Before the Feast

by Sasa Stanisic

  Magdalene ripples softly in the sun. Suzi forgets his mother, forgets Gölow, Lada, Father, Suzi is the main owner of all the time in the world. Magdalene is reading now. Pretending to be reading. The air still isn’t warm, but pleasant enough. Suzi takes off his sweater, sits on it. In his undershirt. Magdalene knows about Suzi. All those times he goes fishing here. When they once meet by chance in the ice cream parlor she says hello, but he does not reply.

  Suzi is whistling, barely audibly. A mouse comes out of the reeds, nosing around. Suzi puts a jelly bear on the grass. The mouse snaps it up.

  A minnow jumps in the lake. Something glittering lies in the reeds. Two mice scurry from there to here. Suzi smiles. Gives them another jelly bear. Whistles. They bring him the glittery thing. It is slightly bent, a little crown like those the beauty queens wear. Only prettier. Prettier, of course, because it is Magdalene’s.

  Good.

  The mice have gone away.

  Good.

  Suzi goes over. Gives Magdalene the tiara. Magdalene reads aloud to him. Between sentences he feels her gaze on him, on his undershirt, his dragon, his hands, his cheeks and his temples. Now and then he closes his eyes to feel it on his eyelids too, along with the sun.

  Hugo von Hofmannsthal smiles.

  FRAU KRANZ WAS WELL EQUIPPED, BUT THE CHILL of the lake and the cold wind have seeped into her old bones, slowly freezing her hands and her memories. Frau Kranz is frozen through, remembered through, and in a bad temper, and it is not surprising that she is dissatisfied with her picture.

  And now here’s Frau Zieschke into the bargain buttonholing her outside the bakery, in an elated mood. Lord almighty, it’s much too early for cheerfulness, but Frau Zieschke is one of those whose emotional streaks reach out in all directions. She is waving the Nordkurier like a soldier with a banner after victory in a battle: Frau Kranz is in the paper, a whole page! With a photo! In the photo Frau Kranz is smiling, although now she can’t remember any reason for smiling and surely Frau Zieschke isn’t going to read it all out loud to her in the street! Frau Kranz pushes the baker’s wife back into the bakery, and there a way to calm the woman down occurs to her: she shows Frau Zieschke last night’s painting. Yes, that, she says, is how it will be for the auction. It works: Frau Zieschke’s enthusiasm disappears.

  “Oh,” she says.

  Frau Kranz takes the newspaper and asks the baker’s wife to make her a hot milk. She does feel a little curious. She skips the introduction with her biography and career, because she knows all that. She merely skims the central part, with the description of her hairstyle and the way she smokes a cigar. She shakes her head over the lavish praise of a picture she can’t even call to mind from its description. She reads only the conclusion properly.

  Ana Kranz does not see herself as a painter of local scenes. She doesn’t like to be linked with a particular countryside and its culture. However, her paintings do show local scenes—the countryside of our Uckermark. They show our memories, even those that we first know we have only through our image of them: our childhood, the young faces of our parents and grandparents, the work and everyday life of three generations in the eddies of time. Kranz’s paintings are no less than journeys into the past.

  Ana Kranz is not a painter of local scenes. She is our painter, and a painter of this place. We wish her well on her ninetieth birthday, in deep gratitude for her work in our homeland.

  Slushy, but never mind, thinks Frau Kranz. You can forget the rest, and your birthday isn’t until next Saturday.

  She escapes the bakery with the arrival of the next customers. Frau Kranz can tell that the weather is changing from the pain in her joints, but above all from the blue sky. An old woman on her way home. She had made herself pretty for the memory, and it had been no use; you can’t fool memories.

  Frau Kranz has failed with her picture of the night. She is a little sorry for the sake of the village. Frau Schwermuth and Frau Zieschke and the Creative Committee were expecting something special for the auction. Hirtentäschel even wanted a preview of the picture so that he could say something about it. There isn’t much to say about this painting. Frau Kranz had seen that in Suzi’s beautiful eyes, in Frau Zieschke’s eyelashes that stopped applauding for a few seconds.

  She had wanted to paint more than what she saw and knew, but she knew only the six women, and she saw only the gray of the night. On such a night, she had tried to imagine what the village would see if it were in her place, and she hadn’t the faintest idea.

  At home, Frau Kranz drinks elderberry juice, cleans her teeth and lies down in her bed, with the picture of the night leaning against it, and the picture of the night is gray and bleak. She closes her eyes. Through the window, the sun paints on her face what the sun sees and knows.

  A sun like that also shines on Frau Kranz’s favorite picture. Yes, we think she does have a favorite, although she denied it to the journalist when he asked her. The name of Frau Kranz’s favorite picture is:

  THE ROMANIAN OUTSIDE THE CARAVAN FOR Romanian Harvest Workers on the Country Road out at Kraatz.

  The Romanians pick apples and strawberries for five euros an hour, they harvest lettuce, they cut asparagus. Some come back year after year; you might think they had made friends in the village. They eat ice cream at Manu’s, one of them sometimes goes to Ulli’s for a beer and might recite a poem in Romanian, but they marry elsewhere, in their towns with musical-sounding names, in Baia Mare and in Vieu de Sus.

  A few years ago caravans for them to live in were placed on the country road out at Kraatz. Wheaten-yellow, a hotplate, a window with a wide view over their place of work, the fields; an estimated fifteen square meters, an estimated 240 euros, four beds for an estimated six persons, no smoking; they all smoke.

  And last year: neo-Nazis from this area except for our own two, Rico and Luise, who had overslept and missed the gathering. Campfires, togetherness, barbecues near the caravans, music, pogo dancing and fun with the wobbly caravans, and at some point in the small hours of the morning the police.

  Afterward the words Rumänen raus, Romanians Out, were to be seen in large, slanting letters on one of the caravans, but kind of in a quiet voice because they were sprayed in white on a yellow background, and because the exclamation mark was missing, and it stayed like that for some time until one morning a sleepy Romanian climbed out of the caravan, looked at the slogan for the time it took him to smoke a cigarette, fetched sticky tape and toilet paper and made the “r” in raus into an “H,” adding a hyphen after Rumänen, so that it now read Romanian-House. It didn’t take him a moment, he cleaned his nose, sat down on the little flight of steps in front of the caravan and ate a bread roll.

  That is Frau Kranz’s favorite picture. That is Frau Kranz’s Romanian. A small man with a receding hairline, tracksuit trousers, undershirt, breakfasting in front of his house, the morning sun. A tattoo on his upper arm: the letters B and D in a heart, and the year 1977.

  We think that is Frau Kranz’s favorite picture because she dedicated it to the Romanian and gave it to him. She never usually dedicates pictures to anyone. And now it is hanging somewhere, maybe in Baia Mare, maybe in Vieu de Sus: a morning in the Uckermark in 2012.

  ON THE MORNING BEFORE THE FEAST THE VILLAGE does not walk three times round the field, reciting a secret saying; it does not sprinkle grain at every corner for the birds to eat, instead of stealing from the field; the village has forgotten the secret saying.

  A troop of girls adorned with brightly colored silk ribbons do not pace out the fields, they do not shout and make a noise to tell field spirits and kobolds: we’re here, keep away, even winter belongs to us. The girls are not accompanied by young men singing, and the old folk do not wait companionably at the village inn for the return of the young, ready to begin the Feast afterward with a dance round the bonfire.

  The village has not pinned nosegays of pinks to its breast, and does not sit amicably together singing the old songs, nor does it say whether it rained the nigh
t before the Feast:

  “If St Anna brings us rain, heaven’s blessings come again.” It’s all one to the village whether it rains on St Anne’s day or not, no one whispers so help us God, Maria, holy St Anne, so help us God these days, and St Anne’s day is really in July.

  The first thresher has not made the Anna Crown, and the crown, interwoven with flowers, is not placed on the head of any girl not yet promised in marriage, nor interwoven with thorns to lie on the head of any woman who has made a pact with demons. No wearer of a crown will dance round the bonfire or burn on it, and white-clad children do not flit between the festive tables, the rakes are not adorned with colored ribbons, and the colored ribbons don’t flutter in the wind. Sometimes there isn’t any wind.

  THE SENIOR CITIZENS ARE AWAKE. IMBODEN IS doing his morning exercises: 1–2–3.

  Frau Steiner is saying her morning prayers. Frau Steiner’s golden teeth, her white hair: how people stared at her when she was a young woman. Her hair was red then, and she preferred to be alone with her cats, or out and about in the Kiecker Forest looking for herbs. Difficult, difficult. So Frau Steiner joined the faithful and took care to be seen more often in human company. Soon fewer people stared, apart from the men, because she wasn’t bad-looking. Today her hair is white and there is indifference in her eyes.

  Frau Steiner is delivering advertising leaflets for Netto and Saturn and such stores. She once even shopped at Globetrotter in Prenzlau herself, when a pair of walking boots that took her fancy was reduced in price. She still likes to be out and about in the ancient forest. From five cats at first, she now has fifteen, but today you are considered no worse than crotchety with so many cats.

  If she isn’t careful the red roots show at her parting.

  Frau Steiner has survived three husbands; each of them died after exactly nine months of marriage. Difficult, difficult. Anyone could work it out in retrospect. Anyone could say something, meaning something else.

  But no one says anything else, only: poor Frau Steiner. Three husbands, no children. Devout. Has to deliver leaflets.

  We are the only ones who hear her morning prayer. And it isn’t a prayer, or it is one that you must say in a whisper, shaking as if you were feverish. The cats mew; they are hungry.

  I am fighting with mine ire, with she-demons I conspire.

  May the first demon heed him, may the second demon lead him.

  May the third demon charm him, may the fourth demon harm him.

  May the fifth demon bind him, may the sixth demon blind him.

  May the seventh bring him to me and make him wish to woo me.

  Frau Steiner puts her lips to the head of a little stone figure in her hand and closes her eyes. It is a statuette of St Anne, mother of the Virgin Mary and patron saint of widows.

  The senior citizens stretch. The senior citizens shake out their pillows.

  THE VILLAGE WAKES UP COFFEE MACHINE BY coffee machine. Eggs are hard-boiled, anglers collect their catch. Ditzsche cleans himself and the chicken run, looks under the wings of his chickens. The bakery has given away free coffee, has sold orange juice and yeast pastries with vanilla filling, only Frau Kranz has gone off again without paying, but maybe the milk was meant to be free too.

  There are no bells ringing for prayer. The acoustic heralds of the Feast are the sound of drilling from a power drill and the engine of a bus revving up—the wheels, stuck in the mud, are doing their nut. Lada is responsible for the drill. Lada knows he shouldn’t be doing what he is doing, but Lada often knows that. Lada is drilling holes in the commemorative stone beside the holes that already exist. Before long the first windows are opening for protests to be uttered. The classic protest is that the drill makes too much noise. Lada either can’t hear the protests, or he hears them and he couldn’t care less. He has worked through the night, he’s wearier than the protesters, and an exhausted man is always right.

  Otherwise the village has little to protest about. A new day is beginning, and no one has died. Even though pistols were involved. Herr Schramm hasn’t shot himself or anyone else. Frau Kranz hasn’t drowned.

  Fürstenfelde in the Uckermark, number of inhabitants: no change.

  There have been cases of breaking and entering, one or two, we’re not sure how many, but nothing was stolen. All is well, in that we still have what belongs to us. What happened in the Homeland House? Broken glass, and an electricity failure, and since Eddie is dead we can’t blame it on him any more. The police don’t like calling us to say there’s nothing to tell us really.

  The first guests soon arrive. Some satnav devices show Friedhofsweg and its extension the promenade as a fully negotiable road. There’s supposed to be a large car park about halfway down. That, of course, is often seen as a huge joke. The Sat 1 transmission bus, for one, can’t confirm that the Friedhofsweg is a fully negotiable road. Unless you’re a mountain bike. The Sat 1 transmission bus can’t confirm the existence of the car park either, or that at best the lake might be it. The Friedhofsweg slopes steeply toward it. On the right the graveyard wall, on the left the town wall, straight ahead the water. Nowhere to turn. In rain the ground is saturated, the bus can confirm that all right. The wheels, the reverse warning tone hovering over the monument to the fallen, beep-beep-beep, bats fly up. Britta Hansen in her Norwegian pullover is in the passenger seat. She has warned the driver, let’s call him Jörg, about the road, but only half-heartedly because it’s ages since she was here. Her grandfather is with us for ever, lying next to the road in the soft ground. “I get so damn melancholy when I’m here,” she says. Jörg has other problems. Jörg changes up a gear. Beep-beep-beep.

  Not twenty meters away, by the water, the bells watch the large vehicle. The bell-ringer didn’t set his alarm, and that’s a bit of luck, because the bells are not at home—he can sleep his fill for once. Johann has decided to take his bell-ringing exam. Pa will look after Ma that long. But somehow the bells must be hoisted up again. He didn’t want to worry the bell-ringer, so he texted Lada, and Lada answered at once: “Sure what you paying.” And straight afterward: “We do it this way I help you then you come to Eddie’s place and help me for free.” And a few minutes later: “And my golf out of the lake okay.”

  Ulli has got hold of the sliced sausage and opened the garage. He has decorated the platters of meat with cocktail umbrellas. They’re practical because of the toothpicks. Now the platters are waiting on two stools, and it’s too early for sausage. However, the drinking has begun. Ulli is discussing the matches of the day with several pensioners from the new buildings. The ritual is the same every Saturday. Ulli acquires the betting slips, lectures his audience on the odds and the most interesting matches in short and poetic terms:

  “Hannover away

  won’t get very far

  against Borussia Dortmund.”

  Then they mark up their slips and dream. Today he also gives the pensioners a scratchcard. The sound of coins scraping is in the air.

  Ulli has known people to win, and sometime there’ll be another win. Down below here the Feast has begun; it’s the same as usual at Ulli’s. Almost. He is washing yesterday’s glasses. Normally the guests wash their own, sometimes there’s a little queue at the sink. The men give each other tips on the best way to do it (how much dishwashing detergent to use, this is the best technique with the little sponge, how to dry glasses and so on).

  Imboden comes in, mildly excited. Has Ulli seen it yet? Seen what yet? Right, then Ulli must come with him, but first they both need a beer to bring along, there’s something to celebrate.

  It’s the commemorative stone. A small wooden panel is hanging from it. So now Ulli reads Lada’s wooden panel before Imboden’s happy eyes. The betting pensioners have joined them too, people are already drinking to Ulli. He feels both slightly pleased and slightly embarrassed because of what the panel says and drinking to himself like this, although what the panel says is true:

  JUAN STEFFEN OPENED PEACE NEGOTIATIONS IN SOUTH AMERICA

&n
bsp; ULLI OPENED THE GARAGE IN FÜRSTENFELDE.

  Ulli nods, everyone nods. Now what? Well, nothing, the day goes on.

  Imboden goes to Frau Reiff’s. He has a date to meet the bell-ringer, they’re the old guard; in the past Eddie would have joined them. There’s coffee and apple cake and a lecture. They both like lectures; it would be nice if there were lectures here more often, but this is okay.

  Imboden tells the bell-ringer about the panel, the bell-ringer tells him about his injury. What they don’t say is more exciting. The bell-ringer doesn’t say that he does not want to be the bell-ringer any more, just Gustav, and Imboden doesn’t say he’s been at the garage again. Both have much the same reason: they’re ashamed. Imboden knows Gustav doesn’t think much of the garage. He’s bothered about the kind of people you get there. In principle, the bell-ringer doesn’t think himself too refined for anyone, but on the other hand he doesn’t think he’s the unrefined sort. But most of all, he notices when Imboden’s been drinking. In principle he has nothing against that either, but he’d prefer it if Imboden drank with him. That has nothing to do with the kind of people they are, it’s just that then he could keep an eye on Imboden better.

  After the lecture (a hobby diver showed slides of things lying at the bottom of our lakes, for instance a bazooka and a washing machine), the old men make plans for the rest of the day. Any time now, at twelve, the bell-ringer should be supervising Johann’s bell-ringing exam. He has decided it won’t take place. He would have to ring one of the bells, and he can’t. Nor does he want to. He doesn’t know how he is to teach the boy. The anti-Fascist bicycle ride is to be at twelve too. Imboden must be there; as father of our Deputy Mayor, Frau Zink, he can’t boycott it.

  At this point we ought to make it clear, anyway, in case anyone gets the wrong idea, that strictly speaking it is a preventative anti-Fascist bicycle ride, because while racism etc. has been known not so far away, of course, here it hasn’t had any public profile since the war, except maybe at Ulli’s recently, when Özil didn’t sing the national anthem again, and some people thought that meant they can’t be glad when Özil scores for Germany: only a man who sings his country’s anthem can score for his country. And we think they think they really aren’t glad, but that’s not so, because they were definitely glad when things were close and Podolski decided the game.