The Tower: A Novel

by Uwe Tellkamp

  They headed for Turmstrasse, walking in silence for a while. He observed Anne. She wasn’t crying any more, was staring straight ahead. Again he remembered one of the evenings when the whole district seemed to be on the move. People embracing each other had been standing, silent and motionless, out in the streets. The lamps cast a pale light, which suddenly went out, it was dark in the houses all round as well. A power failure. Then something grotesque had happened: Julie Heckmann, generally known in the district as Julie-the-horses, standing with Frau Knabe, had burst out laughing, a hoarse male laugh, swelling into a piercing screech such as he had never before heard; it had gradually infected all those out there, even the ones embracing each other, and set off an outburst of laughter that seemed strangely liberating, vital, now sobbing, now roaring, spreading down the streets; you could hear windows in the houses all around being opened, suddenly someone shouted, ‘Bureaucracy!’, in response someone else shouted, ‘Individualism!’ and another, ‘Socialism!’ – ‘I’m frightened,’ a woman cried, another, ‘Me too!’ and still the laughter echoed round the whole street, interrupted by shouts of ‘Shh!’ and ‘Be quiet’; ‘Soon there’ll be zilch left to scoff,’ someone brayed in a disguised voice, ‘There’s no meat left in Wismar,’ came a squeak out of the darkness; ‘Is there a war on in Poland?’ – ‘Don’t tempt fate, for heaven’s sake!’ – ‘Are they frightened as well?’ roared a female voice Richard thought he recognized as Frau Knabe’s. – ‘Sure they are! Of us!’ and once more the street shook with laughter, and it came from the buildings as well. ‘Marx-isn’t!’ – ‘Stalin-isn’t’ – ‘Hey: generalism.’ The barking of dogs could be heard, immediately the laughter died away and the people quickly dispersed. Someone came towards Richard, stopped close beside him, scrutinized him, hesitated; it was Malthakus, he tipped his hat with his cane, whispered with his sly smile, ‘Well, neighbour, and what’s your problem?’ then quickly disappeared in the darkness.

  Richard pulled his coat tighter round him, the memory of the incident had made him uneasy.

  ‘So they’re trying to put pressure on us,’ Anne said; he was grateful for the ‘us’, but she didn’t take his hand. ‘We must think what we can do.’ Her voice was firm again. That gave him back the power to think clearly. ‘There are two alternatives, either I play along with them – or I don’t play along with them.’

  ‘It’s not a matter of playing,’ she replied quickly and tersely. ‘Exit visa. We have to get out of here. We can ask Regine about making an application.’

  ‘What are you going to ask her? How to fill out the form correctly? It won’t work. They made it quite clear to me that they won’t let me go. Doctors are needed in our country … it would be a betrayal of the patients in your care …’

  ‘They can’t simply hold us here!’

  ‘That’s precisely what they can do. Then we’ll be stuck here and I’ll be chucked out of the clinic – it wouldn’t bother me, but there’s Robert and Christian to think of … We wouldn’t have got anywhere.’

  ‘But we don’t have to report people!’

  ‘And the price we’d pay would be our children’s future?’

  ‘But spying on people, is that a price we want to pay?’

  Richard didn’t reply.

  ‘One possibility is that we stay here – and Christian and Robert can apply. As soon as they reach maturity.’

  ‘Do you know what you’re saying, Anne?! What would happen? Christian would be chucked out of the senior high school and Robert wouldn’t be accepted for it.’

  ‘Christian will be eighteen this year, Robert in two and a half years. They’ll lose time anyway. In the army. So if they have to wait for this or that –’

  ‘You’re assuming everything will work out the way you imagine. And if it doesn’t? If they don’t give them a visa? If the boys can’t leave the country? Do you know if they want to, anyway? We’re talking without taking what they think into account, it might just be too much for them?’

  ‘And perhaps not. We should discuss it with them.’

  ‘And what are they to do while their applications are being processed? Regine’s been waiting for two years and you know what a state she’s in. Sacked from her job with the city administration, branded as an agent of imperialism in front of all her colleagues –’

  ‘– and now she’s an unqualified secretary at St Joseph’s and she only got the job because you’re acquainted with the medical director. I know that.’

  ‘And the boys? They’d take their revenge on us by leaving them to stew much longer, you can be sure of that! Then they’ll be stuck here, no school-leaving certificate, unable to go to university; they’d have to do an apprenticeship … Christian – what trade could he learn? And perhaps they’d never get out anyway. Stuck here, their lives thoroughly mucked up … Do you think they could forgive us that?’

  ‘One of my colleagues has an application being considered. Despite that she’s still working with us and her daughter can finish school.’

  ‘They treat some people this way, others that way, but you can’t guarantee anything. I think it’s pretty unlikely we would be dealt with in the same way as your colleague. Do you want to try and see what comes of it?’

  They walked beside each other, heads bowed.

  ‘What about Sperber? Couldn’t he do something?’

  ‘I don’t know. I don’t know him particularly well. And I don’t trust him either, to be honest. We’d be taking a huge risk if I were to go and tell him everything. What would happen if he’s one of them … or collaborates with them? Don’t you think he must have one foot in their camp? Perhaps he’s a kind of front man, a lure they set out for us?’

  ‘Meno says there’s a few authors he’s helped.’

  ‘Could be. But even if he’s not one of them, would he help us? Who knows which authors he’s helped and in what kind of situation? At the least inconvenience to any reasonably well-known author, the press over there screams blue murder. But for us? For a doctor and a nurse no one’s ever heard of? Do you think Sperber can do anything if they give him to understand there’s no interest over there?’

  ‘I’m tired … Shall we sit down for a moment?’

  Richard nodded. They’d walked as far as the ‘October View’ as the little circle surrounded by a pergola in Mondleite Park was officially called; the locals still called it by the old name of Philalethes’ View, after the nom de plume of King John of Saxony, the expert on Dante. In the middle of the flat hilltop was an obelisk with the names of people from the district who had died in the world war.

  ‘Should we drop in on your brother?’

  ‘No … I don’t want to. He’d think there was something wrong right away. – And there’s one thing we have to sort out: how do we tell the family?’

  ‘We have to think very carefully about whether we tell them at all.’

  ‘For me there’s nothing to think about. Of course we must tell them.’

  ‘Even at the risk that we can’t be sure whether Ulrich for example …’

  ‘He may be in the Party but he’s not an informer!’

  ‘What makes you so sure? Didn’t you warn me against him yourself? You remember, when we were walking home from the Felsenburg.’

  ‘But he’s one of the family … He wouldn’t go that far!’

  ‘Because he’s your brother – and my brother-in-law? Because he likes the boys and takes them to football matches?’

  ‘I don’t know. I just can’t imagine he would be capable of informing on you. Still … Yes, perhaps I can’t imagine it because he’s my brother. Father brought us up to be neither moral cowards nor informants. Do you know what he used to say? You know what’s the lowest form of life? A man who’d inform on his friend or his wife.’ She quivered, slumped forward, started crying again. Richard sensed that she didn’t want him to comfort her and went to the edge of the paved area, which had a wrought-iron balustrade with a stylized nautilus, eaten away by rust, worked into it. Beyon
d it the park fell away steeply. There were lights on in the House with a Thousand Eyes and in the Elephant opposite, at the Teerwagens’ a window was opened. Scraps of music, voices, laughter. There seemed to be a party going on. How carefree … Richard suppressed the thought. ‘Shall we go and see Regine?’

  ‘No … not now,’ Anne murmured. He rummaged round in his pockets, found the twenty-pfennig piece he kept for emergencies. ‘I could call her. There’s a phone booth at the crossroads there.’

  ‘It’s kind of you to try and distract me but … no. I want to go home. I’m very tired.’

  He went over to her, sat down beside her on the bench. ‘Anne, it might be helpful to talk to her. Perhaps she can see possibilities we’ve overlooked. And we can trust her.’

  ‘Her, I agree, but not the bugs in her apartment. – Are you going to tell your colleagues?’

  ‘No. At least not for the moment. I can’t trust them any more than I can Sperber. Most of all Wernstein, but who knows, sometimes it’s the most trustworthy … I can do something else before I confide in my colleagues. I can accept.’

  ‘You really want to do that? You want to work for those bastards?’

  ‘Anne! – I’ll only pretend to. Give them trivial stuff, play stupid – and I’ll go on like that until they realize they’ve got a poor catch in me. I have to be no use at all to them, perhaps that will give me a chance.’

  ‘Don’t you think they’ll notice?’

  ‘I’m sure they will notice. But what can they do? Even a senior doctor doesn’t get to hear everything that goes on in his clinic. And isn’t it logical that the assistant doctors will hold their tongues in my presence?’

  ‘And if they set a trap for you? What if one of your operating-theatre nurses says something incriminating and you behave as if you hadn’t heard it, but that nurse is one of them and the next time they ask why you’ve been withholding information?’

  ‘That would be a mistake on their part, don’t you think? Then I’d know that nurse was one of them.’

  ‘And if they don’t ask you about it? But quietly draw their own conclusions … Then one day they present you with the bill –’

  ‘If, if, if! Do you see any other alternative?’

  ‘Get out of the country.’

  ‘Don’t be stupid, Anne. Surely you’re not serious. Even the attempt is a punishable offence. They’d nab us straight away and we’d end up behind bars … Getting out! How do you imagine we’d do it? With the boys? Or would they stay here? Should we dig a tunnel? Swim across the Baltic –’

  ‘Your student friend managed it.’

  ‘He was a serious swimmer, Anne, took part in competitions. He lived alone and knew exactly what he was taking on. If he’d been caught he would have been the only one to take the consequences. Do you know that they falsify our maps? A patient told me recently. According to our maps, you think you’re in the Federal Republic – in reality you’re still in the GDR. Rivers don’t go where they’re supposed to go according to the map, in the border area the roads and paths aren’t marked –’

  ‘Yugoslavia –’

  ‘Anne.’

  She burst into shrill laughter. Richard looked at her. ‘Let’s go home.’

  They lay next to each other, awake, in the beds they’d put together when they were first married; each listening to the other’s breathing.

  24

  In the clinic

  He was still fascinated by the noises in the building; sometimes he would open the door of his office to listen and the gap would seem to him like the bell of an ear trumpet, like the connection between the middle ear and the pharynx, lined with mucus and cilia (it reminded him that he ought to get the paediatrician to have a look at Lucie, she kept swallowing and complaining that it hurt; protracted inflammation of the middle ear was dangerous); once he’d opened the door, he would close his eyes and listen, for you could not only tell the things that were going on in the clinic from the noises, but also the mood in which they were taking place, what the atmosphere was like and how, as if the clinic were a collective organism like a swarm of bees, it would change with the slightest disturbance, the least excitement. It was the time when the clinic prepared itself for the evening; an in-between time: the day’s work was now largely over; the patients who had been operated on were back in their beds, had been examined during the afternoon rounds and had had the attention they needed, the early-shift nurses and the patients’ visitors had left; there were no more lectures or seminars at this hour either. The solidly built carts that looked like cabin trunks, with the insulated boxes for hot meals, and that the nurses pushed from room to room to distribute the food to the patients, were not yet clattering along the PVC of the clinic’s corridors. The castanet click-clack of head nurse Henrike’s clogs doing the evening inspection tour of her realm could still not be heard. She lived alone with her mother, who needed looking after, and her son, who had broken off two apprenticeships, in a cramped apartment on Augsburger Strasse, not 500 metres from the Academy, a chubby, maternal-looking woman who had shown childlike delight at the Hufeland Medal that had been awarded her on ‘Health Service Day’. Phones rang, washing carts rumbled along in the bowels of the building; the doors of the offices beside his banged open and shut. Most of his colleagues were still there, they’d finished their visits to the wards and would now be going to the laboratories, to the libraries, or writing assessments or reports on operations. Richard had gone to his room to have a rest, it had been an exhausting day. He had been in the operating theatre from seven in the morning until five in the evening and had had no more than three cups of coffee and the sandwiches Anne made for him in the morning. He was on duty but he wouldn’t be called for every minor matter; Dreyssiger and Wernstein were experienced specialists, he could rely on them.

  He lay down on the examination couch, rolled over and over. Then he lay on his back and stared up into space. Ambulances arrived, sirens wailing, he heard an ambulance of the Emergency Medical Services thunder up the hospital ramp: cries, hurried steps, the clatter of trolleys. They’d call him if he was needed. He couldn’t relax, stood up. He felt dazed with dizziness and tiredness, he went over to the window for a breath of fresh air. He grasped the window latch and leant his forehead against the glass. Then he tried some knee bends, perhaps his tiredness came from a lack of movement, the unhealthy posture in which one was frequently obliged to carry out an operation, recently he had often become exhausted very quickly. He sat down at his desk, on which a few specialist periodicals lay open. He was interested in an article on a new method of operating on Dupuytren’s contracture, a progressive condition affecting the tissue of the palmar fascia; he had intended to study it thoroughly, since the disease seemed to be increasing in frequency. In the last three months alone he had had fourteen outpatients suffering from the condition. Eventually it could lead to the hand being completely deformed, nodules developed in the connective tissue, causing it to shorten; in the final stage of the illness the hand cannot be opened. Who were the authors of the article … Of course, the Hamburg group under Buck-Gramcko, the high priest of hand surgery. He could have bet it would be him. It was the fifth publication since January he’d seen by that team and it was still early in the year. And what did they do here, in this country? Mostly they just copied what they did over there, they evaluated the developments but didn’t determine them themselves, they thought about how other surgeons’ results could be applied creatively to conditions over here; that is: they improvised … He read the few sentences from the abstract of the study. When he’d done so he knew that they’d be unable to use any of the results because they lacked the technical resources. The old story. And they were surprised that people got out … Why hadn’t he got out while there was still time? He couldn’t concentrate any more, pushed the article to one side. How tired he was, he couldn’t even be bothered with his hobby, hand surgery. He couldn’t be bothered with anything since his discussion with Anne … But he mustn’t let himsel
f go, he’d always abominated that. If the world consisted entirely of people who let themselves go as soon as things got difficult, they’d still be living in caves as hunter-gatherers … A couple of coffees and a decent meal would be enough to perk him up again, he decided. As he went to close the window, he saw Weniger coming from the Gynaecological Clinic.

  ‘Richard.’ Weniger waved. ‘We’re both on call, great! Perhaps we can chat for a bit.’

  ‘Aren’t you going home?’

  ‘Then the duty assistant would be left on her own. We’ve got a few difficult births due. Once it starts they’ll fetch me anyway, so I might as well stay here.’

  ‘Are you coming over for a bite to eat?’ The suppers that the nurses made for those on duty in the Surgical Clinic had a good reputation in the Academy.

  ‘That’s exactly what I was going to do, old chap.’

  ‘I just want to go round the wards first –’

  ‘I’ll join you, if you have no objection.’

  They told Casualty they’d be doing a round together. These rounds with colleagues from other clinics were standard practice in the Academy; in that way you learnt the most important innovations and problems of the other field from an expert, as if in a private lecture. In general the hospital routine didn’t leave enough time to keep staff informed about the state of things in neighbouring disciplines.