Читать книгу Time Lies - Magnus Stanke - Страница 6

It is daytime, probably. He is aware he has been lying there for quite some time, hours maybe, but the urge to do anything about it — to wake up properly, to get up and move around and inspect his environs — is weaker than the one that tells him to rest some more; no need to get out of bed just yet. The cot or whatever it is feels tolerable. He isn’t cold or wet, he doesn’t think he has pissed himself and he is in no pain.

No, wherever he is, it is all right, no hurry to do anything about it. Knowledge, clinical, precise knowledge of self or others never does any good to anyone. He knows this from experience.

The cotton in his head is different from a straight hangover, that much is clear. Absent is the reassuring thirst of the hair-of-the-dog-that-bit-you that can be quenched by continuing to drink. No, this mist will settle sooner or later, but inevitably the headache will sunder his head in two, probably not much later than whenever he decides to get out of bed. The less he thinks about it the longer he’ll be pain free. Whatever it is that has brought on this sensation is most likely chemical, some kind of drug, judging by the bitter taste and the film on his tongue.

After a while, and against his better judgement, Karl sits up and looks around him. Memories, conflicting and troubling, struggle to come to the foreground despite his best efforts.

The room he is in isn’t exactly small. It’s much bigger and nicer than the prison cells he has slept in. Hell, it’s nicer than most of the flats he’s lived in. The furniture is BRD style, solid wood, a table, a chair, a cabinet; none of that cheap linoleum crap they have on the Other Side. There is also a fridge, a hot plate, even a sink, a shower and a toilet and walls, clean walls, undisturbed wallpaper with red rhomboids, no signs of damp or lurid prison drawings, no peeling in the corners, no crumbling.

The only tangible reminder that Karl is indeed a prisoner of some sort is the fact that there is no window in the room and that the sturdy metal door is without a handle on this side.

Still, nobody raises him, hassles him, plays marching music to prevent him from sleeping. There have been no beatings that he can remember – a quick body check confirms he has no new bruises and, now that he thinks about it, he also notices there aren’t any unpleasant noises, no screaming wardens or rioting prisoners, no humming electricity or fluorescent lights. In fact, there are no sounds at all.

Karl looks around some more and finds the source of whatever brightness there is in the room. It is a simple domestic night lamp on the table, the glow diffused by an off-white round screen. It is plugged into a wall socket under the table. Obviously they don’t expect him to use the cord as a weapon against the wardens or to hang himself with, nor are they worried he will use the broken glass of the light bulb to cut himself or anybody else.

They just aren’t worried. Well, if they aren’t why should he be?

Reassured, Karl lies back down again. These jailors, whoever they are, are certainly unlike any others he has encountered on either side of the curtain, but it could be a mistake to misinterpret their kindness as weakness. In all likelihood the contrary is closer to the truth.

The silence, though, is something else. The silence, the total absence of sound, is something he will have to get used to. Where on earth is it ever this quiet, quiet enough to listen to his own breathing, quiet enough to make him aware of his own beating heart?

Exhausted now by all the brain activity, Karl closes his eyes and dozes off again.

He wakes startled only minutes later. He sits up and looks around, more lucid than before, alert, vaguely remembering his earlier thoughts about being safely imprisoned and cocooned in silence. His toes find the ground and he struggles to his feet, slowly approaching the wall to listen. Nothing. No sounds at all.

His memory starts to come back and he pictures his jailor, that ridiculous individual who claims not to belong to the Stasi. The deductions begin. He must be still in the West, in the capitalist part of Germany, locked in a room in a private house. This conclusion is based on the fact that even the larger holding cells he has slept in since crossing over to this side of the border, in the villages where local policemen scooped him up from outside some Kneipe, drunk into oblivion, have always been smaller and colder than this, and none of the Stasi lock ups he has been in resemble this place even remotely.

What does that amount to? He can’t quite work out whether he is here against his will or voluntarily. Suppose the man didn’t lie – Karl quietly recalls the scene that started all this. He remembers being released from yet another local caboose, walking the walk of shame towards the nearest bus shelter like he had done at least a dozen times before, already thinking about how to raise a bit of cash for his next bender. Was there anything else he could sell? Wasn’t the monthly money order due soon?

Then a green car with a rental sticker, an Audi or a Ford, stopped next to him. The driver opened the door on the passenger side and beckoned him to climb in.

‘Don’t worry, I won’t bite. I’ll drive you home, to your apartment. We talk a little, no strings,’ he said.

Karl hesitated. The man had said nothing that concerned him. He wasn’t worried about being bitten, but there was nothing to talk about, either. On the other hand, it was cold, he was freezing in his damp, pale denim jacket, and the wait for the next bus could be half an hour or more.

‘Look,’ said the man. ‘I’m not queer and I’m not trying to get you to do a…job, if that’s what you’re thinking.’

Karl was still hesitant. He said, ‘Are you Stasi?’

The man laughed, relieved. That thought hadn’t even crossed his mind. He shook his head and the seat squeaked under him.

‘No, I’m not Stasi, nor am I with the BND. In fact and for the record, I’m not with a secret service of any persuasion. FBI, KGB — all of the above I’m not.’

He laughed some more and shook his head, a little too energetically. The seat made the high-pitched noise again.

Until then Karl had barely glimpsed him, but now something caught his eye. The man’s hair moved. That big curly thing on his head was a rug. The beard was probably false too, and the nose and those big sunglasses on this grim winter’s day. Whoever he was, he did not want to be recognised by Karl. Hence he wasn’t planning on killing him.

Reassured, Karl climbed into the car while the man fixed his wig.

The voice sounded familiar, though, didn’t it? Well, it should have. Then again it could have been disguised like the rest of him. They had technology for almost anything, those people from the West. Karl now saw that the man had a big belly that almost touched the steering wheel and that his hands were gloved.

When they drove off, the man glanced in his rear-view mirror once, and again a little later and a third time after a minute or so.

‘It’s probably safe to assume that those friends of yours, the ones you mentioned earlier – State Security of the German Democratic Republic – are behind us. Don’t turn around. Here, use this,’ he said.

The man adjusted the rear-view mirror so that Karl could look without being seen. There was no doubt. A conspicuous car followed at a certain distance, two men in grey overcoats inside. Müller and Schmidt, maybe? Was it possible the Stasi had caught up with Karl? The Volvo was too far away to recognise the faces, but he instinctively felt that the man next to him was more trustworthy than the two men that followed them.

‘We’ll worry about them later. For now, have a look at this,’ the man said, and then pulled the mirror back into position and leaned over to open the glove compartment. ‘In there,’ he said, gesturing with his gloved hand.

At last Karl did look, stretched out his arm and slid his hand into the opening. At first all he felt were maps and a piece of cloth, a window wiper.

‘It’s a small box, a pill case,’ the man said.

Karl rummaged some more and then he pulled it out. What was this, a joke? Was he proposing? The case looked like it contained jewellery of some sort, possibly a wedding ring.

‘Open it.’

Karl did as he was told while the man steered the car towards the centre of the town. Inside the case there was a small, oval shaped white pill.

Karl didn’t ask. He knew in time the man would volunteer all the pertinent information. Only that, no more. The man seemed sure of what he wanted and couldn’t be coaxed into saying any more than he planned – that much was apparent.

Well, neither could Karl.

Both men waited for the other to break the silence. Karl won in this instance.

‘Okay, here’s the deal. I drop you at your flat and drive around the block to lose those clowns behind us. I’m back in fifteen minutes, plenty of time for you to pick up your stuff –well, your toothbrush. You don’t own much else. I stop the car and you get in and swallow the pill. No questions, no explanations. Just this: life as you know it will be over. Something better awaits you on the other side. If you do as you’re told you’ll end up comfortably rich. And that’s a promise.’

Karl studied the man while he spoke in order to grasp the whole meaning of his words, but his voice was motionless and his face might as well have been a mask – what he saw was less than met the eye.

Karl wanted to ask what would happen if he didn’t come back and get into the car, didn’t choose to swallow the pill, but the answer was all too obvious. He would continue slipping like before. He’d resume the unstoppable decline that had started when he was set free into the Golden West, object of a ransom deal between the two Germanys, a political prisoner of the East sold to the West for a handful of deutsche marks, the hard currency the communists craved so badly due to their failing economy.

It was true, Karl didn’t like it in the West, but he knew he could never go back east. If he didn’t take his chances with the strange man he would continue his downward spiral until he really hit rock bottom. Eventually he would probably let himself be recruited by the two guys in the car behind to spy for the Workers’ and Farmers’ State he used to call home.

Neither of them said a word until they reached the Mozartstrasse where Karl rented a small apartment. He was behind on the rent and would have to act fast if he wanted to avoid a confrontation with the landlord, if he hadn’t changed the locks already. It didn’t matter. There was nothing in the flat Karl wanted. Not a thing.

He made his decision.

‘I don’t need fifteen minutes. See if you can shake them in less,’ Karl said and got out of the car.

As he approached the dark building and unlocked the front door, the car pulled away from the curb into the traffic. Before the door fell shut behind him, he saw the grey Volvo follow. Karl dropped the keys to the floor and stepped back outside. There was no point even attempting to go back to the flat; there was nothing of value, nothing he cared to take with him, not even a toothbrush. His few garments were dirty and worn out, and he had his new passport on him.

Back on the pavement he leaned against the door and licked a cigarette with the tip of his tongue, pulled it past his pursed lips. The saliva helped to cool the smoke so it wouldn’t sting his lungs when he inhaled. It was an old trick he had learned back east to make the rough tobacco go down more easily and the habit had stayed with him. He could do with a drink while he waited. Maybe he should go upstairs after all, see if there wasn’t any vodka left somewhere.

Never mind that now. It wasn’t worth running into the landlady on the first floor or her husband on the second. Karl couldn’t be bothered having to explain, having to make excuses.

Would the man in the wig really come back? Light snow started to fall. He’d better come back, and quickly. Karl stepped from one foot onto the other. Cigarette smoke tasted great in cold weather, but the freezing air hurt his lungs and he knew smoking didn’t help his circulation. Before he flicked the butt away, he lit another cigarette from it. A little cold never killed no one.

When his current smoke was half gone the car reappeared and stopped beside him. Karl got in. The wig, beard and sunglasses looked friendlier now, almost seemed to smile at him.

‘I knew you’d come,’ the man said and there was nothing to say to that.

Before they joined the high street traffic, the man checked the rear-view mirror again and the hint of the smile disappeared. He hadn’t managed to shake the Stasi tail after all.

‘Don’t worry. By the time you wake up they will be long gone. Nothing to lose any sleep over. In your case, I mean that literally,’ the man said while he drove, the smirk back on his face.

He reached into his pocket and pulled out the jewellery case, placing it in Karl’s hand without taking his eyes off the traffic. Karl opened the box and lifted the pill gingerly with his dirty fingers.

‘One question before I do this,’ he said.

The man hesitated.

‘That wasn’t the deal. But you may as well ask. I’ll see what I can do, depending.’

‘Why me?’ Karl said.

‘For reasons I can’t go into, you are the chosen one, one in a million – no, one in eighty million and then some. I wouldn’t do this with anybody else. In the world. But you have to take my word for it for now. I can’t explain at this point.’

For the first time the man put feeling into his words, and Karl had no problem believing every one of them.

The man needed him. Karl felt less alone than he had for a very long time.

‘Do I know you from somewhere?’

‘We said one question only, but, for what it’s worth, I don’t think you’ll regret this. Honestly,’ the man said.

Karl placed the pill on his tongue.

‘Nor do I,’ he said and bit down.

The drug, whatever it was, worked as fast as lightning. The last thing Karl remembered was a chalky, bitter taste as the pill broke and dissolved on his tongue. Then there was nothing.

*

So he has given up his freedom — his Western freedom, mind you — to go into this voluntary incarceration. He should have his head examined, Karl thinks, not without mirth. If he told this to anybody back east they’d think him insane. He knows dozens of people who would give their right kidney to go west like he has done, and now here he is, imprisoned, giving himself over to a higher power of some sort yet again, albeit a phonily-disguised one, drugged and abandoned to boot.

And yet he isn’t worried, not now. After all, it wasn’t his choice to come over to the West, not directly. When his position in the East became untenable they, the Stasi, had packed him away into a prison on some drummed-up political charges with an exaggerated sentence — all pre-agreed between judge and prosecution before the trial in order to attract western media attention. The longer the sentence for political prisoners, the larger the ransom that could be extracted. It was complicated, but it worked more often than not, and it wasn’t nearly as complicated as what happened afterwards, when Karl was out on his own and expected to make the most of his new life. He had skills, a trade that should’ve stood him in good stead to find a job, he had freedom, he even had a little bit of spending money. Yet in his head things were so complicated, so convoluted and tangled that he preferred to stay inside, locked up in his head and now in this room, alone.

He started drinking, heavily. All those new choices he now had to make — he just couldn’t cope. Even the act of imbibing is complicated in the West. His money, his very own marks, could buy seven different kinds of vodka, eleven kinds of schnapps, five kinds of brandy, ten kinds of whisky and countless more types of beer and wine, just in a local supermarket. It was hopeless. Back home supermarkets only sold one brand of each beverage among otherwise often empty shelves. Absence of choice makes life easy. It’s a luxury the westerners don’t appreciate enough.

Where are empty shelves when he needs them most?

Karl looks at his hands. They are steady. He doesn’t know how long he has been out of prison, how many hours he has slept. What does surprise him is the fact that he feels no cravings for alcohol or cigarettes. How is this possible? Isn’t he a certified addict? Doesn’t his body force his brain to see mirages and hallucinations whenever it goes sober for any length of time? Where on earth are his damned DTs?

Funnily enough, he only needs alcohol when it’s freely available. If it’s there for the taking he just can’t resist. When he is in prison for any length of time he tends to forget about booze entirely. Being locked up again will provide a healthy break for his body, a sobering drought.

A thought shoots through his head and he gets up and opens the fridge.

Please don’t let there be any booze in there.

His prayers are answered. The refrigerator contains nothing but food: cheeses, ham, vegetables and meat. There are tomatoes and eggs and yoghurt and even some bananas and oranges, luxury items back home. That man, his jailor, obviously doesn’t want him to go hungry. In fact there are probably more vitamins in that fridge alone than Karl has eaten in any given year of his life. And he doesn’t even have to do anything for it, he can just help himself whenever he feels like it, doesn’t have to go into a shop that is full of wrong choices, every product telling him that it is better than the competitors’, pick me or go wrong. The absurdity of it – how can they all be right?

Well, for now he doesn’t need to worry about choices. They have been made for him. Karl discovers he is mightily hungry. He finds cooking oil and a skillet and fries a couple of eggs and ham which he eats with a slice of brown bread and cheese. He pours a glass of milk from a tetra pack and rummages through the cupboard he discovers in the corner between the wall and kitchen cabinet. It contains more food: flour, pasta, rice, cans of tuna, a tin of biscuits and some other things he doesn’t recognise.

Karl has never had much of sweet tooth, but today he decides he wants a biscuit with his glass of milk. It reminds him of home, of his mum, Mamochka, before she got sick, beaming whenever she managed to get the hard to come by ingredients to make real cookies – a bit of real butter and sugar, maybe an egg. He ate them for her sake more than for his own, couldn’t bring himself to say that he didn’t really like sweet things, crush her enthusiasm.

He takes a cookie from the tin, bites off a small piece and chews. It isn’t so bad, so he bites again, chomping off half the cookie this time. Before he can take a third bite, his arm drops and he is asleep.

When he wakes up the room is as before, except the food utensils have been cleared away and the washing up is done. Karl is lying on his bed and remembers the man with the wig and most of the thoughts that went through his head before he fell asleep.

The night lamp is on as before.

The silence invades him again.

How much time has passed is impossible to say. Time doesn’t matter here. It is almost as though it has stopped, is suspended in the room.

Karl gets up, uses the toilet, flushes and wonders briefly if his jailor might be watching.

‘Hello? Hello? Anybody there?’ he says towards the metal door.

He receives no reply.

‘Any chance of some privacy in here?’

He smiles. It is weird hearing his voice cut through the silence. It reverberates and echoes in his head long after the actual sound is gone, swallowed up by these clean, insulated walls.

He opens the fridge. It is as before, with two gaps where the eggs used to be. So much for the notion that it was a magic, capitalist refrigerator that could replenish itself, would never be empty like in the adverts. But no, this is no imperialist miracle machine. The food he has consumed is gone, the eggshells still in the bin. He doesn’t remember clearing away his plate or washing the skillet, yet both are clean and stored away. Come to think of it, it is also strange how he just fell asleep when he was eating the cookie and drinking the milk. Who put him to bed?

‘Where are you? Why don’t you talk to me?’ he says towards the door.

Nothing.

A disquieting thought strikes him. What if, once he has eaten everything in the fridge and in the cupboard, there is no more food for him? Would he just let Karl starve, the man with the wig? But no, he said he would make him wealthy. Surely he wouldn’t let him perish.

Karl strips off — he doesn’t care if anybody is watching or not — and steps into the shower. He opens the faucet and plays with the hot and cold until the mix is just right. He finds soap and lathers his body generously. While he cleans his genitals under the warm spray he becomes refreshingly aroused. Again, this is different from his previous prison experiences. In Cottbus, the last place in which he was an inmate in East Germany, rumour had it that the grub contained sodium nitrate, a ‘chemical chastity belt’ as the prisoners called it, to stop them from buggering each other. It kills all carnal desire outright. Karl didn’t have a single erection in the six months he spent there. Now he has some catching up to do.

Later, when he steps out of the shower and dries off, he is content. All this adds up to some kind of happiness. He made the right choice when he accepted that pill. That man means him no harm. Karl feels better than he has in a long time, and less alone. Somebody is watching over him. For the time being it is a one-way street, but so what? For the time being his conscience doesn’t bother him. Yes, he has done things on behalf of the Party that he is no longer proud of. He has spied on people, informed on potential dissidents, comrades who had forgotten about the purity of the socialist ideal. For many years it was the right thing to do according to the values he’d been brought up with. After all, the Party knows best. He knows this because history knows this. History teaches us that the Party knows better than us. The Party has been the only veritable, consistent opposition to the Great Evil of Fascism all the way back to 1933. The Party fought Hitler’s thugs at every turn, thereby displaying foresight that the Yanks, the Brits and the Frenchies lacked so badly back then — at least the politicians, who tolerated the Führer and even welcomed him and his anti-Semitic views right into their backyard. Appeasement, they called it.

Alas, the Party lost the first battle against the fascists, but they regrouped in Moscow, the lucky ones who weren’t thrown into concentration camps, that is. By 1945 the Party was back, and victorious. They helped liberate Germany, had known better all along than to follow the path to destruction. Of course the Party knew better, knows better to this very day. If they tell you not to read a certain book or watch West German TV, it is for the greater good. Those comrades who stray are like lost sheep. They need help to return to the flock before anything really bad can happen to them, before they can be corrupted irreparably.

At least that’s what Karl used to think, that he was doing his fellow men a favour, that he was protecting the pure from the depraved ways of the decadent West. But in time things changed, the world around Karl and inside of him. Doubt set in. And still, he continued to inform until it led to consequences he didn’t foresee, couldn’t have.

Surely the man with the wig knows all about his past and this is Karl’s reckoning, his way of cleansing his guilt. Yes, Karl understands that the reason he fully embraces his new lot is because he feels safe in the room. As long as he is locked up in here he can’t inflict any further harm, not on himself and not on anybody else. Maybe that’s why he’d een drinking so heavily before, and why the urge has now ceased altogether. This is his punishment, and as long as he stands it, accepts the verdict and the consequences, he is getting better, making amends.

I’ll be patient. I won’t run away and I won’t complain, he thinks.

‘You have my word for it. I understand now, ‘ he says towards the door, feeling gratitude for the man with the wig.

Then he just sits there and stares at infinity as represented by the rhomboid patterns on the wallpaper in front of him.

Time passes. Well, some time passes. Probably.

*

Karl’s sense of time vanishes almost at once. He’s been there before. Soon he doesn’t know if he has been in this room for hours or days. He eats when he feels hungry, goes to the toilet when necessary and showers when he feels dirty. When he is tired he lies down and closes his eyes. He only ever realises that he has slept when he wakes up from bad dreams. This happens frequently at first.

He tries to gauge the passage of time by assessing the diminishing quantity of food in the fridge. In between bouts of hunger he sits and thinks and listens. The silence around him is only interrupted by his breathing and his heartbeat, and he directs his hearing inward, tries to listen to the sounds of his digestive system, to the blood circulating in his veins and to the electric impulses called thoughts. For a long time he hears nothing. But he persists. He knows his body makes these sounds and that he will hear them if only he listens hard enough.

*

More time passes. Karl tries to detect the sound of his growing hair, beard and fingernails. He fails.

If time is an illusion in here, then cellular growth should stop too, shouldn’t it?

But it doesn’t. Time does pass. The proof is in his fingernails – they are longer than when he arrived. He can tell, especially because they have ceased to be dirty the way they used to be. Now, thanks to all the long showers, they are spotless. And the white half-moons at the tips of his fingers grow longer and longer.

Something else happens. He feels alone again, as though the man with the wig has abandoned him here after all, left him to languish in a room-sized grave. The fridge is nearly empty. The bread is long gone and only one egg remains; the milk went sour a while ago. Will his jailor show himself at last if he runs out of food entirely?

Not so fast. Best not to dwell upon events that you can’t control, Karl thinks, returning the last egg to the mould in the door of the refrigerator. The man will show himself when I’m ready for him, when I have earned him. There is plenty of dry food in the cupboard, rice and pasta, some canned goods. For now a biscuit will do.

Decision made. Cookie in hand, images of his childhood invade his stimulus-starved brain, images of the 1950s, when socialism was still taking hold in the recently founded German Democratic Republic. Pictures of his deceased father, working class hero and unassailable symbol of resistance against the forces of the imperialist class-enemy, the capitalists’ never-ending attempts to make inroads into Eastern Europe, Karl and, Mamochka full of zeal for the socialist ideas, and the rich aroma of homemade cookies he smelled rather than ate. Looking back he realises that he felt guilty then, guilty when his mum cried for no reason at all; guilty enough to take a huge bite and smile at her, pretend he cherished the taste, just don’t cry anymore, please.

He now opens the tin and takes out a cookie.

‘Comrade Mother, tovarich Mamochka…’ he says.

He takes a bite and falls asleep soon after he starts to chew.

*

When he wakes up he is in bed, the tin stored away, and he notices the chemical taste on his tongue.

So that’s it. Drugged again. It’s the cookies.

He gets out of bed, slowly, feels his head spinning and forgets why he got up.

Water. To drink water and flush down the foul taste.

When he opens the door to the fridge it is as full of food as it was on the first day. Somebody is watching out for him. But he is not about to find out who, not for a while.