by Uwe Tellkamp
And when he wasn’t reading, he sometimes started to laugh.
When he was younger he’d enjoyed Jules Verne, Jack London, Friedrich Gerstäcker’s novels set in exotic countries, had read Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer again and again. He loved stories of adventure, Stevenson’s Treasure Island, Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, stories of spies, musketeers and agents. When he had started at the senior high school, however, Meno had given him a book that impressed Christian in a way he couldn’t explain; it was The World of Yesterday by Stefan Zweig, a book that told about an age that had long since disappeared, the Belle Époque in the Vienna of the turn of the century. It was teeming with names, allusions, quotations that Christian recognized from having heard them from Meno himself or from Niklas, an effect that delighted him. Not only that, there was a casual remark by Zweig he couldn’t get out of his mind: that in Europe before the First World War you didn’t need a passport to travel wherever you liked; that you could attend university in Paris or Florence, if you wanted (and, of course, assuming you had the money). In that book he found wide horizons he had not yet come across, even with the Tower-dwellers. In the ‘Camp for Work and Relaxation’ he had read Goethe’s Elective Affinities more in an attempt to impress Verena than out of interest; now this book by Zweig gave him a sense of what the concept of ‘world literature’ meant. World literature – they’d talked about that at school as well (Goethe, Faust I: but at the time Christian had preferred to play battleships or handball); he had only had a vague idea of what it meant: it was the grey-linen rows of dignified books behind the glass of the bookcase in the living room of Caravel that seemed to stare at Christian with an expression that said: You’re too young, too stupid for us. Out of a sense of disdain that already had a touch of curiosity, he had occasionally taken a book out of the row, leafed through a few pages here, read a paragraph there (dialogues between lovers, that too), then carefully weighed the book in his hand and replaced it. He had to read, he had to learn more. He told himself that his models had been much farther on at fourteen, fifteen, than he was now, at seventeen; he told himself that, if some day he really was to become one of the great figures of science, he would have to at least double the daily quota he’d set himself. Every day in Waldbrunn he longed for the end of lessons so that he could finally get down to his own work. He studied like one possessed, eight to ten hours a day, both coursework and his own, but only as much coursework as he needed to get an A grade in class and oral tests. His own work consisted of fifty words each of English, French and Latin vocabulary a day together with further topics in chemistry, physics and biology. Christian swotted day in, day out, to the point of bitter despair that arrived by midnight at the latest because by that time he usually started confusing all the vocabulary, had forgotten the word for the biochemical cancer cycle (a complex of thistly formulae intended for second-year medical students), which was almost unpronounceable and ended in -ate or -asis, and no longer knew what the difference between an enzyme, a vitamin and a hormone was. He was dog-tired but he hadn’t done enough yet. He now forced his brain, which was already generating delusions, to read at least one chapter of world literature. Woe to anyone who dared to disturb his daily routine; Christian had already once driven off Frau Stesny, the middle-aged head of the pupils’ hostel, with a fit of rage; astonishingly she hadn’t complained to Engelmann, the principal. The other pupils in the hostel looked askance at him because he shut himself off from everything. Svetlana Lehmann tapped her forehead, Verena shrugged her shoulders, Jens mocked. Only Siegbert said nothing, Siegbert, with his little desk full of matchstick ships and sailing manuals, who knew all the ranks in the People’s Navy (and also of the Nazi navy, but no one was to know that), the types of ships, classes of cruisers and tonnages, Siegbert Füger, who wanted to go to sea and liked stories of the sea, especially Hugo Pratt’s Corto Maltese comic books; Christian had given him a few, ones of which Lange, the ship’s doctor, had spare copies. He even read the Odyssey, Apollonius of Rhodes’s saga of the Argonauts, the reports of Pharaoh Necho’s captain, of Herodotus.
When Frau Stesny, not knowing what to do next, locked the door of the classroom where Christian studied in the evenings (he disturbed the quiet of the building, and not only when, at two in the morning, his overwrought brain had the idea of relieving the strain by playing his cello or the school piano) – well, if Frau Stesny locked the rooms, Christian would just go on working in the toilet. He didn’t get much sleep, just four or five hours, and went with glassy, red-rimmed eyes to classes where he only realized the teacher had asked him a question from the gleeful giggles of the rest of the class. The books were beginning to become attached to him, as he called it, for the others they were something like his emblem. He seldom went anywhere without having a book with him. He read during break, while the others ate their rolls, or, during the lunch hour, went out into the yard, where the girls swapped cassettes and the boys played cards, argued about rock bands or discussed the latest football results. He even arranged his books into different categories: reading for the bus he took to Dresden, reading for the lessons he found boring (English with Frau Kosinke, geography with Herr Plink, who kept waving his pointer at the maps hanging on the walls), reading for his free time (his daily chapter) and reading for the break. Soon he was no longer satisfied with reading one chapter of world literature a day and set himself 100 pages. His day extended well into the early hours of the next. During the autumn break, when he naturally continued his study, he increased his quota to 400 pages a day, with the result that he sometimes read for fourteen, fifteen hours on end and then got up off the couch eyes rolling, pale and wan as a potato sprout. Sometimes he read two or three books in a day and afterwards all he knew about Tagore, for example, was that during the previous week he had got through five books by him. He ploughed his way through the Waldbrunn library, returned the complete editions of Max Planck, Rutherford, Albert Schweitzer after three weeks, in order to take out the next enticing pile for the next week, and the longer the book, the better! Christian loved long books. A novel wasn’t a real novel unless it was at least 500 pages long. At 500 pages the ocean began, anything less than that was paddling in a brook. It was in vain that Meno shook his head and pointed out that there could be more of the world in a short story by Chekhov, more of life and art than in many a fat, blubbery tome. But Christian went for the blue whales, as he called the epic novels of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Thomas Mann, Robert Musil and Heimito von Doderer, he loved Thomas Wolfe, from the pages of his books came the sound of ships’ sirens, music from the steamers in the Southern states, the whistles of the American transcontinental trains. He read that Eugene Gant (that is Wolfe himself, he thought) had read 20,000 books in ten years (which seemed absolutely unimaginable to Christian), a real logodipsomaniac, then.
‘Now Christian’s really flipped his lid,’ Verena said.
On free days it had to be 500 pages, so for that he didn’t bother with physics and chemistry. Now the following happened: Robert had got really hooked on some Balzac novel and, out of the blue, worked his way through 555 pages in a single day. That mustn’t be allowed to happen; as far as reading and studying were concerned, Christian was the boss, Robert’s record had to be broken. One day Christian got up at four in the morning, washed, had not too full a breakfast and started to read. He wasn’t going to study that day, it was to be entirely devoted to breaking the new record. He read uninterruptedly from 4.30 a.m. until 12 p.m., though with two very irritating breaks for lunch and supper that Anne forced him to take. On the stroke of midnight he’d read 716 pages – and forgotten them, but what did that matter, he’d broken the record.
He had to become famous, then those at home would recognize him.
One evening in Waldbrunn, in a dark corner of his brain, overwrought with vocabulary and formulae, the plan for stage-by-stage progress appeared. Christian switched off the light and went to the window. Now the classroom was in darkness, just the metal of the chairs
in the window row, which had been put up on the tables, wearily slurped the light from the lamp in the yard. He had no idea how late it was. The street lamps had come on long ago, the contours of the new district of Waldbrunn merged with the waves of the hill above Kaltwasser reservoir. Behind the two sports halls, low, standardized, glass-and-concrete buildings, was the ridge along which the F170 ran. The yellow headlamps of the long-distance lorries rummaged around over the rye-field on the ridge, the way from the school into the town.
The Great Man. Stage 1: Learning, studying, educating the mind – that was the stage Christian was on at the moment. Being highly educated was the first requirement for becoming a great man. A great man was, moreover, highly cultured as well and so when classes were over for the day (usually around 1 p.m.) Christian, instead of having lunch, would go to the club room and occupy the communal record player for an hour. It didn’t bother him in the least if others wanted to use the record player. Apart from him that was mostly only Svetlana – and she was an enthusiastic socialist, wanted to go to Lomonosov University in Moscow and listened to red singer-songwriters, for Christian ‘the pits’. Every minute the record player was on without that ‘nauseating stuff’ (as Christian, Jens and a couple of boys from the twelfth grade said) was a gain for culture. He saw himself as a serious, mature man and as such listened to classical music, though he was pretty much alone among the boarders with that point of view. Christian didn’t let that bother him: the others were philistines, how could they, coming from villages as they did, appreciate the profundity, the seriousness of a Bach, the serenity, the comic detachment of a Mozart, the emotional power of a Beethoven. Since Svetlana was a bit feeble-minded (an opinion he shared with several boys in his class), she didn’t need a record player. When listening, Christian would sit leaning back in his chair, with his legs up, a profoundly serious expression on his face when, for example, he was listening to Beethoven. Christian understood Beethoven’s outbursts of suffering … Like Christian, this titanic personality must have found himself surrounded by uncomprehending philistines and have had to struggle against them, his whole life long! Beethoven was a Great Man and Christian understood him, for he was cast in the same mould, definitely. Added to that, he really was affected by the music. He didn’t show it; it confused him and when he had the feeling that Svetlana or Siegbert was observing him, he would jump up and switch the record off, furious (leaving the record there, though – he was counting on their curiosity).
Stage 2: University studies. Naturally he would have to abandon them. A trifling university course could not satisfy him, the young scientific genius, the irrepressible hothead and tomorrow’s benefactor of mankind. He would even get poor grades at university: was that not the way it was, had he not read in many biographies of Great Men that they didn’t fit in? Did university courses not cover familiar territory – and wasn’t the reason a Great Man was great precisely that he broke new ground? Something that the simple-minded professors, trying to drum their long out-of-date knowledge into the ordinary minds of their students, could not of course see.
Stage 3: Nervous breakdown. That went with it. The tension the young Great Man is under is just too much. Even Mozart had sometimes gone off his rocker, so it was quite normal. Christian would have to go through terrible crises and consider suicide four times a day (it had to be four times, once or twice was too little, that happened in almost every family, three times sounded like a cliché, at four, Christian concluded, it somehow seemed more serious).
Stage 4: The Great Achievement, finally completed. Honours, prizes, applause would be heaped upon the young Faustian seeker after knowledge. Now the important thing was to remain modest (because of those who envied him and of the capricious deities of moments of inspiration) and not let himself be dazzled by all these externalities. The Great Man continues his research, restlessly, selflessly. He doesn’t care about the applause, all he cares about is his WORK. He makes a further discovery, even more revolutionary, more profound than the previous one. Petty-minded rivals who had begrudged him his success and shouted from the rooftops that the Great Hoffmann would soon be finished would crawl back into their holes. Remorsefully they would recant, shamefacedly admit their limitations. Triumphant jubilation.
So: down to work.
Love, Christian thought, would distract him from his studies.
13
Those we do not know
Little touching habits, he hadn’t forgotten them and he would presumably always associate them with their childhood: back in the fifties, in the sandstone hills by the Elbe. Meno was waiting, among the crowds doing their Christmas shopping, outside the Intecta furniture shop in the Old Market arcades on the corner of Thälmannstrasse, and recognized Anne at once from a distance; the way she threw back the orange scarf with a will of its own that she wore over her coat and that kept slipping down off her shoulders as she hurried along, that spot of orange in the turbid swell of the shopping-bag-laden throng; then the way she nibbled at the fingertips of her gloves while still walking, as if she were trying to take them off; that she always ran the last bit, once they had seen each other, embraced him passionately with all her shopping, her net bags with vegetables, her packages dangling from strings (had he ever, since she was married and the boys were beyond kindergarten age, seen her with her hands unencumbered – he couldn’t remember), embraced him unconcerned at what others might think, Meno’s colleagues at the publishers, when she met him there (Dresdner Edition looked out onto the Old Market, Meno just needed to cross the square to get to the furniture shop), or her colleagues from Neustadt Hospital whom she sometimes gave a lift to do their shopping. Anne never introduced him, the women would nod and swarm out at the hurried, well-trained pace of mothers who, after the morning shift, their first job, were setting off in the few hours remaining until closing time on their second job, there must have been something in the newspaper, or the bush telegraph had spread a rumour about deliveries: ‘Attention, housewives, the Centrum store has preserving jars in stock’ (they were needed in the autumn, but they arrived during the winter, what should one do, wait? You always regretted it), on another day the rings for the preserving jars; ‘hairdryers have arrived’ (the particular kind shaped like flounders with the blue plastic casing and black muzzle that after a few minutes of jet-engine noises smelt of burnt flies), or ‘Everything for the Child’: baby bottles of Jena glass that didn’t crack when heated, nappies that would survive no more than three or four washes, pans for boiling nappies, thermometers for checking the water while boiling nappies, Milasan baby food, dummies, two or three of the priceless modern prams that, actually intended for export, had managed to find their way to a department in a store on the edge of town that was now under siege …
‘Mo.’
‘Anne.’
She kissed him on the cheek and took his hand, waving it merrily up and down as if they were a couple that had just fallen in love. The list: in his mind’s eye he could see Anne’s rough-looking handwriting, a dozen lines, of which a couple at the beginning had been deleted; but he liked going shopping with her, he was interested in all the apparently trivial little things that were needed to make daily life troubleproof: shoelaces, vacuum-cleaner bags, buttons, a darning mushroom (he had seldom seen a new one in the families he visited, everywhere he went the ones he saw were the bread-brown darning mushrooms from the pre-war Müller sewing-machine works in Dresden, riddled with the holes of countless needles), and Anne liked to have him with her, since he never grumbled on their expeditions that took them all round the city, he was able to summon up an interest in coffee filter papers or the varying quality of materials for suits, she trusted his judgement of dress patterns (she had done that, he recalled, when she was still a little girl) and she asked his advice when she needed to buy presents. It was Advent now and when he looked at the faces of the women in the Centrum store or the poorly stocked shops along Prager Strasse, he thought that they hated this time of the year: all the running round
after a few ridiculous articles of, in general, mediocre quality, the hustle and bustle of the Christmas Market with its brass bands, the chimney-sweep figures made of prunes, the baked apples, hot, strong grog, moaning kids clinging on to their hands and men who didn’t have to bother with all that because they had to work (but the women had to as well) or were sitting with a beer in their local bar watching Sports Report or playing cards. Robert, for example, wanted some new football boots, the ones with screw-in studs, and Anne told him as they crossed the Old Market, heading for Prager Strasse, that she had asked Ulrich where she might find boots like that, ‘he says the best place would be in Dům Sportu in Prague, they have Bata boots, they’re better than ours, but to go all the way to Prague for a pair of football boots … ? But when I think about it, why not? Perhaps I’d find something for Richard there and perhaps a decent shirt for Niklas, he’s always wearing the same ones and the cuffs are already frayed, I’m surprised Gudrun doesn’t say something about it, and his trousers ought to be let out a bit, they’re much too short for him … We’ll see. Perhaps I’ll manage to get to Prague. You could come too, we’ll go in the car and have a nice day out. And you can speak Czech.’