Magnus Stanke - Time Lies

Karl has never had much of sweet tooth, but today he decides he wants a biscuit with his glass of milk. It reminds him of home, of his mum, Mamochka, before she got sick, beaming whenever she managed to get the hard to come by ingredients to make real cookies – a bit of real butter and sugar, maybe an egg. He ate them for her sake more than for his own, couldn’t bring himself to say that he didn’t really like sweet things, crush her enthusiasm.

He takes a cookie from the tin, bites off a small piece and chews. It isn’t so bad, so he bites again, chomping off half the cookie this time. Before he can take a third bite, his arm drops and he is asleep.

When he wakes up the room is as before, except the food utensils have been cleared away and the washing up is done. Karl is lying on his bed and remembers the man with the wig and most of the thoughts that went through his head before he fell asleep.

The night lamp is on as before.

The silence invades him again.

How much time has passed is impossible to say. Time doesn’t matter here. It is almost as though it has stopped, is suspended in the room.

Karl gets up, uses the toilet, flushes and wonders briefly if his jailor might be watching.

‘Hello? Hello? Anybody there?’ he says towards the metal door.

He receives no reply.

‘Any chance of some privacy in here?’

He smiles. It is weird hearing his voice cut through the silence. It reverberates and echoes in his head long after the actual sound is gone, swallowed up by these clean, insulated walls.

He opens the fridge. It is as before, with two gaps where the eggs used to be. So much for the notion that it was a magic, capitalist refrigerator that could replenish itself, would never be empty like in the adverts. But no, this is no imperialist miracle machine. The food he has consumed is gone, the eggshells still in the bin. He doesn’t remember clearing away his plate or washing the skillet, yet both are clean and stored away. Come to think of it, it is also strange how he just fell asleep when he was eating the cookie and drinking the milk. Who put him to bed?

‘Where are you? Why don’t you talk to me?’ he says towards the door.

Nothing.

A disquieting thought strikes him. What if, once he has eaten everything in the fridge and in the cupboard, there is no more food for him? Would he just let Karl starve, the man with the wig? But no, he said he would make him wealthy. Surely he wouldn’t let him perish.

Karl strips off — he doesn’t care if anybody is watching or not — and steps into the shower. He opens the faucet and plays with the hot and cold until the mix is just right. He finds soap and lathers his body generously. While he cleans his genitals under the warm spray he becomes refreshingly aroused. Again, this is different from his previous prison experiences. In Cottbus, the last place in which he was an inmate in East Germany, rumour had it that the grub contained sodium nitrate, a ‘chemical chastity belt’ as the prisoners called it, to stop them from buggering each other. It kills all carnal desire outright. Karl didn’t have a single erection in the six months he spent there. Now he has some catching up to do.

Later, when he steps out of the shower and dries off, he is content. All this adds up to some kind of happiness. He made the right choice when he accepted that pill. That man means him no harm. Karl feels better than he has in a long time, and less alone. Somebody is watching over him. For the time being it is a one-way street, but so what? For the time being his conscience doesn’t bother him. Yes, he has done things on behalf of the Party that he is no longer proud of. He has spied on people, informed on potential dissidents, comrades who had forgotten about the purity of the socialist ideal. For many years it was the right thing to do according to the values he’d been brought up with. After all, the Party knows best. He knows this because history knows this. History teaches us that the Party knows better than us. The Party has been the only veritable, consistent opposition to the Great Evil of Fascism all the way back to 1933. The Party fought Hitler’s thugs at every turn, thereby displaying foresight that the Yanks, the Brits and the Frenchies lacked so badly back then — at least the politicians, who tolerated the Führer and even welcomed him and his anti-Semitic views right into their backyard. Appeasement, they called it.

Alas, the Party lost the first battle against the fascists, but they regrouped in Moscow, the lucky ones who weren’t thrown into concentration camps, that is. By 1945 the Party was back, and victorious. They helped liberate Germany, had known better all along than to follow the path to destruction. Of course the Party knew better, knows better to this very day. If they tell you not to read a certain book or watch West German TV, it is for the greater good. Those comrades who stray are like lost sheep. They need help to return to the flock before anything really bad can happen to them, before they can be corrupted irreparably.

At least that’s what Karl used to think, that he was doing his fellow men a favour, that he was protecting the pure from the depraved ways of the decadent West. But in time things changed, the world around Karl and inside of him. Doubt set in. And still, he continued to inform until it led to consequences he didn’t foresee, couldn’t have.

Surely the man with the wig knows all about his past and this is Karl’s reckoning, his way of cleansing his guilt. Yes, Karl understands that the reason he fully embraces his new lot is because he feels safe in the room. As long as he is locked up in here he can’t inflict any further harm, not on himself and not on anybody else. Maybe that’s why he’d een drinking so heavily before, and why the urge has now ceased altogether. This is his punishment, and as long as he stands it, accepts the verdict and the consequences, he is getting better, making amends.

I’ll be patient. I won’t run away and I won’t complain, he thinks.

‘You have my word for it. I understand now, ‘ he says towards the door, feeling gratitude for the man with the wig.

Then he just sits there and stares at infinity as represented by the rhomboid patterns on the wallpaper in front of him.

Time passes. Well, some time passes. Probably.

*

Karl’s sense of time vanishes almost at once. He’s been there before. Soon he doesn’t know if he has been in this room for hours or days. He eats when he feels hungry, goes to the toilet when necessary and showers when he feels dirty. When he is tired he lies down and closes his eyes. He only ever realises that he has slept when he wakes up from bad dreams. This happens frequently at first.

He tries to gauge the passage of time by assessing the diminishing quantity of food in the fridge. In between bouts of hunger he sits and thinks and listens. The silence around him is only interrupted by his breathing and his heartbeat, and he directs his hearing inward, tries to listen to the sounds of his digestive system, to the blood circulating in his veins and to the electric impulses called thoughts. For a long time he hears nothing. But he persists. He knows his body makes these sounds and that he will hear them if only he listens hard enough.

*

More time passes. Karl tries to detect the sound of his growing hair, beard and fingernails. He fails.

If time is an illusion in here, then cellular growth should stop too, shouldn’t it?

But it doesn’t. Time does pass. The proof is in his fingernails – they are longer than when he arrived. He can tell, especially because they have ceased to be dirty the way they used to be. Now, thanks to all the long showers, they are spotless. And the white half-moons at the tips of his fingers grow longer and longer.