Eugen Ruge - In Times of Fading Light

The biker will move his queen to b6, and at the moment when the biker has made his move, Alexander will realize that he isn’t concentrating hard enough to counter this blatantly awkward attack, hardly to be taken seriously, on the easily exposed position of his king that he allowed by opening with f2–f4.

After the game of chess, which he will have given up after the seventeenth move, he will lie in the hammock outside the door of his room. He will push himself off from the terrace parapet with his fingertips, will feel his sinews and muscles, weary from his run, and while the force of gravity takes him in its arms, all kinds of thoughts will be racing around in his head, out of control; he will think of Columbus, who brought the hammock to Europe, and for a moment it will appear to Alexander, briefly, as a great discovery that when, at the sight of the Indian hanging bed, Columbus saw it as nothing but an efficient way of stacking up sailors on board ship, that might be one of the greatest of all misunderstandings between the two cultures; he will also wonder whether he ought to have moved his bishop to d5 at once; yet again he will think of the ugly pullover, darned several times in a color that didn’t quite match, and he will wonder why it is so good, even comforting, to remember it.

Then the palm fronds will have stopped rustling. The shouting and laughter from the village and the clattering in the guesthouse kitchen will have died down. Car engines will be silent, and so will the voices coming from the radio that otherwise waft up here at all times of day from the loudspeakers in the branch of a bank that has just been opened here.

Only the creaking of the hemp ropes will still be audible. And the indifferent, distant roar of the sea.

Eugen Ruge was born in the Urals, studied mathematics in Berlin, and became a member of the research staff at the Central Institute for Geophysics in Potsdam. Before leaving the GDR for the West in 1988 he was a writer, contributing to documentaries made at the state-owned DEFA Studios. Since 1989 he has been writing and translating for theaters and broadcasters, and he teaches periodically at the Berlin University of the Arts. He was honored with the Alfred Döblin Prize in 2009 for his then still unpublished first work of prose, In Times of Fading Light, which won the German Book Prize and the Aspekte Literature Prize, has sold more than 450,000 copies in Germany, and has been translated into twenty languages.

Anthea Bell is a freelance translator from German and French. Her translations include works of fiction and general nonfiction, books for young people, and classics by E. T. A. Hoffmann, Freud, Kafka, and Stefan Zweig. She has won a number of translation awards in the United Kingdom and the United States.

Funding the translation and publication of exceptional literary works

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Originally published under the title In Zeiten des abnehmenden Lichts

Copyright © 2011 by Rowohlt Verlag GmbH, Reinbek bei Hamburg

Translation © 2013 by Anthea Bell

This publication is made possible, in part, by the voters of Minnesota through a Minnesota State Arts Board Operating Support grant, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the arts and cultural heritage fund, and through a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. Significant support has also been provided by Target, the McKnight Foundation, Amazon.com, and other generous contributions from foundations, corporations, and individuals. To these organizations and individuals we offer our heartfelt thanks.

A Lannan Translation Selection

Funding the translation and publication of exceptional literary works

With special thanks to Edwin C. Cohen.

The translation of this work was supported by a grant from the Goethe-Institut, which is funded by the German Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Published by Graywolf Press

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Published in the United States of America

Print ISBN 978-1-55597-643-9

EBook ISBN 978-1-55597-073-4

First Graywolf Printing, 2013

Library of Congress Control Number: 2013931482

Cover design: Kyle G. Hunter

Cover photo: istockphoto.com