by Uwe Tellkamp
‘What a lovely prek-fest!’ Libussa clapped her hands together with joy. ‘Krishan, Gerhart, let me remind you of that before you start eating like horses. We can thank God that at least we can get enough rolls and bread in this country. When I think back to the war …’ She went round filling their second cups with hot milk that she got from a collective farm beyond Bühlau, on the Schönfeld plateau; very little fat had been taken out of the cow’s milk – it was more like white soup than milk and Christian found it nauseating; but Libussa thought he didn’t have enough muscle, and that he was at the stage that would decide ‘whether he would turn into a man or a pencil’. Therefore she refused to be put off by his expression and filled his cup.
‘Thanks again for the roses, Libussa.’ Meno, who had switched on Radio Dresden, bent over a tub with Maréchal Niel roses. ‘All the wives were envious of them and insisted I give them the address of the market garden. Did I perhaps get the flowers from the Rose Gorge or from Arbogast’s greenhouses? How did I manage to bribe the grower?’
The ship’s doctor came in. He’d put on a dressing gown and was carrying Chakamankabudibaba, who blinked in the light, arched his back and climbed into a basket that was next to a magnificent sago palm. Lange and Stahl rubbed their hands expectantly and licked their lips. There was the smell of tea, coffee, freshly made cocoa, there were preserved quinces and cherries, plum jam and forest honey, and beside the basket of rolls covered with a cloth was one of Libussa’s specialities: apricots that had been dried to make a kind of firm pastry and cut into thin strips that Christian (who kept squinting over at the plate, bringing a grin from Stahl, whose chair was much closer to the delicacy) thought would do a lot more to promote his growth and physical development than hot cow’s milk. Libussa and her husband put their hands together for grace: ‘By Thy hands we all are fed, give us, Lord, our daily bread.’ Radio Dresden was broadcasting a poem by a senior functionary of the Writers’ Association who had fought valiantly for socialism. Meno listened, a pained look on his face, while Christian and the others, unmoved, helped themselves to what was on the table. The poem was about ideals, a bright future, Lenin and Marx, about heroic deeds on the building site of tomorrow, about shaping communism and ‘About you, comrade, blithely breakfasting, / free of the cares of those / on guard!’ Stahl paused as he was cutting his roll open. ‘Tell me, Meno, do you have to read that kind of stuff every day? O blithely breakfasting book-editor …’
‘Theodor Fontane?’ the ship’s doctor suggested, pursing his lips as he looked for his Heilpunkt digestion tablets. Meno still had the pained look on his face. The engineer put his knife down and, his elbow on the table, rested his chin on his hand to listen, chortling now and then, the sides of his nostrils quivering. Seizing the opportunity, Christian speared two slices of apricot with his fork.
‘That’s what those in East Rome like to hear. If it was up to them, writers would only produce that kind of stuff.’
‘Do they have to broadcast it? So many verses from blithely breakfasting bureaucrats per month? For once they could’ – Stahl looked round, searching – ‘celebrate something quite ordinary in their verse. We have to do it! Four fuel engineers fashion fire from faeces. Celebrate the common things, comrade.’
Meno laughed, picked up his roll and examined it for a while, a glint of mockery in his eye. He stood up, stretched out his hand with the roll in a histrionic gesture:
‘Thee will I sing, O thoroughbred Dresdner bread roll,
Splendidly chubby-cheeked promoter of gluttony.
But, tell us, cam’st thou from Elysium’s Konsum?
Did Bunn, the baker, take thee out of a state-owned oven?
Cam’st thou from Wachendorf’s cosily floured emporium?
Or from Walther’s or George’s baskets, morose in the dawn’s early light?
But tell me, O dough-born culinary marvel from Dresden,
How should the bard’s greedy-gluttonous mouth name thee,
He whose longing lips laud thee in lustful lines?
Pert and pliant as a young girl’s bosom thou lurest
To taste thee, but is it merely a taste thou wilt grant
When the bard’s one desire is to sink
His teeth into thee as deep as a ravenous wolf,
To tear, with beastly maw and howling, juicy lumps
Out of thy flavoursome flanks – O how!
How shall I name thee, freshly baked, toothsome bagpipe,
Taste-buds tickler, O Dresdner dulcimer,
Manna of the muses, who suffer in silence
The oven’s hellish heat, thou acme of Saxon genius,
O bread roll?’
Their laughter broke off abruptly as applause came from the door to the spiral staircase and the hall. They all turned their heads. The two young men who lowered their hands and slowly put them in their trouser pockets looked by no means unsure of themselves. The flush on their cheeks seemed to come from participation in the amusement rather than from embarrassment, and Christian, who kept looking back and forth between the twins and those sitting round the table, would never have managed the lack of inhibition with which they, giggling and praising the condition of the plants on either side, sauntered towards them. They were identical twins, and they added to their confusing similarity of appearance by wearing the same clothes: white, fine-gauge, cable-stitch roll-neck pullovers, rather worn jeans and trainers.
‘This is a private room, Herr … Kaminski?’ Stahl was the first to recover from his surprise and pointed round the conservatory with his knife, which had a little blob of butter on the tip.
‘That is correct, Kaminski is our name. And to distinguish between us, I’m René and this is Timo.’ The closer of the two jerked his chin in the direction of his brother, whose cheerful expression turned into an inviting smile at the words ‘distinguish between’, which his brother had accompanied with an explanatory, but not mocking gesture. No one returned the smile or interpreted it as the invitation to a friendly response, as it might have been intended; Libussa and her husband sat there, stiff and silent; Meno, who was still standing, blinked in irritation then, after an exchange of looks with the ship’s doctor, sat down as Kaminski, perhaps in order to get over the oppressive silence, came towards him. The news was on the radio now; Christian heard the ten-minute clock chime in Meno’s living room. Chakamankabudibaba had woken up and was eyeing the two brothers suspiciously; their blond hair, combed this way and that over several cowlicks, was struck by the irruption of light and looked like frothy sunshine.
‘Oh, you’ve got two more chairs, that is nice.’ The twin whose name had been given as Timo pointed to two folded garden chairs that were leaning against the tub of roses. Stahl cleared his throat and dropped his knife on his plate with a clatter. The bafflement on Lange’s face had given way to outrage. ‘This is a private room, as Herr Stahl said, and I cannot remember having invited you to join us for breakfast. Would you be good enough to explain your behaviour, gentlemen? You are in the apartment of Alois and Libussa Lange and I am not aware that the Communal Housing Department has made any new decrees or amendments –’ The ship’s doctor broke off as Kaminski quickly raised his hand. ‘New decrees or amendments are not necessary, Herr Lange. At least not insofar as you are referring to existing tenancy agreements.’
‘This is home invasion!’ thundered the engineer. Timo Kaminski had unfolded the chairs and placed them on the chessboard floor under the sago palm. His brother took out a packet of Jewel cigarettes, sniffed the air and asked, with a suggestion of a bow in Libussa’s direction, whether he might smoke. She nodded, speechless with surprise, as it seemed to Christian. Kaminski flicked his lighter, lit the cigarette, drew on it with relish. ‘No, it is not a case of home invasion, Herr Stahl. The concept doesn’t apply here … We are the new tenants in the attic apartment in this building. We were very pleased to be allocated that apartment … You know the difficult housing situation. And then we are assigned the attic apartment in a quiet hous
e on a slope with excellent views … Can you not imagine our delight? And can you not imagine that in such a case one does not simply move in, as into any old accommodation, but makes enquiries about the conditions here, finds out as much information as one can in city departments, in documents at the land registry, and about you as well, of course, our future neighbours? That is right and proper, is it not? We’re not moving just anywhere but here, into this district above Dresden, to Mondleite, into the former property of a manufacturer of fine soaps whose renown, in his day, had spread far and wide beyond the confines of the country …’
The ship’s doctor interrupted him: ‘What do you want?’
‘Us? Nothing at all. Except to introduce ourselves, make ourselves known in the hope that we will be on good terms with our neighbours.’
‘And for that you break into someone else’s apartment, into our conservatory? What kind of behaviour is that?’ Libussa shook her head in indignation.
‘Breaking into someone else’s apartment?’ René and Timo, who had already sat down and spent the conversation pushing back the cuticle of his fingernails with a knife, looked at each other in astonishment. ‘Breaking in? Home invasion? My dear neighbours – is that how you respond to our attempt to be friendly, to introduce ourselves? That isn’t very fair. It doesn’t show goodwill. As I said, we have gathered information, my dear Frau Lange. And in no lease, no document in the land registry, in no tenancy agreement does it say that this conservatory belongs to your apartment and is thus for your own private use. It is not written down anywhere and that is a fact. You don’t need to go and check now,’ René said, raising his hands as Lange stood up. ‘But if you don’t believe me – well, go and check in your documents. You will see that I am right. And that means this conservatory belongs to all of us who live in this beautiful house, that is to you, Dr Stahl, and your family, to you, Herr Rohde, to the Langes and to us, since we now live here – and for that reason, then, prohibitions, claims of established rights and so on have no relevance. No more than those misleading expressions you used previously and which we beg you not to repeat. As good neighbours.’
7
East Rome
Snow, snow was falling on Dresden, on the Mondleite where Meno, as he came back from his walk in the dark, could see the shadows of the inhabitants in the lit windows, the worried face of Teerwagen, a physicist in the Barkhausen Building at the Technical University, who waved to him from the balcony; snow was falling on the district, was caught on the branches of the trees, lay there like strips of candy floss, transforming the rhododendrons into white bells, piling up on the footpaths, covering the tracks of birds, deer and cats in the front gardens with a sheet of fresh, glistening damask, burying in a few hours the cars, which had been laboriously scraped clear, in thickly spun layers, huge cocoons in which shapeless organisms slept through their metamorphosis.
On Monday morning Meno got up earlier than usual, yet he could hear the engineer already bustling about in the kitchen.
‘Morning, Gerhart.’
‘Morning. Baba’s back outside. I’ve already given him something.’
‘Can I have a bath?’
‘It’s free. The boiler will take a few minutes.’
‘Did Sabine ring?’ The House with a Thousand Eyes had a telephone; Lange had finally had a line allocated after waiting for fifteen years. The tenants used it communally.
‘Her train should arrive at Neustadt Station at half five. Nine-hour delay because of snow drifts. I’ll go and collect her, that’s why I’m up already. The Eleven’s still not going, but should I try with the car in this weather? What d’you think?’
‘They were gritting Bautzener Strasse yesterday, it should be fairly clear by now.’
‘But the stuff is so corrosive, it’ll absolutely ruin the bodywork.’
Stahl went to the refrigerator, took out bread and butter, started to butter a few slices. ‘Sylvia will be really tired. And hungry. After Berlin there was nothing to eat in the buffet.’
‘Give both of them my best wishes.’
After his morning wash Meno went to his living room to look through the papers for the Old Man of the Mountain again. Christian had lost his place markers in the Schelling books but hadn’t mentioned it, presumably confident that he, Meno, immersed in thought, self-absorbed and dreamy, as he probably appeared to most people, wouldn’t notice. Oh but he did! His father had encouraged him to observe things precisely; he had often gone walking with him in the hills of ‘Saxon Switzerland’ and his father had always subjected botanical or zoological finds to detailed scrutiny; he hadn’t been satisfied with a quick glance but tried to bring out the specific characteristics of any living thing, whether plant or animal, ordinary dandelion or rare lady’s slipper, to familiarize Meno with it. Precise observation, quiet, devoted faithfulness to the large- and small-scale phenomena of nature, daily routine and yet tireless seeking, digging, the capacity for amazement. Meno thought of his university teachers – Falkenhausen: choleric, obsessive attention to detail, running round the institute in Jena, white coat fluttering out behind him, by day wearing a magician’s blue bow tie with white spots, by night sleepless in his pyjamas and dressing gown; he had a room in the basement of the institute, where he lived surrounded by snakes, white mice and spiders, making coffee in Erlenmeyer flasks, frying eggs for supper in platinum crucibles which were iridescent with the remains of chemicals, setting off firecrackers, left over from New Year celebrations, to counter the oppressive silence of all the stuffed and prepared animals in the nocturnal corridors of the institute; Otto Haube in the Leipzig Institute, which had two massive stone bears by the entrance and labyrinthine staircases and laboratories where alchemists would have felt at home; Haube, who had escaped from the concentration camps in the Third Reich and wanted to develop a socialist zoology – before the beginning of the term, he sent all the students out into the fields round Leipzig to help in the fight against the Colorado beetle, which had been dropped there by the imperialist class enemy – but who could also, after hours of an inquisition-like viva, suddenly push his spectacles up onto his scholar’s forehead with the duelling scars and, faced with a fruit-fly that the candidate, as a last resort, had had to make out of modelling clay, quote Goethe: ‘Nature and art, they seem to shun each other’. It wasn’t easy with either of these teachers, they were merciless in their fight against imprecision, and Haube, the socialist zoologist, once even had an assistant transferred because he had twice, in a short space of time, recorded imprecise data, saying he had no sense of the dignity of his work, that was what he, Haube, had been forced to conclude from the results of these experiments, which had been carried out inadequately out of sheer laziness, whereas a scientist expressed his love in the strictest precision. Such assistants were no use either to him or to socialism.
Meno picked up the manuscript the Old Man of the Mountain had submitted to Dresdner Edition. There were going to be problems with the book, that was clear to Meno; that was clear to Josef Redlich, Meno’s superior at Dresdner Edition; that was clear to the managing director of the firm, Heinz Schiffner, who read a few pages, raised his ice-grey bushy eyebrows and slowly lowered them, closed the book and shook his head sadly; and that was clear to the Old Man of the Mountain himself. A tale about a mine into which the ‘hero’ descended, enticed into the depths by the siren song of a silver bell. Problems less of an artistic than of an ideological nature; the old story Meno had become sick of hearing over the last few years. Editor’s report, external report from an editor not employed by the publishing company with a recommendation for publication, Yes or No, together with the grounds for the decision, then the whole lot went to the censor and, if he was unsure, which had been happening more and more recently, the dossier went to the Minister for Books or even higher. A time-consuming process, injurious to one’s self-respect. He wondered how the Old Man of the Mountain dealt with it, and whether one of the reasons that had prompted him to try Dresdner Edition was precisel
y these problems with the censors and the hope that he could avoid them in a branch of Hermes-Verlag that was outside Berlin. That would be a mistake, as he would have to make clear to the old man; after all, he had been in the business long enough not to harbour any illusions. Meno knew that it was a delicate mission he was about to undertake. Schiffner didn’t like these conversations with his authors and would send his editor, Meno, in his stead. Meno felt that there was something dishonest, perhaps even obscene, in these conversations – he’d once mentioned this to Schiffner, but the only result had been an outburst of rage from his boss, which to him seemed to suggest a guilty conscience. You explained to the author which passages would, in all probability, be objected to and then left it to him to decide whether, and to what extent, he was prepared to accept censorship, that is self-censorship. Some called that fair dealing; but on top of the humiliation that the manuscript would not be printed as it had been written came the humiliation that the author had to mutilate it himself, bit by bit. That meant he was left without the opportunity to defend himself against certain criticisms – he had given the book the shape in which it had appeared himself. This was standard practice with all publishers, but it gave Meno palpitations, and he felt sorry for the authors, and not just because he was an author himself. It was taking away part of their dignity. Meno hated these conversations just as much as Schiffner did, but Schiffner was his boss. He hated them above all when the authors themselves – and this did happen – had no problem with the practice, when, on the contrary, they were grateful that the publisher was so cooperative and discussed desired changes of an ideological nature with them.
Meno thought of Lührer. With the most unconcerned expression, he would pick up the red pencil and cross out whole paragraphs of his text, which wasn’t badly written at all, would change the interpretation of a character with two or three sharp cuts, would turn a pensioner non grata into an acceptable policeman, an undesirable allusion to our Polish brothers into a pat on the back for Bulgaria; he knew the most important people in the Ministry of Culture who were responsible for publishing, knew their characteristics, preferences and little foibles, and took them into account in his writing. What he didn’t know was the ‘state of the weather’: the guidelines of the binding ideology that could change from week to week, sometimes from day to day. What was acceptable, what was no longer acceptable and, even more important, what would soon be acceptable. Lührer would rewrite his manuscript according to the way the managing director or Meno interpreted the prevailing mood; recently he had even gone over to working from the outset with variants that would fit in with the most common, the most likely developments, such as had been seen often enough since the sixties and seventies. Meno would sit there with this man, who once, long before the Bitterfeld writers’ conference in 1959, had written some outstanding stories and been one of the most talented writers of the East, saying nothing and staring into space while Lührer talked about the compromises ‘Schiller and his comrades’ had had to accept to get their works performed and printed at all. Eventually they would drop the topic of literature and examine the entrails of various Party Conference resolutions, commentaries on them and circulars from the secretaries of the different levels of the Writers’ Association. Perhaps it would be different with the Old Man of the Mountain, perhaps he would be confronted with a fit of rage and a plain refusal to distort his manuscript until it fitted in with some kind of ideological concept. Perhaps. Meno was looking forward to the meeting with a kind of sporting thrill of anticipation. He was acquainted with the Old Man of the Mountain as an author, in fact very well. But as far as this side of literary work was concerned, he didn’t know him at all. In a somewhat excited and apprehensive state, Meno shut the briefcase in which he had put the papers and books and stood up. The clock was striking half past six as he left the house.