by Uwe Tellkamp
‘What did you think?’ Meno said, even more surprised. ‘Just imagine if it sounded hollow.’
They waited in the foyer. The dusty brass hands on the clock clicked onto seven. Max Barsano could be heard laughing from some way away, immediately the group of people waiting relaxed, the faces of the Comrade General Secretaries in the two window-sized portraits on the walls either side of the entrance assumed encouraging expressions. Barsano stopped at the foot of the stairs, surveyed the assembled guests with a swift glance and, with an ‘Excuse me, comrades’, went up to Judith Schevola and clasped her right hand in both of his. ‘You’ve had your feathers ruffled, so I hear,’ he said to her in a sonorous bass voice that didn’t seem to go with his delicate figure, ‘doesn’t matter! That means it’s some good. Keep writing, tall oaks from little acorns grow and you’re someone who’s got what it takes to follow on from our great writers of the older generation.’ With that, he went past Meno to the author Paul Schade, who was proudly wearing his anti-fascist-resistance medal on his chest, and to Eschschloraque, who gave a thin smile and elegantly sketched a bow of the head as they shook hands; Schiffner, whom Barsano greeted next, looked embarrassed after the praise that had echoed round the foyer, Josef Redlich glowed with pleasure. ‘Just don’t get carried away,’ growled Paul Schade, the author of the revolutionary poem ‘Roar, Russia’, lengthy extracts from which were in the school readers of all their fellow socialist nations with the exception of the USSR, ‘we’ll deal with you later.’ Schade, who held an important position in the Writers’ Association, gave first Schevola then Meno a threatening look. Barsano turned to the two Londoners, father and son; Philipp in an elegant cream summer suit, still wearing his hat over his hair done up in a ponytail, something probably only he could get away with there. ‘Well, Herr Professor,’ Barsano cried cheerily, ‘I’ll send my barber round to you tomorrow. In the war those splendid locks would have been full of lice! – That’s young people for you,’ he said to his deputy, Karlheinz Schubert, who, at least a head taller than anyone else there, was doing the honours after Barsano in the cautious, slightly bent posture of people who are too tall. Barsano patted the Old Man of the Mountain on the shoulder, a gesture that would have seemed too hail-fellow-well-met and falsely jovial had it not been for the moment of hesitation that seemed to beg his complicity, to ask whether the restrained pat on the shoulder was acceptable; not everyone saw it as a mark of honour, for some it was crudely chummy familiarity, others perhaps even felt it marked them out. Barsano greeted Meno; he put his left hand in the pocket of his poorly cut jacket – how much more elegantly dressed were the Londoners, Eschschloraque and Schiffner! – then took it out again as if he realized that things one hid attracted interest, tried to smile but broke off immediately when the conversations of the others, conventional as they were, just filling in time, died away. ‘How’s your father? Haven’t seen him for ages. Making preparations for a journey, is he?’
‘He’s giving illustrated talks. Most recently in the Magdeburg House of Culture.’
‘Aha, in the Magdeburg House of Culture. Just needs to go down the Elbe. I wouldn’t put it past him. Kurt Rohde gets in a canoe and paddles to Magdeburg.’
Schubert and Josef Redlich were the first to laugh.
‘You’re the spitting image of your mother,’ Barsano said, subduing the laughter with a wave of the hand. ‘Brave Luise. I’ve lots of memories.’ He turned to Paul Schade. ‘Do you remember her facing Nadezhda and showing her Vladimir Ilyich’s letter?’ Schade’s leathery face brightened. ‘And the hand grenade she threw back into the train, a real partisan!’ As he spoke he gave Meno a disparaging look.
‘Let’s go into the film theatre,’ Barsano said. ‘Communal viewing of TV News at half past seven, the reports at eight.’
Meno and Schevola were the last to go in. Once they’d left, the foyer filled with members of staff from Party headquarters. A secretary attempted to breathe fresh life into three ceiling-high yellow rubber plants with water and peat. Voices could be heard from the offices again, one after the other lights gradually went on in the telephone booths underneath the picture of the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
‘Probably government lines,’ Schevola said. Black telephone receivers were painted sloping diagonally across the glass doors, below them was the yellow glow of the letter T engraved on the frosted glass. ‘Do you know the man with the ponytail? And could you introduce me to him?’ Schevola hadn’t turned to Meno but addressed the air between him and Philipp Londoner, who was in front of them; she’d spoken loud enough for Philipp to slow down until he and Schevola were side by side; she tried clearing her throat, which Meno discourteously cut through with a ‘And how is Marisa? Did you leave her in Leipzig?’ and an innocent expression, at which Philipp muttered that she was still tired from a trip to Moscow as a member of the Chilean delegation to celebrate Yuri Vladimirovich’s appointment. The film theatre was a box-shaped, wood-panelled room on the first floor. After impatiently shooing his guests to their seats, Barsano pressed a button; blinds came down over the windows, televisions slid out from the walls, immediately followed by the signature tune of TV News. ‘Lower Jaw’ was reading the news. That was what the newsreader was popularly called; with sparse hair and square spectacles, he sat stiff as a poker on the screen, like a mummy, holding a sheet of paper from which he read the news without making a single mistake and emphasizing each syllable equally – Lower Jaw had never made a slip of the tongue, the whole Republic seemed to be waiting for that unheard-of event to happen; only the lower half of his angular face moved, grinding out news item after news item at the calm, steady speed with which a cable is unrolled from a cable drum … moving purposefully towards the realization. Schevola and Philipp Londoner were sitting in front of Meno, on Schevola’s left was Barsano’s deputy, Schubert, who’d squeezed into the row at the last minute … comprehensive exchange of views … in a constructive atmosphere. On the screens combine harvesters advanced in formation over the wide grain fields of the Uckermark … impressive testimony … all-round strengthening. Barsano pointed to the screen, a jubilant sea of waving hands as the General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Socialist Unity Party and Chairman of the State Council of the German Democratic Republic, Comrade … shook the hand of the Chairman of the Praesidium of the State Great Hural of the Mongolian People’s Republic, Comrade … matter of prime concern … unshakeable foundation. Now the bottling plant of the state-owned Wine and Preserves Combine was shown, muted clinking of glass as bottling forewoman Comrade … spoke of the overfulfilment of the plan’s targets for gooseberry juice … the assent of millions. The next picture showed tanks in the course of a NATO exercise, Paul Schade roared ‘Imperialist swine!’ … indestructible relationship based on mutual trust. Aeroplanes thundered across the sky, rockets jutted out their noses threateningly. Cut: a major in the ‘army service uniform/summer’ of the land forces of the National People’s Army in a steel helmet, binoculars to his eyes, scanning the horizon: … impressive testimony. Eschschloraque took out his handkerchief and quietly blew his nose. Now the reporters of TV News were visiting the Agricultural Cooperative ‘Forward’ that had harvested the largest pumpkin in the Republic. ‘’s already been on Unique or Freak!’ Paul Schade crowed … worldwide recognition … dynamic growth. Three of the four televisions suddenly went dark. Barsano pressed a button, there was a knock at the door, Herr Ritschel in an Arbogast Institute lab coat came in and inquired, emphasizing each word equally, what Barsano’s wishes were … far-reaching change came from the television, which was still on; the General Secretary flapped his hands at the three sets and told Comrade Ritschel to repair them immediately.
Barsano had chairs taken to his office, a sparsely furnished room at the end of a corridor with a grey PVC floor that swallowed up the sound of their footsteps; the murmur of voices behind the doors with the official signs, the sound of roll-fronted cupboards being opened and closed, the cla
tter of typewriters seemed to fade away in the puddles of light left by the fluorescent tubes with yellowing protective strips. While Paul Schade arranged his manuscript on the lectern and started to speak when Barsano gave the nod, Meno looked round: wood-panelling, a few veneered cupboards, a wide desk with a pennant on the right and a signed portrait of Lenin, which Barsano was very proud of, on the left corner, photographs of his wife – she was a doctor at the Friedrich Wolf Hospital, one of the few wives of senior functionaries who still went out to work – and of his daughter, about whom, as far as Meno knew, Barsano never spoke. Paul Schade’s voice grew higher, the worker-writer’s cheeks were flushed bright red and what had happened at the congress was about to happen again: one of his feared fits of rage, foaming with coarse venom, that the audience let wash over them with closed eyes and stony expressions and that in Berlin had come to a ghastly and grotesque end: Paul Schade’s false teeth had come loose and, rattling like those of a ghostly skeleton, shot out between his lips, which had brought a horrified expression even to the face of the chairman of the Writers’ Association. Meno shuddered as he recalled the urge to laugh welling up inside him, like a poisonous liquid boiling over in a hot saucepan, at the sight, at the icily embarrassed silence of the gathering: woe to anyone who lost control of themselves; the corners of Judith Schevola’s mouth had twitched, as they did now when Schade raised his left forefinger to castigate ‘parasites, formalists, scribblers out of touch with the people and the real world’, during which, remarkably, he did not look at Meno, the Old Man of the Mountain or Schevola, as he had in Berlin, but at Eschschloraque, who was sitting in the front row beside Barsano, legs crossed, and was giving his fingernails all the more bored and weary looks the more enraged Paul Schade became. Judith Schevola had assumed her insect-researcher look again, the cold, stone-grey interest in a man with medals and decorations bobbing up and down on his chest as he continued his vulgar vituperation. What was she thinking? Was she reflecting on the fact that Paul Schade had been in a concentration camp, had experienced the Gestapo’s torture chambers? Was she thinking of his book in which he described his childhood in a working-class district of Berlin and with which he had made his name until no one read him of their own free will any more since ‘Roar, Russia’ and various novels in which Stalin was portrayed as a father and the Germans – with the exception of those who had emigrated to the Soviet Union or communists working in the underground – as a wolfish race of incorrigible fascists? Josef Redlich was squirming restlessly in his seat in the second row beside Schiffner. Was it just that he couldn’t stand the shouting or was he thinking of Paul Schade’s editor, whom no one envied … Art was a weapon in the war between the classes, Schade bawled, today it was no longer enough to sit quietly in one’s attic room, turning well-crafted sentences, the world was once more threatened by the old enemy, by imperialism and its accomplices, literature had to go on the offensive, novels had to be like MIG fighters and articles like a salvo from a MIG and he demanded that agitators be sent to the schools to practise revolutionary poetry with the children; he had noticed that bourgeois ideas were creeping back into the teaching of literature and music, formalism, defeatism, recently he’d discovered poems by Eichendorff in a school reader, that was pure reactionary ideology. And by other Romantics! In earlier days people like that were strung up from the nearest lamp post. Eschschloraque nodded.
Schiffner, who followed Schade at the lectern, drip-fed his audience with figures and tables, dwelt on Dresdner Edition’s overfulfilment of its Export Plan norms for the non-socialist economic area and on the acquisition of hard currency. After him Josef Redlich reported on the political-ideological training of Dresdner Edition’s authors, especially the younger ones; at this point Judith Schevola stood up, cried that she couldn’t bear any more and left the room, slamming the door behind her. ‘Don’t worry, my dear, we won’t molest you, you’re as white-hot as ice,’ Eschschloraque mocked at her departing figure. ‘Oh, isn’t she sensitive,’ Barsano said, ‘and yet what Comrade Redlich is demanding is correct, only too correct. We’ve slackened the reins too much recently. That always takes its toll. Reactionary elements immediately stir like the nest of vipers they are. Think they can make something of it. We must be vigilant, comrades. The young are always at risk. They must be given a firm grounding in ideology.’ After Josef Redlich had returned to his seat, Meno didn’t dare get up to read his paper; it was about the ‘Role of the Author in a Developed Socialist Society’, of all things, and had already been criticized in Berlin; he looked across at Schiffner, who gave a quick shake of the head, even though he’d cut the most provocative passages, and stood up to leave, to see how Judith Schevola was, which Paul Schade misinterpreted, and said, ‘There’s no point in you dumping your shit again here, Rohde, your mother would have given you a good box round the ears for stuff like that’, which had Barsano, Schubert and Schiffner slapping their thighs in amusement.
Meno went out. Judith Schevola had opened the window at the end of the corridor.
‘There’s a balcony at the front,’ he suggested. She nodded. ‘I need some fresh air. I just have to get away from here.’
Their footsteps echoed in the empty corridors. The sound of voices and the clatter of typewriters could only be heard from a few rooms. In the rotunda the murmur of conversation drifted up from the telephone booths on the ground floor, the service lift for food in the shaft beside the stairs started to move, one of the beige microphones of the intercom crackled, someone cleared their throat, then all was quiet again. Curtains from the sixties, printed with grey flowers, hung over the wide double doors.
‘One for you?’ He offered her his packet of Orient, she mechanically took one, didn’t move when he gave her a light.
‘May I ask you something?’ She turned her face towards him, without looking at him. It looked pale and tired but perhaps that was an illusion created by the faint light that came to them from the searchlights in the park directed at the castle. ‘What are you actually doing here?’
He remained silent, smoked. ‘And you?’
‘Typical. You’re as cautious as … well, as an editor. – There was a time when I believed in all that. The better social order … But with them?’ She pointed vaguely over her shoulder. Meno leant his ear forward, which made her smile. ‘Oh, I don’t care if they do hear! They know anyway, don’t you think? All those clichés … it makes me want to puke! And most of all Schade would like to lock us up, like in Stalin’s days. Or simply whisht.’ She made the gesture of having her throat cut.
‘Do be quiet,’ Meno whispered, ‘just smoke your cigarette but keep your mouth shut.’
‘Shall I tell you something? I can’t be bothered.’ She laughed her ugly, gritty laugh. ‘My grandmother always used to say, “You’re nowhere so safe as under Old Nick’s hams, child.” ’ She waved her hand, drew on her cigarette. ‘And afterwards we’ll be good as gold and play along with them, say nothing and get drunk. That’s it, not a word more.’
‘It’s not just for me,’ Meno said after a long pause. ‘My mother … oh, let’s forget it. Later, perhaps, if you’re really interested. Schade’s just chucked me out with a verbal box round the ears.’
‘You’re a funny person,’ Schevola said reflectively. ‘I never know where I am with you. Despite that, I trust you.’
‘We should go back in,’ said Meno, changing the subject, ‘you can’t simply leave one of Barsano’s receptions as if it were a birthday party where you’ve had an argument.’
‘And what comes after the insults?’
‘Drinks, a film and singing revolutionary hymns. He seems to like “Vetcherniyzvon”.’
‘Then he’s moved to tears?’
‘That kind of thing.’
‘I’ll stay for that.’
They finished their cigarettes. In the distance dogs could be heard barking and for the first time Meno noticed the overpowering smell of henbane that grew rampant on the castle walls; the park must attract lots
of nocturnal insects.
‘Calmed down, have we?’ Barsano asked with a cool ironic expression when they came back. ‘You shouldn’t be so touchy, everyone says what they think here, you have to be able to take the odd jab.’
‘A conspiratorial meeting!’ Schubert gave a suggestive smile.
‘The following’s on offer, comrades,’ said Barsano, counting the items off on his fingers. ‘One: watch a film, Chapayev or Vesyolye rebyata –’
‘Have you got the whole series?’ Paul Schade broke in.
‘The lot. Or Sergei Eisenstein’s Oktyabr. Two: we can have some food. Three: go down to the White Pavilion and see how Comrade Vogelstrom’s getting on with the panorama of revolution. Four: something special. I’ll show you some documents from the time of struggle. So, what d’you think? – Right, we’ll have a bite to eat and then communal viewing – of? Oktyabr. Great. A good choice.’ Barsano pressed a button, the doors of a cupboard opened, a control desk with hundreds of buttons and levers came out. There was a knock at the door after he’d pressed a button, a man in forestry uniform came in. ‘No, no,’ Barsano told the man, ‘I want the comrade duty cook’, pressed another button, a man with a grey beard in the uniform of German Railways appeared. ‘Not you either, isn’t it possible –’ He searched, scratched the nape of his neck, pressed the next button, this time it seemed to be the right one, the duty cook from the Ivan V. Michurin restaurant complex pushed in a trolley with dishes and a canister of kasha, a minibar on the shelf beneath them.
‘Buckwheat groats,’ Philipp Londoner groaned to Eschschloraque, whom he’d asked how his play was progressing and the nightwatchman question was developing.