Kruso

by Lutz Seiler

  Ed climbed the servants’ staircase to the top floor. The wind had freshened the room. Kruso’s curtains swayed. Ed tried to stick his ruined fingertips into the coarse netting, but the curtain would not be calmed. On the night of the last allocation, Ed had slipped into Kruso’s room and looked down at the terrace. The cowl he had draped over Kruso had seemingly melted in the rain into a mirror, shaken now and again by a tremor, a kind of stutter in his back, a cold, wet, lonely stutter. This had pained Ed, but he had still gone to sleep in his own bed. He had only wanted to rest for a moment, just to dry his hair, and rub cream into his hands …

  Hesitantly, he started clapping again. He was careful not to get too close to the window again.

  No one left.

  No one left.

  When Ed went back downstairs, the manuscript caught his eye. Kruso’s Collection. His book. Ed smiled at it across the bar room. In some way, it had taken over the old crew’s place, the place of their collective absence, of their old life in its entirety even though it was nothing more than a small pile of paper, writing with bloody caps, neatly stacked. All of a sudden, Ed had a past.

  The gate to the barracks was not locked. The dog run was empty. No guard, no dogs, just the smell of dogs, the smell of a kennel and rotten meat. A light was on in the sentry post, but there was no one there either. Ed entered the compound tentatively. The garages were deathly silent. A Robur truck, a field kitchen, a military motorcycle, and the cycling patrol’s bicycles. Next to these were a coal bucket and bags of coal, set out as if in anticipation of discovery by a future civilisation.

  Then he heard it.

  It came from the ground, from the moraine at the foot of the watchtower. Ed circled the small, roughly cone-shaped hill and found an entrance covered with netting. Two doors covered with steel levers, unlocked, and a third, closed door with a small square window at eye level.

  ‘Out on the breakwater, they looked over the wide, wide sea, out on the breakwater, hearts heavy with longing …’

  The bunker was panelled with wood all the way to the ceiling, like a house bar or a basement workshop — narrow, finely sanded boards with a thick coat of varnish that formed farmhouse-type benches along the side walls and an extra, roofed counter at the gable end of the room. On the bar shelves, Ed saw a television’s shimmering green screen. It was turned off. Cola Bar was burned in ornate script into the wood above the counter. Next to the television, there were beer mugs covered with disassembled clothes pegs and an array of wooden craft items, arched candle holders, and Erzgebirge Christmas decorations, enveloped in a thick cloud of cigarette smoke.

  ‘Out on the breakwater …’

  Only two seconds, but Ed had recognised Vosskamp immediately, his cap pushed far over his ear, and next to him, the good soldier; the entire observation company was gathered in the hobby bunker, arm in arm, and on the floor a guard dog was stretched out as if exhausted.

  ‘Out on the breakwater, Annegret waits in the evening …’

  Twenty men, Ed guessed, and a hundred bottles. Vosskamp was conducting. A corporal had slumped to the side and fallen asleep on one of the benches, his arms bent over his head. It looked like a victory celebration; as if a war had ended.

  One of the dogs started in.

  There had been a flash amid the windswept trees, a magical light. ‘Ahoy, ahoy, the wide, wide sea,’ drifted up from the bunker moraine. Someone had opened the door. The sound of barking was approaching as Ed overcame his fear and reached for the first iron ladder.

  The watchtower was manned day and night, Kruso had explained to him. But the searchlight was turned off and no one stood at the telescope. Every step sent a dark roll of thunder through the structure, which seemed to sway slightly.

  Ed had seen the glow halfway there. But it wasn’t coming from the lights on the frigate or from the patrol boats. Where there was otherwise only blackness, lights flashed in every colour — red, yellow, blue, and, yes: green, green, everywhere green, the green light …

  ‘The dead!’ Ed exclaimed in a whisper. He was probably losing his mind.

  The dead had risen — there was no room for any other thought in his head after all that had happened. ‘Look at the signals,’ Ed murmured. The entire bay was full of them, risen, back from below ground, from their flight, from the place they’d been waiting all this time for this day — the sea had set free its dead.

  ‘Ahoy,’ Ed whispered, then again, ‘Ahoy there, ahoy!’

  Kruso was right. None were lost. None had gone missing forever.

  ‘Ahoy, dear Sonya! Ahoy there, little G.!’

  No wonder there was a celebration. No wonder they were singing in the bunker. ‘No wonder!’ Ed shouted joyfully and felt faint. He grabbed onto the railing; he hugged the searchlight. He wept and finally understood: no wonder.

  He couldn’t remember what happened next. It was unclear how he regained consciousness, how he made his way down the ladder. He found himself back on the ground, at the gate. One of the dogs leapt at him. He threw up his hands, and the dog fell back into the darkness without a sound; as if it had never really been there at all.

  He fell, got up, kept on running. He dragged the first table he could into the kitchen, set a stool on top of it, and pulled the beer mug out of the radio.

  A smell of mould streamed from the radio case. All he had to do was bend the silvery tubes back to their original position. Viola came to — she still worked.

  ‘Eight o’clock. West German radio, the news.’

  Like a performer in a complicated cabaret, Ed crouched high up near the radio. In the Klausner’s kitchen, in the middle of Chef Mike’s realm. A lonely, comical figure, but also loyal and perhaps brave.

  For a while, Ed wasn’t sure he understood. But he knew Viola’s voice, and she helped him calm his breathing.

  All the borders were open. They had been open for days.

  EPILOGUE

  MISSING DEPARTMENT

  (EDGAR’S REPORT)

  I learned of Kruso’s death in 1993, on August 23rd. The following morning, I drove towards Potsdam to the Russian cemetery on highway B2 to look for the grave of his mother, who had been a performer in the Red Army. I’d been living not far from there for some time, just a few minutes by car, a half-hour through the woods on foot.

  The cemetery lay on a hill among fir trees that stood like columns between the graves, offering shelter and shade. Still, the area had changed greatly in recent years — even 1993 seems long ago now. Back then, when it happened to Kruso, I had no influence on the course things took. It’s important to me to state that again, just that. All the circumstances have been explained, as difficult as it is for me to conclude with this. The circumstances don’t belong in this report.

  I had no point of reference, so I searched the entire area. The officers were buried in the front, near the road, behind them were the soldiers, then the children’s plots, and finally, all the way in the back near the fence, the women’s graves. Many of the graves’ borders were broken, the stones shifted and covered with pine needles. In the middle of the cemetery, there was a grove of honour, guarded by a kind of golem, a cast-iron Red Army soldier, four or five metres tall, with a helmet and a machine gun. This fearless figure was completely focused on the main entrance, to cow with his cast-iron glance anyone who might wish to enter the area without respect.

  There were all sorts of toys on the children’s graves, plastic cars, rubber dolls, and teddy bears leaning against the gravestones, their legs covered with moss. Soldiers who had died together were also buried together, according to the inscriptions — one company until the end. Often the cause was a downed plane, and the silhouettes of the plane models (bomber, MiG, cargo jet) were engraved in the headstone above the names. Some headstones had portraits, small oval photographs behind glass and bordered in stainless steel. Others had only names, no dates of birth or death — executed d
eserters, I learned later.

  The further away I went from the golem, the softer and thicker the moss on the gravestones became. There were many soldiers who had died very young, especially in the years 1958 and 1959. I could not make sense of that. Even stranger was the large number of children. There was a pinwheel stuck in one of the graves, a little plastic pitchfork in another. I found the tightrope artist’s grave near a mound of roots and earth where wreaths and flowers were composted.

  I stood there for a while. I have an exact memory of that moment. The day was warm. The fir trees’ bark was peeling off in the sun, making a crackling noise as small, light-brown flakes whirled to the ground, as opaque as skin in the light, and I imagined Sonya doing her magic tricks beside the open grave. Then, the salute into the dome of firs, and Kruso-the-child, unable to cry or say goodbye. Without admitting it to myself completely, I had been convinced (or afraid) that I would see Sonya’s name under her mother’s on the gravestone. Sonya Valentina Krusowitsch, Kruso’s sister.

  ‘And if ever I’m not here for a while, then — take charge. Promise me that,’ Kruso had said. It was as if his death had finally put my promise into effect, and maybe that’s the reason I happened on the book (everything is by chance). A few days later, on one of my aimless searches through the shelves in the city library, I read the title: Across the Baltic Sea to Freedom. The sea-grey jacket bore the subtitle Dramatic Tales of Escape. The book was on the ‘Recent Acquisitions’ shelf, near the entrance, almost impossible to miss. In the appendix, there was an interview: ‘Stranded on Klintholm: Harbourmaster Erik Jensen Recounts’. I picked up the book and retreated behind the newspaper stand, where there was a small reading nook with soft brown upholstered chairs in which a few retirees and homeless people spent their days.

  The interview with the harbourmaster concerned East German refugees who had landed on Møn. He talked about broken dinghies and crushed folding canoes with no crew. And about the dead who washed up on Klintholm, ‘on his doorstep,’ he said, or who had been hauled in by bottom-trawling Danish fishermen, or who had been pulled from the water over the years. Nowhere were there so many as between Rügen and Møn, the harbourmaster said.

  ‘We brought them on land here and then to the Forensic Institute in Copenhagen.’

  ‘Could a relative of a missing GDR refugee still find out about their fate today?’

  ‘If he knows the approximate date of their escape and can provide a description or a photograph, then it might be possible. Descriptions of the dead are kept in the Forensic Medicine Institute of Copenhagen University, Rigshospitalet, Blegdamsvej 9, Copenhagen.’

  I changed some money and bought a map, on which I drew the way with a ballpoint pen. On the seventh of September, I took the ferry from Rostock to Gedser in Denmark, and from there to Copenhagen, to Rigshospitalet. The cost of the crossing alone blew my budget. The country, the city, they were all new to me, and I occasionally had the feeling of being on an expedition, a voyage of discovery, a test, perhaps, but that does not belong in this report either.

  The main building of the National Hospital was a grey building of steel and glass, about twenty stories tall. The woman at the information desk did not understand me at first — because of my bad English. She switched to German and explained the basics, and the forensic department’s location and office hours. Her friendliness was reassuring, but the institute had just closed.

  I drove along a road that passed directly in front of the forensic medicine building, Frederik V’s Vej, a peaceful neighbourhood. There was a park right next door, with a football game in progress. The Rigshospitalet compound seemed enormous, a kind of hospital-Manhattan, surrounded by open areas that symbolised the Hudson. I took a turn through the park and took a picture of a bicycle that had a big black hutch attached to it like a rickshaw. I treated myself to a cup of coffee and started to calm down. I sat on a bench near the football pitch and made some notes — consultation times, the name of the street, the neighbourhood, and so on. My intention was to be meticulous about everything. I didn’t want to miss anything. If you’ve promised something, you have to deliver — the childish maxim. Or perhaps not, it was more of a parental maxim, the goal of a certain kind of upbringing that later could only be quoted ironically for reasons I didn’t need to think about because I was certain and my goal was clear. I ate the last of the sandwiches I’d brought with me, and returned to the car to set up for the night.

  A good three years earlier, my parents had left me their old car, a 1971 Shiguli, which, as I knew from my childhood, was very well suited to sleeping in because the backrest of the front seat lined up perfectly with the surface of the rear seat when folded back. There were no headrests or bucket seats at the time, at least not in cars from Togliatti. The Russians had named their car manufacturing city after the Italian communist Palmiro Togliatti. Furthermore, the cars were built on Italian licence, ‘modelled on the Fiat 124, 1966 car of the year!’ — my father had told me these facts an endless number of times when we were driving in the Shiguli, so often, in fact, that they still whirred through my mind now that the valuable car belonged to me and that I was the one behind the wheel, as if these facts were a necessary component of the car, as indispensable as the wheels or the stick shift. What I liked most was the wonderfully soft brown artificial leather, stitched together in stripes, which still smelled of my childhood, of driving and sleeping stretched out on the backseat with my feet against one door, my head against the other.

  But my report is not about this either. I was exhausted and could have dropped off to sleep then and there, but I wanted to wait at least until darkness fell. I took one more turn around the grounds of the Rigshospitalet. In front of the wards, there were elongated pools with nervous little fountains. Over the entrance to the forensics department was a sign that read ‘Teilum-bygningen’. The woman at the information desk had also said ‘Teilum’. For me, it was the Museum of the Drowned. The expression had first occurred to me when I was reading the interview with the harbourmaster, and I hadn’t been able to get it out of my head since.

  The ‘Teilum’ didn’t look like a museum, nor did it look like a morgue. It was a new five-storey building with a façade made of gravel concrete, as were the planters to the left and right of the entrance, in which tiny gingko trees struggled to survive. Through the glass doors of the front and back entrances, you could see the foyer and the adjoining hallways. In the spacious corridors, seating areas furnished with colourful shell chairs in light blue, green, and red had been set up behind folding screens. It was inconceivable that anyone had ever used one of these areas. A lemon-yellow spiral staircase led down to where the dead were probably kept.

  When I pulled my forehead away from the glass and took a step back to photograph the ‘Teilum’ and its desperate colourfulness, which inspired in me a sense of respect that was hard to express (was it perhaps possible to deal with death in a more modern, more optimistic way?), a man came up to me on a bicycle. Without dismounting, he asked me something, probably what I was doing there. He wore a grey security-guard uniform that looked like a locksmith’s work clothes. He was grey, too: grey hair, grey complexion. I answered in English. I explained that I was a German writer doing research for a book about the dead, ‘about the bodies who came here in former times,’ I stammered. At that, the security guard wished me luck and went on his way. He set off at a considerable pace, bent far over the handlebars. There must have been some kind of bike race. Suddenly, I realised he had already passed me several times while I was trying to scout out the Museum of the Drowned more thoroughly.

  I climbed into the Shiguli and soon fell asleep. Overhead, the rustling trees of the Fælledparken (the name in my notebook). The next morning, I tidied myself up as best I could. Water from the water bottle, teeth brushed behind the car’s open trunk. I changed my shirt and tried to smooth out the wrinkles. Then I went into the park, but the coffee kiosk was closed.

 
I found a last apple in the car. I contemplated whether it would help my cause to stick to my cover of being a writer, in any case, it seemed to make more of an impression. I had a folder with Sonya’s picture, and I’d prepared an explanatory text in English that was meant to explain why I could claim to be a ‘relative’. And I had gathered Sonya’s personal information (as much as I knew), along with the presumed date of her escape, her presumed escape. I opened the folder again, but couldn’t concentrate, and just picked a few drops of wax off Sonya’s crumpled face.

  ‘Blow them out, dammit!’

  ‘You have to blow them out, Ed!’

  I tried to brace myself. My head was filled with zombies and body parts. I pictured Sonya’s dead body in a morgue refrigerator ‘on the kingdom’s good ice’ — utterly absurd, yes, and suddenly it seemed no less absurd of me to have come here, naïve and ignorant as I was. But, still, not without reason. Yes, I would take charge, and naturally I hoped I wouldn’t find Sonya.

  I wandered through the hallways on the ground floor for a while — Auditorium 1, Auditorium 2, the doors were open, a sweetish smell hung in the air. The offices were on the floor above, where there was a kind of waiting area with a cloakroom and a reception desk with two secretaries, one younger and one older.

  I started reciting the sentences I’d memorised (my bad English). Even before I could open my folder, the younger secretary reached for the telephone.

  ‘Doctor Sørensen?’

  Dr Sørensen spoke German and for that I was instantly grateful to him. In his building, around 3,000 post-mortems were done a year, of course, some might have been drowned refugees found on the coast of Zealand, Lolland, or Falster. He had vague memories of a few cases, but unfortunately only the police had access to the files … Sørensen wore a white shirt with a large point collar. He tilted his head as he talked, and nodded a few times in a ‘things-are-what-they-are’ kind of way.