The Tower: A Novel

by Uwe Tellkamp

  In the side streets yellowing curtains were raised and lowered. The window frames had splits, cracked panes were held in place by screws or replaced by plywood. Meno stopped outside a butcher’s; there were two sides of bacon and one sausage hanging in the window, he couldn’t understand why there was still a queue outside. As soon as he bent down to look in the window, where a poster with ‘Long live Marxism–Leninism’ hung over piled-up cans of meat, a woman started to scold: he should kindly join the queue at the back like everyone else. ‘Tourists!’ he heard someone else moan. ‘Probably from Berlin, eh? Buy up everything here then put on airs!’ – ‘Clear off.’

  The way to the Museum of the Sea was signposted. Meno slowed down once he could no longer hear the vituperation. He thought about Judith Schevola. He hadn’t seen her since the events at the annual general meeting; she was probably at some machine doing a job no one else wanted. After she’d been expelled from the Association there was hardly anything else left for her. Perhaps Philipp knew more details. At least the book had been printed, in the West, by Munderloh’s publishing house. A few smuggled copies would certainly already have found their way through customs and be passed round the nomenklatura or as typewritten parts stapled together like school exercise books in the Valley of the Clueless. Those in the senior ranks of the Party and favoured officials of the various associations had no need of such subterfuges, they could acquire books from the West quite legally. Perhaps Jochen Londoner had the book and could lend it to him.

  An odd idea, housing a museum of the sea in a former monastery. And equally odd that the brickwork of the monastery and the aquariums harmonized, that disciplined drawing, a Gothic silver pencil and unfettered painting, the play of colours, soiled by reality and never to be found in an entirely pure state, should live together so peaceably. The skeleton of a finback whale with a gigantic shoe-shaped mouth and jawbones as thick as your arm hung down from the vaulted ceiling. Children, probably from a holiday camp, were making a racket under the shrill-voiced supervision of two teachers. That, Meno felt, was the unpleasant aspect of natural-history museums: there were always children scurrying around, especially when there was no school, shouting and playing the fool with no consideration, no feeling for the fawn-like stillness, waking the corals from their sleep, making even snails moulded from plastic or alone in jars of formalin pull in their horns. Why could people not stand silence? Zoology was a quiet science and as he walked past preserved dolphins and aquariums bubbling with oxygen, he recalled scenes from his student days in Jena under Falkenhausen, the fraught and taciturn interpreter of the world of central-German spiders who called his predecessor, Haeckel, a fool, though a commendable one, and the Phyletic Museum in Jena a Planet Goethe. Art Forms in Nature. Dried plants, dust-encrusted chandeliers in the shape of jellyfish in blown glass, drawings of diatoms the size of a saucer, Radiolarians, Amphoridea: a stranded kingdom gradually fossilizing.

  No more noise, the children had gone; there was no one to be seen, apart from an attendant dozing in a chair. Someone licked Meno’s hand; in the aquarium by which he had stopped there appeared the guileless, panting face of a black dog.

  ‘Do excuse me. Kastshey’s still rather rude. It’s difficult to teach this breed anything, but they’re good watchdogs. And anyone they’ve taken a liking to … Good afternoon, Herr Rohde.’ Arbogast tipped his cap with the stick with the gryphon handle. The Baron looked fresh and healthy; his usually grey face, which his steel-rimmed spectacles gave an extra touch of coolness to (now he was wearing glasses with tinted oval lenses, a Western pair), had a deep tan. The skin where his watch and ring had been was still white. Arbogast noticed Meno’s glance and, inviting him to walk along with the gesture of an expert guide, explained that that year, contrary to his habit, he had not taken off his watch before going on holiday, nor his ring, which he now hardly noticed during his everyday business; however, it did bother him while sailing. At the moment his boat was in Stralsund harbour. Had Herr Rohde received – ‘as promised’, Arbogast smiled – the packet of pencils? ‘No? Then it’s on its way, or arrived after you left. You’ve moved up, so to speak, there have been some changes in our Institute. I presume you’ve heard that already from Fräulein Schevola?’

  Meno said no.

  ‘Some of my physicists, including Herr Kittwitz, have not come back from a conference in Munich. It caused quite a stir. I spoke up on their behalf to make sure they could go, but they abused my trust. That requires a certain lack of imagination or, to put it better, a fair amount of selfishness, just to clear off like that. They want to go to India. There’s a lot of poverty in India. And they shouldn’t think that all that glitters in the West is gold.’

  You can talk, Meno thought but said nothing. He was surprised to hear that Kittwitz had left the country and he felt a stab of pain, for although he had only met the physicist once, he had sense of loss. Contemporaries form a cohort; they watch out for each other, even when the years pass and no one drops a hint.

  ‘You’ll be thinking I don’t practise what I preach.’ Arbogast pointed to a room with aquariums arranged according to themes, one was ‘The Baltic’, one ‘Symbiosis’, one ‘Poisonous Sea Creatures’. Kastshey was attracted to the ‘Harbour Basin’ aquarium in which wrasse and butterfish, codling with barbels on their lower jaw (they made Meno think of Lange’s goatee), turbot and mackerel were swimming round.

  ‘I don’t want to sound impolite, but for my part I’d love to travel and I think I’m not the only one who feels like that. I’m sure lots of people would like to see what the world outside is like for themselves, instead of getting it at second hand.’ Meno watched a cuckoo ray with dark blue spots rising up with calm shimmering movements.

  ‘Of course, there’s no disagreement on that, my dear Rohde. The people in charge should accede to those wishes. Privately I advised the General Secretary to do just that but I fear he’s forced to ignore the suggestion. Unfortunately. In their greed people would take the West for paradise and not return.’ Arbogast pointed to some sea anemones and their iridescent colours. ‘From our own cultures. We’ve had great success at trade fairs.’ He took Meno by the arm and walked on a few steps, as a ruler in affable mood might do with one of the ‘ordinary people’ when it’s politically opportune and there’s a camera nearby. ‘The country would empty, as it did before ’61. The time it took for people to realize their mistake would be enough for the useful and meaningful experiment of socialism to collapse. How are your affairs in Thomas-Mann-Strasse?’ That was where the Hermes offices were. Meno hesitated. Arbogast took a glasses case out of the inside pocket of his elegant, white-linen summer suit, swapped spectacles and, leaning forward, mouth slightly open, observed a red lionfish that was languidly fanning its fins. Its antennae, red-and-white-striped like a stick of candy, were erect.

  ‘We’ve been sidelined.’

  ‘Hmmm’ – Arbogast tapped the glass, the lionfish turned away – ‘that’s not the way to go about original projects. – You’re on holiday? In this area?’

  ‘On Hiddensee.’

  ‘Kloster? I guessed so. I can take you there.’

  ‘There are seven of us,’ Meno lied.

  ‘A nice number. Usually one too many and quarrels break out. No offence meant, you know I like jokes. There’s one they ought to put in the quarantine basin.’ A weever fish with half its tail-fin missing limped past. ‘Taking seven people wouldn’t be a problem on my boat.’ It was a proper yacht, Arbogast explained, and, of course, not only meant for pottering along the coast. His wife was there too, they were heading across the Baltic to the Soviet Union, he had authorization to enter their territorial waters, to sail at night and PM 19, permission to cruise to the land of their socialist brothers. Meno hesitated.

  ‘I can see I’ve caught you by surprise. But you must come to one of our evenings again. People are already asking if you’re coming. We have an interesting programme.’ Arbogast waved Kastshey over.

  Hagstones warded off m
isfortune. There were some threaded on a faded clothesline over the door of the waiting room in the holiday season doctor’s bungalow, with dazzling white shells with holes bored in them between the stones. To take one off and keep it for later was to steal good fortune and that didn’t count; neither Christian nor Robert touched the chain. Genuine stones with a natural hole were difficult to find. In the grey-yellow sand of the lagoon they found empty ink cartridges, shards of glass, dried dog shit and, if they were lucky, a rusty key; but the white flints, smooth and round from the sea with a hole you could thread a string through, were rare. Mostly a hollow of varying depth had been ground into the stone. Boring it through didn’t count. The hole had to go right through, a talisman-eye for the view from Fuhlendorf beach across Bodstedt lagoon to the Darss, for the pearl-white balls enclosing the bathing area, the jetty with its boathouse, the fish-traps further out with cormorants and seagulls perching on them; to see through to the Baltic sky, to the reeds cradling the August of bleached hair and freckles. Anne thought the lagoon was too warm, too shallow, too unsavoury. Children with brightly coloured buckets built messy sandcastles, threw mud as they waded in the water while their mothers dozed under sunshades, paddled on air beds, dreaming they were on the Kon-Tiki, below them the 5,000 feet of the Humboldt Current full of bonitos and snake mackerel, above them clouds driven by the trade winds, before them South Sea islands. In the lagoon there were ruffe, roach and occasional eelpouts. For zander you needed a boat. Robert had brought his angling equipment and went for non-predatory fish, Christian took the spinning rod, attached a 0.35 mm green line and cast spoons and blinkers. Ruffe bit, little spotted guys with spiny fins and huge appetites, some were shorter than the blinker lure that they’d taken for their prey.

  The summer season doctor – for three weeks in August that was, alternating daily, Richard Hoffmann and Niklas Tietze – lived with his family in the bungalow on the village street. A white flag with a red cross was unrolled and placed in the mounting beside a bug-plastered lamp. As soon as the inhabitants of Fuhlendorf, nearby Bodstedt and the communities as far as Michaelsdorf saw the flag they remembered various infirmities that couldn’t stand the long journey to the hospital in Barth and, silent and within their rights, occupied the plasticized-linen waiting-room chairs. There were four rooms in the bungalow, one of which served as the doctor’s surgery. Two WCs (private and patients’). The rooms each had two bunk beds at right angles to each other, two cupboards and a washbasin with a cold tap. If you wanted a shower, you packed your flip-flops, picked up your toiletry bag and went through the German Mail holiday camp, to which the bungalow belonged, into the shower shed beside the canteen kitchen, where you hung your things under one of the clouded mirrors in the corridor and waited on bleached duckboards, a potential source of athlete’s foot, in the cabins open to the corridor, surrounded by cheerful and cursing voices, for warm water to come.

  The Hoffmanns had been going to Fuhlendorf since 1972; Richard shared the practice with colleagues (for a long time Hans had joined them), which allowed him to give his family holiday on the Baltic, which were much sought after, and also earn an extra month’s salary. Only once had the family managed to get a holiday that wasn’t associated with Richard’s work: at a German Trades Union holiday hostel in Born, on the Darss lagoon. The food was poor, the weather even worse and that year the lagoon had been full of jellyfish and seaweed. A bell in the corridor to wake them and a radio that couldn’t be switched off. They preferred Fuhlendorf, even if the bungalow beds had horsehair mattresses that were turned over from one doctor to the next, and steel springs on which Richard, who slept in the lower bunk, regularly tore his scalp when he got up. The Tietzes had Room 1, the Hoffmanns Room 2. That room looked out onto the village street and Christian knew it was a disadvantage, for often drunks coming from ‘night angling’ in Redensee Café would go past the bungalow bawling, hammer on the door demanding nurses and booze. Some years previously a soldier from the Soviet forces had appeared and, Kalashnikov at the ready, demanded the practice motorbike, an elderly Zündapp, and zoomed off on it, lurching from side to side, only to be brought back several hours later, bound and held on either side by grim-faced officers in order to have various broken bones seen to.

  Christian immediately felt at home again in Fuhlendorf. The storks’ nest on the reed-thatched cottages. The continuous barking of the spitz next door. The light-blue dovecote full of snow-white doves whose cooing and fluttering the Tietzes counted against the risks of the village street. The holiday camp: the dozens of bungalows in rows down the slope with children’s faces looking out of the windows. The gravelled paths edged with white stones, lit by welded toadstool lamps. Wakey, wakey at six in the morning from the camp loudspeakers. Once a week the siren was tested. Roll-calls, the clatter of cutlery at set times in the camp canteen. Socialist competition: races, games of football, volleyball, table tennis on concrete tables, the nets could be collected, after having been signed for, in the camp office. Flags fluttering in the summer breeze.

  Christian was on leave, much longed for by members of the army. He didn’t talk very much. What did it smell of in the bungalow? Dry air, aniseed drops from the shop in the Mail holidaymakers’ canteen, twenty pfennigs a tube, the drops always stuck together. There was the smell of the toilets that always had daddy-longlegs sitting on the cistern. Vita-Cola didn’t smell, but tasted good, ice-cold from the humming refrigerator in the recreation room. There, as in the previous thirteen years, was the Junost television with the irrevocably faulty aerial, showing GDR 1 and 2 plus a semolina image of West German Channel Two that suffered additional interference from the military’s Baltic transmissions. It smelt of the wood lining the outer walls that was badly affected by the winter weather, of Florena sun cream, sand, heather: beside the bungalow, shut off from it by a chain-link fence, was a path going to a little pinewood. Floor polish, insect repellent, medicines. Acetate of alumina for wasp stings, Ankerplast spray as a substitute for plasters, Panthenol for sunburn, Sepso tincture. The glass syringes tinkled in the enamel kidney bowls, sweated out strepto-and staphylococci in the cylinder sterilizer. The very sight of wooden spatulas made you feel sick. Scissors and scalpels were submerged in disinfectant solution. Bandages, Gotha adhesive plaster, the smell of rubber: the brick-red, washable sheet on the examination couch, the enema bags, the footplate of the scales, gloves drying off to be used again, dusted with talcum powder. It smelt of brackish water, the air from air pumps, the lemon mist that Gudrun sprayed to combat all the other smells in the bungalow.

  ‘Hiddensee!’ Lange had exclaimed in both envy and appreciation. ‘We’ve never had a holiday there. Send us a card.’

  Without the offer from the Association’s trade union, Meno would have gone to Saxon Switzerland again, would have taken his little room, inserted a sheet of paper in his Fortuna typewriter; but this year, he had been informed, it was his turn to have one of the rooms in Lietzenburg, the Association’s rest home, ‘for the purposes of vacation’ as it said in officialese; attached was a three-page list of house regulations. Meno knew that this was probably the only time he’d have the privilege of staying in Lietzenburg. It was offered in rotation over a cycle of thirty years. Meno’s application had originally been made in 1974, so he’d been lucky. Especially since married couples were given preference. Editors were the lowest of the low in the Association. Only the head of Editorial Section 1 in the central office of the publishing house was said to have managed to get to Lietzenburg twice.

  The ferry chugged its way north from the Sound of Strela, above which the needled outlines of St James’s, St Mary’s and St Nicholas’s rose up into the leaden sky, past Altefähr on Rügen, meadow-flat Ummanz. For a while Arbogast’s ship kept alongside with shortened sail, then the wind freshened; the Baron, at the wheel, nodded to Meno, who was standing by the ferry rail watching the manoeuvres that Herr Ritschel, a bosun’s whistle between his lips, piped up to the sailors climbing the rigging with even movements. Th
e sails caught the wind, billowed out, the black-caulked yacht cut across almost silently and disappeared in the haze. Meno filled his pipe, staring at the bottle-green waves flickering with phosphorescence, offered his Orient cigarettes first to Judith Schevola, then to Philipp Londoner, listened to the stories, scratched by loudspeaker noises, that the grey-bearded captain was telling about the steamer, the Caprivi, the author Gerhart Hauptmann had brought to Hiddensee, about Gret Palucca and her longing for dance in the flaxen light of the north that they greeted at dawn, naked and worshipping the sun. Between announcements of lentil stew with sausages, the captain asked if all the passengers had a coin in their pockets, for the deceptive glitter on the waves could be the golden roofs of Vineta, the lost city that emerged every hundred years, seeking deliverance. It had appeared to a boy called Lütt Matten, offering him all its treasures for a mark, a ten-pfennig piece, any coin at all, but the boy had been wearing his swimming trunks and had no money on him at all, so the town had sorrowfully sunk back down.

  ‘Perhaps our General Secretary ought to go diving here.’ Philipp had spoken to Judith Schevola but she remained silent, lips pursed, blowing smoke rings that the wind blew away. Streaks of cloud, tinged with ochre and pink, announced the approach of the island.

  It was evening by the time the ferry berthed at Kloster. Philipp Londoner and Meno carried their cases to the Lietzenburg handcart. They waited until the last day-trippers had gone on board, the few visitors who were staying on the island had disappeared inland. The ferry cast off, turning into the channel for Schaprode. Judith Schevola did a handstand on the harbour edge.

  ‘Risky,’ Meno said when she dropped back down. ‘I wouldn’t have fancied fishing you out.’

  ‘We’ve already had a conversation about risks.’ Judith Schevola frizzed her hair until it stuck out like the bristles of a bottle-brush. ‘The gentlemen will pull my luggage.’