Before the Feast Read online

  We first heard about it in 2011. Frau Schwermuth applied to the community, as represented by the Mayor Frau Zink, to authorize the purchase of an electronic lock for the massive wooden door and a device to regulate humidity in the cellar. There was talk of a “sensational historical find” that the History Society wanted to keep suitably safe and sound. Part of it was documents that wouldn’t even be regarded as lost because no one had known that they existed. Examination of them had apparently already begun, and it was hoped that the papers could soon be made accessible to the public and to scientific research. Frau Schwermuth called the archive then being set up the Archivarium.

  The Mayor wasn’t the right person to apply to, but of course she turned up at once wanting to see the “sensational find.” Frau Schwermuth wouldn’t let her. Frau Zink was first amused and then upset to discover that it wasn’t a joke. Frau Schwermuth said she was sorry, but she couldn’t let just anyone in to see it. What did she mean, just anyone—and so on; Frau Zink was on the point of forgetting the dignity of her office, but then she asked to speak to the chairman of the committee, who was the ferryman at that time. They went into a room and talked privately for quite a long while. After that the community agreed to finance those two purchases.

  The fact is that no catalog of the Archivarium exists, and to this day no public use for it has been found. Does the Museum of Brandenburg History know about the archive and the “sensational find,” and what does it think of them? From time to time Frau Schwermuth puts something on display in the glass case on the upper floor: an old lease, a marriage certificate. Or statistics: the quantities of fish caught in the year 1744, those from Fürstenfelde who died in this or that war.

  In 1514 the feudal lord of the time, Poppo von Blankenburg, required four wethers a year from the shepherd appointed by the rural district council in consideration of his use of the meadows in Blankenburg’s possession.

  We do take a little interest in the shepherd, but only because we like the idea of a shepherd appointed by the rural district council.

  The Blankenburgs in general appeal to Frau Schwermuth as archivist: a document of a hundred years later records the purchase of an ox by the former feudal lord’s descendant, also Poppo von Blankenburg by name. Frau Schwermuth connected the record of the purchase with a letter of complaint about the sadly unedifying character of the said ox, rounding its story off with Blankenburg’s account of the truly remarkable end of the ox, which was driven to the Baltic and there fell from a cliff into the sea, history does not relate whether of its own accord or not.

  We do feel a little historical surprise about that ox.

  We take an interest in the fact that both documents are dated from the time before 1740 and the Great Fire. So they were preserved from the flames by a small miracle, and remained undiscovered until recently by a larger miracle.

  We take an interest in the tooth of time. The tooth of time is not sharp in the cellar of the Homeland House. The document about the shepherd appointed by the rural district council shows no signs whatsoever of age; it is immaculate. Like all the other documents exhibited to date.

  Now that, too, is interesting.

  We are more inclined to believe our reason, which tells us that those documents are remarkably clumsy forgeries, than to believe Frau Schwermuth, who says that the device for regulating humidity in the atmosphere is super and top-notch. The archivist says nothing to explain how the documents managed to stay in such good condition before the acquisition of the device.

  Johanna Schwermuth interests us enormously in terms of human and criminal history.

  EARLY IN THE YEAR OF OUR LORD 1607, THE remarkable Discovery of a great Quantity of Pippins in the fallow Field on Geher’s Farm led to a Disputation concerning the rightful Owner of the said Fruits, and in Consequence the Ownership of the entire Field. Four Men had stated their Entitlement, three of them submitting documentary Evidence, to wit a signed Agreement, in proof of their rightful Claim to have leased that same Field. The fourth, his Honor the high-born Poppo von Blankenburg, had no Document to show, notwithstanding which he challeng’d the others in a loud, insistent Manner to a Bout of Fisticuffs, in order to decide upon the Matter—namely, to the Effect that he who was the Last left standing be declar’d Owner of the Apples.

  Not three Days after that Challenge, the Mayor, a bankrupt Schoolmaster, determin’d, albeit amidst great Indignation and Protestations, that the Fist-Fight be deem’d a proper Method of reaching a Verdict.

  Poppo von Blankenburg struck down All concern’d, including the Mayor, and was ajudged to have Carried the Day. That same Evening he wax’d roaring Drunk, ran out into the Field intending to Embrace the same, fell, struck his Head upon a Rock, and expire’d of that Injury.

  Therefore the fallow Field laps’d into the Wilderness of its unknown Origin again, in which Condition it bringeth forth Wasps, and Coneys, and wild Roses Year after Year, only to engulf and consume them once again.

  MY MA WEIGHS TWICE AS MUCH AS MY PA. SHE weighs 130 kilos. In spring she puts on another 30 kilos of weighty thoughts (worries, fears, shame and general listlessness). Then my 160-kilo Ma lies down among the daffodils in the garden, because when she is lying down the dark clouds are about 160 centimeters farther away. Her eyes are closed, and we’re supposed to leave her alone. There’s nothing any of us can do about that, as a husband or a son or a daffodil. It’s impossible to get my 160-kilo Ma back on her feet if she doesn’t want to stand on them, it’s impossible to get her to cheer up if she doesn’t feel like it.

  If it gets colder in the evening we cover her up. We sit with her. In fact it’s almost nice for all the family to be doing something together. Pa is busy with DIY of some kind, I’m preparing for our next role-play meeting (I’m going to be a thieving half-elf, good at fencing and flight). Demographically, my hobbies ought to be first-person shooter games and right-minded ideas, but neither of those is as cool as the role-playing.

  Sometimes I lie down beside Ma and read her old stories from hereabouts. She likes those. The one she likes best is the story of Jochim the invisible tinker. Ma’s mouth twists. Maybe she’s smiling. Or maybe she’d like to be invisible.

  I’ve never known Ma to be any different in spring. My 65-kilo Pa and I and Dr Röhner in Prenzlau don’t kid ourselves. Ma is not okay. She knows it herself. It’s in her nature, she says, and there’s nothing you can do about your nature.

  There’s a lot of gossip about Ma, but people will gossip about everyone. They praise Ma a lot too. Most of all they praise her for working so hard at everything to do with the Homeland House. Ma runs the Homeland House because she has real ideas about it. Ma has a better idea of the village than anyone else. She’s not interested in the country round the village. If the tourists ask her about it she just points to the brochures on display in the Homeland House, or to Frau Schober who sits around there and has family in the area, but Frau Schober is usually sitting around in the Homeland House because she’s old, and her family never come to visit, and she’d be bored to death on her own, so it’s teamwork between Ma and Frau Schober.

  Ma also belongs to the History Society. They meet twice a week, sometimes Ma doesn’t come home until the morning after a meeting. I haven’t the faintest what goes on. A few old folk who like each other and like history too, sitting together jabbering away, that’s how I imagine it. After a while someone says, “Right, let’s talk about witch-burnings today. How do we feel about that? Anyone like to say something? Johanna? Yes, go ahead.”

  They’re responsible for Our Fürstenfelde, too. That’s kind of a magazine full of old folks’ memories. The old folk are always complaining that no one’s interested in their memories. Our Fürstenfelde shows you how wrong they are.

  Ma always writes something for it. The latest edition is subtitled “The Fire Brigade and Other Associations.” Ma has two pieces in it, one about the church choir, she didn’t sing well enough to join it herself but Ma’s not one to bear a grudge, and one about
our fires. It starts like this: “Fürstenfelde isn’t a bad place for fires.” Great opening, Ma. It’s a fact that there have always been fires in Fürstenfelde. That’s a tragedy for Ma. Not because of the victims but because so many books and stuff like that get burnt. Old books mean to Ma what the bells mean to me. Her fingers sometimes smell like the last century when she comes back from the Homeland House (it’s all that yellowed paper).

  For instance, Ma found out that Fürstenfelde was once a town, only the right to a town charter got drunk away so now Fürstenfelde is only a village. And she knows all the old folk tales about this place. Better not ask her to tell them: she tells them so as they’re really frightening, does different voices, body language, all that. The kids either love it or run away.

  This is what I think: I think Ma uses the past to take her mind off the present. I mean off her body and her worries. Including in spring. In spring she lies there whispering stuff from the folk tales to herself. Sometimes it sounds like there’s someone answering her. I like that. I like anything that cheers Ma up a bit in spring.

  Ma swallows vitamin pills, avoids eating fatty food, goes for a bike ride every day, but it makes no difference, she’s very fat and she sweats and gasps for breath. I can see how difficult going to the loo is for her. And how badly she suffers from the heat of summer and her own body. She complains of it, naturally she complains of it. And I think it’s disgusting too, of course, but I’d flip my lid if anyone said anything nasty about Ma.

  Ma is organizing an anti-Fascist bike ride for the Feast. People wanted a long route going right out of the village: Fürstenfelde—Wrechen—Parmen—back to Fürstenfelde. Ma said: “Thälmann-Strasse—Berlinerstrasse—Mühlenstrasse—the barn by the wall—Thälmann-Strasse. I’m organizing it, so I say where the route goes.”

  Ma doesn’t much like going away from here. I guess that’s because she feels okay in Fürstenfelde. Everything’s always the same, or if it changes, it changes very slowly. The lake is shallow close to the banks, the depths lie in wait farther out. Ma gets nervous when things aren’t just as she expects. At home she always chooses the same route. She could go straight into the kitchen from the living room, but she takes the long way round down the corridor. She has her sofa and her chair. Visitors have to say in advance that they’re coming. You might think all those new tourists turning up in the Homeland House would bother her, but the differences between them are too small for that: some wear North Face jackets, some wear Jack Wolfskin jackets. Some want to know if there really isn’t a restaurant around here open on a Monday (yes, there is, but you have to go to Feldberg), others want to use the toilet (down the corridor, door to the right of the TV set). That’s all the difference there is to it.

  Sometimes she calls from the Homeland House at night. “I mustn’t come home tonight.” Right. I fetch Pa, and all three of us spend the night in the Homeland House.

  I think that if for some reason or other the rapeseed wasn’t to come into flower, Ma would run amok in the fields with her gun. Yup, her gun, that’s another thing.

  I once asked whether she was a good shot.

  Yes, she said, just not very quick off the mark.

  Ma is funny, that’s for sure. She doesn’t function like anyone else I know, but then again she does really: she wants to get through the day somehow. She’s never nasty. Likes everyone except for people she’s right not to like. Reads a lot. Votes for the Left. But then she goes and cooks nothing but stuff with beetroot in it for two weeks, which is great because beetroot is great, but eating beetroot every day for two weeks on end, well, that’s different.

  All the same, Ma is no crazier than the rest of us. You don’t have to take it seriously when she does something wild like getting a gun (it was for security). Pa says, even if what she does seems strange, take it seriously. Yes, strange, but suppose it’s also true and not so harmless?

  That about levitating is harmless. Ma says she can make small objects levitate. I’m not arguing. Maybe it’s her weight that does it. Everything else around my 130-kilo Ma loses mass by comparison, I feel lighter myself. She sits on her sofa, practicing on mini-carrots. She holds a mini-carrot between her fingers and concentrates on it.

  I ask why she’s doing that. Why does she want things to levitate?

  To make people happy.

  That’s my Ma for you: wants to make people happy.

  Ma’s reached her limit. I get that much. Could be she thinks up stuff like levitation to move back from the limit a bit. Maybe she thinks that as long as she can’t do it, can’t make things levitate, everything’s okay with her. And if she really has a gun so as to feel more secure, then that’s okay too. If she only thought that up about the gun and feels better all the same, so much the better. I’m her son. Ma could never shoot anyone. (Where and when it’s okay by you, don’t change anything about that where and when.)

  This year her springtime blues went on until the first of May, which was a really warm day. Ma got up and made beetroot with fried eggs for breakfast, so we knew she was feeling better. Then she lay down on her stomach in the garden and rowed in the air with her hands, sweating like an iceberg, all over bits of grass from head to toe.

  Me: “Ma, what are you doing?”

  Ma: “Learning to swim.”

  After an hour of that she runs out into the road, turns off toward the promenade, going faster and faster, an outsize version of Sebastian Vettel, runs to the landing stage by the ferry boathouse, cuts in past the ferryman and jumps into the lake like a bomb, throwing up water to form new landscapes.

  Pa and I go after her, worried. Well, of course we’re worried. But Ma was happy. Ma was swimming. It’s not cold, come on in, you cowards! The ferryman is in already. Ma and the ferryman swimming a race. Ma lets him win.

  Maybe she could always swim, and Pa didn’t know. Maybe she learned to swim that day in the garden. At least my Ma didn’t sink. “Yoo-hoo!” cried my Ma.

  IN THE YEAR OF OUR LORD 1590, AT THE ANNA Feast, there was a tightrope-walker present who fasten’d his rope above the Church Gable, fixing the other End to the Berlin Gate, so that he flew down from the Gable to the Gate uninjur’d, all the While pushing a Handcart!

  On that same Day, however, there was a Cutpurse at large in the Crowd, the latter being distracted by the Tightrope Dancer, so that there was great Suspicion of the Dancer as being one of a Pair of Rogues!

  Thus was it confirm’d again that ’tis not Opportunity maketh Thieves, but Opportunity is the greatest Thief itself.

  THE NIGHT BEFORE THE FEAST, ON THE FIELD, with his forehead on the steering wheel: Wilfried Schramm, former Lieutenant-Colonel, then a forester, now retired and also moonlighting for Von Blankenburg Agricultural Machinery. On average, more dead drivers lie with their heads on their steering wheels in the German TV series Crime Scene in any one year than in six selected American crime series in the same space of time.

  Herr Schramm is a critical man. Herr Schramm thinks it’s silly to have so many dead drivers in Crime Scene lying with their heads on their steering wheels. Sometimes it’s their cheeks on the steering wheel, and the face is all crumpled up, but usually it’s the forehead. Herr Schramm is sure of it; when yet another body lies like that, Herr Schramm switches channels.

  So Herr Schramm is lying with his head on the steering wheel, whistling the theme tune of Crime Scene. Herr Schramm imagines what it would be like if an episode of Crime Scene were set in Fürstenfelde. Which death would be most suitable for the episode? Not counting his own. Among the top three would probably be: the Chinese man, the tractor and Frau Rebe. By the tractor he means Rüdiger under the tractor.

  The Chinese would be good, because it probably wasn’t self-defense as everyone claimed. But the Chinese was, well, Chinese, and the murderer was someone from here. However, that was almost a century ago, the first episode of Crime Scene set in Fürstenfelde doesn’t have to be that far back in history.

  The tractor would be better. Rüdiger lay dead
under it all night. And Rüdiger’s dog brought him a dead pigeon all the same. Put it down beside his head, terrible. Drunk as a skunk, people said, an accident. The tractor under which Rüdiger was lying was Rüdiger’s tractor and it stood on Rüdiger’s farm. Rolled backward. And the dead pigeon was lying there in the morning. Terrible.

  “I don’t know.” Herr Schramm has stopped whistling. His voice inside the car sounds like some other person’s voice, any voice, not his. Because it’s like this, thinks Herr Schramm: first, Rüdiger had a good head for liquor. Herr Schramm found that out by comparison with his own headache on several occasions. And second, he knew his tractors better than Herr Schramm knew the Crime Scene theme tune, and a tune like that is a lot simpler than a tractor. Although he has just this minute noticed how tiring the tune is to whistle. Yes, and third, a few months after Rüdiger’s death von Blankenburg finally managed to buy Rüdiger’s agricultural machinery business. The heirs weren’t objecting, unlike Rüdiger.

  Herr Schramm goes on whistling.

  But Frau Rebe’s would be the best case all the same. On 3 October, it had been, in 1990. Who’d have thought it? Eleven stab wounds. Anyone who knew Frau Rebe, and that was a lot of people, couldn’t really celebrate 3 October after that, not that many really do celebrate it, and there you go, that shows how little some in Fürstenfelde, the murderer included, thought of German Reunification.

  Anyway, the murderer had been an apprentice of her husband’s. He always looked at Frau Rebe when she came into the works, and he imagined her naked, he wanted her to undress for him. But unfortunately she didn’t want to do that, and we have to say she really was very good-looking, and then he helped himself, eleven times.

  Someone called Sigrun, a psychiatrist, with a name like that Herr Schramm isn’t quite sure whether a man or a woman, has found out that on average women are more creative killers than men. And in crimes where a knife is used, women are stabbed more times than men.