Clemens Meyer - All the Lights

Now it belongs to a Parisian collector, and once when Johannes Vettermann was in Paris he visited him and stood a long time looking at the angler and the forest and the water.

Almost all the pictures in his collection were auctioned off for a lot of money; Berlin, London, New York; the wholesale fruit market and the bridge where he’d stood for so many years were gone but so were the debts, and Johannes Vettermann gave up eating fruit.

‘Paint, you have to paint again, Johnny …’ And he painted. The end and the beginning. It took quite a long time until he managed to get the pictures out of his head and onto canvas. And it took quite a long time until the critics, the collectors and the other painters started celebrating him.

‘Hell on canvas. The genius nightmares of Johannes Vettermann.’

And now here’s his friend, the man he painted to look like Mephisto, like the devil himself in human form, standing in front of him and saying, ‘Johnny Superstar’ and ‘At the end, Johnny, everything goes very fast,’ and then he’s gone. And Johannes Vettermann finally reaches for the receiver and presses it to his ear. But all he can hear is a very loud and never-ending beep, beep, beep, beep …

We called him ‘The Boxer’ because his nose was beaten so flat it almost disappeared into his face.

Sometimes when I sat with him by the window in the evening and we smoked in the floodlights and waited for the night, he laid his big hand across his battered face and left it there until we got up and went to our beds.

We had plenty of beaten-up guys. I saw them at work, I saw them in the corridors and the yard; there were some who came in with really pretty faces and went out mashed up, but in all my time I never saw a nose flat as the Boxer’s.

At night, when I lay awake and he was asleep, his nose made whistling sounds, and when I listened for a while and thought about things, they’d turn into real little tunes.

‘Hey, Boxer, play something else,’ I said quietly, but he stopped whistling altogether — he’d woken up and started tossing and turning above me. ‘You know,’ he whispered in his hoarse night voice, ‘you know, I really used to … back then …’

‘Yeah,’ I said, ‘that’s what they’re all saying. This guy came in last week, short guy, going a bit grey …’

‘Wolfgang,’ he whispered.

‘Yeah,’ I nodded a couple of times, even though he couldn’t see me.

‘Always was a big-mouth,’ he whispered.

He turned over above me. I saw his foot for a moment in the light of the prison moon; we hung our towels over the window, but the floodlights were in the yard and outside the walls, and we never managed to completely cover it. I heard him breathing, and a few minutes later he started up his whistling again.

‘He weren’t bad,’ Wolfgang had said, passing round cigarettes, he was shit-scared, ‘back in the East. Not right at the top, but a couple of times he nearly made it to the Olympics a couple of times.’

The Boxer had never told me that, even though we’d been sharing a cell for more than two years. The Boxer didn’t talk much, and once he did get started, because the Russkis had brought us some samogon , he used to tell me about his daughter. She must have been seventeen, eighteen.

He still had a few years to go. They said he’d knocked some guy out and he hadn’t got up again, in the pub, a fight, money, women, no one knew exactly and of course he’d never told anyone anything.

One of the old dossers, who came and went, and were all back inside again for the winter, even told me once the Boxer was a lifer, on a long stretch. Apparently he hadn’t just knocked out that one guy but beat a security man into a coma too when he tried to hold him down, and he slept so deep he never woke.

‘The Boxer lost it; it was the drink,’ the dosser said and shook his head and rolled his eyes enough to make me dizzy. ‘They got him down to ten or eleven years; it was the drink, you know.’

‘I know,’ I said, and the old guy licked his lips and I gave him a bit of tobacco. But I didn’t believe the Boxer was carrying two cold ones round with him, and the tramps talked a lot of shit when they were coming down.

‘They should have built it by the river,’ the Boxer said. We were sitting at the table, like every morning. It was slowly getting light outside; the window was open although it was cold and it had snowed. We were eating and looking out across the walls at the bare trees and the city. ‘What?’ I asked, although I knew what he meant. He tapped one of the bars, and I nodded. ‘Might have been better.’

‘The view, you know.’ He pushed his plate aside and got up. ‘You know, a river, when you can see it all the time, on a river there’s always something going on.’ I got up as well and stood next to him, and we looked out at the buildings, a long way off, that the river must have been behind somewhere. He did us two roll-ups and passed me one. ‘You gonna look at it?’

‘The river?’ I gave him a light and he nodded.

‘Maybe,’ I said.

‘Gonna get your leave after all, eh?’

‘Looks like it. But you never know with them.’

‘You gonna go on a trip?’

‘It’s only a weekend.’

‘I mean a real trip.’ He looked at me and I saw a thin trail of smoke coming out of one of his nostrils, now just a slit.

‘Nah, they always find you anyway. A trip …’ I laughed, and he smiled too and flicked his roll-up out between the bars.

‘So … so d’you wanna go anywhere, got any plans?’

‘This and that,’ I said, ‘Leipzig, the usual, you know.’

‘Our city,’ he said. I stubbed my rollie out in the snow on the windowsill. He rolled two more, lit them up and passed me one.

‘Wanna visit your sister, eh?’

‘Nah, better not. She’s just got married.’

‘Kid?’

‘Yeah. Still a littl’un.’

‘When my daughter …’ He flicked his half-smoked roll-up out the window and closed it. I picked up the ashtray from the table and lay down on my bed. ‘You know your leave …’ The Boxer turned round to me for a moment, then he leant his forehead against the window pane. I smoked and looked at his back. It was a pretty broad back; maybe he’d been a cruiserweight, maybe even one class higher, in his golden days, when he’d nearly made it to the Olympics. I dragged on my rollie until I felt the heat on my lips. ‘When you’re out on leave …’ the Boxer said, muffled against the glass and moving his head back and forth. I pressed the butt into the ashtray, the key banged in the lock, the Boxer turned to face the door, I jumped up, the ashtray fell on the floor, I nudged it under the bed with my foot. The warden was standing in the door, seven a.m., time for work.

‘When you’re out on leave,’ said the Boxer in the middle of the night, when he woke up, ‘You listening …?’ I didn’t answer, I didn’t breathe, but he kept on talking because he knew I was awake. ‘… And when you’re in the city, in Leipzig … you know, son …’ I hated it when he called me ‘son’. I’d celebrated my thirtieth with him last summer. He’d got hold of some samogon and home brew from the Russians, and then he’d spent all night talking about his daughter until he fell asleep. ‘Got such dark hair, nearly black, not from her mother, no. Had it down over her shoulders, back then, you know … And take a good look what she looks like now, you listening son, take such a good look that … How tall she is and that, her eyes, her eyes as well …’ He came down the ladder, I saw him dark in front of my bed. I sat up and leant against the wall. ‘Course,’ I said, ‘I’ll tell you all about her eyes, if that’s all you want.’