by Uwe Tellkamp
‘Let’s go.’
‘But you’re an ill man, Herr Altberg.’
‘Just a failure, Herr Rohde, just a failure.’
They got out at Neustadt Station, stood there in the station forecourt watching the pigeons and the trains. Perhaps Altberg was hoping the noises would accept him even if the ground wouldn’t; he pressed the soles of his shoes into it, perhaps to trigger off recognition or at least a greeting in the putty-grey humps, cracked like elephant skin. Perhaps. Soldiers walked past, travellers with the weary, hostile memories they had of the uniforms and of those they seemed to mark: Meno sensed that in the eyes of these other people the uniform and those wearing it were not – perhaps: could not be – two different things. ‘But how proudly the colours fade,’ said Altberg; Altberg said, ‘D’you know, Herr Rohde, I sometimes used to think that, in order to be less alien, I ought to find something even more alien, and that could only be a place where, from the memories of somewhere I’d travelled through in one of my daydreams, I’d often wished I could be. You will know it, but walk with me for a while.’
Meno took the letter about the Old German Poems from the shelf beside the ten-minute clock, put some more coal in the stove, read both letters once more before sitting down at his typewriter.
11
Moss-green flowers
– The very fragility of the vestibule, Meno wrote, frightened me, we waited, even though the worn banister still seemed to be the same, the foot scraper, the grating with the steel slats that spring round, the sign above it Please wipe your feet; the damp patches on the walls, the high door shielded with dulled white lacquer.Suddenly you seemed changed to me. P. Dienemann, Succrs. I read but, while I was listening to you, I had nothing to say to someone good enough to hide their own name behind a philosophy of life going by the name of Succrs. White-haired, cigar-puffing Herr Leukroth certainly did have a taste for it: a few photos over his daughter’s desk showed the antiquarian bookshop on König-Johann-Strasse before the air raid, showed letters with Dienemann’s letterhead that had gone round the world under exotic postmarks and returned, showed a signed portrait of Gerhart Hauptmann, the writer from Obersalzbrunn, that you kept on looking at. Perhaps Leukroth would even have hung over the Local History section a ‘Dresden Succrs.’ sign, as you insisted on calling it, handwritten, of course, in the iron-gall ink that was rusting through the index cards on which his staff (just for his sake?) kept track of their stock. For the present, sir, I thought I heard the voice of Herr Leukroth say, is nothing yet. And I saw him shaking his head as he took the books of the old man in the beret, who had gone in through the door marked No Entrance in front of me and now, at the remarks of the old man chewing on his cigar as he roughly leafed backwards and forwards through them, hunched his shoulders or, rather, let them slump, like a collapsing soufflé, in resignation. What do you say, young man? Herr Leukroth grouched to you, making a dog-ear in a page that had been given a dismissive wave. – Right then. – So. You can take ’em home again, Dresden, Herr Leukroth declared, can manage without your presence. At this the old man shook his head, muttered Ye gods and turned to leave. One moment, Herr Leukroth, waist-high on a ladder, gestured, tell me, do you really want to lug those all the way home? For five marks you can leave them here with me, books to books, since you’re here already. And with trembling fingers (he had Parkinson’s disease) he took a coin from a jar of five-mark pieces with a strip of adhesive tape on it on which Taxi Money was typed. Behind cotton curtains with a pattern of moss-green flowers cans of food were sleeping, pyramids of floor polish towered up, writing paper from the VEB Weissenborn paper factory was turning yellow and slumbering away on one side were cardboard boxes full of handmade, deckle-edge Königstein paper which Herr Leukroth printed owls on and sent, covered in his Parkinson’s handwriting, with Christmas greetings to good customers; you showed me examples on which was written To be prepared is everything, Your antiquarian bookshop P. Dienemann Succrs. Herr Leukroth revealed to me one day that the assistant in the chiffon blouse with a paper rose on the collar (always a similar one, never the same), who wrings her hands with a careworn look, is in the habit of coming to the shop by taxi every morning and he is in the habit of leaving by taxi. The five-mark piece (the beret-hatted gentleman gladly clenched it in his fist) gave most of his clients the feeling they had got away with something again; it was a heavy, handsome coin, minted to celebrate the XX th birthday of the Republic and, like the twenty-pfennig piece, was not made of aluminium. You and I, Herr Altberg, were still in the vestibule, the matt-white lacquered door in front of me, beneath my feet the foot scraper that didn’t have any steel slats, instead there was a coconut mat that was covered with a floorcloth in the damp season and steamed all day long when the bookshop was open. Please wipe your feet carefully. The carefully was carefully underlined. Fräulein Leukroth, the daughter of the current owner, would certainly be sitting at her desk in the corridor between the two rooms of the bookshop, writing, now and then dipping her steel nib into a little pot of iron-gall ink from VEB Barock and carefully wiping off the superfluous drops on the glass rim. I suspected she was in contact with important minds of the past, for the scratch of her pen on the paper, which was yellowing at the edges, and the ink would be bound to seem familiar to the souls of the dead, residing perhaps somewhere in the wide expanses of the void, more probably, however, here, in the steps between and inside the books, and have the power to call them up; it must be possible to get them to leave the heavens above Dresden and swirl back down into King Solomon’s bottle, and then all that would be needed would be a cotton curtain, with a pattern of moss-green flowers (Fräulein Leukroth had a dress of the same material), over the light from the window for the soberly effective conjuration; in the twilight and the night, when the woodcut Book Fool in the corner of the adjacent room would come to life and, together with his employees, take over the bookshop, Fräulein Leukroth would, so I thought, have no choice but to disappear with the ghosts that had been conjured up. That was until one day when the assistant at the elderly cash register in the front room of the shop, opposite the No Entrance door, waved me over and, raising her eyes to the heavens, accidentally on purpose let me see a note from Fräulein Leukroth: It would be welcome, gratifying even, if you would be good enough to see to it that the porcelain flower gets one over the eight to drink. For some particular reason the water, with which, despite the request, she had nonetheless to be economical, had to be stale. – We stood in the vestibule, listening. It must have been a Monday, for all that I could hear behind the matt-lacquered door was the murmur of my memories, not the voice of the lady with the paper rose telling a customer off for not treating Rororo paperbacks with due care and attention, Herr Leukroth shuffling along beneath the sacrosanct dimensions of a plaster cast of Goethe’s Jupiter head enthroned above the bookcase doors with little filigree keys in the locks that also wore adhesive-tape ties, also with typed inscriptions – Classics! Apply at counter to inspect! The command was obeyed, for an unauthorized touch would have created a different kind of silence; also, I thought, the keys must be linked to an invisible alarm: to Fräulein Leukroth’s nervous system turned inside out and stretching into the bookshop, perhaps also to the whispering of some telltale benign spirits conjured up by the scratch of a pen. It must have been a Monday, for Dienemann Succrs. was ‘Private’ and ‘Private’ shops were closed on Mondays, I knew that from Walther’s and Wackendorff’s bakeries, Vogelsang the butcher’s and the cobbler Anselm Grün. The floorcloth wasn’t steaming; deliberately ignored, it was drying out into the grey of a shark’s fin that had been washed up on the coconut mat. No icy silence from within when someone interrupted Fräulein Leukroth in her inky activity to ask about the books in the glass-fronted case beside her desk: behind a curtain with a pattern of moss-green flowers were, guarded by pharmacists’ bottles, Hermann Hesse books of the old S. Fischer Verlag, linen-bound in faded blue with gold-embossed lettering, Unger Gothic typeface, and those of the GDR Aufbau
Verlag, linen in artificially faded lime green, sand-coloured wrappers, Garamond typeface, and when a train went past, the pharmacists’ bottles took over the trembling that sent out its jagged rays from the core of Fräulein Leukroth’s silence: Books by Hermann Hesse, sir. And for Fräulein Leukroth, who didn’t even turn her head, no further explanation was necessary. – Oh, Hermann Hesse, the potential customer insisted: – Most certainly! and: I will tell you straight away, Fräulein Leukroth said; – I presume you’re not selling them? – Listen, said Fräulein Leukroth, terminating the discussion, after Hermann Hesse! there is! no more literature! then carefully, while the prospective customer shrugged his shoulders, realizing he had not passed one of the usual Dresden tests of worthiness, wiped off a superfluous drop of ink from her steel nib on the rim of the Barock jar. And you, Herr Altberg, were listening. And I was watching as you opened the books, chatted with the assistants, advised Fräulein Leukroth about pharmacists’ mixtures for skin problems and illnesses caused by radiation from outer space, as you gave Herr Leukroth, who approached, withdrew, approached again with one of your volumes of essays in his hand, a signature; you seemed confused, perhaps you hadn’t imagined you yourself could be an object of interest for P. Dienemann Succrs.; I found it touching that I could observe you, one of my stern teachers, in a carefree moment. There is much that you have taught me – without realizing it, I have never had the courage to tell you; for I cannot pretend that I understand you. I suspect that our impressions of life, which I am unwilling to call experiences, since I don’t know whether anything is ever repeated, lie too far apart. I see us standing in the vestibule outside Dienemann’s antiquarian bookshop, you told me about the beginnings of the German Democratic Republic, about your hopes and dreams, about the dawn you greeted joyfully and for which, after the thousand-year darkness, you were prepared to do, to give, everything. You fell silent; I was listening. Gramophone records had eaten their way into the walls. Voices did not come together. The line from the fishwives’ song: Shark thou sea-green officer, slipped through the matt-lacquered and the connecting portal, disappeared into the bookcase beside Goethe’s Jupiter head, behind the table whose overhanging offerings of books worried the wooden fool. There was a little key in that case as well: Romantics, ditto! was typed on the tape. And as you remained silent, Fräulein Leukroth raised her head and listened on her part: even if no one was ‘rooting round cluelessly’ (as the assistant in the chiffon blouse would quietly groan after she’d followed a customer to see what he was up to, only to find, manically and fearlessly rummaging in the second rows, behind eternal revenants such as Karl Zuchardt’s Stirb du Narr! – never read, notoriously in stock – or Sienkiewicz’s Quo Vadis? ditto, an intellectual robber baron by the name of Georg Altberg); could there be someone who wasn’t standing the accepted Dresden viewing-metre away from the books, head respectfully tilted to one side in order to examine the titles, chin in his right hand and that supported by his horizontal left arm? Fräulein Leukroth listened. Was it time for her medicine? It would be welcome, if the staff of this establishment were more economical in their use of brown paper; old newspapers are just as good for wrapping books, for which reason I, as you are aware, always bring a supply. The subjunctive ‘were’ was carefully underlined.
12
Rust
You had to learn your lessons, relentlessly, tirelessly, endlessly, if one day you wanted to be one of the great ones – that, too, was a lesson Christian had learnt. Niklas, Ulrich and Richard had little time for anything but the best and the most significant; Ezzo, when he played a piece, was told that this or that violinist had done it better, that he still lacked this or that ‘in order to really move the listener, not just to play the notes but to fill them with life; there’s still no depth to it’. Christian had learnt this when Richard had taken out his old school reports and silently tapped an A grade in a subject where Christian had a B; a C was already a minor disaster and he didn’t dare imagine what would happen if he got a D, or even an E, the maximum credible catastrophe. Nor did he dare imagine what would happen if he didn’t get a place at medical school.
‘Being a doctor,’ Richard said, ‘is the best, the most wonderful profession there is. It’s a clearly defined, beneficial activity, the results of which can be seen immediately. A patient comes with a complaint. The doctor examines him, makes a diagnosis, starts the treatment. The patient goes home healed, relieved of pain, able to start work again.’
‘If he hasn’t died,’ Ulrich retorted. ‘Has it never struck you that hospitals are often next to graveyards? And next to ones where the gravediggers are shovelling out holes all the time, at that. – It’s the economy where the best jobs are, my lad. There you’re creating things of material value. Let’s say you’re producing lavatory seats. You don’t have to grin, it’s time someone undertook a defence of the lavatory seat. Despised it may be, but everyone needs that oval, even if no one talks about it. By the way, did you know it’s called le couvercle in French? You won’t be in the limelight if you manufacture kuverkles, definitely not, but woe betide you if they’re out of stock. The economy is real life. And you’ll make a packet there!’
‘You and your stupid jokes, don’t confuse the boy, Snorkel,’ Barbara said reproachfully. ‘The economy! Which one are you talking about? The socialist economy? Don’t make me laugh.’
‘You may laugh, my little ball of fluff, but I tell you that the economic laws also operate in …’
‘Richard’s not that far off the mark. The boy has to learn something solid. I always thought he should be a tailor. I think he has a natural talent for tailoring. A feeling for material seems to run in the Rohde family … Meno has a feel for it too. – Just don’t be anything connected with books, Christian. That’s all crap, isn’t it, Meno?’
‘Not entirely. Though there’s a certain amount of shit there too.’ Meno hardly took part in these discussions at all, concentrating on his supper while the others argued.
‘Rubbish! I know writers, they come and moan to me. They want to write that the sky is blue, but they have to write that the sky is red. A suit always has two sleeves, here just as in the West. And it has buttons. One of these … scribblers! asked me whether I knew the people who make buttons, he’d like to make buttons, nothing but buttons.’
‘As a doctor you really are a general practitioner. You have to be able to do everything. You even have to know a bit about the economy. And lots of doctors I know are artistically inclined. Art, craftwork, culture: everything comes together in the doctor. You can go into research, as Hans has. Toxicologists are always needed. You can even, if you study history along with medicine, become a medical historian, we have a chair in the Academy. A well-paid professor, with a nice situation in the Faculty of Medicine, well away from the ideologists. He sits there writing books all day.’
‘Well I think the nicest thing of all is still music,’ said Niklas.
When he was staying with his parents, Christian liked to go for a walk by himself in the evening. He didn’t see many people, mostly the district lay in profound silence. More clearly than ever he sensed the melancholy and solitary atmosphere of the old villas with their pointed gables and steep roofs, lit by the Advent stars on the balconies and in the oriel windows, by the meagre light of those street lamps that were still working. Snow fell, snow melted, sometimes it rained as well. Then he would hear his steps echoing on the wet flagstones of the pavement and feel that these houses concealed something, an insidious disease, and that this disease was connected with the inhabitants.
He often went to see Niklas, whom he liked very much, and he would look forward to the visit to his uncle well in advance, during the last class, during the monotonous sway of the journey from Waldbrunn to Dresden. If they had agreed on eight o’clock, he would be walking restlessly round the streets an hour beforehand, looking at the lights and asking himself what the inhabitants behind the windows might be doing, whether, at the sound of the bells from the city, at the s
triking of the clocks, which was audible through the windows, they too might be thinking of the disease, for which he could still not find a name, however hard he tried. He’d once talked about it with his Uncle Hans. Hans had given him a surprised look, shrugged his shoulders and answered, with an ironic smile, ‘We’re being poisoned, that’s all’, had added, ‘And Time, how strangely does it go its ways’, and placed his index finger to his lips. Christian had not forgotten that. It was a quotation from Der Rosenkavalier, it was sung by the Marschallin; and Christian believed that this Marschallin was still alive, somewhere here in one of the houses, and was whispering about time, even possessed it, like an essence, and fed it into the clocks in the slow, patient manner of a spinner at her spinning wheel from which there went a thread: time, dripping, trickling in the wallpaper, scurrying in the mirrors, time weaving its visions. On one of these evenings with Niklas in the music room of Evening Star, the needle of the record player kept jumping out of the groove and playing the same passage again and again, Tannhäuser, Christian imagined, kept raising his arm and singing the praises of Venus in her mountain grotto, at which point the needle would go no farther, seemed to hit a barrier that knocked it back and made it mechanically repeat the same melody to a rustle of tremolando violins, rippling harps and the crepitation of the record, that had been made during the Third Reich, a probe into a long-vanished theatre, scratched and, as Christian sometimes thought when he was sitting listening with Niklas, pervaded with the crackle of air-raid warnings on the wireless and the radar of the bombers approaching Dresden. But in the same way as the needle kept jumping back, until Niklas got up and put an end to the echoes, multiplying the minnesinger’s earnestness so that he slipped into ham acting, copy after copy thrown out like a jiggling marionette in an endless loop, so the days in the city seemed to Christian, repetitions that made you want to laugh, each day a mirror image of the previous one, each a paralysing copy of the other. Then he thought of Tonio Kröger, the bourgeois from the city with the draughty, gabled streets, the warehouses and churches, the Hanseatic merchants with a cornflower in their buttonhole and the ships sailing past their counting houses up the Trave. He had no idea what had made him think of that, the sight of the house called Dolphin’s Lair perhaps, or his happy anticipation of a musical evening with Niklas. It was a long time since Christian had read the story. Meno thought highly of it; sometimes, at their soirées, they would talk about Thomas Mann. As Christian walked round the sparsely lit streets that smelt of snow and the ash from lignite, he felt as if he were Tonio Kröger himself; true, he didn’t quite have the right style, since he wasn’t the son of strait-laced Lübeck patricians. He would presumably have had to go in and out of the Gothic vaults of the Kreuzschule in Dresden as well. Yet he still had that feeling and the longer he walked, the more Tonio Kröger seemed to take possession of him, as if he were the right mask for the district up there, protection against something Christian couldn’t define but that seemed to cause the morbid atmosphere of the houses all around, their silent decline, their sleep.