by Lutz Seiler
‘How lost, how abandoned one feels, yes?’ The humming changed.
‘Your particular susceptibility, call it receptivity, did not escape me, young man. Along with your perceptivity, your excitable temperament, let’s say, your fundamentally spiritual disposition. It’s the radiation that relaxes you, isn’t it? That returns you to the old days — sleepy villages, doors that open with a sigh …’
The humming swelled.
Ed saw himself on a mountain of sand, the world was made of sand, murmured languages that rolled out in search, also, of houses, bridges, and streets, murmured languages …
He saw himself as a child, saw how he would go out in the morning to the mound of sand in front of the barn in the back courtyard and sit on it. He would sit there all day and build houses, bridges, and streets, until the grownups came in the evening and marvelled at his sandcastle, which was enormous and contained everything that held the world together at its very core: a colourful glass marble shimmering softly and the spiral of a long, flawless track.
Twilight had half set in. The grownups’ praise, like balm, and their heads, large and dark under the swallows’ flight paths.
THE LAST ESSKAY
Ed had not bolted the front door or the servant’s entrance, so that Kruso wouldn’t be locked out. The terrace lights were lit. Some light fell on the playground, too. In the early dawn, the seesaw’s steel tubing towered into the sky like artillery before the battle.
Something moved in the house.
Ed stood at the window for a while, listening. The attack would come from the west, from the sea and up over the bluffs, always from a direction no one expects. As he decided to get dressed and light the stove, Ed barely understood how he could have slept that night.
First, the chopping block. Second, the stove. Third, coffee.
He took charge.
The wood quickly caught fire and burned well. He used the slender pieces of kindling that Kruso had made. Ed stared into the flames and warmed his face. He thought of his military service in the winter camp, sleeping in a squad tent with a pot-bellied stove in the centre. Twelve iron-frame beds and eleven soldiers asleep. He tried to see it that way. He was on duty, and the rest of the crew was asleep. The sea was frozen solid. The earth was frozen. They had had to dig the latrine with a pickaxe; the blows still reverberated in his arms. You were not allowed to sleep on stove duty. He wore his winter uniform. He heard the wild boar outside the tent. He stared at the glow of the embers on the sand in front of the oven. Then he fell asleep. No. He was on duty, dammit, he had to pull himself together. The embers’ glow on the sand must still be there.
Ed got some bread, butter, marmalade, and an onion from the kitchen. Some sort of noise.
He stood at the stove and listened.
The sea.
Just another kind of silence.
He generously spooned coffee into a cup and poured boiling water over it. Even as a child, he had heard other sounds behind the noises he himself made, voices calling softly, short Gregorian chants, which must come from those things that use such opportunities to switch with others. He also heard mockery and something that sounded like abruptly stifled laughter. For a while, it was possible to cover it all up with a louder noise, but sooner or later he had to become quiet again and the listening resumed.
It would have been easier to eat his breakfast right in the kitchen, but he carried it all to the bar room and sat down at the personnel table. My place, Ed thought. His first personnel breakfast seemed decades in the past. Next to his plate lay a receipt book. The skin between his fingers was so chapped, he could hardly feel the pencil. He wanted to make a list of things that needed to be done, but he couldn’t think of any. A few words flitted through his mind, and because he had wanted to write he started writing, three or four pages’ worth.
He chewed slowly and looked at the photographs of earlier crews. The camaraderie shining from their faces was unrecognisable. The oldest was hung high up, in the shadows, a few years were missing. More than a few of them must have died in the meantime, and so these were faces of the dead looking down at him. A dead person’s glance is always a little reproving — who had said that? Probably some clever waiter, or, no, a good bartender, someone like Rick.
Ed imagined a photograph of him and Losh, suntanned with gleaming, bare forearms. The two were laughing, and the caption read: Robinson and Friday playing chess, 1990.
‘After a bit of time up here, you know how to cross the water, boy.’ One of the dead had spoken from the shadows right under the bar-room ceiling, the crew of 1932. The man wore a white shirt and round, black-rimmed glasses; not much more of him was visible. He looked like Fernando Pessoa.
The noise was there again. Something was moving through the house, but not with footsteps, as if the Klausner itself had woken, a rumbling in the walls, a distant, muffled rattling deep in the stone foundation. ‘There, they discovered it,’ Ed murmured, ‘behind the inn, in the forest. The so-called forest inn high up on the bluff hid nothing other than a prehistoric being, in whose body a dishwasher had been trapped for the rest of his life …’
‘Arise, go to Nineveh …’ The Pessoa-man was talking again.
Ed stood up. He crouched down and tilted his head. He knelt in the corners, held his breath, and listened. Essentially, it was everywhere. Experimentally, he pressed his ear against the cast-iron side of the cash register, then against the bar; the beer cooler was still. He rushed through the house, but it was neither upstairs nor downstairs. It moved, it was nowhere.
Time to sit down, concentrate.
His eyes fell on the receipt book. Had he written that?
Yes.
No.
The onion.
He took little pointy and started peeling with stiff wrists. I need a ladder, Ed thought. He wanted to try to fix Viola, but he couldn’t even get the word ‘ladder’ down.
There was a kind of vibration, a muffled clattering, then again a groan, maybe a giggle, but very soft and roaming.
Ed pushed his breakfast things aside and pressed his ear to the table, his arms spread wide. He tried to hold very still. He looked like he’d just been shot. Caption: The Last Esskay. What he heard was a rushing sound, the usual rushing sound. It was always there, in him and in the objects. And he heard the soft rustle of his hair. The wood felt cool against his ear. He heard his blood, his heartbeat, and it calmed him: it’s just your clumsy old heart, Ed thought. Maybe the Klausner and I have become one overnight, topsy-turvy. He almost laughed.
He had to move around a bit. He carried his breakfast dishes into the kitchen and tried to recall Kruso’s lecture about writing. ‘Actually, what you want to do is sink completely, submerge yourself, but for now it’s enough just to move your hands in small circles underwater …’ Ed turned off the water. It was already pleasantly warm (good stove). He stared at his plate under the stream and felt a faint longing to put his ear against the wet rim of the sink. He asked himself fleetingly what he’d seen — what he might have seen behind him, near the shelves.
Too late.
LOVE
From that point on, just details. The force with which something hit him from behind. The weight and the breathing on the back of his neck. Rolling around on the floor and the animal strength that tried to push his head into the drain.
Ed gasped for air. He sputtered a ‘No-no’, then ‘Ow-owww, owww’ and a pathetic ‘Please’. In the midst of his pleading, his mouth dipped into the stringy slime in the drain grate. He spat and breathed some of it in — soap and rot.
There was no doubt: the animal from the wall was Kruso. He wheezed and his voice was hoarse. From the sink above him, water poured onto Ed’s head and made everything incomprehensible. Again and again, Kruso spat the word ‘betrayal’ at Ed’s neck, along with Rommstedt’s name and ‘told him everything, everything!’ His main word, however, was ‘bet
rayal’. Betrayal of Sonya, betrayal of the Klausner, ‘and of my mother, my mother …’ He paused at that point and switched to Russian. A feverish heat streamed from his body, and his breath smelled of illness.
‘Losh!’ A bubbling splutter.
Only then did Ed notice it: a stabbing pain in his hand. Little pointy. Still have to wash, have to finish washing — whether that was his thought or Kruso’s poetics of dishwashing was irrelevant. As he fell to the floor in that half-dreaming and then no longer comprehensible moment, his fist had closed around the blade. He had held tight to little pointy, pointlessly.
Kruso was kneeling on his back. He stuttered, repeated himself, far above Ed and the waterfall. Far below, Ed’s ribs on stone; they were going to crack. The Radiation Institute, the sanitation inspector — betrayal all around. Ed had stopped understanding what Kruso was saying for some time. The grate was pressing into his face and forcing it into a grimace — washed away, the word pulled him into the depths, washed away, into the sewage pit, into the amphibian’s realm, washed away like filth, garbage, greasy sauce, and now it was his turn … Grey slime was his friend. Grey, stringy slime that kept the rusty wires from tearing into his lips. He had other friends, the rest of his verse hoard, for example, brave helpers, ready, as always, to whisper something to him. A piece of advice, an idea, in the very last second.
‘And softly the dead woman’s hand
reaches into his mouth. Sonya’s smile is gentle and lovely …’
A muffled gong, and Kruso seemed to hover.
Ed heaved the heavy body to the side. He doubled up; he couldn’t breathe. The water kept pouring; he held his face under the stream and vomited into the sink. He tried to rinse out his mouth; he gagged, and spat.
Kruso lay on the ground as if felled, arms outstretched as if the Klausner’s dishwashing station were his final stop. There was blood in his hair, though not much, and it seemed already to be congealing. Little pointy had torn Kruso’s shirt near his hip, but there was only a scratch on his skin underneath. His flank had been hit, but not seriously. It had just been the surprise, the sudden pain: Kruso had reared up and banged his head full-force against the steel sink — more precisely, against the rusty steel frame that supported the sink …
It’s where he hit his head, Ed thought, a sensitive spot.
He slumped to the ground. He couldn’t stand, he had to wait. His heart was pounding. Only later did Ed ask himself how he could have got a grip on the little knife’s handle as his right arm shot backwards randomly.
The man on the ground was completely drenched. He looked very peaceful and relaxed. A light shuddering ran through his body, and Ed carefully felt his forehead. It was hot. Ed found no feeling he could trust, just a fresh wave of fear and panic. And the mechanism of worry that would support him on the basis of some experience he’d never actually had. And in it all was a feeling of disappointment — disappointment was the only feeling he trusted. But there was also a feeling of concern, once again, genuine concern, the concern of friendship, then disappointment anew, bitter and dark, and rage, and, deep within, helplessness. The whole insanity that he could no longer comprehend.
It took an eternity to move Kruso into Krombach’s cubbyhole, and used up the last of Ed’s remaining strength. He had put together a kind of dragging apparatus from a few Romans. Time and again, the wet body slipped away from him and hit the floor. ‘I’m sorry, please forgive me …’ Ed trembled with the effort. He was gagging the entire time, and he urgently needed to throw up.
In the cubbyhole, it looked like Krombach had intended to leave behind an accurate impression. It smelled of Exlepäng. Ed ran back to the dishwashing station and rinsed his mouth out again. His tongue was swollen and stuck to his gums. He picked up the little pointy and washed it. The clean-up-all-traces thought drifted through his mind, wan and unimportant.
Kruso lay in front of Krombach’s desk like a hunter’s prey. Beneath the worry, a sense of insult spread, cold and silent. The rage of rejection. Ed put the knife on Kruso’s chest and breathed deeply.
He thought of stills in a film. He, himself, was now in a film. He was the main character, the last Mohican. As deep as the insult cut into the Mohican’s flesh, the voiceover said as the camera showed a lone rider crossing the desert through two towering rock spires, something just as powerful must exist on its flip side. And it must reveal itself now, now or never, open and unguarded, at least for this instant: his love.
Ed stuck the knife into Kruso’s shirt.
Or what would you call this last …
Piece by piece, Ed cut the wet shirt from his body.
Kruso’s penis was swollen, but not fully erect. Ed tried to heave the large body onto the high mattress, but that seemed impossible. In a new attempt, Ed wedged himself between the sloping wall and the bed and created a kind of lever. First, he had to prop Kruso’s torso against the bed and make sure it didn’t slip off to the side or slump forward, which turned out to be a challenge. Eventually, Ed had no alternative but to grab Kruso’s hair to hold him upright while he danced around the bed to get leverage. As Ed pulled and tugged, Kruso came to. He immediately put his arms around Ed’s neck.
‘One man, two valves, Ed, sometimes that’s the way it is.’
Ed tried cautiously to take his head from Kruso’s embrace, and it worked. He circled the bed and lifted the long, hairy legs as heavy as tree trunks onto the bed.
‘Or just one, one valve is enough, Ed.’
Ed picked the blanket up from the floor and covered Kruso up to his chin. He tried to make him as comfortable as possible.
‘Edgar?’
‘One is enough, Losh, like you said. But now you have to rest.’
‘Why do the moon …’
‘And the man slide together …’
‘So submissively to sea?’
They had recited the last line together. As if it were their question.
Once again, Kruso reached his hand out to Ed. Ed looked at the little pointy on the table. Then the hand sank onto the covers, and Ed’s companion fell asleep.
‘I’m sorry, please forgive me …’
For a confused, indeterminate amount of time, Ed sat at Krombach’s desk and let the waves of shock roll over him. His next action was one of self-defence: he made up a little plate. A little plate, as his mother called it, is what she made for him when he was a child, lonely and sad, a single child in his single room, overwhelmed by his schoolwork and by life in general.
‘I’ll make you a little plate, Losh.’
He washed an apple, took little pointy, and cut the apple in slices, which he placed evenly on a saucer in the shape of a sun. As he did, he continuously murmured to himself, ‘I’m sorry, please forgive me …’ He tried to eat one of the apple slices himself, but couldn’t face putting anything in his mouth. A few tears ran down his cheeks.
He ran to the dishwashing station to rinse his mouth out yet again. He bent over the sink and cooled his face. The traces of the grate hurt. He had to be reasonable now.
He noticed the open doors of the dumb waiter, and the puddle on the floor. The dumb waiter, which was never used, which for years had simply been a recess in the wall, a place for Karola’s tea and a few cake tins during the noon rush! How long had Kruso hidden in it? Crouching in this cube. And how did he manage to raise and lower it topsy-turvy?
Kruso was asleep. Ed pulled Krombach’s chair cautiously up to the head of the bed and set the little plate on it.
‘I made you a little plate, Losh.’
A little plate signified affection and consolation, without intruding on the other’s sorrow.
‘Should I make you another little plate?’
He went to his room and took Sonya’s photograph from his notebook. The picture felt hot, as hot as Kruso’s forehead, but this came from Ed, caused by the cut on his hand, which now burned slightly. The
knife had hardly penetrated the dried, mouldy dishwasher skin, and the cut had hardly bled, only a thin, yellowish fluid had come out. Maybe, being a dishwasher, you no longer had any blood in your hands after a while, but instead just lye, liquid soap.
Ed placed the photograph on the chair so that Kruso would see it when he woke. He felt like a child stroking a half-dead bird he had just shot out of its nest.
Only then did he think of the telephone.
He had behaved as if Kruso were his possession. As if he alone were responsible. Because of some monstrous distortion, the world now consisted only of him and Kruso, only the two of them. Again, he felt nauseous.
Because he couldn’t decipher the number immediately, he tore the paper from the plastic envelope. The island doctor was fourth on Krombach’s list, a three-digit number. The telephone jack was half-broken, but he was able to plug in the wire. Ed pressed his ear to the receiver. For a time, he listened numbly to the changing tones, a short then a long, very long, drawn-out tone. As if someone would answer even if he hadn’t dialled.
WE WHO HAVE STAYED BEHIND
The carpet, the wall unit — as if he had walked into his parent’s living room. Mountains of dully gleaming artificial leather — the sitting-room suite. Like large animals in a little stall. Ed went to get some air. He could hardly breathe. It seemed even colder in the house than outside.
At first glance, the electrical appliances were missing. Television, stereo, speakers — the dark outlines of their absence on the polished veneer. Behind these, the wounds, the severed cables. A jigsaw, Ed guessed, or a drill. Surprisingly crude for a doctor’s house, or at least very different from the meticulous work his father would have spent hours on.
The house stood on exactly the spot where the island had been flooded and separated into two long ago. The private quarters were in the back; the rooms for the doctor’s practice faced the street. There were no chairs in the waiting room, just the scrapes from chair backs on the wall, and above them shiny grease spots where the patients’ heads had rested tiredly over the years. The long, unnerving wait for solace and death before they could finally return home.