by Uwe Tellkamp
72
The magnet
… up out of the deep sleep of time,
Meno wrote,
paper: was sucked down grumpily where the fullers were poking their rods, fulling mills felting the raw material, down the arm of the river to the paper republic, SS Tannhäuser sailed down the avenue of uniforms (and I remembered brass bands and military bands, the wide boulevards of the Atlantic city with winter and clouds sweeping across it like eider-duck nests, polar explorers sailing in the sky: the Chelyuskin and Nobile expeditions, greeted by children of October), the river raised and lowered the city as if it were on hydraulic stages, the water, brown, with smears of ice, heated up by remnants of cellulose and engine oil and the loudspeaker horns (encrusted, leaking, dented by body hammers) over the concreted bank that spewed into the effluent drain from a fertilizer factory, the foam: guano white, phosphates, swirling at the sluice, set off a vein of lemon yellow – was it the lemon-yellow Neva, crackling with rouble notes in the frost, was it the Moskva, was it the Elbian river that suddenly became transparent for the ships on the bottom, poisonous honey glowing with blossom? – ice floes creaked as they rubbed against each other, and in the early hours of the morning, when the brontosaurian, weather-beaten, thousand-headed tenements – with the sour smell of rumours and fear, of the sweat of having to hold their tongue, at night holding their breath at the beams of light, the stamp of boots, the corridors with the washing lines and vests frozen overnight into Eskimo salt cod, the blocked toilets in the communal apartments, the Moorish plaster arches in the rigging four metres up, rooms divided up by the backs of cupboards, curtains, trunks – seemed to melt back out of frozen blocks of graphite in the early hours of the morning, when the black lorries with the inscription ‘Meat’ had done their work, when the crows from the city parks had discussed what was to be done during the day (visit the slaughterhouses, see the frozen fountains of Bakhchisaray, blacken the portrait of Our Beloved Leader over the Admiralty, the Navy Museum), in the early hours of the morning the military marches started up, pumping four-four time out of the loudspeakers onto the main streets, where it lay like ooze, it must be the birthday of one of the bigwigs, one of the high priests from the Palace of Byzantium, red star over the sea of ice, it was going to be a morning full of trolley buses stopping, faces tense with joyful expectation, veterans with chests covered in chinking metal; a morning of the air force, Ulrich, envying the pilots their Poljot watches and the light blue on their peaked caps and collar patches, waved their flag with the propeller on it; I liked the navy uniforms, dark blue with gold buttons, liked the Raketa twenty-four-hour watches the submarine commanders wore, and then, when the commands from the loudspeakers died away, drumrolls and military marches faded, there was a second of silence, Atlantis holding its breath by radio sets in the factories, schools, universities, the inevitable Tchaikovsky melody rang out, played by the Bolshoi, then the Great Procession started to move, drum majors’ batons whirled in front of white-gloved drummers and shawm bands, on the gallery of the Red Pharaoh’s Mausoleum there was a flash of gold as the fanfares were raised. Mere dots, the royal household, sublimely blasphemous on the red granite blocks beneath which the Great Man lay, waved to the masses of workers marching past, to the electricity works on wheels, to the Taiga, the boreal forest of the rockets, the white-gloved commanders saluting on their tanks that creep past aligned on an invisible spirit level, the MIGs tying colourful birthday bows in the air, I remembered that the houses of Atlantis were rinsed through with military marches and Tchaikovsky, losing grain after grain of an old, half-forgotten substance, like salt being washed out of a level –
The city was listening. Extremely sensitive stethoscopes kept track, as if they were in the hands of midwives on the bellies of the summer days pregnant with rumours that waddled along the singed Elbe valley, squashed flat beneath the baroque shapes of cumulus, without looking for a place to give birth. They listened to Prague, to Libussa’s reports of the things happening in the Federal German embassy there, climbed the stairs of the district, returned, distorted and blown up, didn’t come to rest, trickled down Buchensteig to Körnerplatz, scurried across the Blue Miracle, encountered Meno in Fendler’s delicatessen, where he was buying foam-rubber cosmonauts, as a conjecture, at Nähter’s, where he was doing an errand for Barbara, as a manifest certainty. They were listening to East Rome, where the garden gnomes were smiling and the cuckoo-clock postboxes overflowing with petitions.
Londoner wanted to know what Meno was worried about. During those days he seemed to be in the best of moods, gave his ex-son-in-law a glass of port, crossed his legs with an expression of cheerful satisfaction. Yes, Hanna had told him. Those people at the embassy … He was the brother-in-law of a surgeon, wasn’t he, they called it lancing the abscess. Where there is pus, make an incision. At that very moment there were unmistakable signs of significant progress; the Secretary for Economic Questions had consulted him, referring to an article he, Jochen Londoner (the old man’s face glowed with pleasure), had published in Einheit, the Central Committee’s periodical for theory … There was to be an, oh, what was he saying, there were to be many, rubbish, there were to be masses of actions taken by the Free German Youth, for the Max iron works in Unterwellenborn, for example: Max needs scrap iron – we’ll take them a hundred thousand tons. That showed what huge reserves we have at our disposal. Meno remained silent, staring at Londoner. In previous times he would have said what an awful joke he’d just made, now he was rubbing his hands, talking about loans from Austria, about secret (how he savoured the word, the gratified smile of one in the know on his lips) reserves of hard currency, making Meno wonder what the Londoners father and son would talk about in the evening; Jochen Londoner gave Meno a cheerful pat on the shoulder: his latest book (‘perhaps, no, definitely my best’) had now finally been accepted for printing, moreover he and Irmtraud were going on holiday: to Sicily, Taormina! What did he have to say to that?
… but then, all at once …
(Schade) ‘Oh, do stop going on about the people knowing best, Fräulein Schevola. We’ve seen what that amounts to once before, we, the communists of the first generation were proved right and the people wrong! We have a truth, we have the truth, just you remember that, and we will defend it again, even against the people if need be!’
(Lührer) ‘Haven’t you got anything else to say? You sound like a scratched record.’
(Schade) ‘And you’re talking like my uncle, who was a shopkeeper. You say “my readers”, just the way he used to say “my customers”. And he did everything for his customers!’
(Schevola) ‘Knowst thou the land, where light and shade are clearly distinguished? I long for it.’
(Barsano) ‘Something for your joke collection? When Khrushchev was sacked he wrote two notes. To his successor he said, “If you’re ever in a hopeless situation, open the first one. If you get in such a situation again, the second.” Soon his successor was in such a situation. In the first note it said: Just blame me for everything. That helped. In the second it said, “Sit down and write two notes.” ’
(Emcee) ‘I’m the Whirligig, when wound, I keep everything going, round and round.’
The cry of the thousands of prospective emigrants up to the balcony of the German embassy, where the Federal Foreign Minister had proclaimed freedom, was like a highly infectious splinter in the hearing of the sick and weary body whose fortieth birthday had to be celebrated in a few days’ time. Even when the six trains with the emigrants were passing through Dresden, the Prague embassy was overcrowded again. The news that a further train from Prague was to be diverted northwards, via Bad Schandau and Dresden, swept through the town like an infection, beyond the control of the radio and the press, which were trying to play it down, impossible to contain with lies and intimidation, beyond the despairing fury with which the duty officers employed their nautical instruments: despite their delirious tone, the ship they believed they were steering was scarcely obeying thei
r orders any more but, as Meno knew as he made his way home from Barsano’s reception for the Writers’ Association, the wind, with which the unpredictable, power-hungry force that they thought they had tamed over the years with promises, threats, distractions, sweetness, returned.
The cold built up in the tenements, in the kitchens with the extractor hoods and sliding doors, from which hung little mascots, kitchens in which the mothers grew old at the tiny cookers for baby’s milk and dinner, the menu dependent on what was available in the local store: shelves for flour and malted bread, for cabbages, preserves and for ‘nowt’, at the meat counter gleaming empty hooks and the usual under Plexiglass hoods: blutwurst, brawn, tripe, bacon fat, among them a little aluminium figure of Ernst Thälmann; cold air saturated with particles hung in the hatch between kitchen and living room where the Sandman introduced the children’s evening programmes to Young Pioneers sitting staring at the standard wall unit with matryoshka dolls, miners’ pennants; the cold in the halls with local wall newspapers, the house rules, the announcements of the Tenement Community Committee (‘Tee See See’ voices resounded across the river, SS Tannhäuser at the border of Atlantis): The Committee Secretary calls on you to do a day’s extra voluntary work. Care for your green spaces, citizens. Not everything should be put down the refuse chute, citizens. Call to participate in the Economic Mass Initiative (‘Ee Em Aye, Ee Em Aye,’ sang the Minol oriole): Repairing the paths in the area. Cold turned the puddles outside the tenements to ice, made the muddy paths freeze. Wind, the dark foreman, sucked warmth out of the central heating, tore the banners outside the House of Culture, rummaged round in the skips where the children played cowboys and Indians after school
Pale children. Scarred knees, cuts on the head, gashes that are sewn in the local outpatient clinic without anaesthetic; grazes, stinging, at the ice-cold Sepso tincture, while racing round the clothes poles in the back yard, skin scraped off on the wood; freckled, jug-eared children in football shirts made by their mothers with the famous numbers on, the legendary names: Walter, Rahn, Ducke, Puskas, Hidegkuti (difficult to spell! difficult to find someone who knew how to), Pelé. Girls played at Chinese twist, girls read books … girls played chess. (‘This book prize is to honour your successful participation in the City Spartakiad in the field of chess. We wish you much joy and success in the practice of this mental exercise. Your sponsoring work team.’) You couldn’t go a hundred metres without names. Freedom for Luis Corvalán. The Bohr, the Rutherford, model of the atom; the Comrade Chairman of the State Council looking up from the light-blue background, his head slightly tilted to one side, with a thoughtfully reflective gaze at (‘nah!’ ‘nah!’) ‘our young citizens’. Build up, build up: in the physics and chemistry rooms the ‘Young Technicians’, ‘Electronics’, ‘Young Cosmonauts’ study groups –
On 3 October a crowd forced its way to Central Station, to the Kasko advert and the ever-lit Radeberger sign, several hundred men (the women, more cautious, waiting to see what would happen, behind them) on the dull, chilly evening that belonged to a new reckoning since the New Forum had been banned, since the events on castle hill in Prague, something had happened that could no longer be determined by the traditional enclosures, something was happening somewhere in the darkness that was perforated by the rectangular yellows of the tower-block windows on Leningrader Strasse, the reciprocal tunnelling of the headlights of the trams and country buses. The men were young, almost all of them around twenty or thirty, dressed in the ill-fitting jackets, army anoraks with dyed artificial fur and check cotton shirts of the country’s garment industry; a few middle-aged men were, absurdly, Meno thought, in their Sunday best, as if they were off for an excursion and a meal at a country inn. Their faces bore the defensive and horrified expressions of people who have been rescued, and are in a place that is for the moment safe, at the sight of a natural disaster. The larger the waiting crowd became, the more police lined up against them. They seemed to have come from all over the country, Meno saw Rostock and Schwerin numberplates on the police vehicles.
‘But we’ve got tickets, we have the right to go through,’ Josef Redlich said. He was stopped, a policeman brusquely ordered him to show his ID and open his luggage. Confused, he lifted up his briefcase with the documents for Hermes’s autumn meetings, a swift gesture of surprise, the policeman leapt back and raised his truncheon. Meno and Madame Eglantine, who was chewing a frankfurter, stepped between them and were grabbed by several policemen, who pushed them into the station, where they managed to prove their bona fides. More people were waiting there. Most, Meno learnt, had come from Bad Schandau, where they had hoped to take one of the emigrants’ trains or get to Prague but had been forced back by police or men in bomber jackets. Since midday, passport- and visa-free travel to Czechoslovakia had been suspended, that to Poland had not been reintroduced. Now the bitter joke in the town was that the only way of leaving the country was feet first.
The police were wearing helmets with visors; they were uncertain and watchful in their movements, like pilots who had made a good landing but in the wrong place and were therefore only half heroes. Punks were camped in front of the station flower shop. A bevy of nuns was following a yellow umbrella waving the message ‘Jesus lives’ above the heads of the waiting crowd. Outside the telephones near the exit to the tram stops for the 11 and 5, usually, when Meno went to Berlin, an area with bunches of people buzzing with impatience as they besieged the booths, an exclusion zone had formed round a huge patch of vomit, a beige ejaculation fraying outward, still seething with explosive energy, a paint bucket slopped out in a wild, Expressionist gesture. Josef Redlich took off his hat to it. In the Mitropa a crush, tobacco-smoke-filled air, yeasty looks over the red-and-white checked oilcloth covered in splotches of sauce, plastic plates, restaurant cups with a green rim. Outside, clusters of people, the three had difficulty pushing their way through to their platform. Overfull wastepaper baskets knocked down. Pigeons, fluttering, agitated, the whale skeleton of the concourse stretched over a chalk reef given a daily coat of whitewash. Josef Redlich examined the trains, explained details. Electric engines, diesel engines, on the outer tracks fossils from pioneering days expelling smoke from their nostrils like angry buffaloes. The little man seemed uncertain what to do, jiggled his case, kept tugging at his hat. ‘What do you think of all this, Herr Rohde?’ He stared at the smooth, putty-grey floor covered in beer bottles and crumpled newspapers.
‘I don’t know,’ Meno said evasively. They had to be careful, that was all he could say. He’d always liked Redlich, that ‘honest soul’ as he was called at Hermes, who ‘did what he could’.