In Times of Fading Light

In Times of Fading Light Read Free Page B

Book: In Times of Fading Light Read Free
Author: Eugen Ruge
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of space, terrorizing his family all that time. Irina had cooked and done the laundry for the sake of that meter of space. Kurt had been awarded orders and decorations for that meter of space, but he had also earned reproofs and once even an outright reprimand from the Party; here he had bargained over the print run of editions with the publishing house, which was always contending with paper shortages, he had fought a running battle over phrasings and titles, had had to give in, or use cunning and persistence to achieve some measure of success—and now all of it, all of it was wastepaper.
    Or so Alexander had believed. After the fall of the Berlin Wall and German reunification, he had thought that he could chalk that at least up as his own triumph. A line, he told himself, had now been drawn under all that. The alleged research, the half-truths and halfhearted arguments on the history of the German labor movement that Kurt had assembled—all of it, Alexander had thought, had fallen along with the Wall, and nothing would remain of Kurt’s so-called oeuvre.
    But then, at the age of nearly eighty, Kurt sat down in his catastrophic chair again, to write his last book in secret. And although the book did not become an international success—yes, twenty years earlier a book in which a German Communist described his years in the gulag might indeed have been an international success, only Kurt hadn’t been brave enough to write it then—although it did not become an international success it was still, like it or not, an important, unique book, a book that would “live,” a book such as Alexander had never written and now probably never would.
    Did he want to? Hadn’t he always said he felt drawn to the theater for the very reason that the theater was ephemeral? Ephemeral—sounded good. As long as you didn’t have cancer.
    Midges danced in the sunlight, Kurt was still asleep—although they say old people don’t sleep as much as they used to. Alexander decided to lie down for a little while himself.
    As he was about to leave the study, his eye fell on the folder labeled PERSONAL, a word that had always made him want to open it, but he had never dared to—although as a teenager he hadn’t shrunk from looking at his father’s collection of erotic photos. Until Kurt put a security lock on the cupboard door.
    He took the folder out. Scraps of paper, notes. Copies of documents. On top, several letters written in violet ink, the usual color in Russia many years ago.
    “Dearest Ira!” (1954)
    Alexander leafed through them ... typical of Kurt. He had written even his love letters accurately on both sides of the paper, in neat handwriting, all the pages filled to the last line, and the lines themselves at a regular distance from each other, never moving apart or crowding together at the end of a letter, never spilling over into the margin of a page anywhere ... how on earth did the man do it? And then there was the irritatingly effusive manner in which he addressed Irina:
    “Dear, dearest Irina!” (1959)
    “My sun, light of my life!” (1961)
    “My darling wife, my friend, my companion!” (1973)
    Alexander put the folder back and climbed the stairs to Irina’s room. He lay down on the large sofa, which was covered with some kind of teddy-bear fabric, and tried to sleep a little. Instead, he kept seeing the pockmarked Karajan character rocking back and forth on his swivel chair like a clockwork figure. The lenses of his glasses flashed, his voice repeated the same thing over and over again ... oh, the hell with it. He must think about something else. He had come to a decision, so there was nothing more to think about now, nothing to decide.
    He opened his eyes. Looked at Irina’s cuddly toy animals sitting on the back of the sofa, neatly arranged side by side just where the cleaning lady had lined them up: the dog, the hedgehog, the rabbit with its singed ear ...
    Suppose they had all been wrong?
    It was absurd, he

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