even more than he had in the summer, and his talk grew vague. He repeatedly called the Klausner’s two valves ‘the heart valves of freedom’.

  Ed peeled onions as he had in his first days, onions and potatoes. He had inspected the stores in the cellar and the cold store and drawn up a list. Following Chef Mike’s example, he put together a shopping list and drafted an emergency menu: scrambled eggs, meatballs, bockwurst, with a side of bread or roasted potatoes. He was now the Klausner’s commissary of stores. He was chef, sous chef, and dishwasher at the same time, the epicentre of a relatively enormous kitchen, which filled him with a certain pride despite the setbacks. Nothing demonstrated more clearly how far he had come since his decampment. Before the words ‘doubt’ and ‘grief’ could enter these reflections, he bit heartily into his onion: Robinson dreams up Friday and Friday appears. Kruso had not been wrong to bet on Ed, to trust him, had not been wrong when he had seen in Ed something that had never been before. Kruso had dreamt correctly.

  During these days, Ed paid a great deal into the account of unspoken requirements — he must have more than broken even. The feeling of falsehood or whatever was the source of Ed’s constant feeling of depression (or whatever had weighed on him) when he was at Losh’s side or among the esskays, all those, that is, who had distinguished themselves through insubordination, had been wiped out. Furthermore: he didn’t leave; he didn’t do what all the others had done.

  Among the stores in the cellar, there were a few hundred rusty tins of pears that must have been left over from an earlier year. The labels had rotted off. Ed cleaned the tins and carried them up to the kitchen. He suggested to Kruso that they sell the pears as compote. And the cakes from the cold store that had been ordered for the last round of guests on company holiday (the seven samurai and their families) could be offered as ‘dessert’. With a knife, Ed indicated the size of the slices he intended to cut from the cake, which was made from some rubbery fruit jelly — little morsels ‘for thirty or forty pfennigs a piece’. Kruso, who was constantly rushing back and forth between the valves to serve drinks and food at the same time, stared at the knife then threw his arms around Ed.

  ‘U menja brat I sestra!’

  He ran back to the hatches. Yes, they were now truly like brothers.

  On the day of the traditional allocation, only five esskays showed up, whom Ed hardly knew. No castaways, no homeless. No one had brought any contributions, and it soon became clear that the esskays just wanted to drink and watch the sunset. Although Ed served them well, they complained that the drinks usually served on the bluffs in late summer weren’t offered. Kruso returned to the bar and mixed the drinks. Ed was outraged, but his friend gave him a sign. With glasses in hand, the small group went to the edge of the bluffs, to the highest point, in view of the barracks, which none of them seemed to care about.

  They drank and looked out over the sea. The wind was so strong on the escarpment, that it tore the laughter from their mouths and left them standing there stupidly with their mute grimaces of lips and teeth as the glasses in their hands turned to ice. The low light of the sun lifted the chalk cliffs of Møn from the sea like a miracle. Indeed, the island of longing seemed to have grown larger in the past weeks or to have moved closer. Perhaps it had something to do with the fact that the sun now set much further to the left, much further south than it did in the summer, and in autumn its light was completely different. Mostly, it’s the chill in the air, Ed thought, the air is clearer and the wind sweeps the view clean.

  Streaks of storm clouds flew in from west over the sea, at a slant across the mountainous waves constantly rolling onto the shore. These waves, if one believed the marine experts, would slowly but surely swallow up the Dornbusch, along with the lighthouse, the barracks, and the Klausner, one by one. Minutes after the sun set, the sea was nothing but a dark, eternal mass. The storm whistled its singsong on the lighthouse column at their backs. The clouds drifted in large, light-grey masses, billowing like the smoke of a giant chemical plant — ‘bunabuna,’ Ed muttered, and thought of the Bunesians and the suffocating emissions of their enormous steel battleship at the gates of the city he had fled.

  He took a step back from the cliff edge and suddenly all was still, as if there were no more wind, or anything else in the world. Once again, he pictured G., the way she had crouched next to the light well in the courtyard and tried to lure out the tiny cat who had fallen in with a bowl of milk: ‘Matthew!’ Maybe it was Sonya he meant in his thoughts. He suddenly felt too warm. ‘’Tis Autumn — Autumn yet shall break thy heart …’ Though Ed’s memory hoard of verse had resurfaced, he couldn’t remember the author’s name. The rest of the poem was also shrouded in fog.

  ’Tis Autumn — Autumn … The forgetting had begun.

  GOODNIGHT

  At night, the silence froze in the empty rooms. Outside, the trees or the sea or time roared, but they were inside, sheltered, not transient. Kruso drank. He stared into the dark dining room and rubbed his hands as if he were trying to wipe something away, but it didn’t work. Then he held still and spread his fingers. It looked like he had a cramp. Now and again, he would wander into the kitchen to straighten a few things. Or he ran to the dishwashing station to get the bottle of the fabled skin cream. Since their hands no longer soaked in dishwater for hours every day, they’d become like old, sun-cracked leather, like brittle, mildewed gloves, gloves you couldn’t get rid of, no matter how hard you tried.

  Sometimes, the two men acted like strangers.

  Ed’s attempts to start conversations sounded hollow and petered out. It wasn’t easy to withdraw now that there were just the two of them in the Klausner. Suddenly, every retreat meant something. On evenings when they sat together for a long time, Ed felt a certain embarrassment. But they drank their way through it, and, in the end, when Kruso went behind the bar to wash their glasses, the cutting board, and the knife (nothing was left lying around anymore), they were drunk enough to no longer feel their separation at night was artificial or forced. Still, it felt strange when Kruso wished him properly ‘Goodnight’ and added ‘Sleep well’, the way parents do, and Ed immediately answered with something similar, which turned them both into children again, children in striped pyjamas. In fact, their work clothes, which were too
thin for the autumn weather and, now stiff with dirt, flapped around their joints, reminded Ed of such pyjamas — prison stripes or pyjamas.

  They paused a moment, cheek against cheek, unshaven, dirty, somewhat run to seed. Ed felt faint remains of pain behind his eyes — the tiny fissure in the Gulf of Mexico. Kruso bent down to him since he was the taller child, the older brother. It could not be denied: they treated each very cautiously and carefully, not only at that moment. Perhaps also because they knew they had the whole autumn and the entire winter ahead of them. One evening, Ed had asked his friend when they were saying goodnight (they were already standing in the hallway, outside their rooms) if he should get the manuscript of poems from the hiding place. Kruso just shook his head and closed his door without a sound, so that Ed wasn’t sure if his friend had even understood the question — something always remained unresolved between the two of them.

  At night, Ed felt a tremor. In his dream, the Klausner slipped into the sea, slowly, deliberately, with all its hatches bolted, like a battleship leaving the shipyard. The bar stuck out of the roof, the bridge. Ed saw Kruso leaping about on it, swinging his binoculars, and shouting commands. The ship set its course. All doubts dropped away — pure joy, indescribable.

  NO VIOLENCE

  14 October. The autumn holidays had begun. Once again, boats full of day tourists arrived, even if fewer of them made the effort of climbing up to the Dornbusch. Most of the late season tourists settled for a walk on flat land, from the bodden to the sea and back, and because there was nothing better to do on that route they would take a spin through the island museum and one through the Gerhart Hauptmann House, with hazy memories of a play called The Weavers or with nothing at all in their heads aside from the sound of the sea. Ed remembered Kruso’s stories of illicit meetings that the esskays had held in Hauptmann’s study in earlier years — at midnight in almost complete darkness because it was easy to see into the house from the road. Rimbaud had apparently given a talk about his namesake entitled ‘Ophelia, or the Poetry of Drowned Corpses’. He talked for an entire hour without notes or an outline.