Seven Thunderstorms

I’ll be right back, see you shortly, be right back, I told Ralf. I just had to eat dinner, and I ran all the way back down to the other end of our street.

            That morning—no, really early in the morning—Grandmother and I had made the long walk into town. I could choose any one I liked. There were red, green, and blue ones in the bike shop, leaned up one against the other like horses. I chose a green one, metallic green, even though I’d never had one before. And I can’t pedal yet either, I’m too short, even with the seat set all the way down.

            I got a green bicycle from Grandmother, a grown-up size, 28-inch. If I try really hard and Grandmother pushes me, keeps on pushing me the long way back here from town, I can push one pedal at a time with my tiptoes as long as I don’t fall over before she catches up and gives me another push.

            I’ll be right back, see you shortly, be right back, I told Ralf. I just had to eat dinner and I ran down the street, to the other end of the neighborhood. Be back soon, be right back with my new bike, it’s green. We’ll ride to the pool this afternoon, Ralf and I, and maybe Mulei will be there, too.

            Just long enough to eat dinner, I’ll have to push one pedal at a time with tiptoes so I don’t fall over with the new bike, Grandmother will give me a push from the garden gate.

            She’s made pickled eggs. They’re better than the ones with mustard sauce, practically my favorite dish. Bundt cake with blueberries is even better—be right back, be right back. Grandmother says, don’t eat so fast, you’ll get a stomach ache. My bicycle’s waiting, the seat’s already adjusted, all the way down, the dealer pumped up the tires this morning. I can’t let the pump get stolen at the pool, I’ll have to hide it under my clothes. The tool kit in the saddle bag is brand new too, wrapped in a big yellow cleaning rag—they love to swipe that kind of stuff.

            Be right back, be right back, don’t eat so fast. Got a brand new lock, too, a steel ring with a red-and-black sleeve, nobody’ll cut through that, even if he’s got a pair of nippers. I mustn’t forget to link the spokes and frame together with the bike rack when I lock it at the pool, and I can’t lose the key or let it get stolen, I’ll tie it to the cord of my swim trunks, and when the cord gets wet the knot’s really hard to untie, I’ll have to be careful of that.

            Be right there, be right there. Grandmother says again: Don’t eat so fast. Be right there, be right there, I’m done, the pickled eggs were great, next week I hope we can have Bundt cake with blueberries if there are any, or if not, then with applesauce. My stomach’s a little upset, be right there, be right there—I guess I did eat too fast.

            Grandmother says: You ate a good dinner, but much too fast. The buffing collars looped over the shiny hubs are the same red-and-black as the sleeve of the lock, we made sure of that. I have to take along a bag for my wet swim trunks, otherwise the carrying rack will rust. I can use the bag to take some cookies on our way there.

            See you shortly, be right back, Ralf must already be waiting now and maybe already envious of my new bike, he just has a yellow one and not metallic, just a 26-inch. Metallic green, that sounds like the sea, not “elegant” like Grandmother says.

            See you shortly, be right back, now I’m going, now I’m getting up from the table. Of course you can’t go now, says Grandmother, it’s raining.

That afternoon, the boy sat on the two dry steps at the front of the house. It’s raining buckets, the sky has opened the floodgates, and when the rain is so hard it makes bubbles, you know it won’t stop soon, and one July thunderstorm will be just the first of seven. Why does she say that, something like that, the boy thought. First she buys me the new bike, then she says something like that. Does she have connections up there in the sky, she’s the only one who knows I can’t really pedal, because I’m a little too short and would’ve fallen over, she could see that this morning.

            This rain is no accident, the boy thought, and he watched the little stream that had formed in the yard and the shimmering bubbles floating along on it before they popped.

12/6/1994

Must be show on demand

In the afternoon, we locked our bikes up outside the swimming pool, Ralf’s yellow one and my green one. Even from outside the fence we could hear the echo of all the voices in the water and on the lawn. When you stood near the old wooden fence there by the bike racks at the entrance it sounded like the pool was boiling, a bubbling of human voices, the bright children’s ones and the bass tones of the grownups. Shouts and buzzing, cursing and cheers, screams, whistles, and the squawking sound of portable radios all filled the air, lapping in waves over the old fence and making it vibrate gently.

            We removed the air pumps from our bikes and walked up to the entrance. Ralf said, “Of course, he’s already in there.”

            I saw the old, black ladies’ bicycle, easy to recognize as Mulei’s by its red-painted fenders and the yellow light on the handlebars.

            “My parents would’ve never let me,” I said. “I would’ve had no swimming for weeks.”

            “I would’ve gotten a beating and been grounded,” said Ralf.

            Ralf had come in first in our class again today, this morning when the grade reports were given out. I hadn’t done badly either, came in fourth. Back home, my father delivered a lecture: Well, as usual, neither the top nor the bottom of the heap. If you weren’t so lazy you could be first every year, win a book prize, it wouldn’t always have to be Ralf. He must have a whole bookcase full already. But sure, you can go to the pool. It’s not that bad when you come right down to it, a good enough report card. Surprising in fact, the way you’re always wasting your time.

            At the gate we paid our ten pfennigs admission, which got us a small tear-off ticket from the big yellow roll. On it was printed, in bold letters: must be shown on demand. We walked across the bright gravel and headed for the grassy area.

            That’s when I heard somebody calling my name, loud and clear above the other voices, and I could tell right away that it was Mulei calling.

            Mulei had entered our class the year before, he’d already been left back once and was two years older than me. During this past year we’d become good friends, we’d done homework together, taken day-long rides into the surrounding woods on the weekends, or gone sledding in the winter. We were together all the time, we tied our sleds together to make a two-man bob and refused to let anyone else ride it with us, or at most, one of the girls from our class. On days when Mulei didn’t ring our doorbell to have me come out, or I went to visit him and he wasn’t home, I felt suddenly alone. Why hang around with the others? None of my friends was like Mulei.

            Now it was summer, and Mulei had been left back again, the second time for him, so now he had to leave school. We’d found out just this morning when the grade reports came out. Starting in September he was supposed to learn the masonry trade and begin his apprenticeship somewhere in town. Now Mulei was standing up to his chest in water in one of the pools, both arms in the air, waving and calling my name.

            “Are you going to keep on wasting your time on him?” Ralf asked.

            “But he’s calling my name,” I said. “He’s my friend, too, after all.”

            “Some friend you picked out there,” said Ralf, “that flunk-out.”

            Mulei was still waving from over in the pool, he shouted my name, waved both arms in circles over his head. He must have been thinking we hadn’t seen him and kept on calling my name.

            “Kiss my ass,” I said and walked over toward the pool. Mulei was positively beaming, laughing and jumping up and down in the water. I sat down on the edge and dangled my feet in. He swam butterfly over to me and brushed the hair back out of his eyes.

            “Now I can build you anything you want,” he said. “Once I’m a mason.” I saw his radiant face with the drops of water running off it. He just kept on laughing.

            I would go back to the other kids, the ones who always had good grades. I realized now that I’d always be with the wrong ones. Never would I be that happy, so filled with happiness. I could never in my life be the way my friend Mulei was that afternoon.

• January 1995

End of the summer vacation

“Drink up now,” said Uncle Herbert. “What are people going to think if you don’t drink up?”

            “Salzbrenner’s sitting right over there,” I said. “He teaches English, and as fate would have it, he’s also the assistant principal.”

            “If you don’t drink you don’t get the two marks,” said my uncle.

            The owner of the Landschänke Tavern brought another double green bitters over to the table for him, and he downed the glass. “Your turn now,” he said.

            I took my beer, which had been standing there for a while now and into which my uncle had dropped a two-mark coin. I started drinking.

            “The whole thing!” said Uncle Herbert.

            While I drank, my eyes searched for Salzbrenner over at the other table, the teacher I’d have for English this coming school year. He also taught German and was a potential threat to me in both subjects ¾ starting tomorrow.

            I drank the beer in one draft, without seeing Salzbrenner, who sat squarely behind the bottom of my glass where the two-mark piece, bathed in the last of the foam, glinted at me. I could barely get my breath back and was trying to remember now whether that poem, “The Diver,” was by Schiller or Goethe.

            “Down the hatch now,” said Uncle Herbert.

            “Done,” I said, putting the glass back down on the table with a light rap.

            “Now take the coin, it’s yours.”

            “Thank you, Uncle Herbert,” I said. I looked across to the other table, to Salzbrenner. He kept staring at us, and behind the dark horn-rimmed glasses his eyes shimmered like a pair of green bitters.

            “English isn’t something you’ll have much use for in life, do you think?” said Uncle Herbert. “I never had anything like that.”

            I didn’t have time to answer him, because just then the door swung open and in came Uncle Rudi with a case of empty beer bottles. Rudi, who the whole livelong day, while Uncle Herbert and I sat in the Landschänke, had been back at his place chopping wood and had finished off a full case of Silver Crown, just like every Sunday. Now he was back for fresh supplies.

            “What are people going to think?” said Uncle Herbert.

            “Hello, you two!” Uncle Rudi called over to us from the bar. “Just stopping by, fellows ¾ right on time for back to school, as you see!”

            Uncle Rudi ordered himself a small draft while the proprietor went to exchange the beer cases, and he was having some difficulty holding on to the bar.

            “Now he’s going to come over here,” said Uncle Herbert. “What are people ever going to think of us?”

            But Uncle Rudi stayed there at the bar, calmly finished his pilsner, deftly picked up the full case with one hand, and on the way out called, in his best English: “How are you, Mr. Salzbrenner?”

            Salzbrenner, with a drowsy expression, smiled cordially and said: “Herr: es ist Zeit. Der Sommer war sehr groß. I am very well. Leg deinen Schatten auf die Sonnenuhren. I’m feeling green. Und auf den Fluren laß die Winde los.”

            “Wer jetzt kein Haus hat, baut sich keines mehr!” boomed Uncle Rudi, pulling the door shut behind him.

            “What possesses him, shooting off his mouth like that in here?” said Uncle Herbert. “If people ever heard that! But listen to me now,” he said. “You can earn yourself another two marks in one day. Run back home quick and get your new English book and the air rifle, and don’t forget to bring the thermometer from the aquarium. I’ll order us another one.”

Italicized lines are from R. M. Rilke’s poem, “Herbsttag” (Autumn Day, 1902):

Lord: it is time. The summer was immense.

Lay down your shadow on the sundials’ faces,

and over meadows now unleash your winds.

…

Who has no house now shall not build him one. 

The light from the gardens

The ruby is as big and round as the fallen apples in the grass. The little tree in the yard, leafless for weeks now, dropped them last of all, in late October.

            The gardens have turned off their late-season lights. Now in the daylight you can clearly see that they’re gone. For a time, you remain aware that the light is missing. Then just since today, the neighborhood is a flat, dirty place, shapeless, covered in black rooftops, surrounded by the black branches of trees. The colors of fences, gates, wooden sheds are not lights.

            No one hangs their colored laundry out across the little gray patches now, out in the silence of their yards, along the hedges abandoned by birds. There’s no clothesline strung between the trees; it’s lying rolled up in the house.

            When you’re on vacation this late in October there’s no need to fear the downhill way to the school.

            The ruby is set in its mount like an acorn, its metal half-shell gleaming, bolted to a finger-length iron strip with a hole drilled in it. When you’re on vacation this late in October you definitely need a ruby the size of a windfall apple, in a metal mount with an iron strap, a hole drilled in it, a cylindrical bolt with no rust, and a nut to fit it. Then the Fog Spirit will never catch us!

            Not one child on the school break this late in October is out today, on the street in our part of town. First of all, they're afraid of school, the street that runs downhill all the way; and besides that, they don't go out in October when they're on vacation because of the Fog Spirit. It put out the last dying lights in the feeble yellow grass this morning, and everybody is alone today. I'm the last one who still has light. I have the ruby. I have to go out in the fog!

            The keys turn quickly, the door to the shed is unlocked, the garden gate swung open, and my wooden kick scooter stands ready. The white balloon tires are pumped up till they shine. They must never be underinflated, that way the Fog Spirit will never catch us! Quickly I locate the bolt and matching nut in my pocket, in my hand the ruby in its mount; quickly the bolt is passed through the hole in the iron strap, the nut tightened with rust-covered pliers.

            I have the light. My ruby shines from the scooter's handlebar. The evil Fog Spirit, if it sees me like this, will never catch me!

            I rode out through the open gate onto the street that runs through our neighborhood. I kicked the scooter along, calling out all the way: Don't be afraid now, I have the ruby, the taillight from my father's trailer, a lamp full of wonders, I've saved the last light from the gardens, it's burning right here in my hands, the evil Fog Spirit can never catch us!

            I rode up and down the street. I kept calling out. I called until past noon. I shone, I lighted the way for them with my ruby. The gardens were devoid of light, and the grass was already weary. But they didn’t come, they didn’t hear me. And they didn’t see.

            There I stood, out on our street, between the four shining walls of fog, with a ruby lamp, just me, like being in a new house the others would never know about. I said softly: Why didn’t you come? I saved the ruby, the last light from the gardens, for you. The Fog Spirit would never have caught us.

            I was alone in the ruby-red house of fog, and they didn’t come, and they were too fearful to hear, and they didn’t see. And so it has always remained.

• 12/5/1994

 The wild huntsman

(A Message for the Semi-Educated Classes)

For three days it had been snowing; no one was out on the streets. For three days I hadn’t seen any of my friends go past the house, even though the village must already have had the taste of white sugar icing by now. The little caps on fence posts, the bushy cones over the garden beds grew taller and taller; the wondrously glittering powder on the roof of the shed kept getting thicker. At times, the trees in the yard would swing impatiently heavenward, indignantly casting off their white burden.

            Blackbirds, finch, and titmouse, a whole flock of sparrows sat on the cover of the ashcan that I’d swept clear of snow with a whiskbroom just an hour before. Once again, with each little jump they took on the metal cover, the birds’ claws sank into the snow. At the beginning of winter I’d driven a stake next to the ashcan and nailed a little feeding station onto it with two sides protected from the blowing snow by thin sheets of wood. Now the birds crowded with loud cries around the corncobs, rings, and loose seeds. Coming back inside the house just then, I’d noticed the distinct smell of roasted apples and freshly baked cake. For it was already Advent.

            Well, why not, I thought: If I buckle on my snow boots now, maybe I can meet up with some of my friends. Could be that one or the other of them has also thought of going out in this snow. But some token, I thought ¾ you have to bring them some token, something from the warm indoors. I stood in the living room. Here, too, it smelled of the things whose odors had wafted over from the kitchen. I saw the powdery curtain falling outside the window. I touched the needles of the Advent wreath on the table with the four thick, red candles planted in it, three of them already having been lighted, their wicks black. A cigar’s the thing, I thought ¾ an eighty-center at least, one with a red-and-gold band.

            I pulled open the drawer of the buffet cupboard, reached with practiced hand into the cigar box filled with several different varieties. I knew right away which one: I needed the dark Brazilians with the red-and-gold bands. I wasn’t searching around; I knew my way. For no one in our house smoked. Well, occasionally my father did, very rarely, but even then more just to humor me. I was crazy about all of it: cigarettes, the little trays and silver tobacco boxes, the colors of the packages and their smells. At the age of five I knew what a meerschaum pipe was. I knew them all: Cuban, Brazilian, Virginia, stogies, cigarillos with and without filter; pipe tools, pipe cleaners, smoke eliminators in the form of owls, cats, and dachshunds; cases with spring-loaded lids, cigar cutters, snuff; cigarette papers with the name Gizeh and a picture of the sphinx; chewing tobacco in three strengths (red, green, or blue box); Bodespitzen and White Owl, Casino, Turf, Dubek, Salem Yellow and Salem Red, Jewel in packs of twelve or twenty-four, Orient with and without mouthpiece and that picture from the Arabian Nights of the city gate with a camel and its turbaned driver resting before it just a few steps from the gateway. Later on: Stanwell, Astor, and Amphora, all high-priced; Pall Mall with the charcoal filter that Peter Stuyvesant doesn’t have, but Peer Export has the cork-tipped filter. Better not reach for HB, and don’t come home with the Marlboro box (too many flavoring additives). My first Lord Extra ¾ light, and risky as hell up in the dormer under the wood beams in late summer of sixty-eight, blended with diesel exhaust from the armored vehicles. Speechless, Krus, and Curly Black make silent escape through iron bars. On a green box: Sándor Petöfi with hair as long as George Harrison’s (ought to remind my history teacher of that). Coarse-cut, fine-cut, gold and silver shag; the dark Carmen from Seville ¾ fate on the banks of the Guadalquivir. Elbe, flow quiet. There’s no love in all the wide world. Thus to my queen I shall send a dispatch: Red and white, I, a Pole and Europe’s savior, defeated the Turks at the gates of Vienna ¾ Take my advice: smoke Jan Sobieski! Cleopatra ¾ not bad, but bland, like a bog-lily, though more refined. But then, Sweet Afton with the poem by Robert Burns on the package: “Flow gently, sweet Afton, amang thy green braes, Flow gently, I’ll sing thee a song in thy praise.” Papastratos Number 1 must be smoked in Atlantis, on the rim of Santorini’s crater. Finas Ovals from Kyriazi Frères on the Nile. Dark Gitanes with their yellow papier maïs. Karo, pursued by Memphis and the Guardia Civil. Esportazione senza filtro, In your eyes I saw the green ships sailing leisurely up to Arcadia, unhurried. Ligeros and Ducados, these are sweet night odors from Granada’s gardens. Romeo y Julieta ¾ there comes Mercutio to the fountain, Tybalt will slay him, Romeo must flee to Mantua ¾ thus Verona’s morning dawns. And the Greeks before Troy, as we know, were smoking Achilles and Helena blonde, it’s just that Homer forgot to report that detail. Proof enough: in the end, the whole city was smoking.

            It can be hard to stop, once you start doing it, that much is certain, but how can you stop dreaming ¾ for the world is a glorious place ¾ for the child who smokes. Leave chocolate cigarettes to father, mother, all the would-be types, and anyone else who wants them!

            I stood in the living room, pushed the drawer of the buffet cupboard shut, and let the eighty-cent Brazilian with red-and-gold band slide down ¾ against my skin, across my chest, my stomach, all the way to my trouser top. The cigar came to rest there above my belt, a good hiding place: my mother would never notice it, and it wouldn’t break easily, cushioned there between my body and my clothes ¾ the perfect spot. And this way I could take it outside with me to my friends, a sign of warmth, out into the cold, sugar-powdered world beyond the window.

            I pulled on shoes and jacket. Snow boots and poles were in the woodshed, and ski wax I took along with me from the shoe closet. That wasn’t going to happen to me a second time, never again! Last winter at the school championships I had utterly disgraced myself. I had come in dead last in my age group, and my phys-ed teacher had shouted in horror: What’s the matter with you! Last summer in cycling and swimming you sweep the whole field and here you take last place!

            It was all that damned Goldklister. It was because of that stuff that I’d had to let ten skiers, who had started later, pass me on the course with jeering calls of “Coming through!” So each time, I stepped off the trail seething mad to let them pass, with a layer of snow inches thick clinging to my skis. I’d used the wrong wax that time, pure and simple.

            That afternoon, in the couple of hours before we were to go to the starting line, it had gotten suddenly colder. An icy wind brought a dusting of new powder, and I made the mistake of using that Goldklister, a gummy, tarlike mass that wouldn’t let you take one step forward in freezing new snow. I had seen only the wet snow cover at midday and, thinking of the steep climb at the beginning of the course, I’d applied a thick layer of Goldklister, so that on the descent on the hard, frozen-over trail I attained approximately the speed of a snail, while the ones passing me zipped by with a sound as if skiing on knife blades. They had either used no wax at all or ¾ the best solution ¾ they had lightly scraped an ordinary candle along the running surface of their skis. But for Goldklister I had my brother to thank. He’d gone into town back then and let somebody talk him into buying the stuff, and I was mad at him all the way into spring, when the bicycle races started again.

            That wasn’t going to happen to me again, not on your life, and there in the shed I applied a paper-thin, greenish layer of rock-hard paraffin my brother had brought me from town at the beginning of winter, as his final atonement ¾ not even from the same store, as he assured me.

            I clamped on the skis and zipped down the street in the falling snow, between the rows of houses, planting my poles far ahead of me in rhythmic alternation and driving the skis forward with long strides. Just above my belt, between clothing and skin, I could feel the cigar resting securely.

            At the edge of the village I came to the garages, the cemetery on the right, the gently sloping field where corn and rye grew in the summer, then I saw the railroad line farther down, and before that the Cat’s Back, where my friends would usually be and where I had supposed they would be now. But today I was making a fresh track, the only one, in the snow. I’d noticed it even at the top of the sloping field but was still hoping, there behind the thick-falling curtain of snow, once I’d gotten closer, that I’d see some sign of them. But at the Cat’s Back there were only a couple of fresh tracks that a rabbit had recently made coming from the direction of the rail line. None of my friends had come here today, none of them had ventured out. Now I can smoke my cigar by myself, I thought, just because they’re too chicken in this weather, and I climbed slowly up the side of the hill we called the Cat’s Back.

            A train went past, coming from either Leipzig or Zwickau, and in the yellow light of the steam locomotive’s enormous headlamps I could see how thick the snow continued to fall. The lighted windows of the cars swooshed by as pale yellow patches, then the white, billowing curtain closed back over the landscape.

            I stood there a moment longer on the hill, checked the bindings on my boots, and pushed off down the other side, the steep slope of the Cat’s Back. This was the way, on this side, that we always skied down, but I’d failed to consider that now there was no trail to follow and that I’d be skiing blind all the way to the bottom of the hill, coming out at some point that I couldn’t see from up where I started. Nor did I stop for even a second to think that I had used that hard, dull-green paraffin that would make my boards lightning fast on a steep downhill.

            A bush bent double by the new snow caught my left ski with a jerk, I left what I thought must be the trail, just off to the right, sank into a gully filled with soft snow at the bottom, almost fell backwards but stayed on my feet as I flew over the low ramp the little kids had built here for sledding a week before, no choice but to jump it, somersaulted, and landed on my back in some bushes, on a rock, I’m not sure what, and tailbone, spine, and the back of my head were hurting like crazy. I was all alone. The snow, it seemed to me, was falling grey now. High overhead was a black opening, and when I looked to one side, four horsemen with terrifying faces came riding across the field. They rode right up to me with lances at the ready. I looked into the great black space above me and suddenly saw my grandmother standing there. She held one finger to her lips and whispered to me: Don’t call out to them! Those are the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Don’t speak to them, and they’ll ride on.

            I heard a noise from the other side now, a sudden hissing above me, and a fiery spot, borne on a great black wall, was coming toward me. Only when I saw the friendly yellow lights in the passing cars did I realize that it was the train, and that I was lying just a couple of meters from the tracks. It must have been the returning train from Bad Brambach. To my right, on the path across the field, I could no longer see the riders ¾ they’d evidently passed the Cat’s Back by now, and they’d left me unscathed. What if I’d spoken to them or called for help, what if Grandmother hadn’t come to warn me?

            I was still lying on my back, and I took hold of my left boot and struggled to turn it so I could finally unfasten the ski. My right boot had somehow come off in mid-air when I lifted off the ramp and did the somersault. I was all alone; I sensed for the first time, as if looking at myself in a picture, how alone I was. And yet, Grandmother had saved me from the four riders at the last minute, or it had been just a dream. Last evening she’d been telling me about the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse ¾ maybe I’d only been dreaming of them just now.

            Again I tried to turn onto my side, braced myself with both arms. There was a stabbing pain in my back, and on the back of my head I could feel a large bump, slightly damp and soft like tar, maybe the curse of the Goldklister ¾ though today it would actually have been better to ski down with the brakes on, and even better not at all, better to stay home altogether. But I did manage to get to my feet and take a first step toward the railroad embankment where my other boot was lying. With a little more momentum it would have landed on the tracks. I crouched down ¾ and again I felt the pain in my back ¾ and buckled on the skis. Slowly, I thought now, you need to take it slowly. It doesn’t matter if it’s getting dark, in this snow you wouldn’t have been able to see much anyway. You’ll find your way in the dark, you’d always find your way back, even at night, even without the trail, that’s for sure. You just need to take it slow, really slow.

            Just then it occurred to me that Grandmother always said: If you’re ever in shock, there’s a secret remedy: you have to pee. My God, I thought, maybe I’m in shock. I spread my feet a little, braced myself with one hand on the poles, and took careful aim between my skis. Not that I felt any better afterward, but I must have peed out the shock somehow if Grandmother was right.

            The path that the horsemen had ridden across the field was already blanketed with fresh snow; I found no trace of them, even though their horses must have sunk in deep. The path seemed steeper now than I’d ever known it to be, and I thrust one ski forward, pulled the other one along mechanically, I almost kicked my feet ahead of me so as to feel less of the pain in my back. The cold snow falling on my head the whole time felt good on the bump I’d received; my cap I’d lost somewhere in my fall from the Cat’s Back.

            It was already getting dark, and it was an eternity until the cemetery and then the garages finally came into ghostly view. I reached the lower end of our street. Nothing more could happen to me now, no one could harm me, and besides, maybe that stuff with the horsemen was all in my head. I’d been in shock and then peed it out of me. There can’t really be horsemen like that; Grandmother must think it’s funny, telling me such terrifying stories.

            When I saw the red gate to our yard, the gray fence with its white caps, the white cones covering the shrubs, and above them the impatient, swaying branches of the trees, I wasn’t thinking of a powdered-sugar landscape; I was thinking it was a better idea to stay home in a snowstorm like this one, home with the smells of baked apples and fresh cakes, and maybe to write your list of Christmas wishes for the big day next week.

            A sprained back, a bruised tailbone, a lump on the noggin, and a bloody forehead, said my mother when I appeared in the kitchen, what else could you expect from a maniac?

            Well, a bath with some herbs in it will do him good, said Grandmother.

            She always had hot water ready on the coal stove, in a big gray enameled pot, sometimes bubbling away for hours; nobody needed hot water around the clock, the black stovepipe no doubt glowing red under all the soot, and Father was always saying: Such a waste!

            Well, you just never know, Grandmother would always answer him.

            Now they began ladling hot water out of the pot and into a big galvanized upright tub with a high back. Then they poured cold water in with the hot.

            Get those things off, said Grandmother, you must be chilled to the bone.

            I pulled off my heavy socks, my pants and my sweater.

            Grandmother said, Get in quickly; warm feet are the main thing, or else you’ll get sick.

            With one quick motion, I stripped off my underpants, took a big step over the rim of the tub, and stood there with shirt still on, up to my knees in water that shimmered greenish yellow from the herbs and bath crystals. I unbuttoned my shirt, and suddenly the cigar, the eighty-cent Brazilian, dropped out of my undershirt and splashed into the water, floating there on the surface, obviously broken in half, the red-and-gold band shining in bright, gaudy contrast with the soft tones of the water. I bent down quick as a flash, slid into the tub with my legs drawn up, and with one hand pushed the broken cigar under the surface. I had completely forgotten it! The way you forget that you’re going to die some day. Goldklister, Cat’s Back, my friends ¾ never. But wouldn’t you know ¾ something like this.

            Now then, what exactly happened to you? asked my mother, refilling the water on the kitchen stove ¾ just in case.

            I took a fall, I said, because the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse were chasing me, trying to run me down.

            Now you’re imagining things again, said my mother, there’s no such thing.

            What do you mean? Go ahead and tell us, said Grandmother.

            Well, see, it was…, I said, and began frantically trying to think how in heaven’s name I could escape from the tub without arousing suspicion to get rid of the cigar, which was slowly beginning to disintegrate in my hand; the first few tobacco leaves were already floating, olive-green, around my knees.

            There’s no such thing! my mother shouted again.

            But Grandmother said, We’ll see. Just let him tell us.

            When I told them how I had shattered the long, silver lance of one rider with my unfastened ski and attacked the other three with the tips of my poles, stabbing one of them in the leg, Grandmother said, nowadays you can’t venture outside your own doorway any more, this wouldn’t have happened back then ¾ but we can look it up in the Brockhaus.

            And better bring a psychiatrist back with you, too, said Mother.

            Grandmother had to go upstairs to the bookcase, so I had her out of the way for a moment, and a moment was all I needed to take action.

            Look, here’s the proof, I said to my mother, that lump on the back of my head, that’s from the hoof of Wotan’s horse Sleipner, just ask Grandmother, that’s one of their names, and they’re dangerous, in league with the devil, go on up there with her and look it up for yourself, how could you expect to know all that by yourself?

            But I heard Grandmother already coming back down the wooden stair with unaccustomed haste, her footsteps in double time, her old house slippers rattling the steps as if descending a ski jump.

            Look at this, she called, just coming through the doorway, the boy’s right! She had her glasses perched on her nose and the Brockhaus open in her hands.

            Abandon all hope, I thought, the one coming through the door there is your grandmother, and there’ll be no stopping her with that fat book in her hand. Might as well surrender. Family is worse than Wotan’s riders ¾ they never retreat.

            The cigar in my hand under the water felt swollen now, like a ripe ear of corn with the leaves still on it in September, and it just seemed to keep growing.

            So, just as I was saying last night, said Grandmother, opening up the book, there’s Wotan right here, also called The Wild Huntsman, with his eight-legged steed Sleipner.

            I’ve seen it, I said, but this time the horses only had four legs.

            Well see, those could have been other ones, said Grandmother, the ones with four legs aren’t as dangerous.

            Maybe Sleipner was sick, I said, in this kind of weather.

            Well now, there’s more. Grandmother sat down on the corner bench at the round kitchen table and laid the heavy book down on the tabletop.

            At his side Wotan has two howling wolves, Geri and Friki, and the ravens Hugin (Thought) and Munin (Memory).

            I’ve heard about them, but they weren’t there tonight either, maybe got lost in the snowstorm.

            You’re both crazy, said my mother, practically Christmas and it’s like living in an insane asylum here.

            Let me read the rest, would you? said Grandmother. The one-eyed god is followed by a bellowing, raging host, the army of wild riders ¾ the Wotis-heer or Wut-heer ¾ and behind them a pack of barking, snapping dogs, constantly driven forward by the riders with cries of “Heyda, heyda, hafta” or “Hoho, hoho, hey, wut-hey, wut-hey, wutsche, wutsche!”

            That’s exactly how it was, they were running around screaming pretty loud all over the field.

            But whoever dared to look directly at them was struck dead.

            That’s what I said first off, a dangerous bunch.

            But anyone finding a hoof from one of the wild riders will always have good luck.

            Gotta have another look around next week. After my crash I didn’t really take the time to search very carefully.

            Don’t keep interrupting me, Grandmother smacked the table impatiently with the back of her hand. At the final harvest cutting, farmers would leave three heads of grain uncut ¾ the “Wotan’s knot,” left there for Wode ¾ on fields north and south of the woodlots.

            I probably sailed right over it before I was knocked down.

            Aha, said my mother, I thought the riders had been chasing you.

            The natural result of them trying to run me down, that crash.

            Naturally, said my mother.

            Quiet now, I’m almost finished. Christian monks were powerless to oppose this custom. Yet another rider in Wotan’s train is the guardian of death, Mother Hulda, whose cave in Hörsel Mountain was falsely reputed to be the gates of purgatory, following the Christianization of the Germanic peoples.

            Went there during summer camp, I said.

            To Mother Hulda’s? asked Grandmother, finally looking up from the book, closed it with a heavy bang, and took her glasses off.

            What do you think? No, to Hörsel Mountain, of course. It’s up near Eisenach.

            You don’t say “What do you think?” to your grandmother, even if she is talking nonsense, and right now it’s getting pretty bad. Mother pressed her lips tight and said no more.

            Eisenach’s where Uncle Rudi took delivery of his Wartburg, I said, went there in person to make sure no screws were loose ¾ on the car, I mean ¾ so it was watertight in the rain and stuff, but unfortunately it was a beautiful sunny day, and a Sunday too, and Aunt Vera hit him over the head with that Mireille Mathieu record until it broke in a thousand pieces, even though it was vinyl and they don’t actually break.

            What is that boy talking about? asked Grandmother in a worried voice.

            Because Vera thought Rudi had taken a girlfriend along on the “maiden voyage.”

            That Mireille Maddyeu? asked Grandmother.

            No, that’s just some singer, a French one, the album title was Rendezvous with Mireille, Aunt Vera must have gotten something mixed up, but Uncle Rudi is into French, I’ve noticed that myself.

            What are you saying? said my mother, you go straight to bed now!

            Why? I said. Beginning French, Encyclopedia Publishers, Leipzig ¾ I’m telling you, I saw it myself.

            Oh, said my mother.

            But Aunt Vera must have smelled a rat somewhere when she found the bill for a double room from the Johann Sebastian Guest House in his jacket pocket, and the one from the Tournament of Song Restaurant for eleven small Budvar beers and two bottles of Bulgarian red, but Uncle Rudi claimed he drank all that by himself and also polished off two steaks, one “à la Vogelweide” and one “Wolfram von Eschenbach,” as well as two quick “Martin Luther” apéritifs after dinner, though he’s always had excellent digestion, by all reports in the family.

            Now don’t ask which one of the two, my mother gave Grandmother a stern look.

            But Grandmother thought for a moment, then said, One of them that spent the night there could possibly be that fellow with the Hulda woman, I’ve heard things like that on the radio, Death and the Maiden one was called, and Dame World, I’ve Tasted of Thy Wine, I think. Rudi’d be the one for that, he could drink the world dry with his thirst.

            Oma, said my mother with resignation, would you stop that now? The boy’s already in utter confusion from all your twisting things around.

            If that Maddyeu girl wasn’t involved somehow, in the tournament of song, said Grandmother, I’ll eat my hat.

            But that Mireille seems to be exactly Uncle Rudi’s type right now, I said, because of the way Aunt Vera let him have it.

            Probably another one of those people he meets at the trade fairs, I’ll bet you anything, said Grandmother.

            Pretty nice, that French girl, I thought, but not exactly my type, I was more for Judith, the one that sawed Holofernes’s head off. On one of our class trips to Dresden I’d seen her giant tits in the art gallery and bought myself one of the color postcards on the way out. When Mother found it under my pillow and yelled at me, demanding to know where I’d got that “jerk-off picture,” I explained that I was planning to study art history. And Gunther Schicho was even there a second time with his parents and reported back that the whole Semper Wing was full of paintings of naked women, I’d missed that on my visit there because after seeing the Dutch and the French painters, with all that dehumidified air, I’d gone to drink beer with Mulei at the Italian Tavern.  Or Charlotte Corday ¾ because French women are supposed to be hot ¾ who stabbed poor Marat in the back as he sat in his bathtub, blonde, it’s true, but her tits were pure cream, sort of a Frau Hulda type (unfortunately, I’d never seen either her good or her wicked daughter topless; Snow White and Rose Red were also not on my list yet). But the best knockers were without a doubt the ones on the hero’s girlfriend in Orinoco, the lovely mulatto from Amazonas, full, round, pear-like tits, my buddy Reinhard Krause was a big fan of hers and always said that picture of her in the Orinoco book had made our entire generation stand tall.

            Charlotte Corday was French too, from Cannes, I believe, but in the case of Judith I wasn’t quite sure where she came from, somewhere in the Bible, and actually, I thought I could have done with all of them right now, as I felt a pleasant straining between my legs, but yes, preferably a French woman, I thought, besides, she’d even know French. I had to hand it to Uncle Rudi, he was on the right track, as always.

            Good Lord, here we are just chattering away, exclaimed Grandmother, and that water must be ice cold!

            Oh no, it’s really not, I called back, it’s not even down to lukewarm yet!

            I now had two reasons why I couldn’t get out of the water: a spongy cylinder of tobacco in my hand, and a rigid one of my own.

            The boy needs fresh water and then off to bed, Grandmother announced.

            Mother went to the coal stove and dipped up some water with a small aluminum pan and was just coming back toward me when Grandmother called out: Lord Jesus, look at that, he’s shit himself!

            No, no, I cried out, that’s …

            That’s from shock, you poor boy, you must have taken a terrible fall, and we just babble away here!

            Good gracious, my mother said, to think we didn’t notice right away. But you mustn’t let it upset you, these things happen, first your accident and then in here where it’s so warm …

            No, it was before that, I said, sensing my chance to escape.

            Lord God above, cried Grandmother, gingerly fishing out one of the detached tobacco leaves ¾ a piece of the wrapper ¾ that by now were floating all over the surface.

            You surely did take a beating, she said thoughtfully; even your bowel movement isn’t normal. Now then, fresh water and out of that tub!

            I now had reason to hope, unlike Marat, that I might get out of the tub alive, noted with relief that my own cylinder had also gone soft, and stood there unmoved for Mother and Grandmother to wash me off and pour warm water over me from both sides as if they would never stop.

            Our hero the Wild Huntsman, said Mother, but for now, you’ll stay home in weather like this.

             Our Apollo, said Grandmother, he’ll go up against anybody, even one-eyed Wotan.

            There you go mixing things up again, said my mother. Typical.

            For now, definitely, I thought to myself, as Grandmother and Mother began rubbing me dry with rough, warming towels. I’ll have to locate that Judith, find out where she’s actually from, see if I can score something with her; in time I’ll get her to stop sawing people’s heads off. Or maybe ¾ vision of my entire generation ¾ the peace-loving girl friend from Amazonas would be better, the pears of the Orinoco, where, incidentally, the finest tobacco is grown. Two birds with one stone, I thought; we’ll see.

• December 1994 – March 2005

 The crowning glass

Outside, on the little front yard, the street, on the bushes and trees and the field, snow had fallen all night long.

            Now, by midday, it wasn’t cold, and a thick mist had formed over the surface of the snow, wrapping the house across the street in a fog-like veil. Smoke from the chimneys of the neighborhood’s little houses slid down the dark-gray roofs, then dropped almost straight down along the walls, spread over the new-fallen snow in gardens and front yards, and came to rest there in yellow swaths, not dissolving until evening.

            It reminded him of Father smoking a cigar—his father, who sometimes smoked cigars—the smoke flowing out of his mouth, spilling down over his chest and getting caught on his heavy Norwegian sweater in swirling gray swaths and veils, from which the knitted stags and reindeer with white antlers peered out.

            The boy was sitting in his room, still looking with displeasure at his Christmas gifts. He didn’t like any of them. The worst was the bulldozer; that was the thing he’d wanted least of all. And his mother said, when she saw his disappointed expression, Our cleaning lady at work has a son who I’m sure would have been happy to get it. I can always take it along when I go and give it to her.

            That was one of those things his mother would say, and she’d said it in that way she had, implying that the bulldozer had been expensive.

            It moved on tracks made of black rubber. You could see the pistons going up and down in the engine block. A revolving lamp on the cab roof flashed, casting orange beams of light. It had forward and reverse gears, headlights front and back, and you could move a lever to change the height of the dozer blade. It had to have been expensive. – The boy was startled and a little frightened by his mother’s words, threatening punishment—for nothing, really—and the tone of her voice, the way she’d said it, had been punishment already, just by themselves. The boy hadn’t meant it that way with his unthinking expression when he saw the bulldozer under the Christmas tree. He hadn’t expected that present, and he didn’t particularly like it, and he wasn’t happy and not at all surprised; but in that moment he couldn’t have said what he would rather have had, what would have surprised him on this Christmas Eve. And also because he really hadn’t been wishing for any kind of thing at all, his mother’s remark had sounded to him like a punishment. What he’d been wishing for most of all, ever since yesterday afternoon, was that his father would come downstairs and sit together with his mother and him, next to the presents and the Christmas tree, like every year. And last evening, when an opera called The Abduction from the Seraglio came on, the boy had gone up the stairs again and knocked softly on the bedroom door, and after his father’s whispered answer he’d gone in. But his father had told him to just go back down, because he was sick, that was the reason he’d been here in bed since afternoon. But the boy didn’t believe that, because he’d been there himself when they decorated the Christmas tree with Father, hanging first the colored balls, then apples and sugared chocolate rings, on the bobbing fir branches, and laying strands of tinsel loosely over the smaller twigs. Then they were going to put the colored blown-glass finial in place, and that’s when it happened. The finial wouldn’t stand straight. Father got the ladder from the cellar and sawed a piece off the top of the tree. It was still crooked. He and his mother laughed, his father pushed the finial down hard on the tree, it fell, and they heard it shatter. Nobody laughed. The color drained from his father’s face, he climbed down off the ladder, folded it up, took it back to the cellar, and went to bed. He’d been there a whole day now. Word that The Abduction from the Seraglio was on TV hadn’t moved him to get up last evening either. It would have been comical, the whole thing, if it hadn’t been Christmas. We could have laughed about it. But not with them. Always, every year, his parents fought. Christmas was for other people, and Mozart operas were not meant for his family, thought the boy as he stood there in the room. Abduction from the Seraglio was for the other ones, like all the holidays: not meant for them.

            On that day he didn’t know yet that this was the last Christmas together with father and mother, and in this house. In the summer, in July, his parents would divorce, but the boy sitting there now by the sawed-off Christmas tree with its glass tip missing could not know that. Now toward afternoon, since it was starting to get dark, on time for Christmas day, and his mother had probably forgotten to relight the candles on the tree, he went over to the kitchen to look for matches or a lighter. Because in the light from the tree, he thought, the bulldozer and its lights and headlamps would look nice, too.

• December 1994

Applied Mechanics 

My brother was studying applied mechanics and I was just twelve. Yesterday they’d cut his financial aid by more than half because our parents weren’t workers, they were just employed. There was this new law—there’d been a letter in today’s mail. My father worked as an engineer at the transformer plant in town, and my mother was often traveling as a textiles buyer when she was selecting fabrics for a new collection for her clothing factory. But today she was home for once and had been crying all afternoon with Grandmother at the round draw-leaf table in the kitchen.

            I was busy in the adjoining laundry shed—which also housed the bathtub and toilet—doing chemical experiments, though we wouldn’t have chemistry in school for another year, in seventh grade. Naturally, I wanted to produce at least chewing gum and dynamite.

            One day two months before that, quite unexpectedly, my father had surprised me with a book he’d brought home called Experiencing Chemistry. I’d found formulas for black powder in the Brockhaus Encyclopedia in the black buffet bookcase upstairs where Grandmother lived, and since then I’d been experimenting and planning to major in chemistry. All I needed for making nitroglycerine was diatomaceous earth. My aquarium, with its mouth-brooding cyprinids and the live-bearing cichlids that came later, fell into neglect and had been acquiring green algae. Not a problem for me, it was just gross and unsightly, not toxic like blue algae. I sent Grandmother to the store a number of times to buy muriatic acid and oil of vitriol, caustic lye and sodium—all things they wouldn’t sell to a twelve-year-old. The storekeeper, Herr Böhne, who knew Grandmother well, didn’t ask who or what it was intended for. It had already happened one time in the laundry room that after superheating in a refractory test tube the potassium permanganate and sulfuric acid had splashed in my face, but my brother had washed my eyes out under the bathtub faucet. It left hardly any scars.

            Earlier that afternoon I’d caught the phrase “scrape together.” Grandmother had said it. No, it must have been Mother. I forget; I mean, I forget her exact words—something like: “How are we supposed to scrape enough together now, can you tell me that? He’s supposed to be in the university program.” “Applied mechanics,” said Grandmother. And they went on crying.

            I turned down the wick on my alcohol lamp and blew out the flame. Carefully washed out the Erlenmeyer flask and pipettes. There was sticky plastic foam adhering to them. In the attempt to make chewing gum I’d evidently added too much lye.

            “Chemistry is our nation’s key to beauty and prosperity.” I’d read that in the book my father gave me. A month before that, he’d moved out to live with another woman and taken the rug from in front of the TV with him. But just a week ago it had worked, and I’d made a firmer gum (with a faint taste of soap) and had a small supply left over. Now, with a piece from my private stock in my mouth I was headed to the kitchen for a eucalyptus lozenge to suck on while I chewed—my approximation of Wrigley’s Spearmint. That’s when they used that expression again.

           I opened a drawer of the kitchen cabinet and took out the lozenge. Mother was wearing the loud yellow ladies’ suit jacket with black skirt that she always wore when traveling for work. Grandmother still had on her green apron and over her shoulder hung the red-and-white kitchen towel she’d been drying the midday dishes with before the letter from the university arrived. The blue budgie recognized my voice and called to me from its cage. “Where are you going?” they asked. “Upstairs,” I said, “don’t be sad any more.” The steep wooden stairs always creaked, and I was thinking I probably wouldn’t see her anymore either, my girl friend from school who lived in town down below, on Cantor Hössler Street. Maybe from up on the roof I could pick out the rooftops on her street.

On the second floor of the house I went through Grandmother’s room, past the gleaming black buffet cupboard with some porcelain behind the glass: a coffee set with cups, plates, and coffee pot, a smoke eliminator in the form of a little brown ceramic dog; in the drawers I knew there was silverware and crocheted doilies. The lower shelves, behind sliding doors with cut glass panes, were full of books. The Brockhaus Dictionary—a help in any of life’s situations—was there. Next to it, even heftier, were two volumes, Anatomy I and II, in which I had seen a naked man and a naked woman for the first time. You could unpeel them until you came to the internal organs—heart, lungs, and liver—until you hit their white bones and then pieced them back together to discover what there was between their legs. If my father was with the other woman now, as Mother and Grandmother said in the kitchen, right after the letter came, he wouldn’t pay any more support for my brother and me. That would have to be fought in court. But my brother has to go to college, I said, but I’d be no problem at all, because I’d already picked up almost all of “organic chemistry,” which was taught in eleventh grade. I’d be happy to learn masonry to start off, I suggested, and leave school as soon as possible. They had yelled and asked if I was out of my mind; but then, when I went into the laundry room and listened in on them, they were saying they could never get both of us through. That’s when I heard that expression.

I opened the door to the attic, but left it open and turned back quickly to write a note, which I left on the aquarium: “Sometimes they need water fleas, not just the dry food. Pürzel’s Pond has the best ones!” I dropped in the rest of the bloodworms from a dish, and the firemouth cichlid came straight up to take the biggest chunk. Then I climbed the narrow stair to the attic. Hanging from a nail to my left was a green rubber gas mask with its aluminum-colored filter. There was a wooden wardrobe up there, too, with old overcoats and an air rifle inside. Grandmother had said one time, “Hitler doesn’t manufacture rifles to be hung back up in the closet.” I didn’t know what she meant—the rifle was still hanging there, and they’d burned the uniforms when the Russians came. Next to the wardrobe stood the old gramophone; shellac discs were lying around, most of them by German men’s choruses, but there was one I liked and had listened to over and over. A wounded deer lies bleeding at the feet of the remorseful hunter, while the ballad singer tells: “Now all of eighteen years it’s been, / and those eighteen he’s been a hunter’s lad. / But his rifle ’gainst a tree he now did lean, / and spoke, ‘Life’s but a dream, and nothing more than that.’” That fit the situation perfectly. My foot grazed a bowl of dried peas, and I nudged aside a small carton of ersatz soap from the war years. The ladder to the skylight had just six rungs. I pried open the heavy metal frame of the four-pane window and climbed out. Though it was only September, I could see gray frost on the roof of the woodshed in the yard below, and fog lay over the treetops in the garden. There was no hope of picking out the roofs of houses on Cantor Hössler Street in the lower part of town. So much the better, I thought, maybe there’s a good side to that, now she needn’t suffer and she can go with her black-haired admirer from the tenth grade, she has him eating out of her hand anyway.

The roof up here was slippery with the fine, hard-frozen white frost. I stepped all the way to the rain gutter at the edge and jumped.

There was no controlling my airspeed, no way to go faster or slower as I would have wanted; Newton’s apple came to mind. But with only a slight movement of my flat hands I could steer left and right, or change altitude with a light dolphin kick. I flew toward the fruit trees first, where a few late pears glowed in the fog—Williams’ Good Christian, Bonne Louise, Clapp’s Favorite—then gently over the bare lilac tree, gradually gaining altitude, but I was getting deeper and deeper into the thick fog. “Watch out, look where you’re going! Are you blind?” It was my classmate Mulei I’d bumped into. “Want to head over to Kohlaff’s and pick him up?” Mulei had seven brothers and sisters; nevertheless, his family had bought an ancient black 4.5-liter Horch Pullman built in Zwickau a few days before. We marveled as the whole family climbed in for the first time, and watched as the springs of the car slowly compressed with a loud squeaking. (After all, Horch! or in Latin, Audi! does mean Listen!) Kohlaff lived with his mother and younger brother Bernd right around the corner, three houses down the narrow Settlement Street. He had no father, but he did have a grandmother. They never let us into their house, so we had to call. He saw us, quickly grabbed a warm jacket, and jumped from the roof; it only took him a minute. Then we picked up Aufi, who ranked especially high in my estimation because he’d once hit the red-headed math teacher, who did nothing but yell in class, over the head with the numerical tables. We got him on the way, in the railroad workers’ subdivision, and fat Schicho too, from the rooftop next door. “Don’t you have homework to do?” Mulei asked him sarcastically. “I don’t plan to get left back three years in school like you,” Schicho said, “and I plan to be a railroad engineer like my father was.” “You’ll see what that gets you, later on,” said Kohlaff. “Buzzing in your ears and black lung, just like him.”

            “Maybe we could take a detour over Cantor Hössler Street,” I suggested. The others laughed and grinned at each other. “We know what that’s about, but sure, why not?” said Kohlaff, who was two years older than me.

            “Then on the way, maybe take Ralf along with us?” I asked. But Mulei said, “Maybe on the way back—that grade-grubber.”

We preferred to do our flying on weekends and during summer vacation; it rarely happened that one of us was aloft from November to March. We were careful to avoid especially the nights between Christmas and New Year, when spirits walk. Only Mulei claimed that he’d once met up with the Wild Huntsman and his entourage around the big smokestack at the textile finishing plant, and told us Mother Hulda had looked really fat, even fatter than Schicho, who could never squeeze into a locomotive cab anyway.

Two years later, Kohlaff suddenly crashed, from a Sunday, when we’d all just been out flying together, to Monday—a complete surprise. We saw him the morning of September first walking down Settlement Street in heavy shoes, carrying a bag with a thermos and lunchbox. He was to become an electrician, and this was his first day. Ralf was the second to go, one year after the disappearance of Kohlaff. He was going to the university in Leningrad and would eventually end up in Wandlitz. Schicho followed three years later, starting his engineer’s apprenticeship at the railroad station in our town. But Aufi held out for a long time, together with Mulei and me, until he was called up to apprentice as a machinist. Ten years later he got blood poisoning working at a lathe and died within a few days.

            Then it was always just Mulei. He continued coming with me for many more years, and I heard that he never crashed, his whole life long. Because I crashed too. I never did study chemistry. I did begin medical studies, but dropped out after two semesters because I could see that there were going to be enough doctors in the world.

            My brother finished his degree in applied mechanics with a B-plus average. But later on he couldn’t advance any further, could never conduct research in his field or even be a group leader, because he had a brother like me who didn’t fit in and who flew out of the country at the age of twenty-five.

• Berlin, Wed., 8 Feb. – Sun., 12 Feb. 2017

 One morning in Baltimore

Salzbrenner: I knew him and tried time and again to push him out of my mind. Somehow he was lodged in my heart and there he stayed for several decades. Paeans to teachers are something I detest. They’re sung by old, over-satisfied former students who’ve been successful in life. But Salzbrenner was my English teacher, and I’m old myself now.

            Tom and Peggy: From London. Communist Party members. Meek labor unionists and faithful readers of The Morning Star. And Gunther Schicho: Monday afternoons in the fall. After English we’d walk from our school in the nearby countryside, on paths that followed the gentle descent of the creek, back down into town. The school served a large area and was attended by kids from the scattered farms, from the home for orphaned children up by the woods, and the generally better-off students from neighbourhoods on the edge of town: Star Gardens and the railroad workers’ subdivision, the SA Village all three built in the 1930s (the name of that last one reminded us by whom).

So back in our day, the sixties, the school enrolled a broad mix of pupils with the most varied backgrounds and life experiences. You could learn some really great or nasty tricks from the orphanage kids, and be exposed to violence, too. As one of those from the town neighbourhoods, I enjoyed tutoring them and the farm children as long as it wasn’t in Russian, which they were mistrustful of to begin with, not believing that a language could use an alphabet different from the German one they’d already worked so hard to learn. They became suspicious then, even of me. Only a few who’d somehow got the hang of Russian ever made it to Salzbrenner’s English class, which started in the seventh grade. For the farm children, the plural of “tree” was “treece,” and there was no shaking them out of it. But then, on late afternoons, these same kids would take me down the hill or up the hill to their farmyards to see their animals in the stable or in rough-built pens and cages. Horse, cow, sheep, and rabbit sniffed at the boy from town and were not ashamed of the stupid geese, chickens, and goats they shared the space with.

            But probably what attracted me to Gunter Schicho was that his father was a railroad engineer, and Gunter had an enormous model train layout that took up one whole room in their house, displacing his sister for several months in the winter when it was set up. That was one common interest of ours; the other one was our passion for tropical fish. Each of us had an aquarium  perhaps in defiance and as consolation for not having larger animals. We’d obviously been infected with the devotion, love, and attention the farm children showed to theirs. 

It was for our fish, for the water fleas we fed them, that we walked down into town together every Monday after Salzbrenner’s English class. And because both of us were in love, I with Karin Hornfischer: pretty, almost ash blond; Gunter Schicho with Marina: medium blond, later: secret police, Stasi, same as her husband. A little awkward at class reunions years later. The two of them could never talk, never chat about what kind of work they actually did, which particularly offended the former girls and boys from the farms, truly wounded their feelings for good. Uncommunicative as fish and that’s not an insult to the fish.

            So late Monday afternoons: a quick jaunt into town from the fields and the edge of the woods where the school was, and still is, saying no more for now about Marina, who later in life wanted to know everything, Karin Hornfischer, about whom I wanted to know a few things early on, but in a different way, of course, and with no need for words, Gunter Schicho and I, both seriously in love. So you acquire pets that swim around and say nothing, and you lavish your affection on them.

Salzbrenner’s Mondays, afternoons that were turning into evenings by September: hardly any lights along the paths, only the running, rippling, strangely sputtering sound of the stream flowing townward; long treks in the rain, three, four kilometers to the light; fog, too-early snow, just showers at first, then settling in at a long, steady rate. The town is aglow. The display at the news agency, Gunter Schicho walking past, more slowly than I because he’s overweight, magazines in the window, a colourful display, blondes too, of course, just a glimpse, not even breaking stride, hurrying past on our way to the water fleas with our hopeful impatience to see if maybe some new species had arrived  cichlids from Yucatan and Brazilian mudskippers were possibilities, the brood-protecting firemouth cichlid native to Guatemala like the ones I was so fascinated by at the Leipzig Zoo with Uncle Rudi  until he started feeling nauseous from the humid air indoors and waited long and patiently for me outside the aquarium building, his face ashen. He didn’t abandon me and spent the time staring at an immobile, though live, giant African tortoise, maybe struggling, in his momentary physical weakness, with the idea of sitting down on the beast, since there were no benches anywhere nearby. Four weeks after that he gave me a trio of convict cichlids for my aquarium, the rowdiest inmates I ever had, that quickly finished off the other inhabitants of my peaceful pond and the plants as well, and finally turned to devouring each other.

            So I understood, with hurrying step, now passing by the windows of the news stand, Gunter and I with our shoulder bags, with the brochure about Peggy and Tom’s life in England, and for each of us an empty preserve jar with tight-closing plastic lid, Monday afternoons in the darkness of fall and winter, quickly past the store window, catching sight of the colourful magazines on display there, with a blow aimed more at my head than my heart  understood in a flash that Karin Hornfischer’s blond would be longer lasting, would have more to offer, was something finer than a medium blond like Marina’s. Both types were generously displayed behind the glass panes of the news agency window. When I was kicked out of high school four years later, I’d often run into Marina in the park they called Old Cemetery, and the medium blond would still say hello to me, which I thought was nice of her. I didn’t see Karin Hornfischer again. She married an officer and seemed to be well provided for.

For thirty minutes now Gunter Schicho and I had been standing in front of the glass (the other glass: greenish, radiating warmth, maybe it was into November already). There was nothing lovelier in the world for us than coming in from the darkness to a dimly lighted room full of aquariums, and Salzbrenner had taught us a few more of his irregular verbs, and with night falling rapidly we found the tiger shovelnose catfish already resting, the angel fish already asleep, next to it the green discus, a pair of Mexican mouth-brooders digging listlessly in the fine sand, the zebras chasing each other tirelessly in their flashing black-and-gold stripes, the neons too, lined up one behind the other, still awake, and we both always made sure to check on the black mourning-cloak tetra, motionless in the green darkness, seeming to watch us with surprised empathy. Made sure to do that. Next to the true blond of Karin Hornfischer my favorites were the Buntbarsch, or cichlids, those in particular because they care for their brood, selflessly defending their newly-hatched young. And before all that, their dance: twitching, bewitching dance, an amorous display. How they tremble for the love of each other! Basins round and deep, dredged from the depths of devotion, where after days of rest the still and lifeless eggs themselves begin vibrating, trembling, taking up their parents’ love-dance again, gratefully, eggs burst, and equipped with little sacs on their throats they appear as tiny fish. Then, when the sacs are empty, in two or three days: such hunger! Salzbrenner’s Monday afternoon classes promised adventures abroad in the hours that followed, even though we were helpless prisoners of love. The only thing missing was flying fish, and you still couldn’t find saltwater aquariums.

            For a long time I shut Salzbrenner out of my memory, I think it was because I soon recognized that he still had his place in my heart and needed no outward presence. Nevertheless: a story. I wanted to memorialize him. But he never sat in a bar, as I once told the story, and definitely not on a Sunday evening at the end of the summer vacation, and he never drank schnapps. But in this story, this report of mine on him, he did sit alone.

            It’s always a little awkward when an author presents himself in a text as the person he is. But I had reason now to let Salzbrenner step forward, the one who was in my heart and wasn’t leaving, had no intention of leaving, even though he’s been dead a long time now. One reason alone: gratitude.

            And because I’d heard that “evil” among the world’s people was far less a problem than their boundless stupidity, which, though less cruel, is more enduring. Evil could be dealt with just by bringing it to light, and it would crumble away in an instant. But you can never put your finger on stupidity; in the end, it will eat your finger off. During the years I was expelled, in prison, and expatriated and later half starving in another country, I never forgot Salzbrenner. Or only half forgot him, really didn’t completely accept him, went on hiding him and kept him hidden.

I’ve already described the foreign country, but there’s still more to tell about here at home.  Because the hallway, the corridor on this floor of the school, was to be avoided. You were a student here, after all, one who thought himself an adult, smarter, something of an operator, if not exactly the smoothest one. And your school buddies. Classmates.

            Nobody liked having to go past the office. She behind sealed frosted-glass windows, the secretary, indefinable blond, you had to knock but were only allowed to during the long recess period at 9:20 was actually nice. But a superior power, the smell of danger flowed out when she, Frau Klein, raised the glass pane and smiled. Behind her murky, fear-laden, not stuffy, more like odourless, hopeless danger: the principal’s office. Stomp. Stick. Brown. Walking the hallways on silent black rubber soles was the very expression of his existence. Purpose. Betrayal. And listening. But not with us. Fear, but not completely naked fear, a smarter kind, a precaution like hard winter Boskop apples hardheads. Stored up for the endless days in grey overcoat, days of mourning, rain and snow storms, paralyzing image of what you might still come up against, blunt. Just the opposite of locomotive days. But every December, that’s when school went up in glorious smoke at the thought of your own model railroad layout at home: one that ran on two levels at Gunter Schicho’s, with express and freight trains, forests, papier-maché mountains and tunnels. Two modest loops, a double-decker train with a switching locomotive and a siding with a bumper for me. Which was quite enough to keep me happy. Later on, Gunter Schicho overdid it and went to work as a locomotive driver. Never marry a railroad man. I don’t think he ever had a clear track to England.

Stomp. Stick. Brown. Silent black rubber made its stealthy approach. Better hope he’s not coming this way! When he does, the handle of the classroom door where he’s been standing, listening tilts down and springs back and there he is: Principal Träger!

            Recess means freedom, or at least a break, in the rooms of the dreary building, but also students moving around. On all three floors at once; on the top one: Knoll’s gruesomely fascinating body parts in paraffin, embryos supposedly the way we ourselves had once looked a stuffed feral cat and what was thought to be a golden eagle. Brehm’s Animal World in excerpts, filling the poorly lighted third floor up there, it made a deep impression and we avoided it on somber days and in the late afternoon.

            He’s coming, walking slower now, will the door handle tilt? Listen! No fear now! Saved! Salzbrenner listen!  there in the music room, he’s playing the piano!

            Träger, unlike Salzbrenner, didn’t wear glasses. He saw everything, stood, walked with stiff, silent step, saw everything under his supervision. We were subject. The love in Gunter Schicho’s heart fell silent, as did mine, we concealed it, somehow, somewhere else, when the pale steel of the door handle began to tip. Stomp. Blond was gone from two hearts.

Before I forget, while I’m still thinking of this, I should note that Salzbrenner was a political emigrant in England during the Second World War. Träger, a man of the Waffen SS who became the principal of the Socialist Polytechnic High School I attended beginning in 1960, at age six.

            Salzbrenner’s piano playing in the music room, the man who’d been gone for such a long time overseas, appeared to disconcert Träger. Especially in the long recess periods, as if because of that, because of Salzbrenner’s music, he lost his sense of sneaking and snooping, became disoriented in his own familiar hunting grounds. He reacted to it with raging crimson face and husky voice  red face like a child’s and the bellowing we children never forgave him. His leg injury, from when he aspired to enlarge the Greater German Reich while still standing on two legs, was the cause of stomp, stick, and brown. His high blood pressure was caused by Salzbrenner.

Salzbrenner actually taught only English and music, I remember quite clearly because I played an especially weak part in his singing and instrumental classes: stiff and beset by head colds, and my voice changed for the worse, which he gentlemanly and graciously ignored. We sang, and I sang along too: Who’s still hiding in the ground? / Who’s riding in the truck to town? / Potatokin, potato! / Potatokin’s dream is done. My voice, I hoped, swept away down all the corridors. Many of the teachers claimed that Allied planes, British and American, had dropped potato beetles over the fields to destroy our harvest; nothing was ever said about poor economic planning. Salzbrenner thought otherwise. We sang: Our song far o’er the border sails, / Friendship prevails! Everybody knew it was only our songs that were free to travel, but friendship was okay. Along with Peggy and Tom in England, we sang loudly: The union is behind us, / We shall not be moved! and also: O my darling Clementine  the girls from the English class especially liked singing that, but we all liked the Christmas songs: The snow, the snow is falling, we’ve waited long to see, then with a more pronounced beat and not so fast: Ah, the good smells, fragrance so fine. The girls imagined cookies baking, we boys were thinking of the locomotives waiting at home. And we learned, with the help of Salzbrenner and the English textbook brochure, how Tom and Peggy kissed on Christmas Eve in London: under a sprig of mistletoe.

Having arrived in Pennsylvania, old now, measuring my age in decades, a writer in residence teaching seven bright students German literature from Walther von der Vogelweide to Jürgen Fuchs, where everyone at the college addressed me as “Professor,” and up until then I’d never taken English from anyone but Salzbrenner, I made a deep bow across the wide ocean, all the way to Salzbrenner’s grave. Salzbrenner. All he’d given me up to this point and for my mind. We don’t have strictly prescribed running times, and his resting time could have run out by now.

            Weeks later in Baltimore, in Indian-summer October, though a chilly morning, I stood smoking outside the bus terminal doors at the back of the building, alongside the Greyhound buses that would soon be departing for all those places I’d dreamed of since childhood: St. Louis by way of Columbus, Ohio and Indianapolis, the hotel room in Granville reserved, two days later back to New Jersey and a reading at the university in Madison, now time to board. In every direction friends are waiting, and a little dog named Suki in a neighbourhood back yard in Gettysburg, with a yellow ball that I alone can throw for her and that glows in the dark. Our song far o’er the border sails. The ABCs that weren’t meant for us: Alabama, Baltimore, Colorado.

            All at once (I was still standing there smoking, right beside the buses) someone barked out a command, a black driver wearing a toxic-green warning vest: Stay behind the doors!

I was startled and thought back to Salzbrenner. For the first time, my heart was calling my head. To our listeners in Germany! Damn, what did “behind” mean? My head was refusing to work. We shall not be moved! This is the BBC in London. This morning the armed forces of five member nations of the Warsaw Pact crossed the border into the Czechoslovak Republic. How much fear had there been in Salzbrenner’s heart when the German fleet was headed for England, how much fear during the nighttime bombings of London, and Churchill asked every morning if St. Paul’s was still standing? Was Salzbrenner only playing the piano during recess because of us, distracting Träger to save us? So we could escape. Be free and without fear. Nobody is behind us no one, until in a foreign country we light a cigarette where it’s not permitted, and suddenly understand. Early one morning in Maryland, outside the bus shed in Baltimore.

            Maggie Sue Ann had been waiting a long time for me, and I got there okay. That evening we had Brooklyn pastrami with Octoberfest Beer (nothing left over to send to the army) tastier than at Katz’s Deli, no bananas today, I know. Not a sign of mistletoe anywhere, but an aquarium with dark-green plants and red-orange live-bearing swordtails, their blue-and-black swords gleaming velvety. The service was very friendly, the light in the Hanover Grill subdued, and we could count ourselves lucky.

• Berlin, January-February 2012