by Uwe Tellkamp
‘He has his subjective point of view. Other doctors are of a different opinion.’
‘So you say.’
‘No. I know. My uncle’s a doctor too and he’s not one of those who only see the negative side or are only in it to earn money.’
‘What are you suggesting about my father!’ Christian cried angrily, waving his hand as if he were trying to mow down whole swathes of grass. ‘Oh, forget it. – Do you think it’s right that boys have to spend three years in the army?’
‘They don’t have to. Eighteen months is what they have to do, anything beyond that is voluntary.’
Christian dropped his arms. He couldn’t believe Reina really was so naive. ‘Fahner “suggested” we think about volunteering for the three years – the file with our assessments and what we want to go on to study was very visible on his desk. And they call it volunteering!’
‘The American soldiers have to go to Vietnam. They have to kill people for the interests of the ruling classes, of capitalism. Or do you think they’re there for humanitarian reasons? And what about the Falklands War?’
‘The Russians have to go to Afghanistan. That’s just as much an invasion. And they have to kill people there too. Can you tell me what business the powerful Soviet Union has in poor Afghanistan?’
‘That’s Western propaganda. I don’t believe that’s correct. You’ve got it from West German radio, that’s just imperialist propaganda.’
‘So, in your opinion, what are the Russians doing in Afghanistan?’
‘Responding to a request from the government, for help against the counter-revolution.’
‘Of course. Just as in ’68 in Czechoslovakia. They also asked the Russians for help. Funny that the population wasn’t of the same opinion.’
‘That’s Western propaganda again. The people cheered the Soviet soldiers, we saw that on TV. Christian, you really ought to think about what you’re saying.’
It didn’t sound threatening, just puzzled, but it brought him back down to earth at once. But he was interested in the topic, he couldn’t leave it just like that; there was also the urge to be right, so he changed the subject. ‘You told me your brother’s homosexual. He doesn’t have any problems?’
‘My father threw him out. And for Mother he doesn’t exist any more. She says she never had a son. Otherwise – not as far as I know.’
‘There used to be a law according to which your brother would have had to go to prison. Just because of his nature. He can’t help it.’
‘The Yanks have racial discrimination. Anyway, that law was abolished. – And my brother’s going into the army for three years.’
‘Because he believes in it?’ Christian asked dubiously.
‘What are you suggesting?’
He had to laugh. ‘It wasn’t meant as a suggestive remark.’
‘I’d wait for you,’ Reina said.
Turgenev’s pounding heart after all; he knew he’d blushed and stuck to the dim light of the path; Reina’s armpits, her body the sheet had slipped off, how simple it would be to touch her now, to seek the lips of her wry, freckled face, to stammer the usual things, but he resisted: her fingers, stroking the pus-capped bumps of his acne, would say: a nasty rash; a shudder of nausea, I don’t want to catch acne, then, out of consideration for him, she’d murmur something soothing, yet still feel nauseated: a lead balloon the whole thing; what would it be like to sleep with Reina, he longed for it, feared it.
‘Would you stick to your convictions whatever happened?’
‘I’d try to,’ Reina replied after a while, without looking at him; the distance between them was more than her outstretched arm; his hand would have had to do its bit.
‘Even if you were blackmailed or tortured?’
‘If I say yes, you’ll think I’m bragging or overestimating what I’m capable of resisting. Who can know that? – Do we have to talk about this?’ Reina was getting irritated, he could tell from her voice and yet he continued to provoke her, now because it gave him a certain pleasure. ‘And if they didn’t torture you but someone you love?’
Reina took a deep breath. ‘Who should torture you?’
‘Beware of Reina,’ Verena said one evening, ‘I think she’s one of them. Be careful about what you say.’
A magnetic needle swinging round the compass, indecisive fluttering, floundering movements; Verena seemed out of reach, she now openly held hands with Siegbert, and Christian could stare at the musical-instrument brown of her hair for so long that he noticed streaks of sweat and a powder of dandruff on the shoulders of the dark velour pullovers she wore; he could bear her looking at him without feeling he immediately had to make a contribution to the ongoing discussion or conceal the directness of this exchange of looks with some fidgety gesture – clenching his fists, scratching his head – firmly push everything away from him. Suddenly the magnetic needle had come to a halt.
Beware of Reina.
But now he had to be where she was; he hated it when she lost her balance going downhill and Siegbert or Falk grasped her flailing hand; when they had a rest he stared at the down on the nape of her neck, that vulnerable hair bent in bright whorls that exuded a dangerous attraction: several times already he’d stuck out his finger because there was a mosquito on them or he needed to check something, he also thought that the scar must hurt and the pain would go away if he touched it. He remembered in time that Falk was keeping an eye on his movement and it was only a matter of seconds before the conversation would die away and Reina sit there, mortified; in the evenings he wished she were still on the mattress next to him and he could decide where she should feel the shudder of his first kiss – but she’d moved to a different place well away from him. On her back, the side of her shoulder, the spot with the whorls of hair (too predictable, he told himself, perhaps she’d have forgotten later on when he asked her: Where was my first kiss, do you remember? or another boy had already kissed her there, immediately he assumed that must be the case, probably on the scar, that’s what happened in pirate films – he didn’t even know whether he’d be Reina’s first boyfriend; it was unlikely, there must have been crushes in her earlier years at school; did she actually have a boyfriend? he decided to give him a good thrashing, the swine); perhaps on the scar after all or, better still, a point on the line the sheet had made, where her back merged with her pelvis; her earlobe (the right or the left? both were well perfused), her navel (at the thought of that he gave a soft cry of pleasure: just before the kiss her stomach would draw back as if electrified, as if an ice cube had been dropped on it, would slowly come up again, as when you breathed out, and he would hold his lips precisely over that rising movement so that her navel would touch his lips, not the other way round), her elbow (unusual, but dry, the way he imagined model-railway enthusiasts kissed), the tip of her nose (but she wasn’t a cat after all), or better still her ring-toe, the one next to the little toe (no one ever placed a kiss there, but would she realize that? perhaps that was too far-fetched, too complicated?), her breasts (sure, where else? he went on walks feverishly visualizing the colour of her nipples, whether they were pink or light brown like milky coffee, whether he could nibble at them delicately without hurting her, whether they would respond to his tongue, his lips, possibly even his nostril – that when he snuffled particularly lasciviously), or the back of her knee?
No.
He would kiss her armpit. Of course there was always her mouth as well but that was out of the question for his first kiss, he’d go there later. His first kiss, he decided, would be on her armpit, that shaven, sweating, bread-roll-white dove-bellied cove under her left arm.
Kurt didn’t have a telephone, invitations came to him by post; Lene didn’t have one either; Christian went into the town to ring Barbara. He didn’t want to worry Anne and he could well imagine what Richard would say. As he dialled the number, he could see the dilapidated balcony of the Italian House in his mind’s eye, the staircase windows with the dame’s violets he and Meno h
ad admired during the winter, the night of the birthday party. It was Friday, Ina would be out; it would have disturbed him very much if she’d answered. Barbara often came home earlier on Fridays, she’d probably be in the kitchen, cooking. She answered. He told her about Reina.
‘And you’re asking whether you should fall in love with the girl? Tell me, have you gone soft in the head? Now you just listen to me. Do you think we were interested in politics when we were your age? Do you think Ina gives a damn about the politics of whoever’s her latest?’
Perhaps she ought to, Christian thought.
‘But that’s something you get from your father. Just between you and me, Christian, your father’s a bit … well, how shall I put it? Inhibited? Recently we were talking … oh, but now I remember it’s something you’re not to know about. Enoeff. You need a girlfriend, a boy of your age without one, if I were your mother I’d be wondering. – Why haven’t you rung Anne?’
‘I don’t want her to worry, Aunt Barbara. Please don’t say anything to her.’
‘No, enoeff. Silent as the grave, that’s me. You know how a girl kisses and what else comes after … Red roses, sure, etc. etc. – all that has nothing to do with politics.’ Barbara sighed and in his mind’s eye he could see her splayed fingers with all the rings, he heard her bangles clunk against the receiver. ‘You’re only young once.’
Meno warned him. Christian had never seen his uncle so exasperated. He would have liked to talk to him about Hanna but no one in the family seemed ever to have asked why Meno’s marriage had failed.
‘If she informs on you? – From what you’ve told me you should be prepared for that.’
‘You really think she’d inform on me –’
‘Even though she’s in love with you, you mean? That kind of romantic stuff is Barbara’s cup of tea, not yours, Christian. What do you know about love? What do you know about what’s possible?’ Christian felt hurt; Meno seemed to sense it, he said, ‘They kiss you and they betray you. Both in the same breath. It doesn’t have to be like that, but sometimes it is and you can’t take any more risks. Perhaps Reina’s an exception. But only perhaps. What if you try it out, just to see, and walk straight into the trap?’
‘I like her very much … The way she walks, the way she moves and …’ Christian hesitated, watching his uncle out of the corner of his eye. ‘… her armpit,’ he concluded with a trusting smile. Meno burst out laughing. Christian felt as if a machete were cutting apart the flesh between his forefinger and middle finger.
‘Her armpit? And you call that love? That’s just sexual. It’s about time you started to learn that in this country you can’t behave like a little child.’
‘Now you sound like Father,’ Christian retorted indignantly. ‘Just because you and Hanna –’
‘Don’t talk about Hanna.’
Christian was sorry but he refused to apologize, he felt hurt.
‘We want the best for you, especially your father, but he won’t be able to help you any more if something else like the training-camp business should happen. If you let Reina know what you really think and she tells others … She doesn’t even have to do it with malicious intent. Perhaps just out of pride in you, out of naivety, or simply to get over an awkward pause in the conversation … Lots of things happen out of boredom. Do you want to risk your future for this girl? Have you absolute trust in Reina? Do you really know her that well, how she will react, what you mean to her? Does she know herself?’
‘So in your opinion I have to make a dossier on a girl before I can fall in love with her?’
‘That’s the way things are,’ Meno said coldly. ‘I understand your feelings better than you perhaps think. No, this country’s not the place to be young. I wouldn’t be talking to you like this if I didn’t know someone who’d gone through what I’m warning you against.’
‘Who was it?’
Meno prevaricated. ‘Later perhaps.’
‘No, now,’ Christian insisted.
‘Your grandfather Kurt,’ Meno said after a long hesitation.
‘Oma informed on him?’
Meno shook his head, started to speak then broke off. ‘No, the other way round. It was in the Soviet Union, at a terrible time. He told us children on his seventieth birthday. I don’t want you to talk to anyone about it.’
Interlude: 1984
In the evening doors into the dream opened. In the evening the cast-off skins of the body were left behind after the magic word ‘Mutabor’ had been spoken. In January ’84 the dustbins were overflowing, ashes had to be tipped out on the snow beside them, sometimes the Tower-dwellers, on the initiative of a citizens’ meeting, would heave the dustbins up onto a lorry that took the ashes out into the woods. Newspapers piled up, were torn to shreds in gusts of wind sharp with frost. The District Hygiene Inspector’s office recommended putting a layer of lime over the garbage. The lime was distributed to designated individuals in each street from whom the inhabitants filled their buckets: ‘Causes severe eye damage. Keep out of reach of children.’
Andropov died.
‘So what now?’ the Tower-dwellers asked while they were queuing at the butcher’s, the baker’s or outside the Konsum. ‘The next juvenile lead will take the stage,’ they whispered with an apprehensive shrug of the shoulders.
Cigarette smoke, aquarian swirls of incense, eyes on the ceiling in the dim light of a guttering candle in an apartment somewhere in the Prenzlauer Berg district of Berlin. Shutters with the paint peeling off, cracks plugged with newspaper, putty rock hard and crumbling; the tiled stove is doing its best but plywood, fenceposts, mouldy coal are only enough for a few hours’ heat a day. Men in woolly pullovers with biblical beards, workers’ hands, beer mugs in their nicotine-stained fingers and a Karo or an F6 between their lips, are listening to a poet reading out poems typed on wood-pulp paper, hastily, making mistakes, deliberately avoiding pompous declamation, they’re all friends together, highfaluting stuff is not what’s required here. Judith Schevola is listening, observing, smoking. She has introduced Meno to this group, to which you only gain admittance after passing through several rear courtyards with bullet holes from the last war, after giving a password at the cautiously opened door with no nameplate, after submitting to partly furtive, partly openly aggressive scrutiny the newcomer has to accept: there are too many spies and instinct is not always infallible. Meno senses that he is a foreign body, but his presence is accepted, no one seems to be holding back in what they say because of him. The poet reads. They are poems with turned-up collars and flat caps pulled well down. He’s been published in one of the magazines lying on the table in the middle of the room, where the air is so thick with sweat and tobacco smoke you could cut it with a knife. Without the Communist Manifesto under one of its legs the table would definitely wobble; the Communist Manifesto performs this service alternately with a brochure about venereal diseases after protests from members of the audience committed to grass-roots democracy. The magazines all give off the fresh air of insubordination, have titles such as POE TRY ALL BUM, bones of contention, AND, POE TRY ALL bang, and are screen-printed on thin Czechoslovak copy paper at ten crowns per 2,000 sheets – solely for the church’s official use, thus avoiding the need to apply for permission to print. They lack a stapler that can reliably staple more than fifteen pages. There’s a lack of paper: the entry fee to the reading was a certain amount of writing paper that can – for the church’s official use – be stapled or folded into little booklets and filled with controversial articles on environmental issues in editions of between fifteen and fifty.
‘My hand for my product.’
And then? the Tower-dwellers ask.
Sarajevo calling, a wolf-cub waves to the viewers watching television. Skyscrapers, bare mountains surrounding a basin, a dreary urban landscape that is not sought out by any reporter accredited to the first Winter Olympics to be held in a socialist country nor recorded by the camera that cannot lie. Here is the ice rink, there the tracks of the
cross-country ski run, the ski jump where Jens Weissflog from Oberwiesenthal flew on strictly parallel skis to gold and silver. Did people recall a summer’s day seventy years previously when a student was waiting on a street corner for the car of the heir to the Austrian throne? The Ice Queen sets out on her free programme. Her trainer stands behind the barrier, stony-faced, while her protégée, with fluttering miniskirt and Kirgiz eyebrows, inscribes flowing cursive periods on the ice. The exclamation marks of a triple toe-loop, pirouette flourishes, bouquets of roses in cellophane, Heinz Florian Oertel wallows in tulle and taffeta. Torvill and Dean dance to Ravel’s Bolero, a Swede runs up the slopes with skating steps. There is a smile on the fairest face of socialism.
It was Christian’s winter holiday from school. He had been accepted for medicine at university. Oddly enough, he hardly felt delighted at all, relieved rather, also weary; a guilty conscience for those who had been rejected. Becoming famous didn’t seem that important any more after his experiences at the training camp and with Reina. He’d hardly done any school work since the start of the twelfth year, his marks had got worse, which was a matter of concern to more than just Dr Frank – there had been discussions in the staff room: he’d stopped singing in Uhl’s choir, had resigned from the Free German Youth committee without giving any reason, cut himself off more and more. When Hedwig Kolb set an essay on the essential characteristics of socialist literature, Christian wrote a single sentence: ‘It lies.’ Hedwig Kolb didn’t give his essay a mark, took him on one side and told him that she had to insist he did the essay: couldn’t he? As he knew, his acceptance for university was still provisional, so couldn’t he? He was kept in for an extra hour, under the surveillance of Herr Stabenow, who was still full of enthusiasm for physics, a critical attitude to research and the unprejudiced pursuit of the truth, and he put together some rubbish with the usual platitudes that Hedwig Kolb returned to him without comment but with a two minus mark. He avoided Reina. Verena was in Dresden a lot now. Siegbert had to find another career, since he’d been rejected for the merchant navy because of a lack of social commitment. He still didn’t know what to do. When Svetlana started a discussion at the supper table in the hostel, Christian would silently drink his soup, and when Falk started fooling around and set Jens Ansorge off as well, he went out for a walk, stood for a long time on the bank of the Wilde Bergfrau or Kaltwasser reservoir, where there were just a few ice fishers with Mormyshka rods, sitting staring gloomily at the holes they’d made. He often went out for walks when he was at home, which made Richard remark that the lad had been ruminating and brooding over things too much recently, perhaps a regular work-out would do him good, a girlfriend; he, at Christian’s age … Anne said that with all those walks at least he got out in the fresh air and if he didn’t want to talk they ought to respect that. Christian neglected his cello. In his pocket he had Reina’s letters. There were long queues outside Hauschild’s coal store, the conversations of those waiting cut across by the sharp sound of the shovels with which Plisch and Plum removed the swiftly diminishing mountain of briquettes. It was the time of theatre productions, of Erik Orré’s Recitation Evenings, Adeling’s (the waiter) and Binneberg’s (the pastry cook) ‘Chocolate kitchen for children and those who want to become one’ in the foyer of the Felsenburg: cooking chocolate was melted in pots and pans to a dark brown molten mass with a Christmassy smell and poured into baking moulds from Binneberg’s cake shop: chocolate caravels stuck out their curving bows that Binneberg, an obese man with a network of burst veins and cheeks like a bulldog, provided with frosting sails and a sweet dribble of rigging from a piping bag; Pittiplatsch with his tongue sticking out and a white fondant cowlick multiplied on the edge of the table as if in a hall of mirrors; heads of Napoleon and culverins attacking the fortress of Königstein delighted the fathers. For each chocolate moulding Binneberg and Adeling charged one mark, which they put in a money box on which ‘Solidarity’ was written; they used the money to buy toys in König’s toyshop on Lübecker Strasse that they gave to the children in the Arkady Gaidar children’s home on Lindwurmring: an extensive, dilapidated building in the Swiss style beside the villas requisitioned by the Russians.