“We’d met at dance classes, in Dresden,” he then began. “I was seventeen, she was sixteen. Her parents liked me and even invited me to come along on outings with them; they had a car. In the late sixties that was still something special. But for her sake — her name was Ines too — I found excuses not to. I really loved Ines, and I think she loved me too. We hadn’t slept together yet. I always thought that was the last step, the one thing still lacking for us to be truly intimate with each other.”
Fred sat bent forward, letting his head hang and kneading his hands.
“It was the end of August, just before the school year started up again, and she was back from the Baltic with her parents. She had a great tan, and her hair was almost blond. She had written me several postcards, but brought them all back with her. Next year, she said, we would take off together, just her and me. I was happy, but I needed a little while to get used to Ines again, although I’d thought about her the entire time. When I told Ines that my parents would be gone for the weekend, she said she wanted to stay with me. And so Ines came over, and I suggested we ride our bikes out toward Moritzburg, past the harvested fields to the woodland ponds. Directly opposite the nudist camp was a small meadow with access to the lower pond. We were the only ones there. We undressed and went swimming. We didn’t stay in the water long, but when we came out we found four men sitting on the spot where we had laid our clothes — all of them in their late twenties, certainly not rowdy teenagers. Ines stayed in the water, and I got out. But they wouldn’t give me my clothes, they said my little Ines had to fetch them for me. They spoke very softly, almost as if they were friends of mine. They had removed our IDs and called me Friedrich the whole time. I didn’t know what we should do. Ines came out of the water then, and they made comments and cracked dirty jokes at every step she took, every gesture, and just in general, and at first only handed over her velour pullover, followed then by her bra and so on. And her towel was the last item. Then they left. They’d been sitting on my things, but otherwise hadn’t done anything with them. Our IDs were lying on top.” Fred’s fingernails had turned all white. “It doesn’t sound very dramatic, because they never laid a hand on us.…”
At first I thought Fred was fighting back tears. But then he raised his hands, as if to indicate there was nothing more to say. Eventually, however, he did go on, even speaking a little faster than before. “I’ve always wished I could surgically remove those minutes, like some infected lesion, cauterize them — or start speaking a different language. I don’t know, whatever. Of course Ines and I cursed them and made plans to go to the police, to take revenge. But once it had grown dark, Ines rode home. Maybe if we had spent the night together it would have saved our relationship. But maybe that was just no longer possible, at any rate it became less and less so from day to day. Just the way someone pronounced our names was all it took. The worst part was that it didn’t have to be any particular word. Just a random remark, and we would be back at that woodland pond. But for me it was enough to know and to see that Ines was thinking of it too. I later blamed myself for not having hurled myself at those men. It would have been better to have taken a beating or for us to have ridden home naked. Anything would have been better than what did happen. But I was paralyzed with fear. Above all we didn’t want things to get any worse. Fear — it’s so disgusting.”
Boris turned around to Elvira, maybe he was expecting some reaction from her, maybe he wanted to ask her something. Elvira’s head was resting on Susanne’s shoulder. Susanne could barely move a muscle but managed to carefully put a finger to her lips. When Boris offered to carry Elvira to bed, Susanne made a face. She evidently found it pleasant to have Elvira’s head on her shoulder, was even a little proud of it, I think.
Ines and Pavel said they needed to be going. Boris nodded, but neither of them got to their feet. Everyone else likewise went on sitting there and looking at Elvira. The thought crossed my mind that if we left now, we would never see Elvira again.
I would have liked to have said something about Fred’s story. I wanted to ask Boris if he remembered the brown water in those woodland ponds. I’d often gone swimming there myself. The bottom is very stony at that spot.
My recollection of that night at Boris’s turns hazy after Fred’s story, at least in terms of the contents and sequence of what was said. The mood, however, is just that much more present in my mind.
Fred, Lore, and Charlotte sat bent forward as if listening to a program on the radio. Now and then someone would reach out a hand for snacks or slices of baguette topped with tomatoes and cheese that Boris had brought in at some point.
A strange quiet had come over us. I’m intentionally avoiding the words “silence” or “hush,” even if — or so it seems to me — almost nothing was said for a long while, or if so only sotto voce. I was relieved that the strange tension that had descended over everything with Elvira’s showing up had now lifted. The stories had calmed Boris down as well. It bothered me that the storytelling had left me feeling good somehow.
I don’t know of course what actually kept Ines and Pavel there. But I’m sure that Susanne, too — even if Elvira’s head hadn’t been resting on her shoulder — would never have considered leaving now.
I may well make myself an object of mockery when I admit that it made me think of strip mines being phased out, and suddenly — nobody knows just how — all sorts of stuff starts sprouting, as if it were umpteen million years ago, as if it were nothing for nature to start all over again. That’s the feeling I had.
I didn’t tell any stories myself. Nothing ever happens to me that could be shaped into some kind of narrative. I’m not an entertaining sort of guy, sad to say — which used to distress me. I wondered if I should contribute something I’d heard on the radio a couple of weeks before, an incident that kept running through my mind. I’d probably recognize the woman’s voice. It was on Deutschlandfunk, an interview show plus classical music. The interviewee was an opera singer who had just given her farewell concert. I’ve forgotten her name, along with the whole interview really. Except for one question. The moderator wanted to know if it was possible to make new friends, real friends, friends for life, after the age of fifty. “Sure, why not?” the opera singer had exclaimed. The question had, as you could plainly hear, upset, almost outraged her. The moderator tried to explain her question, to which the singer then replied with a brusque, “No, I don’t believe a word of it!” In the silence that followed you could hear the rustling of paper until both began speaking at once, fell silent again, and the moderator said, “Please, please, it’s your turn!”
That’s when the singer told about a friend she had come to know eighteen months earlier in Chicago, an American originally from Germany, who had come to the States as a child in the late forties. I think his name was Rüdiger, at any rate a name no American can pronounce. This Rüdiger had come up to her in a coffee shop after hearing her speak with a German accent. He had invited her to join him the next day to visit the Chicago Board of Trade, where he worked. She described how the shouting began with the ring of the bell at nine on the dot and how much physical stamina it took just to stand for hours in the amphitheaters of the pits.
“You were going to tell us about a friendship,” the moderator said, breaking into the singer’s account. She, however, was undaunted and plowed ahead. “And later that afternoon it was this man of all people who told me that socialism was the only real solution, that one should help the poor and take something from the rich, that industries essential to human life should be nationalized, because state industries were still better than private monopolies. And then he asked me,” the singer said, “whether our way of life and the corrupt behavior that necessarily went with it wouldn’t drag the whole world into the abyss. At first,” the singer exclaimed, “I though he was joking, but he was in earnest, dead earnest. Nowadays I hate myself for thinking he was joking.”