Eugen Ruge - In Times of Fading Light

Who was going to pay for those glasses of his?

“I’ll get started now,” said Lisbeth.

Suddenly, she was there beside her.

“Well, that’s just great,” said Charlotte. “And there was I thinking you’d gone on vacation.”

She turned and left the room. Briefly, she thought of retreating to the tower room for a moment, to calm down. It was the only room she could still call her own in this house. But the forty-four steps up to it deterred her, and she decided to make do with the kitchen.

In the hall, she collided with Wilhelm. Charlotte flung up her arms, the breath knocked out of her. Wilhelm said something, but Charlotte didn’t hear it, didn’t look at him. She made a wide detour around him and went quickly into the kitchen. Shut the door. Turned the key in the lock, to be on the safe side, strained her ears…

Nothing. Only the suspect, rattling sound of her own breath. She put her right hand in her trouser pocket to check that the aminophylline drops were where they ought to be: they were. Charlotte clenched her fist firmly around the little bottle. Sometimes it helped just to clench her fist around the bottle and count up to ten.

She counted up to ten. Then she went around the kitchen table, which was piled high with unwashed coffee cups and saucers, and sank down on the stool. Tomorrow, she decided, she would call Dr. Süss and make an appointment. Tangible evidence!

Not that she hadn’t already given him any amount of tangible evidence! Weren’t the locksmith’s bills—was it ten or was it twelve of them?—tangible evidence? They arrived because Wilhelm kept having safety locks installed and then lost the keys, or rather he hid them and couldn’t find them again… didn’t that mean anything? Or the ND, in which he had recently taken to crossing out every report in red pencil so that he wouldn’t forget what he had read already. Or the letters he sent to all manner of institutions… well, to be honest, she didn’t have the letters themselves. But she had the answers: an answer from GDR Television when Wilhelm complained of a program it had transmitted. Only it turned out to have been a program from the West. And what did Wilhelm do next? Wilhelm wrote to State Security. In his red scrawl that no one could read anyway. Wrote to State Security because he suspected that the Sony color sets, a few thousand of which the GDR had imported, contained an enemy mechanism that kept secretly retuning them to the West…

And what did Süss say?

“Comrade Powileit, we can’t consign him to the madhouse for something like that!”

Madhouse! Who said anything about a madhouse? But surely somewhere could be found for Wilhelm in a proper care facility. After all, Wilhelm had been a Party member for seventy years! Was decorated with the Order of Merit of the Fatherland in gold! What more did anyone want?

Süss was useless. And to think he called himself a district medical officer. A blind man could see what kind of state Wilhelm was in. They’d all seen him again today: I have enough tin in my box! How would you describe that? He’s being decorated with the Fatherland Order of Merit in gold—she didn’t even have it in silver!—and he says: I have enough tin in my box! A good thing the district secretary wasn’t there. What a disgrace. And then striking up a song. She’d expressly told Lisbeth not to let Wilhelm have any more alcohol. He was hard enough to bear when he was sober. And the way he spoke to people! Take those vegetables to the graveyard. What did he mean, anyway, take those vegetables to the graveyard?

Charlotte had not switched on the light in the kitchen, but the bluish beam of the streetlamp outside filled the room, and through the door to the servants’ corridor, which was ajar, she could see the one at the other end of it leading directly to his room, the door that Wilhelm had walled up thirty-five years ago. Only now, while she thought about what Wilhelm meant by graveyard, did she realize that she had been staring at that walled-up doorway all this time. The sight of the walled-up doorway annoyed her. She stood up and closed the door to the former servants’ corridor. Dropped on the stool again.

Once Wilhelm is out of the house, she thought, I’ll have that door opened up again. Always having to go the long way around, by way of the hall, it was idiotic. All that chasing about, as if she didn’t have enough to do. Every time she wanted something from the kitchen she chased around the place. If she was looking for Lisbeth, she had to chase all over the place. Think of all the chasing around she’d had to do only today! Tangible evidence! And another piece of tangible evidence was the way Wilhelm was gradually ruining the house, bit by bit. Tangible evidence wherever you looked!

Maybe, thought Charlotte, I ought to have it all photographed. Unfortunately she had no camera. Kurt owned one, but of course Kurt wouldn’t do it. Did Weihe have a camera? With a flash? That was important! The ceiling light in the hall didn’t work. Furthermore, Wilhelm had blacked out the windows in the upstairs corridor so that the neighbors couldn’t spy on him when he was going to bed. Now the only electric light on in the hall, day and night, came from the shell that they had once brought back from Pachutla. And in a way it was a good thing that the only light came from the shell, so at least you didn’t see what Wilhelm had done here: oh, the paint on the floor! Wasn’t that “tangible evidence”? The cloakroom alcove, the stairs, and the banisters… and now he was painting all the doors upstairs! Wilhelm was painting everything made of wood with red-brown floor paint, and if you asked him why he was painting it all with red-brown floor paint, he said: because red-brown floor paint lasts longest!

What had come over the district medical officer? Or was his title area medical officer?

Then there was the bathroom. That ought to be photographed as well. Everything broken. He had hammered it all to pieces with the electric hammer. Mosaic tiles, you’d never find replacements. And why? Because he’d had to build in a floor drainage system. Floor drainage! It was since then that the light in the hall didn’t work. Yes, and that was dangerous, too! Electricity and water didn’t mix! Tangible evidence…

Wilhelm did nothing all day but produce tangible evidence. Come to that, he did nothing else at all. Made a mess of meddling with things he didn’t understand. Repaired household items that were broken by the time he’d finished with them. And if she didn’t give him something to calm him down now and then, for instance, a couple of spoonfuls of valerian drops in his tea, who knew whether this house wouldn’t have burned down or collapsed long ago, or she might already be dead of gas poisoning?

Then there was what he did to the terrace. That was worst of all. Why hadn’t she done something? Called the police? Only to a depth of two centimeters, he said… God knows why. Because he didn’t like the moss growing between the natural stone slabs! So he laid concrete over the terrace! That’s to say, Schlinger and Mählich laid the concrete. Wilhelm was in command. Stretched cords of some kind, fiddled around with a folding rule. And what was the result? Now the rainwater ran into her conservatory. The flooring had come away. The door to the terrace had swelled, the glass in it was broken…

And what did Süss say?

“Regrettable,” said Süss.

Regrettable! It was everything to her! Her study and bedroom! Her retreat! Her little bit of Mexico, preserved over all these years—destroyed. Now, several times a day, she climbed the forty-four stairs to the tower room, where wind blew through the cracks, where she had to sit at the desk wrapped in blankets. Where it smelled of dust and the roof rafters on hot days—a smell that, humiliatingly, reminded her of the smell in the room where her mother used to shut her up as a punishment.