‘Sins?’ I ask, feeling my tongue stick to the roof of my mouth even though I’ve just taken a drink, and I drink again in great gulps.
‘Sins, oh yes, sins!’ He’s got louder again suddenly, bending over to me, and suddenly I can’t bear to be near him any more; I turn aside and twist away, ‘Guilt and punishment,’ he calls right in my ear; I drop the bottle; it falls on the open bag at my feet with the other bottles in it, there’s a clinking and smashing, clinking and smashing, it can’t just be the bottles hitting each other, ‘sins, oh yes, sins,’ and then I see suddenly, pressing my hands to my temples and my ears, suddenly I see through the crashing and splintering that’s getting louder and louder, I see the small blue car at the edge of the road, I see my van, the wine running onto the asphalt, red and white mixing to rosé, I see the man with the long, thin neck stumbling out of the car, a woman caught in the windscreen, not wearing her seat-belt I guess, and she’s red, all red, her hair, her face, her clothes. ‘I didn’t mean it,’ I call out and throw the bottle away, just a few sips of Schloss Reinhartshausen, Hattenheimer Wisselbrunnen during the drive, I hear the bottle shattering somewhere, ‘Are you out of your mind?’ and the man with the long, thin neck kneeling in front of the car, it’s smashed beyond recognition on a slant in the ditch by the side of the road, and it looks as if he’s praying.
‘I didn’t mean it,’ I say over and over and I want to lean over to him and ask him why he’s on the same train as me, why he didn’t recognise me, but the man’s disappeared, only broken glass on the seat and a large crack in the window pane, and I look out into the night, and there are all these people standing around me, ‘Just went crazy … threw it right at the window …’
I’m bleeding, or is it just wine? I want to get up, the broken glass crunching beneath my feet — where’s the man? — but someone’s holding onto me. I’m a wine rep.
THE OLD MAN BURIES HIS BEASTS
He fills his pipe. He chooses his favourite pipe with the straight mouthpiece. He fills the bowl slowly with the tobacco, pressing it down with his thumb. Then he sits down by the window and smokes. A hen runs across the yard. He has to catch it but that’ll be hard; it can smell the others lying in the shed. No one wanted to take his chickens. The few people still living in the village have enough hens of their own. And the really old ones don’t have any animals any more, only cats and dogs. What’s he to do with his dog? Call the vet from the next village to put him down? No. He’s had that dog for twelve years, for twelve years Kurt’s been sitting in his kennel by the gate, keeping an eye out. Kurt can sense something’s not right; he won’t stop howling and whimpering. The hen races past the window again and he gets up, his pipe between his teeth, and goes to the door.
There’s a willow basket on the bench. He picks it up and walks to the shed. He hears the dog howling and collects the hens’ bodies and heads in the basket. The sawdust and the sand by the chopping block are dark with blood. His pipe’s gone out, and he taps it out against the axe handle and shoves it in his breast pocket. The bowl of the pipe is still warm. His apron’s lying in the corner like a clump of black and red. What a crying shame, he thinks; all those lovely chickens. He could have asked around in the neighbouring villages but he didn’t want that — they’d only have asked him why he wanted to give his hens away. And they’re his animals; he doesn’t want them to end up somewhere else. He has to take two trips to lay all the hens in the little pit he’s dug in the garden. He looks over at the fields behind the garden; he’d leased them until two years ago. But he’s glad enough that he hasn’t got the cows any more; what would he have done with the cows? Behind the fields and the meadows he sees the dilapidated halls and barns that once belonged to the agricultural cooperative. He shovels earth onto the chickens, a few white feathers left next to the pit, and then he goes back to the house.
The hen’s still running around the yard. It’s slowed down now but the old man’s tired and he doesn’t want to catch it. He walks over to the kennel. Kurt’s disappeared inside, not howling any more, and the old man knocks on the roof. ‘Kurt,’ he says, ‘my boy, my old boy.’ The dog pokes his head out and the old man strokes his grey muzzle. He doesn’t want to look at him and he strokes him and looks out at the road and the houses, most of them empty. ‘Kurt,’ he says, ‘it’s going to be a long day for the two of us.’ It’s only midday and the sky’s blue and the sun’s shining after a whole week of rain, and the old man asks himself if he ought to wait until it gets dark, or go for a walk with Kurt in the evening sun. It’s not far to the woods, but perhaps it’s better to stay by the house. He thinks of the sea, which isn’t far either, twenty minutes in the car — but what does he want with the sea? He never used to go to the sea often; that was for holidaymakers. They just used to go for a meal in the old harbour tavern in town every couple of years. What was it called again — The Dancing Sailor? No, that was somewhere else; wasn’t it the Seaman’s Heart? He’s not sure any more.
And he’s still thinking about it as he walks down the road to the village. He stops at the old Konsum cooperative shop and looks in the window at the empty room. The shop’s been closed for years now, and there’s nowhere to shop in the next village any more either. He doesn’t like the big supermarket in the middle of the fields just outside town. They used to meet here outside the Konsum when they came home from work, from the cooperative or the fields. They used to drink beer and talk, sometimes they drank beer and didn’t talk, before they went back to their farms and into their houses. Fred, Wee Henry, Walfried, Jochen Schuster and Jochen Meyer — all long gone now or dead.