The Tower: A Novel

by Uwe Tellkamp

  ‘Right, then I will give you two names for which I will fight in the publishing plan. Let’s not fool ourselves, Rohde. You have fourteen titles, twelve of them are’ – Eschschloraque glanced through the telescope by the window of the room that was stuffed full of books and papers – ‘the way they are. Two will cause offence: Altberg’s essays and Eduard Eschschloraque’s slim volume of writings full of wittily mendacious truths and classic pesticide for the romantic rodents gnawing away at the vineyard of literature. You know just as well as I do that one of these projects has to die.’

  But Eschschloraque’s smile vanished when he continued. Meno left his tea untouched and let his eyes wander round the room while the playwright, who seemed to Meno like a mixture between a clown and a sharp-witted old woman, exercised his wickedly mocking tongue on the more or less characteristic qualities of those colleagues whose manuscripts he had reported on in his quality of assessor. A copper engraving of Goethe on the wall, the old Weimar edition of his works in a glass-fronted bookcase, a bust of Goethe on the dramatist’s desk between a Soviet pennant and a signed portrait of Stalin; in front of them two neatly aligned typewriters: a black Erika and beside it a sign, like those saying ‘Reserved’ in restaurants, bearing the inscription ‘Mortal’; a second sign, beside the other typewriter, made by Rheinmetall, with ‘Immortal – when I’m fresh’; by this time Meno had shifted sideways up to the table and didn’t need to bend back much as the playwright strode up and down. ‘Hoary expressions, Rohde! And always with heartfelt’ – Eschschloraque drew the exclamation mark in the air with his finger – ‘good wishes … why not liverfelt or lungfelt once in a while? We all have to breathe, why should good things always have to come from the heart? Most people’s ticker is a clock, not a heart. The liver: the body’s chemical factory. Its potions and juices are much richer.’

  His sarcastic thrusts broke off as if he’d hit a barrier when Eschschloraque got round to the Old Man of the Mountain’s book.

  Meno was astonished at the seriousness, the knowledgeable, almost solemnly expressed love that warmed Eschschloraque’s remarks on those essays; he wouldn’t have believed Eschschloraque capable of it, wouldn’t have expected it of him. ‘Do you know what I see, my dear Rohde, when I look through this telescope? I see a classical land and Altberg is one of Goethe’s children. Goethe. Goethe! After all, he’s the father – and all the criticism merely the twitching of frogs’ legs.’ He had never, Eschschloraque went on, read such essays on writers and their works. That was European, indeed world, class.

  Meno couldn’t believe his ears. Eschschloraque, that captious critic, that occupational shadow who ruthlessly pursued every careless slip, who openly spoke up for Stalin and the Stalinist system, for whom Richard Wagner’s music was a crime, the man was standing there by the door, disarmed, all his mockery, his caustic wit gone. ‘Don’t gawp like that, that’s your blasted lemon. Hm. So we’ll live and pray and sing, and tell old tales and laugh at gilded butterflies … but he misunderstands matters when he says that their relationships with each other are always created by people alone. Have you never encountered lifeless people? Have you never thought about the idea that you might have different shadows that take alternate shifts? – Now you know,’ Eschschloraque said brusquely, ‘or at least you think you do. The manuscript submitted by Eschschloraque needs to be revised and improved. It cannot be recommended for publication at the present moment. And now out you go, you’ve stolen enough of my precious time as it is. You’ll have it all in writing – and no sly tricks, Rohde.’

  ‘Left leg shorter by twelve centimetres,’ Dr Pahl wrote on the form and closed the handbook on assessing fitness for military service. ‘The man is entirely unfit for military service. At ten centimetres he could have been conscripted as a naval wireless operator or staff clerk without having to go through basic training. Of course, that leaves the question of what we do if there’s an appeal or if the orthopaedist for the regional military command should read the file. He’d immediately want to know what remedial measures were being looked at. Are there orthopaedic shoes with the soles built up by twelve centimetres?’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ Richard said. ‘We’d have to add that an operation to shorten the other leg is being planned.’

  ‘Hm.’ Pahl thought for a moment. ‘A bit thin. That would be a matter for Orthopaedics and at least I do know some colleagues there that we can trust. But what will happen if some overzealous military bone setter should simply summon this tyre repairer to have a look at the leg.’

  ‘And would he not also want to know how the man had managed to walk up to now? Twelve centimetres, Herr Pahl!’

  ‘Yes, he’s not just got a limp. Well, we’ll just say he’s made himself raised soles for his shoe out of old tyres. It’s crazy to conscript this man! We have to stop it. Do you know the orthopaedist for the local military command, Herr Hoffmann?’

  ‘Unfortunately not.’

  ‘Me neither. – Shall we risk it?’

  ‘Let’s risk it.’

  Meno almost exclaimed, ‘You!?’ when he saw the Old Man of the Mountain come out of the door. The old man invited him into his room. ‘What would you like to drink? Tea, mineral water, lemonade? No, I know what you drink.’ Altberg reached under the desk and, with a sly grin, fished out a bottle with an oily, amber liquid. ‘Home-made, the recipe comes from my housekeeper. Nectar of the Gods. Please …’ Waving away Meno’s protests, Altberg poured some of the nectar into two glasses. ‘Prost!’

  Meno took a sip: shards of fire went tumbling down his throat, merging into a fire-eel that slowly, bristling with spines, filled his gullet; Meno felt he was on fire and as if his eyes were being forced out of their sockets from inside. Then the blaze splashed back in a surging wave that went to the roots of his hair, to the tips of his fingers, electrified his nostrils and brought peace. The Old Man of the Mountain poured himself a second glass, tossed it back, chewed on the drink like a slice of bread. Then he took the reports out of the drawer and his friendliness vanished.

  The old man tore, ripped, slashed almost the entire publishing plan to pieces. He made holes in a novel by Paul Schade that left it like a Swiss cheese; he made the pieces between the holes sound as if they had the taste of a rubber eraser, designating them ideologist’s puree, he crossed out the holes, sliced them lengthways, chopped them up crosswise, drew, after he’d downed a third glass of nectar, the slats of a blind in the air and shut them.

  ‘Do you know what would have happened to you in the past, after the Eleventh Plenary Session of the Party Central Committee, if you had ventured to present such a plan, such deviations from the Party line? Just ask your colleague Lilly Platané in Editorial Office 1 … A financial penalty in the form of a reduction in salary, a serious charge of endangering the targets of the plan, self-criticism before the editorial board … Just be glad I’m not attacking you personally. You can look over the cuts I prescribe when you get home.’ He put his reports in a folder and tossed it over to Meno.

  ‘But there’s something else. Herr Eschschloraque’s manuscript. That, my dear Rohde,’ the old man said, ‘I’m going to finish off for you well and good. My volume of stories is going to be chucked out, a good thing then that I’ve got a few more essays as well; and in place of that you want to publish this crap, this stilted celery, this …’ He struggled for words to drive his contempt for Eschschloraque, who was a blowfly, incapable of flight, crawling over plaster casts of the classics, forcibly into Meno’s ear while he, pale, was contending with the consequences of the nectar. Meno wondered if he should make the Old Man of the Mountain aware of Eschschloraque’s attitude but, stunned, he decided not to.

  Three o’clock. Richard checked his wristwatch as the gong echoed. Regine had said goodbye, she had bravely and defiantly decided she was going to come back there in a fortnight’s time. No hysteria à la Alexandra Barsano, that only led to trouble and got you nowhere. Obstinate insistence, unwavering chipping away until you found the w
eak spot – ‘even if I have to spend the night here’. Richard leant against the wall, looked out of the window, wondered whether to steal one of the little copper watering cans or at least a sucker from one of the fleshy leaved plants, ate his last sandwich. The violin evaluated, the report with Pahl finished – a sensible and experienced man, you never knew which assessor you were going to get … That left the gas water-heater. The strange ticking noise there’d been this morning had gone. Meno had not turned up at twelve and the porter had refused to send out a call for ‘any old citizen, we’re not at the football stadium’.

  Or the racecourse, Richard thought. Flurries of snow started. The derricks in the prohibited area of Coal Island were just visible, as if sketched with faint pencil lines. Crows winged down from the Marx–Engels memorial; the sentry in front of it, whom Richard could see obliquely from behind, stood there motionless, covered in snow, rifle at attention. A clunking meandered down the heating pipes that ran, uncovered, along the walls. Richard folded his sandwich paper, washed himself in one of the hand-basins and set off for the eleventh floor, G corridor, office CHA/5.

  Meno looked at the clock: his next appointment was for 3.30 p.m. Ravenous, he ate the apple and the two pieces of cream cake he’d packed in his briefcase in the morning. Slalomon. He was the only one who still wrote his reports – extensive free-skating programmes with a scatter of cut flowers – by hand. His handwriting was clear and flowing, as in official letters from the nineteenth century. They looked strange among the office files, like jetsam from a long-ago age, and when he read Albert Salomon’s reports, with the roundabout style avoiding anything too direct, Meno had the same feeling as with the pre-war telegrams he saw at Malthakus’s, lines that read as if put together laboriously and against considerable resistance, arousing in him the urge to write an essay on the attraction of the ‘just-about’; it must have something to do with being saved, an innate desire for protection, that made such a document, rescued from the crypt of time, seem more valuable than modern, easy, newsy letters which gave the impression that neither their preparation nor their distribution had taken much effort.

  A lengthy part of Salomon’s reports consisted of apologies: apologies for having to make a judgement; for recommending a cut here and there; for inconveniencing the author and editor; for the fact that he, Albert Salomon, existed.

  Mrs Privy Councillor: Eschschloraque, in his role as dramatist, had once taken the liberty of making a joke and given himself a speech in one of his plays: ‘Censors! Who is it that becomes a censor if not someone / whose head is largely empty / even if the fellow’s read this line’ – that was what the whole play was like had been Karlfriede Sinner-Priest’s sole comment on this salutation from a fellow socialist. Meno was afraid of her. She was unpredictable, her opinion outweighed all others in the Ministry of Culture, she had been on Coal Island since time immemorial, her reports were looked upon as an ideological litmus test. No Hermes editor had ever managed to get a book accepted that she wanted to refuse ‘entry into literature’. She was gaunt and looked as if she’d been turned on a wood lathe, a doll that never laughed, who, depending on her mood, would kill off a book or a person with a single sentence, sharp as a sliver of glass, or go off on sparkling, sometimes self-ironic purple passages enthusiastically scrambling over each other. Her authority was Lenin, her interest free of prejudice. She had pencils stuck like Japanese pins in her wig that was always askew and made her face seem unnaturally long, giving her the look of something extinct; Meno sometimes imagined her at a castle ball, dancing ceremoniously to the sound of a spinet. She had been given one of the SS’s travel scholarships. She had survived Buchenwald.

  Richard was astonished to see Albert Salomon at the office of the Communal Housing Administration. He was waiting on the sixth floor, C corridor, office H/2; office CHA/5 in G corridor on the eleventh floor was only for heating problems, insulating material, pumps and the maintenance of gas meters, but not for gas water-heaters, they were a sanitary problem, as Richard was informed. Albert Salomon kept looking at the clock above the office window and appeared to be getting increasingly nervous. Richard knew him, he was one of his patients. Before 1933 Albert Salomon had worked for Meissen Porcelain as a pattern maker and design painter but someone had informed on him and he had ended up in a Gestapo prison, then in Sachsenhausen concentration camp, where he was tortured and both his arms were crushed. His right arm, the one he used to paint and write with, had had to be amputated in the concentration camp. Only once, as far as Richard could remember, had Salomon talked about the camp: commenting on a passage in a Soviet novel in which he thought a detail was wrong – the boot-testing track with different surfaces along which prisoners had to go at a forced march for days on end to test out various materials for the soles of army boots; every surface ‘a city I thought about’.

  A shrill bell sounded. ‘Closing time!’ The office window rattled shut.

  19

  Urania

  The ten-minute clock struck twenty to five; once more Meno checked his manuscript, key, the letter of invitation written by Arbogast’s secretary, took the rose for Arbogast’s wife out of the water, wrapped it in paper and left. He went down Wolfsleite, waved to Herr Krausewitz, who, puffing away at his Mundlos cigar, was busy in the garden of Wolfstone: ‘Oh, good evening, Herr Krausewitz, isn’t it a little early for flowers?’ – pointing at the garden tools in Krausewitz’s wheelbarrow.

  ‘For flowers yes, Herr Rohde, but it is time for the fruit trees, and the branches of the old apple trees are too thick, I’ll have to thin them out, otherwise we’ll only get little apples in the autumn.’ – ‘Pretty cold, isn’t it?’ – ‘Oh,’ said Krausewitz, waving the comment away, ‘fear ye not the cold March snow, a good warm heart doth beat below, as the farmers say. And the caterpillars have to be dealt with as well. Look’ – he pointed to several branches – ‘I put some glue-bands on – and now the blasted creatures have laid their eggs underneath the strips. The winter moth especially, it was a real pest last year. The bands aren’t sticking on any longer, I’ll have to renew them. Otherwise the caterpillars will crawl up the branches and that’ll be it for the fruit and everything that goes with it.’

  ‘In our garden the trees have lots of splits in the bark.’

  ‘You mustn’t leave them open, Herr Rohde. No wonder given how cold it’s been. The bark splits like dry skin. I recommend you cut away the edges smoothly and then seal them with a proprietary product. Frau Lange should still have some, I saw her getting in a good supply in the pharmacy last October. Otherwise just come and ask.’ – ‘So cut away smoothly?’ – ‘Like a surgeon, yes. These trees are living beings too. And they have a character of their own as well. But, as I said, don’t forget to seal the splits.’

  How were things at the airport, Meno asked. Krausewitz worked there as a controller. Same as ever, routine you know, they tried to transfer him from the tower to ground control, after all he had turned fifty-eight, hadn’t he? But in the tests he’d outperformed two younger colleagues and then there was the experience, so he was still slotted into the cycle of four-hour shifts like all the rest. Give the Langes my best wishes, won’t you. With that, Krausewitz tipped his angler’s hat and dug the spade, which he’d been leaning on while they talked, into the soil, which was still dappled with snow.

  Meno had gone home rather earlier than usual that day, which was easier on a Friday since the publishing section in the Ministry of Culture didn’t call after one and Schiffner left at that time when he’d come from Berlin: not to start the weekend but for his beloved visits to artists’ studios where he hoped to find up-and-coming young artists. ‘Until this evening, Herr Rohde, we’ll see each other then at Arbogast’s, I’m very much looking forward to your talk. You could have told me what your hobby is, after all we can do something for that sort of thing – you just sit here quietly pondering over literature and keeping yourself to yourself.’

  Meno really ought to have done some more work o
n a manuscript by Lührer, an urgent task, but he wanted to read his paper out loud again and had gone to see his colleague Stefanie Wrobel, known as Madame Eglantine. ‘Off you go,’ she’d said with a resigned smile, ‘and all the best for this evening.’

  ‘Thanks. I owe you. If I can do anything for you –’

  ‘You could put on a pot of water for my coffee before you go. I’d also like a copy of your talk, a detailed report of course – and an honest explanation.’

  ‘Of what?’

  ‘Of how you managed to saddle me with our classical author’s latest opus.’ She pointed at Eschschloraque’s manuscript.

  ‘He’s threatening me.’

  ‘Who is he not threatening?’ Madame Eglantine shrugged her shoulders and hurriedly downed the last of her coffee.

  Darkness was still falling quickly, the lights above Wolfsleite and the Turmstrasse crossroads drifted into view like moons. A white Citroën turned into Wolfsleite and stopped outside the first house after Turmstrasse. That had to be the car of Sperber, the lawyer. Meno kept in the shadow of the trees on his side of the road. The lawyer got out, there was a jangle of keys, the gate at the end of the wrought-iron fence opened and Meno watched Sperber, about whom there were many rumours circulating in the Tower: that during the week he worked in a lawyers’ chambers on the Ascanian Island, where he also had an apartment and a mistress, whom his wife not only knew about but had selected for him herself from among the throng of female students in the law faculty, where he also gave lectures; that he was a fanatical supporter of Dynamo Dresden – Meno had that from Ulrich, who had often met him in the stadium – and that he was ready to listen to anyone who was in political difficulties. Sperber turned round, fixed his eyes on Meno, waved: ‘Good evening, Herr Rohde, it doesn’t start until seven, if I’m not mistaken.’ Does that mean Sperber’s part of Urania as well? Concealing his surprise, Meno went over to Sperber, trying to appear unselfconscious, for he was embarrassed at being discovered in his attempt to hide. But he’ll be familiar with that, he told himself with amused irritation, it’ll be the behaviour pattern of his clients. Sperber said it was good they’d finally got to know each other, he was a fan of Dresdner Edition, a subscriber, you might almost say, and since the name of the editor was always given in the imprint, he had in a way already made his acquaintance, assuming one could take a person’s approach to their work for the person, as he also had that of Frau, ‘or Fräulein?’ – Sperber gave a charming smile – Wrobel, who, however, ought to be more strict with some authors, there were errors, naming no names, of course. – Of course. – Some of our living classical authors are quite unsure about punctuation. For prices you need an em dash, not a two-em dash nor a hyphen. Recently he’d come across a word division he’d immediately made the subject of his lecture: surg-eon instead of, correctly, sur-geon! Sperber chopped down with the side of his hand and screwed up his right eye. Schiffner was one of the old school, couldn’t he … But more of that later. Sperber laughed and took Meno’s hand in a limp handshake.