Sasa Stanisic - Before the Feast

Ana Kranz does not see herself as a painter of local scenes. She doesn’t like to be linked with a particular countryside and its culture. However, her paintings do show local scenes — the countryside of our Uckermark. They show our memories, even those that we first know we have only through our image of them: our childhood, the young faces of our parents and grandparents, the work and everyday life of three generations in the eddies of time. Kranz’s paintings are no less than journeys into the past .

Ana Kranz is not a painter of local scenes. She is our painter, and a painter of this place. We wish her well on her ninetieth birthday, in deep gratitude for her work in our homeland .

Slushy, but never mind, thinks Frau Kranz. You can forget the rest, and your birthday isn’t until next Saturday.

She escapes the bakery with the arrival of the next customers. Frau Kranz can tell that the weather is changing from the pain in her joints, but above all from the blue sky. An old woman on her way home. She had made herself pretty for the memory, and it had been no use; you can’t fool memories.

Frau Kranz has failed with her picture of the night. She is a little sorry for the sake of the village. Frau Schwermuth and Frau Zieschke and the Creative Committee were expecting something special for the auction. Hirtentäschel even wanted a preview of the picture so that he could say something about it. There isn’t much to say about this painting. Frau Kranz had seen that in Suzi’s beautiful eyes, in Frau Zieschke’s eyelashes that stopped applauding for a few seconds.

She had wanted to paint more than what she saw and knew, but she knew only the six women, and she saw only the gray of the night. On such a night, she had tried to imagine what the village would see if it were in her place, and she hadn’t the faintest idea.

At home, Frau Kranz drinks elderberry juice, cleans her teeth and lies down in her bed, with the picture of the night leaning against it, and the picture of the night is gray and bleak. She closes her eyes. Through the window, the sun paints on her face what the sun sees and knows.

A sun like that also shines on Frau Kranz’s favorite picture. Yes, we think she does have a favorite, although she denied it to the journalist when he asked her. The name of Frau Kranz’s favorite picture is:

THE ROMANIAN OUTSIDE THE CARAVAN FOR Romanian Harvest Workers on the Country Road out at Kraatz.

The Romanians pick apples and strawberries for five euros an hour, they harvest lettuce, they cut asparagus. Some come back year after year; you might think they had made friends in the village. They eat ice cream at Manu’s, one of them sometimes goes to Ulli’s for a beer and might recite a poem in Romanian, but they marry elsewhere, in their towns with musical-sounding names, in Baia Mare and in Vi eu de Sus.

A few years ago caravans for them to live in were placed on the country road out at Kraatz. Wheaten-yellow, a hotplate, a window with a wide view over their place of work, the fields; an estimated fifteen square meters, an estimated 240 euros, four beds for an estimated six persons, no smoking; they all smoke.

And last year: neo-Nazis from this area except for our own two, Rico and Luise, who had overslept and missed the gathering. Campfires, togetherness, barbecues near the caravans, music, pogo dancing and fun with the wobbly caravans, and at some point in the small hours of the morning the police.

Afterward the words Rumänen raus , Romanians Out, were to be seen in large, slanting letters on one of the caravans, but kind of in a quiet voice because they were sprayed in white on a yellow background, and because the exclamation mark was missing, and it stayed like that for some time until one morning a sleepy Romanian climbed out of the caravan, looked at the slogan for the time it took him to smoke a cigarette, fetched sticky tape and toilet paper and made the “r” in raus into an “H,” adding a hyphen after Rumänen , so that it now read Romanian-House. It didn’t take him a moment, he cleaned his nose, sat down on the little flight of steps in front of the caravan and ate a bread roll.

That is Frau Kranz’s favorite picture. That is Frau Kranz’s Romanian. A small man with a receding hairline, tracksuit trousers, undershirt, breakfasting in front of his house, the morning sun. A tattoo on his upper arm: the letters B and D in a heart, and the year 1977.

We think that is Frau Kranz’s favorite picture because she dedicated it to the Romanian and gave it to him. She never usually dedicates pictures to anyone. And now it is hanging somewhere, maybe in Baia Mare, maybe in Vi eu de Sus: a morning in the Uckermark in 2012.

ON THE MORNING BEFORE THE FEAST THE VILLAGE does not walk three times round the field, reciting a secret saying; it does not sprinkle grain at every corner for the birds to eat, instead of stealing from the field; the village has forgotten the secret saying.

A troop of girls adorned with brightly colored silk ribbons do not pace out the fields, they do not shout and make a noise to tell field spirits and kobolds: we’re here, keep away, even winter belongs to us. The girls are not accompanied by young men singing, and the old folk do not wait companionably at the village inn for the return of the young, ready to begin the Feast afterward with a dance round the bonfire.

The village has not pinned nosegays of pinks to its breast, and does not sit amicably together singing the old songs, nor does it say whether it rained the night before the Feast:

“If St Anna brings us rain, heaven’s blessings come again.” It’s all one to the village whether it rains on St Anne’s day or not, no one whispers so help us God, Maria, holy St Anne, so help us God these days, and St Anne’s day is really in July.

The first thresher has not made the Anna Crown, and the crown, interwoven with flowers, is not placed on the head of any girl not yet promised in marriage, nor interwoven with thorns to lie on the head of any woman who has made a pact with demons. No wearer of a crown will dance round the bonfire or burn on it, and white-clad children do not flit between the festive tables, the rakes are not adorned with colored ribbons, and the colored ribbons don’t flutter in the wind. Sometimes there isn’t any wind.

THE SENIOR CITIZENS ARE AWAKE. IMBODEN IS doing his morning exercises: 1–2–3.

Frau Steiner is saying her morning prayers. Frau Steiner’s golden teeth, her white hair: how people stared at her when she was a young woman. Her hair was red then, and she preferred to be alone with her cats, or out and about in the Kiecker Forest looking for herbs. Difficult, difficult. So Frau Steiner joined the faithful and took care to be seen more often in human company. Soon fewer people stared, apart from the men, because she wasn’t bad-looking. Today her hair is white and there is indifference in her eyes.

Frau Steiner is delivering advertising leaflets for Netto and Saturn and such stores. She once even shopped at Globetrotter in Prenzlau herself, when a pair of walking boots that took her fancy was reduced in price. She still likes to be out and about in the ancient forest. From five cats at first, she now has fifteen, but today you are considered no worse than crotchety with so many cats.

If she isn’t careful the red roots show at her parting.

Frau Steiner has survived three husbands; each of them died after exactly nine months of marriage. Difficult, difficult. Anyone could work it out in retrospect. Anyone could say something, meaning something else.