Clemens Meyer - All the Lights

‘Something else,’ he said, and I heard him walking across the dark cell to the table and sitting down. His lighter clicked, and then I saw the burning tip of his cigarette moving to and fro as he spoke. ‘There’s these two poofters owe me something. Won’t be any trouble. Got a little shop. Beer, schnapps, herring rolls. I’ll let them know you’re coming. It’s not much. Take it and give it to her. S’a surprise. She’s on a training scheme, not much coming in. I trust you. And tell her … tell her …’

‘I’ll tell her, Boxer.’ I leant against the wall, pulled the blanket up and over my head and breathed through the material.

The Boxer was standing at the window. But when I looked up at him and raised my hand briefly, I wasn’t so sure any more, so far away, and the twisted wire between us on top of the wall. I looked at the big clock on the tower, ten to eleven, same as always. I noticed it was snowing, and wiped the snow off my hair. Then I walked slowly away from the gate, turned around again, saw the woman behind the glass of the porter’s lodge, old and white-haired — been here since Adolf, we used to say. I walked past the little shop, closed now, saw the original jailbird products in the window: guaranteed organic potatoes, wooden figures, baskets, my baskets; I’d got to be a great basket-weaver during my time. I stood still by the commemorative plaque in the little car park a few yards away from the shop. ‘In memory of the victims of the fascist dictatorship in Fort Zinna.’ Someone had laid flowers in the snow. There was another commemorative stone a bit further along, because the Russkis had been here too. When I first arrived I’d walked to and fro between the stones until it got dark and I went up to the gate. I put my bag down and looked past the jail to the fields. I lit up and squatted down. I pressed my hand into the snow and felt it melting between my fingers and kept looking at the white fields and dragging on my roll-up, until I noticed the snow had put it out. I wiped my wet hand across my face and got up. I threw the roll-up away and walked towards the bus stop. I passed the low building where the day-release boys lived. Two of them were standing outside and nodded at me. I raised my hand briefly, fingers slightly apart — that was how we used to put them on windows, doors, walls. When I turned round again a few yards later they were still watching me go, hands in their pockets. ‘Drinks World,’ ‘Sports Corner,’ ‘Torgau welcomes careful drivers’. The bus drove so fast I felt sick, but I knew it would get slower the further we drove. Someone once told me he’d had to puke the first time he got on a bus after five years.

I felt people looking at my bag and staring at me and leant my head on the window. When we drove past the brewery I wanted to get out, but I stayed put. The bus stopped at a crossroads and I saw the sign ‘Riesa 182 km’ next to me. There was a big juvenile facility there, out in Zeithain, in the middle of nowhere, but I was a few years too old for them now. ‘How much time you done now, son?’ asked the Boxer.

‘It’s been a few years now,’ I said, ‘all together.’

‘Can’t grumble either,’ said the Boxer. We were playing chess and I offered him a pawn. He ate it up, and a few moves later his king got what was coming to him. It was only boxing he’d been top-class at. I’d learned to play chess more than ten years ago in Zeithain. ‘Traudi’s Inn’. I got out. The station was one stop away, but the trains to Leipzig ran all day, and I went in to see Traudi. The door swung to behind me, and I opened it again and looked out. The bus was driving down the road and I saw a couple of heads moving behind the big rear window. ‘Hey, it’s getting cold,’ someone said, and I flinched, dropped my bag and turned around. Just an old bloke at one of the tables, holding tight to a beer bottle with both hands and looking down at the tabletop, pretty far gone. I picked up my bag and went up to the bar. Some scrawny guy was fiddling with the beer pumps, but when I sat down on one of the bar stools I saw that the scrawny guy had a truckload of lipstick on and must have been a woman. As if she wanted to prove it, she stuck out her chest and smiled. She had a name-tag on her apron, it said, ‘Traudi Schmidt at your service’.

They talked about Big Traudi inside, ‘Got this great place, you gotta go there when you get out, Big Traudi’s got the best beer in town, you better believe it,’ but perhaps Big Traudi had been on a diet over the years. ‘All right,’ I said.

‘Beer and a shot, right?’ she said and smiled and looked at my bag and curved her scrawny back so far forwards I started worrying about her spine.

‘Coffee,’ I said, and she turned round and got to work on the coffee machine. I went through my pockets and put a tenner down on the bar. ‘Can you change this for me?’

Traudi put my coffee down next to the note. ‘No problem,’ she said and took it. She held the tenner between her forefinger and thumb and fanned it in front of her face and smiled at me as if she’d been in another kind of business, back when she was fat. I unwrapped the sugar cube, dipped it in the coffee and watched it slowly dissolve. Traudi was still grinning at me and now she stroked her lips with the note. I drank a mouthful of my coffee, then I poured in some milk and stirred it around a couple of times with the spoon. ‘How d’you want it?’ asked Traudi and looked at me over the note.

‘For the machine,’ I said. She screwed up the tenner in her fist and bent over to the till. She fingered through the coins and slapped three twos and four ones down on the counter. I nodded and went over to the cigarette machine. The old bloke looked up for a moment, still clinging onto the beer bottle, empty now. He really did look pretty far gone, like the alkies and dossers inside when they couldn’t get hold of any home brew. Some of them tried to make their own, and collected every crust of bread and every rotten apple they could get, but most of them had the DTs and messed it up.

‘A beer,’ said the old man, ‘a nice cold beer. And a shot, you know. You’ll think of me, won’t you, drink one for me?’

‘Yeah, right,’ I said, ‘a double just for you. Soon as I get to the station.’ The old guy smiled, and for a second his head stopped wavering and even his eyes were still. The coins jangled through the machine and I selected my old brand. I had to put more money in; the prices had gone up. I leant over and picked up the packet. I looked around. Traudi had poured herself a beer and was drinking and flicking through a thick catalogue in front of her on the counter. Looked like underwear and clothes.

‘Mate, got one for me?’ The old man looked at me, lowered his head slightly and let go of his empty bottle. I put the new packet in the inside pocket of my jacket and gave the old man four of the roll-ups the Boxer had given me that morning, ‘For the journey, son.’ He smoked the cheapest stuff, we called it ‘pubes’, but some evenings, when we were sitting at the window and waiting for the night and swapping cigarettes, his roll-ups tasted better than Davidoff Filter. I paid for my coffee and left.

I saw four chemist shops by the time I got to the station, three of them on the same road. Maybe people in Torgau were really run-down and got ill easily, or they beat each other up all the time and needed loads of bandages.

There were a couple of people in the ticket office so I got my ticket from a machine. The station pub didn’t open till the evening, and I stood in front of the timetable and smoked and read the names of the towns, until they announced my train and I noticed I was cold and felt a bit sick. On the platform was a girl with a dog. Fairly pretty even, maybe a bit too young, seventeen or eighteen, dark hair and nearly black and down over her shoulders, and her eyes …