by Uwe Tellkamp
In the winter the blinds on the windows of the Steiner Guest House were kept lowered. When you came from the tram stop the lamps were shimmering like green and yellow eyes through the venetian blinds, which were crooked and rattled in the wind, behind them shadows went to and fro. An officer who’d been on the general staff of the Afrika Korps lived in the guest house, next door to a stocky man with a thick moustache dyed black and a shaven head who called himself Hermann Schreiber; rumour had it that in reality he had a Russian name and when he was young he’d been a spy for the Tsarist secret police, the Okhrana, and at the same time for the Red troops that were still operating underground. Romanians, Poles and Russians often stopped at the guest house on their way to the Leipzig Trade Fair; the parties they held with the foreign-language secretaries of the branch of the Council for Mutual Economic Aid, the Russians sometimes also with officers from the hospital of the Soviet forces, formerly a sanatorium, were notorious. Opposite the Steiner Guest House, on the other side of Turmstrasse, was the Central Depot for Automotive Spare Parts. On days when a delivery was rumoured, long queues formed outside. Meno knew nothing about cars but he’d once joined one of those queues on a kind of heroic impulse, having been gripped by the lust for possession. Among those patiently waiting he’d seen Dietzsch, the sculptor, who’d asked him whether he’d registered an application for a car. That was indeed the case – ‘But you’re never going to drive, are you, Herr Rohde? Sell me your application – I’ll pay five thousand marks!’ For that was the first thing many GDR parents gave their children when they reached the age of confirmation or the secular youth dedication: to register them for a car that they would be able to buy after a wait of fifteen years, when they’d long since finished school, an apprenticeship or a degree and would be earning enough to buy one … A registered application such as Meno’s, which dated back to the early seventies, was worth its weight in gold. But Meno was suspicious (moreover his application was to go to Christian) and in a fit of acquisitiveness had joined the queue and purchased two exhaust manifolds for a Polski Fiat, a Wartburg shock absorber and three complete sets of windscreen wipers for a Saporoshez. After that there was ‘Nothing left’, Herr Priebsch, the sales assistant, raised his arms apologetically, not even one of those wires twisted into a tube with a sucker on it in which an artificial flower from Sebnitz in Saxon Switzerland could be attached to the dashboard of a Trabant or a Wartburg, of which there had actually been a delivery that day. Herr Klothe, who lived above the Rohdes in the Italian House and was next in the queue, took it with the composure people had developed for such cases: ‘I presume you haven’t got any beds left?’ – ‘No,’ replied Herr Priebsch in his blue-grey overalls, ‘we only have no winter tyres here. You’ll get no beds in the furniture shop. And you won’t do any better over there either, since we don’t make beds here any more.’ – ‘You don’t say. And why is that?’ – ‘Simple, they’re not necessary! The army’s on peace watch, for the intelligentsia life’s a bed of roses, the politicians sleep abroad, the pensioners in the West, the Party never sleeps – and as for the rest of us, who wants to sleep on a bed of nails?’
Meno had stored the treasures he’d bought in the cellar. They’d turned out to be hard currency, for Stahl, the engineer, had managed to exchange the Wartburg shock absorber for a new mixer tap for the communal bath of the House with a Thousand Eyes.
– And as the needle, Meno wrote, lifted the music out of the record and Niklas’s expression changed, the tension, the strain giving way to a happy calm, coloured photographs, woven from the fiery threads of the music, began to appear inside my head, slid up with jellyfish-soft outlines, stayed there for seconds in which I saw them clearly, like pieces of a retina filled with life, consisting of life; a tide washing up things, the sea’s furnishings: round pebbles ground smooth, stones with holes in them, a seaweed-entwined lump of amber with an insect trapped inside it, a drowned moth, the swell rises, rolls up its gifts, rears into a glassberg and when it reaches its peak the movement stops, the projectionist presses a button and the breaker curdles; and then I saw the musicians moving, the spider made of violin bows going up and down simultaneously, saw faces, pockmarked with the wine-scale of time, drifting among the Amphoridea and medusas of the room, listened, on another evening as we sat over a hectographed booklet in landscape format, to Niklas putting names to the faces and recounting anecdotes: ‘the one with the long neck, standing with his double bass, that’s the Parlour Giraffe’, ‘that one, a ring with a big stone on every finger, in the orchestra they called him Jumbo-Jewels’, then the ‘flautist, Alfred Rucker’, out of whose silver stick the furies of music thundered, ‘the greeeat Alfred Rucker, called Typhoon, he blew everything away’, and at the word ‘great’ Niklas was already leaning back, extending his chin, half closing his eyes behind his square glasses in order to give the adjective, which came from the depths – of his voice and the history of music – that dreamy quality that I heard from the Tower-dwellers when they wanted to characterize some achievement as unrepeatable and superb, as irredeemably lost in the past, in more glorious and perhaps also more sublime ages, as a ‘marvel’; and I sometimes thought that the Tower-dwellers themselves moved through time in a similarly strange and typical way: their future led into the past, the present was merely a pale shadow, an inadequate and stunted variant, a dull rehash of the great days of yore, and sometimes I suspected that it was good when something sank into the past, when it expired and perished, that the Tower-dwellers secretly approved of that, for then it was saved – it was no longer part of the present, that they shunned, and often it was precisely once something was dead that it suddenly shot up into the heaven of their esteem, while they hadn’t even noticed it while it was still living. – The music seems to be flowing out of the tips of Niklas’s fingers, which are white because he wears gloves; I can see the signed photograph of Max Lorenz on the wall over the piano, his arm pointing, the knight is looking into the distance, his voice, revelling like a bare blade, ascends, makes its thrust, the disc spins, heavy with cobwebs, sparks crackle, the label in the middle a yellow magnet, and as the music rose, I saw Niklas growing restless again, a person for whom it was the elixir of life, who would not be capable of breathing for long without it, and I thought it would be the end of him, of his world, if some circumstance should cut him off from music, from his life of longing to be in music; the fishes in the room surged up and down, moved like handkerchiefs on a line the wind was plucking at, the rose under the bell glass seemed petrified –
The old houses with their crumbling plaster … The outlines began to fade, the goods wagons full of ash from the hospital heating plant rumbled; the deep throbbing noise, the origin of which he couldn’t explain, started up, perhaps it came from a transformer or a ventilation system; he had heard it often before on his evening walks.
‘Still out this late?’ It was Judith Schevola. He started and automatically took a step out of the thin light a street lamp cast over the Lingwurmring/Mondleite junction. ‘You gave me a fright. – What are you doing up here?’
‘And if I were to say, I live up here?’
‘I’d reply: In that case I’d have noticed you.’
‘Aha, people know each other in the gold-dust district.’
‘What did you call it?’
‘It was my grandmother’s name for it. Sometimes she would take me by the hand, we’d come over here and she’d say: When you grow up, girl, you must marry someone from here. From the gold-dust district. Where the professors, doctors, musicians all live. But today I’ve just come for a walk. I take the 11 up here, breathe a few lungfuls of the bigwigs’ precious air then buzz off back home. – I bring greetings for you.’
‘From Herr Kittwitz?’
‘Your tongue’s shedding its needles, be careful when you swallow. Herr Kittwitz lives in Gruna. – No, from Herr Malthakus.’
‘You’ve been to see him. He’s married, as far as I know,’ Meno said with a smile.
‘No
w you’ve got that I-don’t-think-that-would-interest-you expression.’
‘And you the men-are-all-the-same look.’
‘Malthakus and I are just in the process of making friends with each other. A nice old bird. He’s very precise, but his clocks have a heart, if I can put it like that.’ She took out a packet of cigarettes, offered Meno one. He declined, gave her a light. ‘May I accompany you to the tram stop?’
‘Thanks but I’d prefer to walk with you a while, if you’ve no objection.’
He accepted that Judith would now be walking beside him without a flicker of emotion and didn’t look back when she went on ahead to the junction, stopped and listened, her face turned towards him, though he would have liked to look round to see where she had so suddenly appeared from; in his mind he went through the building entrances he had passed, but at this hour they were usually closed and he would surely have heard a door creaking; of course, he had been deep in thought, and perhaps she had come silently from farther away. The outlines of the buildings had now been erased, the few lighted windows were patches of yellow hanging in the darkness. Meno crossed the road, the hats in Lamprecht’s shop window, on which the greasy light from the lamp at the junction cast a faint glow, looked like the visible part of beings that had a rendezvous with the wigs in the Salon Wiener but it wasn’t quite time yet. Schevola held her nose: ‘Rotten eggs, yeuch!’
Past Lukas, the tailor’s, past the Roeckler School of Dancing and the drizzle of tremolos from a piano worn to a state of thin-skinned irritability.
It must have had a toothache, Meno wrote, that piano in the dance hall on the first floor, it sounded so out of tune and out of humour, and beside it the Nosferatu fingers of a cellist, carved in stucco from feet to elbows, were twined round the fingerboard of his snuffling cello, the pianist’s bald head glinted in rhythmical harmony with the palm-court-soft upanddown of the violinist’s bow; he was standing apart from the cello and piano, in bib and tucker, in the metallic shimmer of formality, beside a Monstera with mustard-yellow leaves, sending tangos slithering across the chessboard dance floor to the sandpapering steps of the beginner’s course, his left hand churning out vibratos, which elicited from the pianist, with a paper flower in his dinner jacket, blank looks at the ceiling where putti and winged hippopotamuses, which only admitted to being angels at a second glance, were playfully teasing each other amid rosy clouds; the music from Tannhäuser sprouts over the decor and I could touch Niklas now, only his body is present, it’s frozen and would perhaps not feel anything, the spell is upon him and the second Niklas, the one only he knows, that inhabits his body, has gone.
This tremolo at the peak of tunes that had become dull from repetition aroused in Meno memories of his schooldays and of dancing classes he had attended in vain. The fog that had come up from Grünleite, a blind alley off the Lindwurmring beyond the junction and where Arbogast’s chemical laboratory was situated, was now creeping past Guenon House and down Mondleite in the direction of Bautzner Strasse.
‘Shall we go on?’ Meno indicated the fog.
‘Why shouldn’t you smell of rotten eggs when you get home?’ Schevola replied. ‘What do they actually produce there?’
‘No one knows that apart from the Baron and his colleagues. As far as I’m aware it’s being kept secret. There are all sorts of rumours.’
‘Well let's walk on. – Tell me about yourself.’
‘There isn’t much to tell.’
‘You’re very reserved. You don’t say much and observe a lot. People like that often have a lot to say.’
‘That’s your opinion.’
‘You don’t seem to be particularly adventurous,’ she commented when he stopped as they approached Grünleite. Now it was stinking like a rubbish tip.
‘It all depends where you’d look for adventure.’
‘I bet you won’t seek one here and now.’
‘Don’t bet too much on it.’
‘How about there?’ She pointed down Grünleite, to the steaming building of the chemical laboratory.
‘And if there are guards?’
‘Then I could have bet quite a lot on it.’
‘We have to be cautious, I don’t know what’ll happen if we get caught.’ He had a quick look at what they were wearing. ‘You’re too well dressed for what we’re about to do. And your coat’s too light-coloured, people will see you.’
‘No they won’t. This is a reversible coat. Just a mo.’ She took it off and turned it inside out so that the dark lining was showing. ‘Do you know your way round here?’ She put on a provocative smile.
‘We’ll soon see.’
Grünleite was lit by the faint light from a few houses that belonged to the military hospital, Soviet officers and doctors lived in them. One of the windows was open, radio music spilling out of it. Schevola crossed over to the other side of the road that was in the shadow of a high wall. The masonry was badly affected. Meno took out his penknife and stuck it in the mortar to see what it was like. The blade went in right up to the handle without him having to exert much pressure. There was barbed wire running along the top of the wall, but in some places trees stretched out over it. They must be part of the woodland the Kuckuckssteig passed through from Arbogast’s chemical laboratory down to Bautzner Strasse and Mordgrund. Fabian Hoffmann, the son of the toxicologist from Wolfsleite, had explored it together with his gang, to which Ina Rohde and Fabian’s sister, Muriel, belonged, he’d told Meno about weathered statues and an impenetrable wall of overgrown wild roses separating Kuckuckssteig from the wood of the Chemical Institute. Schevola turned to the wall and stifled a cough. The fog was like damp cotton wool pouring out of the laboratory entrance, which, like that to Arbogast’s house, consisted of an elaborately wrought gryphon, here surmounted by a steel arch with black and yellow bands. With that stench Meno wondered how anyone living here could leave their window open, they couldn’t have very sensitive noses or were used to much worse. Schevola peered through the gate. ‘No one to be seen. Best down there,’ she said, pointing to the end of the blind alley where there were a few garages with dustbins beside them, ‘if we roll them up to the wall we ought to be able to manage it.’ The yellowish fog, which now stank of fish soup, came up to her knees; the expression on her face was both alert and eager, and she seemed to see it reflected in Meno’s look: immediately the expression vanished, as if she had let it drop and run a fine, swift eraser over it. ‘Just look at this.’ She held up her forefinger, showing Meno a black blob on the tip. ‘What do you think that is? Tar?’