The Tower: A Novel

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The Tower: A Novel Page 46

by Uwe Tellkamp


  He went to fetch the pump from the shed. Stahl had placed a lantern beside the tin bathtub, a yellow pinhead in the darkness dappled with the white moth-attracting plants: narcotic vibrations; he suddenly felt the need to dip a hand in the rainwater butt beside the shed; then the other hand: he was amazed how unpleasant it was if you only wet one. The hornets’ nest was empty, he remembered that Meno had told him that hornets lived for just one year and that the queens built new nests after they’d overwintered; also hornets, unlike wasps, didn’t go for human food; he could have told Reina that. When he looked up, the pinhead had gone. He found candles in the shed, matches as well, Meno probably used them when he worked out there. On a shelf were some apples from the previous year, on the windowledge cardboard cylinders of greenfly killer; there was a smell of fertilizer and rubber boots. The tin bathtub was in the lowest part of the garden, on a terraced piece of lawn with tomatoes and raspberries where Libussa toiled to keep them clear of dog roses and the maple shoots that landed in the autumn like invading propeller troops from the mother trees below the end of the garden – beyond a rotten wooden fence there was a drop of several metres, the neighbouring plot was overgrown and didn’t seem to belong to anyone. Glow-worms whirred across the path Christian was slowly going down, twigs kept scratching his face; here were gnarled fruit trees, the Cellini apples Lange used to make cider and puree, Boscs, Russets and Orange Pippins; Lange’s particular pride, the old pear trees: Beurré Hardy, Gute Luise, one tree with Christian’s favourite variety, the red and yellow Comice, Meno preferred the cinnamon-red Madame Verté and the spherical Grüne Jagdbirne; in the cellar there were hundreds of jars of bottled fruit.

  He waited. One woman’s and one man’s voice, then splashing and when they burst out laughing he recognized Ina and Siegbert; he squatted down and only stood up again when his legs started to hurt. The splashing again, they were laughing in the drawn-out way drunks laugh, Christian crept nearer and saw their milky bodies in the bathtub, they separated, murmured, came together, touched each other gently, as if they were two doctors sounding each other with the warmed membranes of their stethoscopes.

  Yes, he thought, yes. You ought to be somewhere else. But he waited, avid and sad.

  Then he went upstairs, fetched the loungers, put them up in Meno’s living room and saw to the air beds. His thoughts wandered hither and thither and the chirping of the crickets coming through the open balcony door was excessively loud. The desk lamp would attract insects, he switched it off, went outside for a breath of fresh air. All at once the garden was alien, the frothy, dark-blue tree shadows threatening, there was still pop music coming from somewhere, suddenly cut through by squealing, as if someone were being thoroughly tickled. How boring, how meaningless! And all these blooms and plants, pushing against each other like forces in a polite and unfair game, existed just as well without him; this insight filled him with such consternation that he could no longer bear it on the balcony. The door opened. Verena switched the light on, started. ‘You gave me a fright. I didn’t know you were here –’

  ‘Where are the others?’

  ‘Still at the Bird of Paradise. Siegbert went off with Muriel and Fabian. Have you seen Reina?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘She left shortly after you. Christian … may I say something to you?’ She looked past him, he had to swallow. Verena wanted to go into the garden, to the iron table, but he said no, even though, for a moment, he felt a desire for revenge because he was expecting reproaches.

  ‘OK then, we can just as well stay here,’ she said.

  ‘No, I … Would you come? I’d like to show you Caravel. Just from outside –’

  He hesitated, he turned away. ‘We won’t need to ring, I don’t want to go in … it’s not far,’ he said quietly.

  They walked along Mondleite, deserted at night, it was dark now at the Teerwagens’ too. For a long time Verena said nothing and he didn’t urge her, recalled the walk with Meno in the winter, before the birthday party in the Felsenburg, how mysterious and full of stories the district had seemed, now it looked closed. There was something ghost-like about Verena’s dress over the streets that were like grey ribbons, she was wearing soft shoes, he couldn’t hear her steps. ‘I don’t think it was right of you simply to leave like that,’ she said when they’d already reached Heinrichstrasse, where the only lights were at Niklas’s and in number 12, the house with the wisteria, the scent of which mingled with that of the elderberry bush outside Caravel. ‘We’d so looked forward to this evening and then –’

  ‘This is where I usually live.’ Christian pointed over the arched gateway to number 11.

  ‘You mustn’t be annoyed with me for telling you this.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I don’t know if you realize yourself, but you have a way … We’re dancing, you sit in the corner. We’re enjoying ourselves, you’re pulling a face.’

  ‘Of course. My arrogance –’

  ‘You don’t need to be cynical. Please, you must understand, I don’t have to tell you all this –’

  ‘Well don’t do it then.’

  ‘Actually you’re pretty immature,’ Verena retorted softly. ‘Pity.’

  ‘But Siegbert, he’s mature.’

  ‘Let’s go back. You’ve gone into a huff just like a peacock. Won’t you listen to me for once! Or can’t you stand being criticized?’

  They walked back in silence, not by Wolfsleite, where Muriel and Fabian lived; he didn’t know whether they’d given Verena their address or not.

  He couldn’t leave it at that. ‘Out with it, then. What was it you wanted to say to me?’ he said when they reached Mondleite again.

  ‘Yes, that is arrogance,’ she said reflectively. ‘You call us into question, for to you everything we do’s too stupid … All the fun of a dance, how common; then the look on your face, like, Oh God, how I must suffer, no one loves me, I’m all alone in this world full of cheap rock music and stupid jigging about, no one understands me, I’m so misunderstood, in such a bad way!’

  ‘It’s certainly not Bach those guys are strumming –’ Christian was shivering with rage.

  ‘Yes, that’s what I’m talking about. This disparagement. And the arrogant twist of your lips when you express it, I don’t need a lamp to see it. But I like what they do ten times better than your spoilt –’

  He broke in. ‘Oh, leave off.’

  ‘I think you’re a coward,’ Verena called after him.

  32

  East Rome II. Barsano

  ‘I’m not interested in what Fräulein Schevola thinks!’ Schiffner stood up and began to walk agitatedly back and forth. ‘I would like – no, I demand that that scene goes. We’re both just back from the congress, you heard the directives just as well as I did and now you present me with this!’ Schiffner threw the pages up in the air, they floated down slowly to the floor.

  ‘We’ll destroy the book if we insist on cutting that kind of scene,’ Meno replied quietly.

  ‘So what! Then she’ll just have to rewrite the stuff. Why else did she become a writer? Do you know how many drafts Tolstoy made for his books? Tolstoy! And Fräulein Schevola and you rabbit on about “destroying the book” …’ There was a knock at the door. ‘Come in,’ Schiffner roared. Frau Zäpter appeared in the doorway, small and apprehensive. ‘Barsano’s office have rung to say it starts at seven tonight.’ Schiffner nodded and waved Frau Zäpter out with a rough gesture. ‘What do you have to say about this, Josef?’

  Josef Redlich lowered his head and nervously played with a ballpoint pen. ‘But it’s true, Heinz. Such … incidents did actually happen, we all know that, and our friends better than anyone –’ Schiffner cut him short. ‘Truth! As if literature had anything to do with truth! Novels aren’t philosophy seminars. Novels always lie.’

  ‘I don’t share your view on that,’ Josef Redlich ventured to object. ‘You know my opinion: literature that capitulates in the face of reality is not literature but propaganda. We’re not
making propaganda, Heinz. Rohde let me have the manuscript, I agree with him. If we take that passage out we’ll be castrating the book. And it’s not the days of the Eleventh Plenary Session any more.’

  ‘That’s clearly your opinion too?’ Schiffner leant over to Stefanie Wrobel, who avoided his eye. ‘I only know that passage, not the context –’

  ‘But I gave you the manuscript,’ said Meno, astonished.

  ‘I didn’t get round to it. Herr Eschschloraque has priority.’

  ‘All right, then, let’s try it,’ Schiffner said in conciliatory tones. ‘But on your head be it, Josef. I will make my objections known if Central Office rings up and there are difficulties. I bow to the will of the majority of my editors. But I can tell you both right now’ – Schiffner leant forward with his hands on the table and fixed his gaze on Josef Redlich and Meno in turn – ‘it’s your necks that are on the block. Of course the event Fräulein Schevola thinks she has to write about did occur. But the question is, to whose advantage is it if she does write about it? Our country has problems enough as it is, our friends as well, and she comes along with this old stuff. My God, who was it who started the war! That’s just the counterclaim, and she’s moaning and wailing just because a few Nazi women –’

  ‘They weren’t just Nazi women,’ Meno said even more quietly. ‘She portrays quite ordinary people.’

  ‘Do shut up, Rohde. It was these very people you describe as “quite ordinary” who elected the Nazis in 1933! They sowed the whirlwind and were surprised to reap a hurricane. The scene ought to be cut precisely because your objection is possible, but have it your own way, and don’t say I didn’t warn you. – I want three external reports, then it must go to the Ministry first of all; I want a translation for our friends and that has to go off before anything’s decided. This evening is the report on the congress; you’ll write it again please, Herr Rohde, and show it to me.’ He went over to his desk and handed his paper back to Meno. The pages were covered with corrections in red ink.

  Meno looked back from the middle of the bridge to East Rome: a yellowish haze hung over the town, fed by the smoke from the factory chimneys; the outlines of Vogelstrom’s house and the funicular creeping up the rise shimmered in the air; the slope above the Elbe drifted into the falling twilight like an island hedged round with a proliferation of roses. A smell of decay wafted over, perhaps the wind came from Arbogast’s Chemical Institute. Judith Schevola was waiting on the Oberer Plan. She told Meno about the evening in the House with a Thousand Eyes and the Bird of Paradise and he let her talk; his thoughts were already at Barsano’s reception that was being held in Block D, on Karl-Marx-Weg; it was the headquarters of the Party, the Schneckenstein, the former castle of an expropriated prince of the Wettin dynasty. Judith Schevola fell silent and surveyed Meno with furtive glances, Josef Redlich and Schiffner would have made the most of the situation and kept her on tenterhooks a while longer; Meno didn’t like these little games they played with authors, the revenge of those whose hard work in the background went unheeded and drew little thanks; he told her about the editorial discussion.

  ‘Three external reports,’ Schevola said quietly after a while, ‘and a translation for the Russians … That’ll take for ever. That means the book is dead, it won’t get through.’

  ‘I promise I’ll do everything I can.’

  ‘And what can you do?’ Schevola retorted in irritation. ‘You know just as well as I do how things work here. It’ll end up with you paying me an advance of ten thousand but the book won’t be published.’ That was common practice, Meno didn’t dispute the fact: the publishers would pay a so-called difficult author for a bogus edition of, say, ten thousand copies, but in reality only a few hundred were printed, to be locked away in the collections of non-approved books in a few libraries – and the author, although cheated, couldn’t even complain.

  ‘I’m prepared to go a long way,’ Meno said. ‘You’re very talented and I … I’m grateful that you trust me as your editor. Your writing is unusual. Very French. Elegant, light, roving, not ponderous like that of many German authors, especially those over here.’

  ‘It’s the first time you’ve said that to me.’ Schevola turned away.

  ‘I’m not trying to cheer you up. It’s going to be hard work getting your book published. You’ve got enemies.’

  ‘Why?’

  Meno accepted the naive astonishment he saw in her expression as genuine. ‘Why? You’re lively. You’re vivacious and passionate. You understand people, you express yourself in language that is worthy of the name. Put together, all this means that when people read you they have the feeling they’re reading something true. Not intended as propaganda.’

  ‘Something true, my editor says! That won’t buy me anything. I have the impression that that’s not what the reading public wants at all. They want entertainment, something to take their minds off things, otherwise stuff like Hermann Kant’s Aula wouldn’t have had such a success.’

  ‘You want to write best-sellers? You won’t. And in my opinion that’s not something for you.’

  ‘But the others are praised and courted, I’ll have to bow and scrape, suck up to VIPs …’

  ‘Listen,’ Meno broke in, ‘none of them is capable of writing a scene like the one in which your heroine says farewell to her father. You complain about your lack of success. Lack of success makes one sensitive. Sensitivity, along with background, is a writer’s great asset. Don’t let yourself be corrupted.’

  ‘Said the man with the steady income. It’s easy for you to talk of lack of success. True, I’ve got talent, as you say, but no one will know.’ He sensed she was tired and didn’t reply. They turned into Karl-Marx-Weg. At the gate to Schneckenstein they were stopped by soldiers who checked their identity cards and Meno’s briefcase. A sergeant phoned the castle, Meno and Schevola waited, there was no point in getting worked up about the process and pointing out that the check and phone call had already been carried out by the sentry posts when they’d gone onto and left the bridge. The gate, a steel wall several metres high on rails, opened like a theatre backdrop and closed again behind them.

  The drive was tarmacked, in earlier times carriages would have driven up the serpentine road, lit by spherical lamps, to the castle building. It was in the shadow of tall trees and noticeably cooler; Schevola was shivering and Meno gave her his jacket. ‘Do you know Barsano?’ he asked to prevent her from refusing it.

  ‘Only from a distance. And you?’

  ‘I’ve been up here a few times.’

  ‘You were born in Moscow, weren’t you?’

  Meno looked at her in surprise. ‘How do you know that?’ She winked at him. ‘I like to know about people I have to deal with. – Did you know that Barsano’s father was one of the founders of the Comintern?’

  ‘And of the German Communist Party, together with Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht. The family emigrated to Moscow in thirty-three, they lived in the Hotel Lux, Barsano attended the Liebknecht School. His father died during the purges.’

  ‘I didn’t know that,’ said Schevola.

  ‘And never mention it. His mother and his brothers and sisters were arrested and he, as the son of an enemy of the people, was expelled from school and banished to Siberia. He slaved away in the mines and lost his left index finger. When we get there, behave as if you haven’t seen it.’

  ‘How long were you in Moscow?’

  ‘I don’t know exactly, I only have hazy memories. Sometimes I remember fragments of children’s songs. My brother was born in thirty-eight, he knows more. My sister was still in kindergarten when we came back. – Can you speak Russian?’

  ‘Only what I learnt at school, Nina, Nina tam kartina … and a little that has stuck in my mind from travels. – Why?’

  ‘Because up there’ – he pointed to the castle – ‘they sometimes only speak Russian. Almost all of Barsano’s people are ex-Muscovites, and they send their children to school and university in Moscow.’
>
  ‘The Red aristocracy,’ said Schevola. ‘The ones in the West go to Paris and London and New York, here they go to Moscow. Paris … That’s the city where all the women wear gloves and white dresses with black spots. Oh well. Mustn’t it be great to be cured of your clichés. I’d still like to go there one day.’

  ‘You might perhaps be disappointed.’

  ‘Yes. The grapes will surely be sour. There’s one single reason I’d like to go there. In his novel The Man Who Watched the Trains Go By Simenon has his central character, Kees Popinga, write a letter to the police chief: “… he deliberately used paper with the letterhead of the bar”. So there are bars there that have their own writing paper! I think that’s wonderful. It sounds so matter-of-course … As if it often happened that people wrote letters in bars.’

  ‘You’re a dreamer and pretty trusting,’ Meno warned her with a smile. ‘You don’t know where I belong.’

  ‘No, I don’t know that,’ Schevola said after a while.

  The castle was a neo-classical fort, the main building flanked by two octagonal towers, the Soviet flag flying on the left-hand tower, on the right-hand one the flag of the Workers’ and Peasants’ Republic. Meno and Judith Schevola crossed the gravel of the square outside the entrance; a head of Lenin in reddish stone was like a meteorite lying on the ground, the Tartar face staring with a faint smile at the trees in the park; Schevola couldn’t resist tapping it with her knuckles. ‘Solid,’ she said in surprise.

 

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