by Uwe Tellkamp
‘– informed me. – As you wish, Frau Barsano.’
‘That’s also what my daughter wants. We have everything necessary there.’
‘You don’t owe me an explanation. Nor your daughter.’
‘We have even acquired magnifying spectacles and a operation microscope. – Good. I would like, and my husband would also like’ – she inhaled then threw the cigarette away – ‘nothing of this conversation to become more widely known. Can we rely on that? Thank you. Goodbye, Herr Hoffmann.’
‘Goodbye.’
The Wartburg slithered off, Richard watched it go. A few minutes later a figure emerged from the shadow of the park, spoke into a walkie-talkie. The flurries of snow were thicker now. For a few moments the man stood there, irresolute, then raised his arm in an awkward salute. A car drove up. When the chauffeur opened the door, the man bent down to get into the seat; the interior light revealed Max Barsano’s face.
52
Keep the record and needle free of dust
The wind had died down, the Party secretaries fallen silent, in the living rooms there was the flicker of the evening programmes: Potpourri, What’s It Worth?, Portrait by Telephone, a cowboys-and-Indians film with Gojko Mitić. Meno felt he could almost hear it, the whole country breathing a sigh of relief: at least we’ve made it, a comfortable run-up to Christmas with festive roasts, warm stoves, slippers and enough beer. The provision of pretzel sticks and peanut puffs for the New Year was guaranteed, as long as people didn’t go crazy. The masters of entertainment, of giving the people a thrill, calming them and lulling them to sleep, had taken up the baton, Willi Schwabe, in his velvet smoking jacket, white hair neatly parted, went up to his junk room to the tinkling doll-like strains of Tchaikovsky’s ‘Sugar-Plum Fairy’ and chatted, once he’d hung his carriage lamp on a hook, about the Land of Smiles that had been set up in the UFA studios of Potsdam-Babelsberg or of Wien-Film … an old charmer, a soigné esprit from the world of yesterday sashaying elegantly in front of a backdrop of black-and-white photos and theatre curtains, leaning against the curve of a grand piano with a lighted candle on it. Meno loved the programme, Willi Schwabe’s Junk Room, he was annoyed when he missed it, and when, sometimes on a Monday, as he came home late from the office, he could see in many windows of the district the simultaneously changing pictures of GDR TV 1 and imagined he could hear through the glass the well-modulated tones of the presenter reminiscing about Hilde Hildebrandt, Hans Moser, Theo Lingen, ‘the great Paula Wessely’. Once, once there was … and the silent snow, goose-white, downy flakes with grains of soot, more like organisms (starfish, children’s hands) than lifeless crystals, floated through the even tenor of the days. Once, once there was … but the clocks struck, the ten-minute clock signalled the hour with softly resonating strokes; in the evenings the theme tune of TV News crept through the houses, made its way through the apartments on Lindwurmstrasse without upsetting the creations of Lamprecht, the hatmaker, without making the apprentices in Wiener’s hairdressing salon pause in sweeping up the day’s production of fallen hair, rummaged round the premises of Harmonie, the furrier’s, where the manager was still sitting, bent over accounts, with a dutiful sewing machine humming away on fur waistcoats or mittens (no, Meno knew better: at this hour no one was sewing for the people), ignored Dr Fernau’s curses with which, in camel-hair slippers, an open bottle of Felsenkeller-Bräu in his hand, he would toast the newsreader with the lower jaw faultlessly grinding out reports of successes for the annual accounts, made Niklas Tietze, when he stopped below the windows of the Roeckler School of Dancing on his way home from his practice to listen to the out-of-tune piano, the slurred waltzes of the violin and cello, open his bag and pull out his tattered diary: for it was the time, the signal swirling in uncertain outlines from the windows and through vestibules, that reminded him of the time: was it not already Thursday today, which meant he was invited to the regular hour at Däne’s, the music critic’s, on Schlehenleite, had Gudrun asked him to do something that he might possibly have forgotten, were there still house calls he had to make, Frau von Stern, for example, who had an iron constitution but also a will of iron that insisted on her weekly examination by Dr Tietze, who, ‘as always’, ordered cold affusions that did her, the ‘old lizard’ (Frau Zschunke) of over ninety, no harm, prescribed ‘as always’ cardiac drops and digitoxin tablets, that she regularly collected from the pharmacy (one shouldn’t let them go to waste, should one?) and equally regularly (as Meno knew) mixed into the food for her ageing cats, that she called by name to prevent the young ones from snatching their food …
… Atlantis, the contours of which Meno saw returning behind the rooms, a kind of parallel displacement, a flickering projection; the planks, uprights over the Rose Gorge, with a scab of barnacle-like rust, Grauleite was listening in with slowly rotating parabolic dishes, at that hour, when the wooden snow shovels had cleared the paths between the banks of dog roses and been knocked clean beside the snowed-in cars, pupils of the Louis Fürnberg High School were going to the funicular, throwing snowballs onto the roof of Arbogast’s little observatory, at the elegant black numerals of the white enamel oval house numbers – and Meno could hear, when the 11 wasn’t running and he had to use the funicular to go into town, the pupils in the car cheerfully prattling about football (Dynamo Dresden, BFC Dynamo): they were going to Helfenberg Manor Estate for a day’s ‘Instruction in Technical Production’, where they would assemble K-16 cameras, trying to match the standard time and get a good mark. And the elephant-backed dustcarts of the City Cleansing Department were grinding along the streets again, leaving snakes of ash beside their tyre-tracks. ‘Rice pudding with cinnamon’ the Dresdeners called it, glad that the dustcarts, with the coarse-mouthed dustmen on the boards under the dumping device, who were so good as to bowl the dented dustbins out of the yards – cleared and sanded, if you please – were running again; they were said to be the best-paid workers, supposedly earning more than a professor at the Technical University. Lange, wreathed in the smoke from his pungent cigars, muttered his lack of understanding for the overtones of envy in those rumours, reflected out loud on the due reward for hard work, before ringing Guenon House to see whether he should take a ‘decent bottle’ to Frau Fiebig’s rummy evening.
On the Wednesday after Richard’s birthday Meno decided to ask Madame Eglantine to remind him that on Friday he intended finally to start on his long-postponed winter washing. The winter washing! He dreaded the sight of the linen basket full of used sheets, and bed and cushion covers, which in the summer he could give to Anne and sometimes, if the washing machine was working, to Libussa – now in the winter that wasn’t possible, the women had enough to do with hunting for Christmas presents, baking biscuits, getting New Year firecrackers and sparklers. Madame Eglantine grinned as she reminded him and on Friday Meno went home with an uneasy feeling that he was faced with an impossible mountain to climb. Just his bad luck that that year the steam laundry wasn’t taking any more orders! The linen basket, woven out of willow with strengthening hoops, capaciously rotund, was sitting in one corner of his bedroom, brooding and full of malice. Meno dragged the basket over, tried to empty it out, but the washing was stuck as fast as a deep-lying boil. Once he’d managed to pull out the top layer the rest of the washing burst out onto the floor, spreading itself with a sigh of relief. Meno went down to the laundry room, a spark of hope still glowing, even as he opened the door, that Libussa’s washing machine had been repaired, but its place was empty, the Service Combine had been fiddling around with it since the summer washdays. Meno looked round. How he hated this subterranean chamber! He hated it with the hatred of the bachelor who wants to read and smoke a pipe on the balcony before strolling back to his warm living room, at ease and relaxed, at one with the world, sniffing the scent of fresh linen promising a night of sweet dreams. What was it Barbara had said? The washing would turn out whiter if it was soaked overnight. So, take hope and a few spoonfuls of Schneeberg Blue, and off you go int
o the lye, you children’s ghosts.
He woke at around four in the morning after a terrible nightmare: an incubus was squatting on him, a sheet-demon that kept calling for more and more linen to come flying through the air and, with a grin, piled it up on its back – though all that had happened was that Chakamankabudibaba had crept into his bed and stretched out on his stomach. There were fern-patterns of ice on the windows. Meno went down to the laundry room. The water in the tubs had frozen over. Taking the dolly, he smashed the layer of ice: the sheets floated round in the solution like frozen lumps of dried cod. Too early to light the stove; with weary, leaden steps, Meno went back to bed, even though he was tempted to pay his new neighbours back for their lack of consideration in knocking others up, for the repulsively triumphal radio music accompanying Honich’s bending and stretching before he slammed the front door to go out for his early-morning exercises. But even a combat group commander was exhausted by the winter; and after the Kaminski twins had also quarrelled with him Honich at least showed some consideration at weekends. Meno dreamt of being able to sleep … but Chakamankabudibaba was prowling round the bed, mewing, and upstairs Meno could hear Libussa, already busy with the coal scuttle for the bathroom stove. He dreamt of the laundry room … Saw the ox-like, hoop-bound washtubs, made by a cooper in a past age, quality workmanship the soap-manufacturer presumably thought he owed himself. They stood menacingly on their wooden stands over the drain that kept blocking. Then the male inhabitants of the house had to poke round in the darkness beneath them with long wires, hoping that the suds stuck there would find their way out to the pipes going down the garden slope … the toilets of the House with a Thousand Eyes also drained there and they, too, tended to get blocked. Stahl had explained that to Meno: if such pipes went down too steeply then the fluid quickly ran off but solids remained – and they had to rod them. For that purpose there were iron rods, about five metres long with hooks and eyes, and when Hanna and Meno had moved into the house the ship’s doctor had given them a short introductory course in the problems and peculiarities of life in an old building that hadn’t been renovated for decades. At the sight of the laundry room Hanna had just shaken her head in disbelief, until she’d got married her mother had done the washing for her and she knew nothing of unreliable ‘fully automatic’ washing machines, nothing of the tiny spin-dryers that consisted of a drum standing on end that was full with two towels and, when it was switched on by a plastic bow sticking out over the lid like a record arm, developed such dynamic imbalance that it started to move across the floor, the water came out of the drain-spout beside the basin and the spin-dryer pulled the plug out of the socket, thus switching itself off. Meno remembered Hanna going round the laundry room. The stove, made of bricks with a zinc tub let in, had to be fired up, each tenant taking the wood and briquettes out of their own allocation. There were a table, chunky slabs of soap, packets of powdered Schneeberger Blue that, according to the theory of complementary colours, was added as a whitener to washing that had yellowed. When clothes were being washed there was vapour, that warm, lethargic, cottony steam, saturated with moisture, that made your clothes stick to you, made breathing a struggle and the laundry room a tropical cavern, vapour that billowed up out of the boiler piping hot when, protected by rubber gloves, you lifted the wooden lid in order to use the dolly (Libussa called it a ‘butter paddle’) to stir the 95°C sludge that had a steel thermometer, long, thin, as beautiful as a tailor’s yardstick, stuck in it. There was a washboard for shirts and underwear; Meno dreamt of scrubbing hands that, instead of soap bubbles, had plectrums growing out of their fingers, making the rasping rhythm for jazz … The inexorable chainsaw screech of his 3ap alarm clock bit into his benumbed mind.
One week later the washing was done and dried in the loft of Caravel. Meno and Anne had managed to get a slot on the wringer that was beside the steam laundry, an eighty-year-old fossil in Sonnenleite.
‘Well now, Herr Rohde,’ said Udo Männchen at Dresdner Edition, ‘are you going to need another day off for spring cleaning?’
‘It’s all very well for you to talk,’ said Meno, irritated by the typographer’s obvious pleasure, ‘living in a three-room all-comfort apartment and with a wife who looks after your, er, fabrics.’
The typographer had taken to wearing wide-sleeved jackets with cuffs at the wrist, self-cut and self-sewn, silk and linen combined and as colourful as the flags of developing countries.
‘How is it that the people in Central Office always go for this Garamond? Why not Baskerville for once, as in the Insel edition of Virginia Woolf? Three-room all-comfort! Are you pulling my leg? During the recent power cut it was three-room blind man’s buff! The maternity hospitals in this city have something in store for them, I can tell you.’
‘Persitif, persitif,’ said Miss Mimi, boldly and determinedly putting a ring of cactus spines round French yearnings.
‘A day off for doing housework? I assume, Herr Rohde, that you’re not a married working woman, so you have no right to a statutory day off for housework,’ Josef Redlich said. ‘Look, I too, wrinkled workhorse that I am, have to take leave when the washing gets too much for me. “The tablets of chocolate and arsenic upon which the laws are written”, Lichtenberg, Volume D.’
A distant creaking in the morning twilight mixed, as Meno and Anne turned from Rissleite into Sonnenleite, with the clatter of the coal the apprentice at Walther’s bakery was shovelling into his wheelbarrow, with the hum of a transformer, the rasp of ice scrapers on windscreens. The creaking was approaching radially from Lindwurmring, Rissleite and lower Sonnenleite; soon Meno perceived dark patches laboriously trudging closer: the women of the district who, like Anne, had the day off for housework and were bringing their washing to the steam laundry in handcarts. They approached through the grey undulations of snow, the brighter patches of their faces gradually separating from the darker ones of their bodies (their coats came down below their knees, their clumpy boots sank into the frozen snow that the few lamps with their white glow made to look like paper; the snow clearers and the winter morning shift would start work later), of those broad-shouldered, warmly wrapped-up, non-gender-specific bodies that, heading, as if drawn by a magnet, for the point of intersection of their tracks (it seemed to be Walther’s bakery, which sold rolls after 7 a.m., there was already a queue), would form an arrowhead aimed at the laundry. The women nodded greetings, but weren’t speaking yet. The creaking was an acoustic foreign body in the morning quiet, Meno thought: a rusty bar rubbed through a pelt; unpleasant, as if it were dragging bad dreams out of the night and into the day. It was the sound of the handcarts in which the women were bringing their washing, the wooden wheels scraping against dry bearings; the wheels had iron rims, on many of which quarter or half circles were missing, or the heavy square nails fixing them had loosened, causing the carts to bump and jolt; it was the screech of the shaft in the pole arm, the rumbling of the stanchions over the front wheels and the knock of the supports over the rear wheels; a medley of sounds, grey as driftwood like the colour of the carts bleached by rain and sun.
‘I just don’t know whether Richard can trust Stahl,’ Anne went on. ‘They spend whole weekends out there in Lohmen. And it’s all “Gerhart” and “Richard”. It’s not for my own sake that I’m asking and Robert often stays the weekend out in Waldbrunn … despite that we could do something together again.’
‘Go to Saxon Switzerland the way we used to,’ Meno said, ‘with Enoeff dishing up the gossip, getting annoyed she can’t find any mushrooms, that she’s got the wrong shoes on because she thought we were going out dancing, and Helmut merry and sliding into a crevasse? And once we’ve lugged him out, Enoeff says, “But we’re not over the hill yet, over the hill we’re definitely not yet.” ’
‘Reserving seats in the wrong restaurant, Niklas bawling out opera arias, Gudrun going on about Bach flower therapy, returning via Schandau …’
‘… where we all pile into Lene’s,’ said Meno, completi
ng her sentence as Anne burst out laughing. ‘Good old Lene Schmidken. Have you been out there recently?’
‘Ulrich wanted to go but now, just before Christmas, they’ve got the Plan Commission on their backs. – They’re not showing their old car to anyone. But you’re Stahl’s neighbour.’
‘I don’t believe he belongs in that street,’ Meno replied. ‘But what does “believe” mean and “I can’t imagine”? The Stahls are certainly having problems with the new tenants.’
The ‘new’ tenants: the Honichs had been living in the House with a Thousand Eyes for almost a year now, but that was the way things were up there: hardly anyone moving in or out, many of the people had been living in the houses with the strange names for thirty or forty years and someone could still be ‘the new inhabitant’ when they’d only managed a quiet decade, hardly enough to acclimatize.
‘They must be uncouth people. Do they at least leave you more or less in peace now?’
‘A bit,’ Meno replied with a grin – had the atmosphere rubbed off on Anne so much that her childhood language had been swapped for the more discriminating mode of expression up here. Meno had noticed that even in everyday conversation they used words that some authors even avoided in written German, ‘Kunigunde-speak’, he called it, ‘uncouth’ where ‘coarse’ or ‘boorish’ didn’t seem precise enough.
‘Perhaps they don’t mean to be importunate, perhaps they think their homespun pleasures are everyone’s idea of happiness – and are baffled when they come across people who see things differently.’ Meno pulled their handcart past the queue, which stretched from the steam laundry to the rotting fencepost. Halting conversations, dirty looks that only cleared when Meno opened the door with the inscription ‘wringer’ in Gothic letters. They’d been given a slot for 7.30.