Star 111, page 1
Star 111
LUTZ SEILER
Translated from the German by Tess Lewis
New York Review Books New York
This is a New York Review Book
published by The New York Review of Books
207 East 32nd Street, New York, NY 10016
www.nyrb.com
Copyright © 2020 by Suhrkamp Verlag Berlin
Translation and afterword copyright © 2023 by Tess Lewis
Originally published in German as Stern 111 in 2020.
All rights reserved by and controlled through Suhrkamp Verlag Berlin.
First published in English in the UK in 2023 by And Other Stories, Sheffield.
Cover photograph: Christiane Eisler, Jana and Mita of the Berlin band Namenlos in Leipzig, 1983; © 1983 by Christiane Eisler
Cover design: Katy Homans
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Seiler, Lutz, 1963– author. | Lewis, Tess, translator.
Title: Star 111 / by Lutz Seiler ; translated from the German by Tess Lewis. Other
titles: Stern 111. English
Description: New York City : New York Review Books, 2024. | Series: New York Review Books classics
Identifiers: LCCN 2024003216 (print) | LCCN 2024003217 (ebook) | ISBN 9781681378534 (paperback) | ISBN 9781681378541 (e-book)
Subjects: LCSH: Families—Fiction. | Germany—History—1990– —Fiction. | LCGFT: Domestic fiction. | Novels.
Classification: LCC PT2681.E529 S74713 2020 (print) | LCC PT2681.E529 (ebook) | DDC 833/.92—dc23/eng/20240315
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2024003216
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2024003217
ISBN 978-1-68137-854-1
v1.0
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright and More Information
STAR 111
Part I
Part II
Part III
Part IV
Part V
Part VI
Part VII
Part VIII
Part IX
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Translator's Afterword
Biographical Notes
For my parents
I am twenty-eight, and practically nothing has happened.
RAINER MARIA RILKE
The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge
THE CABLE ADDRESS
Carl’s train stopped well before the station, accompanied by a metallic stuttering and juddering as if his journey’s heart had suddenly stopped beating just before arrival. Outside, a sea of crisscrossing tracks and behind them, the Wailing Wall. The Wailing Wall was a kilometer-long brick facade that demarcated the Leipzig station grounds from the city, pierced by strange, honeycomb-like openings through which a street, buildings, and sometimes even people were visible. For some reason, it was not uncommon for trains to stop here, outside the station, the destination in view, for minutes or hours; it was like an old complaint, a familiar song. The travelers’ gaze inevitably fell on this wall—hence the name.
The morning after the telegram arrived, Carl had set out for Gera. He wore a clean pair of jeans and his old black motorcycle jacket with the diagonal zipper across the chest over a freshly washed shirt. He owned three of these collarless work shirts, identical shirts with thin, pale blue stripes from his time as an apprentice bricklayer before he began his studies. He’d even trimmed his hair a bit, laboriously, with dull nail scissors—shoulder-length would have to do. He was returning home like someone long-lost, at least that’s how he saw it for a moment. Most castaways were stranded only after their return—that’s the saddest part of those stories. Once home, they could not adapt to life on the mainland. The many obstacles, storms, years—all the loneliness, which, ultimately, turned out to have been best. Often, they were unable to tolerate mainland food or they died because of their excessively long hair, which they had to display at local fairs to make money, and which, one night, when they were asleep, would wrap itself around their necks like a noose . . .
Outside, the conductor walked the length of the train, swearing and knocking on the windows of each car: “Off the train, everyone off!”
They were on an old outer track with a temporary wooden platform. Technically, it was not a platform, but a ramp through which grass grew and a few young birch trees protruded sideways, apparently impervious to waste oil and excrement. The birch leaves glowed yellow. Carl saw this glow and heard the rap of his steps on the wooden ramp. Like convicts, they trudged single file toward the station on a narrow walkway between the tracks.
The dimly lit concourse surged with people, a billowing motion, shouting and braying. Again and again, the loudspeakers, which transformed every word into a muffled, hollow dream language, a single, completely incomprehensible call, repeated: “Uh-uck!”
The object of their siege was the express train to Berlin, a string of eight or nine grime-encrusted carriages with nicotine-yellow windowpanes. On the evening news the day before, there had been talk of additional trains and further provisional border crossings, along with repeated formulaic appeals for calm. A few of the Berlin-bound managed to scale the greasy carriages and launch themselves headfirst into the overcrowded compartments through the skylights. A scene out of Bombay or Calcutta—in the Leipzig train station it appeared excessive, like part of an overblown choreography, out of place and on a large scale.
Carl slowly pushed his way through the crowd. His bag kept getting caught. The strap cut into his shoulder and seemed about to tear. He immediately regretted having dragged all his papers and books along—how stupid, how thoughtless of him. Several expletives rang out, his face was pressed into the coarse felt of a jacket that promptly made a feral sound—then something rammed him in the chest. He fell, dragged down and twisted by the weight of his bag. Someone who surely was just trying to catch him hit Carl’s face hard with the flat of his hand; Carl tasted sweat and lost his bearings.
“Uh-uck! Uh-uck!”
The cry now came from on high. It was the voice of a drunken giant babbling down at them from the soot-blackened cathedral of the station, but his dwarves no longer obeyed.
“My bag!” Carl shouted when he came to.
“Which bag, young man? Do you mean this one?”
The bag was still there; more precisely, he was lying on it. For a moment Carl saw nothing but faces bending over him, tense but controlled. It’s joy, Carl thought, pure joy. But he couldn’t actually tell what emotion was controlling them, if it was, in fact, still joy or already hatred.
“Do you need help?”
A girl, sixteen at most, was offering him a handkerchief. As always, Carl was surprised by the gleaming red, that fresh, slightly unctuous substance that couldn’t possibly have come from him: blood.
“Will you be alright?” The girl touched Carl’s arm. He saw her round face and in it, her eyes, very light and watery, as if blind.
“No, you have to stay with me. Forever.”
“Thanks. You’ll survive.”
He made his way outside along an empty platform. He tried not to pay too much attention to the blind girl (she wasn’t actually blind), but she stayed with him, holding his arm. They were a couple, at least until Carl collapsed onto a bench.
“Are you also going to Berlin?”
Carl tilted his head back and felt it in his throat—a warm thread that unspooled from somewhere on the roof of his mouth and, strangely enough, burned a little. He had to swallow, again and again, but it still hung there. Since he was a child, he often had nosebleeds. Back when these things mattered, he used to impress his friends by being able to stop the bleeding with a single blow of his fist to his forehead. It was a boxing trick. He rammed the ball of his hand against his forehead, or the blow glanced off it. The impact had to be forceful, making the head jerk backward. It was all in the jolt. If you were too timid it didn’t work.
“No, I’m going . . .” He shook his head gingerly to stop the spinning before his eyes. The girl remained standing next to him for a while. Carl considered what he could ask her but then, suddenly, she was gone, and he murmured his answer: “Home. I’m going home.”
Centimeter by centimeter, the express train to Berlin pulled away from the platform. The overcrowded carriages slid past. Someone hollered, “Arrivederci, you bum!” and a spontaneous chorus struck up the song that Carl only knew in his grandmother’s melancholy rendition: “I’d love to stay a bit longer . . .” Carl watched the train leave. The departing chorus passed the ramp with the glowing birch trees, which began waving shyly and tremulously.
The word bum was still buzzing in his skull. A bum was someone with a bloody nose, squatting on a train platform that no trains left from. Someone who has no idea where the journey is headed, thought Carl.
He pulled the telegram from his bag. It was just a note, handwritten, with a stamp below the writing. In the lower right-hand corner, the operator had noted the date and time: 10 November, 9:20 a.m. “we need help please do come immediately your parents.” No reproach, no mention of his months of silence, only this, a cry for help. Just that weak little word do. Carl could hear it, in his mother’s voice: “do come.” He pictured her hurrying downhill into town, with short, brisk steps, he pictured her dictating the address, filling out the telegram form, meticulous but also tense, nervous, which is why she forgot the salutation, and he pictured Mrs. Bethmann, the woman at the counter, counting the syllables. Even these days, whe
Carl had to admit that he hadn’t been particularly worried—parents were solid ground, unassailable, the home turf you could retreat to in times of need. Missed, yes, it was odd, he missed his parents and not just this past year when he’d only seen them one single time, no, even before then, always, actually, he had always, always missed them.
He looked for the track on which the southbound trains usually ran, to the region on the border between Thuringia and Saxony from which his family came—“where the fox and the hare bid each other goodnight,” his father’s favorite expression for “in the middle of nowhere.” When he was a child, every night before he went to sleep, Carl had imagined foxes and hares slowly gathering at the forest’s edge to say goodnight. Sometimes there were other animals in the mix, all different kinds of animals, and sometimes a few humans who were good friends of the animals. All these gentle, clever creatures gathered in one particular, moonlit spot at the end of the day—a silhouette of raised muzzles, raised heads and a single chorus: “Goodnight, you hares from Gera, you foxes from Altenburg, you ravens from Meuselwitz, goodnight!”
PART I
BEWILDERMENT
Carl couldn’t remember who’d first suggested “going out for a few steps,” his father or his mother. It wasn’t unusual. He followed behind, his parents in front, as always. His father had just turned fifty, his mother forty-nine. His father had become slender, the brown leather jacket, the drooping shoulders, gray hair thinning on the back of his head—Carl had never seen him this way. They walked along the Elsterdamm from Langenberg to the Franzosen Bridge, their traditional walk along the river. There were hundreds of photographs of it in the family album, neatly glued and meticulously captioned by his mother: the six-year-old in a collared shirt and bow tie, his eager smile and large, eager teeth—Carl on his first day of school. Then the fourteen-year-old with a pageboy haircut and a serious, dismissive air. Next to him, his mother, her hair in a chignon, wearing a Corfam coat, autumn ’77. And so on, along the timeline through all the years and seasons until today, which no one photographed. On their right, the lazy flow of the Elster, its moldy bank and the Langenberg meadows. His father stopped, turned and said, “Carl.”
It would be nice to relate that a wind suddenly rose in the Elster Valley, blowing along the river, or that there was a peculiar sound, maybe a kind of whistling, a thin, soft whistle from the meadows that is heard only once every fifty or one hundred years: “Carl . . .”
His parents wanted to go. To leave the country, in short.
A soft whistling, for example. Carl looked around and it was suddenly as if this (their) world of river and path had only been set up provisionally (not for eternity) and as if it now (like everything else) (obviously) had to be dismantled and stashed away, as if it had (from one moment to the next) become irrelevant and worthless. “That’s not how we meant it,” Carl’s mother would have interjected if there had been the opportunity but there was no pause in the sequence, just bewilderment. Carl’s single sentence, bumbling, stammering, like that of a helpless, frightened child whose parents are suddenly no longer adults: “I think you’re underrating the whole, the whole—I mean, the whole homeland thing.” It was strange for him to say it, he wasn’t used to talking to his parents like this; something had been turned upside down. They walked on upriver in silence—mother, father, child amid all the shams of their abruptly obsolete, discontinued life.
There was no conversation at supper, either. The mood was tense, and Carl started to consider it all the result of a bad hypnosis and he didn’t want to be drawn in any further. First, they had to eat, then clear the table and wheel everything back into the kitchen on the serving trolley, a small, two-tiered cart with a chrome frame. The muffled rolling sound it made on the carpet, long familiar, the soft clatter of the dishes as always, as if things could only stay this way forever—after all, that’s what everything here had been set up for. The cart was lifted over the doorsill in the hallway, this was his father’s job, but today Carl leaped up to help him, carefully, so that nothing slipped off. “Now there’s someone who sees what work needs to be done,” was his father’s highest compliment.
Like two children, they pushed the trolley together down the hallway and into the kitchen. Carl felt helpless but he lent a hand and was suddenly overcome with a feeling of homesickness, with a longing for homecoming, for rest, sleep, the return of the prodigal son, something along those lines. Longing for that exhaustion that descends like a seizure, which only ever struck him here, at home, on his childhood sofa: “Oh Carl, why don’t you stretch out for a bit? And here, take the pillow. Do you need a blanket? Here, take the blanket . . .” First the pillow, then the blanket, which meant: defense against all self-doubt, the obliteration of all distress.
When Carl and his father returned from the kitchen, his mother was on the sofa. She seemed nervous and fitfully crossed her legs. These days she wore her hair short and smooth like a young boy’s, which made her look even smaller than she was. Still, it was easy to see how much strength there was in her, how much determination. His father held him by the arm.
For a moment, it looked like they were only play-acting: sudden departure, parting, escape—and the papers on the flat surface of the secretary, lined up parallel to the edge. They reflected the light from the small fluorescent tube covered by a shade and Carl had to close his eyes for a moment—land certificates, deeds of transfer, a gift deed form certifying that all this would now belong to him. Carl Bischoff, the only child of Inge and Walter Bischoff, born 1963 in Gera, Thuringia, “currently a student”; “student” was only written faintly and in pencil.
“It would be nice if you could look after the place, that’s to say, we’re asking you to.” Or: “Could you look after the place, that’s to say, we’d like to ask you to.”
Later, Carl couldn’t remember the exact wording, just “ask” and “look after” and that he had allowed the handover, which in the moment had a solemn aspect to it, to happen without resistance, at least without any mention of his own plans. The brute force of incomprehension left him at a loss for words and eclipsed everything else.
That little word “why?” presented itself but was not admitted, on the contrary, “why?” and any answer, Carl sensed, would only lead deeper into that state of unreality that, it turned out, became absolute when he learned that his parents planned to attempt their departure (that’s how they referred to it) separately after Giessen. From the central transit camp on, they would initially each try on their own, in order to “double our chances.” That’s how his mother had put it and that was the name: “Central Transit Camp.” She was trying to keep her voice steady, but Carl could hear that separately after Giessen had not been her idea.
“We’ve thought it over carefully.”
And then: “Your mother always wanted to leave.”
Carl didn’t have the slightest doubt that Inge and Walter (since adolescence he was in the habit of calling his parents by their first names) belonged in this house, in this life and no other, which is why he started in on the dangers and risks, of which he only had vague notions. His mother looked at him.
“And you, Carl? Where have you been all this time—without a single word? Do you have any idea how worried . . .”
Then the handover.
A tour of all the rooms, the new oven’s features, the electrical wiring and the fuses, their farewell to it all. An envelope lay on the secretary. “Five hundred marks,” his father said.
“Any other questions?”
•
It was already late evening when they returned once more to the garage, down in the valley, next to the railway embankment. For a while, they stood next to each other, their hands in the cone of light cast by the workbench lamp while Walter explained how the tools were organized. That summer, a few important and rare pieces had been added to his collection, including an ignition timing mechanism and a distance gauge with twenty tabs (0.05 to 1 millimeter), priceless tools. There were larger, cruder tools on the metal shelves, but the valuable ones were hung on the wall over the workbench with rubber straps made from preserving-jar rings or mounted on brackets Walter had made himself from narrow slats rubbed with recycled oil: tools of various sizes, ordered in increasing and decreasing sizes that, together, created a kind of landscape (a homeland), gleaming and cool.
