In Times of Fading Light by Eugen Ruge Read Free Book Online Page A

had not been a good idea.
    Wilhelm ordered the porter around. Charlotte gave the startled man a two-dollar tip.
    “You’re overdoing it,” said Wilhelm.
    “So are you,” said Charlotte.
    The train came in, hissing alarmingly. It smelled of railroads: the typical mixture of soot and excrement. Charlotte hadn’t traveled by rail for a long time.
    She looked through the window. The landscape passed by to the regular thud-thud of the turning wheels. The forest was dripping wet. Dirty remnants of the first snow lay on the fallow fields. Smoke rose from the grade-crossing keeper’s little house, and even as they went by Charlotte caught sight of the keeper beginning to wind the barriers up again.
    “A crossing keeper,” said Wilhelm. Triumphantly, as if that proved something.
    Charlotte didn’t react, but went on looking at the scenery. Tried to spot something comforting; tried to be glad of the brick-red church tower; tried to feel some kind of sense of homecoming at the sight of the landscape. The tree-lined highways, at least, reminded her that even Germany had something like summer. A mild wind as you rode along, Wilhelm’s BMW R32 motorbike and sidecar with the boys sitting in it. Unsuspecting. Laughing.
    The train stopped, the compartment door opened. A breath of brown-coal soot and cold rain blew in. The man who followed it didn’t say a word of greeting, didn’t take his coat off as he sat down; it was a worn old dark leather coat. He had mud on his shoes.
    The man inspected them briefly out of the corner of his eye, then took a sandwich box from his briefcase and removed a sandwich with a few bites already taken out of it. He munched assiduously for a long time, and then put the sandwich, three-quarters consumed, back in the box. Then he took a copy of Neues Deutschland out of his briefcase and opened it, and Charlotte immediately noticed a headline on the back page of the newspaper, which was turned toward her.
    THE PARTY NEEDS YOU!
    Charlotte felt ashamed. Ashamed of the little veil on her hat. Of her fears. Of the fifty cans of Nescafé in her cabin trunk ... yes, the Party needed her. This country needed her. She would work. She would help to build up the country—could there be a finer task?
    Now the man was holding the ND so that she could also see the lower part of the page. Minor items, small ads, but suddenly they interested her. How good to know that, if she wanted, she could actually go to the Stern cinema in the Berlin Mitte district this evening—it was showing The Way to Hope, Charlotte was prepared to take that title as a good omen, and it moved her almost to tears—why?—when under the heading of Highlights she read:
    Orders for large Christmas trees to be sent in writing or by telephone to the Greater Berlin Co-Operative by 18 December at the latest.
    The man opened his newspaper right out, so that Charlotte could see the front page, and as if of its own accord her glance fell on a picture caption saying:
    State Secretary in the Education Ministry, Comrade ...
    And the next words ought to have been: Karl-Heinz Dretzky.
    But they weren’t.
    The train was jolting over points. Charlotte staggered back and forth in the corridor, hardly aware of what she fell against. With difficulty, she reached the toilet, flung up the lid with her bare hands, and vomited what little breakfast she had eaten.
    She closed the lid again, sat on it. The thud-thud of the train wheels was going straight into her teeth now, straight into her head. She still felt the cold, probing look that had been turned on her over the top of the news paper. Black leather coat—of all garments. It was all clear, it made sense.
    Infiltrated, that was the word. The Party was supposed to have been infiltrated by the Zionist agent Dretzky.
    There was a squealing and a creaking as if the train were about to fall apart. She held her head in both hands ... or was she losing her mind? No, she was in command of her reason. Her head was