The Tower: A Novel

by Uwe Tellkamp

  ‘The woman who does the unloading on my shift,’ Christian said after a while spent searching hungrily through his memory, ‘lives on a farm somewhere in the coal. There’s sure to be something there.’

  ‘D’you know where it is?’

  ‘Not exactly,’ Christian said hesitantly. Schecki had pointed vaguely in a northward direction. ‘Torch and compass, perhaps we’ll find it. We could ask one of the railwaymen.’

  ‘Better not, Nemo. If we want to get something, then we don’t want anyone else in the know.’

  ‘We could knock.’

  ‘We could. But if she lives the way you say, she won’t open. – We have to be back before the shift starts. I don’t fancy being put away again.’

  Doctor Varga lifted up the lamp, shortening the shadows on the walls of the cellar passage. The water on the floor didn’t seem to be getting any higher, it still hadn’t risen up the legs of the rubber boots they were wearing; also it was starting to freeze over so that the rats, which showed no fear in following them, had to go under water in some places; the dark bodies with the pointed noses covered in bristles paddled under the ice and didn’t panic even when one of the soldiers accompanying Varga and Meno tried to crush them under his heel. ‘Air-raid shelter,’ Meno read, a red arrow pointed to a steel door, the handle of which was draped in spiders’ webs. Notices in old German handwriting with Cyrillic scribbles over them on the cellar walls. The water started rising again.

  ‘Here, I think,’ Varga said, but he spread his arms out in front of the doors. ‘I don’t know exactly, I’ve never been down here before.’

  ‘Voda – otkuda?’ Barsano’s deputy asked. The soldiers shrugged their shoulders. With the butt of his Kalashnikov one knocked the padlock off one of the doors; the rats scurried towards it and vanished, it was impossible to see where. The soldiers dragged the door open, Varga said, ‘Let’s have a look’, and clicked on a rotary switch, light shot out of ceiling lamps encrusted with spiders’ webs only to be swallowed up by the darkness again with a muted ‘fatch’ that was reflected back from the depths of the room as a distorted echo – the teeming darkness filled with pecking and scraping noises into which Varba pushed his pit lamp. Meno thought: the ticking of thousands of clocks; but it was the legs of the brown rats, some heading purposefully, though with comical slithering, stumbling and waving of legs, for the depths of the room, while others were trying to recover their balance with desperately clutching claws; thousands of brown rats; there were so many black button eyes caught in the smoky light that they looked like a shower of sparks leaping across the room. It seemed to be very big, the far side couldn’t be seen. None of the men ventured inside, the soldiers grasped their rifles tight – the rats kept going towards their goal. The water wasn’t coming from there, although the floor was covered in a thick layer of ice. Meno took Varga’s lamp (the microbiologist had frozen, likewise the deputy, though he had managed to turn his head); by the faint light Meno could make out marks, lines forming a circle, the ice sounded as hard as porcelain; the strange ticking noise of the thousands of tiny feet had grown louder. But there was a goal there! A handball goal with a torn net, beside it posts and climbing ropes, wall bars, a pile of rubber mats – the gymnasts were there too. Frozen stiff in the ice, orthopaedic models were standing on the court in bent and contorted postures; they were carved from old wood that gleamed darkly in the light of Meno’s lamp, as if it had been rubbed smooth by the hands of generations of interested pupils.

  The torches were kept off, Pancake waited until the grey of first light began to change objects back out of the cellar darkness: a chopping block with the axe sticking out, jars that the blanket of snow had cemented together, making them look like dully glittering molars in a white shimmer of swollen gums. He broke out one, a standard jam jar with a plastic lid, examined it in the meagre light, cut out a cone of the waxy pale contents, smelt it. ‘I don’t think anyone would conserve poison in jars,’ he whispered, holding out the cone to Christian. ‘Though time can poison many things.’

  69

  A storm brewing

  ‘When I saw you for the first time I never thought you’d be giving me lines of verse. – That’s honey. Frozen honey.’

  ‘Artificial honey?’ Pancake wondered as he tasted it. He broke more jars out of the snow and put them into their bag. The jars seemed to have stayed airtight. ‘We’ve got to clear off. It’s too quiet for my liking. I’m surprised they don’t have a dog. I’d have one if I had to live out here.’

  The dog jumped up on Christian in silence, pressed him against the wall by the cellar door, stayed on its hind legs, panting and flapping its chops, its front paws on his shoulders. A scythe blade curved round Pancake’s throat, drawing the alarmed blacksmith up the steps. Schanett crooked her index finger, beckoning them into the house, the scythe she hung on a peg over the door. The house was cold, the windows crooked, covered with fern-patterns of ice. Schanett led the way with a lantern, leaving it to the growling dog to push the two surprised burglars forward. More dogs appeared but Schanett shooed them away. The touch of the soft muzzle Christian could feel on his behind was like that of a rubber truncheon – a sign from stick to cloth, individual, biding its time; Christian was horrified at the thought that Schanett might report them and thus send them back to there; in that case, he decided, he’d try to take the quick way out. They probably didn’t have a telephone here and of course there was no electricity … They seemed to be going down, there was a cellar smell to the air. The circle of light from Schanett’s lantern no longer reached the ceiling, a black vault with meat hanging down in pieces from the size of your finger to that of a man, all frosted over, some entirely encased in ice that seemed to be waiting, motionless, for contact with the floor; presumably the weight of all this and the yielding ground of the open-cast mine were making the house gradually subside. But that didn’t explain the vast height of the room that nothing suggested from outside – perhaps the house had been torn in half, the lower storeys were sinking while the roof stayed above ground. Meat; Pancake kept his head down. Dark-red flesh, with sinews running through, embedded in white fat; ice-bound kidneys; pig’s heads, glittering with rime, their open eyes giving them a strangely ironic expression; hearts close together, dotted with white lumps.

  ‘Come.’ The proofreader nodded to Meno. ‘Redlich,’ Klemm murmured, ‘as every year honest Josef Redlich faithfully bears the yoke, prepares for the Fair and … oh, Fräulein Wrobel, I didn’t think you were still here; the Beethoven quartets have fallen silent.’

  ‘You’re … going to the events?’

  Instinctively they moved out of the light from the street lamp and as answer Oskar Klemm, a gentleman of the old school, offered his arm to Madame Eglantine – which she took even though, as Meno was aware, the ‘Fräulein’ annoyed her. Her face was pale, her eyes dark with doubts and fear; but her coat, her grandfather’s loden coat that had been altered to fit her, had felt patches of various colours in the form of soles of the feet, the toes of which were cheekily splayed. ‘May I tie your shoelaces? Just think of the consequences of a stumble, my dear.’

  ‘Rosenträger’s going to speak,’ Meno said cautiously.

  ‘It’s good to hear something different for once. Schiffner’s forbidden us to go but, my dear colleagues’ – Klemm stopped and lifted up his face – ‘I for my part have finally decided to start being brave.’

  The Church of the Holy Cross, a programme of music by the choir’s former director, Rudolf Mauersberger. The people were so tightly packed that a middle-aged woman close to Meno fainted but didn’t fall down. The motet: ‘Now is the town laid waste’. But (and that was characteristic, Meno thought) the terrible things had to be beautifully expressed, resolved in euphony – the transparent tongue of the boys’ choir started to beguile their ears – and harmony, within a framework of elegant proportions and established modes; people then called it traditional, even though it could well be something different. Ethereal voices,
the simplicity of the burnt-out church a contrast, the roughcast walls, in the candles’ halo above the boys’ heads the measured gestures of the conductor evoking mourning, negotiating hurdles, which the choir’s veil of transfiguration around the supporting tones of the Jehmlich organ followed with childlike innocence.

  Rosenträger entered the pulpit. A perceptible movement went through the people who had been gripped by the music, upper bodies leant forward (like the ominous, tumescent turn of a carnivorous plant towards a potential prey that has unknowingly touched the outer signal circuit), necks were craned, hands nervously felt prayer books, fingered the brims of hats as if they were prayer beads; the clouds of breath from their mouths became invisible and passed, when the clearly articulating voice of the preacher was at last heard, like a sigh of relief through the flickering gloom of the nave. He spoke about the thirteenth of February. Meno sensed that that wasn’t what people had hoped for – and what Madame Eglantine had perhaps meant with the hesitantly spoken word ‘events’; they had expected memories of the air raid, war, devastation and the past, but had hoped for words about the present. When they did come, it was as if a flash of lightning went round the galleries, so quickly did the congregation lift up their faces to look at Rosenträger, whom Barsano, as Meno recalled, had designated a ‘main enemy’. The lean man with the straggly, casually combed hair calmly said things people would previously only have dared to whisper in private or have kept to themselves. Meno kept being made physically aware of the way people froze when Rosenträger spoke of ‘aberrations’, of the sole and indivisible truth that could only be found in God and not in political parties; when he used the comparison of a mirror that didn’t reflect fine wishes but realities people would prefer not to see (out of ingrained habit Meno was not sure whether the image worked). The man, Meno decided after some time observing him, was neither a gambler carried by the wave of presumed gratitude beyond the sands of inhibition necessary for survival, nor a self-important windbag for whom, when he mounted the pulpit as God’s representative in ecclesiastical dress, a little sun of vanity rose. He expressed simple truths in simple words. That he was doing it here, in Holy Cross Church in front of an audience of a few thousand, was a necessity and it was by no means merely the way of seeing things of an ‘isolated clique’, as Barsano called those who attended services in the church. Here someone was breaking through the barrier of silence, of looking the other way, of fear; Rosenträger was afraid, Meno could tell that from the pastor’s movements, which were more agitated than might in the long run be good for his authority in the eyes of cool observers – but the people, as Meno could see, sucked in his words in greedy silence. Perhaps it was precisely the fact that Rosenträger’s bearing was not that of a Party official crudely and dictatorially handing down judgments from the clouds of the laws governing the progress of history; Rosenträger adjusted his spectacles, spoke without notes, searching for words, in an upright posture, the people heard no empty words; he was afraid – and still spoke.

  Richard had asked Robert to stop before the bend to the quarry. He wanted to do the last few metres on foot, with Anne’s sarcasm behind him, true, but, to make up for that, in glorious anticipation of enjoying a long eye-to-eye; and he also wanted to amaze Robert, his seen-it-all son (being overwhelmed was good for people). How clear the air was – spring sketches; a bird on a branch shook its feathers, sending down a shower of alarmed drops of water.

  Jerzy, the sculptor, was hanging from a pulley, busy on the ear of his giant Karl Marx, and waved to Richard. From the other end of the quarry came the sound of furious hammering: Dietzsch was shaping his ‘work in progress’ as he called it, ‘The Thumb’, but didn’t wave back to Richard. The shed was in the lovely disorder of children’s games. Stahl, in reflective and self-ironic mood, had once commented on work that was done with enthusiasm and for its own sake because it was being done by grown men disguised as boys; brightness threaded in through the gaps in the planks. His car was waiting under the tarpaulin. ‘Hispano-Suiza,’ Richard whispered, the very sound delighted him. Repeating the name, his eye fell on some pliers Stahl had used. Nothing was left of his aeroplane, the ‘SAGE’ as Gerhart had christened it after the first letters of ‘Sabine’ and ‘Gerhart’, but a few chalk marks, partly washed away by the rain that got in, partly scuffed by Richard’s shoes, indicating the former places of tools and material. The children had been sent to children’s homes, in different towns, that much Richard had learnt from Sperber. Which towns? Embarrassed, Sperber had looked away and shrugged his shoulders.

  For a few seconds Richard enjoyed the sight of the postbox-yellow oilcan on the black shelf. The way it shone. How immediate it was and how calm its immediacy. Then he went to the car and pulled off the tarp.

  The Hispano-Suiza had been demolished with professional precision. The leather seats had been slit, the steering wheel, the column sawn off, had been stuck into the upholstery of the driver’s seat. Richard opened the bonnet. The leads, the copper arteries that seemed so alive, the nickel-plated fuel veins, had been hammered flat and cut up – with enjoyment, oh yes, one could sense that. The engine – concreted in; lying in the solidified mass as if in a stone case – Richard could take them out easily – were the bolt cutters he’d lost when they’d tried to steal a Christmas tree. Dangling from them, neatly attached between the two blades as if they were a birthday present, was a note on which ‘With socialist greetings’ had been typed.

  Splints, padded protection for legs, leather straps: even though it was an old-fashioned version, Christian had already seen the seating along the tiled walls during his periods of practical experience in hospitals, similarly the glass cases with neatly arranged instruments: steel cylinders of various sizes cut off at an angle, dressing forceps, kidney bowls, clamps. From the next room, the warmly heated kitchen gleaming with copper, came the rich sweet smell of cakes. The honey extractors rattled and rumbled as Pancake and Christian turned the cranks to remove the wax. Towards evening Schanett let them go with a shoebox full of vanilla slices topped with caramelized almonds.

  One April evening, there were more people than usual out for a walk, Pastor Magenstock put up the call to action of an environmental group in the glassed-in board outside the church, a bright orange notice, a magnet to the eye, between quotations from the Bible and another one about donations for the Third World. Meno stopped and watched Herr Hähnchen, the district policeman, reluctantly approach, looking down at the ground and up at the sky fading in floral colours, placing his hands alternately behind his back or over his imposing stomach, thumbs in the Adidas braces visible under his uniform jacket. ‘You know that you shouldn’t do that,’ Herr Hähnchen said after he’d read the notice thoroughly through the spectacles he’d made heavy weather of unfolding. By now Herr Kannegiesser, the organist, his face bright red with alarm, had come to stand in front of Pastor Magenstock, taking deep breaths as he protected him; the tall, fat district policeman and the short, skinny church musician looked each other up and down in amazement for a while.

  ‘I suppose you want to be a hero?’ Hähnchen asked, sadness in his look.

  ‘The word “hero” does not occur in the New Testament, Herr Hähnchen. It is my duty to my parishioners and to my own conscience no longer to remain silent,’ Pastor Magenstock said.

  For a moment Hähnchen said nothing, then admitted he could understand that. Nevertheless it was his official duty to request the removal of the notice.

  ‘But you have children as well,’ cried Herr Malthakus, who had come over with the Kühnasts and the Krausewitzes and stood by Magenstock’s side. Herr Hähnchen replied that that was true.

  ‘There’s no point shutting your eyes,’ Frau Knabe declared. She was carrying several shopping bags and also came to stand at Magenstock’s side, together with a few members of the emancipation group she’d recently set up.

  ‘Herr Rohde, come over here,’ she commanded.

  ‘Herr Hähnchen,’ said Meno, ‘perhaps it’
s possible that you haven’t seen anything?’

  Herr Hähnchen said that in principle such a possibility always existed, only –

  Staff from the Grauleite barracks approached. ‘Disperse!’ an officer bellowed. But the people stayed where they were. Frau Knabe slowly shook her head. The officer looked aghast, seemed confused. Other people out for a walk saw the gathering and instead of quickly going past, heads down, with eyes that saw nothing, as had been the case in confrontations with the power of the state so far, they came over, more and more of them, followed by observers from the gardens along Ulmenleite and stood beside Pastor Magenstock.

  The officer remained silent. And never had Meno seen such a lonely man as District Police Officer Heinz Hähnchen in the middle of the open space between the two groups.

  Nina Schmücke’s circle was mixed. Richard, whom she greeted like an old acquaintance with kisses to the cheeks right and left (probably so that Anne would see, he started on an explanation but she waved it away), nodded across to Clarens and Weniger, who gave him a surprised and hostile scrutiny, at the same time whispering something to one of the bearded men in check shirts and jeans, who, as far as Richard could tell from a quick assessment, ran the show. Anne was confused by the pictures on the walls, on several easels whose crusts of coloured drips were at war with the aggressive tones on the canvases. From one of the few windows of the studio that weren’t pasted over or nailed up with cardboard or plywood, Richard looked out over Neustadt: broken roofs in which naked men bowed before the setting sun; eroded chimneys, the boards below them for the chimney sweeps all taken: a fat man was sleeping on his back, arms and legs hanging down. A gaunt person in black latex clothing walked up and down, a woman was checking her angling equipment. Richard got a drink for Anne, put a chair by the window for her – after the man with the full beard had taken Nina Schmücke aside and clearly been calmed down by her, the discussions, which had been interrupted by their entrance, continued with frequent striking of matches and clicking of lighters. Sluggishly, slowly, sluggishly. Richard knew a few of those present: two women who were medical technical assistants from the Neurological Clinic, the former junior doctor from Internal Medicine who had spoilt their Christmas-tree triumph, Frau Freese stared at him with uncomfortable directness – he lowered his head, was furious with himself at his cowardice and stared back defiantly, at which Frau Freese ducked behind the shoulders of two men who worked on Coal Island. Richard recognized the attendant who had leafed through his documents in melancholy fashion before Regine had emigrated and let him stay in F corridor; he had had dealings with the other about the gas water-heater. Rapid looks that slipped off faces and waited between them. Fear that was afraid of fear. Hands that didn’t know what to do with themselves. An engineer was talking about his life that, as he concealed rather than revealed in evasive descriptive loops, could no longer be ‘sufficiently’ distinguished from the mundane … tedium. The Great Tedium had his existence in its grip! One agreed. One shared the experience. One asked for suggestions. – One ought to start with a sit-in straight away, said a woman with a pirate’s headscarf and a linen dress that had embroidery in the shape and red-and-white colour of a traffic cone on it that Richard found as beautiful as it was unusual. Something must finally change in the country, too many had gone already, half the multistorey building where she lived, for example – how was it all going to end?