Sasa Stanisic - Before the Feast

Frau Kranz’s brush has painted entire generations. Including Rico’s grandfather, who wasn’t a Nazi at all. She has painted people from outside the village. Animals. They’d all have been forgotten sometime, but you can’t forget a picture like that. Almost seventy years of a village, a chronicle in oils, watercolors and charcoal. Savings Bank at Sunset is the latest title listed.

Of course, in spite of the pictures, many of their subjects will soon be forgotten, but it’s the principle that counts.

Even we don’t know the full extent of Frau Kranz’s work. We know her first picture. Its title is April, perhaps May . It shows six young women holding hands on the bank of the Deep Lake. They are standing in a row roughly where Frau Kranz has just put up her easel now and is clearing her throat, as if to ask the lake a question. The six women are looking at the water. Their profiles, chins, cheekbones, skin: clear and youthful.

They could be dancing.

The observer is looking at the ferry boathouse. You can see the landing stage on the left-hand side of the picture; on the right, reeds frame the scene. Some houses are left still standing by the wall, some are not. Some still have a roof, some don’t. Their facades are sooty, as if night hadn’t been able to take her black dress off.

They could be playing a game.

Morning mist takes the breath of the colors away. The height of the sky, the depth of the lake. It is as if the young women were standing in front of faded wallpaper with a lakeside motif. Frau Kranz gave them clear touches of color: a red scarf here, a blue blouse there, sunny yellow hair.

They could all be friends.

Our memory of that morning is hidden in mist as well, although we have nothing to hide.

“A Madonna?” The journalist points to a drawing showing the front of the bakery. “The windows as her eyes. And look, the door — her blissfully smiling mouth. The bread in the basket as Baby Jesus.”

Perhaps it’s something to do with the elderberry juice.

Frau Kranz takes his elbow and leads him away from the picture.

We can almost understand him. Like us, he is wondering what Frau Kranz’s pictures — how would we put it today? Wondering what they mean? They are sufficient unto themselves as they depict the world. Sometimes the choice of colors is freer, sometimes the proportions are unusual, but that’s more to do with the fact that Frau Kranz doesn’t bother so much with proportions.

It is hard for us to believe that a woman who knows so much, and there is also much she doesn’t know, a woman who has looked four political systems in the eye, and heard their promises, and looked those who made the promises in the eye, as well as those who believed the promises and those who broke them, a woman who had to begin again so often and watch the dreams slumbering in her new beginning turn to nightmares, a woman who has known misery and change and change that brings misery, exile, collectivization, redistribution, bankruptcy, possession, dispossession, the collective, collective stupidity, unjustified redistribution, justified extravagance, the stupidity of individuals, of the group, of many, all, malice, hatred, envy, passivity, ambition, delusion — our lousy, lovely, hypocritical, live-saving, reinvented Europe — it is hard to believe that a woman like that, and with what might be called a fairly well-marked artistic talent, is happy merely painting a savings bank at sunset.

We are upset. It’s not for us to make demands.

More people die than are born.

Who will paint us when Frau Kranz isn’t painting any longer? Who will paint our tools, and our hands holding them? Who will paint the cooking spoons that we carve?

Who will paint the houses cleared by Lada?

Who will paint the new inhabitants? For instance, sensitive Magdalene von Blankenburg, the agricultural machinery mogul’s daughter, whose father renovated the little Baroque hunting lodge by the Deep Lake where she spends her summer holidays learning Russian, because that’s considered the language of the future in Brandenburg, but also because she likes Isaak Babel and the soft sound of Russian songs.

Who will paint silent Suzi trying to concentrate on his angling, while Magdalene whispers Russian vocabulary to the sun?

Who will paint Anna’s last run through our night?

ANNA HAS LEFT THE FIELD BEHIND, SHE IS RUNNING along the edge of the clay-pit. The beam of her headlight briefly brings the black water in the clay-pit to life where it lay as if it were viscous, unmoved by rain and wind, under dead leaves and waterweeds.

Anna runs past the old brick kiln. Every broken windowpane has its own geometrical pattern. The brick kiln stopped working early in the 1990s. Anna’s uncle lost his job, and didn’t become an alcoholic. Someone from Dortmund or Darmstadt bought the building and the plot of land for peanuts. Nothing’s been done to it since then. Maybe that was the plan. The plot is a large one, building land with a view of the lake if you chopped down the birch and ash trees.

Sometimes the mice take over the brick kiln and pilot it on jet flights all over the Federal Republic of Germany, visiting other mice in buildings standing empty; they like historic listed buildings best, and meet in abandoned streets, where they stage illegal races against unused business premises and written-off apartment blocks, having no end of fun.

Anna’s breath is coming with difficulty again. It’s raining harder now, she needs asphalt underfoot, she doesn’t feel well here. She turns onto the former railway embankment, runs past the ruined station and on in the direction of the new buildings. A bat drops from the top of the water tower, empty of water now, and flies low over her head.

WE HAVE A PROBLEM WITH MICE. THEY SPREAD IN inhabited and uninhabited buildings alike. They feed on grain and abandoned ideas. They eat out of the hand of the Treuhand organization. They increase and multiply while we’re asleep. They dig. They run about. Tap-tap-tap they go over old floorboards. They scare away investors, they devastate the larders of people who have moved into the area. At last the roof has been mended and the asbestos removed, now they want to be able to look at the lake in peace, and then guess what: mice.

Bad luck for Poppo von Blankenburg. The agricultural machinery mogul had invited his family and friends to a little party at his hunting lodge. The Baroque building beside the Deep Lake has been renovated since last summer, the property has been spruced up and fenced in, silent Suzi has to climb now to get to his favorite place for angling, but Suzi doesn’t mind. There’s also a maze of hedges, but a very easy one; it didn’t take Mustard-Micha ten minutes to find the middle and steal the cushions from the pavilion. In addition there are private game reserves, and there’s private access to the lake, and until recently there was a wireless local area network. But now, unfortunately: rodents.

Von Blankenburg had dreamt of a party at the hunting lodge in the country for a long time: food and drink at a long table on the bank under the linden tree, staff in livery, a temperature of 26 degrees, and in his dream the male guests wore hunting garb and the ladies white trousers that fitted tightly, but not too tightly. The white trousers were even specified on the invitations, in small print, and there really was hunting, but no one counted who bagged how many ducks. In the dream a Scandinavian string quartet played chamber music under the linden tree.

Mice did not feature in Blankenburg’s dream. They did in real life. Their hunt began while the party guests were hunting too. They scurried across the meadow, tap-tap-tap they went over the recently relaid floorboards, hundreds upon hundreds of mice, they ate the food, they drank the wine. The staff screamed, the braver ones stamped as if dancing to that gray music. But what can you do against such an army when it’s well co-ordinated?