by Lutz Seiler
On the last section of the steps, the one that hung over the beach, the wounded very nearly slipped from the soldiers’ grasp. Ed saw the Soviet muscles tremble, the tension under the uniforms, the general’s hand oddly contorted, his flapping coat — for a moment, he looked like a large, amusing puppetmaster, on whose strings the personnel table danced and with it the whole story of this endless season, accompanied by the dance of four young lackeys in sailor costumes. Kazakhs, perhaps, yes Kazakhs would be fitting, Ed thought.
He noticed that Kruso’s eyes were open — his broad face, smooth and white, with incredulous eyes; a youthful and yet leaden face, a child’s face with graveyard eyes, it was — Georg Trakl’s face. Only Ed and his madness could think such thoughts.
At first, there was no boat in sight, just the armoured cruiser, enormous in the fog, so Ed initially thought the men were simply going to push Kruso out to sea on the table top, all the way to the dark hull on which the number 141 was written. He had never seen such a large ship so close to shore. The bow towered above the water; the stern, however, hardly seemed to rise above water. Between them were two domes like cyclops skulls, from which a pair of gun barrels protruded, long and as thin as spears. Then Ed saw the dinghy. It was beached just a few hundred metres to the north, at Ed’s swimming spot, where there was a path to deep water that was somewhat free of stones.
Without thinking, Ed had put one foot on the bow. He belonged with Kruso if anyone did. First, the Kazakhs’ alarmed looks (he hated them at that moment), then the general’s hand on his shoulder. Not in acknowledgement, not in consolation.
Ed only grasped what happened from that point on in isolated images. The hovering drip. The metal barque. The handing off of the infusion. The dark hollow sound of the personnel table on the thwarts. The medic who took the bag from Ed’s hand without a word. The general’s shiny shoes half-sunk in the sand. A wave and the dark, wet hems of his trousers. The wet bottoms of his Soviet trousers — the story ended with this image, it contained the entire story.
The general’s hand had nailed him to the beach. He could still feel it when the dinghy was hauled onto the mothership and the diesel motor roared and the armoured cruiser or whatever that waterborne fortress was supposed to represent slowly picked up speed. His body became leaden. To lend his stiffness some kind of expression, Ed lowered his eyes. Rocks, algae, rotten hair. Heaviness flowed into him from every direction and the hammering of the diesel didn’t subside, it did not stop.
Then the shot.
The crazy boy in the harbour, mouth open wide and arms raised high, then the shot. The coachman Mäcki in the stall with a bottle and his bear-horse, then the shot. The counter-couple with their luggage and bags between bushes, right in the puzzle of the border, then the shot. Chris? Rolf? Speiche? The shot. Chef Mike with his family? And Rimbaud somewhere, neither reading nor writing? Then the shot. Mona and Cavallo on their way south — Rome, Naples, the Stazione Zoologica, then the shot.
Ed dropped to the ground as if he’d been hit, and pressed his face in the sand. For seconds, the surf was still, the landscape touched by thunder. Even the general had gone insane. The line of fire must have passed far over him, over the bluffs, the land — the entire hermetic space filled with echoes. The entire rotten space that was their home.
Another shot and its echo in the cove.
Then one shot after another in respectful succession. As if the guns were imitating a giant’s dying heartbeat. Between them, a faint whistling, like the sound of jets flying high above, almost in outer space. But no impacts; no explosions.
With each peal of thunder, the sky was raised slightly. Air streamed in. Ether of intoxicating freshness and purity. Ed tasted sand. A few strands of algae stuck to his face, and he could feel his constricted heart wanting to expand. Twenty-one claps of thunder. Maybe he was losing his mind. He finally surrendered, he tittered at the sand: Salute, salute!
Shipwreck, salute! Two valves, salute! Dishwashing station, salute!
Salute! Salute!
He had understood. It was a signal.
It could all fall apart.
RESURRECTION
9 November. He served in the bar room, but through the valves, which were bolted shut. He had established a provisional neatness, lit the stove, and made coffee. He did it all very slowly, one thing at a time, separating each movement. He made a provisional solyanka with brown bread on the side. Some parts of his body had trouble emerging from the state of shock into the usual flow, so he stalked stiffly back and forth between the bar and the tables. There was something accompanying him inside, using his eyes and his ears, with whatever he did, something that had to be treated very gently and very well.
Seven guests came on his first day. Calm, taciturn lovers of the island, loners who warmed their hands on their coffee cups and stared at the terrace through the net curtains while Ed washed cups and glasses or stood motionless at the bar, letting the tap run. The soft stream did him good, as did the gentle snorkelling and warbling of the overflow’s waterfall. If anyone spoke to him, Ed answered, ‘Exactly!’ or ‘Why not?’, as if he, too, were in the midst of life. There were even moments when he forgot everything and fantasised about running an inn on his own. Maybe the control commission from Berlin-Schweineöde would never show …
His last guest was a young woman who asked for Kruso in the way that castaways by the dozens had asked for the king of the island. She was very short and had long brown hair, wet with rain. For two seconds, Ed pictured her in his room, her hair on his pillows. Then he gruffly pointed out that the season had ended. November — the end of every season, he emphasised unnecessarily.
It was also unnecessary to shout at the small woman. His name wasn’t Rimbaud. His pain, his grief — the entire loss. He was ashamed. He thought of the last castaway in his room, a woman named B., who had slept in his room the nights before Island Day, the day of the parade, the day that was the beginning of the end. She had been at least forty, maybe even older. There was hardly a sentence from B. that was not accompanied by a puff of smoke. She was a chain-smoker. She said she didn’t want to be a maid-of-all-work anymore — on the other hand, it’s also nice to be a maid-of-all-work. She talked and quoted Losh: ‘Scrapped and valuable people. The enlightened and shady characters.’ There was something dismissive about her; she was in the process of throwing everything away. Ed slept on the floor, B. in his bed. She slept, woke up, talked and smoked, then slept again. At some point in the night, Ed imagined he could taste B.’s smoky mouth. Even in the darkness, he could recognise her small, hooked nose and her long, straight neck that became, almost without transition, the back of her head, as if she had no occipital bone, just endless neck that constantly whispered to him: lay your hand on it, go ahead, lay the flat of your hand on it. B. laughed about Kruso. She called him, ‘His Majesty, Lord and Master of the entire island.’ She also called him a rag-picker, and compared the allocation with the last bus home but without anyone being able to say what or where home was. Freedom Inn? Boarding House of Lost Souls? She prattled on about such things without interruption, blowing smoke. It was all a game to her, an intermezzo. She said she had no intention of making jewellery for anyone and had turned down the sacred soup. She said, ‘I’m not going to eat my soup,’ and laughed. She added that she had her own ways of getting intoxicated, without alchemy, and, besides, the sacred soup smelled like shit. Ed was offended, although he had to admit the soup did not smell good. Ed thought B. was in distress. She’d been married twelve years and had got divorced three months earlier. It was her decision, she said. On the day they separated, she hadn’t been able to sleep from excitement and joy. They still got along, she said, still saw each other now and then. Ed was completely stiff with exhaustion, stiff. Twelve years. Her husband was jealous but had always had a bit on the side. Because she always danced so ecstatically, people often thought she was out of her mind, especially at the office Christmas par
ty. But she wasn’t crazy, not in the least. However, she wasn’t getting ahead. And now she couldn’t imagine anything else. Here she had nothing to lose. Here there was just this island. The last place.
In the evening, Ed locked all the doors and drew the curtains. He wrote with Chef Mike’s grease pencil on a piece of cardboard — CLOSED DUE TO STAFF SHORTAGE — and stuck it behind the glass of the drinks valve. He blocked the entrance to servants’ staircase with Monika’s ironing board.
There was no one left.
He went to his room, gathered his things, and brought them all downstairs to Krombach’s office, where he wanted to sleep from this point on in a cloud of Exlepäng, in the heart of the Klausner. He locked the swinging doors to the kitchen, but left the door to the cubbyhole open so that he had a few metres of open view at night as well.
I saw you coming. Those had been Kruso’s words at night on the beach after the baptism of the esskays, shortly before the kiss — he had only been dreamed up, had only been another person’s dream. A Friday envisioned by Crusoe in sleep, in his longing.
The bed smelled of sweat. Ed wrapped himself up and stared into the darkness. He had only been dreamed up. But now they’d taken the dreamer away and so Ed couldn’t really exist.
Voices woke him the following morning. When he entered the bar room, they fell silent, but at breakfast they were there again. The voices were coming from the photographs of former crews. Nothing that should worry him. No threats, no vulgar remarks, just simple, well-intentioned advice like: ‘Don’t do anything stupid, kiddo!’ (from high up on the right; the year was barely legible, maybe 1930) or ‘You should take off, whippersnapper’ (1977) or ‘Do something about Viola, man’ (1984). This last comment sounded like it came from the dead cook whose radio Viola had once been. A giant of a man in crisp whites, on the far left in the picture, still not aware he would soon drown. But since then, he had found out everything, Ed thought; he saw all the crews that followed him, and now he saw Ed, the last 89er, who was not taking care of his radio.
Ed spread jam on a slice of brown bread. They had frozen a lot of it. The time of breakfast rolls was over. He had sawed himself a slice from the five-kilo block of mixed-berry jam, enough to last three or four winters. Finding food would be no problem; he had a sure supply. He could stay here forever, could keep his promise.
He had taken to sitting in his old place again. He had pushed another table to where the personnel table had been, and placed the chairs around it. Twelve chairs — a one-man crew. A room filled with absence.
He brought his dishes to the sink and whispered a few lines into it. ‘My good Kruso. My dear Losh.’
He remembered the list of things he had to do. The Kazakhs had stolen the receipt book. No, it was on the windowsill behind him, and next to it was his pen and the ashtray, put aside neatly. The good Kazakhs. He read the list, but it was no list. And not from him. But it was his writing. He read. Three pages of the receipt book, written in Kruso’s tone, not by Kruso. He read.
He went back to the dishwashing station and turned on the water. He gathered plates, cutlery, and glasses, and began drawing circles with his hands on the bottom of the sink. ‘Good man. Dear man.’
After a while, he dried his hands on the Roman and got the large notebook from his room. He looked at the light-blue grid on the pages. The book lay half on Krombach’s side, half on Monika’s. He turned it this way then that, first towards Cavallo, then towards Chef Mike, and finally towards himself.
Look, everyone: a present from G.
He leafed backwards and rubbed his hand over the old entries. He caressed them; he caressed G. He could now simply think of her. With his worn fingertip, he could feel the indentation from the ballpoint pen, the way the writing had been impressed into rough, woody paper. She was gone, and he thought the actual word, gone.
No one left. Ed stood up and put on his Thälmann jacket. He was wearing it for the first time since he had arrived on the island — the weather was cold enough. He made sure no one was standing outside the door or in the courtyard, some hiker who might not want to respect the closed sign. He resembled a hermit, full of mistrust. A strong wind buffeted his face. He hesitated then took the path to the bluffs.
Walking did him good. The roar of the surf became louder as he descended. The breakers thundered, and a howling had set in, soft at first, then louder, a whistling that rose and fell as if the general’s shots had been deflected into an orbit. Kruso’s bottles, Ed thought. That toots, it does. That toots them moles in the noggin.
He couldn’t think anymore; he could only walk. He grabbed his temples as if he had to remember something or as if he were greeting the sea in that old, almost forgotten customary way. The endless roar — it now penetrated him directly and tried to erase his memory. ‘We walk a-long the great wide sea, ’til-the-sun-sets-hap-pi-ly …’ Mother, Father, and Ed-the-child between them, their bright, shining faces, all three walking in step on the sand of Göhren, on the island of Rügen — the only memory that came to his assistance.
All of a sudden, his walk stopped. The beach had disappeared. Instead of the mountain of loam, there was a giant avalanche that extended far into the sea. A section of more than a hundred metres of the coastline had broken off. A few boulders as tall as a man stuck out like the skulls of submerged giants, and between them lay uprooted trees and shrubs. Ed noticed the delta at his feet. There wasn’t the slightest trace of where the fox was buried.
Old rascal.
Gaffer.
Ed imagined his fox protecting the folder with his leathery body, and he heard the poems whispering softly deep in the earth. He understood each word and repeated it, and soon his talk expanded beyond the line ends and reached out into the breakers. He declaimed the poems forcefully against the surf; he became cocky and almost fell. Shaken, he fell silent and understood: what the least, the only thing he had left to do was. For Losh. For Kruso.
Three days later, on the evening of the twelfth of November, his notebook was filled, single-spaced, a line in every square, covered with writing. He hadn’t slept; he had worked day and night. Sometimes, he sat at the personnel table, more often in the dishwashing station at the sink for coarse cleaning or the sink for cutlery, always switching between his side and Kruso’s. ‘Actually, what you’d most like is to sink completely, to be submerged, but in the meantime the little circles your hands make in the water are enough … An enormous loss, that’s what it feels like. But nothing is really lost, no one is, Ed, no one. You just keep on talking softly to yourself, with your own voice, you knock at the words’ door with your voice. Hundreds of times, to yourself. And at some point you’ll hear it …’
In the end, Ed had washed the entire stock of cutlery, pots, glasses, and dishes again. His hands were disintegrating, his fingers like those on a drowned corpse. ‘I have to arrange them into one volume. There’s nothing better than compiling a volume of poetry, you know, Ed?’
Ed climbed through the trapdoor behind the bar and brought up a pile of Klausner letterhead. He took Krombach’s Torpedo from the cabinet and began. He sat at the typewriter the entire night. Certain letters had bloody caps. In the morning, the job was done. Maybe not word for word and not every line, but Ed could hear that it was right, he heard the tone. ‘The two of us,’ Ed murmured.
Writing had emptied him out. A feeling as if there was nothing left to do in life. He crept straight to bed and fell into a deep, dreamless sleep.
Barking woke him in the evening. One of Vosskamp’s dogs. It was barking mechanically, without stopping. Maybe a fox near the security gate, Ed thought, or wild boar. Maybe there are only animals left, animals and me. The thought was oddly comforting. He wrapped himself in his blanket and wanted to fall back asleep, but there was knocking at the door.
The control commission.
Ed stayed still for a while and listened to the rain. No one there anymore.
Then someone knocked again.
Ed turned on the outside lights and peered through curtains. The good soldier was at the door. He was in his dress uniform and did not have his gun.
‘Be well, Ed, good luck,’ the good soldier said.
‘What’s going on?’ Ed asked.
‘I’m just wanted to say good luck in case you weren’t here tomorrow. So, good luck.’
Ed had no idea what to say, and rested his hand against the door.
‘Good luck,’ he finally murmured, and ‘I’m sorry,’ without knowing why. The good soldier turned and disappeared into the night. Ed watched him go. He took the shortcut, the narrow path through the Svantovit Gorge, straight to the barracks.
‘Good luck.’
He stood in the doorway a few minutes and listened.
Then he made his way to the dishwashing station to get the bottle of skin cream. The skin was peeling away from his fingertips, and two of his nail beds were inflamed, covered in tiny red bulges. Maybe I was too generous with the cream, Ed thought. He rubbed some of the cloudy slime between his fingers and clapped his hand a few times. Silence fell again immediately, so it started taking effort to clap. Silence demanded silence, that’s how it was, ‘and that’s how it always has been,’ Ed murmured. On the other hand, the clapping felt good. It warmed his hands; blood hummed in his fingers, clapping bolstered his spirits. So he kept clapping as he wandered aimlessly through the darkened Klausner — like a damned spirit rattling its chains, Ed thought. He clapped and pictured Ettenburg, the Ur-hermit, whose ashes had been strewn over the sea — Ettenburg, the revenant. He walked along the bluffs in his monk’s habit. Now and then, he rammed his foot despairingly into the sand and a large chunk of land would break off and slide into the sea. It was his revenge; bit by bit, the island would vanish into the sea.