Before the Feast Read online

  The one and only neo-Nazi painted by Frau Kranz is asleep. That’s the trick of it. In spite of his bald patch, an outsider wouldn’t immediately assume that this was a Nazi. But he is. You can read it on the back: Neo-Nazi Asleep is the title of the picture. The people of Fürstenfelde would know it was a neo-Nazi asleep anyway, because it’s a picture of Rico. We have one and a half Nazis here: Rico and his girlfriend Luise. Luise is a half-Nazi because she goes along with all that shit only for love of Rico.

  “I never stopped to think what it looks like when neo-Nazis fall asleep,” says the journalist, stroking the air above Rico’s cheek.

  Frau Kranz’s brush has painted entire generations. Including Rico’s grandfather, who wasn’t a Nazi at all. She has painted people from outside the village. Animals. They’d all have been forgotten sometime, but you can’t forget a picture like that. Almost seventy years of a village, a chronicle in oils, watercolors and charcoal. Savings Bank at Sunset is the latest title listed.

  Of course, in spite of the pictures, many of their subjects will soon be forgotten, but it’s the principle that counts.

  Even we don’t know the full extent of Frau Kranz’s work. We know her first picture. Its title is April, perhaps May. It shows six young women holding hands on the bank of the Deep Lake. They are standing in a row roughly where Frau Kranz has just put up her easel now and is clearing her throat, as if to ask the lake a question. The six women are looking at the water. Their profiles, chins, cheekbones, skin: clear and youthful.

  They could be dancing.

  The observer is looking at the ferry boathouse. You can see the landing stage on the left-hand side of the picture; on the right, reeds frame the scene. Some houses are left still standing by the wall, some are not. Some still have a roof, some don’t. Their facades are sooty, as if night hadn’t been able to take her black dress off.

  They could be playing a game.

  Morning mist takes the breath of the colors away. The height of the sky, the depth of the lake. It is as if the young women were standing in front of faded wallpaper with a lakeside motif. Frau Kranz gave them clear touches of color: a red scarf here, a blue blouse there, sunny yellow hair.

  They could all be friends.

  Our memory of that morning is hidden in mist as well, although we have nothing to hide.

  “A Madonna?” The journalist points to a drawing showing the front of the bakery. “The windows as her eyes. And look, the door—her blissfully smiling mouth. The bread in the basket as Baby Jesus.”

  Perhaps it’s something to do with the elderberry juice.

  Frau Kranz takes his elbow and leads him away from the picture.

  We can almost understand him. Like us, he is wondering what Frau Kranz’s pictures—how would we put it today? Wondering what they mean? They are sufficient unto themselves as they depict the world. Sometimes the choice of colors is freer, sometimes the proportions are unusual, but that’s more to do with the fact that Frau Kranz doesn’t bother so much with proportions.

  It is hard for us to believe that a woman who knows so much, and there is also much she doesn’t know, a woman who has looked four political systems in the eye, and heard their promises, and looked those who made the promises in the eye, as well as those who believed the promises and those who broke them, a woman who had to begin again so often and watch the dreams slumbering in her new beginning turn to nightmares, a woman who has known misery and change and change that brings misery, exile, collectivization, redistribution, bankruptcy, possession, dispossession, the collective, collective stupidity, unjustified redistribution, justified extravagance, the stupidity of individuals, of the group, of many, all, malice, hatred, envy, passivity, ambition, delusion—our lousy, lovely, hypocritical, live-saving, reinvented Europe—it is hard to believe that a woman like that, and with what might be called a fairly well-marked artistic talent, is happy merely painting a savings bank at sunset.

  We are upset. It’s not for us to make demands.

  More people die than are born.

  Who will paint us when Frau Kranz isn’t painting any longer? Who will paint our tools, and our hands holding them? Who will paint the cooking spoons that we carve?

  Who will paint the houses cleared by Lada?

  Who will paint the new inhabitants? For instance, sensitive Magdalene von Blankenburg, the agricultural machinery mogul’s daughter, whose father renovated the little Baroque hunting lodge by the Deep Lake where she spends her summer holidays learning Russian, because that’s considered the language of the future in Brandenburg, but also because she likes Isaak Babel and the soft sound of Russian songs.

  Who will paint silent Suzi trying to concentrate on his angling, while Magdalene whispers Russian vocabulary to the sun?

  Who will paint Anna’s last run through our night?

  ANNA HAS LEFT THE FIELD BEHIND, SHE IS RUNNING along the edge of the clay-pit. The beam of her headlight briefly brings the black water in the clay-pit to life where it lay as if it were viscous, unmoved by rain and wind, under dead leaves and waterweeds.

  Anna runs past the old brick kiln. Every broken windowpane has its own geometrical pattern. The brick kiln stopped working early in the 1990s. Anna’s uncle lost his job, and didn’t become an alcoholic. Someone from Dortmund or Darmstadt bought the building and the plot of land for peanuts. Nothing’s been done to it since then. Maybe that was the plan. The plot is a large one, building land with a view of the lake if you chopped down the birch and ash trees.

  Sometimes the mice take over the brick kiln and pilot it on jet flights all over the Federal Republic of Germany, visiting other mice in buildings standing empty; they like historic listed buildings best, and meet in abandoned streets, where they stage illegal races against unused business premises and written-off apartment blocks, having no end of fun.

  Anna’s breath is coming with difficulty again. It’s raining harder now, she needs asphalt underfoot, she doesn’t feel well here. She turns onto the former railway embankment, runs past the ruined station and on in the direction of the new buildings. A bat drops from the top of the water tower, empty of water now, and flies low over her head.

  WE HAVE A PROBLEM WITH MICE. THEY SPREAD IN inhabited and uninhabited buildings alike. They feed on grain and abandoned ideas. They eat out of the hand of the Treuhand organization. They increase and multiply while we’re asleep. They dig. They run about. Tap-tap-tap they go over old floorboards. They scare away investors, they devastate the larders of people who have moved into the area. At last the roof has been mended and the asbestos removed, now they want to be able to look at the lake in peace, and then guess what: mice.

  Bad luck for Poppo von Blankenburg. The agricultural machinery mogul had invited his family and friends to a little party at his hunting lodge. The Baroque building beside the Deep Lake has been renovated since last summer, the property has been spruced up and fenced in, silent Suzi has to climb now to get to his favorite place for angling, but Suzi doesn’t mind. There’s also a maze of hedges, but a very easy one; it didn’t take Mustard-Micha ten minutes to find the middle and steal the cushions from the pavilion. In addition there are private game reserves, and there’s private access to the lake, and until recently there was a wireless local area network. But now, unfortunately: rodents.

  Von Blankenburg had dreamt of a party at the hunting lodge in the country for a long time: food and drink at a long table on the bank under the linden tree, staff in livery, a temperature of 26 degrees, and in his dream the male guests wore hunting garb and the ladies white trousers that fitted tightly, but not too tightly. The white trousers were even specified on the invitations, in small print, and there really was hunting, but no one counted who bagged how many ducks. In the dream a Scandinavian string quartet played chamber music under the linden tree.

  Mice did not feature in Blankenburg’s dream. They did in real life. Their hunt began while the party guests were hunting too. They scurried across the meadow, tap-tap-tap they went over t
he recently relaid floorboards, hundreds upon hundreds of mice, they ate the food, they drank the wine. The staff screamed, the braver ones stamped as if dancing to that gray music. But what can you do against such an army when it’s well co-ordinated?

  Silent Suzi watched the chaos from his favorite place for angling, which also had a view of Fräulein von Blankenburg’s favorite place for bathing. Before the mice gave battle, Suzi had whistled a little tune, and after it had died away they went back into the chinks and cracks provided by Nature.

  The mice didn’t spare Magdalene either. Fräulein von Blankenburg (aged seventeen) likes poetry more than agriculture. Hardly ever uses her posh “von” particle. Likes to go barefoot: Magdalene. Moves with a sleepwalker’s certainty: Magdalene. Likes Hugo von Hofmannsthal, the Russians and their language: Magdalene. Highly strung. Well brought up. She’d rather have spent her summer holidays on the Mediterranean, all the same.

  Magdalene did not take part in the festivities. Once the hunting party had broken up she went swimming, carefully, so as not to disturb the bittern. And then the mice struck, stealing her tiara, an heirloom left to her by her great-grandmother Magdalene. A tiara set with jewels, full of sparkling memories.

  “CRAZY SHIT!” CRIES THE JOURNALIST, WHEN FRAU Kranz opens the attic, another torrent of canvases flows out, and Frau Kranz would probably like to lock him in up there so that she can have some peace at last, but she doesn’t do that out of consideration for her work stored up here and her cat who goes hunting in the attic.

  “Is that Jesus?” The journalist has gone up to a large portrait.

  “No, that’s Manu from the ice cream parlor.”

  A Kranz hangs in Manu’s ice cream parlor (a still life entitled Ice Cream Sundae). A Kranz hangs in Krone’s butcher shop. A Kranz in the Prenzlau school dining room smells of Healthier-School-Dinners-in-Today’s-New-Federal-German-States.

  The picture of Ulli’s garage hung in Ulli’s garage for some time, but without the calendar showing erotic pictures of Polish girls, which Frau Kranz had replaced by a sunflower, but then Ulli pasted a tiny cut-out naked Polish girl over it again.

  This season there has been a Kranz hanging in the clubhouse changing room of Fürstenfelde FC. First XI, as a talisman. The footballers touch the sports field in the picture for luck, before running out on the real sports field. The team did lose the first two matches 0–5 and 1–4, but none of the players were injured.

  The journalist looks at an unusual sequence of pictures: the colors are stronger, the heads and bodies more angular. Threshing Machine with Transmission Drive in the Fields is the title of one of the paintings. On another, one showing children and Colorado beetles, there is even a text: Everyone Must Help Fight Off the Yankee Beetles! The journalist asks about the background to it. Frau Kranz tells him not to be so dim.

  “Did you ever paint the Banat district?”

  “I was too young.”

  “But you must surely have some memories of it.”

  “Memories aren’t always a lot of use when you’re painting.”

  Countless, countless pictures, but none of Fürstenfelde by night. There had been attempts. Failing perhaps because of the demands they made on Frau Kranz, or her poor night vision. Failing perhaps because of the night. This time she has promised to paint a night picture for the auction sale. But also for herself.

  “Do you have a favorite picture?”

  “Oh, well, I’ve painted so many. Do you see this one? Do you know where it is? It’s the dance floor in Blissau’s restaurant. End of the 1960s, that was. My goodness, no, I suppose you don’t know it, you wouldn’t have been born yet. How old are you, twenty?”

  “Forty-four.”

  “And still on a local paper, are you?”

  “Depends what you mean by local—the Uckermark. . . I mean, I. . .”

  “But I think that’s good! You know your way around here, don’t you? I think it’s good to know your way around. All I wanted was to know my way around. German castles, the Rhine, the Pyramids. It’s all right, in fact it’s good there are things like that. For whoever lives there, for whoever wants to travel and can. I went on a long journey. Or rather I had to. I’m happy with that. The Banat area, yes. Birth is our first lottery ticket in life. Mine was a dead loss, but there’s no need to make a great fuss about it.”

  Frau Kranz only talks about things that she wants to talk about; she doesn’t have time for anything else. She doesn’t show her self-portraits to anyone.

  “Blissau closed in the early 1990s. Do you realize, Mr Journalist, that they used to brew beer here, there were seven restaurants, and now people meet in a garage to drink? And the likes of you write about the falling birth rate and schools closing. Good heavens above! Suppose gastronomy does die out? Fewer restaurants, fewer children, it’s as simple as that. Having a drink together in a place that’s right for it counts for more in life than where you come from.”

  Frau Kranz has dressed up for such a night as this. But there is so much dried mud left on her gumboots from previous expeditions that they look as if they were made of fired clay. She is conducting a conversation with herself. The ash trees drink it in, they drink in the scent of the old woman. She shoulders her easel once again; something about this spot doesn’t suit her, she walks down to the water’s edge, and it seems as if she might go on walking, simply walk into the lake, just like that.

  “All my life I’ve been painting what I know, nothing but that,” Frau Kranz has told the journalist. He has already said goodbye, but he is still fidgeting in the doorway because he doesn’t know a polite way to get out of finishing his elderberry juice.

  “If you could travel back in time and into one of your pictures, to experience that moment once again, what moment would it be?”

  We admit that wasn’t such a bad question.

  And Frau Kranz really does walk into the water, just where her first picture shows the six women. If you look closely, you can see something of Frau Kranz in each of them. The scar over her eyebrow, her pointed chin, even her hair was blonde once.

  Traveling in time. Such nonsense.

  The street lights cast pale patches on the town wall. The church tower is floodlit. The colorless alternation between rooftops and the silhouetted ash trees. Frau Kranz knows it all very well. Once she painted the Berlin Gate from memory, getting every crack in the stones of its arch almost perfectly accurate.

  She closes her eyes, and the six women take their first step as if they had practiced doing it at the same time.

  Frau Kranz doesn’t see her village, she knows her village.

  Her mother called her Ana, so that she wouldn’t have one more “n” than all the other Anas thereabouts.

  Omne solum forti patria est. Everywhere is home to the strong.

  She would have liked to paint not reality sometime, but something that became real later. But how do you do that?

  Frau Kranz would like to paint what no one knows.

  Frau Kranz would like to paint the evil in us, but how do you do that?

  Frau Kranz would like to paint staying the course, but how do you do that?

  And prevention, but how?

  Frau Kranz wades through the lake. A duck is startled out of its sleep and scolds helplessly. Its quacking slops over the wall and into the streets. Frau Kranz’s evening dress gets wet.

  THE SETTLERS WHO FIRST CAME TO LIVE BESIDE our lakes, hundreds of years ago, found sandy soil that could be worked reasonably well, dense forests in which they killed game and were killed, as well as waters poor in fish but with plenty of fine crayfish in them. The crayfish were considered a specialty in aristocratic circles, although they tasted horrible, until one day someone ventured to say that they did taste horrible, and the fashion for eating them died out at once.

  The settlers considered the larger of our two lakes uncanny. Yes, its waters were shallow and a healthy brown color near the banks, but farther out the bed of the lake fell steeply to such black depths that
folk said: this is where the Devil washes himself once every thirteen years, this is the Devil’s Bath.

  The forest was grubbed up, the cultivated fields grew larger, and where there had once been isolated houses and farms there was now a village. Later it was granted a town charter, and a strong wall to mark it off from the land belonging to the town of Stargard. At first people said that they lived in the vörste velden, the first fields beside the Devil’s Bath—today the name has become Fürstenfelde.

  At first, when people wanted to get to the new settlement, the ferryman rowed them across the lake. He capably took them and their belongings on board, and instead of money he often asked strangers to the place for stories as his fee, passing the stories on to the locals at the village inn.

  One chilly evening—autumn had set in some time before—the frogs fell silent, the water was calm and the wind died down as if it were holding its breath. Then the bell on the landing stage was rung vigorously, and there stood a weedy little fellow in the twilight, gazing grimly over the lake.

  “Tell me, old man,” said the little fellow hoarsely to the ferryman, with his bony finger pointing over the water, “what’s all that nonsense going on over there?”

  The ferryman couldn’t see any nonsense, only the farmers busy in their fields with the last of the day’s work. Nor did the little fellow seem to expect an answer; he had already jumped into the boat and said he wanted to be taken across the lake. The ferryman hesitated for only a moment. He felt that there was something uncanny about his passenger, but the man was a passenger and the ferryman would treat him accordingly, so he made the boat ready and rowed away.

  On the way, he felt that the ferryboat was getting heavier and heavier. Then the manikin asked whether the ferryman wasn’t finding it hard work to row. But the ferryman was proud, so he shook his head and didn’t show how hard it was. Soon, however, he found that rowing was not just hard work but downright impossible. It was as if his oars were dipping not into water but into thick porridge. The little man asked his question again, and this time the ferryman, gasping for breath, said that he’d never yet failed to row anyone over the lake.