A sun like that also shines on Frau Kranz’s favorite picture. Yes, we think she does have a favorite, although she denied it to the journalist when he asked her. The name of Frau Kranz’s favorite picture is:
THE ROMANIAN OUTSIDE THE CARAVAN FOR Romanian Harvest Workers on the Country Road out at Kraatz.
The Romanians pick apples and strawberries for five euros an hour, they harvest lettuce, they cut asparagus. Some come back year after year; you might think they had made friends in the village. They eat ice cream at Manu’s, one of them sometimes goes to Ulli’s for a beer and might recite a poem in Romanian, but they marry elsewhere, in their towns with musical-sounding names, in Baia Mare and in Vi
eu de Sus.
A few years ago caravans for them to live in were placed on the country road out at Kraatz. Wheaten-yellow, a hotplate, a window with a wide view over their place of work, the fields; an estimated fifteen square meters, an estimated 240 euros, four beds for an estimated six persons, no smoking; they all smoke.
And last year: neo-Nazis from this area except for our own two, Rico and Luise, who had overslept and missed the gathering. Campfires, togetherness, barbecues near the caravans, music, pogo dancing and fun with the wobbly caravans, and at some point in the small hours of the morning the police.
Afterward the words Rumänen raus, Romanians Out, were to be seen in large, slanting letters on one of the caravans, but kind of in a quiet voice because they were sprayed in white on a yellow background, and because the exclamation mark was missing, and it stayed like that for some time until one morning a sleepy Romanian climbed out of the caravan, looked at the slogan for the time it took him to smoke a cigarette, fetched sticky tape and toilet paper and made the “r” in raus into an “H,” adding a hyphen after Rumänen, so that it now read Romanian-House. It didn’t take him a moment, he cleaned his nose, sat down on the little flight of steps in front of the caravan and ate a bread roll.
That is Frau Kranz’s favorite picture. That is Frau Kranz’s Romanian. A small man with a receding hairline, tracksuit trousers, undershirt, breakfasting in front of his house, the morning sun. A tattoo on his upper arm: the letters B and D in a heart, and the year 1977.
We think that is Frau Kranz’s favorite picture because she dedicated it to the Romanian and gave it to him. She never usually dedicates pictures to anyone. And now it is hanging somewhere, maybe in Baia Mare, maybe in Vieu de Sus: a morning in the Uckermark in 2012.
ON THE MORNING BEFORE THE FEAST THE VILLAGE does not walk three times round the field, reciting a secret saying; it does not sprinkle grain at every corner for the birds to eat, instead of stealing from the field; the village has forgotten the secret saying.
A troop of girls adorned with brightly colored silk ribbons do not pace out the fields, they do not shout and make a noise to tell field spirits and kobolds: we’re here, keep away, even winter belongs to us. The girls are not accompanied by young men singing, and the old folk do not wait companionably at the village inn for the return of the young, ready to begin the Feast afterward with a dance round the bonfire.
The village has not pinned nosegays of pinks to its breast, and does not sit amicably together singing the old songs, nor does it say whether it rained the night before the Feast:
“If St Anna brings us rain, heaven’s blessings come again.” It’s all one to the village whether it rains on St Anne’s day or not, no one whispers so help us God, Maria, holy St Anne, so help us God these days, and St Anne’s day is really in July.
The first thresher has not made the Anna Crown, and the crown, interwoven with flowers, is not placed on the head of any girl not yet promised in marriage, nor interwoven with thorns to lie on the head of any woman who has made a pact with demons. No wearer of a crown will dance round the bonfire or burn on it, and white-clad children do not flit between the festive tables, the rakes are not adorned with colored ribbons, and the colored ribbons don’t flutter in the wind. Sometimes there isn’t any wind.
THE SENIOR CITIZENS ARE AWAKE. IMBODEN IS doing his morning exercises: 1–2–3.
Frau Steiner is saying her morning prayers. Frau Steiner’s golden teeth, her white hair: how people stared at her when she was a young woman. Her hair was red then, and she preferred to be alone with her cats, or out and about in the Kiecker Forest looking for herbs. Difficult, difficult. So Frau Steiner joined the faithful and took care to be seen more often in human company. Soon fewer people stared, apart from the men, because she wasn’t bad-looking. Today her hair is white and there is indifference in her eyes.
Frau Steiner is delivering advertising leaflets for Netto and Saturn and such stores. She once even shopped at Globetrotter in Prenzlau herself, when a pair of walking boots that took her fancy was reduced in price. She still likes to be out and about in the ancient forest. From five cats at first, she now has fifteen, but today you are considered no worse than crotchety with so many cats.
If she isn’t careful the red roots show at her parting.
Frau Steiner has survived three husbands; each of them died after exactly nine months of marriage. Difficult, difficult. Anyone could work it out in retrospect. Anyone could say something, meaning something else.
But no one says anything else, only: poor Frau Steiner. Three husbands, no children. Devout. Has to deliver leaflets.
We are the only ones who hear her morning prayer. And it isn’t a prayer, or it is one that you must say in a whisper, shaking as if you were feverish. The cats mew; they are hungry.
I am fighting with mine ire, with she-demons I conspire.
May the first demon heed him, may the second demon lead him.
May the third demon charm him, may the fourth demon harm him.
May the fifth demon bind him, may the sixth demon blind him.
May the seventh bring him to me and make him wish to woo me.
Frau Steiner puts her lips to the head of a little stone figure in her hand and closes her eyes. It is a statuette of St Anne, mother of the Virgin Mary and patron saint of widows.
The senior citizens stretch. The senior citizens shake out their pillows.
THE VILLAGE WAKES UP COFFEE MACHINE BY coffee machine. Eggs are hard-boiled, anglers collect their catch. Ditzsche cleans himself and the chicken run, looks under the wings of his chickens. The bakery has given away free coffee, has sold orange juice and yeast pastries with vanilla filling, only Frau Kranz has gone off again without paying, but maybe the milk was meant to be free too.
There are no bells ringing for prayer. The acoustic heralds of the Feast are the sound of drilling from a power drill and the engine of a bus revving up — the wheels, stuck in the mud, are doing their nut. Lada is responsible for the drill. Lada knows he shouldn’t be doing what he is doing, but Lada often knows that. Lada is drilling holes in the commemorative stone beside the holes that already exist. Before long the first windows are opening for protests to be uttered. The classic protest is that the drill makes too much noise. Lada either can’t hear the protests, or he hears them and he couldn’t care less. He has worked through the night, he’s wearier than the protesters, and an exhausted man is always right.
Otherwise the village has little to protest about. A new day is beginning, and no one has died. Even though pistols were involved. Herr Schramm hasn’t shot himself or anyone else. Frau Kranz hasn’t drowned.
Fürstenfelde in the Uckermark, number of inhabitants: no change.
There have been cases of breaking and entering, one or two, we’re not sure how many, but nothing was stolen. All is well, in that we still have what belongs to us. What happened in the Homeland House? Broken glass, and an electricity failure, and since Eddie is dead we can’t blame it on him any more. The police don’t like calling us to say there’s nothing to tell us really.