Today, we’ve partnered with Scribe Books to introduce the majestic German Book Prize winner Der Spiegel calls “the first worthy successor to Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain to appear in contemporary German literature.” It is also the debut novel of Lutz Seiler, a major German poet we’ve published in our pages before. In the novel excerpt below, our protagonist has just arrived at a seaside town after an unspeakable tragedy. The true subject of this chapter is revealed to be Ed’s unsettled inner state—dive in and read all the way up to its heart-stopping end.
He smelled the sea even before he got off the train. From his childhood (memories of their only trip to the Baltic Sea), he remembered the Hotel am Bahnhof. It lay directly across from the station, a big, beautiful attraction with oriels built as round towers, and weather vanes in which the numerals of the years crumbled.
He let a few cars pass and hesitated. It wouldn’t be wise, he thought, especially as far as money was concerned. On the other hand, there was no point in arriving on the island in the afternoon, since there probably wouldn’t be enough time left to find a place to stay—if he could find one at all. He had about 150 marks on him; if he were careful, he could make it last for three, maybe even four weeks. He had left ninety marks in his bank account for rent transfers, enough until September. If he were lucky, no one would take exception to his disappearance. He could have fallen ill. Summer holidays would begin in three weeks. He had written his parents a card. They believed he was in Poland, in Katowice, for the so-called International Student Summer, as he had been the year before.
The reception desk was built unusually high and looked as if it had been swept clean, no papers, no keys; but what did Ed know about hotels? At the very last moment, the heads of three women appeared, rising like the pistons of a four-stroke motor in which the fourth spark plug has failed to ignite. Impossible to discern from exactly which depths the receptionists had suddenly surfaced; maybe the high shelf of the desk was connected to a back room, or maybe over the years the women had simply got used to staying under cover as long as possible, quiet and still, behind their dark veneered barrier.
‘Good afternoon, I …’
His voice sounded weary. Alone in the compartment, he had once again been unable to sleep. A military patrol, probably some kind of advance border security, had confiscated his map of the Baltic coast. The train had stopped for a long time in Anklam: the patrol must have got on there. He regretted that nothing more intelligent had occurred to him than claiming that it wasn’t actually his own map… As a result, he had no way of knowing why particular places were underlined and particular sections of the coast line were traced in ink… His voice had suddenly failed, and in its place was the murmuring in his brain—Brockes, Eichendor, and, as always, Trakl, who echoed most relentlessly with his verses of foliage and brown—that made Ed grab his head. A sudden move: in reflex, one of the soldiers raised his machine gun.
In the end, Ed could consider himself lucky that they left him alone. ‘Odd duck,’ the Kalashnikov-wielding soldier murmured out in the corridor. Ed’s forehead was covered with sweat. Fields flashed by, black grass along the railroad embankment.
‘Do you have a reservation?’
Ed was taking a room for the first time in his life. The amazing thing was, it was working. They gave him a long form on dull paper and asked for identification. As he lifted his elbows onto the high surface of the desk with some effort and filled out the form with a stiff wrist, the receptionists took turns leafing through his pass booklet. For one absurd instant, Ed feared his secret departure might have automatically been registered in one of the very last, empty pages in his pass, under ‘Visa and Travel’. Unauthorised displacement—from the days of his military, he remembered this fateful stamp that incurred a wide variety of penalties.
‘I beg your pardon, this is my first time,’ Ed said. ‘What?’ asked the concierge. Ed raised his head and tried to smile, but his attempt to bridge the gap fell flat. He was given a key from which a varnished wooden cube dangled on a short string. He closed his fist around the cube and knew his room number. The number was neatly burnt into the wood. He briefly pictured the hotel caretaker in his basement workroom, bent over an endless row of little blocks sawed to the proper size and sanded, onto which he placed the glowing rod of his soldering iron—number after number, room by room. Ed had once been a labourer, too, and part of him was still at home in workshops, in the caves of the working class, those side rooms of the world, in which things asserted their definite, tangible outlines.
‘Second floor, stairs on the left, young man.’
The word Moccastube shimmered above a brass-studded door next to the staircase. On the first landing, Ed looked back again; two of the three women’s heads had disappeared, while the third woman was speaking on the telephone and following him with her eyes.
When he woke, it was already after four in the afternoon. A wardrobe stood at the foot of the double bed. In the corner, a television stood on a chrome-plated stand. Above the toilet hung a cast-iron flushing tank, coated with a film of condensation. The tank must have dated from a much earlier era. The lever for the flushing mechanism imitated two leaping dolphins. While the animals sedately returned to their initial position, an endless stream of water gushed out. Ed liked the sound of the water, and felt like the dolphins were his friends.
That you could go into a hotel, ask for a room, and get one (rather straightforwardly) had to be counted as one of the few wonders of the world that had survived—‘for a’ that an’ a’ that,’ Ed gurgled into the stream of water from the showerhead. Over time, you simply forgot that such things still existed; fundamentally, you didn’t believe in them anymore, yes, you forgot what life could be good for. Ed’s thoughts ran along those lines. He wanted to masturbate, but couldn’t muster enough concentration.
To the right of the hotel was a lake with a fountain that regularly rose into the sky, collapsed in on itself, and disappeared for several seconds. A couple in a pedal boat glided slowly up to the water feature. Ed was suddenly overcome with a good feeling as he crossed the road towards the lake. All this was the beginning of something. Someone who’d been through a fair amount showed himself capable of … With that, his sentence ended. It was clear to him that his departure was overdue. He felt the pain, as if he were only now awakening from anaesthesia, millimetre by millimetre.
A cobblestone street that turned to the left was named An den Bleichen. He passed a few run-down villas with conservatories, courtyards, and garages. He walked up to the nameplate near the door of one to have a look at the house’s travel itinerary until now. The small, brave lighted doorbell plate also preserved the legibility of some of the names that had been pasted for some time, perhaps for years now. As he passed, Ed tried to capture their rhythm: Schiele, Dahme, Glambeck, Krieger… His muttering formed a bridge across the lake, and his steps on the wood were a kind of metronome. ‘All-of-those-who-died-al-ready…’ whispered Ed, and he automatically covered his face with his hands, ‘see everything in a new way?’ The old city wall appeared, then an archway and a café called ‘Torschliesserhaus’, the Gatekeeper’s House.
He crossed the old city to the port and checked the ferry departure times. In the kiosk of the White Fleet, he bought a crossing for the following day. The sight of the boat put him in a euphoric mood. The steps to the dock, of light-grey cement, and then: the sea. To eat cheaply, Ed returned to the train station. He felt rested, and gauged his chances. A hide-out in the sea, hidden sea, Hiddensee… He knew the stories. Continuous whispers washed around the island. Ed chewed deliberately and drank his coffee in tiny sips. First, it wouldn’t be easy getting onto one of the boats. Then it would be almost impossible to find a place to stay, but another goal was not conceivable inside the border. Certainly, he had heard the experts who claimed that Hiddensee actually lay outside the border, that it was exterritorial, an island of the blessed, of dreamers and idealists, of failures and rejects. Others called it the Capri of the North, booked-up for decades.
In Halle, Ed had met a historian who’d worked winters as a waiter in the Offenbach Stuben, a wine restaurant where he and G. had occasionally sat at the bar. Every spring, at the opening of the season, the historian (that’s what everyone called him, after all) returned to the island. ‘At last, at last!’ he liked to call out to his customers, who nodded indulgently when he started in on one of his eulogies, which he usually began by addressing his audience in the Offenbach Stuben with ‘Dear friends!’ ‘The island, dear friends, has all I need, all I’ve ever searched for. As soon as it surfaces on the horizon, seen from the deck of the steamboat, its slender, delicate form, its fine outline, and behind it, the mainland’s last grey cockscomb, Stralsund with its towers, the entire hinterland with its filth, you know what I mean, dear friends, the island appears and suddenly you forget it all, because now, before you, something new is beginning, yes, dear friends, right there on the steamboat!’ the man rhapsodised. Grey-haired and in his mid-forties, he had left his position at the university—voluntarily, it was said—and was therefore all the more deeply immersed in dreams. As many of the country’s thinkers did, he wore a beard like Marx’s. ‘Freedom, dear friends, is essentially a matter of writing one’s own laws within the framework of existing laws, of being simultaneously the object and the subject of legislation, that is an essential characteristic of life up there, in the north.’ That’s how the historian of the Offenbach Stuben summed it up, holding a tray as round as a bass drum and full of bottles in front of his chest.
For Ed, the most important piece of information was that places could suddenly free-up even in season. From one day to the next, waiters were needed, or dishwashers, kitchen-help. There were seasonal workers who disappeared overnight for a wide variety of reasons. Usually, those telling such stories would stop abruptly at that point and throw a glance at the listener—and then, depending on the situation, would continue in one of the possible or impossible directions: ‘Of course, there are people who give up and return to the mainland, who just aren’t cut out for it.’ Or: ‘You know, an exit visa is suddenly authorised, in the middle of the summer …’ Or: ‘Sure, it’s hard to believe, fifty kilometres, but there have always been strong swimmers …’ After every conversation, Hiddensee seemed like a narrow strip of land of mythical splendour, the last, the only place, an island that was constantly floating away, always outside the field of vision—you’d have to hurry if you wanted to reach it.
After eating, Ed returned to the hotel. Someone had been through his things, but nothing was missing. He stood at the window and looked across at the train station. In bed, he began to call for Matthew—a regression. But he only called quietly, and really just to hear his voice again before going to sleep. No, he had not jumped.
Kruso by Lutz Seiler, translated by Tess Lewis, is published by Scribe (£16.99).
Lutz Seiler was born in 1963 in Gera, Thuringia, and today lives in Wilhelmshorst, near Berlin and Stockholm. Since 1997, he has been the literary director and custodian of the Peter Huchel Museum. His many prizes include the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize, the Bremen Prize for Literature, the Fontane Prize, the Uwe Johnson Literary Prize 2014, and the German Book Prize 2014.
Tess Lewis is a writer and translator from French and German. Her translations include works by Peter Handke, Anselm Kiefer, and Philippe Jaccottet. She has won a number of awards including the 2015 ACFNY Translation Prize and a Guggenheim Fellowship. She is an Advisory Editor for The Hudson Review. Her website can be found here.
*****
Read More Translations: