Kruso

by Lutz Seiler

‘Please wait here and please help yourself.’

  He gestured toward a plate of biscuits with a thermos and two plastic cups next to it.

  He turned in the doorway.

  ‘With Novalis, the dead are the good ones, Mr Bendler!’ Then the sound of his feet on the stairs.

  Out in the room, a frenzy of flashing lights set in, a few hundred fluorescent bulbs flickered on. From my place on the bridge, I could see Henri combing the aisles. There was something off with his gait; a slight limp or just the sway of his weight. He pushed a kind of serving trolley in front of him with just the sheet of paper on it at first. The trolley made a deafening rattle on the stone floor, but the more Henri reached into the shelves the quieter it travelled along the aisles.

  After a time, he passed the bridge again. He looked up at me and called out: ‘Biscuits, Mr Bendler, help yourself to some biscuits!’ Then he turned right into the more modern section of the archive.

  Four or five enormous grey filing cabinets slid over the floor with a soft murmur. Madsen touched them lightly (evidently there was a keyboard) and they began to move faster like a caravan of steel elephants. The workbench vibrated and the Commodore PC crackled. Madsen moved between these monsters without haste, he was their tamer with brown coveralls and raised arms, and it was a miracle they didn’t crush him, or rather it was no miracle when you saw how elegantly the tall, heavy-set man glided through the narrow lanes. Now and again, there was a light, almost childlike lilt to his hips, and each turn was like a caress with a tender decisiveness. With each extension of his hand, another slipcase landed on his trolley

  All the convictions I’d carried with me on my trip vanished in that moment. I felt no trace of the loyalty that had perhaps only been a sense of duty, fed by an old guilt now barely measurable, no trace of the thrill of the promise and the will to keep it come what may, proof of being worth it, being worth the friendship — none of it played a role any longer. Just this moment of clear beauty, this — what else to call it — dance of death. As if I had come to this underground box only for this, an audience of one man in thirty years.

  Not just for Novalis, but also for Trakl, were the dead the good ones — I grasped it that very instant. Trakl was not just trauma, he was also longing. I wondered if it would be possible for me to get to the exit without being seen, if the code was necessary on the inside, too, if I could find the way upstairs without the source.

  No idea how what followed could be part of any report. When I picked up my Copenhagen notebook again in those days, I thought it was more likely that someone else who was interested in all this had written it, not me. Someone had noted it down hastily over several pages, like this:

  Foot in shoe, rotted stumps. As if bones had been bitten off, M.: tennis shoes act like life jacket. Rest of corpse missing

  Woman: no lips, no nose, face just teeth, arms black, covered with algae, M.: algae groundcover

  Male torso: full of holes, as if shot. Eels, says M., usual animal bite marks

  Woman like a rubber doll, bloated, fringes, shiny. M.: corpse wax, adipocere

  Woman with bare skull, worn away, abraded, skin on all sides, M.: scrape marks, abrasions, face against the ground

  Man in coat, white bubbles on his mouth, M.: foam from lungs

  Man with tree root on chest, black, like a tattoo, M.: subcutaneous hypostasis

  Person, gender unidentifiable, no contour, M.: boat propeller, shredded, disintegrated. 20 pages of text, photos, overview and details

  Male torso, M.: head and arm 4 km away, photographs of places of recovery, dismembered by animal bites, eaten, perhaps scattered by stray dogs.

  And so on.

  That’s how it was written, but I don’t remember it. Only what was said. Madsen’s talk was like a sound you hear in a dream. Sentence after sentence, without words. We all dreamt this sound: Madsen, the dead, and I. There was no message, no communication in it. It simply sounded in everything. It was in the half-darkness of the hall, in the labyrinth of shelves, in the photographs on the work bench, and only then did something that was said surface clearly.

  ‘Imagine, Ed, they lived down there. They sit at tables, they go on walks, they’re free, they’re all free.’

  ‘All these corpses, Ed, it was if they were gliding by in the darkness, precious, as if they were alive or holy.’

  I counted four green lights. Those were the emergency exits, two at each end of the hall. Every dream had to have an emergency exit or it wasn’t a dream. On the other hand, there were dreams of great clarity, dreams in which everything fit together, incredibly authentic.

  First, I recognised the shirt. He had worn it in the picture taken at the opening of the 1989 season. Then the gap between his front teeth. Then his hair, blond hair, strangely undamaged (angelic — the word was there without my having thought it up, and although I tried to erase it from my mind immediately I couldn’t get rid of it). His body, however, was blackened and bloated. Still, you could tell the deceased had been a thin, lanky man. Speiche.

  To make sure, I asked Madsen to translate the entire post-mortem and the police report. He understood that I had happened on something, someone I had found but hadn’t been looking for, but had found. His trouble had been worth it.

  He gave me a shred of Speiche’s shirt glued onto cardboard (the clothing card, Madsen said) and a bundle of hair as thick as a pencil in aluminium foil. A number was written on the heading of his file and I asked Madsen about it.

  ‘That’s the number of his grave. His number in the row grave.’

  ‘What does that mean, the row grave?’

  ‘That’s what we call the graveyards of the unidentified dead.’

  ‘Why row?’

  ‘The deceased are buried in rows. That way they can always be found using the coordinates in this number. It indicates the exact location where the body is buried. As you know, there are no gravestones on graves of the unidentified, no cross, just grass, nothing else.’

  ‘The bodies aren’t cremated?’

  ‘No. The deceased are waiting, after a fashion. I mean, on the chance that someone might come to claim their remains. Their graves are kept indefinitely, and these files here, too, are kept forever — not a single case is considered closed as long as we don’t have a name. At first, the bodies lie in dormitories in the forensics department, minus twenty degrees Celsius. Some for an entire year or longer. That has happened. At some point, they’re taken back to where they were found.’

  ‘Taken back?’

  ‘To where they washed ashore — the community is responsible for them, that’s the law. Stege was for them, the row graves in Stege, the largest town on Møn.’

  Freed from the narrow shelves, the files gave off peculiar fumes that clouded my awareness. It wasn’t the musty smell of age, nor the smell of glue or decay, no — the paper smelled ill. I breathed, in and out, that was the essential thing in this world, breathing evenly in and out. The dead were not lying at rest in Copenhagen, not in the Bispebjerg Kirkegård. In Copenhagen, they were given a post-mortem and all the files and reports stayed there. They themselves, however, travelled back to the sea, they were buried in the sea, provisionally, invisible, in a row.

  Copenhagen gave the impression of being an all-around solid city. The houses on the waterfront were built of brick, high-fired, Nordic. Now and then, a herd of broken-down bicycles leaning against the wall of a house, timidly huddled together, like some kind of animal that had found no bolthole. Twilight was falling, lit windows that fill one with longing even though the surroundings are foreign. I recognised the old longing for caves, for solitary happiness, hidden away in these rooms, at this table, in the light of this lamp, under which you can finally feel at peace, far removed from everyone and everything. After recognising Speiche, I concentrated all my willpower on one single point and told Madsen that I would like to come again �
� tomorrow, the day after, the day after that.

  I walked aimlessly for two or three hours, and darkness had fallen when I went in to a café called La Esquina. I ordered something, pulled out my notebook, and started recording everything, all that I’d seen and heard that afternoon. In the end, I even wrote down the name of the café and the address (Ryesgade 76) and that there were deer heads mounted on the walls from which the menus hung, and so on — all mechanically recorded. I looked around the café, at the counters and the people sitting outside, because I knew that I had to write it all down for myself. It was hard to set the pencil down, my wrist was stiff, but I kept writing, my fingers cramped, but I kept writing, I scratched line after line into the paper, all of Copenhagen, without a single thought.

  In the back room of La Esquina, there was a hairdressing salon, doubtless the café’s key feature. Through a glass door on which the outline of giant scissors had been glued, you could see the hairdresser at work. I had just begun to eat a sandwich (sandwich in one hand, pen in the other) when the hairdresser closed her shop. She had her coat on and was holding a small plastic garbage bag. She knelt down (very elegantly) and tried to fasten the tie, but she couldn’t manage it. When she passed my table, I saw that the bag was full of hair — overflowing with hair.

  She was still in the doorway when I caught up with her, but I couldn’t make it to some corner or even a metre away from her in time. To be precise, I threw up right at her feet. A young hairdresser, she had just finished work, was nicely dressed (and surely had plans to meet someone for dinner, a movie, a concert, or whatever), and I stumbled after her and vomited at her feet, her and me and her bag full of hair, this tangled mess, this tangled, blotchy hairball, this spotted, snarled clump of human detritus. She gave a little cry in Danish, a kind of raspy ‘ay’ sound, and called something into the café. As I threw up, I roared at her. In my mind, I roared at her and at the street, I roared into the Copenhagen night: Why are you bringing these corpses to my table? What was I supposed to do with these corpses? What?

  Months later, before I started writing this report, I saw the dead in a dream. They stood on my path in their fragmentary, almost indescribable condition (post-mortems resemble descriptions of paintings, Madsen had said), asking after their own names. Am I called Boat Propeller? Is my name Rubber Doll? Or is my name Walter? Or Monika? In my dream, it was as if the answer had to be found now, as if it were the last opportunity before the dead would retreat from the path, leaving no questions, no traces, as if they had never existed.

  But I had left Denmark. I did not return to the archive. From my report, it’s clear how unsuited I was for it all, how little I measured up to the task. A report full with negligible details, feelings, and thoughts noted down where facts were essential.

  There were other reasons as well. I had entered their space, the territory of the dead. By chance it was I, and writing was my defence, my shield, my cloak of invisibility — without my notebook, I would have seen nothing. They had not chosen me for this, nor had anyone else, I was aware of this. I was no researcher, no historian, I was not familiar with the ways of working through the past. I had simply followed a promise, the law of friendship, if you’d like, that’s all it was to start with: Kruso’s request. And only that. But then I’d crossed a line with the expression ‘the third disappearance’, when I began to think just so.

  Nonetheless, my reason returned as I wrote, and the dull burning in my stomach lessened. I went to the shed that lay at some distance from my house. I hadn’t entered it for a long time. A rotting carpet of pine needles lay in front of the door. After a while, I found what I was looking for, a pale-yellow postal box on a shelf full of children’s toys, bits of technological devices, fitness equipment that had never been used. A muffled sorrow hung over it all, stale and persistent. I opened the box. There was a large sticky moth cocoon in the jumper, and the suede shoes looked like they were covered with mould. I was wearing both when I left the island, and wore them later, too. In the bag’s inner lining, I found Speiche’s glasses — when I lay ill in the Klausner, I’d stuffed them in there at some point, and had not thought of them again, not for a second.

  Keeping these things could not have been anything more than an attempt to hide the fact from myself that I had used and worn out a few things that weren’t mine. If Speiche ever showed up one day, then I’d be able to … This or something along these lines must be what the person I was back then had thought for a short time, before he forgot the box all together.

  Although my actions were (to a certain extent) the opposite, I felt like a graverobber when I entered the cemetery with the box under my arm. I had just put the box down when someone behind me began calling in Russian. I didn’t look around, but the man came closer. He was wearing a uniform, his coat was open, and without a doubt he was drunk. I hastily assembled the remains of my schoolboy Russian (maybe twelve words, occasionally more) but didn’t use them. ‘Not drink, fascist!’ The Russian grabbed my arm and led me across the cemetery, past the golem, and over the long, sodden paths, to the grave that belong to him. He pointed at it.

  There were three of them, two women and him. The women wore coats and scarves over their heads, the older one had felt boots on her feet. They sat on a small sheet of plastic. A dishcloth was spread over the lower half of the grave on which chocolate, ham, and cigarettes had been spread out. A tin can was leaning against the headstone. ‘Drink-drink, comrade, five minutes — no fascist!’ He sliced his hand through the air in front of my chest, and with that it was decided. The vodka was called Parliament. They’d even brought glasses with gold rims. The soldier poured the first swallow in the grave’s upper-right-hand corner, next to the headstone. Then he lit two cigarettes. He stuck one in the grave, and it slowly burned down. The women spoke to the deceased, stroking the earth and blowing on the cigarette’s embers. Now and then, they whimpered softly, a kind of weeping that lasted a few seconds, then vodka again. The Russian nodded off. He looked satisfied. I stood up and said goodbye to the women — I believe I even bowed — and went back to my grave. I was happy to have been ‘no fascist’ and probably was drunk.

  I took the things out of the box one by one and wiped them off, at least provisionally. They’d served me well, yes, back when I had really needed them. ‘Really needed,’ I whispered to myself, and suddenly felt boundless gratitude streaming through me beneficially. Maybe it had nothing to do with Speiche anymore. For an imponderable moment, I saw my life as a whole, as one long story tied to these items, yes, at this moment they were the most exact expression of everything that had happened leading up to this day, this hour, this place: a pair of mouldy shoes, a bundle of wool, and a pair of spectacles with just one lens.

  ‘Forgive me, please forgive me.’ At some point, I began my speech. First, I apologised to Kruso — for not standing firm. I explained it to him. I tried not to leave anything out. I tried to summarise it all: fear and a crazy revulsion (revulsion for the dead) on the one hand, grief and a crazy sympathy (sympathy for the dead) on the other. Suddenly, I could speak. Because I was drunk, I added a few sentences I hadn’t planned, that I hadn’t ever spoken aloud before, about things that concerned only the two of us, Losh and me, we two. The tears weren’t planned either. Finally, I asked Kruso’s permission for the thing with Speiche. I explained what I’d planned to do (it was closely associated — Speiche, ‘the one from the home’, the orphan, at some point it had become clear to me that he had no relatives, that there would be no one other than me, his successor as dishwasher in the Klausner) and why it wouldn’t stain Valentina Krusowitsch’s memory or Sonya’s memory (that’s how I formulated it), on the contrary. I could now be here regularly and take charge as I’d promised. This would be the right place for the Found Department. Then I apologised to Speiche himself, first for taking his sweater and shoes. Then, as representative, for the slander, the mockery (Orphan Child, flunky, loser), all the mean-spirited jokes about someone w
ho was, as Kruso put it, ‘unsuitable above and beyond that as well’.

  Over the course of autumn, Wulf D. Wätjen from the church council in Copenhagen had written again. ‘I am still very sorry that I was not able to help you in your search …’ his letter began, and I have to admit that I was touched by this sentence. In the Danish newspaper Politiken, he had read about a project initiated by the Berlin Wall Museum. It was about GDR refugees who had fled to Denmark. The Museum had commissioned Jesper Clemmensen, the author of the recently published book Flugtrute Østersøen, to collect objects, names, and other details. Contact with the Berlin Wall Museum, Wätjen suggested, might help me make progress. I telephoned Jesper again, and he told me that the people in Berlin first wanted to pull together the relevant applications to find funding for the project. I pressed the receiver more tightly to my ear and claimed I was positive there would be funding for it, no end of money, ‘what else would it be for, Jesper?’

  The Russian cemetery was renovated that spring. The graves shine like new. The cemetery gates have been repainted as well (the two Soviet stars are now grey), and a stronger fence built to keep out the wild boar that rule the area.

  I usually just sit by the grave, and nothing much occurs to me. No hymns, no psalms. The woods are silent or they rustle with the old sentences.

  ‘The dead are waiting for us, Ed. What do you say to that?’

  or

  ‘Think of the green light.’

  or

  ‘Wait here long enough and don’t go anywhere.’

  ‘I promise,’ I murmur, and eventually Speiche and I start talking about the Klausner, work in the dishwashing station, ladles, Viola, Chef Mike, and something that could only be found there, on the island, and only at that time. And why he still had to try, why there had been no other way for him.

  When I have time, I stop on my way home at a diner called Rita’s, a shack on Highway 2, halfway to my house. There is a sawmill and a decommissioned railway station named Nesselgrund. And there is a turning area for lorries — actually, it’s just a very large open space, nothing but sand, three kilometres outside of Potsdam.