by Uwe Tellkamp
Niklas …
‘Salve, Christian, come on in, I’ve got something for you.’ It was mostly Niklas who came when he rang the bell at the door with the peeling light-grey paint and the crooked ‘Tietze’ sign covered in verdigris. Gudrun seldom went to the door and when she did Christian knew it wasn’t a good evening to visit Niklas; then he would often see him already in the hall adjusting his beret in the mirror with the curving frame and silhouettes of Reglinde and Ezzo on the right and left (Zwirnevaden Studios, Steiner Guest House), putting on his coat and gloves, checking his midwifery bag, his car keys – then he had a house call, would wave him away: another time, as you can see, today’s not on.
‘You can always go and see Ezzo,’ Gudrun would say, ‘though he has to do his practice and you mustn’t distract him; when you’re there he doesn’t complete his daily quota. And I have to go out soon as well. – But there aren’t any pears for you to gobble up,’ she explained and Christian, feeling slightly awkward, wondered whether she meant it seriously or whether it was intended as a kind of hearty joke, which to his mind didn’t go with Gudrun’s delicate features (Niklas said he’d recognized them in drawings by Dürer) and her stage voice (she was an actress at the theatre), with her smell of preserved rhubarb, ears of corn and deer tallow cream. Or she said, ‘Use sea-sand and almond bran for your acne, I don’t want you to infect Reglinde or Ezzo’, and when Christian replied that his pimples weren’t infectious, gave him a sceptical look, as if he were knowingly telling a lie, but anyway certainly didn’t know enough about such matters to have an opinion that was worth listening to. Sometimes there were better-eyesight weeks when the Tietzes fed mainly on carrots, since Gudrun had read in a magazine at Schnebel’s, the hairdresser’s, or heard from a colleague at the theatre, that carrots contained a lot of vitamin A and that vitamin A was good for your eyesight; during those weeks their eyes were sharp but their stomachs rumbled. Gudrun discovered that sliced carrots absorbed the taste of the meat that was cooked with them in the frying pan – the better-eyesight weeks were followed by the weeks of carrotburgers. She was told that butter was harmful and read something in an old magazine about an outbreak of margarine disease: ‘Professor Doktor Doktor aitch see Karl Linser of the Charité Hospital in Berlin gave an interview, so there must be something to it’, and she immediately threw away all the margarine she had in the house. (‘Carcinogenic! You turn yellow!’) Every year, shortly before Christmas, a scientist (‘a specialist!’) would announce in the newspapers his discovery that bananas were harmful and oranges (except for those from Cuba) contained certain substances that could inhibit children’s growth and lead to constipation in adults (‘he describes it precisely, you can peel them as carefully as you like, there’s always a bit of pith left on the piece, it’s deposited at the pylorus in your stomach and eventually you’re completely blocked up, for the pith of the orange doesn’t get digested!’). No one apart from Gudrun believed these specialists and to the annoyance of her family she gave the West bananas in the yellow packets away to the Hoffmann children. ‘You’ll see what they do to you, you’ll grow up like little dwarves; go on then, eat them, if you don’t believe me, go and catch cancer. You’ll all be eaten away by cancer! You always have to know best.’
‘Oh, do stop your nonsense,’ Richard said, ‘it’s just a very obvious ploy. They don’t want to use their hard currency for tropical fruits, and to avoid criticism, they put this rubbish about. And you fall for it! If it really were true, all monkeys would die soon after they’re born, given the amount of bananas they polish off.’
‘Oh yes, you always know best. The man in the newspaper was a proper scientist and you’re not even a proper doctor.’
‘Oh, come on now!’
‘You just hack people about!’
‘Despite that, I do understand something of these matters,’ said Richard, hurt.
‘Because you get everything out of books, just out of books, most of the stuff in them is pure fabrication, just to get people so they’ll believe anything and so the writers can collect their royalties.’
‘Is that true, Meno?’ At such moments Richard would fold up the newspaper.
‘Physicists and medics are the worst,’ said Meno in a matter-of-fact tone. ‘They fabricate like nobody’s business and have no idea, none whatsoever. And moneygrubbers! Suck the publishers dry like vampires.’
Gudrun was not to be moved. ‘You two can make fun of me if you like, but I know what I know. I read recently that monkeys are monkeys because they eat nothing but bananas. You can let your children grow up into monkeys. Not me. And you, Meno, you haven’t even got any.’
‘Salve,’ said Niklas. ‘I’ve got something for you.’ Christian was eager to see what it was this time, a new record from Philharmonia, Trüpel’s record shop, picture postcards from Malthakus or a piece of Saxon sugar cake from Walther’s on Rissleite? Niklas loved surprises and put on a mysterious air, shuffled along in tattered slippers, one hand in the pocket of his baggy trousers, vigorously playing an air piano with the fingers of the other (or was he trying out fingerings on an imaginary viola fingerboard?), over the soft PVC of the hall to the ground-glass living-room door, illuminated with seductively warm light. Gudrun withdrew, either to the bedroom to learn her lines or to darn stockings, eight thimbles on her fingers making a soft, castanet-like noise, in the kitchen, where the cupboards hung crookedly and the window ledges were eaten away with black mould, where the paint on the pipes was blistering and embroidered recipes for Salzburg soufflé, pumpkin soup and a dish called ‘industrial accident’ (an exceptionally fragrant, disgusting-looking hotchpotch the children stirred with long spoons) could hardly cover the damp patches on the walls.
Then there began another session of what Christian was unwilling to call ‘teaching’, although there was a teacher, Niklas, and a pupil, Christian (only occasionally Ezzo or Reglinde as well, sometimes Muriel and Fabian Hoffmann, the children from the house on Wolfsleite); even though it was mostly the pupil who asked the questions and the teacher who gave the answers, ‘teaching’ didn’t describe it, that would have reminded Christian too much of Waldbrunn. The evenings with Niklas – and with the other Tower-dwellers Christian visited – had little in common with the lessons there. When Ezzo and Reglinde had time, Christian would bring his cello and they played string quartets, sometimes Gudrun would take the piano and they would go through a Mozart quintet or the ‘Trout’, the lilting theme of which would regularly send Gudrun into ecstasy and, humming along, she would get the utmost possible out of the yellowed keys of the Schimmel piano, which occasionally stuck in the top and bottom registers.
‘Salve.’ In the living room the tiled stove was pumping out regular rings of heat, briquettes rumbled onto the grating, the wind howled in the chimney. Sometimes sparks flew out onto the metal plate under the stove door. The windows rattled and banged even when it was snowing and there was no wind outside; the wood in the frames had cracks, the old-fashioned bascule bolts were covered in verdigris and, as in many of the apartments up there, thick draught excluders made in the Harmony Salon workshop from remnants of wool and clothing were stuck between the windows on the sill. Niklas poured a glass of mineral water for Christian and a Wernesgrüner Pils for himself, stroked the threadbare corduroy of the three-piece suite, leant back and said, ‘Aah’ and ‘Right, then’ to the plaster frieze round the ceiling, to the paintings by Kurt Querner on the walls: stolid scenes from the Erzgebirge done in earthy colours, the Luchberg in melting snow; a lane in Börnchen with gnarled trees; one of the famous portraits of Rehn, a peasant farmer, bringing out his pinched features with the rich blue of his eyes, his hands, crooked and knotted like roots, that had always impressed Christian. As did the portrait of Reglinde in the corner with the honey-coloured wing chair: it was one of the painter’s last works, Reglinde at eleven or twelve, in a plain dress, a few dolls beside her that Christian remembered from winter theatre evenings at the Tietzes’ and the Wolfsleite Hoffmanns’
years ago; as he walked home Christian often wondered about Reglinde’s alarmed eyes in the picture.
Niklas talked about productions from the past. The sound of the ‘abbot’s clock’, of Ezzo’s violin exercises in the adjoining room, of Gudrun declaiming, ‘Oh, who is the villain, speak’, of the chimes of the grandfather clock with the brass face fading away over the carpet, in front of the ceiling-high bookcase with Dehio art books, alphabetically arranged biographies of musicians and volumes of correspondence from Europe’s past, all mingled with names from the heyday of opera and music, which for Niklas was a German art, with all due respect to the Beatles and ABBA, about whom he could talk knowledgeably at the evening meetings of the Friends of Music. ‘The pentatonic scale … now, when the orchestra plays in Japan, they can’t get enough of our music. Mozart on the pentatonic scale, well, OK. America has its dschezz and Dschordsch Görschwin, it has Börnschtein’s West Said Schdori and Nyu York … Great, great. People are always saying the Germans are the nation of poets and philosophers, I would say they’re the nation of musicians. In no other area is the Germans’ contribution so unique as in music. Leaving aside Verdi and Berlioz, Puccini and Vivaldi … there’s not much left! A few Russians, Tchaikovsky, Mussorgsky, Borodin, but that’s a special case, that’s already peripheral. Shostakovich as well and Prokoviev, Stravinsky, but he’s too abstract, it comes from his head, not his heart … No, music is a German art and that’s that.’
Niklas talked about the singers of the Dresden Opera, about the great conductors of the past. Outside the rain would beat against the windows, the snow swirl, the flakes, a hundred eyes sticking to the panes, slowly melt. In the summer Christian and Niklas would sit on the veranda, beside the music room. It smelt of the white-painted wooden furniture that came from Gudrun’s parents’ house, of the tobacco from Niklas’s pipe that he would smoke with relish on mild evenings with open windows, the humming of the bees, orange and blue sunset streaks and the call of the blackbirds. In the winter Christian would listen to Niklas, to the wide sweep of his memories bringing the past to life again, in the living room and the music room, where Niklas would first of all sit by the telescope table, then, when it was time to listen to music, on the chaise longue in front of the mirror that had turned a watery grey. The record on the turntable of the hi-fi machine with the imitation beech veneer would start to revolve and they listened to the singers Niklas had been talking about. Then, Christian felt, something happened to the room: the green wallpaper with the pattern of protozoa and diatoms seemed to open up; the Viennese clock acquired a human face; the yellow artificial rose under the glass cover on the escritoire in the corner where Niklas wrote his letters in ink on hand-made, deckle-edge Spechthausen paper, seemed to grow rampant and branch out, the way it happened in silhouette films in the Tannhäuser Cinema in which shadow plants (roses? thistles? neither Muriel nor Christian nor Fabian knew) twined round a castle; the photos of the singers on the walls were no longer close, looked as if they had floated up from the cabins of ships that had sunk; the rasping sound of the stylus sounded like the swell of the sea. Niklas sat leaning forward, tense, caught up in the sweep of the melodies, the entries. Christian observed his uncle surreptitiously; he too seemed to be part of the world of the tides, the murmur of the sea from days long past, not the present; sometimes Christian was even slightly startled to hear his uncle talk of everyday matters such as snow chains for the Shiguli or Dynamo Dresden’s last game; in this world of the thousand little things and the curse of climbing the stairs to the offices of public officials he seemed to be merely a visitor, wrapped in the cloak of a kind fairy. Christian had to feel his way back into his everyday world when he said goodbye to Niklas, had to find his way back as he went home (Caravel was diagonally opposite), often taking detours, his head full of the names of singers and composers, anecdotes from the life of the State Orchestra during previous decades, full of pictures of German cathedrals and features of pre-war Dresden.
And with Malthakus it was the stamps, the historical postcards with the landscapes, that the dealer’s narrative commentary turned into little living tableaux; the albums with stamps from distant countries: ‘papillons, 100 différents’, ‘bateaux, 100 différents’; butterflies from Guyana and Réunion, Gabon and Senegal; ship motifs: ‘République du Bénin’, Indochina, São Tomé e Príncipe; triangular stamps from Afghanistan joined by a perforated line at the hypotenuse that the dealer patiently explained: ‘The ship here with the red-and-white striped sails is a cog of the Hanseatic League’ (Christian knew it from an engraving on the glass door of the staircase at Caravel); ‘the one on the other side, with the blood-red sails, a Venetian merchantman’; then he rotated the globe and tapped his finger on the places that sounded legendary to the ears of the Heinrichstrasse and Wolfsleite children – Benin, previously the Kingdom of Dahomey, a narrow country on the west coast of Africa, capital – capital? I ought to know that. Quick, open the atlas. What is the capital of Benin called? But they got stuck in Togo, a former German colony bordering Benin; Togo was interesting too and then they discovered countries such as the Ivory Coast and Upper Volta, the capital of which (they all loved its name and could remember it later when they played ‘name – city – country’: Ouagadougou; Sinbad and his crew would certainly have been to Ouagadougou; everything was different in Ouagadougou).
Knowledge, knowledge. Names, names. Brains soaked it all up like sponges until they were dripping with knowledge that they didn’t release since these sponges couldn’t be squeezed. Knowledge was what counted; knowledge was the closely guarded treasure of those who belonged up there.
Those who knew nothing seemed to count for nothing. There was hardly any insult that was worse than ‘ignoramus’. At weekends there were anatomy lessons with Richard (he particularly enjoyed testing them on the bones of the wrist, having taught them a mnemonic verse: ‘A tall ship sailed in the moonlight bright – lunate – Triangulated a pea-shaped rock one night – triquetral, pisiform – The captain and his mate, each on a trapeze – trapezium, trapezoid – Dived head over heels, caught the hook with ease – capitate, hamate’) and talks on famous doctors: Fabian, Muriel, Robert and Christian, who intended to study medicine, sat in Richard’s study and revised their notes: ‘When did Sauerbruch start to work in Munich? – Late summer 1918. – Name three forerunners of surgery of the chest and one of their achievements. – Bülau. Bülau drain. Rehn. First open-heart operation. Mikulicz. Mikulicz line, clamp; operation on the oesophagus in the chest, made possible by Sauerbruch’s low-pressure chamber. Sauerbruch’s teacher in Breslau.’ Muriel and Fabian seemed to join in more out of habit (there was also tasty food from Anne); Christian admired Sauerbruch, was fascinated by the stories about Robert Koch’s heroic rise, dug his way through Ärzte im Selbstversuch, Bernt Karger-Decker’s book with its scary bright-orange wrapper about doctors who tried remedies out on themselves, through the many volumes of the biographical series Humanisten der Tat that took up a whole shelf in his father’s bookcase, opened, full of trepidation, the anatomical atlases, where thousands of Latin names indicated meticulously described parts of the body – ‘Do we have to learn all this at medical school?’ – ‘That’s on the syllabus in the first two years, in addition you get biochemistry and physiology, chemistry, biology, biophysics, mathematics for doctors and, unfortunately, Marxism–Leninism still,’ Richard replied. Christian refused to be put off by Anne’s concerned objections (‘Let them go out and play, Richard, you’re stuffing them full of books; you’re going too far and I don’t think it’s good for them’) and devoured as much knowledge as he could. He too wanted to be famous and recognized by Richard and Niklas, Malthakus and Meno, the Tower-dwellers, his name too must shine out: Christian Hoffmann – the great surgeon, the man who conquered cancer. The first person from the GDR to win a Nobel Prize, applauded in Stockholm. After that he would probably get out, accept the offer of an English or American elite university. Or study economics and become director of a concern a
fter all, like Ulrich? A clear desk every morning, the secretary brings papers that can determine the future state of a whole country, your signature, please, Comrade Director. Comrade – unfortunately that was unavoidable. Christian examined his own feelings about it: no, no scruples. If it meant you could become a director. Or a scientist like Meno. An insect specialist and umpteen insect species will end in H for Hoffmann. A physicist puzzling over the foundations of the world! Ezzo saw himself as an astronaut. Sinbad and Tecumseh were good. Chingachgook, the big snake. To be a trapper like Leatherstocking. To be a cellist on the world stage, to thunderous applause – but Christian sensed, and his teacher had indicated, that his talent wasn’t up to that; it was enough to get by with, certainly; you could surprise the presidents of countries when, as the Nobel Prize winner for … (whatever) you picked up your cello and played one of Bach’s suites. Fabian, much taken with Lange’s stories, was drawn to the tropics, wanted to become a ship’s doctor and a second Albert Schweitzer. Robert would say, ‘You’ve all got a screw loose’, and go fishing or to watch football with Ulrich. Muriel was getting difficult, talked more about love than about science and art. Christian read.