In Times of Fading Light Read Free

covering—Irina’s pride and joy, real wood veneer on the walls! Even the jungle of souvenirs (Russian Irina’s word for it when she really meant jumble) was still there, but not exactly as it had been. When the room was redecorated, Kurt had dismantled the wildly proliferating collection of souvenirs that had spread over the wood veneer walls for years, dusted the various items, chose “the most important” (or what Kurt thought the most important), and arranged them back on the wood veneer walls “in casual order” (or what Kurt thought was casual order). In the process, he had tried to make “functional” use of the holes for nails already present. It was Kurt’s aesthetic of compromise. And that was exactly what it looked like.
    Where was the little curved dagger that the actor Gojkovic—who, after all, used to play the big chief in all those Indian films from the DEFA state-owned film studios!—had once given Irina? And where was the Cuban plate that the comrades from the Karl Marx Works had given Wilhelm on his ninetieth birthday? Wilhelm, so the story went, had brought out his wallet and slammed a hundred-mark bill down on the plate, thinking that he was being asked for a donation to the People’s Solidarity welfare organization for senior citizens.
    Never mind. Things, thought Alexander ... they were only things, that’s all. And for whoever came here after him, just a heap of old junk.
    He went across to Kurt’s study on the other and, so Alexander thought, more attractive side of the house.
    It was not like the living room, where Kurt had turned everything upside down—he had even replaced Irina’s furniture, her beautiful old glass-fronted display cabinet had gone in favor of some horrible kind of fiberboard flat-pack unit; even Irina’s wonderful and always wobbly tele phone table had gone; and so had the wall clock. The absence of the friendly old wall clock was what Alexander held against Kurt most of all. Its mechanism whirred every hour and half hour, to show that it was still on duty, even if the case with the chime inside was missing. Originally it had been a grandfather clock, a longcase clock, but following a fashion of the time Irina had removed it from its tall case and hung it on the wall. To this day Alexander could remember going with Irina to collect it, and how Irina couldn’t bring herself to tell the old lady who was parting with the grandfather clock that its long case was really superfluous to requirements; he remembered how they’d had to ask a neighbor to help them load up the clock complete with the entire case, and how that huge case, which they were taking away only for the sake of appearances, stuck out of the trunk of the little Trabant, so that in front the car almost lost contact with the ground ... well, unlike the totally redecorated living room, in Kurt’s study all was still, in a positively ghostly way, as it used to be.
    The desk still stood at an angle in front of the window—for forty years, every time the interior of the house was painted it had been put back on precisely the same pressure marks already left by its legs on the carpet. The seating corner with the large armchair where Kurt used to sit with his back bent and his hands folded, telling his anecdotes, was also the same as ever. So was the fitted Swedish wall unit. (Why Swedish, come to think of it?) Its shelves were buckling under the weight of books they held; here and there Kurt had fitted another shelf that didn’t quite match the color of the rest, but the cosmic order remained the same—a kind of final backup recording of Kurt’s brain: there were the reference works that Alexander himself had sometimes used (but mind you put them back!), here books on the Russian Revolution, there again a long row of the works of Lenin in their rust-colored brown bindings, and to the left of Lenin, in the last compartment of the wall unit under the folder sternly labeled PERSONAL, stood the battered