by Uwe Tellkamp
‘Well, Herr Rohde … no. Of course I suspected it might happen, you know that, your words, so carefully chosen to break it to me gently, tell me that … And now you’re wondering why I’m laughing? Because once again I’ve noticed how much vanity there still is inside me. How the rejection rankles, despite the tactfulness with which you step delicately round it, how it gnaws at me and festers. Festers, yes, that’s the right word. It was three years’ work, by the way, hard work; I’m pretty exhausted. And then I have to laugh. Just laugh. At myself, at my face, that’s staring at you, at my head, that looks as if it’s made out of papier mâché, a real rag-and-bone ghost’s head fit only for the puppet-theatre, with fluffy bits of wool instead of hair – don’t you think?’
‘Please, Herr Altberg, I’m …’
‘Yes, yes, I know, you’re sorry. Incidentally, so am I. I can imagine how hard it must be to have to come and tell me … Who enjoys being a bearer of bad tidings, eh? But I’m forgetting my duties as host. Would you like coffee or tea?’
‘Now I am able to continue the letter. I don’t want to send it as it is. I’ve had a temperature, I had to stay in bed when it was at its worst. Dr Fernau, my GP, will make a house call, but after that he won’t come again if it’s under forty degrees. Mere trifles, he says, up to that limit the body can help itself. I was tired and exhausted, had to think a lot. Now I’ve more or less recovered and I don’t want to give up that soon. Your questions have brought so many things back to mind …
‘Am I outside, with no one to watch over me? In a landscape of deep snow? For I dig my hands into the white and see myself sink to my knees trying to match my father, who lifts up the ball and carefully places it on top of the other one, giving the snow-woman a torso; with a large wooden comb she made herself, my sister has already traced the pleats in her skirt, now she’s waiting for the third ball, mine, to fix straw hair into it, make the eyes with little lumps of coal, stick a carrot nose in and cover it with a battered pot that’s usually in the shed and full of bulbs in the summer. The enamel has split off in several places, the patches look like black islands, which makes me say: Gundel, we’ll sail to the South Sea in it. With no one to watch over us. No one to keep a watch on us. But Father’s standing beside me, my face is still stinging from the smack he gave me, because it won’t do that I, the son of the district pharmacist Hubert Altberg, do not have the strength to lift a measly little ball of snow up onto two others. His big red hand. On the back of his hand dry skin from freckles, tufts of sandy hair on his fingers, thick; Father’s fist (just catch a sniff of that, one tap and you’re done for, eh?) looks as if it’s got fur on. Education with cats: he throws the kittens in the rainwater barrel behind the house – either they manage to scramble out of the water, which is so good for the flowers in the beds in the front garden, or they’re sucked down into the depths, in which soft shadows play for minutes on end. The kitten that managed it is grasped by the scruff of the neck and held over the water again; Father looks seriously at the struggling paws, seems to be wondering whether my sister and I, who have to stay by the barrel, understand what he’s telling us; finally he swings his arm out to the side (but not always; sometimes he throws the kitten back in and holds it under water with his thumb until the end), opens his fist over the ground and only then may we pick the cat up and rub it dry.’
Meno was impressed by Altberg’s ability to transform his look. The thousands of wrinkles and creases seemed to be there for the sole purpose of producing every possible facial expression with the precision of a woodcut; the light in the spacious study, which cast imperious shadows, only served to intensify that impression. A piece of acting? That was not how it seemed to Meno; every emotion that appeared on the old man’s face seemed to be genuinely there at that moment and every one was unmistakable. Essences of emotion: at those words he could see in his mind’s eye the walnut pharmacy cabinets beside which the old man had walked up and down, the brown and white phials with their many-coloured contents, labels with rounded corners and ornate inscriptions in iron-gall ink, the precision balance on a shelf above the desk. The old man threw the manuscript into a drawer, muttering something in a tone of contempt rather than resignation that alarmed Meno. The housekeeper came, bringing coffee, hot milk and a basket with biscuits, reproachfully held out to Altberg a scarf that he wound round his neck with an expression of disgust, took a china mortar and pestle off a shelf, ground tablets. ‘Your medicine, you haven’t taken it again,’ the housekeeper said in a voice weary of reminding him, of her fruitless struggle with the old man’s obstinacy. He grimaced, waved her away, went over to the window, slurped the milk after having tipped the contents of the mortar into his cup.
‘I’m not supposed to get up yet, that’s why she was so short with you. My doctor has forbidden it. She’s his ally and begrudges me the pleasure of having a visitor,’ the old man croaked with a conspiratorial expression. ‘But you can only believe half of what doctors say and if they write something down you should be extra suspicious.’ He laughed quietly to himself. ‘It was my father who said that, the owner of the Sertürn Pharmacy in Buchholz, a little town in the Riesengebirge. Unreadable prescriptions, outrageous potions! “Quacks with degrees the lot of them!” was his stock phrase. Of course, it was partly jealousy. Fernau sounded my lungs, tapped me on the chest and back: “You’ve got pneumonia, Altberg, you should be in bed, right? You’re wheezing like an old alarm clock.” And I said, “Yes, sir, Major Doctor, sir!” ’
‘A tactful man,’ Meno remarked.
‘He knows how to treat me, that’s all. His gruff manner cheers me up. Moreover I imagine a gruff doctor can deal with illnesses better, but that’s probably an old wives’ tale, but I tell myself: he’s not taking the illness seriously, so it can’t be serious. Oh, look.’ The old man pointed out of the window to a bird table standing alone on the steep downslope of the garden where the snow, perhaps from the power station, perhaps from Black Mathilda, had traces of soot here and there.
‘Sparrows, inevitably,’ said Meno. ‘Hawfinches. A pair of goldfinches.’
‘And there a crossbill, if I’m not mistaken!’ Altberg was pleased. ‘They’ve become rare. Next to the chaffinch, do you see? But let’s sit down.’
‘I will pick the smooth yarrow … And Grandmother’s gestures, her wood-pulp voice: You shall have some soldiers, my lad, hussars in dolman and jerkin with mother-of-pearl buttons and braiding, drawn swords and horses from the Puszta, and during the night the wind will tell you stories of the rivers, of the Neisse in the country round Glatz as it winds its way through our Silesia, and it will tell you about a girl, my lad, who is waiting for you and whose picture you carry in your hussar’s coat, and when the smoke comes from the great Silesian Railway her eyes will not be sad. The train, the fiery horse with smoking nostrils and blazing red hair behind the tender, will carry me off, on a winter’s morning like that the air is soapy, the snow wheezes under your feet, a rickety zinc-white suit of armour and the knight inside it is breathing heavily, as if he were combing hessian when he takes a breath. Yarrow, yarrow … And sage and arnica – that the old women in the little town call mountain wolverley – meadow kerses and devil’s spoons, horsetail for cleaning silver and the Aesculapian snake in the glass cylinder, Rübezahl, the spirit of the Sudeten Mountains, smiles down from an enamel advertising sign promising healing power from the Riesengebirge and when the doorbell has stopped ringing after the butcher’s wife has left, there are no more customers in the shop and Father is stomping upstairs, puffing and panting, with the sausages that he’s been given in exchange for Glauber’s salt, an infusion of bittersweet, a specific to lower blood pressure and Altberg’s Genuine Digestive Herb Mixture, patent pending in Breslau, the light in the room pauses, has to get used to the silence again, has to peek out of its hiding places in the medicine cabinets, phials, chemical ampoules, has to grow again, to unfold on the writing engraved in the frosted glass of the shop window before it starts to flirt with the wall
mirror, with the brass banister going up to the living quarters, before it gets sleepy again and stretches out on the polished mahogany on which Father checks prescriptions and puts them together; then it starts to trickle out of the clouds on the ceiling on which a Silesian heaven, as Aunt Irmelin derisively puts it, has been painted. The driver grasps the cord of the steam whistle.’
‘You despise me, don’t you?’ The old man raised his hands in a protective gesture when Meno made a movement. ‘You won’t admit it, of course. But when you’re by yourself, what then? You’ll take an image of me away from here, of Altberg’s doleful countenance and his hundred pathetic paste pots, with the contents of which he sticks feathers on his paper birds, and of that there’ – he pointed to a manuscript on the desk, a jumbled heap of interleaved sheets of paper and photos all stuck together; but the gesture could also have been directed at the sketches hanging beside the desk, tangled lines full of cryptic symbols, numbers and arrows in different colours. That must be the mountain project, Altberg’s magnum opus. ‘This thing,’ he murmured, ‘that I’ve been hacking away at for eight years and it still refuses to take shape. Ten days for one page, and every page has to be of the same glass on which even the hardest and most malevolent reader’s eye cannot leave a scratch. But you … You’ll go home and despise me, secretly, perhaps without even realizing yourself that you despise me … An old man who still believes in a just society – after the events you have read about in the manuscript your publishing house has rejected! A perfect fool, yes? As to your rejection – I know Schiffner. An honest man, a publisher of the old school and that means one who knows how to find a way; but he’s also a bit self-important and timorous … Self-importance and fear, that, by the way, is the typical German mixture. Expressed in externalities: sentimentality and the barracks yard … they love songs and munitions do the Germans … Well, I’m a dead man, Rohde, I’m not fooling myself. But the thing that I’ve believed in is alive … What do they think of us over there?’ the old man asked, abruptly and with an eager expression, leaving it to Meno to interpret ‘over there’ as the district to which the funicular railway went. ‘Not very much,’ Meno said after some hesitation. ‘They don’t like East Rome. Anyone who lives here is despised by those over there, without exception.’
‘So I’m right.’
‘I don’t despise you.’
‘But you will! Times change and we are asleep … Didn’t the gnomes smile at you as you came up the street?’
‘I too believe in the improvement of mankind, Herr Altberg … That it is possible to build a society in which everyone can live a decent life.’
‘But that is not this society, Herr Rohde!’ the old man said in a voice that made Meno shudder.
‘Rübezahl’s helpers come steaming out of the engine’s chimney, on the window ice-patterns form that my breath makes transparent, makes disappear so that I see the marketplace of Buchholz gradually float out of sight; on a hillside the train goes past the valley in which the town lies, the church tower with its weathercock and fire bell, the Hagreiter House of the Rebenzoll brothers, the richest merchants in the town, with its arched façade and half-timbered upper storey on which a fresco painter from Obersalzbrunn has painted hunting scenes; his father’s pharmacy with its turret and the statue of Friedrich Sertürner holding a snake and a balance, then comes the bend and Buchholz is memory; the flood-sprite is booming, the ebb-sprite is looming, the sand-sprite entombing, I can hear Grandmother whisper as she soothingly strokes my fevered brow; the snow-sprite … The train stopped on the open line, a man in uniform got on the train, held up a lantern and ordered us out, one suitcase per boy, “Off the train, at the double, cases on the sleigh”; we were to follow him. Snow slipped off the branches of the spruce trees, hobgoblins were crouching in nests of shadow, pointing malicious fingers at us, the uniformed man strode on ahead of us at a speed we could hardly keep up with, on the left a gorge opened up, a menacing eye with lashes of bizarre branches; I was the last in the line, not daring to turn round, Woodwose would have given me a wolf’s foul form, Banshee howl till I was lost in the storm; how I started as a heavy bird flew off with a clatter of wings. The Löschburg came in sight, the former robber baron’s lair in the Eulengebirge, now a school and educational establishment for “useful future recruits for the state service”, as it was called and where Father had decided I should go, Aunt Irmelin could sigh and Gundel weep as much as they liked: Georg has to be broken, it will be for his own good, one day he’ll thank me for it and you’ll see that I was right. He dreams too much, and anyone who dreams too much will end up as food for the crows. – A room in which a hundred pupils sleep. An iron bedstead, a bedside table, a locker, unlocked because, the principal tells us at roll-call: Anyone who steals from a comrade should be cast out of the community of the school and from the community of the German nation. Obedience, Order, Honesty, Loyalty are demanded by an inscription in the refectory, where at six in the morning we say prayers with our breath steaming in the cold before we eat nettle soup and a crust of bread. We, ten-year-old boys with cropped hair, had the honour of being selected, from among all those in Silesia, for the Löschburg, the brightest minds in the country, as Father said; I see his name scratched on my desk. Stand up when answering, thumbs on your trouser seams, sit down when required to, sleep to order, lists of Latin vocabulary, a smack with the cane on the palm of your hand for every word you forget. Motto: pain makes you remember. The boy in the bed and desk beside mine, he’s called Georg like me, is bold enough to contradict the teacher; a month’s detention in the castle with lessons to catch up on makes him hold his tongue and sends me, who also have to undergo the punishment, into despair, to the sick-bay, full of hatred, fear and introspection. I had done something, as the rector announced at punishment roll-call, that was worse than Georg’s contradiction: I had supported him, I was loyal to the deviant, not to the school; I had not obeyed the undisputed authority of the teacher, expressed in the silver braid on his epaulettes, where we, the pupils, only had a cloth number. I get a month in the detention cell instead of being expelled because Father goes to see the principal and agrees with him that I need a firm hand. I avoid being expelled. I get a thrashing with a cane soaked in water and am allowed back in the dormitory where Arthur, my personal servant – whom I, like the other pupils with their servants, never address by anything other than by his first name – will once more empty my chamber pot and washbasin for me, who have returned to join the young elite of the future model German state, to join those whose resistance to the silver braid will consist in gaining it.’
‘By the way, I’ve read your piece about spiders. Arbogast was good enough to make a hectograph copy for me. I assume he’s invited you to one of our Urania meetings? He intended to do that, he said so in the accompanying letter.’
‘I ran into him this morning and, indeed, he did invite me.’
‘What do you think of him?’ At this question the Old Man of the Mountain gave Meno a quick, cold glance.
‘I don’t know him and I don’t think one should draw any half-baked psychological conclusions from the fact that he sets store by his “von”, has a walking stick with a silver gryphon handle and an untrained dog. They’re just labels.’
‘And that, you think, is the same as the Spreewald pickled gherkins the label on the jar promises us, without the piece of paper telling us how they taste! A good answer. A cautious answer.’ The Old Man of the Mountain laughed quietly. ‘You don’t trust me. You secretly despise me and react like a fox that has scented the hunter.’
‘What you are insinuating is not the case, Herr Altberg,’ Meno replied indignantly. ‘Why should I despise you? What would make me do that? Please believe me.’
‘I know that earlier on you said you consider a better society possible … the fair social order in which people can be happy. Égalité, Fraternité … the ideals of 1789, in other words the socialist kingdom of heaven. It comes from Paris, as we see. In Antiquity hope was an
evil … Égalité, hmm. Soon it’ll be the year of people who are more equal than all the rest.’
‘You read Orwell?’ Meno said with a faint smile. ‘If you’re trying to test me –’
‘It would be a poor testing technique to quote the class enemy first of all in order to lure you out of your reserve; as it happens I’ve had a sniff of that as well. You have a sense of humour, Herr Rohde, I like that. Humour is an unmistakable sign …’ Of what? Meno didn’t ask when the old man broke off abruptly.
‘1940, the official letter with swastika and stamp. Romanticism and bureaucracy, there’s nothing worse, Herr Rohde. Conscription papers for those born in 1922, of which I am one. Report to the barracks; I was delighted to do it, I was an unconditional supporter of National Socialism, blond, blue-eyed and six foot tall, I had nothing to fear from it, I belonged to the race of the chosen ones, that was setting out to conquer the world … and would conquer the world, for me there was no doubt about that. And that was quite right for the others were inferior; it had been hammered into us that they did not share our beliefs, our values: decency, loyalty unto death, honour. I was part of it, a hussar a hussar thou shalt be with dolman and sabre and sword-knot, the villages will burn, but thou but thou, my little Guards officer …’
The old man walked up and down in front of Meno, giving him reflective, searching looks. He sat down at the desk and opened the manuscript. Then he started to talk, with many a ‘well then’ and ‘act-u-al-ly’ (‘act-u-al-ly you should never say act-u-al-ly, no, not ever’) and, something at which Meno was quietly amused, ‘No, that ain’t it, nope’ with a nod whenever he was trying to remember a line from a ‘book poem’. ‘Wrong quotation … here I am trying to spice up my account and, to stick to the image, have picked out cardamom instead of salt again, you must forgive a man who lives like a monk as far as culinary matters are concerned.’ As he spoke he twisted his mouth in a wide grin. His housekeeper brought a tray with a bottle of Nordhäuser schnapps, frosted with the cold. Meno said no thanks, Altberg filled both glasses with trembling hand.