Dark Satellites

Clemens Meyer, Katy Derbyshire

• Publisher: Fitzcarraldo Editions
• Year: 2020
• Topic: Literature
• eBook ISBN:
  9781913097141
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

International Booker-longlisted author Clemens Meyer returns with Dark Satellites, a striking collection of stories about marginal characters in contemporary Germany. A train driver's life is upended when he hits a laughing man on the tracks on his night shift; a lonely train cleaner makes friends with a hairdresser in the train station bar; and a young man, unable to return to his home after a break-in, wanders the city in a state of increasing unrest. From the home to places of work, Meyer transforms the territories of our everyday lives into sites of rupture and connection. Unsentimental and yet deeply moving, Dark Satellites is a collection of stories from our time, as dark as the world, as beautiful as the brightest of hopes.

13

ONE

We were working on an overgrown stretch of land next to a petrol station, right by a dual carriageway. It was hot and there were only a few trees for shade. The grass came up to our waists and we mowed it with strimmers, cutting off the little bushes just above the ground as well. We had spades and other tools with us for pulling up the roots. Someone wanted to build on the plot of wasteland, and we wondered who’d want to live next to the dual carriageway.

It got so hot by noon that we took a long break. We’d started work early in the morning when the sun was still low and red beyond the dewy fields. We walked over to the petrol station; there was a tap round the back which we used to freshen up.

Three men were sitting on the ground against the wall, their legs drawn up, their backs leaning on the concrete. They had water bottles in front of them, probably just filled up from the tap. They looked like Apaches sitting there like that, longish dark hair, but which of us had ever seen an Apache, except in films?

We went to get one of our Turkish guys – they were drinking coffee in the petrol station and they weren’t actually Turkish at all – and he made himself understood somehow with the three men, who kept pointing at the patch of woods behind the petrol station. The middle one of the three was almost a child, still; he didn’t look at us and he clutched his water bottle to his chest.

Our Turkish guy pointed at the woods too now, and we marched off to take a closer look.

A handful of women and men were sitting in a clearing. One of the women had scratched her face underneath her headscarf, and another woman was holding her arms 14down. They were squatting around a small boy lying on the forest floor. He had vomited blood and there were pine needles and grass and a bit of earth stuck around his mouth. We leaned over him but he was dead.

Our foreman used to work in forestry. He picked up a couple of wild flowers lying crushed next to the boy.

‘Autumn crocuses,’ he said, cautiously moving their pale pink petals. The boy must have eaten some of them.

We stood for a while around the boy and his family, come from far away to this patch of woods, and then we thought about whether to call the police or an ambulance or both. One of the women said something to us but we didn’t understand her. Later, when the boy was in a van and we’d signed some papers or other, we went back to the petrol station and the stretch of land right next to the dual carriageway.

The day was long and hot, and we worked in silence until evening came.

15

BROKEN GLASS IN UNIT 95

The nights were dull and endless, started at six and ended at six, they were like dark days that touched in the middle, and when they stopped being dull they got even darker and more endless and we wished we were bored again, hours half-asleep between our inspection rounds, our heads never allowed to touch the table top, we’d doze sitting up, but Unit 95 had become unpredictable and some of us had got unpredictable too and lost our nerve and got taken off the job, but I tried to stay calm, I knew the new part of town, the satellite town where Unit 95 was, I knew the nights when people went crazy, I’d been working in Unit 95, been doing my rounds all over town since the mid-nineties, I knew the hostels the other guys sometimes called ‘roach motels’, where the asylum-seekers lived, no one had ever liked working shifts there, and now it was all getting even worse.

Some of the old guys at work said: It’s all starting over again. And they were right, I remembered the time and the nights when it was dangerous and there was no counting on the police, ‘the pigs’ as we called them back then. It seemed a long time ago, seemed a long way away, and then I realized I was an old guy as well.

Unit 95 was in the middle of the 1970s blocks and the new high-rises of the satellite town.

The blocks from the seventies had all been done up, their once-grey concrete walls decorated with brightly coloured shapes and patterns, and by day I saw a lot of the pensioners who lived there looking out of the windows when the weather was good, their arms resting on cushions, though there wasn’t much to see in the satellite town or in Unit 95.

But there was the refugees’ reception centre. Some of 16the guys at work said Unit 95 was the reception centre, the ‘RC’, but that wasn’t right.

Unit 95 was a square of ten-storey concrete blocks, a large courtyard between the blocks, and the RC a bit further outside the square; a property company had bought it all and done it up years ago, and now someone had to look after it, the nights were long in the satellite town, and as usual they wanted to save money and had signed up one of the cheapest security firms even though the reception centre was part of the package they’d bought from the council. I don’t want to put us down, we were a good team, cheap but good, and at least some of the guys knew what they were letting themselves in for when they put on the uniform.

I started my round without the dog, like I always did. It was still almost light and the dog had hip problems like most of the work dogs, he was an old Belgian Shepherd, well trained but with a slight limp, the onset of HD, hip dysplasia, and I didn’t take him on my round until after midnight. He stayed in the security cabin until then and rested. Our cabin was right next to the road on a grass verge and the light was on from six till six – you couldn’t turn it off – so everyone could see us. A security guy and a dog in a glowing Plexiglas cabin, and outside, the night.

‘One to Twelve, One to Twelve, come in, over.’

I unclipped the radio from my belt. It was heavy and much too large and a better weapon than the rubber baton I also wore on my belt. The radio was a relic from another era, we had mobiles and smartphones and all that crap, but the radio sent out beeps and white noise in the frequencies of the night, it spoke to us through time and space as I saw her again that night in Unit 95.

But it wasn’t her. How could it be her, unchanged and 17so young, after more than twenty years?

‘Twelve, go ahead.’

I started my first round without the dog. It was autumn. I touched the first magnetic tag against my guard patrol reader. A low beep. I put the black device back into the side pocket of my uniform jacket; it looked like an electric shocker. The walkie-talkie crackled and began to speak, and I heard the voice of the old dispatcher back at base, far away from the satellite town, on the western edge of the town proper, out of which the satellite town grew like… days that… I shook my head, too many rounds, too many shifts over the past few weeks.

‘One calling Twelve,’ came the dispatcher. We’d been waiting years for him to retire. They said he used to be a big gun in the secret service but ever since I’d known him, since I started working for the security firm, he’d looked like an old man.

‘Twelve, go ahead.’

‘All quiet in Unit 95, over?’

‘Expecting something?’ I asked into the radio and walked to the next checkpoint, fixed to a wall a few buildings along, next to a children’s playground. There were two children playing there even though it was almost dark. They looked like they’d come over from the RC, straight black hair, dark skin, they usually came to play in the evening once the other children had gone. My patrol reader beeped quietly as I touched it to the magnetic tag. The two children sat down on the sand under the climbing frame and held hands. And they sat there, hand in hand.

‘Nothing in the weather report, over,’ said the old dispatcher. Then I heard the click of his lighter. A lot of the guys at work smoked like chimneys. I’d given it up ten years ago, or maybe seven or eight, and when I began my 18week’s shift, which usually went on for five or six or seven days even though that meant I was overstepping the statutory weekly working hours, I’d empty the ashtray in our security cabin onto the gravelly ground outside. Only occasionally did I go over with the hundreds of fag-ends to one of the stone rubbish bins the property company had put up all over Unit 95, immovable.

‘Then I’ll trust the weather report, over,’ I said. I heard the old dispatcher breathing or blowing out smoke, his nicotine-yellow finger on the transmission button, ‘Have a good shift then, over and out.’

I had touched in at a few checkpoints before I slowly approached the RC. In the nights, and sometimes in the early evenings, but usually in the nights, people would gather outside the RC, mostly young lads. Some came from the buildings in Unit 95, others from the depths of the satellite town. Everything seemed quiet today though. Even though it was a Friday. Some of the pensioners had said hello to me in the courtyards between the blocks, a last few bits of shopping in a plastic bag, a chat outside the building, an evening cigarette by one of the stone bins. And behind the concrete blocks of Unit 95, before the red-black, dark-blue sky, rose the residential complexes of the satellite town. Slab constructions and grid squares from the days of socialism, all over for more than twenty-five years now. When I looked at the map fixed to one of the glass walls of our security cabin, I saw the parts of our town, I saw Unit 95 on the edge of the satellite town, right where the concrete sets in; I don’t know who had stuck the map to the glass. Our units were marked with felt-tip pen and I’d done shifts in most of them by now, the industrial estates, the Mockau Centre at the other end of town with all the shops on two floors and the long corridors, where I stood outside 19the jeweller’s window and looked at the stones and the rings in the light of the night-time display. Only the old Russian barracks where we’d guarded the vacant buildings for a long time had gone, torn down over the years.

I held onto the fence and looked at the open window on the ground floor where the young woman was sitting on the windowsill, watched her through the fence. She was sitting on the windowsill, her legs bent, her head resting on her knees. She looked out into the evening with the room’s light behind her. I could make out some kind of poster on the wall, shelves, a sofa with a blue bag on it. I clutched the guard patrol reader so tightly I thought for a moment the plastic casing would splinter. Where was the patrol tag where I had to touch in?

She had red-brown, medium-length hair and her skin was very pale. She was frowning, I could see that much. Perhaps she was thinking about important things while she looked out into the night, in which I stood behind the fence and understood nothing. I laid my hand on the cool metal strips and looked at her face and her small nose, a button nose, such a nice word, but she didn’t seem to see me. I don’t know how long I stood there; at some point I heard voices behind me, voices getting louder, calls from the night, and I knew the weather report had got it wrong again, and then I saw something happening on the grass between the RC and the fence, more and more refugees coming out of the building, I moved my head, saw a mob of young lads and boys and old men between Unit 95 and the RC. And while I moved my eyes between the two groups in front of me, my hand still on the fence, something changed – was it the light? Did the moon rise and cast shadows, or did clouds draw in across the sky? I looked through the mesh of the fence again. Where was she? Where was the bright window 20she was sitting in?

She stood out amongst the dark-skinned and dark-haired residents standing behind the fence outside the reception centre. There were a few fair-skinned and fair-haired ones – it was the time of the Russian Germans who came to us from the gigantic collapsing empire, but most of them didn’t end up in the hostels. Our beat ended at the fence. We were only responsible for the old barracks, abandoned by the Russians and the size of a small town. Grass grew in the narrow roads between the buildings and there was broken glass everywhere. Sometimes the roads got wider, and sometimes I thought I heard the clank of tank tracks on the cobblestones.

Our room was in a small tower right next to the main gate. There was a plug point for a fan heater, a rotting sofa we used for our fitful naps, sitting up, head against the back because our team’s patrol car sometimes came by, there was a coffee machine on a table and piles of newspapers and magazines everywhere, hundreds of newspapers and magazines – what did we know about the net in those days?

A few of the window panes were still intact; we’d boarded the others up with cardboard. That was where we sat in the days and in the nights. Went on our rounds with the dogs, taking us up to the fence separating the Russian barracks from the reception centre. The buildings were crumbling away, even though the Russians, the Soviets, had only withdrawn two years ago.

I stood by the fence, my hand on the cool metal. Where was she? Where was the bright window in Unit 95? The dog must have sensed I was by his side but somewhere else entirely. He howled quietly and took a few tense steps and rubbed his collar against the fence, like he wanted to get rid of it.21

I always picked up the dog at base, where he waited in a kennel, and took him to the barracks that the Russians had left two years before. I stroked the Belgian She...

Table of contents

• PRAISE
• TITLE PAGE
• CONTENTS
• ONE
• TWO
• THREE
• ABOUT THE AUTHOR
• COPYRIGHT