All the Lights

by Clemens Meyer

  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.’

  He took his old school atlas out of the cloth bag he’d brought specially. It was a very large atlas, and he had to rest it on both knees and wedge the letter under the atlas, and the people sitting next to him and against the opposite wall gave him slightly strange looks. He flicked through the pages, looking; he had opened the letterbox as he went to leave the house. He had sat down on a step and started reading. Then he’d run back upstairs again, he didn’t want to miss his tram, had torn the old school atlas off the shelf, put it in a slightly stained cloth bag, slammed the front door without locking it and run down the stairs to the tram stop. He saw the tram coming round the corner in the distance, he ran and waved, the bag banging against his leg, and as he jumped on through the closing door the bag got trapped and he had to tug it out roughly, and then he sat down, breathing heavily. He wanted to get the atlas out and read more of the letter but the tram got more and more crowded at every stop.