by Uwe Tellkamp
Christian picked up his bag, took out a groschen and spent the remaining moments contemplating the coin: the oak leaves beside the crudely cut ten, the tiny, worn year with the A underneath it, the obverse with the hammer, compasses and the wreath of grain, and he thought back to how often they, the children of Heinrichstrasse and Wolfsleite, had copied the embossed surface of these coins by placing them under a piece of paper and rubbing them with a pencil – Ezzo and Ina had been more skilful at it, and keener than him, back in the days of their childhood dreams of adventurous lives as forgers and robbers, like the heroes in the films at the Tannhäuser Cinema or in the books of Karl May and Jules Verne. The funicular, braking softly, came to a halt, and the doors, graded in height and sloping, released their passengers. The conductor got out, opened the gate and a narrow entrance beside it for the passengers who were going up. The gate had a coin-box attached, and Christian dropped his fare in and pulled down the lever on the side; the ten-pfennig piece slipped out of the rotating disc and joined the others on the bottom. Instead of the groschen, the local children sometimes put in flat stones that had been ground smooth by the Elbe and which they called ‘butties’, or buttons – much to the annoyance of their mothers – who were sorry to lose them, for the little aluminium coins were easy to get while buttons, on the other hand, were difficult to find. The doors were closed; if you wanted to get into the carriage in the winter, you had to pull a cable to open them; they closed as soon as you let go. The conductor had gone into his shed, poured himself a coffee and watched the passengers hurrying off, disappearing like shadows round the corners to Körnerplatz or Pillnitzer Landstrasse.
After a few minutes a weary-sounding voice came from the loudspeaker above the adverts and said something in a Saxon accent that Christian couldn’t understand; but the conductor stood up and carefully closed the door to his shed. Slowly, the round leather change-bag dangling over his well-worn uniform, he went to the driver’s cabin at the front – its many control buttons seemed pointless to Christian, since the funicular was steered by the cable and rollers and was brought to a halt automatically, if the cable should tear, by a sophisticated clasp mechanism. Perhaps the buttons were there for some other reason, perhaps for communication or for psychological purposes: the buttons must have some meaning, a function, and would demand knowledge, guard against monotony and work-weariness; moreover, halfway along, one of the cars had to move onto a siding to allow the other to pass. The cabin door closed behind the conductor with a crash; it was opened with a box spanner and was not connected to the cable for the other doors.
‘The train is about to depart,’ said the voice from the loudspeaker. The carriage remained motionless for a moment, then smoothly started moving, gliding out of the station. Christian turned round and watched the path and platform grow smaller, until all that remained was the oval of the tunnel entrance against the flinty green of the sky; gradually that grew smaller as well, and darkness pressed in from either side. For a short while, before the exit came into view, the only light was provided by the dim tunnel lamps and the headlights. Christian took a book out of his bag; his Uncle Meno had given it to him. He had hardly had time to look at it during the previous week: the pre-Christmas mood had spread round Waldbrunn, and though the lessons weren’t as strict as usual, preparations for the birthday party, and the daily bus journeys home to rehearse the Italian piece with the others, had taken up his time. Christian intended to read the book more thoroughly during the Christmas holidays. It was a fairly fat tome, printed on fibrous paper and bound in coarse linen; he knew the picture on the cover from a facsimile edition of the Manesse Manuscript he had seen in his uncle’s library and at the Tietzes’, in a particularly handsome and well-preserved example – Niklas, Ezzo’s and Reglinde’s father, often read it. The picture showed the legendary figure of Tannhäuser, a man with long red hair in a blue robe with a white cloak, a black cross on his breast; on either side above him were his coat of arms and a winged helmet, both black at the top and yellow below, above stylized tendrils with leaves; ‘Tanhuser’, as his name was written above the plate, had raised his left hand to ward off, or perhaps cautiously greet, someone or something; his right hand was holding his cloak. Christian opened the volume – Old German Poems, selected and edited with notes by Meno Rohde – and returned to the legend he’d been reading on the journey from Waldbrunn to Dresden. The lamp on the ceiling above him started to make a rasping noise, the page the book was opened at had a pale, grainy look and, with the gentle vibration of the carriage, the letters started to blur before his eyes. He couldn’t concentrate on the story of the Knight of the Golden Spur who had set out with seventy-two ships to free Queen Bride. The lamp went out. He put the book back in his bag, and felt for the barometer, a present for his father that he had collected from the former lodge of the Association of Elbe Boatmen. It was safely packed and cushioned in the bundle of dirty laundry that filled his bag.
In its slow but steady upward climb, occasionally jolted by unevennesses between the rollers, the funicular reached Buchensteig, the path that ran alongside the track, and continued parallel to it for a while, a few metres above the ground. You could see into lighted windows; an outstretched hand could easily have touched the passing carriage. At the top the Sibyllenhof restaurant, which had been closed for several years, came into view beside the second tunnel; its terraces stuck out like school slates that had been forgotten there by giant children years ago. The carriage would head straight towards the restaurant, only turning off into the entrance of the tunnel that led to the station shortly before it reached the bottom terrace. On some journeys Christian had dreamt of bygone banquets in the dark, uninviting rooms: of gentlemen pursuing cultured conversations, wearing starched shirts with jet buttons and watch chains over the pockets of their waistcoats; of flower sellers in pages’ uniforms, called to a table with the hint of a click of the fingers, to present ladies, wearing masses of jewellery which gave off fiery sparks under the bowls of the crystal chandeliers, with a rose; of dances for which the band struck up, the pale violinist with pomaded hair and wearing a chrysanthemum in his buttonhole … The light of the January moon slid over the roofs of the houses that sloped steeply down to Grundstrasse, making the ridges shine and giving the snowy gardens patches of powdery brightness which, with the white highlights of isolated, snow-covered sheds or stacks of wood, merged at the edges with the shadows cast by the bushes and trees.
Christian realized they were above the painter and illustrator Vogelstrom’s house, a grey castle that Meno called ‘Cobweb House’, sparking off in Christian’s mind a vision which, as he looked out of the window, his face close to the cold glass, lurked behind the everyday sobriety of the unapproachable windows and tall trees. In the towering mass of the Loschwitz slopes, on the other side of Grundstrasse, which was partly visible as a pale ribbon winding in the depths, the needles of moonlight were sucked into the darkness in front of the watch towers of East Rome and faded at the bridge, across which soldiers were heading for the checkpoint on Oberer Plan. The garden of Cobweb House was in darkness, sheltered from eyes and events, and Christian could hardly even see the tops of the pear and beech trees, with their dusting of snow and their filigree branches hanging like wisps of smoke over the depths; it flowed into the contours, the narrow cleft between the Buchensteig path and the battlements, like brightness in the cross-hatching on old, unfinished drawings. He saw the fountain, the almost completely overgrown driveway that curved round the weathered stone catfish on the fountain and led up over mossy steps; the beginning of a poem had been chiselled into the panel over the catfish, but the letters were blurred, already half erased. However hard he tried, Christian couldn’t remember how the poem went, but he could clearly picture the broken-off barbels of the catfish, its sightless eyes and the dark covering of moss; he remembered his superstitious fear of the beast, and also of the long-defunct fountain that gave off a graveyard chill when he went to see Vogelstrom with Meno, and his almost
childish fear, which was only made greater by the strange conversations that took place between Meno and the gaunt painter in Cobweb House. But it was less the words and topics themselves that had seemed strange than the atmosphere of the house; with his childish understanding, the little that had been comprehensible to the boy of eleven or twelve seemed right and appropriate for the adult world that bent down to him from its heights. He could remember words such as ‘Merigarto’ or ‘Magelone’, words which, in his awakening surmise, seemed more like conjurations than concepts that meant something in the real world, words that touched him in a curious way and that he was never to forget, even though they had seemed less mysterious than the paintings in the gloomy hall of the house: idyllic landscapes, garden scenes with flute-playing fauns and naiads flooded with bright blue light, a Dutch-brown series of ancestors, serious-looking men and women with a flower, a nettle or – he had looked at this for a long time in astonishment – holding a golden snail. These paintings, fading away in the hall, which Vogelstrom and Meno only rarely glanced at as they passed them, seemed to have much more to do with those two words: the one for the island and the other the name of a girl who appeared out of the depths of time and disappeared back into them; he had noted them and repeatedly savoured their long-forgotten euphony in murmured soliloquies. Sound, too, had stayed with him from their conversations, like the babble of a stream from Vogelstrom’s studio, which was so cold in the winter that frost sent out tentacles towards the easels and the lozenge-patterned wallpaper, and the two men, Meno with Vogelstrom’s coat over his shoulders, Vogelstrom himself in several pullovers and shirts, hurried round the room with steaming breath, their voices scarcely distinguishable when they were in the library and Christian was looking at one of the ancestors’ portraits in the hall and listening; now and then there was the sound of cautious laughter, expressions of praise for, or disgust with, the tobacco they happened to be smoking. Sometimes Meno would call out and show him steel or copper engravings in musty-smelling tomes, the painter cautiously turning the pages, and it was probably then that they uttered the strange words that stuck in his ear, words he had never heard before, words like those two magical names.
The lamp above him flickered on again. From above, out of the darkness below the tunnel and the Sibyllenhof, the descending funicular crept towards them, reaching the loop where the track split and one could move out of the way of the other. The driver was a motionless shadow in the passing capsule, which had no passengers, and he replied to the greybeard conductor’s greeting with a brief nod before the carriage continued down and disappeared from view.
Christian remembered that it was in Cobweb House that he had first heard something about Poe; Meno and Vogelstrom had been looking at illustrations to one of Poe’s stories. He particularly remembered one print – Vogelstrom’s needle had etched an elaborate picture of a castle rising up into the darkness of the nocturnal countryside; then one of Prince Prospero and his retinue of a thousand ladies and knights in the castle with the welded bolts on the doors; he saw them again, as he had all those years ago under Vogelstrom’s thin, slim-fingered hand, strolling and chatting, as if the company were alive and playing their merry games, while outside the plague was raging, devastating the land, as if Prospero were passing through the rooms amid the frenzy of a masked ball – music swelled, and the chimes of the ebony clock in the black chamber echoed and faded in the vastness of the castle, and in the six other chambers the people were dancing, for Prince Prospero would not countenance sadness, and the cries of the despairing populace could no longer be heard over the music, the singing and laughter, the barking of the dogs outside the gates.
The carriage was slowing down, coasting the last few metres. Lost in his thoughts and memories, Christian had hardly noticed it enter the upper tunnel, which, with its whitewashed walls, was brighter than the lower one, he had merely glanced automatically, but without really taking anything in, at the upper station with its cheerful bright paint and gracefully curving roof, the red-brick building with the neon sign: Funicular Railway, the machine room and the waiting room where you could examine photographs of earlier models and technical details in a glass display case. The funicular came to a halt, shuddering gently. The doors opened with a clatter. Christian slung his bag over his shoulder and, still immersed in thought, went up the shallow steps of the station towards the exit gate.
The conductor shuffled off in the direction of the waiting room, felt for a button concealed in the wall; there was a buzz, the gate opened and Christian went out. He was home, in the Tower.
2
Mutabor
‘Great that I caught you. I was thinking I’d have to come back again.’
‘Meno! You’ve come to meet me?’
‘Anne has had to find somewhere else for Robert and you to stay tonight. You’re sleeping at my place.’
‘So many guests?’ Christian only asked so that he could hide his delight behind a casual-sounding question. He already knew. The vast amount of baking ingredients that had been procured during the last few weeks and piled up in the larder of Caravel indicated the number of guests they expected for the birthday party – and had convinced him that coming home to stay in Caravel, except to take part in the rehearsals that would take place mainly at the Tietzes’, would be ill-advised; that is, if he didn’t want to irritate Anne, in her nervous state, by hanging about, or risk exposure to her suspicious gaze and end up, once excuses were no longer possible, being sent off to Konsum or Holfix larded with shopping lists, or to face never-ending stacks of dishes in the kitchen.
‘There were at least thirty of us for coffee this afternoon and the official celebrations only start later; more people are sure to be coming then.’
They were walking along Sibyllenleite.
‘And where’s Robert sleeping?’
‘At the Tietzes’.’
So his brother would be spending the night in Evening Star. Christian put his mittens back on and thought of the House with a Thousand Eyes, where he would be spending the night, in a quite different atmosphere from that at home in Caravel.
‘I decided to come and meet you so that you didn’t go home first. Anne has already taken your cello with her to the Felsenburg.’
Christian nodded and looked at his uncle, who had taken his hat off and removed the snowflakes with a few flicks. ‘Since when have you been wearing that?’
‘Anne bought it for me in Exquisit. Said it ought to suit me. A good style too.’ Meno looked at the writing on the sweatband. ‘A delivery arrived from Yugoslavia. Anne said people were queuing all the way back to Thälmannstrasse, at least fifty metres. They didn’t have one for your father.’ He put his hat back on. ‘Did everything work out with the barometer?’
‘As agreed. Two hundred and fifty marks. Lange even cleaned it up and polished it again.’
‘Good. Shall I take your bag?’
‘Oh, it’s not that heavy, but thanks, Meno. Apart from the barometer, it’s only dirty laundry.’
They came to Turmstrasse, the main through-road of the district, and from which it derived its popular name of the ‘Tower’. Meno walked with more measured steps than Christian; he had taken out a briar pipe with a curved stem and a spherical bowl and was filling it from a leather pouch. Christian raised his nose and sniffed, sucking in the vanilla fragrance that mingled with the aroma of figs and cedar-wood. Alois Lange, a former ship’s doctor and Meno’s neighbour in the House with a Thousand Eyes, got a box of the tobacco every year from the deputy chairman of the Copenhagen Nautical Academy, and he gave half to Meno – the ship’s doctor had once saved the deputy chairman’s life and thus, to the annoyance of Lange’s wife, Libussa, there was never a shortage of tobacco in the House with a Thousand Eyes. A match flared up, illuminating Meno’s lean, pale features and bluish five-o’clock shadow; the reflection flickered in his brown eyes, which were warmed by a few flashes of green – they were Anne’s eyes, and those of her other brother, Ulrich, the eyes of t
he Rohdes; Christian had inherited them too.
‘Did you get through all right? The Eleven was cancelled this morning. It was an hour before the replacement came. The curses at the stop’ – Meno sucked at his pipe to get it going – ‘would have been something for “Look & Listen”. And the Six had a diversion.’ His pipe still wasn’t going, he lit another match.
‘I noticed.’
‘Anne was going to ring you, but the lines didn’t seem to be working or something, I don’t know what was broken again – she couldn’t get through at all.’ His pipe was finally going, and he blew out puff after puff of smoke.
‘Yesterday it snowed like mad higher up, the snow’s more than a metre deep in Zinnwald and Altenberg, I was getting worried the bus wouldn’t go. Near Karsdorf we had to get out and help the driver shovel the snow away. The brushwood barrier in the fields had fallen over, and all the new snow had been blown onto the road.’