by Uwe Tellkamp
They waited.
‘Right then.’ The District Schools Officer gave a deep sigh, pushed the drawing, the cloth samples and the watch away from him. ‘I’ll have to pass it on to the Regional Schools Officer.’
Downriver, enclosed by arms of the Elbe, was the Ascanian Island. That was where Richard and Meno were heading after a fruitless meeting with the Regional Schools Officer. He had turned out to be a timid, indecisive man who dropped Christian’s file like a hot potato. ‘Oh God, oh God, what’s this that’s being loaded on me again, always these difficult cases, Herr Doktor Hoffmann. You’ve no idea of the stuff that arrives here every day. Only yesterday we had a similar case … What’s the matter with our young people? What’s going on? I can’t do anything, anything at all. It has to go to someone higher up. I’m sorry but I can’t make a decision on this.’
That left the lawyer, Sperber.
‘Thanks for arranging this,’ Richard said to Meno. They were standing at the entrance to Grauleite, part of Arbogast’s Institute behind them. ‘Did it take a great effort to persuade him – I mean, was he annoyed? After all, I’m not part of the family and you aren’t married to Hanna any more.’
‘He picked up the telephone right away.’ Meno lit his pipe with the spherical bowl and glanced through the papers again. ‘Can we trust Sperber, what d’you think?’ Richard seemed nervous, they were already within sight of the guards in Grauleite, one could see them both from Sibyllenleite and from Buchensteig, which met the road there. The streets were empty, apart from a few children playing football in the square outside Rapallo Castle and the Sibyllenhof restaurant, but the funicular would soon be bringing up people who were coming home from work in the town. But it was already starting to get dark, the implacable July sun was sinking; by day it was like a disc of boiling milk in the stone-white sky, recognizable only by pressure marks, circles of waves pulsing out; as if the air were a body that had been gashed by the low-lying rays, it had been covered with lines of reddish metallic discoloration, light rubbed raw: haemoglobin that was dispersed and deposited in layers on the fences, the shiny surfaces of dark car roofs hot enough to fry an egg on, the cracked asphalt of the streets, that surrendered its living red first and the iron molecules, glittering rust that remained.
‘Of course, he has contact with them.’ Meno nodded in the direction of the grey concrete block on Grauleite. With all its aerials it looked like a larded roast that had gone wrong, left mouldering in the deep terrine of the ring of walls. The clatter of a typewriter could be heard from one of the windows. ‘Londoner says if anyone can help us, it’s him. He called Joffe as well, but he declined: no accused, no defender. Such affairs had no business in a lawyers’ chambers.’
‘They’re all hand in glove with each other. There’s no lawyer in the country who isn’t in cahoots with them. We simply have no choice.’
The guard at the entrance patiently checked all their papers, made a few telephone calls and let the two men through with an imperious nod. At the end of the road was a black-and-yellow-striped sentry box with a barrier, the soldier on duty glanced briefly at their identity cards and gave them two one-quarter permits. If it was Sperber who had arranged for that, they had a long discussion to look forward to. They set out across the bridge.
‘Have you been here before?’ Richard asked; he was walking in front of Meno, there was scarcely room for two people side by side on the bridge. It was made of iron and its railings were closed off with wire netting; a weathered sign said ‘Grauleite’ with ‘Min njet’ beneath it in Cyrillic characters that the soldiers of the Red Army had put on buildings after the war.
‘Once with my senior editor and an author, once with Hanna,’ Meno replied, ‘but each time we went to see Joffe, not Sperber.’ Joffe, the bald lawyer with horn-rimmed glasses whom many people knew from television: with heavy rings on his fingers, that he spread out to emphasize his measured speech, he presented the fortnightly programme Paragraph, during which he discussed difficult and spectacular cases and answered viewers’ questions. Joffe also wrote in his free time and had published two love stories with Dresdner Edition, brilliant pleas, the response to which had in many cases been a deafening silence. Eschschloraque and Joffe hated each other, the relationship between Sperber and Joffe was said to be difficult as well.
‘You know Joffe?’ Richard looked at Meno with an expression of surprise and suspicion.
‘I was just thinking about him. There aren’t many lawyers in the country. He sometimes comes to the office.’
‘A professed communist with a predilection for capitalist sports cars,’ Richard said.
Meno looked at his watch. ‘We’d better hurry up, we’ve still quite a way to go.’
They were above the Rose Gorge; beside it a few turrets and battlements of Arbogast House peeked out of the web of trees, some flat ground with a swing hammock and Arbogast’s observatory not far away. There was no one to be seen, the bridge empty as far as it stretched; the windows of Arbogast House caught the late rays of the sun and threw them back in warm copper tones. There was hardly any wind at all, the Old Man of the Mountain would have said the air was rummaging round in its pockets a bit; there were currents, the warm evening air rising, a strong marshy smell from the Rose Gorge with its thousands of flowers looking inflamed in the darkness.
The inflamed body of a giantess lying on her side, legs drawn up half modestly, half lasciviously, Meno wrote, she seemed to be leaning on one arm, snuggling up against the curve of the bridge; white and red islands that had burst open on her body, and this could be heard: an unceasing, deep humming, like the drone of a transformer but without the crackle as it switches on and off; thousands of bees were scouring the roses, stopping them from congealing, as would have been right and proper for them in the falling twilight, the red, the white liquid, the extract of flower heads woven from hundreds of petals: delicate material, membranes that seemed to consist of old fragrances expressing themselves in fragments: spikenard, battlefield sweetness, forming thin braids, as it were, in the marshy smell and attaching themselves to the brown decay of the pillars, climbing up like vetch – an advance guard of roses was already on the way, exposing tendrils as thick as bell clappers – strengthened by clusters of blossom deepening their red into crimson in their centres, covered with a transparent, glutinous substance, like the sticky traps of pitcher plants, that they released in the no-longer-hot, not-yet-cool phase of evening, in the expectantly trembling stage shortly before being touched, all a-quiver under the tiny engravings of insect legs of which the humming faun of the bees consisted; and suddenly, when the flowers – replete with red, resembling wounds dripping red, magnets sucking in swarms of insects – showed patches of white, white roses a wind we could not yet feel had touched and opened, I was made to think of one of my old teachers, a chemist showing the prospective zoologists the shelves of his laboratory: stuffed vixens; regina purple ‘is a term for three coal tar dyes known since 1860’; rose-chafer paint: which tipped over the blossoms rustling in the wind from the country and set windows of fire a-glitter; rokzellin, an ‘azo dye close to true red’, with which the oscillating rays, like brushes dipped in it, painted the pulsating hedges; again, when the wind turned, splashes of white among the tumour-like clumps of red roses; picrotoxin, a ‘poison obtained from the berry of Anamirta cocculus, it forms a fine, white, crystalline, extremely bitter-tasting powder or crystal needles arranged in a star-form’; or was it the up-and-down of the bees, dusted all over with pollen, that created the impression of a swirling flow, repeatedly discharging white –
‘Look, over there.’ Richard pointed to the bank of the Schwarze Schwester, which, now visible, was winding its way along the Rose Gorge like a snake gleaming purple and tar-black.
‘The statues?’
‘Yes. I’d like to know who this wilderness belongs to.’ Richard took his jacket off and slung it over his shoulder.
‘Arbogast, I assume. At least, it’s below his Institute. As
far as I know it was supposed to have been a rose nursery.’
‘As far as I know, it still is. – I once had a patient who worked here. An accident at work with interesting consequences for the insurance. Got a thorn in his forefinger and it festered, eventually we had to amputate. – It stinks of petroleum here. I wouldn’t be surprised if Arbogast’s chemical laboratory didn’t discharge into the stream. Everything’s dead down there.’
‘Who knows?’ Meno replied. The marble statues, green with age and neglect, were on the bank of the Schwarze Schwester, up to their waists in nettles and asphodel; here and there the face of a stone warrior could be seen entwined by roses; Amazons with bows and arrows that on his last visit Meno had seen with their breasts clear of foliage had been almost completely swallowed up by the hedges.
‘Anne told me you were doing a book with Arbogast?’
‘His autobiography, I’m helping him, sifting through material, listening to him. He’s very much in favour of oral expression.’
‘What does he say about the time he spent in Sochi? There’s all kinds of rumours.’
‘Not Sochi. Sinop.’
Richard nodded. ‘Yes, you know more about that, having been born over there.’
Meno seemed not to notice the jibe. ‘So far we haven’t talked about it and you know how it is – that phase might be left out. It doesn’t depend on us.’
‘He wrote me a letter, he wants to work together with the clinic. Medical projects on combating tumours.’ Richard had let the little dig slip out without giving it much thought and now he wanted say something friendly to Meno, who seemed taciturn and subdued; it couldn’t be him or Christian’s problem that was bothering him, perhaps it was just the heat. ‘By the way, those string quartets you gave me – top class. The Amadeus Quartet play outstandingly well. Those guys at Eterna must know what they’re getting for their limited resources of hard currency.’
‘Nothing but the best.’ Meno smiled. ‘What has Niklas to say about them?’
‘Benchmark recording. He’s got it, of course, though not the Eterna but the Deutsche Grammophon original. He hinted that I should note the difference.’
‘Oh’ – now Meno made an effort to speak in a serious tone – ‘so you’ve already checked which recording had the better sound mixer?’
‘Impossible to say, our man as well as the one from over there are both masters of their art but Grammophon have the better microphones and speakers, that’s just the way things are, we can’t do anything about it. And the better vinyl, of course.’
‘But you have the better record player?’
‘The very idea! Not even the better needle. Niklas is fair, I have to give him that. It would be no problem for him to decide the matter once and for all by bringing stuff back with him. But that would be like the high jump on the moon – only the Americans can get there, so they’d only be defeating themselves, in the long run it’s no fun.’
‘It’s self-irony, is it? I thought music was sacrosanct, especially German music.’
‘Well, we’re not exactly the norm, I can see that.’ Richard laughed. The last time Meno had seen him laugh was at the birthday party, when he’d been given Landscape during a Thaw. Meno remembered Christian and fell silent. He looked across to the ruinous pseudo-baroque town house that used to belong to a manufacturer of photographic paper but now housed the rules committee for the game of skat; four flags were hanging limply from the flagpoles outside the building: the ace of clubs, the queen of spades, the king of hearts and the ten of diamonds; there were lights on, they seemed to be pondering over enquiries.
The DEFA film studios were beyond the Rose Gorge, in the valley of the Schwarze Schwester, the sheds and the rails, on which scenery was moved backwards and forwards, could be seen. The studio grounds were fenced in, there were watchtowers, tall street lamps curved like cobras mingled their dull light with that of the searchlights from the towers. A gigantic Sandman waved, his helicopter was slowly coming towards him from the far end of the valley, the sleepy-time sand was in a third car, Richard and Meno observed it squashed in a corner that the roses from the gorge had already taken over. The bulbs hanging from a chain over the bridge went on but only about half lit up, some were making rasping noises, would soon go out.
‘Odd that you can’t see anyone,’ Richard said, ‘the scenery cars seem to go of their own accord.’
‘Remotely controlled, perhaps?’ Meno raised his hand, music came from one of the studios: ‘First we-he wa-a-tch our bedtime sho-how, then ev’ry chi-i-ld to slee-eep must go-ho …’; the familiar ditty of the Sandman programme, which started at ten to seven. They continued on their way. Settings for Westerns could be seen, on a poster a larger-than-life-size DEFA Indian was brandishing his tomahawk. Beside it were rows of garden gnomes, next to them an arbour, probably for the popular programme You and Your Garden. A searchlight caught the Weather Fairy at the entrance to the site, a cardboard eagle perched on an aerial, the emblem of the Monday-evening programme of carefully selected clips from Western TV, The Black Channel, by and with Karl-Eduard von Schnitzler, known as ‘Sully Eddy’. That’s where Frau Zwirnevaden works, Meno thought.
The closer they came to the Ascanian Island, the more nervous Richard grew, imagining scenarios of what would happen to Christian if Sperber couldn’t find a way out or, contrary to Londoner’s assurance, refused to take on the case. ‘What else could we do then?’ He went through lists of names. Could Londoner himself not do something, after all he was a close friend of the Chairman of the State Council; would Meno ask for an appointment with Barsano or perhaps with Arbogast? He was an influential man, valued by the high-ups, an important earner of hard currency.
Meno tried to calm him down. ‘First of all let’s see what Sperber says.’ But he too was wondering what they could do if Sperber held back. ‘And Christian? Has he written that essay?’ ‘That essay’ had been Anne’s idea, Christian was to present his view of the affair, explain why he’d read the memoirs of a U-boat commander in Hitler’s navy.
‘Yes. It’s been sent to the Regional Schools Officer and to the Schools Committee.’ Again Richard started thinking, found new names, examined and accepted or rejected them.
‘Has he recovered a bit by now?’
‘He is, let’s say, reasonably approachable once more. By now he seems to have come to understand what he’s done. Anne and I have discussed the matter: if all goes well, it would be best if he didn’t come on holiday with us this year but has the chance to think things through, get over it by himself. He’ll stay with Kurt. You can go and see him, of course, that will certainly do him good. He should be free for a few weeks and have time to reflect on what’s happened. Perhaps he has a girlfriend? The boy never tells me anything.’ Richard looked at Meno, Meno shrugged and raised his hands.
The bridge ended with a sign warning, in four languages, that unauthorized persons were not allowed onto the island. There was dense woodland either side of the well-trodden path, only sparse light came through the tops of the trees, Meno and Richard started when a guard suddenly asked to see their papers.
‘Pass,’ the man said in an expressionless voice, waving the two men on in the direction of the ferry. There was a smell of decay, yellow-and-black flowers were slumbering in the twilight, fields of henbane in delicate, fimbriate movement, as if sucking, even though there wasn’t a breath of air. The forest floor was covered in pine needles, the atmosphere was like a hothouse, stifling, deadening all sound. Meno coughed, a brief sound without echo, immediately smoothed out by the syrupy air. He was surprised that no birds were to be heard, nor any other woodland noises: the creak of branches, the warning cry of a jay, the leaves quietly foaming in the listless evening breezes that made thousands of branches, moving up and down at leisurely pace, shade in the darkness with the soft, silent strokes of pencils on paper.
Richard put two ten-pfennig pieces in the coin box by the jetty, Meno pulled the lever, the two coins clicked out of the slots in th
e revolving disc; a grey-bearded conductor came out of the shed with geraniums on the window ledges that was the ferry waiting room, gestured the two men wordlessly to the ferry, a rusted flat-bottomed boat with bulwarks and wheelhouse. The man started the engine, the ferry pushed out into the pitch-black arm of the river by the banks of which, a radiance of metallic white in the sluggish current, masses of water lilies proliferated. Neither Meno nor Richard spoke during the crossing, each looking round with rapt attention.
One of Sperber’s assistants was waiting for them on the island. He led them along a lighted path; soon, between clumps of milky green, the baroque castle came into view; it had been built on the island by one of the successors of the Ascanian dynasty.
‘He wants to speak to you by yourself,’ the assistant said to Richard.
‘What should I do in the meantime?’
‘You can wait in the secretary’s office with a cup of tea, you can have a walk anywhere in the park, just as you please, Herr Rohde.’
‘Then I’ll take a walk. – All the best, Richard.’
Richard followed the assistant. Sperber’s chambers were in one of the pavilion-like outbuildings flanking the Ascanian castle, the seat of the regional high court. The corridor floors were covered with grey PVC that muffled the sound of their footsteps, fluorescent tubes cast the unhealthy-seeming pus-yellow light typical of official buildings. The assistant rang the bell at a door with the plain sign ‘Dr Sperber Lawyer’, after a brief pause there was a buzz, the door opened. It was padded. They passed the secretary’s office, where there were a telex machine and several black typewriters, and went into Sperber’s office. The assistant, aiming his words at the ceiling, said, ‘Herr Doktor Hoffmann’, and withdrew. Sperber, sitting at his desk writing, did not look up. He pointed to the chair opposite him. Richard smoothed his jacket and sat down.