her again. Then he was well underway.
Chapter Five
Karl has done it, — period.
In his mind this thought doesn’t require an adverbial qualifier like ‘already’ or ‘at last’. It took however long it took, and he has done it. He has proved that time actually passes. He knows this because he can hear his hair grow when he does nothing but listen. The sound is faint, but it’s audible, and while he listens moments collect, become longer moments, flow together in a time-and-space continuum. And then they pass.
It’s either that or he has gone bonkers.
Fact is, time can be managed and has therefore become irrelevant. It has lost all meaning. It doesn’t matter if he’s locked up for another year or another minute. Which isn’t to say that he trusts time. Karl has spent more of it being happy than sad, and yet it’s the sadness that gets to him if he allows it to, as though good times were subservient to misery. He learned to condense time through thought when he was in prison. He found a way to get lost in thinking, and to lose time while he was at it, in the infinitesimal spaces between thoughts. He has become rather good at this. He can get lost for hours, maybe days, in a state of near-total suspension where his heart rate and breathing slow down, his metabolism takes a break and his thoughts stop altogether.
He starts by concentrating on these gaps between thoughts and stretches them like rubber bands. From the outside it looks as though he just sits and breathes occasionally. His in-breath is big and he sends it down deep into his consciousness, into the perception of his body, all the way down into the tiny veins in his toes and throughout his viscera. He uses up virtually all the energy contained in the in-breath. When he exhales, there is hardly anything left; little air, even less oxygen and practically no energy at all.
Karl doesn’t know anything about meditation, about the state of nirvana or any related spiritual concepts. That’s not why he does what he does, to reach salvation of the soul. He does it because it comes naturally to him under the circumstances, because there is nothing else to do and because, well, it helps to pass the time. It kept him sane in prison, relatively speaking.
Once the conscious thought process is suspended, Karl’s mind is free to wander back in time. His inner eye watches scenes and people from his long forgotten childhood, almost tangibly in front of him. But he never reaches out his hand, never tries to touch what only he can see, and see only, never hold.
*
Sometimes even Karl can’t help caring a little about how long he has been here in this room. He’s worked out why the air in the room doesn’t become stale. Occasionally he detects weak currents of fresh air coming in through the tiny gap under the metal door. They’re not cold, exactly, but they are different from the air in the room.
Whenever he detects the life-giving flow, Karl concludes that the wig man, his jailor, is nearby. Perhaps he’s as little as a few inches away from him, spying on him benevolently, but watching for sure. This knowledge mustn’t alter the way Karl behaves, Karl decides. The man is watching and waiting for him to do something, and if Karl is aware of that, if he tries to second-guess what the man wants to see, he’s just as liable to get it wrong as not.
So he does nothing. Nothing different, that is. He just continues doing nothing, waiting, thinking, remembering, voiding his mind.
His mind drifts to the day he lost his virginity. A day nobody ever forgets, boy or girl, but in Karl’s case it was a day on a global scale — tremendous, earth-shattering, unforgettable.
And it wasn’t just the sex.
Mum, ‘Mamochka’, as he called her tenderly, not because she was Russian, but because all things Russian made a good impression on her back then, and calling her Mamochka earned him a hair-ruffling at least, sometimes a hug and even more rarely a kiss — Mum was in one of her moods.
‘Mamochka, oh Mamochka, why are you sad again? Comrade Lenin and Comrade Stalin, didn’t they say we socialists should rejoice in our ideals? We’re working hard, we’re working even for the capitalists who think we’re against them. They don’t realise we want this here place, this here earth, to be better for everybody, communist and capitalist alike, united by our higher ideals.’
Was it true? Was the communist dogma really that altruistic back then? Maybe, but they never understood this. Instead, as mum would explain, the capitalists come over to our side, to East Berlin and plunder our shops. You see, we ensure that nobody starves, nobody goes hungry. A bread roll costs next to nothing, two pennies. The price of rent hasn’t gone up for nearly twenty-five years. In fact, the rents after the war were reduced to pre-war — 1937 —prices and frozen there. Nobody sleeps without a roof over their heads or with an empty tummy in the Workers’ and Farmers’ state we call the ‘Democratic Republic of Germany’.
Together, united we are strong. Seventeen million strong in East Germany alone. Four million, nearly a quarter of our comrades – your mamochka included — were refugees after the war, when we beat fascism. We welcomed our brothers from the east with open arms. Sure, there are some…misunderstandings, some misinterpretations. That’s why we have the Party — benevolent, watching, helping others to see it our way. Yes, the farmers don’t like the land reforms. They don’t like giving up their so-called private property. Not yet. But they will come round, mark my words. With time they will see the error of their ways; they too will see the light and drop the egotism.
In the summer of ’61, the time came for city kids — like and including Karl — to do their bit for the Revolution, to soak the land with their honest sweat and get a taste of what it meant to toil for a better tomorrow. Callused hands were highly desirable for future cadres. It was during the summer vacations and good, socialist cabbage was there for the digging. Karl’s class was housed on a farm near Delitzsch where the coal smell didn’t hang as thickly as in the cities.
And there he met Ramona, two and a half years older than him, all red curls, freckly skin and blue eyes. She was a sight to behold all right, practically all woman at the tender age of fifteen. And for some reason she took a liking to Karl, dug up the same part of the field, showed him the ropes of harvesting, and a lot more than rope.
When Karl remembers her now he can’t fathom for the life of him what satisfaction, what earthly pleasures she could ever have hoped to derive from him, a tall but lanky, pimply boy from the city, shy as a rainbow, immature as peace on a cold war afternoon. And yet, there she was, there she is, as though he saw her yesterday, leading him on, coming to him in the balmy night in the barn, spiriting him away surreptitiously from his friends, taking him by the hand and beckoning him up the church tower.
With no moon to speak of, Karl remembers not understanding how she found her way through the pitch black so effortlessly. Then the not-understanding ceased to matter as his hands explored, guided by her hands, the netherworld of her skirt and blouse. Unfamiliar, tingling sensations at the tips of his fingers, up up up. His fingers found her small breasts, her hard nipples, her hot groin.
He remembers the dates, the days, the tingling. The first time, the second, and especially the third and last time with Ramona, the night from August 12 to 13, 1961, forever etched into his memory for two reasons; one is her, Ramona the Red. The other reason is the news that night. It spread like a wildfire and brought on a barrage of emotions and reactions from everybody, young and old.
He remembers images, sensations. Looking up from his reclined, supine position he saw Ramona sitting on top of him, riding him like a bronco; his hands wandering up towards her belly-button but stopping halfway. A reaction, a different sigh from her parted lips, deeper, more intense. He remembers lingering, his fingers relishing her sensitivity. This spot she liked. All focus on her now, on Ramona heading for a crescendo, the first one he’d provoked in a woman. His fingers probing the area, circling it, focusing on the one delicate, tender spot, Ramona getting louder and louder all the while.
She reaches for the sky with both arms but falls short, finds a rope instead. The rope is connected to the lever of the axle of the church bell. She grabs it, wraps it around her arm. Karl sees it now like he saw it then. When