The Tower: A Novel

by Uwe Tellkamp

  When the wind freshened, blowing the snow along in thick clouds, Meno had to hold on to his hat. The park was swathed in fine crystalline veils; icicles were hanging from the branches of the copper beech beside the House with a Thousand Eyes, the massive trunk looking as if it were made of black glass in the half-light. By the park, where Mondleite turned off, a pair of headlights were edging their way closer. Meno saw that they belonged to a dustcart that was approaching cautiously, slithering on the street, which was slippery under the layer of new snow; the men jumped down from the top and, swearing, trundled the dustbins, so full the lids wouldn’t close, to the lorry and stuck them in the clips, at which the bins were tipped up by the hydraulic mechanism and shaken several times to empty them. Meno turned onto Planetenweg. The street lamps were swinging and cast their metallic white light in swaying cones onto the roadway, on which gravel, grit, ash and frozen snow had been crushed to a grey pulp. Professor Teerwagen was at the wheel of his Wartburg, turning the key in the ignition – the engine kept making pained whirring noises but didn’t start – while Frau Teerwagen was busily brushing the snow off the bonnet and scraping the ice off the windows. There was a light on in the garage of Dr Kühnast, a chemist in the pharmaceutical factory; the sound of a hairdryer could be heard, Kühnast was probably using it to defrost the windscreen of his Škoda. Teerwagen’s Wartburg gave a howl, he was clearly revving up in order to try and knock some sense into the stubborn vehicle. The houses on either side were dark and silent. On Querleite, which connected Planetenweg with Turmstrasse and Wolfsleite, the characteristic winter-morning sounds could be heard: the scrape of wooden snow shovels on garden paths and pavement, the shovels being knocked to clear them at irregular intervals, the rasp of the clumps of snow that had fallen off being cleared away. Herr Unthan, the blind man who ran the communal baths in the house called Veronica, was carrying in coal. Meno turned up his coat collar and walked more quickly. It had become appreciably colder overnight; the thermometer in Libussa’s conservatory had gone down to zero. He waggled his fingers in his pockets, the tips stinging in the frost despite his good leather gloves – Richard had received a ‘quota’ through a grateful patient and passed them on to friends and relatives.

  Meno thought back to the birthday party. All the doctors and their wives, with their more or less self-confident bearing and loud voices, had disturbed him. Discussions in which the Hoffmanns, Rohdes and Tietzes were involved would quickly grow more and more heated, threatening to turn into pulse-raising declarations of principle … There was a strange ferocity at work there, an absolute sense of being right came through in those discussions, giving them a sharpness outsiders must find disconcerting, though sometimes, once they had a sense for it and could stand back, pretty funny as well … Meno smiled and gleefully kicked away a ball of snow. The way Richard and Niklas waved their arms about, making grand gestures and shouting, their faces red as beetroots: ‘Gilels is a better pianist than Richter!’ – ‘No! Richter’s better!’ – ‘No!! How can you say that?’ Meno gave a quiet laugh: at that point the gesturing hand, as was only logical, would turn to the forehead and tap it, which usually led to a further entrenchment: ‘Gilels! In-du-bit-ably! Just come over and listen to this, surely you can’t seriously maintain …’ – ‘Well come on then! Now we’ll see that your o-pin-ion is lack-ing all found-a-tion!! I tell you …’ Niklas didn’t get worked up about all this hot air and was astonishingly good at dealing with it; Richard …

  But Meno, who had turned into Turmstrasse, didn’t hear any more of what the opponents in his imaginary dialogue had to say. He started back in alarm – a silhouette appeared out of the driving snow and bounded towards him in furious leaps. It was a black dog the size of a calf, and it halted abruptly about three feet in front of him, slithered clumsily closer in flurries of snow Meno didn’t dare brush off his coat, and started to howl. He clutched his briefcase and, in order to try and assess the moment a possible attack might come, stared the beast in the eyes, which had a green glitter and looked as big as saucers when they were struck by the light of a street lamp. He looked all round. A few windows lit up in the Anton Semionovich Makarenko teacher training college where Mondleite crossed Turmstrasse; a whistle sounded, broke in the icy-cold air and continued a fourth lower, a kind of ‘heigh-ho’; the door of the college for cadet teachers opened and a bunch of sullen-looking students in brown army tracksuits with yellow and red stripes down the sleeves appeared and were ordered out into the street for their morning exercise by a man in a bobble hat. But he wasn’t responsible for the whistle; the ‘heigh-ho’ fourth sounded once more but from a man in black with a fedora whom Meno recognized as Arbogast. ‘Kastshey,’ the Baron shouted in an indignant voice, the whistle still in his hand. In the other he was holding a stick with a silver gryphon handle clenched under his arm. ‘Kastshey, heel.’ The dog flattened its ears, blinked and ducked out of the way. ‘Good morning.’ The Baron raised his hat a few centimetres above his high, emaciated-looking skull and sketched a smile that was perhaps intended to be soothing or friendly but was oddly crooked, almost like a mask on his pale face. ‘Heel,’ he repeated in a strict voice. Kastshey whimpered when the Baron gave him a tap on the head. ‘Was he a nuisance? He’s still very young and inexperienced, and almost completely untrained. Do forgive the annoyance.’ The Baron adjusted his steel spectacles. ‘By the way … I’ve read your study …’ He hesitated and his smile broadened. ‘What do you call it? I presume it’s not a novel? … of our friend Arachne. A very good piece of work, I like to see monographs like that …’ He hesitated again, put the whistle in his pocket. ‘I’ve long been fascinated by spiders. Would I be right in assuming this book is part of a more extensive work?’ The dog was sitting up on its hind legs and following the conversation attentively, panting now and then with its pink tongue hanging out. ‘Probably,’ Meno replied, nonplussed and not with great presence of mind, as it seemed to him. To be asked in the street, by a person with whom he wasn’t very well acquainted, about an article that had been published in an out-of-the-way scientific periodical, and a few months ago at that, seemed as strange as it was pleasing. Apart from the editorial committee, which had spent some time undecided as to whether it wasn’t more suited to a literary magazine, no one seemed to have noticed its publication. ‘Yes, probably,’ he said reflectively, ‘I’ve got some more material.’ Arbogast nodded, looked up again at the sky, which seemed to consist entirely of falling shrouds of snow, dirty grey in the dawn light. ‘We will invite you some time, I think. Do you know the Urania Society?’

  Meno said yes.

  ‘It will be at one of their meetings. We will contact you. Two Mondleite, isn’t it?’ Again the smile appeared and again Meno had the impression it was a foreign body hanging on Arbogast’s waxen features. ‘Or do you have a telephone?’

  ‘Only one that is used by all the tenants.’

  ‘Then we’ll write. We have nothing free for the rest of this year or next January, if I have remembered aright. But there should be something in February and certainly in March.’ Arbogast waved his stick up and down and clicked his tongue at Kastshey, who shook himself vigorously, sending out a whirling spray of white that plastered Arbogast’s face and spectacles with patches of snow. Then Kastshey dashed off. The Baron waved his stick angrily at his departing rear and left Meno without saying goodbye.

  Our friend Arachne? An odd choice of words, and Meno, who was walking on, confused but also pleased by the meeting, would have spent a long time thinking it over had a squad of soldiers not appeared out of the snowstorm when he was level with Arbogast’s observatory. A corporal with a thick Saxon accent was in charge. ‘Right wheel! – March!’ The squad turned off the street onto the path that led to the bridge, followed by the bored and arrogant look of a first lieutenant. A few cars, which Meno only noticed now, were held up behind the soldiers. The soft snow absorbed the echoes of the noises, the voice of the corporal and the tread of the boots seemed to be packed in cotton w
ool.

  ‘Detachment – halt!’ the first lieutenant ordered. ‘Get the men to repeat the manoeuvre, Comrade Corporal. That wasn’t a precise right wheel. That was as slack as an old tart’s tits.’

  More cars joined the queue, pedestrians too who had come out of Sibyllenleite and Fichtenleite and were on their way to work. They waited in silence as the squad performed an about-turn, stamping across the whole width of Turmstrasse as they did so. Meno watched them. Some of them waited with their chins jutting out aggressively, watching the soldiers’ manoeuvre out of eyes screwed up into narrow slits. Most, however, stood there with heads bowed, hands buried in their coat pockets, making patterns in the snow with the toes of their shoes. The driver of the car at the front of the queue looked at his watch irritatedly several times, drummed with his fingers on the steering wheel. One of the cars behind sounded its horn impatiently. The lieutenant broke off the manoeuvre again and strolled, clapping his hands together behind his back, as if undecided what to do, towards the car whose horn had sounded. A brief exchange could be heard, imperious on the part of the lieutenant, abashed on that of the driver. The lieutenant returned, putting a notebook back into the inside pocket of his coat, nodded to the corporal, at which the squad continued the right wheel. When the soldiers set off down the path to the bridge, the traffic jam was released. Intimidated by the behaviour of the lieutenant, whom he would meet again at the control point at the end of the path, Meno checked the papers in his briefcase again: ID card, invitation from the old man, certified hectographic copy of the contract. He had a quick look around – anyone setting off along the path to the bridge was going to East Rome and there was very little that was regarded as more suspicious in the district than a visit ‘over there’, as they would say, their scorn expressed in the avoidance of its real name. People had no great opinion of that district, or of anything connected with it – in general people avoided Grauleite; it was on the corner of Fichtenleite and Turmstrasse and it was where the barracks for the guards stood – they were called ‘the Greys’ after the street name; there also, hidden behind some trees, was a concrete bunker with tall directional antennae on it. People said they oversaw all those who marched along Grauleite, they saw through all those who walked along Grauleite.

  Three-metre-high walls ran along either side of the path to the bridge. After twenty metres there was a gate, the surrounds of which reached as high as the walls, and, beside it, a red-and-white-striped sentry box; the guard had shouldered his Kalashnikov as soon as Meno appeared and shouted, demanding to know what Meno wanted and to see his identity card. Then he pressed a bell push in the sentry box and the door opened.

  ‘Who are you going to visit?’ The lieutenant gave Meno, who was standing at the window of the checkpoint holding his hat, an appraising look and, with a casual gesture, took off his gloves.

  ‘I have an appointment with Herr Georg Altberg, eight o’clock.’ Altberg was the real name of the Old Man of the Mountain, but hardly anyone in the literary world in Dresden used it when they talked about him among themselves. Meno was surprised at how strange the name sounded, unfamiliar and oddly unsuitable. The lieutenant stretched out a hand for a binder that he was given by a corporal who was sitting at a telephone table below a board with light diodes. Rumour had it that the binder listed every one of the inhabitants of East Rome, with their name, address, function and photo, making them easy for the duty officer to identify, so that no unauthorized person could slip in. The lieutenant ran his finger down the page and showed something to the corporal, probably a telephone number, since the latter immediately drew one of the beige phones to him, dialled and handed the receiver to the lieutenant, who, after a short exchange, nodded and pushed Meno’s identity card back out on the little turntable. ‘That’s in order, you may pass. Make out a permit for him Comrade Corporal. How long will your visit last?’ the officer asked, turning to Meno.

  ‘I can’t say at the moment, it’s a business meeting.’

  ‘Take a one-third form,’ the lieutenant ordered. The corporal took a form out of a pigeonhole that was full of neatly ordered papers, inserted it with a carbon and a sheet of paper in the typewriter and started to hack out the permit, letter by letter, on the machine beside the red telephone, which was on the far right, below the light-diode board. There were one-eighth, one-quarter, one-third, one-half and full permits; they were for fractions of twenty-four hours. As far as Meno knew, only residents had unlimited permits. He waited. The two-finger system of the corporal, a well-fed, sandy-haired lad with peasant’s hands, did not seem very efficient. If he mistyped a letter the whole process would begin again, and he would be given another chance to watch the typist’s tongue gradually make his cheek bulge and the lieutenant twitch slightly every time the corporal hit a key. The officer was standing there quietly, sipping coffee out of a plastic mug, and observing Meno. The corporal then began to fiddle with the light-diode board. Behind him were a shelf with keys, a sealed cabinet, a portrait of Brezhnev with a black ribbon across the upper left corner. On the table beside the lieutenant was Snow Crystal, a volume of short stories by Georg Altberg.

  ‘Signature, one-third permit, eight-hour stay.’ The corporal rotated the form and a ballpoint pen through the window. ‘In the box under “Permit-holder”.’ Meno put his hat back on, picked up the pen but was so agitated that his signature came out as a scrawl. He folded the carbon copy and put it in his briefcase with his identity card. The barrier beyond the checkpoint was raised.

  At the other end of the bridge a few soldiers were engaged in shovelling snow and knocking off ice. Meno pulled his hat down tighter and kept his coat collar up by fastening the button to the loop on the lapel; there was a bitter, raw wind, constantly blowing snow over the studded cast-iron plates on which he was walking, playing with the bare bulbs that hung down from the wires between the railings, which were well over six-foot high, plucking at the steel hawsers that secured the arch between the slopes as if they were harp strings, and producing a dark, singing sound, now and then shot through with a violent crack, as when ice breaks.

  The milky early light over the point where the valley opened out in the direction of Körnerplatz and the Elbe had risen as far as the flanks of East Rome, casting a reddish glow over the ridge, which was saw-toothed with the tips of spruce trees; the citadel of the suspension railway towered up from it like an ancient triumphal arch. The light also revealed the funicular, where the cars were just going through the manoeuvre at the loop half-way up, the queue of cars on Grundstrasse below, Vogelstrom’s house, gardens covered with snow and the black blobs of the wood-stacks. Dirty grey smoke came from the chimneys on most roofs; torn away by the wind, the fumes drifted through the air like scraps of dishcloth. Now and then the fog would open up and Meno could see the queue of cars creeping slowly towards Körnerplatz, a 61 bus wheezing as it struggled up the road, could make out the ice brush bristling with jagged prongs into which the White Nun over the wheel of the disused copper mill had frozen. Was anyone watching him from below? Recognizing him from his hat or his build? The railings were high and the bridge itself was over sixty feet above the ground, so it seemed unlikely. However, he still started to walk faster. The soldiers stood to attention and saluted as he passed. That alarmed him. Did he look like someone from East Rome, like an influential functionary with his briefcase, hat and coat? Had they recognized him? It wasn’t the first time he had been there, though his last visit had been almost two years ago – when he and Hanna had got divorced. If the soldiers had been recruits then and had been called up again as reservists, they might remember him. Or did they salute everyone who came across the bridge – just in case and out of fear of the vanity of some important or self-important man? Reflecting on this, Meno passed through the second checkpoint. A captain waved him through without asking to see his identity card. Perhaps the lieutenant had informed him and the captain, knowing him to be reliably alert, had decided he didn’t need to bother with a second check. Still, Meno
was surprised. This laxity was something new. Even when he’d gone out with Hanna and they’d come back over the bridge, they had had to submit to two checks, and neither of the two officers had ever been put off by Hanna’s maiden name, under which she appeared in the binder and was careful to state. At that time the bridge had been the sole access to East Rome – the suspension railway had been out of use for months because of a structural defect – and it was only when Barsano himself, First Secretary of the local Party organization, had been double-checked every time he went across the bridge that the repairs to the suspension railway were carried out at undreamt-of speed.