Sasa Stanisic - Before the Feast

Suzi nods.

He crouches down and touches the road. They have reached Eddie’s workshop.

“Road?”

Suzi shakes his head.

“Ground? What is it, man? Suzi? Asphalt?”

Suzi nods. Asphalt. With his lips and his hands, fingers spread, he mouths the words “something” and “under.”

“There’s something lying under the asphalt?”

Suzi nods.

AND A FLINT AX WAS FOUND IN A STONE GRAVE.

And a pair of tweezers was found in a tumulus grave; the tweezers were decorated at the broad end and were probably for plucking out the hairs of a beard, so it is assumed that the dead man had a well-groomed one.

And in a Slav grave a meerschaum hand spindle was found, and a coin in the dead man’s mouth to pay the ferryman who would take him over to the next world.

And in another grave, the grave of a dead child, there was a hammer and a ceramic rattle. The hammer head was inside the rattle. If you shake a ceramic rattle, it makes a sound.

And when the promenade was flooded in 2004, they found the grave of a warrior who had been buried with a whetstone and a bone ax, so that he could face his enemies with a sharp blade for all eternity.

And in the year 1739 an edict was issued against Gypsies, Vagabonds and other such Traveling Folk , who were a thorn in the flesh of the local aristocracy, since any Person who knowingly gives them an Abode was threatened with a fine of 1,000 thalers. The village communities were also charged with taking travelers into custody. Once a Rabble of Gypsies came to Fürstenfelde. The men claimed to be horse-dealers and musicians, the women to be soothsayers. Their children moved fast. Their tools were the horsewhip and the crystal ball . The Gypsy gallows of Fürstenfelde stood on the ground of a field lying fallow .

And Maria Wegener once protested against the exclusion of joiners and carpenters from the local guilds. She had been unable to prove that they were rightfully born of four grandparents from Fürstenfelde , and were thus worthy to work in our workshops and guilds . Frau Wegener was a wood-carver. She had done carvings for the door of our church, but they had gone up in flames, so no one knows if they looked good. Count Poppo von Blankenburg had commissioned Frau Wegener to carve him a yew-wood spoon. It was beautiful, a fine spoon with a broad bowl and an elegantly curving handle set in silver. Yew is slightly poisonous, but probably no one died of using the spoon, in fact you would have had to eat the spoon itself. A valuable spoon like that was left as a bequest when the owner died; as he passed away, it passed on. Von Blankenburg, our agricultural machinery mogul, keeps the yew-wood spoon that he inherited in a glass display case. Magdalene sometimes eats her muesli with it.

Maria Wegener’s favorite tool was a knife with a carved box-wood handle and a bone ferrule .

And broken shards of Germanic and Slav origin were found in a rubbish tip, in the same stratum, with fragments of a comb made from deer’s antlers under them.

And when diggers were working on the primary school, the building workers found an underground passage beneath the asphalt.

And one grave was that of a woman of about fifty, with two rings as worn on the temples in late-Slav costume beside her. Her head and feet were weighted with stones, probably to prevent the dead woman from returning. Anthropological examination made the reason for that obvious. Her skull showed bony excrescences as the result of benevolent tumors. The woman, who was found in a petrified condition, had a horn six centimeters long over her left eye. It may be assumed that her family were afraid of her.

Fürstenfelde is registered as an archaeological site.

THERE ARE A GOOD MANY HOUSE CLEARANCES IN our village. Lada is in charge, and has five people working freelance for him. When Suzi doesn’t have to be at Gölow’s, he helps out. The two of them make a good team. Lada doesn’t listen, and Suzi doesn’t mind how many words he hears. On Monday it will be the turn of Anna’s house, and now it’s the joiner’s. Eddie’s house. Eddie has been on the list since January, but Lada didn’t want to do it too close to his death, because when it’s our joiner, who has paneled half the village’s bedrooms, you don’t, as part of the village, go straight to remove the paneling from his own bedroom, not even if his daughters keep phoning to ask what’s going on, why hasn’t the job been done yet? And you don’t break up the joiner’s furniture without drinking to him one last time with the other old boys, or drinking to something else entirely, but having a drink as a memento is what matters. You don’t just say, here, 170 euros per ton of mixed scrap. And by the way, what are you going to do with all his tools and his old machinery? At first the daughters said they didn’t mind what became of it, but then Lada hinted that it might be worth getting some of it valued, and suddenly they did mind what happened to the tools and the old machinery.

The only person who can use the machinery is probably someone about as old as Eddie. The joiner was still sitting at those machines until the end, the joiner was a real glutton for work. Many of us lie in his coffins, they were good value, sometimes the base of the coffin was part of a cupboard, while for Herr Geels, our trained angler, his old boat was just the thing, it looked great, not a classic form, but it looked like a boat. Well, not really so great, but that’s how Geels had ordered it, and he had no objection; he should know, because he’d be lying in it himself in the end.

Of course there were some complaints as well, there’s always a bit of shrinkage. As they say elsewhere. We don’t say so. We say: anyone too mean to go to a trained joiner can’t complain if something doesn’t quite fit later.

But anyway, the joiner was a glutton for work. You could call him in the middle of the night and he’d come round, repair your TV set and watch Breakfast TV with you, or take the set away if he thought it was no more use. Our joiner was also an electrician. Many say he was a better electrician than a joiner.

And in retrospect maybe he wasn’t such a good electrician either, if you take the Archivarium as an example. It was Eddie who installed the electronic lock, and then the code sometimes didn’t work, or the door hummed so that Frau Schwermuth complained she couldn’t concentrate, or it was left open, like tonight.

A glutton for work, our Eddie was. When he was dying he made his own coffin, a nice one, cherry-wood, he liked the smell, that’s one of the little things that we all know about him. Another is that our joiner kept everything, as Lada and silent Suzi are now realizing. Not because he was a sentimental man, indeed the joiner was exactly the opposite, he was an optimist. He thought he’d be able to use it all sometime, down to the last nail. His three daughters are none of them sentimental; they none of them stuck it out here, and we know we ought to put that more positively. The three of them thought their future chances would be better somewhere else, and now one of them is divorced, one is working in a dm drugstore, one has a son with learning difficulties, and we don’t feel glad or anything nasty like that. Well, maybe we do a little, because they never came back to see their father’s house, the house of their childhood, after his death, and because they told Lada everything could go, just get rid of it. Get rid of it! We didn’t like their way of sticking to their point for no good reason. We didn’t like their wholesale refusal to separate what was important from what wasn’t important, because yes, we’re sentimental, we are. The joiner had kept all that stuff for us. Materials that he was planning to make into things sometime and sell them to us, or things intended for us although so far no one wanted them, and finally things we’d broken that had ended up with him. Sometimes Eddie brought us back our own radio sets decades later, with a serious expression and not without pride. Of course we didn’t want them any more, so he kept them. And were the old radios just to be thrown away now? The workshop was full of radios up to the ceiling, along with electrical goods and parts of electrical goods, plus music cassettes and video cassettes, toasters, hair dryers, old issues of Playboy . Silent Suzi is astonished, his entire head plus the back of his neck, where the dragon keeps watch to make sure no harm comes to Suzi, is rigid before this infinity of raw materials, implements, tools, dust and history, our own history included, wood in all phases of its aging, cast iron, aluminium, rust, yes, there’s a lot of rust. Eddie always had something better to do than tidy up. When we shot down the Yank aircraft in ’45, Eddie was first on the scene, clambering up on it to pick up what he could carry — from the depths of the shed, Suzi salvages the propeller. A hundred and seventy euros per ton of mixed scrap?