Uwe Timm: Halbschatten (“Penumbra”) Novel Translated by Anthea Bell

Sample translation Uwe Timm: Halbschatten (“Penumbra”) Novel Translated by Anthea Bell Publication: August 2008 Hardcover 272 pages ISBN: 978-3-462-04043-2 Verlag Kiepenheuer & Witsch GmbH & Co. KG Iris Brandt [email protected] Aleksandra Erakovic [email protected] [pp. 7–32 of Uwe Timm’s Halbschatten (Penumbra)] A towering mountain range, sheer blue-grey rocks, a pale brown path carving its way through them as it rises to the peaks; there is a buffalo on the path and a man riding it, his legs dangling down. The man is old, with a long grey beard. Both of them, man and buffalo, are looking at the valley below. Halfway up the slope trees grow, pines, their crowns standing out against the red sunset sky. Up above, soft clouds veil the heavens. It is a picture of peace, with light from outside breathing a little life into it. How dense the white vapours look from here, how they fray and turn translucent the closer you come to them. There’s always a sense of uneasiness as you dive into the drifting grey where all sense of height and depth, up and down, is swiftly lost. Cool, moist air, no visibility. Then, slowly, the grey lightens, and you suddenly see the blue of the depths. The canal, the stony embankment, trodden grass, an asphalt path, and beyond it a small domain tended like a garden; old gravestones, many of them damaged by bullets and shell splinters, beyond them more wilderness, weeds, tall grass, thistles. This cemetery was once a restricted military area. The Wall dividing East from West followed the bank of the canal. Beyond the Wall itself, gravestones had been removed to leave a clear field of fire and a strip was covered with sand, carefully raked like something in the precincts of a Japanese temple. The idea was for fugitives to be given away by their tracks. Some of the toppled gravestones were covered by wooden planks; border guards patrolled here, shouted orders, grey uniforms, steel helmets, snap-hooks, a quiet metallic clicking, German shepherd dogs, no flowers, no bushes for anyone to hide in – that was how it looked, a devastated wasteland, as if the war had ended only days ago. Then the Wall fell, says the city guide, and after the reunification of East and West this cemetery was opened to the public again. A man of around fifty, thin, his hair already grey, a lean face with ascetic lines around the mouth and nose. A long coat, rather shabby but fitted at the waist, also grey and giving him a military look. Buckled shoes. No, on closer inspection they are fashionable light brown shoes that do not go with the grey coat, and are far too flimsy for this cold, wet November day. A late afternoon, verging on evening as the mists rise from the canal. A bent figure walks around the far wall of the cemetery where it runs beside the road. The raucous chatter of a magpie’s cry. There are two or three small candles burning in the cemetery. All Souls’ Day. A fine old name for it, but most of those assembled here are Protestants, says the grey man, and anyway one’s particular brand of religion hardly matters in a disused cemetery. Over there, someone has put a little candle on the gravestone of Mölders, one of the few Catholics 1 in this place. Group Captain Mölders, flying ace and Second World War fighter pilot, he shot down a hundred and one enemy planes. The grey man is holding some manuscript pages rolled up into a kind of tube, and points them at a large marble slab. And there’s another light over there by the wall. Many of the names are illegible now. If the stones hadn’t been knocked about in the war anyway, rain has worn the words away from them, or they’ve been split by a network of roots. It’s all very long ago now. No one’s been buried here for the last fifty years. The grey man coughs, and you can tell that he’s freezing. This guided tour was just for me. He was recommended to me as an expert on this cemetery, I was given his phone number, I called him, and after a moment’s hesitation he agreed. In this place, he says, German history, Prussian history lies buried, or at least the military part of it. Scharnhorst lies here with other generals, admirals, colonels, majors, famous fighter pilots, the heroes of the air in their own day, Richthofen, Udet, Mölders, and among all these men from the armed forces there is a single woman. Look at the gravestone, it was erected recently. The old one was destroyed in the hostilities at the end of the war, this is a granite slab, a single rock. Flying is worth your life. Born 1907, died 1933. Marga von Etzdorf. A woman pilot, one of the first in Germany. Yes, I say, she’s the reason why I came here. I’d assumed she had died in an air accident, but then I read that she shot herself in Aleppo in Syria, after a crash landing. It made me feel curious. A woman of twenty-five doesn’t shoot herself over a crash landing, I thought. You’re right, says the grey man, he has done some further research, he adds, he’s looked for early film clips, photos, accounts of her flights to Morocco and Japan. Sensational feats of flying in those days; she was much admired, she was famous. He has questioned the few contemporary witnesses still alive, and by a strange coincidence a cigarette case came into his hands. The cigarette case played a certain part in her story. Look. The silver case feels smooth yet heavy as I hold it. The lid has been slightly dented by a splinter of brass, still there in it. In one place the tip of the splinter has just pierced the lid; you might think it had been expertly soldered in place. And on the back, look, says the grey man, the initials of two names are engraved: M. v. E. and Ch. v. D, with the word Isobars added, in italic script. When she wears dresses or a skirt and blouse in the photos she looks slender, almost fragile; in trousers or in her pilot’s flying suit she appears quite strong. He has found two film clips as well, says the grey man, silent films, of course. In one she is standing in front of her plane wearing a dress, the wind is blowing her short hair into her face. She laughs, bends her head, slowly pushes her hair back behind her ear. In the other she is sitting out of doors on a bench, in trousers and a leather pilot’s jacket with knitted welts at the wrists. She is talking and 2 smoking, and you can see that when she opens the cigarette case with graceful movements, takes out another cigarette and lights it, it is done not automatically but with enjoyment. There’s a radio interview from the early thirties in which the reporter asks what her dream of flying is. Weightlessness, she can be heard replying against the rushing sound of interference. Even if only at the moment when you’re flying in a parabola. I sing when the plane lifts me up to the sky. I sing even though I can’t hear myself through the engine noise. I feel the air, the wind of my flight, even though the windshield breaks it. She gave that interview, says the grey man, just before she flew to Japan in 1931. She took off from Berlin Tempelhof on 18 August and began by flying north-west in a long loop, turning east later, with the city below her, the cathedral, the castle, the Reichstag building – the flash she saw was the angel on top of the Victory Column – and then, with a slight curve to the right, her course took her south. She saw the river Spree with the sun gleaming on it. She was calm, a little tired, exhausted by those last few days, all the arrangements, the farewells, the conversations, the parties. Her route passed over Poland, over the Soviet Union, over China. Her permit to fly over Russia, over the Soviet Union, had been delayed; the Englishwoman would have been on her way to Japan for several days now. Which of them – and bets were laid on it – would be the first woman pilot to reach Japan, Amy Johnson the Englishwoman or Marga von Etzdorf? Warsaw, Moscow, Siberia. Hours, days in her plane. Provincial airfields with containers of fuel transported there by Shell, because her flight was also an advertisement for the Shell company and the German aircraft manufacturer Junkers. How do you pass the time on such a long flight? I read, she says. A book, a book of poems. Heinrich Heine. Eichendorff. It’s easier to take in lines of poetry. If the air’s calm I solve crossword puzzles. I look down now and then, see flat brown land, then different shades of green from light to the deepest emerald, an endless carpet of forest, the primeval swampy forest of the taiga, steppes again, a little island of green, a few trees, more forest, some houses by the railway line, a station with a sawmill nearby. The workers don’t look up. The sound of their sawing machines probably drowns out the noise of my flight over them.

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