We have to get to the West, his friend had said then one evening when there was only a week’s time left before the exam. We’ll repeat the year there. Students from the East were held back a year when they continued their studies in the West, and that was precisely the year they had lost to their carnival and corpses. A new beginning, his friend had said. Here there was no chance: Here the files on their entire cohort — and along with them time — kept steadily advancing. Then they had thought about where their escape could be undertaken most easily. Neither he nor his friend were familiar with the terrain around the “green” unmarked border, and they didn’t have a balloon, so they decided to try the Elbe. It was still so cold, his friend had said, that the border guards wouldn’t seriously be expecting anyone to try swimming the river. We’ll get drunk first so we don’t feel the cold, and then we’ll just zip across, his friend, the Saxon, had said. Neither he nor his friend had brought up their women. Although this now appears to him beyond comprehension, he would say that at the moment he had simply forgotten all about his fiancée. One week later they packed up a pipe wrench and three bottles of wine, got on a train with their bicycles, rode the train for an hour and a half, and then from a tiny train station bicycled out to the meadows along the Elbe. There they got drunk in the dark and then, on the eve of their exams in statistics and structural physics, just as planned, they climbed down into the river to swim back a year in time.
The next time he saw his fiancée — today his wife — it was in the courtroom. She had been called as a witness and asked whether she’d known of his intention to flee the country. And she had, quite truthfully, said no. Compared with this moment, all questions regarding structural physics suddenly appeared facile, and it was clear to him that he had swum into his test rather than away from it. The swimming though is always just the same. Later he asked his fiancée to bring him a book about structural physics, he studied the book and then conducted tutorials on this subject for his fellow prisoners. The percentage of men from the construction sector that were sitting in prison just then was higher than usuaclass="underline" During the construction of the Berlin Wall, a number of workers had attempted to reach the other side of the very structure they were building. After serving his time in prison, he went to see his former professor and asked for permission to take the exam even though he was no longer enrolled. He passed with flying colors but never took up his studies again.
Now his wife seems to have grown calmer, he hears glasses clicking together which means she has no doubt gotten up and begun to clear the table. When he turns around he glimpses her through the curtain of willow twigs, she is just disappearing into the toolshed with a tray in her hand. His eyes come to rest on the white hanging baskets made of plastic that she has hung in the trees, these baskets are illuminated by the lantern and in their artificiality appear even further removed from the night than the light itself. The shed in which he and his wife have made themselves at home among the tools stands surrounded by darkness. Their arrangement with the mistress of the house has been only provisionally in effect ever since the heirs of the former owner of this piece of land filed for the return of their property, and so both the vacation quarters themselves and the subtenant relationship are now only makeshifts, as the mistress of the house put it. When the ownership of these heirs has been legally confirmed, they will have to leave, both he and his wife, this is what has been agreed. But when that will be is something no one knows. Subtenant sounds like a euphemism for a sort of weed, his wife had remarked after their conversation with the mistress of the house, and somehow ever since he has associated the notion weed with the happiness he experiences here when he is sailing. Happiness grows out of disorder, just as infinity grows out of the finite lake on which he is now turning his back. He and his wife spend their weekends in a toolshed, tie up their sailboat to a dock that doesn’t belong to them, and are nonetheless, he would say, utterly and completely happy on this parcel of land that they have conditionally borrowed.
If he had succeeded in escaping then, he probably would have managed to complete his studies in West Germany. In any case, the Museum for City History had bought his drawings of the corpses right away after the catacombs were opened, the corpses relocated and the church rebuilt. But after his time in prison, as was only to be expected in the East, he had been sent to work in production to purify himself: He was assigned to a furniture factory. In fact this was supposed to be only a transitional position, a makeshift solution. Half a year later he would have been allowed to take up his studies again, even here, but he himself had made the decision to remain in the factory as an ordinary worker. The makeshift had lasted his entire life until now, when it was time for him to retire. Whenever the topic came up in conversation, he would always say that he’d simply realized that he preferred this practical work to his studies. Lord only knows. Feeling the unsteady boards of the dock beneath his footsteps, he thinks that it would be lovely if he and his wife would succeed in dying before the matter of the inherited property was finally settled. Then the person giving the speech at the funeral would be able to say that until the very end they had been able to pursue what they loved: sailing.
THE GARDENER
IN THE VILLAGE they say the daughter of the house has been seen at night sitting with a few boys out on the pier where the steamboat docks, smoking and drinking. Especially when the moon is full she likes to clamber over the railing of the little balcony beside her window with her parents and grandmother none the wiser, she climbs down the window frame of the downstairs window, then steps into the interlaced hands of the gardener held up to assist her, and later she ascends again by the same method.
The subtenants are glad the gardener remains sitting quietly on the threshold with the cold cigar stump in his mouth when they start to saw down the big fir bush, what they’re after is to lay the telephone wire in as direct a line as possible from the house down to the workshop so that this cable they have purchased themselves will reach. In any case the fir bush has become yellowed and unattractive in recent years, besides which it’s been hollow inside for some time now. When they are removing the huge stump with its roots, they discover a crate filled with porcelain. Not bad, all the things that grow in a garden, the young householder says when they show him the crate. A miracle of nature, he says. The gardener nods. The householder picks up the crate and carries it to his car.
THE CHILDHOOD FRIEND
SOMETIMES HE CLIMBS UP a ladder to straighten the tarp with which he covered the thatch roof of the bathing house the previous fall. Perhaps he would use a similar gesture to draw up the covers at night to tuck in his friend if she were now his wife and lying in bed beside him as had been agreed on so many years ago. On the side facing the lake, the roof has begun to rot. There isn’t much sense to what he’s doing, it’s possible the roof will even rot faster under the tarp, but he still can’t bring himself to just abandon the roof to the wind. Under the tarp it will still hold together for a little while longer and look like a roof.