Before the Feast Read online

  Imboden waited politely until everything there was to say about Blissau and Gitty had been said, and then went on with his story. A day before the Feast he had asked Fräulein Zieschke for a dance. He wanted to give her time. Because if she said yes, then—and Imboden was sure of it—she would never want to dance with anyone else again. Except maybe Ditzsche, but in other respects Ditzsche was no competition.

  The garage drank to that. You should give yourself proper credit, no one in the garage objects to that.

  “I remember the fabric of her dress perfectly. I’d know it among a hundred fabrics. It scratched like anything.” Imboden closed his eyes. Danced a few bars of the music with Fräulein Zieschke. Hummed their song. Scratched his wrist. Imboden’s hand on Fräulein Zieschke’s waist at the Anna Feast, the flames blazing up, the ruins cleared away at last.

  Imboden didn’t call it the Anna Feast, but “the Feast of Comrade Anuschka.” That was rather amusing today, but in the old days you had to be careful who you said a thing like that to. People were quick to take offense and easily responded to provocation. And you always wanted to give offense and provoke them, because you were always just the same: easily offended and provoked. For instance, over and beyond giving offense to those who had the say then, you’d always have liked to smash in their faces. But he was forgetting to stick to his subject, said Imboden to his now fully attentive audience. They didn’t mind. The key phrases “provocation,” “those who had the say” and “smash in their faces,” arranged in that order, sounded very promising.

  The dancing had just begun when several Blueshirts from Prenzlau turned up. They were recruiting for the FDJ, the Free German Youth organization of the GDR, and one of them was on the point of making a speech. You don’t make speeches when people want to dance. The ferryman intervened. The bell-ringer was with him, and a couple of other guys. For now, there was going to be more dancing, minus speeches.

  “The Blueshirts fancied dancing too. One of them wanted to borrow Fräulein Zieschke, and I swear I’d have let her dance with him, I mean anyone can dance with anyone else, only she didn’t want to. Of course she didn’t want to because—well, what did I say?” asked Imboden, and the garage loved rhetorical questions. He’d said nothing on the political question, but he wasn’t taking this kind of provocation on behalf of himself and Fräulein Zieschke.

  The garage drank to him again—that’s a habit of theirs, drinking to someone who wasn’t taking that kind of provocation.

  Imboden, so he said, had only warned the lad for a start, but that didn’t help, so what was bound to happen did happen. Imboden invited him to step outside so that fists could fly; there wasn’t room for that on the dance floor. And fists did fly.

  A few days later what was bound to happen did happen once again. Imboden was summoned to Blissau’s, and this time his dancing partners were two comrades from the District Administration: someone had reported him. “They were saying I’d stirred up trouble, denigrating the FDJ and therefore the German Democratic Republic.”

  The garage drank a toast to that nice long foreign word denigrating.

  “But they were wrong,” said Imboden, and as he also said, he’d told them so. “No one was doing any denigrating.” Yes, there’d been a spot of trouble, and he’d take the responsibility for that. But no ideas had been exchanged during the trouble, only blows. It was nothing to do with politics, it was just a normal instinct to defend a young lady from being bothered by a pushy lad carrying on.

  However, the comrades from District Admin didn’t want to know about that. They said there were witnesses, a group of observant young men from Prenzlau, who stated that Imboden had been the spokesman and had thrown the first punch.

  “And then I found out why they were kicking up such a fuss. ‘You’re a troublemaker and liable to be the ringleader, Imboden. What else can we expect of someone whose father, that Nazi arsehole, is in jail in Waldheim Prison?’”

  So at that, said Imboden, he’d jumped up and was about to show them what kind of trouble he could stir up, but then instead of letting his fists speak for him, he heard an apology coming out of his mouth.

  The garage was slightly disappointed.

  Imboden drained his glass. Imboden bowed his head.

  “I’m ashamed. To this day I’m still ashamed of myself for not defending my father. He’d only been in the police, he’d never hurt a soul. But I did right to show restraint. Or the whole thing would have turned out badly for everyone. For those two Party guys there and then, but later for myself, and that would have been for ever. Do you want to know what held me back?”

  The garage did want to know.

  “If I’d fought those two, then with my family history I’d have had no option but to run for it if I didn’t want to end up like my father. And I’d never have seen Fräulein Zieschke again, or not in a hurry anyway. And I didn’t want that. I wanted to see my girl again, and I wanted to dance with her again, my hand on her waist, she’d surely have other dresses made of other fabrics.

  “So that’s how it was. We got married a year later. Yes, we had good times and bad times, but more of the good than the bad. Tomorrow, tomorrow we’d have been. . .” The old man broke off, and the garage didn’t interrupt his silence. He looked down at his hands and the wedding ring deeply embedded in his finger.

  “Gentlemen,” said Imboden, getting to his feet, and no one had to support him. Guessing that the end of the story was coming, Ulli was quick to hand him a nice little Sterni fresh from the fridge. The other jesters added their baubles, one touching another like hands in a quick dance, crossing and coming apart again.

  They drank to dancing.

  To stirring up trouble.

  To Sterni beer.

  The garage drank. To one of the old boys, one of us, Burkhardt Imboden, known as Imboden.

  THE VIXEN TAKES THE LONG WAY ROUND THROUGH the rough terrain of the fallow field. There’s not much land left like this between the old forest and the human houses, land that human beings don’t change with their powerful, noisy diggers and cutters. Nature lashes out on the fallow field, untamed. Grasses, tough bushes reach for the vixen, hundreds of aromas swirl in wild confusion in front of her nose, thorns bite into her pelt. She is happy to go that difficult way—no humans are ever there, and the thick undergrowth gives her cover all the way to the first buildings.

  From the tallest of those buildings iron strikes against iron—again, again, again, echoing far over the land. The vixen knows that sound, the regular rhythm of it. She also knows the pigeons who sleep up here, and the little old man who sometimes feeds the pigeons and sometimes drives them away.

  The iron chimes sound different. Louder, less regular than usual. The iron hesitates, drags. Gets into difficulty. The vixen crouches low to the ground, makes herself inconspicuous. Something that isn’t rain or chiming iron is lurking in the clouds above the tower. Lurking like men lying in wait for game in the old forest.

  The last iron chime hangs like a cloud over the land, echoing away, away, away. The wind brings nothing to the vixen. She’s not used to smelling nothing. Smelling nothing means she must be on her guard. Everything could be hidden in nothing.

  She thinks of the hunt, her concern for her cubs is aroused. She wants to stand up—and can’t. Can’t turn her head or even prick up her ears. The last iron chime lies heavy as iron itself in her paws. A raindrop hovers in front of her nose. Drops don’t do that. Don’t do nothing. It ought to go on falling, but something stops it.

  The vixen knows she ought to run on, but something stops her.

  Something stops the world.

  —

  The long iron chime dies away. All is so still around the vixen that she can taste the silence. When it is so still, the silence tastes of everything all at once. There! Firm and bright and enormously loud, the Up Above discharges an arching light so bright and large that the vixen feels the tingling of its power all the way to the tip of her brush. She whines, the raindrop speed
s up, falls.

  The vixen runs as fast as the field will let her. Only gradually does her instinct come back—she scents a human. In the building closest to the field, where there haven’t been any chickens to be found for a long time, and hardly anything to eat at all, a human female is standing at a lighted opening. The vixen has known the female since it was a cub. She has learned that the human female is no danger. It has a sweetish smell of fear. Maybe it knows of something up above that is hidden from her down below?

  The vixen turns and trots under wild, branching shoots toward the human lights.

  Anna, at her window, doesn’t know there is a fox in the field. Anna stands there composed at the window, as thunder tears the silence like hands tearing paper. In the lightning flash the field opened an eye, but Anna kept calm.

  She closes the window. Rain beats wetly against the glass. Tights, windbreaker, cap, headlight, Anna is ready for her last run. She takes a deep breath, closes her eyes. The finely branching lightning is etched into her eyelids.

  ON THIS DAY THE NIGHT WEARS THREE LIVERIES: What Was, What Is, What Is Yet To Be.

  THERE’S A STONE ON THE SPORTS FIELD, BETWEEN the clubhouse and the disused bowling alley. Nice and square, nice and practical, two meters high. It could have been made for commemorative plaques. It’s what they call an erratic block. An erratic commemorative block. At the moment the erratic block isn’t commemorating anyone. The holes from the last commemorative plaque on it are still left. There’s a cigarette end stuck in one of them.

  The sports field and the erratic block are both in Ernst-Thälmann-Strasse, and the last commemorative plaque on the erratic block in Ernst-Thälmann-Strasse was put up there for Ernst Thälmann.

  Ulli’s garage is on the other side of the sports field. He threw the men out earlier than usual this evening because of tomorrow. Lada helped him to clear up. Ulli stood him a drink. Now they are sitting on the piles of tires outside the garage smoking, drinking and looking at the clouds. Looking up and down Ernst-Thälmann-Strasse. Ulli shakes his head.

  Lada’s orange Shell overalls glow. Somehow or other they positively glow. Ulli is in a denim jacket, jeans and a white T-shirt, and he is nervous. Because of tomorrow.

  “I’ll open early tomorrow,” he says.

  “Mhm,” says Lada.

  “The men will fancy a little nip before the Feast gets going.”

  “Mhm,” says Lada.

  “I was thinking of asking Krone to let me have one or two platters of cold cuts from his stall. He has good salami-type sausage. A little something for people to nibble.”

  “They can nibble anywhere tomorrow. Open at eleven or whenever, they’ll start nibbling.” Lada spits.

  “Stop that.”

  Lada looks at Ulli. Lada rubs the spit away with the sole of his shoe. Drinks to Ulli, who waves the gesture away. They drink.

  The bells are ringing. The bells sound strange. Lada and Ulli would look at the church if the new buildings weren’t in the way. There’s a loud roll of thunder.

  “Hey, it’s the forest fairy.” Ulli looks at the clouds. Lada looks at the clouds. Raindrops begin falling.

  Ulli points his bottle at the sports field. “Know it, do you ?”

  “Know what?”

  “The stone.”

  “The Hitler stone?”

  “That was all done away with long ago.”

  “Yup, you can see it was. Something’s left, all the same.”

  “Know why it lost its little mustache and its parting?”

  Lada pushes out his lower lip. Stands up and strolls over to the erratic block. “Because it looked good? Here? It looks like a face anyway.” He traces the outlines of a forehead and nose on the block. Tap-tap-tap over the stone.

  It’s very quiet after the thunder. Only now that Lada is playing percussion with a bottle of Stierbier on a boulder five hundred million years old do we notice how quiet. It’s as if, all of a sudden, only one sound would be possible.

  Ulli joins Lada. Puts his hand on the cheek of the erratic block.

  “It’s not that,” he says. “Until ’95, there was a plaque here in memory of Thälmann. Know him, eh?”

  “Not personally, nope.”

  “Very funny.”

  “GDR, right?”

  “Exactly. And do you know what this place was called until ’45? The Adolf Hitler Sports Field. And there was a different name on the plaque, guess whose?”

  “Makes sense.” Lada spits.

  “Right. And whoever painted it on knew that.”

  “Mhm.” Lada nods.

  “And before him, before Hitler, we had a plaque on this stone here,” says Ulli, tapping the erratic block’s forehead, “commemorating the Crown Prince.”

  “What Crown Prince?”

  “What Crown Prince? How would I know? The Crown Prince. They were all called Wilhelm. The oak trees at the railway station were planted in his honor too. That was before the First World War.”

  “My father planted a birch tree in my honor when I was born, but later he couldn’t remember where.” Lada grins. Lada spits.

  Ulli walks round the erratic block. “Back in those days we were well off. People came on purpose to settle here. Can you imagine that? Someone coming here on purpose to open something in this place?”

  “That woman came to open the china shop. And there’s the guy from Magdeburg wants to open a shop selling old books.”

  Ulli has stopped listening. “And mind you, there’s more. Hans Steffen, know about him? Don’t bother to tell me. . . Steffen, he came from round here. He was a geographer. Prevented some war or other, I think it was between Chile and Argentina, because he found out the border and told them, look, this is the border between you, stop quarreling. Think of that! A guy from here! A geographer! Went on real expeditions of discovery in the jungle. He’s so famous in Chile, they gave him a Chilean name of his own: Juan Steffen!”

  “Juan,” says Lada. “Cool!”

  “Yup. Suppose you do so much for some country, let’s say France, that they call you Roe-Bare Zieschke!” he said, pronouncing Lada’s real first name of Robert as if it were French.

  “No, La-Da,” Lada puts him right. And a moment later, after thinking it over, he adds, “I don’t want to do anything for France.”

  Ulli nods.

  “But this guy you were talking about did?”

  “Nope, but I wouldn’t have minded if he had.”

  “Mhm.” Lada leans against the left-hand side of the erratic block, Ulli leans against its right-hand side. They look at the clouds, they look up and down Thälmann-Strasse, they see a fox, bloody foxes.

  The vixen picks up the malty aroma of the two human males, keeps her distance, makes for the water.

  “Was it you and your lot did that about Hitler?” asks Ulli.

  Lada shakes his head and fishes the cigarette end out of the hole in the erratic block.

  “Who was it?”

  “No one.” Lada spits.

  “Yeah, well. . .” Ulli raises his beer bottle enquiringly. “Another?”

  “No, I’m okay. Got to get up early tomorrow.”

  “Since when was that a problem?”

  Lada looks the erratic block in the eye. “Suzi and me are clearing out Eddie’s place tonight,” he says slowly, deep in thought.

  “Our Eddie? Wow, oh wow.”

  Lada is thinking. When Lada thinks, he blinks a lot.

  “If you’re through by nine,” says Ulli, “come to Netto with us.”

  “Netto is shit. Go to Kaiser’s. For the Feast, get it? I have a kind of a feeling.” Now Lada is grinning as if he’d been cooking something up. He puts his hand on the place on the stone where the commemorative plaque must have been. “All at once I kind of have a good feeling. And that about cold cuts for the men, yes, do that. I think tomorrow’s going to be good.”

  Lada spits by way of saying goodbye, waves and wanders down Thälmann-Strasse in the rain as it gets heavier. Ulli and the e
rratic block watch him go.

  There’s a stone on the sports field between the clubhouse and the bowling alley. We put our names there and pinned our hopes to it. Nothing came of that.

  The commemorative erratic block doesn’t commemorate anyone any more. But it’s still there.

  IN THE YEAR OF OUR LORD 1587 IT CAME TO PASS that the Miller’s Sow brought forth a Young Pig here, beside the Pillory on the banks of the Deep Lake, and that was a Sign and a Portent, it being in all other points of Form and Feature like a Pig, but having the Head of a Man.

  The people came down to the Lake to see this Curiosity and take Counsel concerning what were best to be done. The young Pig lay there for all to see, and even the Sow had join’d the Men and Women, as if she herself did not believe what had befallen her.

  So the People examined that monstrous Pig at close Quarters, some even kneeling down to inspect it gravely Eye to Eye. The Conduct of others was such that it might seem as if they knew the little Monster’s Face. Perchance it was the way the Pig turn’d up the Corners of its Mouth, as if it were Smiling impudently, or perchance it was the Birthmark that it bore, or the Voice in which it squealed like a Starving Babe for its Mother, but it caus’d the Men to talk Noisily and Wrathfully. Mayhap all would have been well, had not Semmel the Blacksmith foolishly cried out: Good folk, my own Reasoning can make Naught of it, and therefore I make so bold as to ask, does not that Monster remind you of. . .? Whereupon the first Blow was struck, falling on Semmel his own Mouth, and there was much pushing and tugging and a Quantity of Profane Utterances, and old Wennecke landed Head over Heels in the Lake, and what with all this Hurly-burly the Pig was near forgot.

  Then up came Miller Mertens in the company of Count Poppo von Blankenburg, Lord over our Town. The Presence of the Nobleman and the Owner of the Sow brought the Men to see Reason again, so that they Left off Brawling. They adjusted their Weskits and took off their Caps, in so far as the said Caps did not already lie upon the Ground. All was still but that the Piglet snorted, like as it were an old Dotard dying of the Pleurisy.

  The Men moved closer together to conceal the Monster, or so it seemed. The Noble Lord parted the air with his Hands to right and to left—whereupon the Men left a Path free through their Midst for him.