To Die in Spring

by Ralf Rothmann

  Walter drank again from the bitter wine. ‘Of course,’ he said. ‘So did we all.’

  Elisabeth took a deep breath. ‘Oh, no, not you,’ she said and turned the light on. There was a charred spot where the bulb touched the plissé shade. ‘Absolutely not you, my boy. You’ve got the best thing of all – me!’ Smiling, she ruffled his hair and reached into her bedside table, in which dozens of packs of cigarettes were stacked, handing him a bar of chocolate. When she went to the bathroom, he saw a glistening streak on her thigh. ‘Don’t throw the silver paper away,’ she called from behind the curtain. ‘I collect it.’

  He didn’t ask what for, and tore the packaging open. Too hungry to let the Cadbury’s bar melt in his mouth, he chewed it greedily like bread. It tasted of rum and raisins, and while Elisabeth let the bathwater run so that he couldn’t hear her peeing, he smelled the pillowcase again and couldn’t help sneezing. He picked a few reddish cat hairs from his lips and looked around her room, at the wardrobe with the suitcase on top of it, the little table under the dormer, the shelf on the wall. Apart from some ornaments and a candle, there were books on it. A few Brockhaus volumes, Grand Hotel by Vicki Baum, Beneath the Wheel by Hermann Hesse, an old Bible.

  A bell rang in the taproom. Elisabeth washed herself, spluttering and shivering; Walter reached up and flicked through the worn leather volume. It had faded gilt edging and some of the corners were turned down. Dried autumn leaves and a few inflation banknotes from 1923 slipped out from between the pages, in denominations of several million, and when Walter ran his hand over a psalm he could feel the letters under his fingertips.

  He had never read the Bible before. He struggled to decipher the gothic script, particularly since the words on the following or previous pages showed through the thin paper. Words like hind or Leviathan meant nothing to him, and often he only vaguely grasped what each sentence was trying to convey . . . but their cadence, all their repetitions, nonetheless exerted a sort of gravity upon him, and soon he felt as though the rhythm of his breathing was being altered, as though the verses were compelling his lips to move; he took a sip then and read a few lines from the first book of Moses at a conversational volume – and the faint echo this caused in the cup made it sound as if someone was speaking along with him.

  Elisabeth stepped out from behind the waxed cloth. ‘What’s that you said?’

  But he didn’t reply, only scratched the spot with his thumbnail and set the Bible back on the shelf, making the plank shake slightly. ‘I inherited all those old books,’ Elisabeth said proudly, pulling a nightdress over her head. She had removed her pearls, and the holes in her ears were red. ‘A student used to live here. A poor poet. Apparently his bed never got cold. By the way: were you careful?’

  ‘What about?’ Walter asked, taking another bite of the chocolate as Elisabeth lit a cigarette. There was a stern wrinkle over her nose, but her thin mouth seemed to be smiling.

  ‘Oh terrific! And what happens if I get pregnant?’

  He shrugged. ‘Then you’ll put on weight. But only for nine months.’

  ‘Oho! What a nerve on this guy!’ She blew smoke at the lamp. ‘He makes you fall in love with him and then he thinks . . . Maybe you want to have a son, is that it? A son and heir, an heirloom, or whatever the word is. And then we’ll build a house, plant a tree – it sounds very exciting. Aren’t you going to wash?’

  ‘Don’t care,’ he said. ‘Could be a daughter. I’d even prefer that.’

  ‘No, no, you want a son, be honest. The milker’s son . . .’ She lay back on the bed and stroked his arm. ‘What would that make him? Some sort of milking champion?’

  Walter reached for her cigarette, took a deep drag, and was surprised that it didn’t make him cough. ‘I don’t care what he does,’ he said, tasting the smoke. ‘Time, or fate or whatever, will sort that one out. As far as I’m concerned he can be what he likes as long as he isn’t a soldier.’

  He took another drag and looked her over. Even though she was young, there were already fine wrinkles on her cheekbones. ‘So, what about this farm, Liesel? Have you had a think? It doesn’t have to be for ever. Eventually they’ll switch to machines, and we’ll go to the mines in the Ruhr – you can make good money there, too. And you’d be back in a city.’ He cleared his throat. ‘We just need to make our minds up – it’s the first of the month at the weekend. Are you coming?’

  There was no music from the bar now, no voices. The clatter of plates in the kitchen had stopped as well. Elisabeth turned out the light again with the faintest of clicks. It was completely dark for a moment, and she pressed herself against him; he rested a hand on her shoulder blade. The moon couldn’t be seen through the window, but its light turned their smoke blue and quivered on the edges of the furniture and in the facets of the mirror like the reflection of a longing almost forgotten out of sheer exhaustion. And then she said quietly, ‘Yes.’

  Epilogue

  Took the train as so often in early March, weary after a hard-working, apparently endless winter, grateful for the peace in the compartment, the coffee brought by the refreshments service, looking eagerly through the landscape for the first blossoms. But nowhere so much as a bud, a fresh blade; in the ploughed fields beyond Berlin only dry earth, empty pallets in the greenhouses, and in a hollow what looked like an encampment of greyish-brown deer turned out on closer inspection to be piles of stones and their shadows. The reeds by the quarry ponds are still fallow, the sun isn’t strong enough to brighten the dark water, and there’s frost to come. Near Magdeburg, ice on the tracks, thin snow, a cloudbank before reaching Braunschweig. And yet the profound desire for spring is already giving the bare birch trees on the horizon a tinge of green.

  My parents’ grave was to be levelled – unless I decided to extend the lease. It was tended by an aunt, my father’s sister, who planted it with pansies, begonias or heather depending on the season, and put a light on it at All Souls’. A melancholy chain-smoker who always knew where the Jägermeister was, she was the last living relative from my parents’ generation and refused to let illness or loneliness deprive her of her sense of humour. Once when I invited her to Café Kloos, she wouldn’t set her cigarette down save to chew or talk, saying, ‘This crumb cake is good. I’d like to eat it at my funeral.’

  The cemetery was on the edge of Oberhausen, and as I wanted to travel on to Belgium anyway, I’d decided to go via the Ruhr. You could count on one hand how many times in the last twenty-five years I’d put flowers on the gravestone, and I wasn’t sure if I would bother to extend the lease on the plot. Apart from Aunt Leni, who had already indicated that planting and raking were getting to be too much for her, and who wanted to be buried next to her husband anyway, most of my parents’ acquaintances were dead – so what was the point in keeping the grave?

  And yet something in me resisted the idea of letting it be levelled – perhaps superstition, fear of misfortune or some sort of curse, I didn’t know. I would make the decision at the cemetery. The initial lease had been signed by my father, I saw only now, in the old-fashioned Sütterlin script he had always used, already a little unsteady from the cancer. Below the family name, the date, and the number of the plot there was a red stamp: Plot lease terminated.

  Just before I reached Bielefeld, it actually began to snow, a dense flurry, and the train stopped again and again. Dusk was breaking as I arrived in Oberhausen, and I left my suitcase in the Ruhrland Hotel and took a taxi, the only one outside the building. ‘Where to?’ asked the driver, with his grey ponytail, solving a Sudoku puzzle and listening to the radio – a Schubert Lied. ‘Follow the music,’ I said, and he put his hands, covered with silver rings, on the steering wheel, looked over his shoulder and frowned, which looked a little threatening. Two tears were tattooed below his right eye. He grinned when I added, ‘To the cemetery, Tackenberg.’

  ‘Fremd bin ich eingezogen, / Fremd zieh ich wieder aus’ – ‘A stranger I came, a stranger I leave’. Big snowflakes fell against the pane
s but weren’t sticking yet on the busy roads towards Sterkrade – only appearing as grey slush that sprayed up under the wheels of the cab or dripped from the billboards we passed. But as we drove towards the stadium things started to change: the car skidded through ruts that got deeper and deeper until the heavy, wet snow was crunching under the floor panel, and the driver was cursing quietly. We inched our way past the sports ground, past the Schätzlein supermarket, past my former school. No footprints in the white playground, not a soul to be seen, and the hawk sitting on the mosaic fountain was made of plastic; I assume it was there to scare the pigeons.

  Light from the streetlamps shone through the windows into a corridor in the school building – you could see into the classrooms, where the shadows of snowflakes fell on chairs, tables and blank blackboards. The silent building always looked more disquieting empty, during a holiday or on a weekend, than it ever had during lesson times – perhaps because those rectangular, consecutively numbered buildings, their stark architecture, laid bare the true inhumanity of their purpose without the camouflage of people present. But perhaps too because that place, empty, demonstrated better than any graveyard what the world would look like if we all ceased to exist one day, and all that remained of what was dear and important to us was the blurred chalk traces of words and numbers on a blackboard.

  ‘I do not wish to trouble your dream / To lose your peace would be a shame / You should not hear my step . . .’ The driver turned into Elpenbachstrasse, an old avenue of plane trees that stood amid brick cottages with dead straight hedges and curtains like elegant lines of French in a German text. I asked him to stop in front of the graveyard’s nursery and gave him a considerable tip not to drive away; getting a taxi around there was only possible at the cost of an endless wait. Then I stamped through the snow to the little flower shop beside the gate and bought one of the ready-made bouquets in the window: white tulips, conifer twigs and mimosas.

  The cemetery had recently been enlarged. The Calvary had been removed and the gardens behind it cleared, and the little open-air swimming pool on the neighbouring property, which had been closed even when I was a child and had been used as a pasture by the previous tenant – ‘Stop leaving me your old bread!’ he’d once painted on his house. ‘My horse has been dead for five years!’ – was now a burial ground as well. All was white; they’d only cleared the path to the new chapel, and in the deep snow little could be seen of the graves beyond the occasional back of a stone or the tip of an obelisk.

  I strode off in the direction I remembered, past a single red candle flickering crookedly on a snowdrift, and after only three or four steps I was no longer on the path; something crunched and creaked under my feet as if I was walking on old wreaths. Last time I’d seen it, the grave had been next to a hedge, but there was no sign of the privet now as I walked around an enclosure filled with rubbish – black, red and gold ribbons, plastic roses and withered chrysanthemums hung from the lattice-work – and suddenly sank up to my knees, clinging to a boulder.

  The entire landscape fell away towards the mine where my father had once worked, all that remained of which was the pithead, black with resting crows. Monuments and crosses ran to the edge of the forest, and between them were strange paths and bare trees, as if glazed by ice. With snow in my shoes I made several more attempts in one direction or another, stumbled over invisible stairs, tripped over hidden borders and wiped a few gravestones clear, tearing my glove on the reliefs, but couldn’t find my parents’ grave.

  It was getting dark. A gurgling sound came from beneath the layer of ice that covered a pond and a hare leaped away; I gave up looking. I followed my own footsteps back to the ruby candlelight, sputtering now, and left my bouquet beside it, pausing there for a moment. Hardly any wind, and it had stopped snowing; a little way off, where the taxi’s exhaust fumes were sweeping along the road, the lights of the flower shop still burned, and although the snowflakes had fallen without a sound, scattering in silence, it was now, somehow, more silent still.

  RALF ROTHMANN is a German novelist, poet, and dramatist. To Die in Spring, his eighth novel, but the first to be published in the UK, has been a bestseller in Italy and in Germany, where it has sold 60,000 copies in hardcover, and is being translated into twenty-four languages.

  First published 2017 by Picador

  This electronic edition published 2017 by Picador

  an imprint of Pan Macmillan

  20 New Wharf Road, London N1 9RR

  Associated companies throughout the world

  www.panmacmillan.com

  ISBN 978-1-5098-1287-5

  Copyright © Suhrkamp Verlag Berlin 2015

  Translation copyright © Shaun Whiteside 2017

  Cover images: © Universal History Archive / Contributor / Getty Images

  Author photograph: © Heike Steinweg

  The right of Ralf Rothmann to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  Originally published in 2015 as Im Frühling sterben by Suhrkamp Verlag, Berlin.

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