by Uwe Tellkamp
He went to the table beside the crammed bookshelves his father had made out of plain boards, examined the books and periodicals piled up on top of each other. Even here there had hardly been any changes since his last visit: an issue of Nature with a newspaper wrapper was still lying beside several specialist biological periodicals, all covered with a fine layer of dust, and a few fairly well-thumbed copies of Weimarer Beiträge. Beside them was that day’s edition of Die Union, the paper of the CDU, neatly folded, the grainy paper smelling of newsprint. Curious, Christian fingered a leather-bound book, opened it and read the title: The Ages of the World, F. W. J. Schelling; the book beside it had the same author and was also bound in leather: Bruno, or On the Natural and the Divine Principle of Things. Christian picked it up; it was a quarto volume, and a cloud of dust rose from the marbled edges when he blew on it. It still wasn’t clean, so Christian took out his handkerchief, but as he was trying to hold both covers, the pages suddenly fanned out and a few pieces of paper escaped; as he bent down to retrieve them, the book fell onto the floor. Chakamankabudibaba shot up as if he’d had an electric shock and looked at him with green eyes. Christian hastily picked up the scattered pieces of paper and put them back in the book. But they might now all be in the wrong place, so he put the volume back on the table and tried to rectify his clumsiness by opening the book at random: when you did that a book would often open at frequently consulted pages. That didn’t seem to be the case here: it was virgin paper, with none of Meno’s usual underlinings or notes in the margins. Despite that, Christian inserted one of the slips of paper, repeated the process, several times opening the book at the page where he had just inserted the first note, but finally he had all the pieces of paper back in. Feeling apprehensive, he replaced the books in their original positions.
The cat had closed its eyes again and put its head back on its paws, just the tip of its tail was slowly curving to and fro, as if there were another cat inside the visible, cinnamon-coloured Chakamankabudibaba, one that was not yet asleep and was watching the young man, who was listening anxiously by the table, with intense concentration. The six bulbs radiating from the cone-shaped lamp spread a canopy of diffuse brightness over the desk and the cat in its chair. In the distant gloom, the books on the shelves that went up to the ceiling, the plants in the corner by the stove, seemed to be looking at Christian, as if even at this late hour they had been called up from an Otherrealm and whoever had called them had forgotten to say the magic word that would allow them to return. The clock too seemed to be looking at him with both its time-circles. There was no sound to be heard, apart from the regular tick-tock, the rattle of the shutters when the wind got under them and the draught in the stove. Christian went into the kitchen and took a pair of work gloves out of the coal box under the oven, checked whether the bolts on the damper and the ash-pan were closed properly and tightened up the screws a little. He could feel the heat of the metal, even through the heavy material of the gloves; he couldn’t touch the tiles around the stove door without having to draw his fingers away immediately. Yet it was still only moderately warm in the living room; the House with a Thousand Eyes was old – the windows didn’t fit tightly any more, there were cracks in the wood, and the heat seeped out into the corridor.
His father had made the desk, as a wedding present for Meno, with all the meticulousness and attention to detail he showed in matters of craftsmanship. The wood still seemed to smell of the forest, even though the desk had been under the large window for seven years and had absorbed the odour of tobacco. Richard had built it across the corner; the desktop was more than three metres long, and he had managed to make it fit both the cramped proportions of the room and the space by the window – to the right was the arched door leading out onto the balcony, to the left a solid larch cupboard that the previous owners had left because it was simply immovable: it wouldn’t go through the door, it had originally had to be lifted in through the window by a crane. Meno had arranged two workplaces on the desk: one for his slide preparations, dissecting instruments, specialist periodicals and microscope; the other for his typewriter and manuscript folders. Christian switched on the table lamp but didn’t touch anything, and he was careful not to get too close to the desk, Meno’s holy of holies. He looked at the photos: the three Rohde children in their parents’ lounge in Bad Schandau; Meno dissecting in the Zoological Institute of Karl-Marx University, Leipzig; as a boy of eleven or twelve, already wearing his hair with a parting, collecting botanical samples with his father, the ethnologist, near Rathen; a photo of Hanna, Meno’s ex-wife. Beside them were piles of letters, newspaper cuttings, writing paper covered in Meno’s fine, flowing, yet difficult-to-read handwriting – for many of the letters he still used the old German script which had not been taught nor generally used for a long time. Christian saw a few books published by Dresdner Edition, for whom Meno worked. It was an imprint of the Berlin Hermes-Verlag and published books the like of which could not be found on the shelves of any of the bookshops Christian knew: leather-bound de-luxe editions, hand-printed on the best-quality paper, of works such as The Divine Comedy, Faust and other classics, most with illustrations. The larger part were earmarked for export to the ‘Non-Socialist Economic Area’. Many of the few remaining copies went to acquaintances and friends of the managing director or to book collectors in the higher reaches of the Party; Christian had never seen one of these books on sale in a Dresden bookshop, and even if he had, they would have been well beyond his means – the copy of The Divine Comedy that Meno possessed cost as much as a doctor’s monthly salary.
For quite a while Christian stood looking at the things on the desk, things he automatically connected with the House with a Thousand Eyes, and with Meno, when he thought of him from far away, during one of the long bus journeys to and from Waldbrunn or at school.
He switched the light off again, stood there for a few minutes in the gloom, listening, and then took Chakamankabudibaba into the kitchen and put him down on the kitchen bench, which annoyed the cat – it wasn’t as cosy there as in the living room next door. Chakamankabudibaba arched his back, meowed plaintively and jumped down to his feeding bowls. The milk in the dish beside the food bowl was sour, and there was a piece of meat floating in it. Christian poured it all down the toilet, washed the dish and filled it. Then he fetched the barometer and wrapped it in the gift paper.
As he went upstairs he suddenly heard voices. Perhaps Libussa, Lange’s wife from Prague, had visitors; but then he recognized the voices of Annemarie Brodhagen and Professor Dathe, the famous director of the East Berlin Zoo – Libussa had switched on the television and was watching Zoos round the World. For a moment Christian felt a twinge of envy: hearing the popular professor with the clear enunciation reminded him that the last episode of Oh, What Tenants – a Danish series in which many of the ‘Olsen gang’ appeared – was on that evening, a series he loved and had grown up with. He frowned as he switched on the stair light – a bronze flower with a bulb in it; the petals were bent.
He didn’t like big celebrations, as his father’s fiftieth birthday that evening would in all probability be; he preferred to be alone. It wasn’t that he was unsociable – his dislike of company was connected with his appearance. If there was one thing Christian felt ashamed of, it was his face, precisely what people looked at when they looked at you. Although his face was basically attractive and expressive, it was covered in acne and he felt horribly embarrassed at the thought of all the people who would give him searching, mocking or even revolted looks. It was precisely that expression, revulsion, which he feared; he had seen it often enough. Someone would turn round, look at him, and, unable to conceal their shock, or even repugnance, would openly show their reaction for a fraction of a second. Then they would control themselves, realize that Christian would presumably feel hurt if they gawped at him like that and quickly select a different expression, one that was as incurious as possible, from the stock of expressions people use when they meet someone they
don’t know. But in fact it was precisely this incurious expression that hurt Christian even more; for him it was the admission that the other person had seen his disfigurement and was now ignoring it. Christian usually felt these slights so deeply that he burnt with shame. He tried to divert his thoughts from that as he slowly went up the stairs, but the closer he came to the cabin, where his dark suit and, certainly, his good English shirt would be awaiting him, the more and more uneasy he felt at the prospect of the party: all the questions people were bound to ask, mainly just for form’s sake, about how things were going at school, the well-meant advice that would follow, but above all playing his cello; even though he knew his part well, the mere thought of appearing in public made him uncomfortable.
The lamplight spread out palely over the worn stairs, hardly reaching the lower ones. The disagreeable questions and the attention focused on him were one thing, he thought, as he felt the banister, the irregularities and the grain that had been familiar since childhood. The other was the delicacies he was looking forward to, and not just since his breakfast in the hostel that morning – the same eternal constipating bread made of wheat and rye flour from the Konsum in Waldbrunn, spread with Elbperle mixed-fruit jam, syrup or black pudding – but ever since it had been agreed that the party would be held in the Felsenburg; after the small Erholung, it was the best restaurant for miles around. It wasn’t easy to even get a table in the Felsenburg, never mind to reserve the room for a large birthday gathering – as so often, it had only been made possible through connections: not long ago, the chef had been a patient of Christian’s father’s.
The ten-minute clock struck twenty past five. Professor Dathe’s voice had sunk to a low mumble; perhaps Libussa had only opened the living-room door for a moment, to see who had come into the building or to get something out of the kitchen. Since the new tenants in the top-floor apartment had arrived, the ‘Alois?’ or ‘Herr Rohde?’ that she unfailingly used to shout downstairs, however quietly you opened the door, was no longer to be heard. Christian stopped half-way up the stairs and imagined that he could hear Libussa’s high, rather husky voice, the rolled ‘R’ when she spoke his uncle’s surname, the slightly palatal ‘O’s which caused most visitors who didn’t know her to wonder where she came from. As far as he knew, she had worked as a secretary for the VEB Deutfracht shipping company and had moved to Dresden with her husband many years ago. The two of them could be seen together on some of the photographs on the staircase walls: a tall woman with a bony physique, shoulder-length hair and dark, fragile-looking eyes that seemed too big for her slim, heart-shaped face, and which regarded the observer with an expression somewhere between irritation and weariness; the lean man in the white uniform, with a searching look, hands casually stuck in his pockets and half turning away, so that the bright light of a summer’s day in Rostock harbour, some time in the fifties or sixties, left a patch of dazzling brightness on his shoulder, blending it into the background. In that picture, Christian thought, they looked like lovers who had been caught out, but perhaps they were both standing stiff as a poker because they were trying to fit in with the photographer’s idea of what a snapshot for the work team’s diary or the local section of the Baltic News should look like. On the picture beside it they were laughing, both had rucksacks slung over one shoulder and their hair was already grey; Libussa was pointing with her trekking pole into the vague distance: To Špindlerův Mlýn was written in thin handwriting on the mount; Christian had leant forward a little to decipher it. The edges of the photos were perforated, like postage stamps, and they all had the mildly dusty, shallow exposure that one got with ORWO black-and-white film.
The photos on the opposite wall, on the other hand, were quite different, and they had always aroused Christian’s admiration, and Robert’s and Ezzo’s when they were here: they were familiar with their sepia tones from the UFA film programmes that were hidden in a suitcase in the loft at Caravel – in those you could see film stars, hair precisely parted, surrounded by a faint nimbus, looking up confidently at wild mountainsides; there was no Piz Palü on the stairs, however, no dashing Johannes Heesters, but the Gulf of Salerno; the Naples coast road, the Posillipo; and Genoa harbour with the tall, massively castle-like lighthouse above it. In the past, the second flower lamp at the bottom by the entrance had worked, so that there was good light for looking at the pictures; there must be a fault in the wiring somewhere under the plaster since it still didn’t work with new bulbs. When he had been staying here, Christian had often crept down during the night to look at the photographs with a torch, sometimes with one of the miner’s lamps that were lying unused in the shed. He especially liked the three Italian ones and would marvel as he looked at them again and again, would stand there, as he did now, and let his eye wander over patches of light, houses and ships that seemed to have sprung from the sea. He went up the rest of the stairs to the top, each one creaking with a different, familiar sound. There was a dead bulb in the flat ring of lights on the upper landing as well, and the others flickered when he turned them on briefly, so as not to stumble over the coal boxes beside the Langes’ kitchen and the cabin. A strip of light could be seen under the door to the Langes’ living room; Professor Dathe had fallen silent, and a measured male voice, perhaps an announcer, had taken his place.
It was cold in the cabin; the tall cylindrical stove beside the door was only lukewarm, so Christian went to fetch a few briquettes and put them in. They clattered down the cast-iron shaft, flames shot up. In the bathroom next door, which the Langes, the Stahls and Meno shared – only the top-floor apartment had a small bathroom of its own – he washed his hands and shaved with the chunky Bebo Sher razor he had been given by his father. Then he changed, leaving his bag, still with all his things in it, on the bed where Anne had laid out linen, blankets and pyjamas for him, looked round the room once more and drew the curtain over the bullseye window before going downstairs.
He fetched the bag in which he’d put the barometer, left the kitchen door ajar for Chakamankabudibaba, checked his tie in the mirror. Now it was quiet; he could no longer hear Libussa’s television. He picked up the key and put out the light. As he closed the door, he heard the ten-minute clock strike five times; the chimes seemed to come from far, far away.
4
In the Felsenburg
‘The beautiful, refined Felsenburg, hot and cold running water in every room,’ he read on the enamel sign by the entrance. Brambles and roses cast shadows across the pavement, which had been swept and gritted as far as Vogelsang’s butcher’s shop. In the street the cars were closely parked – Christian had even seen the Opel Kapitän belonging to the director of the Surgical Clinic.
In the foyer, facing the stairs that led up to the rooms, there was a sign on an easel: PRIVATE PARTY – PLEASE DO NOT DISTURB. A bit of a cheek, Christian thought; after all, the Felsenburg did also offer accommodation and even though he knew from what his parents said that there was a direct connection between the goodwill of the restaurant staff, encouraged perhaps by repeatedly rounded-up bills, and the availability of certain tables close to the stove – especially now in winter – or clearly in the waiter’s field of vision, he could still, as he slowly walked towards the restaurant door, put himself in the place of one of the poor people who were staying the night but otherwise weren’t to disturb the private party. So there! But what had they had to eat?
‘Ah, the Herr Doktor’s eldest son, if I’m not mistaken?’ A half-smile flitted across Herr Adeling’s cheeks. ‘Of course you are, you’ve been here before, I remember. But you’ve grown since then, oh yes, tall oaks from little acorns grow, as they say. This way, please, your father’s birthday party has almost commenced.’ Herr Adeling hurried out through the flap in the reception desk and calmly took Christian’s coat. He was wearing classic waiter’s tails and there was a badge on his chest with his name engraved in clear, legible letters. He was against the decline in standards in the catering industry. One of Reglinde’s friends was
in training with him and she had told Christian what that meant for the ‘bu-bils en-drusded to my kare’. That he only fell into the Saxon dialect in places where any genuine Saxon venturing out onto the slippery ice of High German would fail hopelessly could perhaps be explained by the fact that Adeling was still, as Reglinde’s friend, full of understanding, had told them, a ‘worr-k in bro-kress’. Because of his centre-parting and manner of speaking, the trainees had nicknamed him ‘Theo Lingen’ – like the film actor, Herr Adeling was also fond of pursing his lips, clasping his hands and, after briefly rocking on his immaculately polished shoes, gliding across the dining room, his head tilted to one side and swinging his arms gracefully. He was, as he said, ‘just one lin-g in the chain’, and for him the PLEASE DO NOT DISTURB sign could well be just one more example of the declining standards in the catering industry.