by Uwe Tellkamp
Influenza infection, Fernau had written, two or three days in bed on a light diet. ‘Could I have an appointment with you, Herr Hoffmann. I’ve got an ingrowing toenail that’s bothering me.’
‘A bit of a temperature?’ Anne asked in a quiet voice once Fernau had left. ‘He’s got forty point three. He calls that a bit of a temperature? Shouldn’t we get them to examine him at the clinic?’
‘Fernau’s been a general practitioner for thirty years, I think he knows what he’s doing,’ Richard replied. – The grandfather clock chimed: a quarter past ten. Anne had let the blind down, but arranged the slats so that a dim light seeped through into the room, pale grey and dismal, in which the heroes of the sea on the wall lost their attraction and Tortuga all its mystery; no ship’s hull bobbing along lethargically in a lagoon with the brass of a sextant glinting on the seabed, no roar of the waves against the prow of the building, as he had sometimes imagined he could hear on windy nights, no navigation lights to starboard or port; and the expressions of Robert’s football heroes said that Italy against Germany, Mexico ’70, had not been a truly world-shattering event, just a football match, in the days when Italy didn’t just play defensively; Uwe Seeler’s expression was blank, not that of a folk hero; World Cup, ’74: Paul Breitner’s hair looked like an electrified feather duster.
Christian got up, put on his dressing gown, staggered into the kitchen to have a drink of the tea Anne had set out for him in two Thermos flasks. In the larder he found an opened packet of Hansa biscuits, he tried one, the biscuits were damp and tasted like soggy cardboard. In Waldbrunn they would be having physics with Herr Stabenow. He didn’t look much older than the pupils with his boyish face and metal-rimmed glasses that kept on slipping down his nose; he would push them back up with the middle finger of his right hand, to which the class, despite its closeness to the gesture of giving someone the finger, paid less attention than to the set-up for the experiment: two chromium-plated spheres on slanting rods, a rubber band and a crank-handle, and when Stabenow turned it, sparks crackled between the two spheres – middle finger, metal-rimmed spectacles; magnets the size of ice-hockey pucks, Stabenow scattered iron filings between them that formed patterns of the electromagnetic field and glittering sheaves at the poles – middle finger, metal-rimmed glasses; but at some point or other they forgot the gesture, forgot their grins and followed, spellbound, Stabenow’s operations that never seemed uncertain; his experiments, which he set up and tried out meticulously in the little preparation cubicle next to the physics room, always worked and that naturally impressed them, for they could put themselves in Stabenow’s place and sensed their own cruel sharpsightedness that no teacher’s idiosyncrasy could escape, they knew that he could well be thinking that they were secretly waiting for him to make a mistake. Christian drank Anne’s strong fennel tea, annoyed that he was here in bed, sick, while the others could do experiments. At the high school he hadn’t liked physics, it was a subject that had too much maths for his taste; it was only when they got onto nuclear physics that he sat up and took notice, but only as long as it didn’t involve calculations – and when Arbogast, as patron of the Louis Fürnberg High School, had come and talked about his own life and about leading scientists he knew. With Stabenow it was different. He was passionate about his subject, the pupils could feel that. His whole body doubled up when he explained the principles behind the construction of a radio and, almost incoherent with enthusiasm, followed the tortuous route of the human voice through all the tubes, transistors, coils and resistances. At the end of the lesson his tie had slipped out of place – one of the so-called ‘bricklayer’s trowels’ you could buy in Waldbrunn and which, so it was said, his landlady chose for him as she did his socks: Herr Stabenow rented a room in one of the lanes leading off from the market. The blackboard was covered with sketches and formulae in his genius’s scribble and the remnants of several pieces of red and white chalk were scattered at an exuberant distance around the classroom. He had sparked off a real fever for physics among the boys, they all suddenly wanted to go in for splitting uranium, do great things in the field of microelectronics, invent pocket calculators with a hundred functions … first of all, however, to learn to smoke a pipe, for all the physicists of genius they saw in the photographs Stabenow brought smoked pipes: Einstein, Niels Bohr, Kapitza … Max Planck had smoked a pipe … or was it Heisenberg? The Nobel Prize at thirty-one … that left them fourteen years, that was piles of time, they’d surely manage it too. They just had to smoke a pipe all the time and learn to be significantly absentminded, like the physicist who one morning leapt onto his bicycle and, eyes fixed, pipe in his mouth, started to pedal, until someone asked him: Where are you going? – I’m going to the Institute. – Without a chain?
The fennel tea tasted horrible, Christian poured it down the sink. He looked out of the window, at Griesel’s garden, which was still in bare hibernation; Marcel, the Griesels’ black poodle, was jumping up and down in his kennel, barking, because the neighbours’ fat, grizzled tomcat, Horace, accompanied by his feline lady, Mimi, white with black paws, happened to be sniffing at the tomato sticks in the bed in front of his run and Mimi was elegantly licking her rolled-up right paw; Marcel howled and savaged his toy, a long roll of rags, but it had no effect.
Briquettes were being shovelled in the coalyard behind Griesel’s garden, familiar noises: shovels digging sharply into the pile, metal rasping over concrete, then the coal clattered into large metal scales, the shovels, briefly tapped to clear them of dust, scraped up slack, took a slithering run-up, dug sharply into the coal again, a little angrily, a little deviously, a little obsessively in the self-assured horny hands of Plisch and Plum, as the labourers were generally called in the district, after Wilhelm Busch’s mischievous pair of dogs, Christian had never heard their real names, one was tall and spindly, the other short and square, a suitcase on two legs, as Aunt Barbara said; and when there was a full hundredweight, the briquettes rumbled down the shiny chutes into gunny sacks that Hauschild, the misshapen, gnarled coal merchant with watery blue eyes shining in his blackened face, would lug round to the shed at the front, on Rissleite, where the customers were waiting.
Christian went back to bed. The light had moved on, the cloud-loom that since Saturday had been weaving a blanket of grey wool over the sky tore open in one place, sending sunbeams into the room: there was Robert’s table, the scattered football pictures, the Olympic photo books he’d borrowed from Niklas, beyond it, placed at a right angle to the window, his own table with the sloping writing top on it he’d made himself from left-over bits of wood and two drawing boards he’d bought from Mathes’s, the stationer’s on Bautzner Strasse, and immediately behind the table the case with his books, hardly three feet away. The tall, solid wood-veneer cupboards, standardized house furnishings, the RUND 2000 model from the state-owned Hainichen furniture works, five of which stood along the walls, leaving just enough space for a sofa, the desks and the bed – Robert’s had to be pulled out – weighed down on the room in their dark solidity. He didn’t like the room, consisting as it did of these heavy cupboards arranged square-on to each other and the carpeted void between them that could immediately be seen into from the door; there was something of a cage about it, the contents of which could be grasped at a glance. The posters on the wall seemed like foreign bodies, tolerated rather than welcomed by Anne, similarly the net with footballs, handballs and Robert’s football boots hanging from a hook over the end of the bed nearest the door. Christian closed his eyes, listened, must have fallen asleep, for he woke with a start when the living-room clock struck the hour. The garden gate slammed and immediately the Griesels’ bell rang: that was Mike Glodde, the mailman with the squint and the hare-lip who was engaged to the Griesels’ middle daughter and brought their mail to their apartment, but only theirs, for the others there were the central lockers at the far end of Heinrichstrasse that the Post Office had set up to make their delivery men and women’s route shorter; anyway, who w
anted to be a postman now, in this phase of transition, according to the law of dialectical materialism, from ‘Soc.’ to ‘Comm.’? Christian smiled when he heard Glodde calling for ‘Mar-tsel’; eleven o’clock: the physics lesson was over and Stabenow would be closing it with his standard concluding exhortation: ‘And just think all this over – why! Why! Why!’
Music was fluttering round the building, a tune full of melancholy and bold sentimentality, sung by male voices: that was the 1930s close-harmony ensemble, the Comedian Harmonists. The tenor’s voice swept upwards, Ari Leschnikoff’s supple timbre, smooth as silk; Christian leant over, put his ear to the wallpaper, now he could hear the lower voices better as well. That was the Stenzel Sisters’ gramophone and at the same interval the record always made a little swerve, soft as butter. Steps and thuds mingled with the music, probably the Stenzel Sisters doing their gymnastic exercises … In their younger days they’d been acrobatic bareback riders in Sarrasani’s Circus. My little sea-green cactus – out on the balcony – hollari, hollari, hollaro … He lay down again. The fever had come back, the weakness in his limbs. Two of the three Stenzel Sisters lived upstairs, the third, the oldest, had a room with the Griesels, and that was something that made Griesel disgruntled: that he, as the officially appointed block superintendent, had had one of his rooms allocated to another person and the Hoffmanns hadn’t, and because there’d been telephone calls about it and remarks about square metres per head and number of children, a few months ago Richard, after a discussion with the Rohdes in the Italian House, had attached a sign, ‘Ina Rohde’, to the door. ‘She only pretends to live here, she never gets any letters,’ Griesel objected. Anne said, ‘Young girls nowadays just get their love letters slipped to them, Herr Doktor Griesel.’ Will we be going to the Baltic again this August, Christian wondered, together with the Tietzes as we did last year? Ezzo had been given a new, one-piece rod, made of very soft fibreglass and with a Rileh ‘Rex’ fixed-spool reel. The Tietzes would presumably go to Rügen again and if Ezzo was lucky the fishermen would take him with them to the lagoon off Greifswald, where there were the biggest pike. Only recently he’d sent a card to Christian in Waldbrunn, telling him he’d bought a spoon-bait, a wobbler and a cod-wiggler from Press’s, the specialist angling shop down in the Neustadt district, as well as some fifteen-pound line, green, they could try it out on the Kaltwasser some time.
Veroonicaa, Veroonicaa … The Stenzel Sisters were small and shrivelled, like old princesses, in the summer they always wore short skirts so that you could see their white calves with the angular lines of their muscles, their thick hill-walkers’ socks rolled down over their ankles. The sisters’ heads were covered in fine, soft hair that was so thin their parchment-pale scalp shone through; they braided it into buns the size of tennis balls on the back of their head, holding them together with hairnets, green, blue and red, that had shopping lists, reels of thread and safety pins stuck in them. They would greet him with ‘Krest-yan!’ when he went up the stairs to look at the photographs behind the glass door; and there was Magellan again, on the landing outside the two second-floor apartments, and his ship, this time on the Hoffmanns’ floor, a caravel with a high afterdeck, lateen sails and gossamer shrouds etched on the frosted glass of the door, the waves under the ship’s hull snaking back like a Malay dagger or Poseidon’s locks, dolphins swimming transparently to the walnut frame of the door that separated the landing from the cylindrical stairwell; and when it was dark and the apartment door was open, the lines of the ship were filled with the corridor light, it was as if an etching needle were engraving constellations on a black sheet of metal: the Ship, the Dolphin; in the glass door of the upper ground floor there were a wind rose and a Hanseatic cog; a windjammer and a relief etching of the Atlantic and South America with a fine broken line running round Cape Horn as far as Chile on the floor of the Stenzel Sisters and young André Tischer, who had moved in only recently … and alone, at that, a lad who was hardly twenty and his own apartment already, no wonder that there were rumours about him going round. He was the son of a high official, people said, who had gone off the straight and narrow, which you could tell from the fact that he had a boxer that he took for walks without a lead or a muzzle, always wearing black leather and his hair either close shaven or long and shaggy – a drop-out! Aunt Barbara declared, I tell you: he’s a drop-out! – a studded belt and cowboy boots, that made Robert green with envy, for where, ‘damn it all!’, was there even the least hint of boots like that in the whole of Dresden – so there! He’ll be one of the ‘Firm’, Niklas opined, he can’t even say hello, that in itself’s a symp-tom! – On top of that every Sunday an opera singer came to see him, cleaned the stairs for him with a steaming hot cloth that slapped on the steps like a great big eel, then went up, at which there was some crashing followed by a profound silence, a silence that Anne tried to fill with an embarrassed expression, a loud clatter of crockery, the noise of the radio and the abrupt observation that there wasn’t enough coal, at which Robert said, ‘If you insist’, and went to fetch some coal; a silence in which, slowly and irrefutably, the asthmatic creak of a bedstead arose, to be joined by the intense quivering of the Hoffmann’s hall light and, finally, the urgent cries of a female voice that sounded as if it belonged to a coachwoman who, thrown to and fro on the box seat of a carriage by wild horses and a bumpy road, still managed, screaming, to hold her course, accompanied by the yowling of the boxer and the rhythmical groans of the mattress springs, intermingled with the grunts of a coachman from a rival firm, ‘Last orders’, ‘Closing time’, the cry of the nightwatchman, and sometimes the opera diva would squeal because the dog was trying to rescue its master. Some thought André Tischer was a mysterious West German because he didn’t speak in dialect, but Richard waved that away and told a quite different story: young Tischer was the son of a couple who were both doctors and had lived in Blasewitz; one day, about a year ago, when the parents were sleeping after a strenuous period on duty, André’s younger brother had been playing with matches and set the house on fire, André had been away with friends; the neighbours, a violinist in the state orchestra and the aforementioned opera singer, had noticed the fire and tried to put it out; in vain. At first André, who had no relatives, had been taken in by the opera singer, but then the city had allocated him this apartment. He was currently working as an ambulance driver at St Joseph’s Hospital.
Voices, upstairs: sometimes the Stenzel Sisters would sing in their husky soprano voices, O take my hand, dear Father or All glory be to God on high, it sounded like cautiously establishing contact with a child and when the windows were open it could happen that Griesel would take the electric cable out of the cellar that gave onto his garden and attach it to the frog-like lawn mower. He might be thinking of the quotation about the shepherd feeding his flock, and if the shepherd looked like Pastor Magenstock, it could be all the more unforgivable for little lambs to put their hands together and pray, accompanied by mellifluous tones and blue-eyed unctuousness from the pulpit; for grown-ups to turn childish. The Stenzel Sisters went in armour-like clothes to hear Pastor Magenstock’s Sunday sermon, having taken off the rusty brooches – orchid flowers studded with paste gems, cranes’ crests dotted with red glass beads – they usually wore on their much mended crêpe-de-Chine blouses: It is a sin to enter the Lord’s House adorned with anything other than His Sign, and raised their wrinkled and gnarled rheumatic fingers according to that strict and chaste command that impressed Christian; and the Stenzel Sisters went to church with, on their breast, just a large, plain silver cross that would softly tap their blouse buttons to the rhythm of their energetic steps. With peaceful smiles on their faces, they nodded to those who came towards them then swung away to avoid them. – Yes, Saxon melancholy, it does exist! Christian heard Aunt Barbara say in a whisper, when they encountered the sisters, and her fingers would open like the seed capsule of old woman’s purse; she silently nodded her head and could be thinking of neglected duties, of opportunities b
eckoning from the sisters’ flat hats, from the veils of wide-meshed muslin with white spots the size of moths, under which their red lipstick blazed, from their hairnets and their mauve-gloved hands raised in greeting; Aunt-Barbara-secrets smouldering in the teeth-revealing smile, in the sketched nod of the heads. The sisters would straighten the pictures on the staircase with delicate, touching carefulness, as if they came from lovers or brothers in spirit; on Saturday mornings, once they’d finished their exercises – Kitty, the oldest sister, would do her ‘Müllers’, as she called her exercises after a gymnastics teacher from before the war, in the Hoffmanns’ garden – once their down pillows and quilts were airing on the windowsills, they would go down the stairwell to clean the paintings and display cases; for that they used dusters made of ostrich feathers (‘the best there are, Krest-yan, from Renner’s old department store’), that were discoloured and felted from forty years of trapping bits of fluff; it was only when it came to cleaning materials that the sisters were more modern, they would let one drop of Fit plop into the cleaning water, that was sufficient for the elaborate frames of bronzed limewood irreverently riddled with wormholes which, after washing, were rubbed with bergamot oil – as were, on the top floor, the leaves of a dieffenbachia, which was turning a palish green from lack of light, and the frames of the signed photos – and Christian sometimes wondered, when he was fetching coal, for example, and saw one of the Stenzel Sisters dusting a picture, whether she was interested in what was to be seen inside the frame, or whether the important thing for her wasn’t to dust, to look at the frame, but to immerse herself in memories for a while, for which she wanted to be alone, away from her sisters for an hour.