“So what are you so worried about?” Markus asked as the waitress brought over two half-litre mugs of beer. I had wanted a second opinion on the Professor’s project – I had had a bad feeling in my stomach after I left his office, the way I did when I knew I had made the wrong decision – so I had asked Markus if he wanted to go for a drink that evening after work. He had looked surprised — I gathered that colleagues at the Verlag seldom socialised together — but he had accepted my invitation.
“Krebs isn’t here, you don’t really have anything else to do, why not help out the Professor?” he continued, raising his glass. “Proust.”
“Proust,” I said. We clinked our glasses together and took swigs of our beer. It tasted so much better than the McEwans lager I was used to drinking in the Edinburgh student union. Mind you, everyone said they watered it down.
“I mean, do you think the work is going to be overwhelming?” Markus said, wiping a dab of froth off his mouth. ”Has he given you anything to do yet?”
I explained that the Professor had given me the English version of the introduction to the encyclopaedia, which he had translated himself, to proofread. I had to admit that his English was excellent and that it would only be an hour’s work at most.
“Then I don’t understand what the problem is,” Markus said.
“I’m just afraid I’m going to get sucked into this huge project and I’ll spend all my time working for him. I’ve seen the kinds of hours he works.”
“But you said he’s been working on this thing since before the Wende. It doesn’t sound like the pace is exactly hectic.”
I moved the candle on our table over a bit so that I could see Markus’ face better. “If I tell you something, do you promise not to tell anyone else in the office?”
Markus laughed. “You’re the only person I ever have a conversation with at the Verlag. I think we can assume your secret will be safe with me.”
I explained that the Professor was retiring in March and that was why he wanted to get the book finished by then. As I spoke, I wondered why I was telling Markus when I had promised the Professor I would keep his secret. But to my surprise, Markus just seemed amused by the whole thing.
“Why are you smiling?” I asked.
“Because last year he told the intern that he would be retiring at the start of this year, or so I heard. The year before that he said something similar to the intern we had then. He may well have said the same thing to the intern who was here before that, I don’t remember.”
“Oh,” I said, suddenly feeling very slow on the uptake, and not a little annoyed at what appeared to be the Professor’s subterfuge. “He said he was going to be 65 in March. Was he lying about that too?”
“I don’t know. I’m not sure how old he actually is. Maybe he’s telling the truth. And maybe he genuinely wanted to retire last year or the year before, but something prevented it. But it all sounds suspiciously like he is looking for a way to get people to do work for him.”
“Isn’t that really devious though?”
Markus picked up his beer mat and tapped it against the table absentmindedly. “He was a high-ranking academic in East Germany. Have you any idea how hard it must have been to get that far? It was difficult enough to get by whatever you did, let alone if you had a good career. I’m sure he did plenty of things he’s not very proud of back then. We all did. We had to. When you come from that kind of background, a little white lie to motivate someone doesn’t seem that much of a sin in the grand scheme of things. And from what I’ve seen of him, he’s a clever operator all right.”
“But do you think I should work for him?”
“Why not? I’m sure you’ll learn a lot from him and you’ll get your name on the book, which certainly won’t harm your career if you do want to go into academia like you told me. But I would just be careful and take what he says with a pinch of salt.”
Proust?!