by Uwe Tellkamp
‘You don’t say.’ Richard tried in vain to sit down on one of the bar stools round the centrally placed worktop. ‘Where did you get that huge extractor hood?’
‘No problem for my husband. He actually wanted to buy a new one and give this one to your wife, who also admired it, but your kitchen’s too small. – And I’d like to say I’m delighted to see you, Herr Hoffmann. My husband has great respect for you. Shouldn’t we call each other “du”?’ She wiped her hands on a tea towel with windmills on it. ‘Evelyn.’
‘Oh, don’t try that on me.’ Richard went out of the house. He wandered round the streets, happened to end up in Ulmenleite. The church was still open. Pastor Magenstock was skipping. Richard watched for a while. Magenstock, eyes closed and seeming not to notice him, was turning slowly, with quick, low hops to and fro, the rope swinging fluently and making a whistling sound. Meditating, Richard thought. And even though the sound of the skipping behind him didn’t suggest it, he found the offertory box by the door and felt the need to make a donation but, when he searched through his pockets, could only find the twenty-pfennig piece he kept for emergencies. He put it in.
‘Ah, Herr Hoffmann.’ Sperber, seeing Anne out, bowed to her. ‘I have some good news for you. My efforts to get your son’s place at medical school reinstated will very probably be successful.’
‘Well, then, brother mine?’
‘Robert.’
‘Is there anywhere we can go in this hole? For an ice cream?’
‘There’s a bar here. If you’d like a beer.’ Robert drinking beer, little Robert – that’s the way it had always been, but not any more. Robert flicking his windproof lighter open with a resonant click and letting the flame that shot up play over the tip of a Cabinet.
‘Later perhaps.’
‘It’s … great that you’ve come.’
‘Hey, you’d never have said that before. Being conscripted must have done that to you. Not bad at all.’
‘Shut it, earhole.’
‘If you insist.’ Robert joked about the army. He’d been sent to join the medical orderlies in a barracks outside Riesa. ‘A real cushy number. My God, that really is a ridiculous outfit. Right turn, left turn, loaf about, wait, end up as a fat cabbage. You can’t take it seriously.’
‘Depends where you are.’
‘You must be doing something wrong to get caught like this all the time.’
‘How about passes?’
‘As many as you like,’ Robert boasted. ‘And my physical needs are well supplied too. I’ve got a nice little girl in Riesa. What about you?’
‘What d’you say to the old folks?’
‘Well parried, brother mine. They’re OK, there are others who’re much worse. It’s great that they’ve gone away on holiday. At last I can do as I like there. You don’t know how long I’ve wanted a place to myself and when I get one it’s at the same time as a sister, and I’ve been called up. You don’t smoke, right?’
‘Half-sister.’
‘Don’t take it to heart like that, brother mine. It happens. She’s called Lucie. Have you seen her?’
‘No.’
‘How would you, shut up here like this? I’ve not seen her yet either. But I am keen to see her. Really. And to be honest, in a way I’m looking forward to it as well. I’ve always wanted to have a little sister.’
66
After this interruption the days … passed
781 years of Dresden: in 1987 one could see stickers with that number on the rear window of many cars; often next to the ‘L’ that officially stood for ‘Learner’, unofficially for ‘Leaver’. The number was a revolt against another number: 750 years of Berlin, an anniversary that was to be celebrated on a grand scale, a spasm of joie de vivre, pride that no one believed in any more; the tired, ailing body of the Republic was to be squeezed dry once more in order to extract from the putrid juices a cup of hemlock that, dribbled into the arteries of the capital, was supposed to transform sickness into life, exhaustion into hope and vigour …
Now Judith Schevola was no longer working at the cemetery in Tolkewitz, she had been sent to work at VEB Kosara, where she made hectograph copies of brochures in alcohol baths and by the Ormig process. Whenever he could, Meno, drawn in a way he couldn’t explain, would drive out to the factory and watch her. He recognized her from a distance by her bat cap as she came out of the factory gates with other workers. She swayed, kept close to fences along the paths and looked for something to hold on to in the streets, drunk from the alcohol fumes coning from the baths for the pieces that were being copied; passers-by frowned when they saw her, presumably thinking she was a drunk and once when she fell into the slush on a grey winter’s evening, no one went to help her until Meno, who had heard her muffled cries for help even from a distance, finally managed to pull her up out of the puddle. Judith didn’t recognize him, staggered as she resisted; no one took any notice of the two people despondently fighting with each other.
Meno took her home. She lived in Neustadt, in a one-and-a-half-room apartment giving onto a back yard; the corridor was created by the backs of cupboards, the half-room ended at a wall; she shared the plaster rosette for the chandelier. There was a screw across the larger room with cigarettes and cut-out poems and stockings hanging from it. The screw had a fine thread with (Judith had counted them) 5,518 turns, passed through the masonry and, braced with straps and pieces of wood outside, held the storey together.
‘What do you want from me?’ Judith muttered, dropping onto the bed.
‘Is there anything you need? Can I help you in any way?’
‘I’m beyond help. Oh, how self-pitying … Have you brought anything to drink? Thank you very much for accompanying me, Herr Editor, and now adieu.’
She was quickly getting clearer, Meno turned to leave.
‘If you could fill the jug, there’s a tap in the kitchen … Since you’re here, you can stay if you like. I’ve a record with Indian music, written for the living and the dead, just the right thing for you and me. Are you hungry?’
‘Yes.’
‘How stupid. I only asked out of politeness. So here’s my suggestion: first we eat nothing at all, then we go dancing.’
‘I can’t dance very well. – How are you? Are you working? Writing?’
‘We aimed so high and look at us now,’ Judith said after a while.
‘I find that too sentimental. You must write, times are changing and I don’t think your exclusion’s going to last long.’
‘I want something to drink.’
‘No.’
‘Are you trying to forbid me to get drunk?’
‘It won’t change anything and you not an immature kid any longer.’
‘Yes, Daddy.’ Judith Schevola felt under the bed, pulled out a half-full bottle of Kröver Nacktarsch and drank the wine in large swigs. She threw the bottle into a cardboard box beside the little stove where it broke on other glass things. Judith gave a hoarse laugh. Then she stretched out on the bed like a big cat. ‘Do you never feel you have to explode? To shake the stars down from the sky? Don’t you ever want to taste all the dishes at once, dance till you drop, drink till everything goes black, blow all your money at the casino, be stony broke, come back after a terrible hour and win everything and more back again? Do you never want to make a river flow upstream?’
‘I’m happy with a bath that works,’ Meno replied coldly.
‘To be able to fly, to be free, to be great, to be full of untamable power that can compel the elements … like the revolution.’
Meno remained silent.
‘But revolutionaries are always timid,’ Judith said bitterly.
The cocoons grew thicker and thicker, deeper and deeper the years. Whom were the clocks calling? In the evening the magic word ‘Mutabor’ was spoken, town and country set up dolls that looked outwards but the Tower-dwellers had long since gone down the stairs to their interests … A Urania evening had attracted a large audience for a talk on Mesopotamia;
the lecturer, who had come specially from Berlin, from the Pergamon Museum, had used a slide projector to cast coloured shadows on a screen in the darkened lecture room of Arbogast House that had roused not only the widowed Frau Fiebig to enthusiastic astonishment. The lecturer signed a few square blue books and left, but his subject remained and ramified and, as if it were tinder, set off discussions and quiet studies in the evening drawing rooms. But the books left behind by the lecturer were also beautiful to look at: there was a reproduction of a relief of the Ishtar Gate on the cover. White lions strode over a frieze of daisies against a timeless azure background; Frau Fiebig said it gave you a shiver, ‘the eternities since then and what has remained’. Suddenly never-heard names appeared, forming little white clouds at the mouths of those waiting for rolls outside Wachendorf’s bakery; Ashurbanipal, Ashurnaspiral I, Ashurnaspiral II and Hammurabi buzzed to and fro, and anyone who did not want to be ‘behind the times’ had to know something about them. In Guenon House research into old Dresden was broken off and they turned to those ages full of mythical men clad in animal skins and with long, rectangular beards, bracelets, hairnets and war-smocks that left their calves and upper arms free and more than once caused Frau Fiebig to exclaim, ‘Those muscles, my God, what muscles those men had’, to which Herr Sandhaus retorted, ‘Yes, my dear, and with them they quite happily cut their enemies’ heads off.’ ‘Yes, but what de-cisive virility, what a proud, lusty culture, a culture with muscle,’ Frau Fiebig replied, ‘and don’t you think there’s something both delicate and muscular about this cuneiform script? When I imagine our newspapers written like that, I’d immerse myself in them more. I think even fibs would be diff’rent in cuneiform script, they’d be quite diff’rent, I think.’
After the talk all four copies of the blue book that had been peacefully sleeping their life away in Bruno Korra’s Paper Boat second-hand bookshop on Lindwurmring were sold, even though the sly bookseller, recognizing the signs of the times, had immediately upvalued them from ten to 100 marks, and were now being photocopied by all the inhabitants of the district who had not had the good fortune to get hold of a copy; some of the secretaries at the offices of the Council for Mutual Economic Aid typed the books word for word on their machines, with up to five layers of carbon and writing paper that Matthes’s stationery shop put at their disposal, as it did the coloured ribbons from their allocation of black ones. The eyes of the Tower-dwellers, accustomed to grey, to the finest gradations of everyday grey, thirsted after colours, were exhilarated by the strange reliefs, the sun and star signs, the sea-blue of the glazed tiles of the procession street, which bore the name ‘May the enemy not cross it’ and went from the Marduk Temple through the Ishtar Gate, one of the eight gates of the inner city of Babylon, to the Akitu Temple. They turned the pages of the book reverently, and if they had one of the carbon copies, stapled and bound in Arbogast’s own printing and binding shop, that had had to do without the illustrations, they didn’t take less care, on the contrary, these had demanded people’s work, people’s time, and that of people they knew and saw every day. There were phone calls at late hours, a network connecting telephone receivers grew up in the district; people pointed out especially beautiful features, discussed the location of the Hanging Gardens in the city of Babylon; the women asked what kind of clothes Semiramis might have worn, whether the Nofretete cosmetics salon could manage to discover and exploit the refined secrets of Babylonian beautification; the men wondered whether Herodotus’s claim that the outer wall was so wide that a four-horse carriage could turn on it was not perhaps just a legend. The lights in the rooms stayed on, outside the acid, black-grained snow of a winter heated with poor-quality coal was falling and brows, smooth, lined, enthusiastic and down to earth, were bent over the colours and shapes of that long-vanished age, buried beneath sand and flood.
It disappeared as quickly as it had arrived. Hardly had a trip to Berlin, to the Museum Island, been organized than the imposing ziggurats crumbled, the charioteers on starflower wheels, the sun-kings in gold and lapis lazuli vanished; Herr Sandhaus, who had gone to the trouble of making the arrangements, stood on the station platform, bewildered, but apart from Meno only Herr Adeling arrived. ‘Is it all over with Assyria now, Herr Sandhaus? But, you know, for me it’s only just beginning, here in our Niniveh.’
The Babylonian fantasies faded away after the visit to the Museum of Ethnology in the Japanese palace. The thirst for knowledge of the Tower-dwellers demanded new material … Quietly amused, Meno watched the fashions change. After Mesopotamia they discovered the Phoenicians and Carthage; the ship’s doctor was in demand because of his ability to transfer plans of the ships of that seafaring nation with the most delicate of pens onto sheets of Polylux film, filigree masterpieces of the art of drawing ships of which Arbogast, from his antiquated alderman’s chair in the semi-dark, expressed his approval with nods and smirks of satisfaction. If only one could do that! Sail across the wide Mediterranean from Cyprus to Gibraltar and out into the open sea that the ancients feared. Model ships were made out of pinewood chip and balsa wood; Stationery Matthes didn’t know what was happening to him and where he could find all the materials that were in demand. You could use cork for balsa, the handles of fishing rods were made of cork – so sharpen your knives and get out your razor blades. Certain television programmes now enjoyed widespread popularity; Meno could tell that from the synchronized switch-over in the windows as he went home … films about heroes of the sea and explorers, bold privateers and adventurers; programmes such as She & He & 1,000 Questions, By Educationalists – for Educationalists and, popular with the Harmony dressmakers, who met for a hen party at Barbara’s, the advice programme for home sewing: From Head to Toe. Joffe, the lawyer, invited people round to an evening with Sandokan, the Tiger of Malaysia, whose smouldering eyes set not only Frau Fiebig’s heart on fire, and the Schlemm Hotel showed a video of Paul and Virginia, set on Mauritius, a shallow colonial love story that the men couldn’t watch without a bottle of beer and sidelong glances at their wives and their watches; afterwards people talked about Joffe’s privileges.
Meno pursued his own researches. It was the cell that occupied him, the smallest unit of life, a highly complex piece of organic machinery that Arbogast put at his disposal in the form of model blocks the height of a man, examples of Herr Ritschel’s skill. It was even possible to simulate a few chemical reactions … He wanted to write poems about them, hoping that would save Romantic poetry, which seemed stuck between antiquated rhymes on the one hand and rapturous effusions about nature (‘Beauty is truth’) on the other … There had been impressive publications from Hermes, an admirable essay on Georg Trakl by the Old Man of the Mountain that had brought a venomous attack from Eschschloraque … The union of science and literature (an old, rather humanist idea), a line of tradition, thin and often almost completely submerged, indicated by the names of Empedocles, Strabo, Rabanus Maurus, Jakob Böhme, Novalis, Annette von Droste-Hülshoff, Jakob Philipp Fallmerayer and Carl Ritter down to Jean-Henri Fabre and Gottfried Benn, had become a quiet fixation with Meno that took up his whole desk, by now shielded from prying eyes by metre-high bookshelves. The guiding star of these endeavours was called Goethe, as so often …
In 1987 Meno didn’t spend his summer holiday in his father’s house in Schandau but in the Museum of Zoology, which, as he discovered to his astonishment, hardly anyone in Dresden knew. There, in dusty cupboards with trays of butterflies bequeathed by Saxon collectors, on microscope tables covered in petri dishes, piles of periodicals, stuffed birds looking out sadly at the Elbe, in the fauna library, extensive but suffering from damp and degradation due to acid, Meno found a profusion of material for his investigations. Since his student days he hadn’t felt the initial joy of the good researcher – to look at nature without questioning or examining it, only differing from the way children see it in that the response is not astonishment but perplexity – so strongly as in the flow of those August days that already had a touch of
autumnal clarity. The town was empty, the children were on holiday, even the cinemas, yawning with the melancholy of hot days, didn’t seem to believe the magic that flickered across their screens, caught in the dusty light of grumpily creaking projectors. The Elbe was grey and lethargic, like an elephant taking a bath. The spider manuscript and his university card for the Biology Department in Leipzig had opened the door to the collections for Meno and thus he sat, undisturbed by the staff, in the brooding quiet of a place behind untidy shelves full of the researchers’ silent dreams, which at night, after he’d gone, might possibly start to whisper about him – he sometimes thought – for uncatalogued collections, cases full of butterflies, of which one is ‘wrong’ because it’s been wrongly placed or catalogued, are like restless revenants thirsting after the neck of a scientist so that they can be released. There Meno sat and studied the cell. Cella, he read, the smallest unit of organisms that retain the fundamental properties of life, metabolism (Meno recalled a saying of his tutor, Falkenstein: metabolism is an investigation of different forms of gratitude), response to stimuli, ability to move and reproduce; most human and animal cells have a size of about 20–30μ; the human egg cell, on the other hand, was a giant of 0.2 mm, even visible to the naked eye. This egg cell rose out of the corpus luteum, a sun in the lunar cycle, guided by a complicated interplay of hormones (the word means ‘to stir up’) and wiped free by the fimbrias of the tubes, sucked into the Fallopian tube, the ovum headed off in the direction of the uterus, from where the counter cells, the flagellated combat swimmers of the sperm, were to be expected. What did all these things mean, what was their significance, organelles within the membrane that formed the boundary of the cell, serving as vascular skin? There was the endoplasmic reticulum, it looked like a layer of potato fritters hastily stacked on top of each other with the biosynthesis of protein going on between them, a bewildering multistorey, thousand-track space launch centre with deliveries and dispatches, construction, customization, repairs and dismantling; then there was the Golgi apparatus, the so-called internal network consisting of several double-layer membranes, folded convex/concave and stored behind each other, some extended to form caverns and vacuoles whose purpose was to package the secretions that they welded, so to speak, into vesicles that were sent out of the cell along special canals; there were the mitochondria, the tiny power plants in the cell protoplasm, compact smoked sausages, some also resembling rugby balls; and there was the mystery of how the egg knew about the seed (for that seemed to be the case, the egg cell seemed to emit attractants and control agents, indeed even sought out the seed cell by which it wanted to be fertilized; Meno had read in Nature that the principle of ‘first come, first served’ was clearly not unreservedly valid; the egg cell seemed to have some say in who for her came ‘first’ – not always the robust woodcutter who, as a muscle man, immediately set his drill to work to penetrate the membrame, sometimes she even let him do the work, only to pull in the soft good-for-nothing, the Bohemian, the charming lady-killer at the last moment, slamming the door in the hulk’s face); there was the mystery of connections, of meaning, that was beyond language.