Sasa Stanisic - Before the Feast

The first male human reaches his tentacle out to her, its claws spread. The vixen gets behind the container, ready to retreat, her injured eye throbbing with pain. But the human just picks up the container.

She’s a killer on the road .

The human calls in a quiet human tone. Her urge to flee disappears. At last the vixen scents something in his call. She scents speech in the sounds of the human who has no scent. He is calling gently to her.

A small male human comes out of the earth. The container is marked with his scent.

A fire going cold .

He croaks, goes toward the vixen, but the one without any aroma goes to him, calls something, the small male human stops. Good. The vixen gets up on her hind legs, propping herself on the container, the scent of egg wafts out, she tries to haul herself up by the edge of the container, slips on the wet wood, won’t let go and hauls the container over with her. Its contents fall toward her. Eggs break on the stone, she can already scent the little male human’s boots, she growls,

A barrel of a gun

snaps at him, no — snaps at a shell that has fallen out of the container, digs her teeth into that hard but fragile shell, runs for it with her brush held low, is off and away,

A villain on the run .

The startled, small male human and the vixen’s accomplices are left behind.

Well played, clever robber girl, we say.

ON THE 27TH DAY OF APRIL IN THE YEAR OF OUR Lord 1611, a female Wolf in Cub was taken in our Trap on the fallow Field at Geher’s Farm. Thereby was great Harm averted, for ten Wolves would have wreaked Havock among our Cattle.

DIETMAR DIETZ SOON CALMS DOWN AFTER THE theft of the eggs. He acknowledges the fox’s clever wit, and the young men agree with him. They fall into conversation. The two young men ask about the Feast, saying they’ve heard that there’s good dancing in Fürstenfelde. Ditzsche sets them right: there’s good dancing anywhere people can dance well, he says. The two of them appreciate his little boast, they say goodbye and wish the old man good music forever when he dances, which is what he likes to hear.

Ditzsche will dance, will swivel his hips without letting it look suggestive. He will smell of aftershave and Frau Reiff’s apple cake. Surrounded by the stony faces of senior citizens dancing the polka, any kind of passion looks extreme.

Many of the older folk have forgotten about Ditzsche or even forgiven him. Not Imboden, who can hardly control himself when Ditzsche turns up anywhere. But last year Zieschke played a piece something like a tango, and Frau Kranz danced with Ditzsche to it. She and Zieschke were already here when Ditzsche’s close relationship with our post was revealed.

But between ourselves: haven’t you ever imagined, for instance on a walk and when the postman has just disappeared into the entrance hall of a building, what it would be like to take a handful of white letters out of the yellow box on the yellow bicycle, or get on the bicycle yourself, ride away, and spend the day immersed in the lives and bills of other people?

These days, with the Internet, doing such a thing would be less interesting than in Ditzsche’s time. These days we all write emails. Well, here in Fürstenfelde not all of us write emails. And other people read our emails too, viruses and Americans read them, but that doesn’t bother anyone much. Back in the past only Ditzsche read other people’s letters. And the Stasi, but perhaps here it really was only Ditzsche. Although everyone knew everything about everyone else anyway, and still does.

Some day, when Ditzsche is no longer around, Fürstenfelde won’t dance so well. Imboden isn’t getting any younger either. Dietmar Dietz speaks lovingly to his chickens in Spanish sometimes. Maybe he learned to dance in Cuba, maybe he learned at the People’s University. And maybe he doesn’t dance so well as all that, but someone once said with conviction that he did, so it became the truth, how would we know? Usually it’s not so much a case of what’s really true as what people think is true.

When he was delivering letters, Ditzsche sometimes forgot himself and did a little dance. Everyone likes to see someone who may be bringing good news forget himself and do a dance. And maybe Ditzsche was dancing for joy because he already knew the good news.

Out of a pension of 534 euros a month, Dietmar Dietz spends nearly 300 euros on his chickens. When Ditzsche is no longer here, there won’t be a single pedigree chicken left in Fürstenfelde. Chickens will just be chickens. If you’ve ever seen specially beautiful chickens, if you’ve ever seen Ditzsche’s pedigree Kraienköppe chickens stalking about, you’ll know what a loss that will be.

But it’s a comfort to know there’s someone among us who understands rare creatures, or creatures hitherto entirely unknown here, whether he’s a biologist, a geneticist or a chicken-breeder. That someone, in Herr Schramm’s words, has a talent for the creation of what’s new and the preservation of the norm. Such a talent that Breakfast TV phones Ditzsche and calls him “Herr Dietz,” asking about his availability, and Herr Dietz hesitantly cracks a joke to the effect that he must look in his engagements diary. The Breakfast TV people say it would have to be a Saturday afternoon, and Ditzsche replies, “Then come to the Feast and you’ll really have something to see, not just my chickens.”

When people still went walking on a Sunday, Ditzsche would open his inner yard and let the chickens out of their enclosure. The people out walking wanted to see the chickens, and the chickens wanted to be seen; they stalked around and children clapped their hands. Ditzsche stood to one side, doing something or other, and no chicken ever left the yard. That’s all over, and the chickens didn’t stalk, Ditzsche would say, the chickens just had rather prominent chests and tall, elegant figures.

Even then, Ditzsche left his home only to go to work, to get things for his chickens, and to shake a leg dancing at Blissau’s. In spite of all his dancing partners, nothing ever came of Ditzsche’s acquaintance with women.

“Ditzsche, you’re as stiff as your chickens,” the ferryman once said, and Ditzsche replied quietly, “My chickens aren’t stiff, but you’re a layman, you wouldn’t know.”

And stiff wasn’t the right word for Ditzsche, either. Abashed was more like it. Except when he was dancing, Ditzsche looked abashed the whole time. And you can’t stand the company of someone who’s always abashed for long. As soon as the music stopped, Ditzsche looked down at the floor. Didn’t know what to do with his elbows and his shoulders, never asked a woman a question. And that’s no good, women have to be asked questions.

After that business with Durden and his act of revenge, Ditzsche lost his job and disappeared for a couple of years. Some said he was taking more dancing lessons in Cuba. Others said: you always want people to be doing something special, but on the whole people don’t do anything special. We’ve seen Ditzsche climbing scaffolding in Prenzlau.

He came back in 2003, but there’s very little to be said about that. Durden had retired, the old bigwigs wore new suits, the polka was still in fashion and was now joined in popularity by the metal band Rammstein, equally simple in principle, and they’re both all right. What didn’t function in the past still didn’t function, or functioned in a slightly different way, and functioned either better or worse, depending on your attitude to past history.

Dietmar Dietz functioned as usual. He began rearing a new breed of chickens. If he really did read our letters, people in the village may have shown him that they knew it, but he himself didn’t get to know anyone better than before.