by Uwe Tellkamp
Tuesdays: take unfinished Faithful Service medal of the German Post from palette of materials on left, briefly check. Take Solidor steel pin from palette of materials on right, briefly check, pick up soldering iron, solder pin to clasp-bar of Faithful Service medal, polish front, especially post-horn and two jagged electric flashes sticking out either side of the horn’s cord. This medal was one of Traugott Pfeffer’s favourites and he urged Christian to work carefully, for: ‘Always remember, young man, it’s mostly older people who get medals and decorations, their whole life is symbolized by the piece of metal, so you ought to get yourself to solder the pin on really straight, not everyone likes to see their life engraved crookedly or hanging askew.’
Wednesdays: Christian was standing at the cutting and embossing presses where the unfinished medals and decorations were produced from little sheets of tombac, brass and aluminium.
Thursdays: Christian washed the grease and oil left over from embossing and deburring off the medals with a solution, used a brush to apply enamel to the indentations – pulverized glass that was mixed with distilled water and adhesive and then fired. After the lunch break Christian moved either to the mordant bath, where the scale left over from firing was removed with acid, or to electroplating, where the medals and decorations were lowered into baths of electrolytic gold beside Traugott Pfeffer’s Solingen oak leaf control spoon that, at the end of the procedure, had to be covered up to the handle with a clear layer of gold; only then did Traugott Pfeffer go for lunch.
Fridays: Christian was back at the workbench, mostly occupied with making Sailor of Outstanding Merit decorations, in bronze, gilt, edge smooth; Sailor of Outstanding Merit, in bronze, edge milled; the Decoration for Outstanding Achievements in Fire Protection; the Golden One children’s decoration; membership badges for the Association for Sport and Technology, Pigeon-Racing Section; the Drop of Blood badge of the German Red Cross for giving blood; the Free German Youth Harvest Pin; the Pin of Merit for Workers in the Administration of Justice, bronze, enamel and gold versions, coated with polyester.
Every day pins of the attachment systems from VEB Solidor had to be filed sharp with a triangular file. Using a doll in uniform which, for the purposes of demonstration, had decorations in the correct position, Traugott Pfeffer explained, ‘The uniform, which is the clothing with which phaleristics in this country is mostly concerned, is made of coarse material and the pins of our decorations must penetrate it easily despite that. Just imagine if the Comrade General Secretary could not attach the Karl-Marx Medal to the chest of the man or woman receiving it, or not in the time allowed, because the pins, which are unfortunately often blunt when supplied by our partners at Solidor, bent out of shape.’
The A shift had to complete 150 per cent of the planned target every day; Herr Pfeffer only put 100 per cent in the account book. Christian learnt the reason three months later.
Traugott Pfeffer did not like fog; he liked knots and Marcel Proust. Christian had worked ‘satisfactorily’, he could – having practised with the ship’s doctor – tie knots and he had at least heard the name of Proust.
‘Good,’ Traugott Pfeffer said, ‘I can see that you’re ready for the B shift.’
On the B shift, which worked at night, neither medals nor decorations were produced, instead the seven volumes of the Rütten & Loening edition of Proust’s Recherche were read. ‘Sometimes you have to force people to do what’s good for them,’ Traugott Pfeffer said. ‘This is my realm and all those who, one after the other, go through my night shift, read the Search – page by page, volume by volume. Sleeping is not allowed. I will test you, to see if you are worthy because you are thorough. With this.’ Out of the left hip pocket of his overalls he took a case, from which he extracted a tiepin, gilded in the electrolyte bath and filed sharp till it shone. Traugott Pfeffer, Christian learnt from a philosopher on the B shift who had been sent on probation to work in industry, would stick this pin into Lost Time, open it at that page, read and start to ask questions. ‘It’s best if you make notes,’ the philosopher said. ‘Anyone he finds worthy of reading Proust doesn’t come off the night shift until he’s read the whole book.’
There were five of them; the other four on B shift were all philosophers, though from different schools, and would spend the whole night in silent but bitter arguments, hastily scribbled in pencil on rough paper, about alienation in a Developed Socialist Society.
65
In our hand
‘Richard.’
‘Anne.’
‘Can I have a word with you?’
Richard stepped back from the vice, in which there was a part for the gas water-heater, improvised and filed to size from a constructional drawing Stahl, the engineer, had made for him. ‘Shall we go out?’
‘Not necessary. The people who’re listening to us know just as much as we do. Or would you like a breath of fresh air? I couldn’t last ten minutes in the stuff you breathe in this cellar.’
Upstairs, in the living room, she said, ‘I can’t take any more, Richard. For a long time I’ve watched and said nothing. But this Reina, this student … it’s too much. We’ – Anne suddenly laughed – ‘ought to have an argument now but, you know, I don’t want to, I … I just don’t have the strength.’
‘Yes, Anne,’ Richard murmured. He touched a few things, sofa cushions, the edge of a cupboard. ‘Is Reglinde in?’
‘She’s gone out. The letter on the table’s from Robert.’
‘I know, I … I’ve read it. He seems to be doing quite well.’
‘Better than Christian. But you always say that Christian tends to exaggerate a bit, with his, what d’you call it … bragger, braggerdosho, I can’t get the word right.’ Again she laughed.
‘Robert, yes, he’s never had that many problems. And yet – perhaps he doesn’t say anything simply because Christian’s already, in a way … that’s Christian’s style and perhaps Robert doesn’t want to be the same.’
‘The grandfather clock, Richard, can’t you stop it? I can’t stand the tick-tock, it hurts. Shall I get you something to drink?’
‘I can do that.’
‘You won’t be able to find anything. What were you going to say?’
‘It meant nothing to me, Anne.’
She nodded and went out. Richard heard her busying herself about the kitchen, there was a chink of ice cubes in glasses, he stopped the pendulum of the grandfather clock. It resisted, started to get back into rhythm with micro-oscillations, Richard had to take off one of the lead weights, he put it down carefully inside the clock case. He heard a clatter in the hall, the dull thud of a fall. Anne’s right hand was full of splinters of glass.
‘We’ll have to go to the clinic.’ He thought for a moment, then rang Friedrich Wolf Hospital.
‘Barsano. Yes, you can use the room. I’ll have everything made ready.’
‘You gave yourself away back at the wedding, you know,’ Anne said. Richard was driving the Lada, wasn’t concentrating, thought it would have been better to take a taxi – No, taxis were rare, they might have had to wait hours for one. Oddly enough, it had never occurred to him to call an ambulance. Anne was staring at her bandaged hand. ‘When I asked you whether you knew the boy, you said: No, perhaps the son of a patient. How did you know he wasn’t the son of Wernstein’s friend?’
‘She’s our senior secretary,’ Richard replied wearily. The red needle flickered restlessly over the the elongated numbers on the speedometer. He was driving on automatic pilot, as if another being inside him were doing it, a matchstick man made of a few nerves and linked muscles. How alien and yet important all this was: the dashboard, the trees along the street, the key in the ignition.
‘Then you shouldn’t have said perhaps. By the way, I’ve seen Lucie. Pretty girl, there’s a lot of you about her.’
Everything was ready at the hospital. Frau Barsano offered to assist Richard.
Anne’s hand. My wife’s hand, he thought. White and bloodless (a nurse had take
n the bandage off), it lay in the dazzling, mocking light of the operating lamp.
A hand – what it does is one thing. A piece of body, a body itself, an assistant at performances; eloquent, undisguised truth. What it prevents, perhaps simply by not moving, is another. He found both interesting. He loved hands. Hands were stimulants, gave him pleasure. He had studied hands: the sea-lily femininity of Botticelli’s women’s fingers (they were fingers, but weren’t they what made hands?); hands that were obstinately convinced of something; hands as if in despair at their size and at their incessant, steady moving away from childhood; creamed and uncreamed hands, alluring and mossily unfathomable hands; the hands of women gardeners, tanned by sap, and of stokers in which coal dust has lodged and can’t be washed off; he had seen the hands of a butterfly expert (who had called them feeble fools); his father’s hands examining a clock: all these (now ghostly-seeming) hands with the trace element of tenderness. Hands that had gone numb, fingers as fragile as a quail’s bones, and had transformed cities. Hands of peasant women, gnarled, a weave of harshness and cold and a life of hard work, Querner had painted them: they seemed to be made more of wood than of flesh, the fingers were crooked with gout and arthritis and blows: blows warded off and blows handed out. At the same time Richard thought hands were sometimes curious, the fact that there were two of them seemed to take away something of their value, of their gleaming precision. Why do Cyclops have only one eye? So that its look is more threatening, so that there’s less distraction. One hand, two hands: around another person’s body – or neck – to clasp from both sides, to caress in stereo; to murder. Lines of bitterness. Some looked restless from unchangeableness. There, that scar – do you remember? On our honeymoon, it was the way the travels of our youth were: no great distance, Rheinsberg and Havel, reachable on our Berliner motor scooter: apples lit from behind, grainy with the nocturnal dew, pumpkins in the windows, the size of grapefruit, striped like the trousers of Turks in operas, some beige with green growths, some like fluffed-up turbans, others pear-shaped, yellow and dark green, a sharply drawn boundary between the colours. The breakdown on the way, Anne letting the second screwdriver slip.
‘You’ve made yourself unsterile, Herr Hoffmann. The edge of your hand was on the tap.’
He’d found reading hands satisfying even when he was a junior doctor; others might see it as a challenge, tormenting, abrasive, for him it was taking something that was packed, carefully and willingly encircling it, peeling off its coverings, full of inhibitions, fear of nakedness – but it was there, softly throbbing, demanding to be known. And no one had explained what cutting into a hand meant (oh, that word: ‘to grasp’). To cut into one’s own wife’s hand; five fingers, the constriction where the wedding ring had been (the nurse had had to use soap and a silk thread to take it off); the ball of the thumb; the pulse of the two main arteries, that couldn’t be felt now; the palm of the hand with lines and grooves and a cloud of superstition; pale, brittle-looking nails; so that the hand on the green sheets looked like an anaesthetized stoat with its winter fur, ready for dissection. No one told you how to deal with the irrevocability, the absence of irony at the moment of the cut: Here I am, the hand seemed to say, there’s no turning back, I have to trust you. So make me well again. What you are capable of will have to be enough. Of course there was experience, but there was always something lurking in the background, always the suspicion that with this patient it didn’t necessarily have to work the way it had in a ‘similar case’ the previous day; always the fear that the ‘knowledge’ would vanish at an abracadabra. As in any task without an escape hatch.
If you looked at it long enough a hand seemed to be sending out watchwords from the hidden depths – they remained motionless, still beneath the surface that presented an unambiguous exterior but their outlines could be made out, could be filled in by interpretation. Hands mostly did quite sensible things. Tied shoelaces in the morning, spooned up soup at lunchtime, cracked open a bottle of beer in the evening and rested. The life of a hand consisted of clenching and stretching for sensible gestures. Richard remembered a patient he’d had many years ago, at the time she’d been fifteen, both her forearms had been torn off in an accident. One night, he’d been on duty in A&E, the neighbours had rung up. She’d gassed herself.
‘I think your wife will be able to be treated as an outpatient. Save us a lot of paperwork. Would you like to operate yourself?’
He nodded. Hands trained you to be economical, at least the operating surgeon. There was no surplus skin. You couldn’t, as was otherwise usual and possible, cut out a generous area round the wound. Microscope. Magnifying spectacles. The hospital was excellently equipped. Frau Barsano was aware of that, which, Richard thought, was why she said nothing. The silence during an operation, thirsting, sucking you in. Absolute concentration; consciousness focused and sharpened to the point of attention, picking out tiny indentations of interest like a diamond drill. In between: slumps, demands on energy, rallying, a spatter of distractions. You could give way for a while, for a while you could leave the burning glass to your cooperator as it crawled maddeningly slowly over the situation, mercilessly revealing, followed by the blade exploring the wound. Hands had their own kind of slumber, but also of ecstasy. That was mostly connected, Richard thought, with the word ‘to attain’: food and light, skin and control-panel knobs, silence, apprehensiveness and prophecies, things made tangible by a child’s drawing.
‘Glass,’ Frau Barsano said, picking up a splinter.
Anne’s hand. If I cut this here, she’ll have no feeling any more there, in this lobular area on the short muscle that bends the thumb. Responsibility. Power. Sometimes he enjoyed, sometimes he feared that power, the thoughts that it seemed to suggest to him and that he found unworthy of a doctor. But they were there, whispered by thin, venomous lips and he had to employ a valuable part of his forces to repress them. Did that happen to other surgeons as well? They didn’t talk about it. Perhaps out of fear of being seen as a bad doctor, without a vocation. One who didn’t correspond to the cliché most patients had of a noble person in a white coat. It depended on what one did. He recalled his conversation with Weniger: to be free. They were free to do what helped people. He looked at Anne’s hand, it was injured, slender and thus, in a discreet way, pleading; a hand that insisted: That’s the way it is, a commitment, startled at its irrevocable nature and yet in the secret of dignity: This is it, my hand (and to hold back the shadows with it); Anne’s hand: small from grief and time, unique …
He felt incapable of continuing the operation. Emotion, sentimentality, despair: overpowered by a mixture that repelled him, he asked Frau Barsano to continue on her own.
It was still light when they stopped outside Sperber’s house on Wolfsleite. With astonishment Richard heard the intoxicatingly sweet, hallucinatory calls of the blackbirds, free of tribulation, somehow selfish in their calm, their self-assurance, he thought, also … merciful. As Anne raised her hand to the bell without any explanation – Richard now felt that sense of shame that disputes one’s right to explanations – raised it, the hand with its dressing that she hardly felt the need to protect any longer, there was something about the white of the plaster, from which Anne stuck out a comical-looking finger (a hard shaft piercing its way through the air, silent and saucy) to press the bell for an absurdly long time, something indocile that didn’t belong in the evening even though it passed through it amazingly close – now, as Anne let her arm drop in front of the trunk of an elm tree, conscientiously slowly yet casually – a white that rendered down its dryness and took on another quality: the indocile, shrewd white an electric socket would have had in the black bark of the tree. Richard walked up and down. When Frau Sperber opened the door, Anne asked him to wait. ‘And please don’t behave badly in such a … theatrical manner. It’ll take half an hour, perhaps an hour, depending.’ The lawyer waved to them from the front door, came towards Anne, arms outstretched, a serious smile on his face (it didn’t even seem
disagreeable, Richard thought), looked at her hand, appeared to be considering, took the silk handkerchief out of the breast pocket of his suit (it seethed a lemon yellow and breathed a sigh of relief), dipped it in a barrel of rainwater and washed Anne’s fingers clean with obscene care. Then all three went in without paying any attention to Richard. After a few minutes he rang the bell.
‘It’s nice you’re still here,’ Frau Sperber said. ‘Won’t you come in?’
‘Where are they?’ Richard forced the woman up against the row of coat hooks where Anne’s coat was hanging.
‘In the cellar. Please don’t disturb them. It’s locked anyway. My husband doesn’t like being disturbed when he’s doing it.’
‘In the cellar?’
‘It’s dry, it’s been converted, with a bar and a fire. My husband loves that cellar.’
‘Will you tell my wife at once that I’m waiting for her and want her to come up.’
‘Would you help me?’ Frau Sperber waved Richard into the kitchen. On the worktop was a large bunch of carrots. ‘There’s going to be carrot salad, my husband really likes that. And I can’t manage with these peelers. If I have to cut up more than two carrots, my hands go numb.’
‘Spare me all this nonsense and tell my wife. At once.’
‘I can’t do that. He’s the only one who has a key to that door.’
‘Then I will call the police.’
‘I don’t think you should do that, Herr Hoffmann. In the first place you wouldn’t have a chance against him. Secondly, your wife, as it appears, went with him of her own free will.’
‘And you?’
‘We have a modern marriage, Herr Hoffmann. Enlightened and tolerant. We have our arrangements, I don’t want you to think me the injured wife. And I must add that I prefer it if I know the women; it means I can more easily work out whether they’ll do him good. Your wife’s very nice, a really pleasant, likeable person.’