The Tower: A Novel

by Uwe Tellkamp

  ‘Truth,’ Siegbert said, drawing the word out, ‘I don’t know. Just watch out that you don’t turn into a blue-stocking. Intellectual women don’t get no men, then no children, my old mum always says, an’ then they’re unhappy. There’s a truth for you.’

  ‘You arrogant male chauvinist pig!’ Verena exclaimed indignantly. ‘It’s my mother who’s right: what this country needs is a women’s movement.’

  ‘Ooh, no one’s got anything against women’s movements,’ Jens Ansorge interjected coolly, ‘as long as they’re nice and rhythmical.’

  Grunts of laughter came from Falk and Siegbert.

  ‘Stick to the point for once.’ Christian felt himself blush as Verena looked up, immediately turned his eyes away and stared at his shoes. ‘What do you understand by truth?’

  ‘Certainly not Schmidtchen Schleicher’s class standpoint –’ That was what they called Schnürchel after a character in a pop song: Schmidtchen Schleicher with the ee-lastic legs …

  ‘Ansorge showing off his cynical side again,’ Reina Kossmann mocked, ‘it’s just courtship display, Verena. What was it Dr Frank told us about peacocks fanning their tails?’

  Jens Ansorge leant up, gave Reina a worried look, puckered up his lips. She slapped her forehead and blew a kiss back.

  ‘So there you are,’ said Jens, satisfied.

  ‘Have you heard? The commitment rigmarole is going to start up soon. Fahner wants it done before 1 May. Then we’ll get a heavy roll-call –’

  ‘And turn into nice and tidy, frigging statistics,’ said Jens, cutting Siegbert short. He frowned, threw the blade of grass away, suddenly serious. ‘Three wasted years … God knows how awful it’ll be, guys. “Every male graduate of this school commits himself to voluntary service in the National People’s Army,” ’ he said, imitating Fahner.

  ‘Not me,’ said Falk.

  ‘It’ll be good for your muscles.’

  Christian was surprised at how coolly merciless women could be, especially since Reina then pinched Falk’s biceps. Women for whom we did everything – oh the heroes in books, in films! – who mourned us when we fell in battle, who before that wept handkerchiefs full of tears for their beloved on the famous platform to the hiss of steam from the engine preparing to depart – and then this callousness from Reina, whose pale, delicate features with the mouth turned down slightly to the left, he liked looking at –

  ‘Hey, you look horrified,’ she said, brushing back her hair in a challenging gesture. ‘We don’t often see you look like that. I must have been really good.’

  ‘She’s keen on you, Chrishan,’ Jens drawled, holding up his hand for a high five with Falk.

  ‘Get lost, you idiot,’ Reina snapped, throwing up her arm. ‘I don’t want to catch pimples.’

  A thrust with a bare bodkin; Siegbert and Jens surveyed Christian, he had the feeling his face had been set on fire, tried a smile.

  ‘You can leave my muscles out of it,’ said Falk. ‘I’m not going to enlist. Three years … I’d have grey hair by the time I got out. And then … all those tanks and guns … I’m not going to shoot at anyone.’

  ‘Just let Chief Red Eagle hear that,’ Reina said quietly and Christian realized she’d said it to him as a kind of offer in the group that had fallen silent, an offer he rejected because he didn’t see why he should make the effort to break the silence; he stared down at the bay below them, wondering whether it would be worth coming fishing here with Ezzo and Meno, he’d have to join the local section of the German Angling Association; funny, these nicknames. They had inherited the name ‘Red Eagle’, as they called Herr Engelmann, their civics teacher and principal of the senior high school, from long-departed generations of pupils and accepted it unquestioningly. Did that indicate their lack of imagination or the aptness of the name – Christian decided in favour of the latter. It was true that when Engelmann spread his arms wide and told them, his lips moist with enthusiasm and his fiery red jug-nose shining above them, about the Great Socialist October Revolution, in which his father had taken part under Trotsky’s leadership, when he started to wave his hands, his eyelids behind his thick lenses drooping so he could immerse his gaze in the great times of the past, at such moments Engelmann did resemble an old, ponderous eagle that swept round the class dictating April Theses with words appearing to fall out of his colourless, bubbling chain-smoker’s voice and plop like early plums on the pupils’ cowering heads.

  ‘First Red Eagle will put the squeeze on you, then Fahner … I’m going away for four years anyway.’

  Verena stared at Siegbert in alarm; he was picking up pebbles and, unmoved, flicking them up into the bright blue sky.

  ‘Four years … Are you crazy?’ Jens scrutinized Siegbert as if he’d been wearing a mask all the time that had now slipped to reveal the face of a monster. Siegbert smiled coolly.

  ‘Just realistic. I want to be a naval officer. I was in Rostock last summer. They don’t take anyone who hasn’t done a period of service in the People’s Navy.’

  ‘I thought you wanted to join the merchant navy?’

  ‘Unfortunately that doesn’t make any difference, Montecristo.’

  ‘The Count of Montecristo.’ Her lips pursed affectedly, Verena imitated Christian’s habit of brushing his too-long quiff out of his face: she put her head on one side, turned her eyes up and, with an exaggeratedly camp gesture, pushed back an imaginary quiff, a kind of habitual tic that he had and that he would have to get rid of immediately if it looked the way Verena had demonstrated. ‘What an appropriate title for His Dresden Highness –’

  ‘Shut it,’ Christian growled. The two girls snorted with laughter.

  ‘Take it easy, old man,’ Jens said soothingly, ‘the women are going through puberty and the nickname won’t last anyway. Much too long and too much trouble to say. – But, my God, Siggi: four years!’

  Siegbert shrugged his shoulders. ‘I want to go to sea. They want four years in the navy. So I go into the navy for four years.’

  ‘Oh, great,’ Verena said. There was a touch of contempt, it seemed to Christian, in her voice, a touch of anger. He thought about Siegbert’s answer, as the others appeared to be doing, they’d fallen silent. He imagined Fahner, who summoned the boys one by one to the principal’s office, which was guarded by his wife at a heavy Optima typewriter; Fahner would definitely be – as he always was when you turned the handle after he had barked ‘Yes!’ – sitting at his desk, writing without looking up, so that you had plenty of time to observe the light cut into strips by the Venetian blinds on the highly polished PVC floor, the severe, shadowed faces of Wilhelm Pieck, Walter Ulbricht and the female Minister of Education on the wall over Fahner’s head, not knowing what to do, for Fahner didn’t say ‘Come in’ or ‘Sit down’; Fahner said nothing at all, just sat there writing, in his elegant suit with the silk oversleeves in the blue of the Free German Youth that he would eventually, with measured movements of his fingertips that spoke of conflicting thoughts, take off and place on the table beside the needle-sharp pencils arranged precisely according to size. In the music class with Herr Uhl they’d recently talked about the English composer Benjamin Britten, and Christian had been amazed at the similarity between Britten’s head and Fahner’s: the same profusion of caterpillar-like locks, the same boyishly soft features; the similarity was so pronounced that Christian had done some research to see whether Britten had had a son in the Erzgebirge … his research had produced no result.

  Verena broke the silence. ‘You could just as well say: I want to go to sea, they demand that I kill a person – so I’ll kill a person.’

  ‘Gentlemen,’ said Jens.

  ‘Just a minute,’ Siegbert said. ‘I’m the one this is about, I’m the one taking on the four years. Anyway, it’s easy enough for you to talk, Verena, it’s not a problem for you, there’s no military district command awaiting you.’

  ‘Killing people … that can happen to you in the forces … They say the army units on the borde
r are still on high alert and if you end up there … Enlisted today, invading Poland, gun in hand, tomorrow … Or in Angola. My father says Castro’s troops are supposed to be there, the Russians as well … You can count me out,’ Falk said.

  ‘You’ll stick to that? And if they throw you out?’

  ‘Now wait a minute, Verena,’ Jens said pretty sharply. ‘It was pretty good recently when you handed in an empty sheet of paper, but you did back down eventually –’

  ‘You must be out of your mind, Ansorge!’ Reina tapped her forehead. ‘Come on, Verena, what are we doing here?’

  ‘You’re right,’ Verena said after a while. They looked at each other in surprise, for she’d said it to Jens Ansorge.

  Three years in the National People’s Army. Christian knew he would never forget that moment, that 24 April 1983; the day before yesterday. The three of them had been waiting outside Fahner’s office, Jens Ansorge had tried to cover up the situation with jokes, for Falk had come out, a touch paler than usual, his right hand clutching the worn, imitation-leather briefcase with VEB GISAG Schmiedeberg on that he’d got from his father; he nodded and smiled his way past them into the light-grey corridor of the senior high school that was decorated with flags and pennants for the ‘Karl Marx Year 1983’. Jens remained silent, Christian avoided Siegbert’s eye that was trying to make contact with his, none of them called after Falk, asked him to stop, to tell them what had happened; they just watched him, the way he walked: it was a little less shambling than usual, he kept close to the banister, suddenly a fissure seemed to open up between Falk and them, the ball of his hand pounding the rubberized stair rail, the thrumming noise echoing round the stairwell, the trousers that were too big for him with the green plastic comb in his back pocket and its curving handle, shaped like a drop of water, sticking up cheekily over his belt, his angular shoulders under the Free German Youth shirt: it was something they’d let go of, all three of them, though probably each in his own way, and the fissure Christian sensed came from the fact that he felt no pity. It wasn’t just because of the discussion that he would never forget that day.

  It had gone differently from the way he’d expected, in an almost friendly atmosphere. Perhaps Fahner had been in a good mood because Siegbert had gone before Christian and signed up for four years, proof of the peace-loving attitude of young citizens with their consciously progressive outlook; once more there was the performance with paper and pencil and silence, the irresolute wait by the door until Fahner, not looking up, murmured ‘Hoffmann’ and, a few seconds later, as if he’d only just remembered his first name, ‘Christian’ and, again after a pause, ‘Sit down.’ Then he’d stretched out his hand and abruptly looked Christian in the face but, with the same motion, pointed to a chair, as if he’d made an error with the gesture, that could be interpreted as impermissible, or at least incompatible with his position as overall principal of the Maxim Gorki educational complex. Christian was embarrassed because Fahner looked good with his tan from holidays in Yugoslavia, his blue eyes and Benjamin Britten hair. ‘From what I hear about you, Hoffmann, you don’t seem to be making a particular effort,’ Fahner had said, his hands clasped over a sheet of paper, at the top of which Christian deciphered his name, below it notes, some typed, some handwritten; among them Christian recognized Dr Frank’s illegible scribble. ‘Medicine,’ said Fahner reflectively, ‘the most sought-after, the most difficult subject. Your marks are good, apart from mathematics. It looks like you’re heading for a disaster there. But grades alone don’t make the medic. What use to us are traitors, who attend the senior high and the university at our cost and then have nothing better to do than to think only of themselves and get out? A sense of social responsibility, Hoffmann, that’s important too. Indeed, it’s more important than anything else. The committed standpoint. The people here make it possible for you to acquire knowledge free from worry, and we have an obligation to those people: you, by doing your best – and me by helping you, if you show goodwill; and by recognizing those who turn out to be parasites, who cannot or will not comprehend what our Workers’ and Peasants’ State is doing for them, by recognizing them as that type of character and treating them for what they are. Our nation invests hundreds of thousands of marks in your training. You must show yourself worthy of that trust and that generosity. That is why I expect your assent to three years’ service in our armed forces, by which you will give back to it a little of what it is doing for you. Especially since, as agitator, you have an exemplary role for your class collective. Your response, please.’ Fahner put down the pencil, the point of which he’d been stabbing at the desk to emphasize what he was saying. Christian had intended to make some objection, to dispute at least one of Fahner’s points, to make it less easy for him, but he couldn’t, he had to agree with Fahner. He could sense that there was a decisive error in Fahner’s arguments, but he couldn’t pin it down, however hard he tried; a discussion would end up with the question as to how he could deny this country a right that all other countries probably demanded, how he could – and at this point the discussion would have become dangerous – make a distinction between the defence of the country over there and here, between the Bundeswehr and the National People’s Army. In his mind’s eye he could see the horrified expressions on the faces of his parents, who had rehearsed this discussion and possible lines of argument over several weekends; he had mentioned the undemocratic character of the armed forces over here that earned him, for the first time after many years, a clip round the ears from his father. You hold your tongue, Christian, understood! And for a moment Christian had hated his father – even though it was Fahner he ought to have been hating; but he didn’t hate him and wondered about that as, sitting in front of him on the edge of his chair, he looked past Fahner with understanding at the faces of the comrade rulers; he didn’t feel hatred, instead he felt a need to agree with Fahner and to do so not only with lukewarm words that the principal would certainly have already heard a hundred times over, their emptiness forming a repulsive combination with the zealous promptness with which they were produced; a kind of bimetallic strip, the fear flowed through it as a current, created warmth, the metal curled and the bulb of the lie lit up. Christian felt the need not to disappoint Fahner, to cooperate with him, to support him. So he avoided the empty phrases and started to lie honestly.

  Pale with conviction, he said he’d been going over these arguments ever since he’d applied for a place at the senior high school during the ninth year in Dresden; he knew of a similar case there had been at the time in his class that had aroused controversy among the pupils and then it had been suggested at a school parade that a pupil’s position on that case should form part of all applications for a place at senior high school and he, Christian, had not changed his opinion since then. There’d been pro-peace demonstrations in Dresden in February – Fahner looked up, Christian had no idea why he’d mentioned this, that was taboo in Waldbrunn, why he even went on and brought in the situation in Poland – he said ‘the People’s Republic of Poland’ – and in Afghanistan, Fahner clasped his hands and frowned; given, Christian went on, that the socialist system was threatened by revanchist forces, here Fahner slid the document for the declaration of voluntary enlistment across the table, however Christian didn’t pause to sign, but suddenly found arguments for the three years’ military service that hadn’t even occurred to his father: it was good, he said, for anyone involved in an intellectual profession to live together with simple people for a while and thus get to know them better, what he learnt by this would be especially valuable for someone who wanted to study medicine, for how could one be a good doctor for people if one behaved in a snobbish, superior and condescending manner towards them; at this Fahner looked at the clock for the first time. He had been born here, Christian went on, in this country, twenty years after the war caused by Hitler’s fascism, which had annihilated so many people and had been financed by money from industrial magnates. Never again must there be a repeat of such a t
errible war or the criminal regime that had brought it about; medicine was a humane science, the socialist state was humane and humane its army, which was serving peace with its armaments, as could be seen in Wilhelm Busch’s poem about the fox and the hedgehog, fully armed yet bent on peace: once you’ve had your teeth pulled out, I’ll shave my spines from tail to snout. Fahner frowned even more and gave the clock a second glance at the moment when Christian finally looked up, took the pen and signed; the furrows disappeared from Fahner’s brow, his eyes expressed, Christian wasn’t sure whether it was right, a strange mixture of feelings: friendly repugnance. ‘You can go, Hoffmann, I’m proud of your conviction. Send Ansorge in.’

  Later Christian remembered again how they’d watched Falk leave; he could still hear Jens’s stale jokes as he lay in his bed in the hostel, staring at the ceiling criss-crossed by the lights of the long-distance lorries on the F170; he could hear the murmur of voices from next door, where the twelfth-grade boys had their room, there was a clatter in the corridor, Frau Stesny was still there helping the others prepare their supper and again he saw Falk in his mind’s eye, his hand thumping the stair rail, his green comb in his back pocket and he, Christian, had just realized that he had crawled to Fahner, had betrayed his principles in the most nauseous way … And yet he hadn’t felt that way about it in the principal’s office, he hadn’t lied to Fahner, as he sat facing him he’d been convinced of what he’d been saying. And as Falk gradually disappeared from sight, none of them made any effort to follow him and ask how the interview had gone, they’d not asked him later either, and so far he’d said nothing. Christian could see himself standing outside the office not feeling any pity for Falk. That was the second surprising experience of the day. What he felt was contempt, even hostility. He didn’t know whether Falk had had the courage to stick to the convictions he’d declared to them by Kaltwasser reservoir, that was probably what had happened and what really shook Christian was that that was precisely why he felt contempt for Falk. To stand upright, even and especially when things got tricky, was that not the way his parents had brought him up? At the same time they practised lying with him … Christian recalled another day he would never forget. It was one of the last days of the holiday before he transferred to the senior high school. His father had brought Erik Orré home with him, Tietze’s neighbour and a colleague of Gudrun’s at the Dresden State Theatre. He had been a patient of Richard’s and had come to express his gratitude in an unusual way, by teaching Christian and Robert the art of lying convincingly, which Richard thought was necessary, especially for Christian; the large mirror was brought in from the hall and the actor had thus practised praising enthusiastically with them – and, at Niklas’s request, Ezzo – had corrected their gestures, showed them how to deliberately turn red or pale, how to flatter someone with a certain amount of dignity, how to say stupid things with a serious expression, to drape them like a disguise over your true thoughts, how to churn out compliments that are empty but intelligently flattering, how to dispel suspicion, how, in some cases, to recognize other liars. Anne had gone out during these rehearsals. Christian had heard her crying in his father’s study. Richard, pale and severe, had watched them, later he’d told Anne that it was hard but unfortunately necessary, especially for Christian. The boys, he said, could only profit from these skills, life was a tightrope and he’d wanted to make it easier for them to keep their balance, to see that it was there, even. At the end Erik Orré had expressed the hope they would recommend him to others, he could well imagine there could be ‘further need for his skills in that district’ and he was sure Herr Doktor Hoffmann knew his neighbours better than he did.