Clemens Meyer: All the Lights

As he walked back home he held the letter in his left hand and the bottle of rum in his right like a small club. Grown men and teenage lads walked past him towards the garage, some with empty cloth or plastic bags, some looking at the ground, others looking him right in the eye and barging into him slightly, but he broadened his shoulders under his jacket, walked along the middle of the pavement and held the letter at chest level so that everyone could see it, as if they’d understand then that his old friend Wolfgang was sitting by the sea in Cuba, watching the big red evening sun and drinking rum with all his money. ‘… and I hope my letter gives you strength and courage. One of the old guard has made it!’

He turned around and saw the neon lights of the garage, a good way away now, a sign shining blue on the roof. It blurred when he squinted, and he tried to imagine a roaring sound, louder and louder, just the roar and the blue. A couple of mopeds rattled along the road. He turned his head slightly and saw a girl sitting behind the driver, both arms raised and laughing.

The bottle was empty. Just a sip left in the glass. He leant against the balcony wall. The night had turned cold but he didn’t feel it.

‘I’m standing on top of an ancient Mayan pyramid on the Yucatán Peninsula in the south of Mexico. If you look at a map you’ll see it’s not far from Cuba to Yucatán.’

He took his old school atlas out of the cloth bag he’d brought specially. It was a very large atlas, and he had to rest it on both knees and wedge the letter under the atlas, and the people sitting next to him and against the opposite wall gave him slightly strange looks. He flicked through the pages, looking; he had opened the letterbox as he went to leave the house. He had sat down on a step and started reading. Then he’d run back upstairs again, he didn’t want to miss his tram, had torn the old school atlas off the shelf, put it in a slightly stained cloth bag, slammed the front door without locking it and run down the stairs to the tram stop. He saw the tram coming round the corner in the distance, he ran and waved, the bag banging against his leg, and as he jumped on through the closing door the bag got trapped and he had to tug it out roughly, and then he sat down, breathing heavily. He wanted to get the atlas out and read more of the letter but the tram got more and more crowded at every stop.

He flicked through and looked, Canada, northern USA, the North West, Mexico, there right on the edge was Yucatán, but where was Cuba? He turned more pages, Central America and the Caribbean. Then he saw the Yucatán peninsula again, large and wide, and a little way above the tip was the narrow, long-drawn shape of Cuba. He put his forefinger on the map and then his thumb. The sea was only a thumb’s width between Yucatán and Cuba. Did Wolfgang go over on a little boat? How long must he have been at sea? A fishing boat, a little fishing boat, bobbing on the very top of the waves and then vanishing and then popping up again. He pulled the letter out from under the atlas and laid it on Venezuela and the Antilles. ‘Chichén Itzá is the largest Mayan city in Central America. From up here I can see the dense jungle, green without end. I’ve rented out a little hut nearby, and at night the jungle makes noises, whistling, singing, high-pitched screams like children, I reckon the birds and the other animals hardly ever sleep.’

‘Mr Mose, please!’ A woman’s voice, and he saw the woman standing in the open doorway, calling out again, ‘Mr Mose, please!’ And her voice seemed high and shrill now, the birds and the other animals hardly ever sleep. Mr Mose walked past him, giving him a dirty look because he laughed and Mr Mose must have thought he was laughing at him like the kids used to laugh at his name. A door slammed, and then he carried on reading, one finger on the little black dot on the map next to the words ‘Chichén Itzá’.

‘I’ve been here ten days now, wandering around the old Mayan city and the jungle and the little town nearby with all its clay huts. There’s a bar there, they call them cantinas here. Have you ever drunk tequila? Some people in the cantina drink it like water, even though it’s hot and muggy here. They drink it with salt and lemon, first the salt on your tongue, then you knock back the tequila, then you bite into the lemon. I saw it once in a bar in Berlin, but I had to come to Mexico to try it out for myself. Go into some bar, Frank, and drink a tequila to my health, maybe I’ll be sitting in the cantina at the same time, drinking to you. I saw something really beautiful a couple of days ago. A woman showed me it. She’s beautiful as well, and she’s not just any old woman. She’s a Red Indian woman, an India as they say here, and when the jungle’s so noisy at night she sits and lies with me. Frank, a Red Indian woman, imagine that! I can’t help thinking of how we played Red Indians as kids, and there was that little girl from down our road who used to be our squaw. And Maria Pilar, who’s something like my squaw now, looks just the way I always used to imagine a Red Indian woman. Skin like bronze, and hair so black it shines like fresh shoe polish. And she smells really different, she has a special smell, slightly sweet and bitter, not like the women in Germany who stink of either perfume or sweat.’ Another name was called, somewhere at another door, and again Frank looked up for a moment and saw a woman sitting next to him; she hadn’t been sitting there before. He leant over slightly in her direction and took a deep breath through his nose. Then he thought of his wife, who’d been a friend of the little girl they used to play Red Indians with as kids. He thought of how long he hadn’t seen her now, but he didn’t want to see her any more, he was glad she was a long way off, just sad that she’d taken Klara with her and he could only see her once or twice a year. He ran a hand through his hair a couple of times; it was still quite thick, only thinning a tiny bit at the temples. Hadn’t Wolfgang been almost bald? Bald Wolf with his young squaw.

‘I like her a lot, but you know I want to keep going to Brazil. Not right now or tomorrow, but one day, maybe soon, I can feel it. But I wanted to tell you what the beautiful thing was that she showed me. She came to my hut in the evening and took me by the hand and led me to a little hill. The sun was very low in the sky, and it was almost dark, and the light and the shadows of the setting sun fell on the steps of the Kukulcán Pyramid and made the shape of a giant snake winding down the steps.

‘There’s nothing to see there usually, only the stone steps, but now this giant snake seemed to be creeping towards us. Then I saw all the tourists standing around the pyramid, but we were all alone on our hill. Maria Pilar only speaks a tiny bit of English and I only have a few words of Spanish, but later someone told me it happens exactly twice every year, every twenty-first of March and twenty-third of September. And as I was standing there on the little hill with Maria Pilar …’ He closed the atlas shut. He looked at the date on his watch, even though he knew very well it was the twenty-eighth of September today. How did the letter get to him from the jungle in such a short time? ‘Mr Eisner, room thirty-two please!’ He put the atlas with the letter in it in his bag. Maybe there was a little airfield there somewhere. Wolfgang had money … Or he’d been standing up at the top of the pyramid, the night was very bright, and he wrote the letter up there. Weren’t the nights always very bright in the tropics? Five days to Germany, of course, why not? Maybe Wolfgang had gone up again on his own the next morning. Maria Pilar was waiting for him in his hut, she’d made strong Mexican coffee. He gazed at the vast jungle, green all the way to the horizon, thought of home and his old friend and took out pen and paper. ‘Mr Eisner, room thirty-two please!’ He said, ‘Yes,’ took his bag and saw the letter between the pages of the atlas and stood up.