Before the Feast Page 2

  She would smell the earthy honey on the pelts of her cubs among a thousand other aromas, even now, in spite of the false wind, she is sure of its sweetness in the depths of the forest. She is sure of their hunger, too, their stern and constant hunger. One of the cubs came into the world ailing and has already died. The other two are playing skillfully with the beetles and vermin. But rising almost vertically in the air from a stationary position and coming down on a mouse is still too much like play. Their games often make them forget about the prey.

  The vixen raises her head. She is scenting the air for humankind. There are none of them close. A warmth that reminds her of wood rises from their buildings. The vixen tastes dead plants there, too; well-nourished dogs and cats; birds gone wrong, and a lot of other things that she can’t easily classify. She is afraid of much of what she senses. She is indifferent to most of it. Then there’s dung, clods of earth, then there’s fermentation and chicken and death.

  Chicken!

  Behind twisted metal wires in wooden sheds: chicken! The vixen is going to get into those chickens tonight.

  Her cubs are staying away from the earth longer and longer. The vixen guesses that tonight’s hunt will be her last for her hungry young. Soon they will be striking out and finding preserves of their own. She would like to bring them something good, something really special when she and they part. Not beetles or worms, not the remains of fruit half-eaten by humans—she will bring them eggs! Nothing has a better aroma than the thin, delicate eggshells, because nothing tastes as good as the gooey, sweet yolks inside those shells.

  It is never easy to get inside a henhouse. Even if no dog is guarding it, and the humans are asleep. She isn’t afraid of the fowls’ claws. But carrying eggs is all but impossible. Her previous attempts were failures, if delicious failures. This time she will close her mouth as carefully as she closes it on the cubs in play. This time she won’t take two eggs at once but come back for the second.

  A female badger slips out of the wood. The vixen picks up the scents of bracken and fear on her. What is she afraid of? Bats fly past overhead. Taciturn creatures, moving too fast for any joking, fluttering nervously away. On the outskirts of the forest a herd of wild pigs is holding a council of war. They are unpredictable neighbors, easily provoked but considerate. Their scent is good, they smell of swampiness, sulfur, grass and obstinacy. Just now they are deep in discussion, uttering shrill grunts in their edgy language, butting one another, scraping the ground with their hooves.

  Their restlessness gets the vixen going. She trots off so as to leave those tricky creatures behind quickly.

  The Up Above, roaring, brings thunder. It doesn’t like to see the vixen out and about. It is threatening her. Warning her.

  AND HERR SCHRAMM, FORMER LIEUTENANT-Colonel in the National People’s Army, then a forester, now a pensioner and also, because the pension doesn’t go far enough, moonlighting for Von Blankenburg Agricultural Machinery, is watching the sports clips on the Sport 1 channel. Martina (aged nineteen, Czech Republic) is playing billiards. Herr Schramm is a critical man. He has objections to the program, he doesn’t think Martina plays billiards properly. She sends her shots all over the place. They never go into the pockets, and that bothers Herr Schramm. Martina dances round her cue, and that’s not right: it’s not right for her to dance, it’s not right for her to sit on the table and wiggle the billiard balls with her bottom, it’s not right for her to be playing by herself. Because if you are playing by yourself it should be with the clear intention of sinking the balls in the pockets. The opponent you best like to beat, so Herr Schramm firmly believes, is yourself.

  Of course, after every shot Martina has to remove an item of clothing, nothing wrong with that. But she could have done it somewhere else. Sport 1 shouldn’t have made a billiard table available to her, it should have been somewhere Martina knows her way around. Herr Schramm believes that everyone is good at something, and he tries to guess what that something might be in Martina’s case. Clues are thin on the ground: she has full breasts, short fingers, shiny fingernails. Herr Schramm believes in talent, and Herr Schramm likes talent. He likes to watch people exercising their talents: he’s an upright military man with poor posture and an empty pack of nicotine chewing gum.

  He doesn’t like to watch Martina. Martina still has her knickers on; they are black with a number 8 in a white circle at the front. Herr Schramm thinks that is witty. But it’s not about her knickers now, it’s about the fact that Martina plays so badly, as if she didn’t even know the rules. And rules are the first thing you teach someone who doesn’t really belong in a place.

  Herr Schramm is a man who avoids conversations with strangers, and even with acquaintances prefers to talk about anti-aircraft missiles, bats and the former ski jumper Jens Weissflog, the most talented ski jumper of all time.

  He thinks Martina has good calves when she bends low over the table. But when she takes off her knickers, drapes them over her cue, misses the white at her next shot and has to laugh at that into the bargain, Herr Schramm has had enough.

  “I ask you!” says Herr Schramm. He switches the TV set off.

  In German households, on average, there are more germs on the remote control than on the lavatory seat. Herr Schramm thinks about that “on average.” It’s all relative. Lavatory seats are larger than remote controls.

  In his own household, thinks Herr Schramm, there are more disappointments about himself, on average, than about the world. With a sigh, he gets off the sofa and in the same movement pulls up his underpants from round his ankles. The rest of his clothes are in the bathroom. He searches their pockets to see if he has enough change for a packet of cigarettes. He does.

  Herr Schramm sits in his Golf for a little while first. A tall, upright man with poor posture, thinking: on average. Martina (aged nineteen, Czech Republic). Bats hang upside down because their legs are too weak. They can’t take a run and then fly away, like a goose, for instance.

  His pistol is in the glove compartment.

  Much that Herr Schramm regrets today was done of his own accord. Pressure is what Herr Schramm was good at. Standing up to pressure and exerting it.

  He drives away. Maybe to the cigarette vending machine, maybe to the abandoned anti-aircraft missile department at number 123 Wegnitz, where he was stationed for seventeen years. A few cigarette ends or a shot in the head, he hasn’t made up his mind yet which.

  Maybe Martina has a talent for fingernails. What would that be called?

  In Wilfried Schramm’s household there are more reasons against life, on average, than against smoking.

  WE ARE GLAD. ANNA IS GOING TO BE BURNT. THE sentence will be carried out at the Feast tomorrow evening. The children are put to bed in the hay with the calves, but they don’t sleep, they peep through the boards at what they’d like to be scared of in their sleep, and when there’s no more boiling and hissing and crying in the flames the baker connects up his fiddle to his portable amplifier and then there’s fiddling, then there’s dancing, predatory fish are grilled until they’re cooked and soft. Anna is going to be burnt, and on such a night many couples find their way to each other, they dance among sparks and stars and security precautions, making sure nothing that doesn’t gain by the flames catches fire.

  Autumn is here now. Ravens peck the winter seed corn out of the body of the fields. They come down to settle on scarecrows, they preen their plumage.

  There’s still time to pass before the Feast. We have to get through the night, and the final preparations will be made in the morning. The village cooks, the village sprays window cleaner on glass, the village decorates its lampposts. Our carpenter, who is dead now, spent a long time making sure that the bonfire would stand steady. An interior designer brought in from Berlin has offered his services instead, but if we let him get at it, so the village thought, there’ll be nothing but problems; it’s not just a case of where to put your sofa for a good view, we have to make sure we don’t have another disaster li
ke the one in 1599, when four houses caught fire, and in all the commotion two notorious robbers escaped being burnt to death, so now a scaffolding company from Templin does the job.

  The village provides itself with seats. The seating plan is a ticklish subject. Who gets to sit at the beer table in front, near the bonfire? Who has earned the merit of being near the flames? Who defines what merit is this year?

  The village cleans its display windows. The village polishes up the rims of wheels. The village takes a shower. The fishermen are after pike today, the bakery is generous with its jam fillings. Many households will prudently lay in a double dose of insulin.

  Daughters make up their mothers’ faces, mothers trickle eyedrops in the lower lids of tired fathers’ eyes, fathers can’t find their braces. The hairdresser would make a real killing if we had a hairdresser. Apparently one is supposed to be coming from Woldegk, but how is that to be managed? Will he go round the houses like the doctor on his Thursday visits, or put up his chair and mirror somewhere central? We don’t know.

  Frau Reiff has invited guests to her pottery on this Open Day: she serves coffee, honey sandwiches and a talk about making pottery. Her visitors get beer tankards made by the Japanese raku method fired in her kiln, or maybe have a go at firing a vase themselves. Later there will be a band from Stuttgart playing African music. The musicians have already arrived. They keep saying how wonderful the landscape is, as if that were the village’s own doing.

  Zieschke the baker will be auctioneer for the sale of Works of Art and Curios again. Last year he did it with his shirt worn loose over his trousers and using a beer bottle as the auctioneer’s gavel. The proceeds go to our Homeland House. We can already guess some of the items to be sold:

  • Antique globe (including Prussia): reserve price 1 euro

  • Self-adhesive silicon Secret + bra: reserve price 2 euros

  • Laundry basket with surprise contents: reserve price 3 euros

  • Local Prenzlau calendar for 1938: reserve price 6 euros

  • People’s Police uniform (with cap, worn): reserve price 15 euros

  • Brand new oil painting by Frau Kranz (painted the night before the Feast): reserve price not known

  Non-villagers can also bid in the auction, and they laugh at some of the items on offer, most loudly of all when they are no laughing matter. Or that’s how it sounds, when some of them think they are cleverer than the story; they don’t credit us with irony.

  Our Anna Feast. No one really knows what we’re celebrating. It’s not the anniversary of anything, nothing ends or began on exactly that day. St Anne has her own saint’s day sometime in the summer, and the saints aren’t saintly to us any more. Perhaps we’re simply celebrating the existence of the village. Fürstenfelde. And the stories that we tell about it.

  Time still has to pass. The village switches off its TV sets, the village plumps up its pillows, tonight hardly anyone in the village makes love. The village goes to bed early. Let us leave the dreaming villagers in peace, and spend time with those who lie awake:

  With our lakes that never sleep anyway.

  With animals on the prowl. Under cover of darkness, the vixen sets out on a memorable hunt.

  With our bells, which will soon be ringing in the festive day. These days, who can boast of still having a bell-ringer, and an apprentice bell-ringer too?

  Herr Schramm weighs up his pistol in his hand.

  Frau Kranz is awake too. What a pity, when many old ladies are snoring! She is out and about, well equipped for the night: flashlight, rain cape, she has shouldered her easel and is pulling the trolley with her old leather case behind her. Going through the Woldegk Gate, she takes a good slug from her thermos flask, which has more than just tea in it. Frau Kranz is very well equipped.

  And Anna, our Anna. Tomorrow is her last day. She lies in the dark, humming a song, the window is open, a simple tune, the cool night air passes over her brow. In this last year Anna has spent a lot of time alone at Geher’s Farm, surrounded by her family’s dilapidated past: her grandfather’s tools, her mother’s garden, neglected by Anna but popular with the wild pigs, in the garage there is the Škoda, in which the cat has had her umpteenth litter of tabby kittens. There is a fallow field run wild under Anna’s window. And tonight, on such a night as this, there are memories of a house that was once full, and the question of what has ever been good for her in the eighteen years she has spent there. On Monday Lada will come to clear the house out, in spring the people from Berlin will take it over, and Anna, on her own, remarkably indifferent to others of her age, Anna with her school-leaving certificate and her love of ships, Anna who shoots her grandfather’s airgun out of the bathroom window at the wild pigs in the garden, Anna up and about at night, even tonight—come here to us, Anna. Come along the headland of the field to the Kiecker Forest, to the lakes, going all the old ways one last time, that’s the plan, we young people of this village, from the new buildings and the ruins, we are glad. Anna is not alone, Anna is humming a tune, a sweet, childlike melody, we are with her.

  The night before the Feast is a strange time. Once it used to be called The Time of Heroes. It’s a fact that we’ve had more victims to mourn than heroes to celebrate, but never mind, it does no harm to dwell on the positive side now and then.

  Over there by the ovens? The little girl with the log in her arms? She is the youngest of the girls called heroines. A child of just five years old, in a much-mended smock and a shirt too big for her, with pieces of leather wrapped round her feet. Her brother beside her is fair and slender as a birch tree. Timidly but proudly he throws the log that the little girl hands him into the flames. Their mother is placing flax to dry in one of the ovens, she will bake bread for the Feast in the other. The village is celebrating because war has stopped stealing and devouring, driving everything out and killing it, because harvest has kept the promise of seed time. Things could get exuberant, the bigwig from town isn’t here: Poppo von Blankenburg, coarse, loud-mouthed, observing the law as he sees fit.

  The village says prayers daily for a to some extent, for an at least. For the continued existence of the fish. For our own continued existence. The little girl and her brother and the sieve-maker’s two boys, there aren’t any other children here now.

  This is the year such-and-such. Frau Schwermuth would know the date for sure. She is our chronicler, our archivist, and wise in herbal lore as well, she can’t sleep either. With a bowl of mini-carrots on her lap, she is watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer, series six, right the way through. The Feast and all the upheaval make considerable demands on her: Frau Schwermuth holds many threads in her hand.

  The little girl chases her brother round the ovens. Anna, let’s call her Anna. A little while ago the ovens were moved from the village to outside the walls. The fire had sent sparks flying too often, the sparks in their turn had rekindled fire, and like all newborn things the fire was hungry and wanted to feed, it swallowed up barns and stables, two whole farms—although the Riedershof fire, people say, had nothing to do with the ovens. It was to do with the Devil. The Rieder family were in league with him, and the Devil had simply been taking an installment of the bargain.

  The children’s mother sweeps the glowing embers out of the oven with a damp bundle of twigs and puts a loaf into it, carefully, as if putting a child to bed. She reminds the children to keep watch on both the bread and the flax, it wouldn’t be the first time that someone helped himself to what didn’t belong to him. “Come and get us if you see strangers arriving.”

  Let’s leave the picture like that: the girl’s brother is combing Anna’s fair hair with his fingers. The little girl stands closer to the oven, holding out the palms of her hands to the stove flap. Their mother sets off along the path back to the village, humming a tune.

  Anna, our Anna, has a similar tune on her lips. She shivers; the night is cool.

  Come along, we’ll take you with us. To your namesake, to other people, to animals. To the vixen, to Schramm
. Into a hunger for life, into the weariness of life. To Frau Kranz, to Frau Schwermuth. To the smell of baking bread and the stink of war. To revenge and love. To the giants, the witches, the bravoes and the fools. We’re sure you will make a reasonably good heroine.

  We are sad, we are glad, let us pass our verdict, let us prepare.

  HERR GÖLOW IS DONATING SIX PIGS FOR THE Feast. One of the six will survive. First thing in the morning the Children’s Day organizers inspect the place, and then the children get to pardon one of the pigs.

  What for, and what does pardoning mean?

  The spits for the remaining five are set up behind the bonfire. The children will be allowed to turn the spits. That kind of thing is fun too.

  The Gölow property. Stock-breeding. Products for sale: honey and pork.

  When pigs are being slaughtered in summer, in the heat that makes all sounds louder, you can hear their screams kilometers away. Many of the tourists who come to bathe in the lakes don’t like it. A few of them don’t know what the noise is. They ask, and then they don’t like the noise either, and they also don’t like having asked about it. So far as we’re concerned the dying pigs are no problem, dying pigs are part of what little industry we have.

  Olaf Gölow walks across the farmyard. Barbara and the boys are asleep. Gölow lay down to sleep as well, but his thoughts kept going round and round in circles: about Barbara’s forthcoming operation, about the Feast, about the ferryman’s death, about the Dutch who have been in touch again asking how things are going.

  Gölow got up, carefully, so as not to wake Barbara. Now he is in the farm buildings, in the air-conditioned sweetness of his pigs and their sleepy grunts. He lights a cigarette, breathes the smoke in away from the pigs, turns the ventilation regulator.

  Gölow is that kind of man, honest to the bone, you’d say. There are certain moments: for instance once, on a rainy day, he saw something lying in the mud outside the shed. There are certain ways of bending down, maybe they set off a reflex action, that could be it, a reflex action making you think: here’s someone helping himself, look at the way he bends down. There are moments like that, something lying in the mud, an object, and Gölow bends down—broad-shouldered, wearing dungarees, a gold earring in his left ear—and picks it up. He takes his time, in spite of the rain, takes his time looking at it and squinting slightly, looking absent-minded. What’s lying here with my pigs, what is it? Is it a nugget of gold, is it a pen, yes, it’s a pen, why is it here? We’re glad to see a man like that, we think of him as kind to his children and fair-minded when he presses the dirty pen down on his hand, draws a loop on his hand with it as well, to see if it works, yes, it does, and Gölow puts it in his pocket. Later he asks everyone: Jürgen, Matze, silent Suzi, have any of you lost a pen?