by Uwe Tellkamp
No Christmas leave. We’ve been detailed to ‘Guard Complex I’, that means guard duty and Social Science Instruction (irradiation with red light) alternately, until New Year’s Eve. Here in our quarters cocoa dust is gradually accumulating on the filthy things from the field camp that are scattered around (despite the cold and the wind coming from the wrong direction we’ve got the window wide open). I’m sitting in the middle of the mess finishing this letter with love from Christian.
40
The telephone
The telephone rang and for a long time the Old Man of the Mountain said nothing; it was Londoner on the line, as Meno deduced from various signs: Altberg automatically straightened his back after he’d picked up the receiver and mumbled his name, something he didn’t do when he was speaking to Schiffner or a colleague. On the contrary, on such occasions he seemed to slump down even more, his face crumpling as if he were anticipating both a reproach, or an attack disguised as a reproach, and the annoyance that would cause him; he was, so to speak, building up a reserve of annoyance so that the actual unpleasantness that came out of the receiver would be as nothing compared with what he had anticipated. To put it in its limits: for anyone who mentally prepares himself for three hours of torture, when about to go to the dentist for example, the half an hour during which the whine of the drill often becomes intense but also often dies away, is a mere fleabite. Taking a sledgehammer to crack a nut, Meno thought, though it wasn’t a nut you wanted to be faced with too often, it was a pretty tough nut. As far as calls from Schiffner or out-of-favour colleagues were concerned, the old man would murmur his ‘Yes’ or ‘Yes, yes’ or ‘Yes, yes, of course’ or ‘Yes, yes, yes, that’s quite clear’ into the receiver like spells to ward off evil, would turn his profile to Meno, but wave him down if Meno was about to go out of the room; he even seemed to get angry at the gesture, would push down with his flat, outstretched hand like a press and shake his head vigorously, which Meno interpreted as a kind of order to remain seated, with which he complied, though reluctantly and uncertainly. The old man would not even let Meno, if he wasn’t allowed to leave the room, walk round, at least putting some distance between them and thus being able to occupy himself with the books on the shelves along the wall, rustle the pages audibly and stare at the paper intently, as if enthralled, so that he would at least not make a bad impression on the housekeeper, should she come in. Meno had once tried this manoeuvre, at which the old man had immediately put his hand over the receiver and glared at Meno suspiciously; close to the bookcases was the desk with the thick pile of the manuscript, a battery of paste pots and a bowl for snippets of paper, and the old man’s ‘That’s nothing for you, editor, sir’, had sent Meno scurrying back to his chair. When Schiffner called, Altberg would wind the telephone lead round his finger, sometimes forgetting what he was doing and pulling the plug out of the socket. If it was a fellow writer who had called, Altberg would walk up and down restlessly, ducking down a little lower at every turn, as if punches from the receiver could hit him in the solar plexus until he was creeping, as far as the telephone lead would allow, round the room as though stalking an animal. Why Meno had to remain present during these telephone calls became clear when, with a conspiratorial smile, the old man once took a large brown medicine bottle off the shelf with utensils from the chemist’s. ‘The stopper, my dear Rohde, fits to a hundredth of a millimetre, so precisely has it been ground, but you can move it – look’, and he began to twist the stopper in the neck of the bottle, which made a terrible, jarring screech, that Altberg skilfully and with a knowing grin screwed up to a shrill squeal. ‘If I should give you a sign, please begin to make the noise. Stand right next to me and start turning it to the left’; and when the call had come that Altberg wanted to be treated in this way, Meno had set up a nerve-jangling ‘shreeek, shreeek’ while the old man, with a expression of intense concentration, as if it were an actor’s swansong, had imitated the sound of a faulty sewing machine, slurping his tongue against his cheek, making soft snoring noises and hollow metallic grunts, repeatedly interrupted by a despairing, ‘Can you hear me? Hello? Are you still there?’ aimed at the ceiling, before finally, with a satisfied though exhausted look, tapping the rest.
If it was Londoner on the telephone his ‘not saying anything’ would, after a long minute, be cut off by a ‘Good’ or ‘Interesting’ or ‘Did you get that from him? From him personally? Oh, on the upstairs telephone’ that startled Meno out of his reflection – at the second or third of these calls, after he’d been able to gather observations and allowed them to precipitate into a conclusion – about how he knew that it was Jochen Londoner talking to the Old Man of the Mountain: during other calls the old man might well straighten up, hold the receiver to his ear for a long time without saying anything, during other conversations he might well nervously pass his hand over his dressing gown or, if he was wearing a jacket, pat the pockets to check the flaps, put the receiver to his left ear when he first picked it up but transfer it to his right ear one second later; perhaps this habit they shared – Londoner also changed ears after picking up the phone when he was taking an official or even just semi-official call – was just one of a number both men had when answering the telephone and that led Meno to the superstitious conclusion: if each used the telephone in the same way as the other then the one, if he showed the same characteristics, must also be talking to the other – which wasn’t logical but, to Meno’s astonishment, was true in the case of the Old Man of the Mountain. Allowed them to precipitate into a conclusion: Meno used this technical term from chemistry for himself, for he liked the parallel between observing and concluding and the arrangement of an experiment in which a substance was carefully and gradually concentrated so that it could form a compound with a second substance – with another observation – which, once a certain degree of concentration had been exceeded, would appear – be precipitated – in the solution. The Old Man of the Mountain had put a small telephone table, clearly visible, a little away from one wall of the room; at Londoner’s the telephone, that is the one the family called the ‘downstairs phone’, was similarly prominently placed in the hall. There were two sides to this prominent position and Meno wasn’t quite sure which Londoner had in mind when he decided to put the little table so well to the fore in the hall that was crammed with vast numbers of books, so that many a visitor, especially if they’d spent some time sampling Londoner’s excellent collection of sherry and port, had stumbled against the table – which did no damage to the telephone, it was a heavy official one with a protruding dial that in such cases would land on a cushion the lady of the house had had the foresight to place there. That was the custom at the Londoners’, the table was never moved out of the way.
It wasn’t out of vanity, Meno wrote, at least not that alone, since most of the guests who made the acquaintance of the telephone in that way had a similar one and shook their heads at Londoner’s strange custom, and even if I in no way underestimate my ex-father-in-law’s talent for acting – he enjoyed every kind of theatre, loved vaudeville and Shakespeare, whom, an English pipe clenched between his teeth, he would study in the original, with the tendency to systematization, to create order, and the courage to attack impregnable-seeming bastions that had won him a certain celebrity in the country and gave his often printed words, which lingered in the minds of the powerful, specific gravity; even though he liked to declaim dramatists’ iambic pentameters, with his eyes pouring out the searing flash of passion or the velvet of ingratiation, and would invite Eschschloraque, the classicist and socialist marshal of moderation, not only to one of the inevitable East Rome binges but also to private sessions to refresh the inner man with a joint play-reading – I do not rate his acting talent so highly that he could make his guest believe he felt embarrassed, even slightly ashamed, in view of the fact that he, Jochen Londoner, was privileged to have his own telephone, if he hadn’t felt the least bit embarrassed; he did feel embarrassed and that was precisely why he put the telepho
ne in such a visible place in the hall – just as a nouveau riche shows off his money – though hardly out of embarrassment – put it in the hall as if to say, That’s the way things are, yes, I’ve got a telephone, sorry; but since you would be more likely to discover it if I’d discreetly put it in a corner – for you’d say, Aha, having a telephone is such a matter of course for him that he can afford to ignore it – I might as well stick it right under your noses; so please excuse me for having been allocated the damn thing. For his embarrassment to be feigned he plucked at his top lip too often when they had visitors and Irmtraud was busy putting coats and scarves on the coat stand; put his hand to his forehead too often – reflecting on something, remembering something? – thus leaving the telephone in the shadow of his tweed jacket that Lukas, the tailor, had measured up and made, with several others exactly the same, out of Harris tweed. Perhaps the prominent position away from the wall taken up by the downstairs telephone was meant as a kind of decoy that hungry observers, greedy for sensations, were to swallow, concluding that Londoner was consumed with vanity and simple-minded pride: So he’s finally made it to a telephone, and to put it properly on display he’s stuck it out in the hall where you trip over it. What a way to behave! – a decoy to distract attention from the much more important second telephone in his study that wasn’t on the same line as the one downstairs – otherwise if he’d wanted to make a call from upstairs he’d have had to take the cable of the downstairs one out of the connection box – but had its own line and telephone number that was known to a few alone. He was, it seemed to me, hiding his light under a bushel and he became nervous and indignant if the upstairs telephone rang while he was talking to someone; he had given us – Hanna, Philipp and me – strict instructions not to call him on private matters on the upstairs telephone. That was what the telephone in the hall was for. It belonged to Irmtraud’s territory, she was the one who answered, whose voice one heard; if it was for Jochen Londoner, he would get her to call him or, depending on his mood or the name she would tell him with her hand over the receiver, say he was out. I hesitate, having read the preceding lines again, uncertain whether I’m not overestimating Londoner, whether the psychological pirouettes that are trying to encircle him are in truth going round and round a phantom, for why can a scholar such as he, member of various academies, valued contributor to daily newspapers and widely read weekly magazines, why can he, who is familiar with the subtleties of the sonnets of the Swan of Avon, he who has, behind his warm brown eyes with the remarkably pronounced bags under them, so much Marxism and so much English style – why can he not simply be vain? Don’t go looking for fish in trees, Father used to say. For the way Londoner bundled up the newspaper when the characteristic ringing tone of the green RFT phone sounded, the way he struggled to get out of his rocking chair, in which, wrapped up in a blanket, he’d not so much read the articles as mutter his way through them, making comments and extensive digressions, reading out to the others in the room, whether they wanted him to or not, examples of journalists’ bad German for minutes on end, the way he threw down the newspaper – rocking forward in the chair, having to throw out his arms like a swimmer diving into the water – and dashed upstairs as if electrified, as if the world, even Dresden perhaps, depended on the call: all that spoke of the craving addicts have for the object of their addiction, an astounded craving, perhaps even alarmed at itself; the way the chair went on rocking backwards and forwards for a while, until it was too much for Irmtraud or Hanna: the stagey way the hand appeared out of the semi-dark of the room and halted the rocking chair, so that the silence deepened, became slightly oppressive, Irmtraud’s worried look that she tried to disguise, Philipp’s challenging clearing of the throat and gleeful ‘By the way, Meno, have you heard this one?’ joke-telling at the precise moment when the silence was deepest and, as I felt, at its most vulnerable, as if it were a white surface on which a verdict would appear – Irmtraud didn’t even dare continue reading the Party’s Study Year brochures or one of Philipp’s publications; she didn’t touch anything during the phone call, as if the sherry were a reward to which she was possibly not entitled, something of which she had been reminded by the ringing of the telephone and, set off by that, by some complicated psychological impressions that had sunk into oblivion in her day-to-day life like bad dreams that you shake off on waking, calm and happy at the prospect of the day that is beginning until you discover an object from your dream on the tallboy in the hall –; the way Jochen Londoner came back, his expression inscrutable, his look indifferent, the way he went into the kitchen to pour himself a glass of water that he drank in several gulps garnished with sipping, tasting, judicious observation of the drops slowly forming on the spout of the tap, the way he came back into the living room without bothering about the silence around Irmtraud, who’d put her sherry glass down, around Hanna or Philipp, who were joining in the game – but was it a game? – which was something that always amazed me; Hanna was staring at the table, Philipp was jutting out his chin, and the jokes – splendid Jewish jokes that always, despite Irmtraud’s reproachful look in the time of silence, made me laugh, which Irmtraud probably felt as a slap in the face; but these jokes, especially the ones with rabbis, had delightful punchlines – Philipp firmly swept these jokes aside, as if annoyed at himself, when his father came back into the room; and the way Londoner came back to the table, didn’t sit down in the rocking chair again but next to his son on the couch, deliberately, letting his legs fold, his broad hands on his knees: one could definitely, I felt in cooler moments, call that vain, and all the following clearing of the throat, the play of his facial muscles, indicated that the conversation he had just had was of immense importance –
In contrast to Londoner and his wife, the Old Man of the Mountain gave his name when answering the phone. When she picked up the downstairs telephone, Irmtraud Londoner would say, ‘Speaking’, nothing more, and Meno wondered how she could know that the person at the other end of the line knew it was she who was saying, ‘Speaking’; when he answered the upstairs phone Jochen Londoner said nothing, as Meno knew from Hanna, simply picked up the receiver and remained silent. Meno had never been able to find out what the reason for this behaviour was; both Jochen and Irmtraud as well as Hanna and Philipp had avoided answering his question. No names on the phone, no slips of paper with addresses on. Certainly no slips of paper with addresses on left lying round the house. Letters are headed with the address of the Institute, the Administration, the Academy, and are written on the most widely available model of typewriter, there are as good as no handwritten notes and they are treated as a sign of great confidence, Meno thought; the sole handwritten note I received from him was when he invited me for Christmas: You’re one of the family. Hanna is in Prague, Philipp will be here and we’ve invited Altberg, who appears to be alone. He’s promised us a surprise.
‘You really want to invite me over for Christmas? I didn’t know, Herr Londoner … Oh, then I’m in your debt,’ Altberg said and Meno was irritated by the formal way Altberg had suddenly started to address Londoner until he realized he was talking to Philipp, ‘but then has your father … aha. However, please understand me … can I speak to him? Hm. I find that a little embarrassing, I have to say it comes as a surprise, of course I’m very grateful, you can … What? You’re right there again … Would you pass on a message to your parents from me?’ Then Altberg expressed – Meno hadn’t intended to observe him but he felt a strange satisfaction to see Altberg in this situation, so he remained seated – Altberg was trying to express something, was struggling to find the right word and, since it didn’t occur to him immediately, cast a number of rhetorical nets to try and fish it out: Would Philipp be so kind as to inform his parents of his, Georg Altberg’s, decision … no, ‘decision’ sounded inappropriate, too familiar, Philipp would know what he meant and should remember how condescending … At the moment he was working on a story that had a beggar in it, not anything that took place here and now, of course –
where were there beggars in our country? – but there happened to be one in his story and what a nice discordant note it would strike if he were to make this beggar decide to accept the alms the other had been so kind as to offer; was his father working or had he been urgently called to the Academy? – However that might be, he wanted to inform him of his intention, ‘Hm’ – Altberg smiled, scratching his head, which he held on one side as he walked up and down – ‘hm … my intention, good God, please forget that slip of the tongue, my dear Philipp’, when you thought about it the telephone was a really strange business, you were speaking into the mouthpiece to another person who was nothing but a voice and whose physical appearance you had to imagine to go with the voice, which didn’t always work satisfactorily, naturally Philipp knew that it wasn’t his, Altberg’s, intention, that was, it was that of course, only he didn’t intend with the self-confident overtones that went with the word, ‘intend … my God, Altberg, you’re in highfalutin mode again today’, stretched out his hand and fanned the air round the receiver as if in that way he could reduce the unpleasant word, which had unfortunately been spoken and heard by the other, to fragments that would make their original shape unrecognizable; ‘that means quite simply, I want to, that is, I’d like to … Would you tell him I’m coming?’