“I’d like to understand that if I could.”
“Yes, but I don’t know what it will sound like. .” Schramm smells his hand. “Right, listen. You can’t say that a place or a general is—” Schramm shakes his head. “Trunov told us to lay out a kitchen garden. We didn’t have to do as he said, but we did. We even gave it a name.”
“The Trunov Garden?”
“The Kitchen Garden of Comrade General Paša Trunov. It grew wonderful peppers year after year. My word, it did.”
Herr Schramm coughs, but it could have been a laugh. He crouches down. “Hey, come here. See that?” He points to the ground near the bells. “Someone got stuck here. Those are the tracks of tires.”
“So?”
“Put two and two together.”
Anna isn’t feeling in the mood for riddles. Only now does she seem to see the bells. She doesn’t think them very interesting. Herr Schramm turns away too. He wants to show Anna something, and gets her to climb the wall.
“So now?” says Anna, from on top of the wall.
“Story time,” says Herr Schramm.
THE VIXEN FOLLOWS THE SCENT OF CHICKEN down the lighted stone path between the human earths. There could be danger lurking anywhere here. One is already lurking. A human male. The vixen catches the scent of his shoulder: the injured flesh. He is standing still in front of an earth that she likes to visit herself. Inside it humans do what humans most like doing: they make one thing into other things. They make large, firm, crisp things out of wheat dust. And sometimes, not often, but they are delicious, those things are put out behind the earth, where the vixen waits for them, not often, but they are worth the wait.
She makes a small detour round the human male. This time the makers of things out of wheat dust haven’t left anything out. But the vixen catches the soft scent of chicken feathers behind a row of boards by the next-door earth. She investigates the boards until she finds one slightly raised from the ground. She slips through. A spacious place with the wooden henhouse in a corner. The hens are dreaming. Their sleep is mild with rain.
BEFORE YOU BUILD A CHICKEN RUN, GET TO KNOW all you can about both chickens and foxes. Find out about the instincts of chickens and the stories of the fox.
The Durdens had always been short. Nothing could change that, no wise women or stretching apparatus, no marrying tall people, no hormone treatment — and the last of the Durdens living here, first name Heinrich or Heini, known as Tiny, Fürstenfelde’s last Mayor before the fall of the Wall, was only 1.45 meters tall.
We didn’t think Durden’s stature was worth mentioning. A joke here, a bit of teasing there. It bothered him considerably. It influenced his footwear, it left its mark on what he thought and did, to wit his efforts to wield influence and authority, and it had him always striving for higher things. He had failed as chairman of the Agricultural Production Society under the GDR, he had failed as a husband in three marriages. So he tried his luck as our Mayor.
If you are building a chicken run, you must realize that you are keeping the chickens 100 percent in, but you can’t keep the fox 100 percent out. If he gets in the chickens are at his mercy. The enclosure that was built for their protection becomes a condemned cell.
Durden took up the office of Mayor in ’84; in ’85 the Schliebenhöners went to the West, the only ones here to do so. Did the former event have anything to do with the latter? No one expressed suppositions out loud. It was just that since taking office Durden had gone on and on to the Schliebenhöners about the idea of a house swap. They had a large house but lived alone, and Durden lived alone, but all the same he wanted a big house.
A month after the Schliebenhöners had disappeared, Durden moved in. Their big house had a balcony with a view of the Great Lake, and a kitchen garden surrounded by blackberry bushes, and a large lilac looming over it like a roof. A cherry tree adorned the inner courtyard. The Schliebenhöners had not sold their goat, so that no one would suspect anything.
If you are building a chicken run, make sure that the chickens have enough space to run around and amuse themselves, and if they have dark feathers that they have enough shade in summer. Chickens also need a place to which they can withdraw when the life of a chicken gets to be too much for them. If you are building a chicken run, build the fence at least 1.50 meters high or higher. Anything less will be child’s play to the fox, not an obstacle.
The Mayor made himself at home. He harvested the garden produce, fed the goat, forged signatures. After his mayoral work was done, he drank beer on the balcony and looked at the sky more often than the lake. He knew he was seeing stars that had been extinguished long ago, and that weighed on his mind. Was it a sign? And if so, what of?
If you are building a chicken run, make the entrance tunnel go in a zigzag, with short straight bits and sharp angles, so that a chicken can get along it easily, but not a fox. And get a dog with a nervous disposition.
The circumstances of Durden’s move were dubious, but we and the time were not yet mature enough to point out such a thing in public. Furthermore, the village had worse problems than the Mayor’s house-moving: to name just one, liquid manure trickled down from the arable fields into the lakes, making their ammonium content twelve times more than was permissible. Children ran into the water and came out itching. Blue-green algae increased and multiplied like rabbits. No one in the Agricultural Production Society was interested in that; even Durden had once tried mentioning the matter, and got nothing but promises.
There was one small comfort. The pike-perch from the Great Lake were sold in the West. People were annoyed about that, rightly so, but not quite so annoyed when the business of the ammonium content came out, and of course we didn’t wish severe nausea on anyone over there — but even a Wessi, we thought, can take a little bit of nausea if there is any.
If you are building a chicken run, use sturdy, close-meshed wire netting. You don’t want the fox to be able to climb it or bite a hole in it. Fix the lower one-third of the netting properly to a low concrete wall that continues underground, preferably for half a meter down. The fox digs fast and well. Don’t build the little wall too high; chickens need light, and should be able to see what is on the other side of the wall. Artificial light makes them nervous.
Durden had a garden makeover. He wanted more tidiness, more pumpkins and melons, fewer blackberries and indeed fewer berries in general, because berries are kids’ stuff. He didn’t like the goat, but he kept her because she licked his hand even when there was nothing in it.
One day he went with the local branch of the Small Animal Breeders’ Association to the district show in Sarow, and saw Dietmar Dietz, known as Ditzsche, win the crowing contest with his Dwarf New Hampshire rooster, which crowed 151 times within an hour, and then win the green victor’s ribbon too in the Dwarf Chicken class, with a blue-porcelain colored fowl that had feathered feet.
Now Durden wanted dwarf chickens too.
Ditzsche thought it was a joke, but Durden’s eyes were shining. The Mayor wandered past the pens. Feathers shimmered in the most wonderful colors, and he pointed in silence to one of the fowls now and then, if he particularly liked it.
Ditzsche tried to dissuade him: it took a lot of time and trouble, he said. Breeding pedigree chickens called for care, good rearing and, yes, love.