Dark Satellites by Clemens Meyer

Author:Clemens Meyer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Fitzcarraldo Editions
Published: 2020-05-15T00:00:00+00:00

UNDER THE ICE

The first time I met him was at the airport in Vienna. It was one winter early in the 2000s.

I was on my way back from the Balkans, or to be precise: from the countries of long-collapsed Yugoslavia, where I worked for a railway company. We patched up the old lines but I wasn’t patching up the tracks personally, I was in planning. Not the major planning, though, other people did that, I just coordinated the workers and the workflows and often went out to the tracks and the stations, destroyed years before.

He stood out the moment I saw him that first time, at the airport in Vienna. A short man, maybe five foot two or three. He was wearing a slightly battered suede coat with a fur collar and a checked flat cap, dark and shiny with melted snow because it had been snowing uninterrupted for days, but it looked kind of posh, expensive and ‘very British’, as we Germans say. Later on, when we were waiting in the little amusement arcade and playing the poker machines because the flight was getting more and more delayed, he told me he’d bought the cap in England, ‘pure new wool, hand-sewn, only the best’, in Newmarket, a town just for horses, as he said, ‘thousands of English thoroughbreds’, and he told me about his old cap (we call them Schiebermützen, pusher’s caps – did black marketeers used to wear flat caps in the old days?), a hat he’d worn for over thirty years, ‘I was sixteen, a present for my first win, that was in Gotha, the racecourse is on a hill there, Thüringen and the forests and an old grandstand from the Kaiser’s days, the horse was called Wild Rose and we won by a length and a half, I know it off by heart.’

He’d been in front of me at the desk, trying to communicate with a thickly accented Swissair employee, when I heard he wanted to get to Dresden on the same plane as me, although I was flying on to Leipzig. I immediately noticed his soft Saxon dialect in the midst of the loudspeaker announcements and buzz of voices around me, and I spoke to him and told him it might be a while because of the snow and the storms, I’d heard as much, and he nodded, looked me in the eye and said, lisping through his slightly wonky front teeth: ‘Then we can wait a while together, later.’

It was one of those flights that put in a short stop before their final destination: unload a few passengers, load up some new ones, and then take off again. That always feels kind of strange at night, people getting off and vanishing in the semi-darkness of the airport buses, everything submerged in tiredness. The wheels would turn again, we’d lift slowly back off the ground… I often used to take that route later too, Vienna–Dresden–Leipzig, usually got to the airport far too early and played

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