The Tower: A Novel

by Uwe Tellkamp

  ‘Dingo, dogfish, dolphin, donkey, dove, dromedary, duckbilled platypus,’ said Herr Ritschel in his strange, equal-emphasis tones. ‘The donkey’s eyes are strikingly similar to those of the Minister of Science and Technology.’ Arbogast picked up one of the blocks and turned it over and over, scrutinizing it. ‘I can’t help it, Ritschel, but I’m sure these eyes have looked at me quite often. You did do them from real life …’

  ‘Of course, Herr Professor. They are from Bileam, our pet donkey that unfortunately died last summer. I asked to have its eyes as a model.’

  ‘He’s my best man for synthetic materials, Herr Rohde, invaluable.’

  Ritschel bowed slightly.

  Meno had never before seen anything like these eyes in the transparent blocks, even in the zoological institutes of Leipzig and Jena, where outstanding specialists were working. The preparations had been cast with the greatest precision in the blocks of synthetic material, though not to scale, however, for they were all the same size, the pupils looked like table-tennis balls with a colourful glaze. In each a single eye had been let in beside the visual pathway, sections showed the internal arrangement: iris ring, control muscle for the iris, corpus vitreum, retina, choroidea and from that a further section with rod and cone.

  ‘One of my hobby horses.’ Arbogast had sat down again and was looking at the stick with the gryphon handle; he nodded to Ritschel, who put the blocks back in the cart and trundled it out again. ‘Another is, as you will have noticed, the physics of alarm systems. Do you know, even I have felt what it is like to have to earn your daily bread – even if it doesn’t look like that. I grew up during the inflation years. It was with alarm systems and cameras I’d constructed myself that I earned enough to gain the knowledge I needed to build my physics laboratory. I started off in a lumber room, in the bad years around 1923 in Berlin. I was just sixteen, Herr Rohde, and an independent entrepreneur. If you like I’ll show them to you afterwards. But, Rohde’ – Arbogast spread out his arms and invited Meno to sit down again as well – ‘let us talk about you instead. When I do have guests, I like to get to know them better. One gets too caught up in one’s daily work and I enjoy evenings such as this, look forward to them weeks in advance. What do you say to Ritschel’s skills?’

  ‘Amazing, Herr Arbogast.’

  ‘Well, von Arbogast. Yes, you’re right, it really is amazing. Ritschel is a master of his art … As a former zoologist you will know how much as a scientist one is dependent on one’s craftsmen. They it is who construct our apparatuses and what would even a Röntgen have been without his laboratory mechanic … These eyes: they are looking at us, Rohde, my friend. It is the eyes that see and are seen. “What is most decisive happens in our looks,” said the optical illusion – a little physicist’s joke in passing. It is a particular delight for me in the evening, after the day’s work is done, to stroll round my eye-room and feel my heart start to pound at the hundreds of mute questions … Not a pleasant feeling, certainly not, but helpful. It seems to set off certain synapses, cause an increase in hormonal activity, I’ve had my best ideas there lately. – But let’s talk about you. You come from the countryside south-east of here?’

  ‘From Schandau.’

  ‘Any brothers or sisters?’

  ‘One sister, one brother.’

  ‘We’ve had business with your brother-in-law … An open-minded man. We have certain projects that require cooperation with a clinic. We’ll contact him again at some point. – You like my pencils?’

  Meno had been staring at his desk, trying to count the pencils, which were arranged precisely according to size, in one of Ritschel’s transparent blocks, a battery of sharply pointed little lances.

  ‘There are precisely three hundred and fourteen. Pi, you understand. Three point one four pencils would have been too few for me, so I moved the decimal point back two places. But unfortunately I can’t give you a pencil. There always have to be exactly three hundred and fourteen, the Ludolphine number, the relationship between circumference and diameter. And it must always be these same pencils. Genuine Faber pencils. The dark green is soothing, it’s a real little pine forest I have before me here, the colour is fresh and young, too; the Czech ones you can buy in this country use poorer-quality wood, it splinters and breaks. Moreover they’re yellow. That never happens with these. I don’t want to be confronted with an autumnal deciduous wood. That’s why I have a special standing order with Faber … I could put you on our list of potential pencil-recipients, if you like.

  ‘Very kind of you.’

  ‘My deputy, my two sons, and the head of our gas discharge laboratory are in front of you in the queue, however. – As a zoologist how did you manage to end up as editor in a literary publishing house, if I might ask. That’s something I wondered about.’

  Yes, Meno thought, that was in Leipzig, 1968. It’s the little things you remember first before they let what’s behind them shine through: a match, perhaps, a swimming cap with something written in ballpoint pen on it, a pattern on a piece of clothing. Perhaps the match with which the Party Secretary lit his cigarette – was it an F6 or a Juwel, or did he smoke Karo, which was considered a worker’s brand? – and then his voice, matter-of-fact, slightly disappointed: As long as you’re a member of that society you can forget about your PhD, Rohde. Socialist zoology demands people who are committed to it. You’re one of Professor Haube’s students, you should take him as your model in that respect too. That gang of Protestant students is a collection of counter-revolutionary subversives, keep away from them! We’ll soon have eradicated them. Just think what’s going on in Prague! – I wasn’t the only one thinking of that, nor the students and assistant professors at the Institute; Talstrasse and Liebigstrasse were abuzz with the whispers, the cafés, it was what people were talking about wherever you went. Socialism with a human face … It was what we all wanted.

  ‘There were problems. I was in the Protestant Student Society, in Leipzig, in ’68.’

  ‘I understand. Yes, those regulations. They were not necessarily to our advantage. When you remember how many valuable people, talented scientists … I know there’s this stipulation that the mark for your degree dissertation must not be more than one grade higher than that in Marxism–Leninism. That, I would say, is not very productive. But perhaps it was necessary at the time … We have largely overcome that now. You must put yourself in the mind of the decisionmakers at the time, we were threatened on all sides, the situation was getting out of control in Czechoslovakia, drastic measures had to be taken. Which is not to say that in individual cases, probably in yours as well …’

  Meno remained silent.

  ‘There were misunderstandings and overheated reactions, and yet …’ Arbogast made a conciliatory gesture. ‘You know how it is. I can understand you. And I have been told that you are an excellent editor. So you were expelled from the university?’

  ‘Not actually. But a scientist without a PhD, at a university—’

  ‘Yes. These are things that happen to people. But take comfort from me, my friend. I was only able to attend a few lectures at university and I’m only an honorary doctor. But I hope that I can say that despite that I have made something of myself, hmm? – Then you joined Insel Verlag?’

  ‘You are well informed, if you don’t mind my saying so.’

  ‘An experiment is only as good as its preparations.’ Arbogast twisted his lips. ‘Which is not to say that I regard you as an experiment. Yes, and now I remember – before Insel you were with Teubner’s, the scientific and academic publishers that also brought out my volumes of tables for electrophysics. You were a bit out of the firing line there, so to speak, but not far from your original field.’

  He’ll have had his informants, Meno thought. B. G. Teubner, where I found work, Haube got me the position. A course at the Bibliographical Institute, evening classes. The bears at the entrance to the Zoological Institute … The light and the rooms come back into memory and if you see them again, they’
ve become strange and have nothing to do with you any more – and yet they did belong to me, just as I belonged to them. The stockily built, bald Party Secretary of the Institute, in the conference room in Talstrasse; my mentor, who’s present at the summons; my fellow assistant, who has to take minutes and with whom I share a room in the student residence … The empty-looking pieces of furniture reflecting Haube’s idea of socialist functionality – he hated flourishes, hated the baroque, the Catholic Church, hated Vienna, where he had grown up and we didn’t know and of which he, a large illustrated book in his hand, would speak in a tone of revulsion, hacking at the black-and-white photos with his index finger, the Theresianum, the Ringstrasse, the Capuchin Vault, the Hofburg: that had been the breeding ground for Hitler and his gang – the shit-brown criminals, ladies and gentlemen, there’s no other word for it, you will have to get used to my strong language in this respect.

  ‘Your eye collection is very impressive, Herr von Arbogast.’

  Write it down, Hanna had said, and then perhaps you can get it out of your system. Those years in the sixties when we were young in Leipzig and carried two cards round with us in our wallets: one with a number, that was the butter number you had to give in the shop to get some of the rationed butter – or not to get it when the ration had all been used up: there’s none left, Herr Rohde, but I can give you a bit of margarine; and the house fire basic card 1, the coal card that you needed for your fuel allocation. – The Café Corso in Gewandgässchen, the decayed splendour of the cloth merchants, with its landlady who spoke in a Bavarian accent, its buffet on the first floor and sitting opposite it the fat ladies, who were worthy of a place in Heimito von Doderer’s Demons, the cream-cake-ladies as they were called; the hum of voices upstairs in the preserved Art Deco room: the sea-green fabric wallpaper behind which the Geiger counters ticked and the auriculate jellyfish listened, so people said; where, when the windows were open in the summer, the bellowing voice of the Regional Party Secretary was squeezed out of the pillars with the city radio loudspeakers; the Café Corso: Ernst Bloch would come and talk about Marxism; the university Rector, Mayer-Schorsch, with the fraternity duelling scars he was said to have acquired on the same duelling floor as Haube, would order half a dozen glasses of Hornano vermouth for himself, drink a toast to the goateed Chairman of the State Council on the wall, stand a round for his students and argue about Brecht with the principal of the Institute of Literature, while we at the tables at the front would whisper about Sartre and Anouilh, Beckett, the poems of Yevtushenko and Okudzhava till our heads were spinning; to get that out of my system –

  Arbogast had been playing with one of the pencils and staring pensively out of the window. Giving Meno, who was sitting slumped in his chair, a brief glance, he said, ‘Well, Rohde, I won’t keep you in suspense any longer. I’m writing my autobiography. Your publishing house has approached me, the book is something they’d like to see. What I need is a critical eye, an opponent I can take seriously … I read these pages to my family at weekends, they all nod, but I have the feeling this acceptance comes either from cluelessness or from a mistaken idea of love; perhaps they also want to spare my feelings … It could be that Trude is to a certain extent lacking in that respect … To put it in a nutshell: I need a partner. I’ve made enquiries about you, as I said, and you have an outstanding reputation.’

  There was a knock at the door.

  ‘We’ll talk about this another time. Think it over carefully. Should you say no, you will be forfeiting a fee that would be, well, appropriate. If you say yes, you will have a large amount of work ahead of you, at an unusual hour now and then. I’ll call you tomorrow evening, at eight sixteen. Come in.’

  ‘The guests are arriving, Herr Baron.’

  ‘Thank you, Frau Alke.’ Arbogast picked up the gryphon walking stick and ushered Meno out of the room. They went down into the hall. Meno recognized Vogelstrom, who was talking to Dietzsch, a sculptor who was a neighbour of the Hoffmanns in Wolfstone, Lothar Däne, the music critic of the Sächsisches Tageblatt, the physicist Teerwagen in conversation with Dr Kühnast from the pharmaceutical factory, the dentist, Frau Knabe, who had the apartment above Krausewitz in Wolfstone. Her husband, who worked in the Cabinet of Mathematical and Physical Instruments in the Zwinger, was standing with Malthakus, the stamp dealer, and a woman: Judith Schevola. Meno had heard rumours about her that were going round the literary scene and read a few remarkable stories by her in Sinn und Form … One of the most gifted young writers, she wrote with a passion that was rare in German literature. He had seen her a few times at meetings of the Writers’ Association, also at the Leipzig Fair, but had never spoken to her. She had grey, close-cropped hair, but seemed to be in her early or mid-thirties at the most. Everything about her face looked displaced and distorted, as if it had been put together out of many other faces. Only her eyes seemed to belong to her. She scrutinized Arbogast, then Meno, taking sips from a glass of pomegranate juice. The men were standing facing her, on the other side of the hall as well. Alke opened the door, letting in Sperber, the lawyer, Schiffner, the publisher, and a man with a slightly hunched walk and a fleshy lower lip hanging down, whom Meno knew all too well; he started back and grasped the banister, which the woman with grey hair seemed to register with simultaneous curiosity and hostility, then she looked up and followed Meno’s reactions; he thought: like an entomologist pulling a fly’s leg off to see how it will deal with the new situation. The man – who had noticed him and surreptitiously raised his arm – was Jochen Londoner, his ex-father-in-law.

  ‘Please make your way to our television room.’

  ‘One moment, Ludwig.’ Giving her husband a polite smile, Frau von Arbogast introduced Meno to the other guests. Judith Schevola’s greeting was brief: ‘We know each other. At the last Association conference you showed a great talent for falling asleep.’ Arbogast led the company to the door out of which Ritschel had emerged. Judith Schevola, Malthakus, the stamp dealer, and Frau Knabe, the dentist, stood looking at the painting over the dragon table and only came when Arbogast rang a little bell.

  After his talk and the subsequent discussion, Meno went upstairs before the others; a buffet had been set up in the conference room. Alke and Ritschel were busy at the table with the white cloth. A youngish physicist, who had sat behind Arbogast during the talk, gave Meno a friendly nod. ‘If there’s anything else you’d like to see …’ He opened a little door that led out onto an oriel running round part of the building.

  ‘Thank you, Herr …’

  ‘Kittwitz. I work at the Institute for Flow Research. And don’t worry, they’ll find you soon enough, Herr Rohde. I enjoyed your talk. The way the garden spider makes its nest – remarkable parallels to the buffet-encirclement behaviour at physics conferences … But I’ll leave you in peace now.’

  Rohde went to the edge of the balcony. The cool air did him good, his face was burning and he was glad that Kittwitz’s friendly gesture had enabled him to have a few moments to himself. He was shaken by hot and cold shivers alternately, the excitement was gradually dying down, for a few seconds he was in a state between profound tiredness and cool alertness, like a clock spring, he thought, that is being squeezed tight by the fingers of a clockmaker but can slip out and fly open at any moment; this blasted stage fright, I didn’t speak well. In his mind’s eye he saw the face of his ex-father-in-law, bright, with the expression of concentrated listening that he knew and in which his lower lip drooped and was drawn up with a start at regular intervals, then Londoner became aware that he was being or could be observed; he would grasp his chin between index and middle finger and clear his throat; those nails that were always too long, Meno thought, the thick signet ring – master’s ring, Londoner used to say – like a yellow frog on the bottom joint of his index finger: one of those tropical amphibians with warning colours; but this one seemed to be asleep in a state of metamorphosis, especially when Londoner, as during his talk, let his hand dangle down and crossed his legs, kept his
heavy eyelids closed and his nose – Hanna’s nose, too small for his full-fleshed face – became covered in drops of sweat. Arbogast’s introduction; Schiffner’s eyes, unfathomable under his white bushy brows, variable: sometimes cool, sometimes concerned, sometimes with a kind of fatherly benevolence that fascinated and oppressed Meno in equal measure; and Madame – in his thoughts he used that instead of the ‘Fräulein’ that seemed inappropriate – Schevola, cold, head proudly thrown back: Do you think what you have to say is of any interest to me? Get it out of your system, Meno told himself, and that strange television room …

  He searched for his cigarettes, Arbogast wouldn’t see that he smoked, but even if he did, he was presumably allowed one now. He hadn’t brought any with him and remembered that he had left the yellow packet of Orient at home, between his typewriter and an issue of Sinn und Form that Schiffner had given him to have a look at. The city lay dark below him, with sparse lights scattered round the edges, Kleinzschachwitz and Pillnitz upstream, above them, near Pappritz, the television tower with faintly phosphorescent antennae; the Elbe water meadows and the hills towards the Czech border mere inky-black surfaces; farther downstream the Johannstadt suburb with its prefabricated tenements; directly below him the continuation of the slope of Arbogast’s garden cocooned in marshy darkness, the Blue Marvel with its filigree double tent stretching so elegantly across the river, a number 4 tram was crossing it, Meno could see the conductor as a patch of shadow in the yellowish light of the carriage. A white smudge was dangling from the power cable over Schillerplatz, a fraying banner hanging down limply like a dead squid preserved in formaldehyde. When there was some movement in the air, bringing back currents of stench, he thought he could smell the decay away over Körnerplatz and the wooded slopes of the district on the edge of which Arbogast’s property stood. It was the smell of ash from the Mitte and Löbtau combined heat and power stations by the Brücke der Jugend, the chimneys of which looked down on the city with red Cyclops eyes. He heard the babble of voices from the conference room, he also had the feeling his name was being called. His tiredness increased, at the same time he felt a strong desire for a cigarette. He watched, saw the Elbe like a spine of tar below him, the houses a gangrenous black, like decomposing flesh, shimmering movements in it, as if gleaming white trichinae had bored into the rotting stone flesh, ready to lay their eggs. There was a play of searchlight beams on the Käthe-Kollwitz-Ufer, fleecy arms of light feeling their way, with the movements of helpless swimmers, over the dark-lying cellular systems of the buildings in the sector of the workers’ housing cooperative; sometimes they were struck, as if by an indignant, hostile glance, by the gleam of a distant window, so there must still be life there. What kind of life, Meno wondered, what is life like down there? A ship with an orchestra on board could run aground, the cracks of light along the curtains wouldn’t get any wider. The Blue Miracle was deserted, only the Schillergarten restaurant on the opposite bank of the Elbe seemed to still be open. There, too, the curtains were drawn but a door opened now and then and a customer staggered out into the fresh air, either to go off in the direction of the bus stops on Schillerplatz or to disappear behind the restaurant. It was not the only such establishment to have problems with the sewerage system, Meno remembered the Bodega in Leipzig, a favourite meeting place during the book fair that possessed no conveniences, one had to use the back yard there as well … Now the Elbe was a bluish shade, then sea creatures seemed to crawl past, milky, misshapen beings made to look leprous by the water. The stench came, rolled up the slopes, Meno knew it from his tongue, it was the taste of a match that has been chewed too long, to which something like a dash of sauerkraut was added: the effluent from the Heidenau cellulose works that was let out into the water at night.