by Uwe Tellkamp
That evening Richard went to Planetenweg. Kühnast didn’t have a telephone at home and the porter at the pharmaceutical factory hadn’t been able to put him through. Richard had rung the House with a Thousand Eyes and asked Alois Lange to put a note on the chemist’s door. All over the district there were boxes on the doors, with a pencil on a string, for that kind of message. Please knock, bell not working, it said under Kühnast’s nameplate.
‘Ah, Herr Hoffmann, do come in. I saw Herr Lange’s note. – No, no, you can keep your shoes on. This way, please.’ They went past bookshelves, with gas and electricity meters ticking between them, and into the living room. Ground-glass doors, damp patches on the hall ceiling, fine cracks, plaster flaking off. ‘My wife’s made a few sandwiches.’ Kühnast pointed to a tray. ‘What would you like to drink?’
‘One of your liqueurs, if you don’t mind.’
A pleased expression flashed across Kühnast’s face. ‘Of course, we’re only at the trial stage. Has it’ – the chemist adjusted his glasses, which had been mended with adhesive tape – ‘got round to you then? I can recommend the peach.’ Kühnast poured him a glass and watched Richard as he tipped the liquid – it was a lurid sunset-red – down his throat. ‘Strong.’
‘Isn’t it?’ The chemist sat down, crossed his legs. ‘Right then. What can I do for you, Herr Hoffmann?’
Richard described the problem. ‘… so I thought that you, being in the pharmaceutical factory …’
‘At the source.’ Herr Kühnast nodded and, after a while, took off his spectacles and dangled them by the mended earpiece. It would soon be Christmas, he said, in measured tones. Richard didn’t quite understand. The Dresden Christmas stollen was famous, and justifiably so, Kühnast went on. Butter, sugar, flour, candied peel, sultanas – and every year it was becoming more and more difficult to get hold of the exotic ingredients; Walther’s bakery was increasingly compelled to only bake them if the ingredients were supplied. Sultanas, where could you get those? And the stollen ought to be rich in fat, when you squeezed it, the cut end should be damp, the stollen should be heavy, nourishing, rest comfortably in your stomach for a while, sweet but not sickly-sweet company for the digestive enzymes, the stollen should be rich in sultanas, the stollen should be from Walther’s bakery. ‘Twenty of them, Herr Hoffmann. All my relations, you know.’
With Wernstein and Dreyssiger, the most enterprising of the younger doctors, Richard went to Malivor Marroquin, the costumier’s; each of them hired a Father Christmas outfit. ‘A bit uncomfortable, but it’ll work. And we need camouflage.’
They parked the car with its trailer on the edge of the heath. The moon peered through the tops of the trees, making the snow beside the forest track shine like corrugated zinc. Dreyssiger shouldered the saw, Wernstein took the axe, Richard the bolt cutters.
‘As long as nothing goes wrong,’ Wernstein said. ‘If we’re caught, we’ve had it.’
‘Nah, we’ll manage it,’ said Dreyssiger, who was in high spirits. ‘Who dares wins. Or are you going to chicken out, Thomas?’
‘If only this stupid beard wasn’t so itchy. I’d guess it’s been stored in tons of moth powder. That’s what it smells like too.’
‘Careful from now on,’ Richard cautioned them. ‘It’s about ten minutes to the plantation from here. It’s guarded. By Busse, the forester, in a raised hide, and a soldier. The local pastor told me that. Busse will probably have his dog with him.’
Grinning, Wernstein help up half a blutwurst.
‘Excellent.’
‘I hate blutwurst, boss.’
‘The best tree is in the middle, slightly apart from the rest. It’s said to be clearly visible from the hillock before the plantation.’
‘Pretty well informed, your pastor.’
‘No one can stop him combining his woodland walks with observations. But let’s get on. The plantation’s fenced off, Busse’s hide is about fifty metres from the track; the soldier patrols the fence. We’ll creep up cautiously – and then this here.’ Richard held up the bolt cutters. ‘Snip, snip, snip and we’re through. Herr Dreyssiger, you and I will crawl over to the corpus delicti and saw it down. Herr Wernstein will keep a look-out. Can you imitate an owl?’
Wernstein put his hands together and blew into the gap between his thumbs.
‘Sounds OK.’ Richard gave a nod of approval. ‘Two hoots if things get dicey. From now on not a sound unless it’s absolutely necessary. And in a whisper.’
The baker’s mother had a heart condition and Walther was in principle sympathetic towards Richard’s request. But he had a bakery to run and a private one at that. ‘The taxes’ – he raised his floury hands – ‘the taxes, Herr Doktor. We have to have a new oven but the taxman takes all our profits.’ Richard gave him the sultanas from Alice and Sandor’s parcel.
‘I’ll make you the twenty stollen, Herr Doktor. But I need medicines for my mother.’
‘I’ll write you a prescription.’
‘No, no, they’re special ones from Dr Tietze. From over there. Made over here but for over there. And sent back from over there.’
They waited behind a tree on the top of the hillock overlooking the plantation and watched. The hide wasn’t to be seen, but the soldier was; he was wrapped up warmly and, Kalashnikov on his shoulder, was walking up and down in front of a gate in the fence. Now and then he flapped his arms, switched on a torch to illuminate the surroundings and rubbed his hands. He looked at his watch. On the hour he set off on his round.
‘I estimate he’ll be back in a quarter of an hour.’ Richard wet his index finger and held it up. The wind was against them, so wouldn’t carry their scent to Busse’s dog. Once the soldier was out of sight, Richard gave the sign; Wernstein stayed behind. In the shadow of the track he and Dreyssiger slipped across to the fence; Richard checked the tension of the wire and cut it apart almost soundlessly. A criminal act! he thought. But the tree has to go through it. I hope it’s not visible and I hope the idiot in uniform doesn’t shine his light on that spot when he comes back. They crept into the plantation, stood up with some difficulty among the closely planted trees. They hung up their Father Christmas coats on a branch – they’d only be a hindrance in there and get torn – and worked their way through to the middle of the plantation. The trees were thinner there and a white rectangle was dangling from every tree. Dreyssiger shielded his torch, cautiously shone it on them. The signs bore names, all of them those of high Party functionaries; the finest blue spruce was labelled with the name ‘Barsano’. It was about ten foot high and completely regular in growth.
The nurses on North Ward 1 opened the last batch of painkillers. Kühnast was sympathetic towards Richard’s problem – in principle. ‘We could run a special shift. The problem is that I wouldn’t have any staff. It’s only possible on a Saturday, our big shots are never around then.’
Richard rounded up his students and arranged a subbotnik. He loved the kind of extra-curricular activity that this Saturday voluntary shift would be. His opinion as a university teacher was that his students ought to know where they were studying, what they were studying and why they were studying. Germany had once been the world’s pharmacy and Dresden the cradle of pharmacology. The pharmaceutical factory, created by the amalgamation of the firms Madaus, Gehe and the von Heyden Chemical Factory, where acetylsalicylic acid – the basic material for aspirin, the most widely sold medicine in the world – was first produced on an industrial scale, had its main site in Leipziger Strasse, in Gehe’s former drugs and chemical finishing plant. The gutters hung crookedly, the windows wore cravats of ash, the smiles of award-winning workers on the photos along the works entry were eaten away by sulphuric cancer, as was the chalked ‘labourers of all kinds’ on the ‘We are looking for’ board hanging beside the porter’s lodge.
‘Psst!’ Dreyssiger held up his hand. They heard the cracking of the undergrowth and immediately scurried into cover.
‘Well, just look at that, it’s Magenstock!’ R
ichard ducked down. ‘Magenstock in person with one of his sons.’
The two of them headed straight for the best blue spruce, listened for a few seconds, during which Richard and Dreyssiger didn’t utter a word, and started to saw. Richard thought: should they jump up and say, Stop, we were here first? Dreyssiger was already doing that and striding over towards Pastor Magenstock. ‘Who are you?’ the pastor grunted. Dreyssiger shone his light on their faces. They had black make-up on, a kind of Indian war paint. ‘We were here first.’ Dreyssiger could hardly control his anger.
‘Oh, Herr Hoffmann,’ Pastor Magenstock murmured, pressing his hand to his heart. ‘So your questions were not without ulterior motive.’
With a wave of his hand Richard told Dreyssiger to switch his torch off. Hearts pounding, the four men listened. There was nothing to be heard apart from the whispering of the trees.
‘Herr Hoffmann, what you are doing is … in the interest of a clinic?’ Pastor Magenstock was breathing with difficulty. ‘You see, I’m doing this in the interest of my faith. The custom comes from the womb of Christianity.’
At that moment Wernstein’s warning hoot sounded. The men pulled themselves to their feet. Magenstock and his son ran over to Barsano’s spruce and furiously completed their sawing. A dog started to bark. ‘Come on, let’s go,’ Magenstock croaked with remarkable coolness. Dreyssiger grabbed the saw, in his panic Richard left the bolt cutters on the ground. Already they could see the swaying beam of a torch through the branches of the young trees. The four of them crashed unhesitatingly through the lower branches. ‘Stop there! Stop!’ and ‘Get them, Rudo!’ came the cries behind them. Magenstock’s son bent the twigs back as he dashed on ahead, and sent them smacking into his father’s face. The dog was barking, interspersed with Wernstein’s nonstop owl cries; how pointless, Richard thought, it sounds like a drugged cuckoo. ‘Stop there! Stoooop!’
‘It just won’t do, Herr Kühnast. You can’t let just any old people in here. There are hygiene regulations, there’s a schedule for machine running time –’
‘They would only have done non-skilled work,’ the chemist said. ‘We’ve had problems in packing for months.’
‘Nevertheless. If something gets broken or an accident happens, what then? Anyway, you should have agreed it with me first.’ The expression on Kühnast’s superior’s face changed. ‘On the other hand, you’re here now. Just come with me a moment, Herr Hoffmann’, and he took him to a broom cupboard full of typewriters. ‘All faulty! I’ve been trying to get a technician from your brother’s firm for eighteen months now. You’ll get your medicines. Once our machines have finally been repaired. And give your brother my best wishes.’
‘I’ll let you go, gentlemen. On one condition. One of you must play Father Christmas for my boys,’ the forester growled. ‘The little rascals don’t believe me any more.’ They tossed for it. Wernstein lost.
Richard took the First Party Secretary’s tree to Ulrich, who had agreed to send a technician to the pharmaceutical factory if he was given a Christmas tree with which his department won the coveted challenge cup in the socialist ‘Who has the best Christmas tree?’ competition – and the considerable money prize that went with it.
‘Will Dr Hoffmann please go to Professor Müller,’ came the announcement over the clinic’s Tannoy. Müller was walking agitatedly up and down. ‘If only Reucker wouldn’t give me those triumphant looks during meetings. I have to control myself, Herr Hoffmann, and I don’t like having to control myself.’ He twisted his lips in a sulky raspberry pout. ‘But it’s no use. I suppose we have to admit we’ve been beaten by the Internal Medicine lot this year. It’s beyond belief that Reucker is also the chairman of the Christmas Tree Inspection Committee.’
‘What? Not the Rector?’
‘Exactly. That’s the scandal.’
‘We’ve not given up yet.’
‘But as far as I can see all that’s left is the Christmas Market.’
‘They’ve got nothing but walking sticks that would make us the laughing stock of the Academy.’
Müller’s face lit up as an idea came to him. ‘And twigs, Herr Hoffmann, and twigs.’
But, at the inspection, with a cool gesture Reucker, the head of the Internal Medicine Clinic, took a screwdriver out of the pocket of his snow-white coat, searched for a while, during which Müller’s lips pressed together until they were no more than a slit, then screwed off one branch of the proudly upright, symmetrically built surgical tree. The nurses, doctors, diet cooks, nursing auxiliaries stood there, heads bowed; the crackle of their coats was audible. ‘The screw-tree does not grow in our land,’ said Reucker and he dropped the screw from high up into the hand of an assistant, who, engaged to a nurse from Surgery, gave a smug smile. In the house on Planetenweg they ate the best stollen in the world that evening.
16
The blank sheet
The Christmas holidays were over. Alice and Sandor had returned to Ecuador, amazed at the ashes and snow, as they had said; amazed at an excursion to Seiffen, where the toymakers turned hoops of wood and cut sheep, cows and the pack animals of the Three Kings out of them, painted them and sold them, bright and new, at the Christmas Market. They’d seen a miners’ procession, breathed in the smell of ‘Knox’ incense cones and punch and, adding the East German marks they’d been forced to exchange to their West marks, they’d bought one of the tall, plain pyramids that were not sold at the Dresden Christmas Market but for which they had to knock at the low door of an Erzgebirge cottage and overcome the suspicion of the carver’s wife, who opened the door and regarded them in silence. And Dr Griesel, who lived on the upper ground floor of Caravel and kept the house register, said to Christian, with a sour expression on his face, ‘You can tell your father that it just won’t do … He told me nothing about that trip and his visitors are staying longer than intended. I shall have to report it.’
‘Oh, the clown can go to hell, he just moans all the time because he didn’t get our apartment. Yesyes, Herr Hoffmann, we’re always helping to heat your apartment,’ said Richard, imitating Dr Griesel’s fretsaw voice. ‘But he’s always leaving his Trabbi in my parking space.’
Their neighbour’s gaunt knuckle tapped the register with Griesel’s entries in his engineer’s script. ‘I am the house supervisor and it is my duty to keep this register. The declared length of visit has been exceeded. And recently you left the front door and the cellar door open and all the cats of the neighbourhood came in and shat on the sand, the next time you’ll clear it up yourself with your bare hands. And we don’t heat the whole neighbourhood, either.’
At school the pre-Christmas torpor had vanished. A hum of tension, of hectic activity, had returned. Upstairs and downstairs the new building, which, compared with the old school, a concrete block for almost 1,000 pupils, seemed full of light, was abuzz with pupils repeating vocabulary and theorems. In the corridors the PVC reduced the sound of hundreds of pairs of slippers – Waldbrunn was the smallest senior high in the GDR – to a soft shuffle. Maxim Gorki’s eyes glittered on a photo in the display case on the first floor, below it were a trumpet, a Pioneer’s neckerchief, a copy of a letter from Gorki to young people, a letter of greeting from the Wismut workers to the new senior high school and, something a lot of pupils stopped to look at, an agate, the polished surface of which was covered in milky rings and fiery patterns. It came from Schlottwitz, not far from Waldbrunn, where many such stones were found.
For Christian the classes with Herr Baumann turned out to be the fiasco he had feared. ‘Well, Christian, thinking again, are we?’ Herr Baumann would say sympathetically, his rosy-cheeked face under the scholar’s brow crinkling in amusement when Christian pondered an exercise on the following model: Calculate where A and B will meet when they are building a road towards each other with A laying concrete slabs of size α at rate x; B concrete slabs of size β at rate y. To hell with those exercises! To hell with mathematics and its five lessons a week! What if B was a boozer and de
viated from the set line … Of course, there was no boozing in maths.
‘Thinking again, are we?’ Baumann smiled quietly and didn’t rate any of the busily scribbling pupils more highly than was necessary. ‘I’m giving you a B, Svetlana,’ he’d said recently when Svetlana Lehmann had to go up to the blackboard and, concealed behind one of the wings, wrestle with a vector calculation. ‘I’m giving you a B because I have to. A B means: good. So that means you’re good at maths. So sit back down. D’you know who was good at maths? René Gruber, he was good at maths.’ With that Baumann shrugged his shoulders and softly announced, ‘Now we’re going to put our folders in our desks and take out a piece of paper.’ The class sat there, paralysed with fear; only Verena had shining eyes. Yes, she was good at maths as well. When she did exercises, Herr Baumann didn’t smile and when, at the blackboard, she found another way of solving an equation and, in the middle of a tangle of formulas and unbelievably complicated-looking integrals and square roots, looked for help from Herr Baumann, who was sitting on the edge of the desk at the front, following, the rings of his blue irises, now devoid of gentleness, like two metal discs, he would answer, ‘What you were trying there was really elegant, Verena, but look at this’, then take a piece of red chalk and insert numbers in his copperplate handwriting in the gaps in Verena’s spiky lines. There were only two pupils whom he always addressed by the familiar ‘du’ – Verena and Heike Fieber, who sat next to Jens Ansorge at the front desk of the window row and during maths lessons held her freckled face in the sunshine that trickled over the hill with the motorway into the classroom. At such times Baumann would ask her, like a kindly grandfather asking his little granddaughter, ‘Well, Heike, dreaming? Or are you counting lorries?’ adding, ‘René Gruber could have looked out of the window. But, do you know, he didn’t.’ People didn’t talk about René Gruber at the Maxim Gorki Senior High School, it was an unwritten law. On the one hand René Gruber was undoubtedly a mathematical genius who had won both the GDR and the Eastern Bloc Mathematical Olympiad in Moscow – and that, as some malicious Waldbrunners said, despite the fact that his mother was on the check-out at the local Konsum, next door to the angling club, and his father a simple forestry worker. On the other hand when they sent René, on the basis of his achievements, his political reliability and his family background, as a working-class child to the International Mathematical Olympiad in New York, where he won a special prize for the most elegant solution, he did not return but accepted instead the offer of an American university. From then on he was regarded as an illegal emigrant and traitor. Baumann never used that word when he talked about René Gruber, and that struck Christian. The closer he came to retirement, the more exclusively Baumann’s interests were directed towards mathematics, the pure sphere of conclusive proofs and irrefutable, crystal-clear conclusions.