“I ask you!” says Herr Schramm. He switches the TV set off.
In German households, on average, there are more germs on the remote control than on the lavatory seat. Herr Schramm thinks about that “on average.” It’s all relative. Lavatory seats are larger than remote controls.
In his own household, thinks Herr Schramm, there are more disappointments about himself, on average, than about the world. With a sigh, he gets off the sofa and in the same movement pulls up his underpants from round his ankles. The rest of his clothes are in the bathroom. He searches their pockets to see if he has enough change for a packet of cigarettes. He does.
Herr Schramm sits in his Golf for a little while first. A tall, upright man with poor posture, thinking: on average. Martina (aged nineteen, Czech Republic). Bats hang upside down because their legs are too weak. They can’t take a run and then fly away, like a goose, for instance.
His pistol is in the glove compartment.
Much that Herr Schramm regrets today was done of his own accord. Pressure is what Herr Schramm was good at. Standing up to pressure and exerting it.
He drives away. Maybe to the cigarette vending machine, maybe to the abandoned anti-aircraft missile department at number 123 Wegnitz, where he was stationed for seventeen years. A few cigarette ends or a shot in the head, he hasn’t made up his mind yet which.
Maybe Martina has a talent for fingernails. What would that be called?
In Wilfried Schramm’s household there are more reasons against life, on average, than against smoking.
WE ARE GLAD. ANNA IS GOING TO BE BURNT. THE sentence will be carried out at the Feast tomorrow evening. The children are put to bed in the hay with the calves, but they don’t sleep, they peep through the boards at what they’d like to be scared of in their sleep, and when there’s no more boiling and hissing and crying in the flames the baker connects up his fiddle to his portable amplifier and then there’s fiddling, then there’s dancing, predatory fish are grilled until they’re cooked and soft. Anna is going to be burnt, and on such a night many couples find their way to each other, they dance among sparks and stars and security precautions, making sure nothing that doesn’t gain by the flames catches fire.
Autumn is here now. Ravens peck the winter seed corn out of the body of the fields. They come down to settle on scarecrows, they preen their plumage.
There’s still time to pass before the Feast. We have to get through the night, and the final preparations will be made in the morning. The village cooks, the village sprays window cleaner on glass, the village decorates its lampposts. Our carpenter, who is dead now, spent a long time making sure that the bonfire would stand steady. An interior designer brought in from Berlin has offered his services instead, but if we let him get at it, so the village thought, there’ll be nothing but problems; it’s not just a case of where to put your sofa for a good view, we have to make sure we don’t have another disaster like the one in 1599, when four houses caught fire, and in all the commotion two notorious robbers escaped being burnt to death, so now a scaffolding company from Templin does the job.
The village provides itself with seats. The seating plan is a ticklish subject. Who gets to sit at the beer table in front, near the bonfire? Who has earned the merit of being near the flames? Who defines what merit is this year?
The village cleans its display windows. The village polishes up the rims of wheels. The village takes a shower. The fishermen are after pike today, the bakery is generous with its jam fillings. Many households will prudently lay in a double dose of insulin.
Daughters make up their mothers’ faces, mothers trickle eyedrops in the lower lids of tired fathers’ eyes, fathers can’t find their braces. The hairdresser would make a real killing if we had a hairdresser. Apparently one is supposed to be coming from Woldegk, but how is that to be managed? Will he go round the houses like the doctor on his Thursday visits, or put up his chair and mirror somewhere central? We don’t know.
Frau Reiff has invited guests to her pottery on this Open Day: she serves coffee, honey sandwiches and a talk about making pottery. Her visitors get beer tankards made by the Japanese raku method fired in her kiln, or maybe have a go at firing a vase themselves. Later there will be a band from Stuttgart playing African music. The musicians have already arrived. They keep saying how wonderful the landscape is, as if that were the village’s own doing.
Zieschke the baker will be auctioneer for the sale of Works of Art and Curios again. Last year he did it with his shirt worn loose over his trousers and using a beer bottle as the auctioneer’s gavel. The proceeds go to our Homeland House. We can already guess some of the items to be sold:
• Antique globe (including Prussia): reserve price 1 euro
• Self-adhesive silicon Secret + bra: reserve price 2 euros
• Laundry basket with surprise contents: reserve price 3 euros
• Local Prenzlau calendar for 1938: reserve price 6 euros
• People’s Police uniform (with cap, worn): reserve price 15 euros
• Brand new oil painting by Frau Kranz (painted the night before the Feast): reserve price not known
Non-villagers can also bid in the auction, and they laugh at some of the items on offer, most loudly of all when they are no laughing matter. Or that’s how it sounds, when some of them think they are cleverer than the story; they don’t credit us with irony.
Our Anna Feast. No one really knows what we’re celebrating. It’s not the anniversary of anything, nothing ends or began on exactly that day. St Anne has her own saint’s day sometime in the summer, and the saints aren’t saintly to us any more. Perhaps we’re simply celebrating the existence of the village. Fürstenfelde. And the stories that we tell about it.
Time still has to pass. The village switches off its TV sets, the village plumps up its pillows, tonight hardly anyone in the village makes love. The village goes to bed early. Let us leave the dreaming villagers in peace, and spend time with those who lie awake:
With our lakes that never sleep anyway.
With animals on the prowl. Under cover of darkness, the vixen sets out on a memorable hunt.
With our bells, which will soon be ringing in the festive day. These days, who can boast of still having a bell-ringer, and an apprentice bell-ringer too?
Herr Schramm weighs up his pistol in his hand.
Frau Kranz is awake too. What a pity, when many old ladies are snoring! She is out and about, well equipped for the night: flashlight, rain cape, she has shouldered her easel and is pulling the trolley with her old leather case behind her. Going through the Woldegk Gate, she takes a good slug from her thermos flask, which has more than just tea in it. Frau Kranz is very well equipped.
And Anna, our Anna. Tomorrow is her last day. She lies in the dark, humming a song, the window is open, a simple tune, the cool night air passes over her brow. In this last year Anna has spent a lot of time alone at Geher’s Farm, surrounded by her family’s dilapidated past: her grandfather’s tools, her mother’s garden, neglected by Anna but popular with the wild pigs, in the garage there is the Škoda, in which the cat has had her umpteenth litter of tabby kittens. There is a fallow field run wild under Anna’s window. And tonight, on such a night as this, there are memories of a house that was once full, and the question of what has ever been good for her in the eighteen years she has spent there. On Monday Lada will come to clear the house out, in spring the people from Berlin will take it over, and Anna, on her own, remarkably indifferent to others of her age, Anna with her school-leaving certificate and her love of ships, Anna who shoots her grandfather’s airgun out of the bathroom window at the wild pigs in the garden, Anna up and about at night, even tonight — come here to us, Anna. Come along the headland of the field to the Kiecker Forest, to the lakes, going all the old ways one last time, that’s the plan, we young people of this village, from the new buildings and the ruins, we are glad. Anna is not alone, Anna is humming a tune, a sweet, childlike melody, we are with her.