Star 111, p.43
Star 111, page 43
“The ashes have disappeared,” his father said softly. “No ashes, no bones—this is all we have.” He gently opened the felt and something golden shone in it. It was their old portable radio with the golden screen over the speaker. Carl recognized it immediately. Above the gold was the white, lightly notched tuning dial, which was already slightly discolored and worn. Not surprising, thought Carl. Every morning and every evening, the radio had stood on their dining table. The small wooden case with the golden screen had been the secret center of their family life—when did it disappear and why in the world had he not noticed?
“Does it still work?” Carl whispered.
His father took a corner of the felt cloth and rubbed the golden screen, whereupon the radio began to play softly. Some writing became visible, too, a small label with the inscription Star 111.
“Star 111,” his father murmured, “from the Star Radio Company.” He touched the label, as if reading it were not enough.
Walter groaned, rose laboriously and stood for a moment before the open grave, motionless, his head lowered. Carl understood and joined his father.
“You were there, too, back then,” he finally said to Carl. Then (as if he were the ghost of this past), his father pointed out over the fields, where the Walk of Fame disappeared between the hills—it was a field path, on which Carl saw the familiar shapes of his parents approaching; their outlines gradually became clearer. His mother had met his father at the train station. She was pushing a baby carriage. His father walked next to her, cradling the radio in his arms. Carl saw the baby in the carriage, who could be none other than himself (plump and with eyes wide open). He saw dusk falling over the east Thuringian hills and saw how the radio’s light illuminated his father’s face. The light and the music, which only now reached his ears.
“What did we listen to?” Carl asked.
“Which station is it set to, son?” his father asked.
Carl knelt down to read the dial. A dark, gluey lava oozed out of the pit; it had already caught the radio, it welled up and Carl watched as it began flooding the Walk of Fame.
A few seconds of suffocation, then Carl made the transition. He lay on the broad sofa next to the dust-covered coffee table, and it was Sunday, his last day in Malibu.
He got up and went out onto the terrace. The sun was dazzling. Two hummingbirds that looked like insects buzzed in the shrubbery behind the parking lot. He heard his mother’s voice, then the music started up again. It was the music from his dream, it came from the garage, blues, powerful but restrained blues, if that’s possible, rhythmic but tender; his father was playing the accordion. Following a sudden fit of longing, Carl went to the garage, his bare feet in grass that felt artificial, like rubber. He opened the side door and just stood there, in his underwear, like a child woken by a bad dream in the middle of the night who wants to be comforted.
•
The Sunset Restaurant looked like a train station hall filled with white plastic chairs. In the aquarium near the entrance, live crabs were piled up, inextricably tangled with each other. At first glance, they formed a single body, a gleaming brown lump of unfortunate life bristling all over with antennae and eyes.
For their last evening, Inge had reserved three seats on the terrace—a “nice table,” as she called it. The restaurant was part of the residential complex and the beach was also private. The breakers below the Sunset were illuminated by halogen floodlights. The menu explained about Humaliwo, a Chumash village. The name meant “where the surf sounds loudly.” Two thousand years later Humaliwo became Malibu.
“What are your plans, Carl?”
After all that had happened, the old parental question. A few overweight seagulls reeled toward them and, with effort, veered away. Only now, as Carl worked out the parental version of his answer—according to which resuming his studies was not out of the question, after all, the German Literature Institute was not far from the restaurant where he “was earning some extra income” as they already knew, then something about his daily life and so on (not a word about Effi, his accident, his failures)—did the pain of the affront reach him.
“And you? We won’t see each other again for a few years, will we? Or not at all? Am I supposed to serve as the rearguard that long?”
“Carl!”
“Walter never played accordion for me, not once. I didn’t even know what was in that case in the cellar.”
“No, you didn’t, Carl,” Inge said.
“Rearguard is probably the wrong word,” Walter said.
They’ve always lived their own life, thought Carl, he should have known when they went away and left everything behind, he should have understood at least that much. Instead, he felt hurt like a child, which was simply ridiculous.
Inge reached across the table for his hand, but Carl leaned back.
“And? What are your plans? Wasn’t Haley in Mexico in his later years?”
Carl’s father ignored the biting tone of the questions and talked about Bill Haley, Haley in Mexico. Carl listened to him for a while and then stopped. A seagull sat on the neighboring table, staring at him, fixedly, lurking.
I was excluded, thought Carl, whereas Inge and Walter were in on the secret for all that time, in as deep as possible. Only now did he understand: they had never told him a thing and lived an alternate life. A good, acceptable, and, in any case, not unhappy life, just a constrained one. With a move from the country to the city, with studies, professions, and their child Carl. It was anchored to him, too, this second-best life. It corresponded to an underlying feeling of his childhood: the feeling of representing someone or something, never being completely and fully the one meant—not in himself or however he could put it. The long afternoons in his childhood room, alone. A decor with cowboys and Indians, an endless battle in endless monologues. Enrolled in school at six, with attention difficulties and discipline problems, teachers’ visits to his parents, love dependent on performance and some incredible effort that was simply too much for him. He had the photographs from the album in mind: father, mother, and a child. A child with an exhausted expression and the feeling of being instead of, without knowing anything more about it, just the feeling.
After dinner, his father suggested “going out for short stroll” along the beach. Carl plodded ahead, then stopped and looked out over the water to let his parents pass him. He wouldn’t look at them and he knew they must find it childish and obstinate of him. They paused for a moment but then walked on, quickly and without turning around once.
They are twice as old as I am, thought Carl, with twice the energy. (And double the courage if he were being honest.) He still couldn’t bring it together: his parents and these two rock ’n’ rollers. He wondered if they still danced now and then. If Inge still jumped up onto him and then hovered. He would have liked to admire this couple. He’d have liked to find it all adventurous. The never-abandoned dream—or what was their story about? About which longing? About two people, in any case, who never complained, not to this day, thought Carl. About two people who left, following their dream like an ancient pledge.
His parents’ mystery and how it marched on, a hundred meters ahead of him, along the beach. Like way back when we walked along the Elsterdamm, when I was a kid, thought Carl. The child had grown, but the fairy tale of the place where one feels at home still beat in his heart, there where one’s parents live. Isn’t that how it was? Lost in thought, Carl slowed. The sand near the water was now pleasantly cool and his feet sinking into it made him tired.
His mother stopped and turned back. She waved at Carl and pointed at a tree that grew out over the cliffs, twenty or thirty meters above them. Carl approached and saw that the tree was swaying in the wind, but very slowly, as if in slow motion. It was bathed in light, evening light, its leaves were made of light and they moved, slowly, the light moved in the tree.
“The fact that we were allowed to see this, that’s the thing,” his mother said softly. “It shows how well things are going for us.”
Carl turned away and closed his eyes.
“When Walter needs more time in the evenings, I sometimes come here alone.” Carl’s mother looked at him, a look he did not want to return under any circumstances. The negative of the tree of light glowed on his retina, as if branded on.
“First, we tried to just forget, and we almost separated. We felt guilty toward each other. Your father was too hesitant back then, after the thing with Bill. Bill liked us for whatever reason. We could have left right away. That would have been best. Maybe we were too young. Later, I was the one who became afraid, in the middle of the forest, at the border, although we’d almost made it. But even so, it was actually already too late.”
“Too late. Two years before I was born,” Carl murmured.
“Imagine, if I’d been pregnant in prison . . .”
She fell silent and took Carl’s arm. Carl tried to figure out what his mother had meant. Why did she say that? He closed his eyes and saw the tree of light. He couldn’t remember what the actual question had been. His anger seemed to have dissipated, evaporated in the sun, and what he felt was a diffuse sense of depth and abyss, as if he were that tree above him, right where the cliff was crumbling away.
“Inge!”
His father approached and Carl freed his arm. Walter looked up at the tree which had now turned completely to gold. For a time, none of them said anything. The sun was already very low. The wind picked up. It slowly grew colder.
“Do you two remember our portable radio?” Carl asked.
“The Star 111. A transistor,” his father said.
“Where is it now?”
Walter shook his head.
“At the time, we always had it with us,” his mother said. “The radio and the three of us on every Sunday outing. You sat in the handcart, Carl, a pillow behind your back and the radio on your lap . . .”
“Three frequencies,” his father said earnestly, “and a retractable antenna. It was an excellent radio.”
“Where is it now?” Carl asked again.
“There was a little flap on the back of the case that had to be opened occasionally; that’s where you put the flat batteries. It was our connection to the world.”
“And then?” Carl asked.
Walter, who had heard it as a technical question, explained: “First, you had to bend the batteries’ contact tongues up slightly, one short and one long. You had to think counterintuitively.”
“Counterintuitively?”
“The short tongue was positive, the long one negative.”
“When did we get the radio?”
“It was our first acquisition as a family,” his father replied.
Acquisition as a family: the expression was very familiar to Carl and for a moment he wondered if it was still used or if it had disappeared with the objects it had once described.
“At the time, when I bought the radio, we still lived in the country. To celebrate, Inge had met my train at the station and crossed the fields with you in the wagon. Buses didn’t run in the evening. It must have been the autumn of ’64. I was in my first year at university. We listened to the radio all the way home. It was already dark, and we had to take care not to get lost in the dark. The radio had a leather strap, so that it really looked like a small suitcase. Sometimes I wore the strap over my shoulder, pretty casually, sometimes I held the radio in my arm. Sometimes we sang aloud, at the top of our voices in the darkness and danced a few steps in the middle of the field. The radio was our only light, Star 111. And you were there, in the handcart.”
“I was there?”
“You were there. You were always there.”
“What did we listen to?”
“Radio Luxembourg. Or AFN. The Beatles had just had their first hits. ‘Love, Love Me, Do’ and so on. That beat everything. You cheered and stuck your little fists out of the wagon. It looked very funny.”
Walter laughed and Inge laughed, too, in her mischievous way, wrinkling her nose, and then Carl laughed as well.
“AFN played them all. Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis, also Johnny Cash and Ray Charles, who were played less often after they did time in prison. Buddy Holly, who died in an airplane crash. Or Little Richard, the songs from before he claimed rock ’n’ roll was the devil’s music.”
Walter talked and Carl stared at him. This was his father. There was a lot that Carl did not know. He didn’t know much about himself, either. Not even that he’d been a Beatles fan.
•
They walked next to each other along the beach in silence for a while. After a few minutes, Carl asked his parents to leave him on his own. “Is that OK?”
He had the feeling that they were secretly following him at first, but when he turned around, he was alone. He wandered aimlessly. He stopped thinking and felt relief—a fine drizzle on his head, he shivered, and had to stand still and close his eyes for a moment.
The roar of the surf, the sea spray in the moonlight, bluish and as if lit from inside. The wind was pleasant, the coolness on his forehead. He walked on and fished a diving mask out of the water, the lens clouded with salt or from being ground in the surf. Carl put it on for a moment and listened: he heard the roar, the eternal noise that embraced him benevolently and took him away. It was a form of profound trust—and abandonment. Trust in one’s own abandonment, if such a thing is possible, thought Carl.
He came to a section of the shore on which several dark, mute figures sat and stared out at the ocean. Each one sat alone, isolated, but there seemed to be something that connected them, invisibly.
These are the dead, Carl suddenly realized. The dead before their departure. And it was strange, how uninhibitedly you could walk between them.
He took off his shoes and took a few steps out into the water. He stood and slowly sank in the sand. One wave and another—it was nice. He was standing firmly now. The horizon stretching out before his eyes and fine, sandy mud between his toes. He hummed “Love, Love Me Do” softly into the surf. He swayed very lightly to the beat of the tides. Wasn’t it wonderful to be alone?
EPILOGUE
THE INVINCIBLE A
(Carl’s Report)
I saw the Assel for the last time on 21 May 2009, just before it vanished completely. The building was already covered with scaffolding, but there were still tables and benches on the sidewalk. I went down the stairs and crept like a thief through the dim rooms, which seemed larger than before because the wall of Fenske’s cellar had been removed, but I only realized that later. It was strange to be down there again after so many years. “There’s nothing more silent than a reunion with a building site”—who was it who said that? Some contented animal deep in the earth.
There was no one behind the bar and no one at the tables; maybe guests were few at this hour (early afternoon). Everything looked normal and smudge-proof—the old tables were covered with a thick layer of clear varnish. On each one was a large menu, handwritten and laminated—a greasy piece of plastic, already crumbling around the edges, as if gnawed on.
The Assel was the first of its kind. After it, restaurants, cafés, and a few kosher shops opened in quick succession. At night, the area was still flooded with tourists who wanted to view the streetwalkers from a safe distance. These weren’t clients (maybe in the next life). The tourist guides dubbed Oranienburger Strasse the “Vile Mile,” and generally mentioned the Assel as the “first post-Wall bar” or a “trendy hangout.”
It smelled of moldy dampness, that hadn’t changed. Judging by the menu, the U-boat of the early years had become a mixture of diner and Italian, but the name was the same: The Assel. Outside, above the flight of brick steps leading underground, the name was written in that shaky, spindly Assel lettering that actually did come from the very first days but now looked artificial and incongruous, or as if this were the entrance to a cheap haunted house.
•
Back then, after my return from Los Angeles and, yes, already on the flight home, the voice of consolation and reconciliation reached me: what had actually happened? I would take care of Effi, support her, because now I knew. Effi’s trauma, or whatever the right word for it is. We could talk about all of it. And about the question of what it really means to be together. And why we were never actually really together and what had kept us from that. And what, despite it all, the future could hold for us—because of our love.
When I got to her place, she was no longer in her apartment. The door was unlocked. Clothing was strewn everywhere, on the floor and on the bed, as if she’d just been there. On the easel was the picture of the woman who was Effi, the eternal image, the eternal Effi with the necklace that she had taken or quoted from a Matisse portrait called L’Asie, as I knew since Paris. She led me to this painting and showed it to me, back then, full of reverence, in the Musée d’Orsay. “It actually hangs in Texas,” Effi had said.
A few weeks later, I received mail from Greece. The return address was I. K., Taverna Odysseas, 70 009 Lendas / Diskos, CRETE. She was there with Freddy—and Rico. For an indefinite period, “at least for the summer.” Three pages folded twice and closely written on both sides: this was her letter. They had a bamboo hut on the beach; they had built shelves of bamboo and a clay oven but cooked over an open fire “down by the water,” in the bay “behind the lion.” The lion was a cliff, Effi wrote, a spit of land that extended far into the water. The shortest way to the village was over the lion—and so on. She also wrote about the sun in her letter and about the moon, the heat, the stars, and the sultriness, and about who stopped by their hut every day—why was she telling me this? Effi had never talked much; now she was describing everything in minute detail and as if it were important to me. The stamp showed an ancient mosaic, in which two naked hunters slew a deer. Rico was only mentioned indirectly. “Some people have set themselves up here for a long stay, and you can tell. They’re calm, they let the days pass, and I’m getting it all more and more.”
