Eingabe

The hall had been a brewery and still held the cold the way a cellar does, from underneath, so that by ten Katrin had stopped feeling her feet and had begun the small stamping routine she did every November without noticing she did it. Her table was the fourth on the left, two down from the coffee, which was the position she paid extra for and would have paid more for. People bought records on the way to coffee and again on the way back. Twice was how you sold a sixty-euro record to a man who had decided against it once already.

She graded as she laid out. Sleeve VG, seam split two centimetres at the bottom edge, sunned along the spine where somebody had shelved it in a window for a decade. Vinyl VG+, spindle marks, plays fine. She wrote the grades on removable dots and the prices on the dots as well, and the dots came off cleanly, which mattered, because half of what she did was making sure the last owner’s handling was invisible and her own was not.

She had been a copy reader for nineteen years, at a paper that no longer existed under that name, and the habit had survived the institution. She still read everything twice. She still saw the error before she saw the sentence. The difference was that now the errors were physical — a mis-slipped inner, a price sticker applied over a catalogue number, a ring wear so faint you had to tilt the sleeve into the light and know to look. She had been retrained in 1994 at public expense and the retraining had produced a certificate in office administration which she had never once used. The vocabulary she used now she had taught herself in about four years, starting around 2004, off forums and off other dealers, and she had it perfectly. She had no opinion about any of the music. She had never had one. That had turned out to be an advantage in a trade full of people who could not sell things they loved.

The Pole arrived a little after eleven and went through her Amiga box the way a professional goes through anything, from the back, fast, thumb on the top edge, wrist doing the work.

His German was better than she had expected. He had a Kraków accent and a full grammar and he used the subjunctive, which almost nobody did any more, including her. He asked whether she had more in the car. She said she did not have a car today, which was true, and that the good ones were on the table, which was not.

He found 8 55 731 about two thirds of the way through.

She knew it by the number. She had never got round to learning what was on it beyond jazz, licensed, 1981, and had not needed to, because the number was what people asked for and the number was what she priced. Thirty-five euro. Sleeve VG+, no split, light ring. Vinyl NM, which was normal for that pressing, because nobody in 1981 had a stylus worth using.

He turned it over, and the carbon fell out of the mouth of the sleeve and landed face-up on the trestle.

She saw it before he did. Foxed at the fold, otherwise clean, that pale onion-skin they used, the type struck hard enough to emboss. An Eingabe — she knew the format before she read a line of it; everyone over fifty did. A carbon, which meant he had kept his own copy.

Marek picked it up by the corner, correctly, the way you pick up paper you know is old.

“May I?”

“It’s not part of the record,” she said, which was the first move, and she made it without deciding to.

He read for a moment. Then he said, “My reading German is slower.”

So she took it back off him, and held it at arm’s length because she had stopped being able to do otherwise around 2013, and she read it out.

She did the voice. She had a small repertoire — a shipping form from a Rostock haulier that always got a laugh, a school report, a complaint about a neighbour’s rabbits — and this one had the shape of the good ones, which is to say it opened at full altitude. Werter Genosse. A statement of the writer’s employment and his residence and the number of years he had held both. The declaration that he had already written on the fourteenth of March 1982 and again on the ninth of September 1982 and had on neither occasion received an answer, which he wished to record, without complaint, for the file.

She let without complaint sit for a second. That got the first laugh, from a man at the next table who was not even pretending to sort his own stock.

Then the substance: that the recording in question appeared in the published catalogue under its number; that the number was therefore not in dispute; that he had attended the shop on Karl-Liebknecht-Straße on eleven occasions since March; that he was aware of the difficulties in the supply of certain goods and did not raise the matter in that spirit; that he requested only to be informed whether the recording would be distributed in the Bezirk in the current year, so that he might plan accordingly.

So that he might plan accordingly. Katrin gave that one the full ministerial reading, chin down, and three or four people had stopped by then, and it landed.

The last line she read flat, because it did not have the voice in it. It was not in the register of the rest at all, and a copy reader would have queried it, and she had queried it in her head the instant she saw it, the way you query a sentence that has come from somewhere else.

I would like to hear it once.

There was a small pause of the kind that happens when a joke has a floor under it, and then it passed, the way those always do, and the man from the next table said something about eleven visits and everyone laughed again, and it was over.

Marek had laughed. He had laughed at without complaint and he had laughed at accordingly. She had watched him do it. He had stopped laughing before she had, by about a second and a half, and had gone back to holding the record at his side with his index finger through the centre hole, and had looked at the carbon in her hand and then at her, and had said nothing at all, and she understood that he had worked out what she was going to do with it and had decided not to make her say so.

That was fine. It was, if anything, courteous.

“Thirty-five,” she said.

“Yes.”

He paid in twenties and she gave him five back and slid the record into a fresh polythene outer, and he put it in his bag, and she did not put the carbon in with it, and he did not ask her to, and there it was, done, without a word from either of them, in front of about eleven people.

Bäumler came over inside a quarter of an hour, which told her he had heard it, and that told her the number.

He bought paper by weight for a shop in Halle that sold it on by the sheet to people who framed things. He had a canvas satchel and a ring binder of poly sleeves and a manner that made no distinction between a Stasi facsimile, a rationing coupon, and a hairdresser’s appointment card, because to him there was no distinction; there was condition and there was subject and there was the going rate for the subject.

“The letter,” he said.

“A hundred and eighty.”

“A hundred and twenty.”

“A hundred and forty and you take the school report as well.”

He looked at the fold and the foxing for about as long as it takes to check a hallmark, and paid, and put it in the binder between a delivery docket and something with a stamp on it, and went back to his own table, and did not read it. She was fairly sure he had not read a word of it, that morning or ever, and would not, and that in six months it would be behind glass in a flat in Munich with three others like it, arranged for tone.

Thirty-five for the record, a hundred and forty for the paper, off an object she had graded at thirty-five that morning. The difference had not come from the record and had not come from the letter either; it had come from her standing at a folding table doing a voice. Very few people in the hall could have done it and she was one of them.

Nobody said anything to her about it. Not the man at the next table, not Bäumler, not the woman selling the Ostalgie tat by the doors who had been there since seven and heard everything. There was no reason why anyone would have.

Pack-down took forty minutes. The empty sleeve she found at the bottom of the box when she was squaring the Amigas, and she put it in the stock box, which was where sleeves went, and it was worth two euro on a good day, and she did not put a dot on it.

Outside it had got dark at four and started to freeze, and at the tram stop the stickers on the pole had frozen into one grey scale that nobody had been able to get off, and she stood with her back to it and her hands in her sleeves and the box against her shin.

At home she put the heating on and did not take her coat off and counted the day out on the kitchen table in the order she always counted it, notes first, then coin, then the card slips.

Nine hundred and twenty.