Kruso

by Lutz Seiler

  ‘You should have seen the esskays, how they hung on his every word. All those dead bodies, Ed, it was as if they were floating past in the darkness, fantastic, as if they were alive or at any rate holy — Hauptmann’s study was an aquarium filled with corpses, and there he was at Hauptmann’s desk, like a reef sticking out of the water. It was the first time I wished I could have been a student, a student of Dr Rimbaud’s in Leipzig on the Pleiße.’

  Despite the general indolence, there were always enough tourists out walking to form a reasonable queue at the Klausner’s hatches, at least at lunchtime. Kruso leapt back and forth between the two valves, the heart valves of freedom that were always a bit too far apart to keep an organism as large as the Klausner going without faltering. When orders were called to him, Ed brought out his dishes. To speed up the process, he would place them on a side table in area behind the ice-cream hatch — it had been his idea. He was also responsible for the coffee machine, and sometimes he was even able to help at the bar as well, which his comrade (comrade in arms, Ed thought) didn’t always seem to appreciate.

  The company vacation home was running, even if they were like prisoners behind the valves, at which they had to bend down to catch a glimpse of the outside world — and there was rarely time for that. As a rule, they only had their voices, and the clientele remained at chest-height. Once in a while, the sun came out, which livened up the tourists. ‘If it works, I’m telling you, they’ll stop in their tracks.’ There was no doubt: the man was talking about those fleeing the country and something that could prevent them or even make them turn back, as Kruso had predicted. The word ‘dialogue’ was making the rounds; people kept talking about a ‘readiness for dialogue’, which Ed understood as challenge. He bent towards the hatch, pushed the beer through it, and looked the man in the face. The man nodded at him but then turned and went to sit on one of the terrace chairs. No one wiped off the tables, Ed thought, and decided he would clean them that evening — ‘If it works,’ Ed whispered.

  He noticed that Kruso was serving particular voices for free or for only a symbolic charge, doubtless people he took for castaways, but who, in fact, were spongers taking advantage of his friend’s generosity. Occasionally, they formed a small following who sat lazily around the terrace and expressed their dissatisfaction ‘with the service’. A few days later, they had disappeared again.

  The holiday week consumed their strength. The tourists’ endless thirst and bottomless hunger and their talk, a general sense of dissatisfaction, a commotion that spread and spilled through the hatches into the Klausner. On the last day of the week, in the middle of the rush, Kruso suddenly lost his cool. He left his post, shouted, and stormed outside. The guests poured in through the open door.

  Only when a stranger appeared next to Ed in the kitchen and grabbed one of his meatballs, did Ed notice the change. In reflex, he’d whirled around and almost stabbed the man with his knife. The man hysterically shouted, ‘No violence!’ Ed then had great trouble herding back outside all the people who were standing in the dining room, staring incredulously at the floor strewn with food scraps and other garbage. The guests seemed much more confident than in the summer, positively unruly, and not easily intimidated. Although the tables in the area behind the hatches were piled high with glasses and stacks of plates, a few sat down immediately and raised their hands to place an order or to get his attention. Indeed, it all resembled a spontaneous gathering at which demands were to be voiced along with criticism that had remained unspoken for too long, but the place was here and the time was now. Confused talk about embassies and trains carrying refugees filled the room; a few had begun serving themselves from the bar. Ed’s voice soon cracked: he issued commands, made threats, and gestured wildly with arms outstretched, still holding the knife, which he occasionally swung back and forth like a machete through the underbrush. He could feel himself growing, surpassing himself. Still on the doorstep — Ed was already grasping the door handle — an older man turned to Ed and confronted him. He got so close, Ed couldn’t avoid his protestations of equal parts speech and spit: ‘Go right back in, boy, you can all go back into your shithole of a prison …’

  Ed was completely exhausted, but the sense of injury weighed more heavily. He washed his face at the bar. At some point in the evening, Kruso showed up again, without an explanation or word of appreciation. He held a large beer glass (the bullseye kind), which he threw straight at Viola, who immediately fell silent. The glass didn’t fall to the ground, because the radio’s brown, grease-encrusted cover ripped and Viola engulfed it completely. A disquieting silence fell.

  Even though the terrace was only sparsely filled for days and a measure of calm had returned to their business, Kruso rushed back and forth between the two hatches. He walked with that stiff, pounding gait that Cavallo had sometimes used to intimidate his guests. Indeed, it was a kind of marching. Kruso scrubbed the serving shelf in front of the drinks valve as if it were the most important plank on their ship. Then he polished a few glasses at the bar, washed them once more, and polished them anew. Afterwards, he was back at the ice-cream valve, wearing the stained white apron that René had worn last. He banged the ice-cream scoop against the side of the aluminium vat below the hatch, a short, squat vat that had not held ice-cream for a long time. It emitted a mouldy smell that amplified the banging.

  Ed was busy in the kitchen. It would take days of work to clean up the chaos of pots, cutlery, and food scraps, everything that he had had no choice but to leave lying around. The work did him good, as did the noises in some way. At least the vague busyness out at the valves was better than Viola’s silence. Lately, he often thought: I have followed the wrong course. My life got on the wrong track when I left construction and my crew and submitted an application to study. Only the Klausner, only my work here, has set me straight again … With all his strength, he lifted a steel cauldron in the air and banged it on the ground, again and again, until a semi-circular piece of coal was knocked loose and fell into the empty sink. A black, silver-gleaming moon that had been burned onto the bottom of the cauldron. With his index finger, Ed pressed the planet into little crumbs of coal, which he then pushed together to form the letters Y and E and S: YES.

  THE BLACK BAND

  René had returned. Ed woke and heard the voice very clearly, his nasal, arrogant way of talking, ‘what’ll it be then, young lady’, and even before Ed understood, he saw the ice-cream man, the way he cracked jokes (political jokes) and sniggered at them himself, and Ed saw the white billiard balls come pouring out of the dark, putrid hole, one after the other, into the vat or right onto the scoop, ‘fifteen pfennigs, please’.

  Ed crept quietly downstairs. All the lights were on. He made his way through the dishwashing station and the kitchen. He stopped before the swinging doors to the dining room and peered through the gap between the two wings. He saw Kruso sniggering as he hectically tore off the ice-cream man’s apron. His expression changed; he turned serious. He rushed to the cash register and raised his head. ‘Fame, when will you come?’ Then he put his index finger on his upper lip as if he were thinking, and yelled something to the chess board: ‘d5 to d6!’ The game had been set up. Kruso sniggered again (René’s effeminate snigger appealed to him even though it was clear he was embodying Rimbaud at that moment) and hammered some imaginary sum into the register with his index fingers, fifteen or twenty characters, as if he were typewriting, one of his own magical poems, perhaps, and then, in fact, he froze for a moment into a wax figure of himself — apparently, it wasn’t easy being Kruso. He took a rapid half-step back to the cash register and gave a small whinny. He galloped to the bar, mixed a glass of kirsch-kali, and sat down at the chess table, on Cavallo’s side. ‘Perché questo silenzio?’ Cavallo’s impersonator asked softly, then made his move and drank. A second later, Kruso rose ceremoniously, and with his hands he made a protective gesture over the chess table that could have been a blessing or could have meant something
like ‘Good luck’ or ‘Stay friends forever!’ None of them had ever done anything remotely similar, and so it must have been a gesture from the narrator of Kruso’s play about the old Klausner. The narrator moved much more slowly than the other characters. He needed much more time. As if in slow motion, he backed up to the bar, turned, and caressed the tap — some kind of bridging, perhaps an awkward interpolation. ‘The barrel is already all, tss-tss-tss.’ Kruso had tried to say the universally despised sentence with Rick’s calm, gentle tone, yet he himself was no longer calm, but dissatisfied — something was wrong. The caresses turned into something more forceful, a kind of milking, but the tap stayed dry. Rick-Kruso banged the flat of his hand on the bar: the glasses clinked. He reluctantly bent down, jerked open the door to the cellar, and disappeared down the stairs (‘Führer-concrete!’). Soon, sounds of an argument drifted up, and soft cursing: the beastly cellar, the damp, the mud you’re always in danger of slipping on and breaking your head open. Then: ‘Mis-er-able, mis-er-able filth!’ Presumably he was trying to tap the barrel and having the usual trouble. Only Rick had been able to do it, but he had needed an assistant, someone to tighten the screw for the gasket around the bung hole while he inserted the tap. So Rick-Kruso called for Ed. Ed-Kruso answered, ‘I’m coming. I’ll be right there!’ Ed-Ed stood there, barely breathing. For a few seconds, he waited for his self to appear, then he crept silently back to his room.

  Throughout the day, a clear, almost wintery peace reigned. In the evening, the cocoon of the Dornbusch engulfed the Klausner with its numbing roar. A beam of light from the navigational beacon swept across the floor of the dining room, a room that seemed to have been shifted out of their radius and was no longer accessible. They also no longer sat at the personnel table (not even for breakfast), but at the chess table near the bar with a view of the terrace. They drank a lot, Lindenblatt in the afternoon and kiwi, kali, or peppermint schnapps in the evening, sometimes mixed with corn whisky or Blue Strangler. With it, they ate smoked ham cut into cubes; they had enough in the cellar. Earlier, Ed had thought nothing of ham. Now he chewed it slowly and deliberately, like a farmer at the end of the day. They were flexible with regard to meals. There were no rules except for Ed’s onions. Kruso made a new dish rack from old wire — for the coming season, he emphasised, and at such moments the bitterness drained out of his voice. He sanded down the wire and painted it with leftover paint from the cellar. Some paint dripped onto the table, but he didn’t seem to care. Blue paint that had also been used for the seesaw on the playground and the metal frames of the covered tables on the terrace. Ed went into the kitchen and made coffee; they talked about God and the world.

  Ed told his friend about his first and only family holiday on the Baltic Sea, in Göhren, on Rügen, in the summer of 1973. The three of them, father, mother, child, had stayed in a small Free German Trade Union Federation hotel in the middle of the village. He had slept on a cot next the wall under the window. Ed collected shells and hid them under his bed in a plastic cup, where they began to stink.

  One morning when they’d come to the dining room for breakfast, he noticed black cloth on the frame of the portrait that hung over the breakfast buffet. He didn’t know what the black band on the picture of the goatee, as his parents called the Chairman of the State Council, was supposed to signify, but something told him (he was eight years old) that it would be better not to talk about it out loud. He waited until they had all sat down with their breakfast rolls and cheese, then he stood up again, ran around the table to his father, and whispered in his ear: the black band. His father’s reaction to this small discovery was so disproportionate that the scene was burned into his memory. Instead of going to the beach with his family, Ed’s father sat in his room the entire day, listening to the radio. He also listened to the radio turned low throughout the following night; he had shoved the little transistor halfway under his pillow and so only very muffled sounds reached Ed. An endless murmuring about the goatee’s rise to power and how it ended. Above all, the murmuring was about the inner German line, of which Ed formed an impression for the very first time in his life: a bloody line through the middle of Germany, as if drawn with a scalpel, one commentator claimed, right through towns, houses, and families, a deadly obstacle, insurmountable.

  Ed looked at Kruso and attempted a brotherly glance. There was a border between them, too. It was better when they were telling each other stories. The stories helped Ed overcome his inhibitions, his fears. ‘We always have a few tanks ready for emergencies.’ The goatee had said this in a peculiarly high, thin voice that was on the verge of cracking, and it was played again and again. It appeared to have been his most important sentence — in any case, it was the one that stayed in Ed’s memory from that night on the cot, and so he told Kruso about it. In addition, it occurred to Ed that he hadn’t yet learned how to swim at the time and he had felt a deep fear at the sight of the sea (he saw it for the first time on that trip). Kruso nodded and looked into his eyes. Robinson and Friday. They had returned.

  Their table stood so close to the bar that Kruso only had to turn around and reach for the bottle in order to refill their glasses. They spent a great deal of their time on ‘cleaning and mending hours’, as his companion put it. They cleared the drains, although these were hardly dirty; they chopped firewood, repaired the palisade around the Klausner, and tried to wash their laundry in the stone sink in the dishwashing station. Monika’s washing machine would not start. First Kruso had tried, then Ed. It was a WM 66, a model Ed knew from home and the usual one around the country. As a child, Ed had thought the WM stood for Weltmeisterschaft, the World Cup. He was convinced the machine had been named after the 1966 football World Cup. As with so much else, Ed had never asked any questions about it, and to some extent he was still that distracted, easily influenced child who believed the world resembled his own dreams.

  Of all the deserted rooms in the Klausner, only Mona’s two rooms seemed homey. Sometimes, Ed lay in her bed and pressed his face into the pillows. As he breathed in the smell of the sheets, he thought of C. Then he stopped thinking of C. and thought of G. Ed tried to remember sex with G. He was ashamed of how little he could recall. Two, three scenes, no more than that. Maybe it wasn’t important. It was just a matter of how grief filled space within him. And finally, it was a matter of not mixing anything up. His desire was just one part of it. A few images from the nights flitted past. Marén, Grit, Tille, the castaways’ stories in the dark. Sometimes, they were still there when he woke suddenly from sleep, and he had to pleasure himself two or three times in a row before he could fall back asleep. In the final moment, it was always C. Her laugh, her hiccupping, her raised eyebrows. C., the way she had looked at him.

  The days trickled into the sea. The delegation from the parent company whose visit Krombach had announced had still not arrived. Neither of the two friends answered the phone. After it had rung constantly one day, Kruso rushed into Krombach’s cubbyhole and ripped the cord from the wall. Ed no longer believed the Director of Hospitality would come. Everyone could guess that this was not the time for delegations and oversight committees. Even Vosskamp hadn’t shown up for days. It all fit Viola’s news reports and her commentaries about closure of all borders, before the beer glass hit her. Not long after, Kruso found confirmation for his thesis: how important it would be to hang on, to persevere, to build a base camp (he used that term), a base camp for everything that was now inevitable. Ed thought of his parents in Gera; he had begun to worry. They would believe he was still in Poland, at the International Student Summer, separated from them by one of the borders that had suddenly been closed.

  Ed now used the bicycle to buy supplies. He no longer needed the cart. Just a backpack for bread, milk, and a few additional things. They had everything else in their stores. He enjoyed riding through the forest and the descent on the road paved with concrete slabs, which could shake a person’s bones from his body and descale the brain (Rick’s theory). A few
days earlier, Ed had seen his companion in the village and immediately made a detour. It was as if he couldn’t meet Kruso outside of the Klausner. As if something might unavoidably be said that would call everything into question. Also, the truth was, he was embarrassed to have seen Kruso standing there between the metal carts in the harbour, prattling absently, his head bowed, like a shepherd surrounded by his herd. Kruso was gaunt, but his face was completely smooth, almost childlike. The grey hairs in the curl over his forehead seemed to multiply by the day.

  Back from his errands, Ed went to the kitchen and unpacked his backpack. A voice that seemed familiar (his own) came from the dishwashing station. He put things away in the refrigerator, and minutes later he was no longer sure if he’d really heard it or had just imagined it. He went quickly to the bar room to gather a few old schnapps glasses. Actually, everything was already done and there was no real work left to do, but Ed stayed at the bar and started rinsing out and putting away again the glasses on the top shelf that had not been used for a long time.

  The two of us, Ed hummed — he wanted to think over his next steps, about his responsibility for Kruso and the restaurant, but his head was empty. First the farewells, then the skeleton crew, then ‘two men, two valves’. He looked out at the empty terrace and saw himself framed, with a reverse look into the window at the bar. Wait here long enough and don’t go anywhere. Sonya’s words before she swam out to sea and turned into a green light.