To Die in Spring by Ralf Rothmann

Author:Ralf Rothmann
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pan Macmillan UK

Epilogue

Took the train as so often in early March, weary after a hard-working, apparently endless winter, grateful for the peace in the compartment, the coffee brought by the refreshments service, looking eagerly through the landscape for the first blossoms. But nowhere so much as a bud, a fresh blade; in the ploughed fields beyond Berlin only dry earth, empty pallets in the greenhouses, and in a hollow what looked like an encampment of greyish-brown deer turned out on closer inspection to be piles of stones and their shadows. The reeds by the quarry ponds are still fallow, the sun isn’t strong enough to brighten the dark water, and there’s frost to come. Near Magdeburg, ice on the tracks, thin snow, a cloudbank before reaching Braunschweig. And yet the profound desire for spring is already giving the bare birch trees on the horizon a tinge of green.

My parents’ grave was to be levelled – unless I decided to extend the lease. It was tended by an aunt, my father’s sister, who planted it with pansies, begonias or heather depending on the season, and put a light on it at All Souls’. A melancholy chain-smoker who always knew where the Jägermeister was, she was the last living relative from my parents’ generation and refused to let illness or loneliness deprive her of her sense of humour. Once when I invited her to Café Kloos, she wouldn’t set her cigarette down save to chew or talk, saying, ‘This crumb cake is good. I’d like to eat it at my funeral.’

The cemetery was on the edge of Oberhausen, and as I wanted to travel on to Belgium anyway, I’d decided to go via the Ruhr. You could count on one hand how many times in the last twenty-five years I’d put flowers on the gravestone, and I wasn’t sure if I would bother to extend the lease on the plot. Apart from Aunt Leni, who had already indicated that planting and raking were getting to be too much for her, and who wanted to be buried next to her husband anyway, most of my parents’ acquaintances were dead – so what was the point in keeping the grave?

And yet something in me resisted the idea of letting it be levelled – perhaps superstition, fear of misfortune or some sort of curse, I didn’t know. I would make the decision at the cemetery. The initial lease had been signed by my father, I saw only now, in the old-fashioned Sütterlin script he had always used, already a little unsteady from the cancer. Below the family name, the date, and the number of the plot there was a red stamp: Plot lease terminated.

Just before I reached Bielefeld, it actually began to snow, a dense flurry, and the train stopped again and again. Dusk was breaking as I arrived in Oberhausen, and I left my suitcase in the Ruhrland Hotel and took a taxi, the only one outside the building. ‘Where to?’ asked the driver, with his grey ponytail, solving a Sudoku puzzle and listening to the radio – a Schubert Lied.

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