The Tower: A Novel

by Uwe Tellkamp

  He rolled the shiny black blob between his thumb and forefinger, it was pliable, like the plasticine from which he’d made models at school: cosmonauts or Young Pioneers, Laika, the dog in the space capsule, the cruiser Aurora after a model in Komsomolskaja Pravda. When Meno wiped the blob off on the wall, it left a black streak. ‘Pitch,’ he said, trying to rub out the streak with his shoe. ‘Be careful, there seems to be more of it.’ He drew Schevola away from the steel arch. The pitch was running over the projecting wrought-iron feathers of the gryphon, dripping in viscous threads down from its beak, which looked like an oozing, upside-down gondola, onto its lion’s claws, filling the gaps in its wings, joining up in braids that in the thinning mist spread out on the ground in puddles that made contact, paused briefly, as if they had to communicate with each other, then merged, seeming to be in constant, searching motion, supplemented from the gate-arch where the black substance was now pouring down in long stretching sheets that tore off with a soft ‘plop’. Schevola regarded her shoes, frowning, gave Meno a disgruntled look.

  ‘Well?’ he said. ‘We’d better get a move on.’

  ‘Hmm,’ she replied.

  ‘You suddenly don’t feel like it any more?’

  ‘My lovely shoes … from the West, genuine Salamander, they were expensive! Judith, you’re …’ She gave herself a light slap on the face. ‘No more of that. They’re ruined now, so let’s get on with it.’

  ‘You can manage it?’

  ‘Now you sound like your boss. All you need is the mirror and comb.’ She gave an amused snort. With the supple swiftness of a cat she was on the garage roof in seconds. Picking up a few pebbles, Meno followed, he too without a sound, which drew a soft whistle of appreciation from her. ‘To be honest, I was going to ask you the same question. I seem to have underestimated you.’ They lay down flat on the roof and stared into the darkness in front of them.

  ‘Watch out,’ Meno said; they took cover behind a tree beside the roof. A searchlight flared up, scouring the terrain, they squeezed into the shadow of the tree trunk when it went across them.

  ‘We can use the tree to get back out,’ Schevola whispered.

  ‘Keep down.’

  Once his eyes had adjusted to the darkness again, Meno threw a pebble. ‘If they’ve got dogs out there, they ought to come now,’ he whispered. Nothing happened. He couldn’t hear anything apart from the distant throbbing and the goods wagons carrying ash from the hospital heating plant; the radio had fallen silent.

  ‘They just chuck their ash down the hill,’ Schevola whispered. There was the hiss of a boiler, the slam of a door shutting, otherwise it was quiet.

  The searchlight felt its way back, boring a tunnel of dazzling brightness in the dark, rolled over the garage roofs, abruptly shot up into the treetops, whitewashed the walls like a decorator painting a room systematically, suddenly jerked upwards, came back down in unpredictable swerves; cautiously Meno and Schevola raised their heads once the tunnel of light receded.

  ‘Did you see that?’

  ‘Yes,’ she murmured. ‘Let’s turn back.’

  29

  Blue vitriol

  The record turns like a ship’s screw, the steamer Tannhäuser casts off, taking me into different times (and I heard the musical clock: Dresden … in the muses’ nests / the sweet sickness of yesteryear rests), on deck Captain Tenkes and Sinbad, Osceola and Four Men and a Dog – in a Tank, films we’d seen in the Round Cinema, in the Faun Palace, in the Schauburg in Neustadt, where it smelt of alum, where the fumes of Chlorodont toothpaste from the Leo Works mingled with the chocolate aromas from the factories on Königsbrücker Strasse; the curses of the coachmen with the disgruntlement of misunderstood wits (‘Shall I tell you what Dresden is? This emirate of floor polish and rubber plants?’), cinemas with threadbare seats and display cases with film posters and reviews cut out of Eulenspiegel that only I studied while Niklas had just a dismissive wave of the hand for them, and the boys, Christian, Robert, Ezzo, Fabian, had already joined the queue outside the cinema, they knew all these posters, Belmondo’s boxer’s face, attractive, cold depravity in Alain Delon’s handsome features, Lino Ventura’s sly, brawny correctness, which went with inspectors who, earlier on, before they were inspectors but honest criminals in their prime, had been made an offer, people who couldn’t give up smoking because they had seen things that went beyond the parting in their hair, their employee’s overalls, their briefcase; they have no illusions about the fact that the past will catch up with them and make them pay for what they’ve seen; they know that any dream they’ve put down will never be carried through, even if it’s waiting unchanged, even if they can take off their jacket, touch it and look for the point where it was interrupted; cinemas that had a supporting programme and the DEFA Eyewitness flickered across in front of us, a black-and-white sun, in earlier years the UFA Newsreel and different people in the cinemas to whom the wordsmiths spoke, they seemed to be providing the soundtrack to a law, those voices in the Olympia Picture House, in the Capitol on Prager Strasse, in the Stephenson and UT Picture Palaces, the law that the world is eternally divided into friend and foe, that there will for ever be command and betrayal, victory and defeat, and that the light is with the common people, the cruiser Tannhäuser put out to sea, radio location finders and beams of light probed the night-dark waters, villas under the Soviet star where the toxic roses grew, and sleep and brown snow came down on the town and acid rain from the brown-coal heating plants, glue crept into the river from the cellulose factory, and Pittiplatsch waved from the television tower and the Sandman scattered oblivion, the Bols ballerina danced at the apprentices’ celebration in the slaughterhouse to folk songs on a hurdy-gurdy and the tinkling of a dulcimer, and they shouted ‘pisspot’ beside the blood-channel, the bolt still stuck in the head of the wriggling pig, and ‘piddlebowl’ at the steaming dishes on the table where, following ancient custom, the master slaughterman adds meat dumplings to the cauldron of gruel; fiddles and friction-drum on the Titanic-, panic-deck (and I heard the musical clock: Dresden … in the muses’ nests / the sweet sickness of yesteryear rests) … benumbed, perhaps that’s what it was, Niklas sat motionless by the record player on evenings when the snow sank down or the light of a summer’s day made the pear tree outside the window glow, I had the feeling that the music sucked him dry and at the same time filled him with the delicious essence of oblivion, the record was a spindle with nettle threads that flew out and clung fast to him with barbed hairs, twined themselves tighter with every revolution and pulled his inner being over: where to? there, there … I asked myself how it was possible for a person to live so much in the past, to be able to wipe away the present with an inner flap of the hand – I didn’t see one outwardly, Niklas didn’t position himself in front of me and raise his arm in a theatrical condemnation of everything that was in the light and shade of our day and that we summed up as ‘now’ – a gesture that was a brusque ‘no’, made with all the unmitigated fury with which a grown-up capitulates in the face of their fear; how could he declare this ‘now’ non-existent – was he a fool who’d made an agreement and would pay for it and could do as he liked until then? – I sometimes thought he’d met the Mistress of the Clocks and that she had granted him a clock face that went differently from those she had allotted us … but what was he doing there, in the past? What was it for him? What was it for the Tower-dwellers? Was he present when I thought of him, visited him, imagined him sitting alone at night in the music room listening to opera voices from long-ago recordings that he preserved and perhaps Trüpel or Däne as well, perhaps this or that person we knew nothing about (but one day they would join Däne’s Friends of Music, it had to happen, and Däne suspected there were these still undiscovered connoisseurs, that was why he liked to put special recordings, rare performances, hidden works on his programme in order to lure them), and when Niklas was going home from Lindwurmring, his worn midwife’s bag in his hand, his beret pulled down sideways over his cheek, the way
he approached with dignified steps, gently waving his hand up and down (the echo of music from a performance?), his expression one of strict absorption, still not having noticed me, then I thought: Yes, that’s him, one from up here, one of the Tower-dwellers: who spoke of the past as of a Promised Land, surrounded themselves with its insignia, heraldic badges, its postcards and photographs, what was that past to them? A constellation of names, a Milky Way of memories, a planetary system of Sacred Writings and the holiest, the Sun, was called OLD DRESDEN, written by Fritz Löffler (and I heard the musical clock: Dresden … in the muses’ nests / the sweet sickness of yesteryear rests) … and I remember evenings in Guenon House: you went in through the scratched swing door, walked down the wall-to-wall carpeting, time-bleached to the colour of ailing rosewood and fraying at the edges, that daily roused Herr Adeling’s displeasure, past potted plants at the stair corners that reminded me of nicotine-yellow octopuses sulking away for years in the formalin jars of zoological collections, felt crumbling plaster decorated with scenes from the Mastersingers, had accustomed yourself to the panes of glass in the corridor doors held together with Ankerplast adhesive tape – and ended up facing an index finger, pale as a fish and knotted with arthritis, over which a conspiratorial smile appeared: ‘Come in, Herr Rohde, we’re just looking at it.’ There it lay, on a damask-covered table, on a carved lectern, polished to a shine with walnut oil and meticulously rubbed dry, spreading its paper pinions like angel’s wings: the book; come all ye that are heavy laden and refresh yourselves and find rest in the unalterability of my dwelling, come and restore your souls. Open at: the Zwinger, photograph of the Cabinet of Mathematical and Physical Instruments. ‘It was built between 1711 and 1714 as the first of M. D. Pöppelmann’s pavilions during August the Strong’s period as Imperial Regent, as is proved by the use of the imperial eagle in the decoration of the pediment frieze.’ Voices, at first husky but then lubricated by coffee with cream, cherry brandy and Dresden custard pie, reading out, forefinger sliding along the lines, fingernails boring into individual letters, reading glasses telescoping up and down over the paper: ‘Proved, Herr Rohde, did you hear: proved. You will recall the little discussion we had in our circle here on that very topic. Herr Tietze and Herr Malthakus were both here then and agreed with me while you, Herr Pospischil, were a little wide of the mark, as we can see.’ Herr Sandhaus ran his tongue between his teeth, a soft slurping noise could be heard, executed a slight turn of his upper body to the left where Ladislaus Pospischil, born in Vienna, stranded in the chaos of a chaotic century in Dresden, hotelier, wine waiter, dealer in second-hand goods, briquettes, agent for concert artists, presently manager of the Schlemm Hotel on Bautzner Strasse, scrutinized one of Frau Fiebig’s exceedingly brightly polished silver spoons: ‘Proved, Herr Pospischil. It’s in Löffler, I’ve also taken it out of one of my older copies for you. We also talked about it with Herr Knabe.’ Herr Sandhaus handed the hotelier some sooty typewritten carbon copies, with precise references to place of origin, page and line number added and, as far as the appearance of the imperial eagle in the pediment frieze of the Cabinet of Mathematical and Physical Instruments was concerned, an enlarged photograph. ‘There you are. Herr Löffler has also personally confirmed everything to me. I always say: in the next edition he must improve the appearance of the imperial eagle. Just a little. But there it is. It does indeed appear in the pediment frieze, does our much-lauded bird. A drop of liqueur, perhaps? That custard pie’s delicious as usual, Frau Fiebig, tell me, where d’you get it?’

  ‘What d’you think, from Wachendorf’s, of course, and all through personal connections, y’know. What’d we do without ’em, as my late husband used to say.’

  ‘You’re absolutely right there, my dear Frau Fiebig, ab-so-lutely right. You get out of your car, which doesn’t exist, go across to the shop and buy till your bags are bursting from the shelves creaking under the load of goods on offer, that’s life, isn’t it? I think we can regard that topic as closed, your very good health, Herr Pospischil, and no hard feelings, I hope.’

  ‘A company of ghosts,’ Hanna called the inhabitants of Guenon House, ‘I hope you’re not going to be part of it.’ The yellow fog drifted through their rooms, leached the substance out of the houses, made the Dresden sandstone porous, left a crust on the roofs, ate away at the chimneys, made the putty round the windows crumble, but the Tower-dwellers listened to Tannhäuser in seven different recordings and compared them to each other in order to argue about which was the best, the greatest, the most beautiful, the standard recording; they went over the measurements of the destroyed Courland Palace, in thought and on paper, while their apartments were decaying, the wood of the roof beams rotting, and that was something I knew from the whole city, this bullet-riddled baroque boat in the bathtub of the Elbe valley, this shimmering foetus trapped in the womb of its own, parallel time; everywhere I went it was the same: coffee morning, custard pie, OLD DRESDEN

  Tannhäuser’s ship sailed away and Frau Fiebig made roses bloom just as others light candles, they were made of fabric, these roses, clouded in aromas of eau de Cologne, dust, furniture polish, the delicate pink had only survived in the shadow of the innermost petals, it was the colour of dancing shoes you find in the loft beside bundles of letters, pastel-coloured paper in lined envelopes held together with dried-up silk ribbons; the gesture of invitation with which Frau Fiebig showed her guests into the apartment made the flowers in the room burst open, made the crocheted antimacassars less distant, brought out the sweetness of the little porcelain chimney sweep, the flirtatious looks of the fake tomes in the bookcase beside the little cupboard in which Frau Fiebig kept her late husband’s war medals and chocolate sweets, they twined round the scores on the piano, their covers decorated with roguish little cherubs and arbours where kneeling huntsmen were singing their hearts out, they budded round the canaries’ cage, these fabric roses from the fancy-goods department of Renner’s store, where Cläre Fiebig had worked as a sales assistant; the guests were shown into the parlour, Herr Sandhaus, who worked on Coal Island for the council of the East District and perhaps therefore felt obliged to provide the Party newspaper, put a whole week’s copies of Neues Deutschland, neatly folded and smoothed out, tied across and down with string, on the part of the table intended for them, straightened up after a moment’s pause for thought, looked to see whether the chocolate girl in the reproduction over the cupboard was rousing herself from her motionless repose, stepped aside to allow Herr Adeling to place a week’s worth of Sächsische Zeitung on Neues Deutschland, the edges and folds perfectly lined up, then came Niklas with the slimmer Sächsisches Tageblatt, Lukas the tailor and his wife with the Sächsische Neueste Nachrichten, Herr Richter-Meinhold with the even slimmer redtop Junge Welt; one kilogram of newspapers; ’s that everything? Frau Fiebig asked, concentrating as she checked them on her fingers while Herr Adeling put on his waiter’s gloves, straightened the stack of paper, tied it up, lifted the pile between thumb and forefinger and went over to the window, which Frau Fiebig opened, Herr Adeling’s outstretched arm, his left hand with the white glove, the package could be seen in the gathering dusk over the Lindwurmring, with hands joined at the fingertips and heads inclined, the company waited for Frau Fiebig’s grandfather clock to strike, ding dong, six o’clock, at the last stroke Herr Adeling’s fingers snapped open, the pile of newspapers thudded into the open dustbin outside the house, Frau Fiebig took off the tablecloth, Herr Adeling sketched a bow to the neighbours, patted his gloves to clean them before picking them off by the fingertips and putting them away, followed Frau Fiebig and the others as they went to wash their hands, filled glasses with liqueur and turned his attention to the geometry of the pieces of cake on the Meissen plate shimmering under the glass cover on the little cupboard, assessing their respective weight with a silver cake-slice; Herr Sandhaus brought the lectern (‘genuine Biedermeier!’), waited for Frau Fiebig, who put a lace cloth over it; she opened the Löffler and said, with the syllable-sculp
ting emphasis with which the Dresden bourgeoisie distinguish contempt from esteem, low from high, garbage from roses: Right. And no-w. We COME. To cul-chure.

  The Tannhäuser caravel, Tannhäuser radio, echo-sounding the depths of time, black-and-yellow the record spindle.

  Winter 1978/79: the central heating fails in Johannstadt and threatens to burst in the severe frost, people mock the confidence shining out of the black-and-white faces in the newspapers, curse the subbotnik, the work for the benefit of the community on Saturdays. Teams of the Free German Youth go out to open-cast mines in the Lausitz and help units of the National People’s Army bring in coal for Dresden.

  ‘They’re supposed to have three wagonloads. They say they’re supposed to come first. Specially to heat the Palace of Culture. Have you heard anything, Herr Tietze, after all you are involved?’ Herr Sandhaus rubs his hands. ‘I’ve actually managed to get two tickets.’

  Niklas leans over the table, lifts his spoon over Black Forest cake and whispers, ‘Böhm’s going to conduct, his first public appearance with the State Orchestra here since forty-three. How humiliating if they can’t manage to heat the Palace of Culture.’

  Frost patterns spread all over the stairs. Sleep. Sleep in winter, the cold sleep at the revolving records on which the hoar frost crackles. The lamps grate, they’re old, from before the war, the wires are worn and oxidized, in some houses in Neustadt they leave the bulbs on because they might not go on again if they’re switched off, a faint, flickering light in winter, and the whirr of the fan heaters, cubes swathed in cast-iron in which a wire twisted into a snake heats up until it’s red-hot, later there are the orange heaters from Hungary in the city’s bathrooms, kitchens, book-rooms smelling of ash.