By night, only Ulli sometimes earns something at the garage. If there’s been a late football match to talk about, or the building of a bungalow beside the lake, or an asylum-seekers’ hostel anywhere, then that’s discussed after midnight too. Closing time is one at the latest. After one, the owner of the cigarette machine still earns a few euros, but that doesn’t count, he’s never been to Fürstenfelde, he lives in Ingolstadt or on Ibiza, he’d be surprised on such a night as this. After that the bakery begins earning, but then the time’s not night any more, then it’s traditionally called the first light of dawn, except at the first light of dawn on Monday, when the bakery is closed.
Night, clouds, violet, the color of the leggings Anna wears to go running along the roads.
On the roads of dear, dirty Fürstenfelde are two elderly, devout Fürstenfelde women, day laborers, they’ve lived for umpteen years in a hut close to the wall, wet night, hunger and stale air, tallow, racing hearts, lost their men to wars. Thin soup and bread, it’s thin soup and bread or go begging over the border in Mecklenburg, fight gypsies, spend the winter in refuges for the poor as if to shame the Prussian rulers, it’s in Mecklenburg, of all places, that they find help in their need. They save for years to go on a journey with no clear aim. They know the legend of the giant who made two lakes out of one here, and they set off south to the giant’s mountainous home. They take with them all they possess, which isn’t much; their names are Isolde Kerner and Flora Kohl, they are on the road, they have no fear but they are also very much afraid, they share bread and water, going hand in hand, asking their way to the south, where is it, that south, praying, they don’t have to say much else. Isolde has lumbago, Flora rubs herbal ointments into her.
The seventeenth century with its wars is over, they travel over scorched earth, they see suffering greater than their own, the bells ring, witches are burnt, idolatry doesn’t find itself up in court so often. They talk to those who will talk, they are wary of those who fling insults at them. And many insults are flung; times are not easy. When Flora wanted to claim a day’s wage long owed to her by the Kladden woman, the woman refused on account of a broken jug, adding, you’ll get nothing from me, you clumsy whore. Flora had expected the refusal but not the insult. Then Isolde stepped in front of her friend and invited the Kladden woman to shave her arsehole.
So what else? To a man we might say you sluggard, you whoreson knave. Or call him a great oaf, a booby, an ox. A Captain Sharp. And there were variations: you murdering rogue, you clodpole. Women: sacramental whore for the pastor’s wife, Polack whore (not necessarily Polish), foreign whore (must be foreign). Mort, doxy. On the streets by night you might hear: Where’s that tailor, that furriner, Devil break his neck? Or: I’ll ask the Devil to take the parson, I’ll have none of them. To wish the French pox on someone, male or female, was unkind. Worst of all was to call a man a rogue of a French whorecatcher.
On the roads of Fürstenfelde at night there are no beggar women now. Isolde and Flora defied insults and the weather, witches and lumbago, they defied the improbability of their ever having set out on their journey. Two elderly women holding hands when the fear was too much for them. Sharing their soup and bread. Some say all they found on the journey was death. We say you’re dead only if you’re found dead.
On the roads there’s the night that makes us visible, the streetlamps shine. At the parish council meeting Frau Reiff recently suggested installing movement sensors so that only someone who needs light would be lit up. That would save electricity and money. But you know how it goes. Others who came to Fürstenfelde recently thought it was a good idea, the old inhabitants couldn’t come to any clear conclusion. After the meeting everyone praised Frau Reiff for her good idea. We’ll admit that expressing our opinion to the authorities isn’t our strongest point. Then Frau Reiff, perhaps joking but probably also in earnest, suggested getting everyone born before 1980 to have group therapy to teach them to be braver. But she hadn’t stopped to think that here we’re even more afraid of psychologists than of courage.
The wet roads shine by night as if covered with cling film.
After harvest, after threshing, after winter sowing we drive tractors and trucks about the roads by night much faster than the speed limit allows, but that’s how it is when you’re driving something powerful, loud and shiny and you’re sitting high up on it. It’s as if when you want to go home after riding high above the fields all day, breathing dust, then on the roads by night you want to show that you’re the man, you represent agriculture, you’re the one who feeds us, we all have our feet under your table. Then you switch off the engine, you cycle home sniffing through your nostrils all clogged with dust. How good a shower will be.
By night in her gumboots, not satisfied with the progress on her painting: Frau Kranz.
Stung by a midge in the rain: Herr Schramm. “I ask you!” says Herr Schramm. On average midges sting more people with a high concentration of bacteria on their feet than people with fewer bacteria on their feet. Since knowing that, Herr Schramm uses anti-bacterial soap, but all the same he gets stung, only not stung so often on his feet.
On the roads: the huntresses. Frau Schwermuth. The vixen.
By night: music and eternity, how shall we ever find peace?
AT 16 THÄLMANN-STRASSE BY NIGHT: MUSIC. Dietmar Dietz, known as Ditzsche, lives there. Unmarried, always behaves decently to children and animals, a postman before reunification, keeps fifteen pedigree chickens today.
Ditzsche arrived in Fürstenfelde during the Extended Countryside Children’s Evacuation scheme, and was never collected. His family here, the Gracedieus, were descended from Huguenots; they weren’t bad people. Family is family; better any kind of family than none. The Gracedieus kept themselves to themselves, went on a trip to Cuba every year, took Ditzsche with them once. There was talk: how could they afford it? They died in a plane crash at the end of the 1970s. An end like that somehow doesn’t belong in Fürstenfelde, but okay.
A table stands outside the gate to the inner courtyard of the building at Number 16, with a pink plastic box on it. The box is always out there, come rain, come ice, come night. The box contains eggs: ten for two euros. It’s a fair price. Ditzsche has good chickens, healthy and well looked after, given special food and the devotion of an outsider. Chickens who smell like proper chickens. They warn Ditzsche of the arrival of a storm or a stranger. They keep quiet when the postman calls.
Every few days Ditzsche takes any unsold eggs out of the box and carefully fills it with fresh ones. This is one of the rare moments when you can see him outside. The face of Dietmar Dietz is as pink as his plastic box. Wrinkled, a wrinkled face. Sinewy arms and legs. Ditzsche’s shirts are too big for Ditzsche in his old age. They weren’t always too big. His shirts used to fit him, and were ironed. His blue-gray uniform suited him perfectly, which is remarkable when you think how rarely GDR uniforms suited anyone at all perfectly.
In ’95, when city folk rediscovered our lakes, the village wanted to print new postcards for the holiday bathing season. The Creative Committee met in the Homeland House to discuss what pictures to have on the postcards. As well as the Homeland House itself and the lakes, of course. There were to be four designs. The third was a horse outside the old town wall, so that killed two local sights with one stone. When we came to the fourth local sight we’d run out of ideas. We thought briefly of giving the church a renaissance, but the majority were against it. And then the ferryman suggested printing a picture of Ditzsche’s egg box on the postcard.