All the Lights E-Book

Clemens Meyer

• Herausgeber: And Other Stories
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Seitenzahl: 343

Beschreibung

A man bets all he has on a horserace to pay for an expensive operation for his dog. A young refugee wants to box her way straight off the boat to the top of the sport. Old friends talk all night after meeting up by chance. She imagines their future together... Stories about people who have lost out in life and in love, and about their hopes for one really big win, the chance to make something of their lives. In silent apartments, desolate warehouses, prisons and down by the river, Meyer strikes the tone of our harsh times, and finds the grace notes, the bright lights shining in the dark.

Leseprobe

ALL THE LIGHTS

Clemens Meyer

Translated by Katy Derbyshire

Introduced by Stuart Evers

CONTENTS

Title Page

Introduction

Little Death

Waiting for South America

The Shotgun, the Street Lamp and Mary Monroe

Fatty Loves

Of Dogs and Horses

I’m Still Here!

All the Lights

Riding the Rails

The Short Happy life of Johannes Vetterman

A Trip to the River

In the Aisles

A Ship Will Come

Your Hair Is Beautiful

Carriage 29

The Old Man Buries His Beasts

Copyright

INTRODUCTION

The Terrifying Possibility of Now

The short story requires precision and economy; no matter how verbose the prose stylist, all writers are bound by its formal constraints. Even with this in mind, Clemens Meyer’s work remains exceptionally lean, pared down, stripped bare. His stories are taut affairs, built – in the main – on short sentences, adjectiveless nouns and vernacular language. But while All the Lights appears simple, plain even, it swells and burns with complexity, subtlety and a strange kind of beauty. This is writing that basks in the terrifying possibility of now; that neither celebrates nor glamorises its cast of lost, lonely or otherwise impoverished characters, but presents them in situations that feel both authentic and devastatingly real. These are razor-blade slices of life, shorn of an overarching moral or social message.

The ‘now’ that each of the stories deals with is haunted by the past; it crops up in the most awkward places, stalks characters as they try to deal with the life the past has given them. In the opening story, ‘Little Death’, Meyer shows this confusion explicitly, hopscotching through time, allowing the past and the present to coexist in an uneasy, first-person present. Christian – if that is his name, we are never quite sure – is a construct of his own memory, a composite of all the people he has been and the person he has become, and the reader is left to piece his narrative together, from the loss of his silver wrist-watch, to leaving his apartment to sign on, to looking at the same apartment, evicted and drunk, passing a bottle to another victim of circumstance.

This blurring of time is at once confusing and dazzling: dreamlike shifts come together to form a unique depiction of lives unravelling and unspooling. While some stories are more conventional in approach – ‘The Shotgun, the Street Lamp and Mary Monroe’ is a junkie story with a twist; ‘Fatty Loves’ an exploration of misplaced love – Meyer always places considerable demands on his readers. He is not afraid to defy readerly expectation and refuses to take the easy road through his fictions.

In ‘I’m Still Here!’, a boxer is forced to defend himself from neo-Nazis and a pair of fight fans demanding compensation for the pugilist he’s just put in hospital. We expect confrontation, violence, a set piece during which we can root for the gentle giant; instead most of the action takes place off-page, Meyer refusing to show the brawl or the tricks of his character’s trade. The focus remains on the boxer’s interior life, his small dreams of opening his own boxing club, of becoming more than his statistics. Just like life, none of Meyer’s stories follow the trajectory you expect.

The lives Meyer depicts are small ones; ones lived in the margins of society. Their dreams are humble: finding enough money to buy drinks and cigarettes, to see the family one more time, to believe that things are better elsewhere. In ‘Waiting for South America’, perhaps the stand-out story in the collection, Frank receives letters from an old schoolfriend who claims to have made it big. For every description of a glorious Havana sunset or sip of thirty-year old rum, there is the humdrum of Frank’s life to balance it: his money troubles, his ageing and infirm mother. Over the story’s course, Meyer cleverly subverts the relationship between writer and receiver, asking questions that Frank is unwilling to pose, let alone answer. Nothing is certain, except, perhaps, the landscapes around them.

The topography of All the Lights is as constrained as Meyer’s language: tenements, one-room apartments, corridors, bars, railway sidings, small-town shops. Water, whether rivers on which to skim stones or the sea inspiring dreams of escape, proves the only kind of redress to the oppressive urban tableau. And it’s clear that Meyer understands this environment, its people and how its tone shifts from day into night. The sparse utility of his prose illuminates a drab former East Germany, pushing its characters into the light.

For all of Meyer’s evident technical ability, it is his gift for character that sets him apart from writers ploughing similar furrows. The tender friendship between Blondie and the narrator of ‘Riding the Rails’ is based on larceny and deception, and a dwindling kind of communication. They don’t need to finish sentences, don’t need to explain their thoughts and feelings; the bond between them makes speech redundant. It takes remarkable confidence in a pair of characters to show them in such a light – they could so easily feel underwritten – but through this awkwardness the reader comes to understand them both, their dependence and their fears.

In an early interview, Clemens Meyer expressed his ‘suspicion’ of trying to define a generation, of any talk of a ‘we’ – ‘everyone dies alone,’ he added – and any attempt to bracket his writing as emblematic of post-reunification Germany is ultimately futile. What he has harnessed is a style that suits his concerns – part American minimalism, part post-modern European – and that he has fashioned it into his own. His is a voice that demands attention, unafraid to do different, sometimes seemingly wrong-headed, things, confident in its ability to move, confront and engage his readers.

Stuart Evers

June 2011

ALL THE LIGHTS

LITTLE DEATH

‘See you around,’ she says, picking up her bag from the bed. I nod and she leaves.

I hear her in the hallway. I haven’t got a light out there and it takes her a while to find the door. I turn to face the wall, but she closes the front door very carefully. The leaving, the goodbye, the hand slipping down a shoulder and an arm into thin air, the lying still. And the dreams. The little death. No, death comes later, when you’re alone and nobody comes any more.

I hear a train crossing the bridge. I turn my head and see the lights of the double-decker carriages through the blind. The train moves slowly; I can still hear it long after the lights have disappeared. I reach behind me for the table, looking for the cigarette I always put there, every time. I stopped smoking a while back now, it’s just this one cigarette every time. I always go up to the guy with no teeth who lives right at the top, beforehand, a scrawny little man who lives with a fat woman.

‘The cigarette,’ he mumbles, grinning. He always calls me ‘Christian’, even though that’s not my name, and I gaze at the last brown stumps left in his mouth. I always stay at the door, and he turns around, walks down the hall to the bedroom. I hear him rummaging around in there, and then the fat woman looks around the bedroom door. She’s wearing some kind of nightshirt, her breasts resting on her stomach. She smiles, and I’m scared she’ll come out. But the guy with no teeth shouts something, and she disappears. The place smells pretty strongly of spirits, and the guy with no teeth stinks like a meths-drinker once he’s standing at the door again, clutching the cigarette in his scrawny hands. I hardly understand him when he talks, and it’s not because almost all his teeth are gone. Sometimes I imagine the fat woman chewing his food for him. I take the cigarette and light it up. I turn onto my back and feel for the pillow, but I can’t find it.

‘You’re so cold,’ she says to me sometimes. I gaze at the ceiling. She’s pulled the pillow over to her and she’s lying a good way away from me with the pillow. I stretch my arm out towards her, but I only touch the pillow. I get up. I walk over to the window and look out through the blind over to the railway embankment. Stairs lead up to the station, lights glowing yellow. Here comes a man, walking down the stairs very slowly, and I turn away. ‘You’re so cold,’ she says, and I feel my face with both hands, but it’s warm.

‘Are you going to the dole office tomorrow?’ she asks. I nod. ‘You didn’t last week.’

‘No. But I will tomorrow.’ I flick the ash onto the windowsill and lie back down next to the pillow. There’s ash on the bedside table, and I blow it away. I’ve smoked the cigarette down to the filter and I balance the filter very carefully on the bedside table with the tip upwards. I watch the smoke rising, very straight, in a thin line. The glow at the tip slowly disappears and I close my eyes. I hear a train crossing the bridge, they come every twenty minutes until ten, I’ll go and sign on, and if I get there early in the morning and it’s quick and I can leave again quickly, then I can use the same ticket on the way back, but that’s only happened two or three times over the years.

I walk down the bright white corridors, I’m tired and I see the numbers next to the doors, I fell asleep on the train, and the short man with the moustache woke me up, ‘Appointments,’ he says, ‘appointments’, he lives a couple of doors down but I didn’t see him getting on. He signs on a lot, and I often see him on the train at other times, on his own by the window, maybe he sometimes rides from one end of the line to the other.

I walk down the bright white corridors, the short man’s disappeared somewhere, I see the numbers next to the doors, chairs, people, and I sit down. Doors open, people disappear, people come out again and walk down the corridors, I look at the numbers next to the doors again, something’s not right, and I get up. ‘But this used to be …’

‘No,’ says the woman with the tag on her chest, I’m tired and I don’t want to look at her chest, ‘they’re over in House B now.’

‘House B,’ I say and look around, but she’s not here any more. I push my sleeve back, but I haven’t got a watch, where’s my good silver watch? It was a present, but that was a few years back now. ‘Appointments,’ she says, ‘so you always remember your appointments.’

I walk down the bright white corridors, the short man with the moustache is back again, standing in an open doorway, his back slightly bent.

He must be saying something, his head’s moving, but all I hear is a woman’s voice: ‘And you’ve only come now?’

I walk past him to the lift. I press both buttons, one arrow pointing downwards, one pointing upwards, and I wait. There’s a ding, but it’s somewhere else, and I wait, and the lift comes very quietly, the doors open, and I walk in. No one else in there, and no mirror either. I press ‘Ground Floor’, the doors close, and we’re on our way.

We’re on our way. I look at my good silver watch. She holds onto my arm and says: ‘We’ll be late, you’ll be late, they won’t give you it because you’re too late.’

I want to say something, but all I do is look at the hands on my watch. We’re sitting on the train, she’s holding onto my arm so tightly it hurts, and I look around for the short man with the moustache. ‘Because you haven’t got a car,’ she says, and I try to push the sleeve of my jacket over my watch and her hand. I close my eyes and hear the train crossing the bridge. I open my eyes and see four cigarette filters balanced on the bedside table next to me. There’s a ding and then a dong, and I get up. I walk over to the window and look outside through the blind. There’s a man standing outside the door, behind him a small silver V W. Another ding and then dong, I want to go to the bell and disconnect it, I’ve been meaning to do that for a while now, but I walk over to the bed and lie down.

The bell goes quiet. He’ll try somewhere else in a minute, but the building’s empty, only the two beauties live at the very top, and I hope they’re not in or that the fat woman’s lying on top of him and he can’t get to the buzzer, and that by the time she makes it to the door the little silver VW’s disappeared.

I pull the cover up to my face, only my eyes are still there, and then, after a while – or was it just a few seconds? – I hear a car door slamming, and then another pause, engine noises. Then it’s quiet. It’s so quiet I’m scared the telephone might start ringing. I listen and wait. I don’t want to pull the plug out, and maybe the line’s been dead for ages already. They don’t have to come round to cut you off.

‘The cigarette,’ mumbles the scrawny guy with a grin, and then he asks, ‘Want to come in for a beer?’ but I say, ‘No, she’ll be here soon,’ and he grins at me, and it seems as if he has fewer teeth every time.

‘Christian,’ he mumbles with a wink. Once I did go in his flat, must have been a couple of years ago now because I still had a car back then, a silver VW Golf, something’s not right, I had a little Japanese make and it was white. We watch TV, the scrawny guy drifts off to sleep, a bottle of spirits between his legs. I want to wake him up, but she holds onto my arm and takes the bottle. ‘You’re on your own a lot, Christian,’ she says. ‘No, no,’ I say, ‘she’ll be here soon …’

‘Christian,’ she says, holding my hand now. Why don’t they know my name? I took the name sign off my door, but that was only a couple of weeks ago, and they’ve been living here for years, just like me. ‘You’re so cold,’ she says.

We’re on our way. Autumn’s coming, and the last time we went to the lake was at the beginning of August, or was that the summer before? ‘It’s too cold to swim,’ she says, but I say: ‘We can just look at the water.’ And I look. I’ve leant my bike against the tree and I look out at the lake. No one else here. It’s a pretty small lake. The water’s dark, that’s because of the sky. There are a few letters in my jacket pocket, from the dole office, from the electricity board and from people I don’t know. There’s one from her too, and I walk up to the water so it’s almost touching my shoes. A little wave comes now, there’s a bit of a wind, but I stay where I am and throw the letters in the lake. They stay close to the bank for a while, then they spread out. I turn away and walk back to the tree. Behind the tree is a little embankment and after that the motorway. I can hear its humming. We’re on our way. Along the embankment are little piles of rubbish, empty bottles, cigarette packs, paper. I ride slowly, turning around and looking at the water, but the letters have disappeared. When I turn around again I see one, a tiny speck of white by the bank. I ride and I don’t look back again, because I know the little speck of white has disappeared.

I’m sitting on a bench by a country road. A few hundred yards ahead of me is a village, after that another one and then the city. Evening’s coming, and the sky’s red behind my back. I’m smoking a cigarette, I don’t know where I got it from, it’s not the brand the scrawny guy smokes. I haven’t been to see him in a long time, sometimes I just hear his beauty, that’s what he calls her, dragging the empty dustbins through the building and out into the yard when the bin men have been. Maybe the cigarette’s from the short man with the moustache, but he rolls his own. ‘Got into the habit when I was doing service,’ he says. ‘Where did you do your service?’ I ask. ‘Here and there,’ he says, ‘I did plenty of it,’ and I know what he means. He has a couple of tattoos and a couple of kids, who play up on the railway embankment almost all day long. ‘Because I was away so long,’ says the short man and raises his shoulders so high that his head almost disappears, ‘I did plenty of service.’ His wife is just as short as he is; I see her sometimes fetching the kids in from the embankment. There are two flies perched on my leg. They’re not moving, not even when I try to blow them off. It’s the time of year when the flies die. They’re just perched on my leg, close together, now one of them moves its wings, just for a moment, and I get up carefully.

Ten o’clock. The blue zero turns into a one. It took me a long time to find an alarm clock with a blue digital display. We were in a shop where they only had clocks and watches. Did she buy me the good silver watch there? The little blue one turns into a two. I’m standing in the dark, not moving. It’s not getting light this morning, that’s because of the sky. The digital display on the alarm clock is empty, but I watch the hands on my wrist. The electricity board came round, and the flat’s dark. I don’t know how long now, and I miss the little blue numbers. I want to lie back down, but I can’t make out the pillow. They rang up a lot; the phone works even in the dark. ‘Why didn’t you come to your appointment?’ I want to tell them about the short man with the moustache, who doesn’t take the train any more, but all I say is, ‘I’ve been very tired recently.’

‘We’re going to have to cut your benefits.’

‘It’s because of my alarm clock,’ I want to say, but they’re sure to know about the good silver watch on my wrist.

‘It’s me,’ she says somewhere, and I say, ‘How’s it going, where are you?’

‘I’m fine,’ she says, ‘I rang your bell, a couple of times.’

‘Must have been out for a walk,’ I say, and then there’s a click, somewhere out there where she is, and I know that sound. It’s a lighter, and she doesn’t smoke.

I hold the phone away from my head; the click’s still moving in my ear. ‘Where are you?’ I say and hear her voice and then I stay quiet and wait for it to click again, a different sound, a very different sound, and she’s gone. I walk over to the bedside table and pick up the lighter. I flick it on and off again and on again. I’ve arranged the filters in a circle. I let the flame burn for a bit, and then I want to hear the sound again. The little death. Not a sound in the flat, even the fridge is silent in the kitchen. I put the lighter carefully on the pillow and walk over to the window. I look out through the blind over to the railway embankment. The lights are glowing yellow; it must be evening already.

I stand in the yellow light and look at the street and then at my building. All the windows are dark, even the scrawny guy and his beauty are sitting in the dark; or maybe they’ve gone out, it’s the beginning of the month. There’s a bar down the road, but maybe they’ve gone to the Italian place a bit further away, the scrawny guy sucking spaghetti into his toothless mouth, and her watching him with a smile.

I sit down on the stairs, jamming the bottle between my legs. I screw off the top and throw it away. A couple of cars drive past, it’s turned cool now, and I drink. Then the light goes on, right at the top on the fourth floor. The curtains are pulled back but there’s no one to see at the window, just a big teddy bear sitting on the windowsill. I feel myself smiling. I hear the train behind me and the cars down on the road, but all I can see is the big teddy bear in the middle of the windowsill. I don’t know how long I look at it, I feel the smile in the corners of my mouth, then I pick up the bottle and put my head back and drink. There’s a plane in the sky, it leans slightly to one side and curves round to the airport outside the city.

‘How’s it going?’

I take the bottle from my lips and hand it to the short man. His moustache has gone, his face is swollen, his top lip hidden under a large plaster. He puts his head back and drinks and watches the plane.

Then he sits down next to me. ‘They gave me magic stitches,’ he says with a tap of his top lip. ‘They dissolve after a while, all on their own.’ He tries to smile but stops again; it must hurt. ‘Magic stitches,’ I say, and he nods. He hands me one of his roll-ups. ‘Do you still take the train?’ I shake my head, and he nods again. He’s sitting pretty close to me, and I feel him going all limp and leaning his shoulder against me. We drink, in silence.

I’m standing at the window, looking out through the blind over at the railway embankment. The lights are glowing yellow; it must be evening already. There’s a man standing in the yellow light. He turns away.

WAITING FOR SOUTH AMERICA

His mother was sitting in the dark. ‘What’s the matter?’ he said. ‘Aren’t you going to turn the light on? It’s getting late.’

‘Oh no,’ she said, ‘I like sitting here watching it get dark.’ She was in her seat, right by the window, and the last light of dusk fell on her hands and the table. He saw the candles, and now he knew she wasn’t watching it get dark out of choice. They’d cut off her electricity. He looked at the date on his watch: the twentieth, more than ten days to go until she’d get her money. And he had to wait more than ten days as well; he was used to waiting, after all the years he’d been waiting now. ‘I’ll be off then, mother,’ he said.

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I’ve got things to do as well.’

‘Shall I leave you something here? I’m flush right now.’ He knew she’d say no. It was only once he was outside in the stairwell that he remembered his eye, thought it was maybe quite a good thing his mother was sitting in the dark, so she couldn’t see it. It wasn’t that bad, not even very swollen, just a small dark blue, almost black crescent under his eye that wouldn’t go away, for days now, even though he pressed ice cubes on it and used some gel from the chemist’s. He didn’t even remember exactly how it had happened any more, some young lad in some local bar. He hadn’t started it himself, he was quite sure about that – when he was at a bar drinking away his money, even though there were over fourteen days to go, all he wanted was to be left in peace and to forget everything. Maybe he hadn’t been watching out and had barged against someone, and some of these young lads were damn quick to pack a punch and start fights over nothing. Most of them were waiting just like he was, just not for as long. But they were waiting all right, for work, for money.

He walked the streets, not looking left or right; he knew everything here, every street, every building, he’d been living round here for over forty years, and he heard the voices from the open windows, the clatter of plates, children, and he felt the people walking past him, and he saw the yellow light of the street lamps and the brightly coloured lights of the bars and shops out of the corner of his eye. Only a couple of bars had kept going, there’d been one on every other corner in the old days, and the little shops had started disappearing as well.

He walked past the playground where the young people met up in the evenings and at night, and he could hear them now as well, maybe the lad who’d given him the black eye was even there.

Someone said, ‘Excuse me, sir,’ and he took a step to one side and asked, ‘How are you?’ And the woman with the big twin buggy who lived a couple of doors down from him smiled and said, ‘Oh, not bad.’ She tapped a finger to her eye and then asked, ‘I hope that was nothing serious,’ but she had dark circles under her own eyes, sometimes so dark that when he met her in the street it looked like she’d taken a couple of punches too. ‘No, no,’ he said. ‘Just been doing a bit of sport.’ She nodded and pushed the buggy past him, and he eyed her baggy jeans that looked two sizes too big.

He stood in front of his letterbox. He hadn’t checked it for post for a few days now, and as he turned the tiny key in the lock and opened the door of the box, three letters fell to the floor at his feet. He bent down and picked them up. One from the job centre and one from a company he’d applied to ages ago, and he knew there was no point reading it but tore open the envelope anyway. He pulled out the folded sheet of paper, held it into the light of the stairway lamp, then he screwed it up and put it in his pocket with the empty envelope and the letter from the job centre. He held the third letter in his hands for a while until the light went out automatically. He stood in the dark, stroking the envelope. He could feel the stamp. There was a large butterfly on it, so brightly coloured that he thought he could still make it out in the dark, and above the butterfly were the large capital letters ‘CUBA’. He didn’t know anyone in Cuba. He had turned the letter over, but there was no sender on the back, no name, no address. He switched the light on and went up the stairs slowly with the letter. He lived right at the top on the fourth floor, and as he climbed up one step at a time he kept thinking over and over, ‘Cuba, Havana, Cuba’. Maybe the letter was for someone else, but his address and his name were written large and clearly on the envelope. He unlocked his front door, put the key in the lock from inside and turned it twice, and then he turned on the light. He thought about his mother and about how he’d have to pay again soon or they’d come round to his place too. Cuba. He hung his jacket on the peg, went into the kitchen and put the letter down on the table, right in the light of the lamp. Then he took a beer out of the fridge but put it back again and made coffee. He had hardly any money left, and the beer had to last another ten days. He could take back deposit bottles, he had over forty empty beer bottles on his small balcony, plus a few mineral water and cola bottles; he’d get a couple more beers for the deposit money but he was ashamed of turning up with large, clinking bags full at the supermarket with the local drinkers standing around outside. The only times they weren’t there were when it was particularly cold in winter. Why don’t I take a small bag to the supermarket, he thought, and get rid of the bottles bit by bit? He poured himself a cup of coffee, milk and sugar, then he sat down at the table. He drank a sip, a few drops of coffee spilt on the table, and he fetched a cloth and wiped across the tabletop a few times, then put the cup down on the cloth. He sat down again. He examined the letter, trying to recognise the handwriting, but he hadn’t got any private post for ages now, only from the benefits office and companies he’d applied to. He held the letter up to the light but he couldn’t make anything out in the envelope. The postmark had ‘Cuba’ in it too, and then there were a few little numbers, probably the date, he could read ‘08’ but the rest was smudged; perhaps it had got wet on its travels. Had the letter come by ship or on a plane? But then it would say ‘Air Mail’ on the postmark, wouldn’t it? His mother had got a letter from New York once, from a cousin, and he’d read something about ‘Air Mail’ on the envelope. ‘Paula’s on holiday in New York, imagine that, New York, an eight-hour flight, you do remember your second cousin Paula, don’t you?’ But he couldn’t remember a Paula, and what did he care about planes and ships and New York?

He tore the letter open, he tore it open so roughly that he broke the butterfly, and then he was holding a sheet of A4 paper in his hand, densely covered in writing. The writing was so small that he got up again to fetch his reading glasses from the front room. He had to look for them for a while; they were on the windowsill. He put them on and peered over the lenses out of the window. It was night now, and he saw the dark houses opposite, lights only burning in a couple of windows. There were lots of empty places round here. He tugged the curtains closed and went back into the kitchen. He sat down and drank a mouthful of coffee. The coffee was just right now, not too hot any more, and he drank another mouthful.

He gave a loud cough before he started reading.

Dear Frank,

It’s been a while since we heard from each other, and it’s been even longer since we’ve seen each other. Three or four years? I can’t remember exactly. Before you start puzzling or look all the way to the bottom, where I’ve written ‘With best wishes, Wolfgang’, I can’t help laughing now because I’ve only just started writing.

He put one finger on the line he was reading and smoothed the paper with the other hand. Wolfgang. He only knew one Wolfgang, his old schoolfriend Wolfgang, who he’d grown up with round here. What on earth was Wolfgang doing in Cuba? He’d been out of work, just like him, he’d been waiting, just like him. Two years ago or so Wolfgang had called him from Berlin, said he had better chances of finding work there.

You’ll be wondering what I’m doing in Cuba. It’s all muddled up in my head, because I’m on my way to South America. Brazil. Remember how we used to dream of Brazil? Pelé, the great Pelé. The white Sugarloaf Mountain and the girls on the beach, remember that? We were ten back then, the 1970 World Cup. That was in Mexico. Brazil versus Italy in the final. We watched it at my uncle’s bar. And the semi-final too, West Germany versus Italy. That was a great game, 4–3 for Italy, I remember it really clearly because my uncle threw a bottle of spirits at the screen after extra time. Rudi had a bet on that Germany would be world champions. You do remember my Uncle Rudi, don’t you? That little bar down by the park. Is the building still there? What’s in there now? Uncle Rudi sold his bar in summer ’89 and went to the West. But you probably know that yourself anyway.

So you still live in our part of town, that’s good, someone has to keep the flag flying, even when times are hard.

Frank, I’ve got rich. No, don’t worry, I haven’t robbed a bank like I joked about once, years ago. I don’t think I could have done it, just walked into a bank and pulled out some gun. Even if I’d been out of work to the end of my days, I’d have tried to get through it with decency.

Frank, I’m almost a bit embarrassed to write to you from Cuba that I’ve got rich. I heard things aren’t going all that well for you, and you’re still my oldest and best friend, even though we haven’t seen each other for so long, and I hope my letter gives you strength and courage. One of the old guard has made it!

But you know I’ve always been a bit boastful, so I have to backtrack a bit. I haven’t got really rich of course, but it’s more money than I’ve ever had in my life. If I invest it well and spend it a bit carefully I’ll probably be able to live off it a few years, but you know me, I’ve never been that good with money and I’ll probably never learn to be, even though I’m trying not to spend it like water. But I want to see a little piece of the world and tell you about it. I’m forty-six now, like you, but I don’t want to start on about how time passes, because you know that just as well as I do. I’m just drinking thirty-year-old rum, do you remember, thirty years ago, maybe a bit longer even, we got really drunk for the first time. We puked our guts out in Uncle Rudi’s bar, but I still like thinking about that night, and I am right now, as I’m drinking this wonderful rum, it’s really dark in the glass, almost black. I’m sitting on the balcony, in a small hotel right on the sea. A beach I’ve never seen the likes of, all white, and the sea’s green and then further out it goes blue again. Turquoise – I’d only seen it in photos. And I want to write about the evening sun, which is so huge, but I can’t help thinking of us sitting at Uncle Rudi’s bar and drinking that cheap blended rum and imagining we were in Rio de Janeiro drinking the very finest rum with fresh mint in it, with the sea and Sugarloaf Mountain outside, and coffee-coloured Brazilian beauties dancing tango on the beach. Tango in Brazil. And we were happy somehow when we daydreamed like that, even though we usually puked really badly afterwards. Yesterday I was in a bar in Havana where they had over a hundred kinds of rum. Some of the bottles from before we were even born. And cigars, the very finest Cuban cigars, hand rolled, I’ll try and send you one but I don’t know if it’ll get through customs. But to stop you wondering, I’ll tell you how I came into the money. Uncle Rudi died. He didn’t get much money for his bar back then. He really wanted to go to the West, and six months later the Wall came down but he never came back, and nobody knew what he was doing. He never wrote either, I didn’t even know he was still alive. And then I get a letter, and then I find out that my Uncle Rudi, the crazy old geezer, had a thriving bar in Hamburg. Can you imagine Uncle Rudi behind the counter of a good, posh bar? I couldn’t either, but that’s just how it was. All those years, Uncle Rudi had a smart little bar on the Kiez, and he put money aside. You know my parents have been dead for over ten years now, he was my mother’s brother, and Uncle Rudi never married and never had children either. He never got in touch in all the years, but I was in his will, just me. And I bet there would have been much more money left if he hadn’t had such a grand lifestyle, but you know Uncle Rudi. It’s nearly dark now. If only I could describe this huge red sun on the ocean. I have to get a camera, I didn’t even think of that, but it is my first big trip.

There’s a little road down in front of the hotel, where real vintage cars drive past sometimes. There are hardly any new cars in Cuba because of the embargo. I’ve never seen such amazing vintage models, Chevrolets with big hood ornaments, ancient black Fords, some of the cars are put together out of several parts of different makes, but they drive.

Frank, I wish I could shake your hand. Say hello to everyone when you’re walking round our part of town. I’ll write again soon, no matter where I travel next.

Your old friend, Wolfgang

He was on the balcony between the empty beer bottles. They clinked quietly whenever he moved. He had folded up the letter and was holding it in one hand. He looked at the dark houses, blue light flickering in a few windows now. He held a glass in the other hand, cheap Jamaican blended rum, he’d gone to the all-night garage specially and bought himself a small bottle, even though it cost almost three times as much as at the shops. In winter, he sometimes had rum in the house, because he liked to make himself a hot toddy when he was cold, but it wasn’t even autumn yet. He took a swig. The stuff tasted terrible; he never drank it straight usually but that didn’t matter right now. He raised his glass and moved it to and fro in front of his face, and the rum moved in the glass and looked almost black in the darkness. He had turned out the light in the kitchen, the balcony door was pushed to, and he heard the quiet hum of the fridge. He was still holding the letter tightly in his left hand, he had taken it along to the garage, had held it so tightly all the way that he could see his fingerprints on it as he stood in front of the spirits section and put the letter in his jacket pocket and took the bottle off the shelf with his damp and trembling hand.

As he walked back home he held the letter in his left hand and the bottle of rum in his right like a small club. Grown men and teenage lads walked past him towards the garage, some with empty cloth or plastic bags, some looking at the ground, others looking him right in the eye and barging into him slightly, but he broadened his shoulders under his jacket, walked along the middle of the pavement and held the letter at chest level so that everyone could see it, as if they’d understand then that his old friend Wolfgang was sitting by the sea in Cuba, watching the big red evening sun and drinking rum with all his money. ‘… and I hope my letter gives you strength and courage. One of the old guard has made it!’

He turned around and saw the neon lights of the garage, a good way away now, a sign shining blue on the roof. It blurred when he squinted, and he tried to imagine a roaring sound, louder and louder, just the roar and the blue. A couple of mopeds rattled along the road. He turned his head slightly and saw a girl sitting behind the driver, both arms raised and laughing.

The bottle was empty. Just a sip left in the glass. He leant against the balcony wall. The night had turned cold but he didn’t feel it.

‘I’m standing on top of an ancient Mayan pyramid on the Yucatán Peninsula in the south of Mexico. If you look at a map you’ll see it’s not far from Cuba to Yucatán.’