Sasa Stanisic - Before the Feast

Sometimes she calls from the Homeland House at night. “I mustn’t come home tonight.” Right. I fetch Pa, and all three of us spend the night in the Homeland House.

I think that if for some reason or other the rapeseed wasn’t to come into flower, Ma would run amok in the fields with her gun. Yup, her gun, that’s another thing.

I once asked whether she was a good shot.

Yes, she said, just not very quick off the mark.

Ma is funny, that’s for sure. She doesn’t function like anyone else I know, but then again she does really: she wants to get through the day somehow. She’s never nasty. Likes everyone except for people she’s right not to like. Reads a lot. Votes for the Left. But then she goes and cooks nothing but stuff with beetroot in it for two weeks, which is great because beetroot is great, but eating beetroot every day for two weeks on end, well, that’s different.

All the same, Ma is no crazier than the rest of us. You don’t have to take it seriously when she does something wild like getting a gun (it was for security). Pa says, even if what she does seems strange, take it seriously. Yes, strange, but suppose it’s also true and not so harmless?

That about levitating is harmless. Ma says she can make small objects levitate. I’m not arguing. Maybe it’s her weight that does it. Everything else around my 130-kilo Ma loses mass by comparison, I feel lighter myself. She sits on her sofa, practicing on mini-carrots. She holds a mini-carrot between her fingers and concentrates on it.

I ask why she’s doing that. Why does she want things to levitate?

To make people happy.

That’s my Ma for you: wants to make people happy.

Ma’s reached her limit. I get that much. Could be she thinks up stuff like levitation to move back from the limit a bit. Maybe she thinks that as long as she can’t do it, can’t make things levitate, everything’s okay with her. And if she really has a gun so as to feel more secure, then that’s okay too. If she only thought that up about the gun and feels better all the same, so much the better. I’m her son. Ma could never shoot anyone. (Where and when it’s okay by you, don’t change anything about that where and when.)

This year her springtime blues went on until the first of May, which was a really warm day. Ma got up and made beetroot with fried eggs for breakfast, so we knew she was feeling better. Then she lay down on her stomach in the garden and rowed in the air with her hands, sweating like an iceberg, all over bits of grass from head to toe.

Me: “Ma, what are you doing?”

Ma: “Learning to swim.”

After an hour of that she runs out into the road, turns off toward the promenade, going faster and faster, an outsize version of Sebastian Vettel, runs to the landing stage by the ferry boathouse, cuts in past the ferryman and jumps into the lake like a bomb, throwing up water to form new landscapes.

Pa and I go after her, worried. Well, of course we’re worried. But Ma was happy. Ma was swimming. It’s not cold, come on in, you cowards! The ferryman is in already. Ma and the ferryman swimming a race. Ma lets him win.

Maybe she could always swim, and Pa didn’t know. Maybe she learned to swim that day in the garden. At least my Ma didn’t sink. “Yoo-hoo!” cried my Ma.

IN THE YEAR OF OUR LORD 1590, AT THE ANNA Feast, there was a tightrope-walker present who fasten’d his rope above the Church Gable, fixing the other End to the Berlin Gate, so that he flew down from the Gable to the Gate uninjur’d, all the While pushing a Handcart!

On that same Day, however, there was a Cutpurse at large in the Crowd, the latter being distracted by the Tightrope Dancer, so that there was great Suspicion of the Dancer as being one of a Pair of Rogues!

Thus was it confirm’d again that ’tis not Opportunity maketh Thieves, but Opportunity is the greatest Thief itself.

THE NIGHT BEFORE THE FEAST, ON THE FIELD, with his forehead on the steering wheel: Wilfried Schramm, former Lieutenant-Colonel, then a forester, now retired and also moonlighting for Von Blankenburg Agricultural Machinery. On average, more dead drivers lie with their heads on their steering wheels in the German TV series Crime Scene in any one year than in six selected American crime series in the same space of time.

Herr Schramm is a critical man. Herr Schramm thinks it’s silly to have so many dead drivers in Crime Scene lying with their heads on their steering wheels. Sometimes it’s their cheeks on the steering wheel, and the face is all crumpled up, but usually it’s the forehead. Herr Schramm is sure of it; when yet another body lies like that, Herr Schramm switches channels.

So Herr Schramm is lying with his head on the steering wheel, whistling the theme tune of Crime Scene . Herr Schramm imagines what it would be like if an episode of Crime Scene were set in Fürstenfelde. Which death would be most suitable for the episode? Not counting his own. Among the top three would probably be: the Chinese man, the tractor and Frau Rebe. By the tractor he means Rüdiger under the tractor.

The Chinese would be good, because it probably wasn’t self-defense as everyone claimed. But the Chinese was, well, Chinese, and the murderer was someone from here. However, that was almost a century ago, the first episode of Crime Scene set in Fürstenfelde doesn’t have to be that far back in history.

The tractor would be better. Rüdiger lay dead under it all night. And Rüdiger’s dog brought him a dead pigeon all the same. Put it down beside his head, terrible. Drunk as a skunk, people said, an accident. The tractor under which Rüdiger was lying was Rüdiger’s tractor and it stood on Rüdiger’s farm. Rolled backward. And the dead pigeon was lying there in the morning. Terrible.

“I don’t know.” Herr Schramm has stopped whistling. His voice inside the car sounds like some other person’s voice, any voice, not his. Because it’s like this, thinks Herr Schramm: first, Rüdiger had a good head for liquor. Herr Schramm found that out by comparison with his own headache on several occasions. And second, he knew his tractors better than Herr Schramm knew the Crime Scene theme tune, and a tune like that is a lot simpler than a tractor. Although he has just this minute noticed how tiring the tune is to whistle. Yes, and third, a few months after Rüdiger’s death von Blankenburg finally managed to buy Rüdiger’s agricultural machinery business. The heirs weren’t objecting, unlike Rüdiger.

Herr Schramm goes on whistling.

But Frau Rebe’s would be the best case all the same. On 3 October, it had been, in 1990. Who’d have thought it? Eleven stab wounds. Anyone who knew Frau Rebe, and that was a lot of people, couldn’t really celebrate 3 October after that, not that many really do celebrate it, and there you go, that shows how little some in Fürstenfelde, the murderer included, thought of German Reunification.

Anyway, the murderer had been an apprentice of her husband’s. He always looked at Frau Rebe when she came into the works, and he imagined her naked, he wanted her to undress for him. But unfortunately she didn’t want to do that, and we have to say she really was very good-looking, and then he helped himself, eleven times.

Someone called Sigrun, a psychiatrist, with a name like that Herr Schramm isn’t quite sure whether a man or a woman, has found out that on average women are more creative killers than men. And in crimes where a knife is used, women are stabbed more times than men.

However, sometimes Herr Schramm wonders: who actually thinks up the questions to ask about these statistics? And then he’s glad that the people who think them up exist. Herr Schramm believes in talent, Herr Schramm thinks that he himself would have been talented in thinking up such questions, always thinking of questions to ask himself and hundreds of other people wouldn’t have been a bad career for him back then.