After all, for a long time people believed there were still countless victims of the night of February thirteenth buried in the cellars, but when a body turned up from time to time, it was definitely of more recent date. A man with his hands tied behind his back, shot in the back of the head at close range — that kind of thing was automatically put down to feuding between black-market gangs, and on the quiet there was also talk of old scores being settled. Once the body of a young woman was found in the bushes, with eyes rolled back and strangulation marks on her neck. “Prostitute”—we didn’t know the word at all, “unfaithful fiancée” was the current expression — and “streetwalker,” a term we had picked up from an adult conversation, meant just as little to us as we wondered why the young woman had put on nice clothes and makeup before she was murdered.
We brought home the material for our stories from the deserted inner city, hauling back trophies, a brittle leather strap, a pottery shard, a fork, adding new items from the world out there to our collection in the loft.
No, the zones didn’t seem dead to us then. I wandered about on my own too, my binoculars round my neck, I got to know more about wheatears and crested larks, tawny pippets and little ringed plovers, sparrow hawks and linnets — or should I say I got to know them all over again. As for identifying plants, however, I have never got back to the standard of the embankment behind our house. Flixweed, tansy mustard, prickly lettuce, redroot amaranth — I hadn’t forgotten the names, and anyway we learned in school how to distinguish the three levels of ruderal plants: parsley fern, horse thistle, and henbane ought to have meant something to me. But when I scanned the terrain with my binoculars, all they showed me were leaves, blossoms, and herbs, more or less varied in shape and color, and nothing caught my attention until it was held by a yellow wing stripe, a red head marking, a white cheek, the ivory-colored beak of a goldfinch.
There is a kind of counterpart to my memory of the goldfinches in the thistle patches: a November evening during the Korean crisis, when we were all waiting for World War III to break out. I can remember a torchlight procession in which all schools took part, youth urging the world to make peace, intimidated youth, “free youth points the way,” and I was part of this movement, like my classmates, among whom I queued to receive my torch at the assembly point. Silently we moved off, not a fun weekend activity, bravely and stiffly we marched down the Strasse der Befreiung to the Platz der Einheit, the leaders of the procession had reached Bautzner Strasse long before and were already moving up the Elbe slopes heading for the Palace of Pioneers.
I can see us now turning into the broad open ground, the sea of light beneath the trees. The chairman of the regional Peace Committee gave his speech, then we stepped forward, one school class after another, until we reached the hillside, where we rammed our torches into the earth — or did war orphans take precedence, was I one of the first to stick my torch into the frosty soil? I know that I immediately took a step backward, leaving my classmates behind me, I stood to one side. It seems to me that by that time I no longer had much in common with Klaus, with Johann.
Neither did I have the slightest inclination to meet up all that soon with Herta, Gerlinde, and Hans-Georg, presumably they were in the hall, there were more speeches, or perhaps the seriousness and intensity of the evening had long since given way to dancing. I wandered for a while through the park, up the hillside, looking down into the valley. Nothing much more than a smooth black surface where you could make out isolated pinpoints of light. It was easy to imagine that these signs of life too must soon be extinguished, as though a harsh wind were sweeping across this desolate landscape, and sooner or later those last inhabitants still clinging on would be forced to give in, as the wind drove them before it to the edge of the great darkness.
Not far from me someone lit his cigarette from a torch. He belonged to a group that stood on the meadow, a little apart, almost as though they wanted to demonstrate to the other participants that although present, they had nothing to do with the actual ceremony. The six of them stood in a circle, young men smoking, a few years older than me. One of them, towering above the others, was wearing a peaked cap, all of them were casually dressed, except for — and I had only just noticed her — a woman, her back to me, lit up by torchlight, wearing a black velvet cap. Wrapped in a long fur coat, a well-preserved garment which had been brought safely through the war, and which made a lady of her. Was she the oldest in the group? Voices. Who was speaking? The young men’s eyes, like mine, were on the woman. I was the only one who couldn’t see her face, only this collar, her cap, her shape in the coat. There was silence. The tall one in the peaked cap raised his head, I had been spotted. And as I avoided his gaze, turned away, I heard a laugh.
It was still ringing in my ears as I entered the hall to look for my new siblings, it was high time we set off for home. Hans-Georg with his angular physique, a hint of his future coarseness around the eyes. Gerlinde with her German plaits. Herta, the oldest, crazy about dancing, but to her regret not very good at it. I was going to stand by the edge of the floor and just watch the dancing figures as quietly as possible, when in the corner of my eye I spotted a flowing movement: the heavy fur coat was gliding through the crowd.
A Russian aristocrat, whose family had gone over to the right side at the last moment. No, that kind of good fortune didn’t happen. A delegate from the national Peace Committee of a fraternal country. Someone recruited very young by partisans in the Baltic, perhaps. But I still hadn’t caught a glimpse of the lady’s face, she passed me too quickly. On her head was the peaked cap the tall character had been wearing earlier, a bit too big, so that it fell over her left ear. So I’d got it wrong out there, it wasn’t a black velvet cap that had been gleaming in the semidarkness but her dark hair. The unknown woman disappeared among the crowd at the other end of the room, the corridor opened up by the dancers closed behind her. I turned toward the exit, it was clear that my new siblings had already left the place.
During the long walk home, it didn’t bother me that the three of them might have hatched a plot, intentionally disappearing in order to tell their parents that I had left the parade ground without permission, that I had hidden from them. It didn’t matter whether I was the one who got the beating, or Hans-Georg for not having kept the crew together. I wasn’t even scared that they might be lurking in the bushes somewhere along the route to give me a proper fright by leaping out in front of me with a fiendish yell, with mock-Russian gibberish.
An open, untroubled, inappropriate laugh, which even after it faded away still dominated everything, the circle of grim young men, the meadow and the hillside, the whole ceremony together with its stupid music. The danger of war and our will to peace. The dark past, the dark future, and the present November night in the open air, which hinted at a harsh winter to come, with lingering frost and snow. I didn’t know the color of her eyes, I hadn’t spoken to her, but this unknown woman’s laugh accompanied me as I fell asleep.
5
I WOULD NEVER HAVE told Ludwig Kaltenburg about my troubles at home, adolescent problems, it would have been too embarrassing. No, perhaps it wasn’t even that — when I was in the Institute foster parents didn’t exist, nor siblings to plague me, and in the evenings I always went home feeling stronger. Not a word, yet Kaltenburg must have sensed the strain I was under when I came to him for an hour in the late afternoon, sometimes out of breath, lacking concentration, eyes restless, like someone who has escaped his tormentors and found refuge. Kaltenburg would not have shut me out, I know, he would have listened patiently, but since I didn’t talk he chose not to mention my agitation. Instead, I had hardly got my jacket off when he took me to the hamster corner: “Look what he got from the bookshelf last night — a couple of pages of Kant.”