The Tower: A Novel

by Uwe Tellkamp

  and

  shouts, the drumming of batons, sheer lust. Kettling, scurrying, boring. Thousands had come back from Schandau on foot, driven partly by the police, partly by other authorities, partly in resignation after days of camping by the tracks

  and

  rioters, the scum of every day on their faces cracking open to show the white undercurrent of hatehatehate, they stripped wood off scaffolding, broke bottles into deadly jagged crowns, suddenly had an armful of cobblestones that they hurled at the advancing power of the state, shields cracked, visors split open, windowpanes shattered, glittering theatrically, into splinters that seemed to salt the ground, howling was the response. Meno was standing pressed against a pillar, incapable of moving

  and

  yet they came closer, the gangs and cordons and rubber truncheons at the ready, Describe the rutting and attack ceremonies of red deer, went through Meno’s mind, he still had his case, not his ticket any more, just a scrap of paper, someone had torn it out of his hand

  and

  the black dogs, barking, their gums very pink, their teeth very white and dripping saliva, pulled on their leads, shaking their handlers with the power of their black haunches, strange engravings of their claws on the smooth, hard floor of the station concourse, loops and scrolls, perhaps flowers, dog roses, Meno thought

  and

  truncheons came raining, pelting, whizzing down, a thudding like horse chestnuts on the roof of parked cars, the bizarre reality of the screams that answered them, people were kicked to the ground, trampled, hands raised in defence, but the rubber truncheons had tasted

  fear and

  blood and

  blood and

  lust

  and

  there were the toilets, Meno ran with the others, the herd, instinctive, opportunities. The toilets. The vault, blue tiles, the stench of ammonia cutting like a discus through the breath of those rushing in. Meno recoiled, the trap, what will you do if they lock them, ran out, he could see the expressions of the police, the index-finger arms. Out, out, outside the station, get out of the station. Tear-gas cartridges clattered on the ground, people ran away, a yielding zone yawned like a slit in taut skin, then the smoke swirled up. Water cannons squirted paths through the tangles of flight and free-for-all, mashed the paper, pushed it into slimy castles on the edge of the tracks. Meno looked up, saw video cameras, saw smashed station monitors; water was dripping down from the girders, filling the station with spray and gleaming metallic ribbons with which threads of blood interwove in slow motion.

  – paper,

  Meno wrote,

  paper, the mountain of paper –

  Christian was sitting in the quartermaster’s store, to which he now had a key, and roared as he bit his teeth into a fresh pack of soldiers’ underclothes. Sometimes he thought he was going mad. That the barracks, the tanks, the transfers from company to company were nothing but a dream, a long, unpleasant nightmare that yet must some time come to an end and he would be in bed, free, perhaps with the Comedian Harmonists singing on the Stenzel Sisters’ gramophone. Then he would go to the barracks library, a grotesque place watched over by a fat kindly woman with a granny apron and knitting (she knitted kidney warmers for the ‘young comrades’). Pale-gold trees shimmered along the barracks roads. The officers saluted jerkily, tension and fear on their faces. The political education classes had been doubled. The clichés trickled from their lips, covering the ground where they lay, invisible but attracting dust, despised, not taken seriously by anyone. There were exercises, work on the tanks, there were to be manoeuvres in the autumn. Christian was counting the hours to his discharge. Sometimes, even though he’d been in the army for almost five years now, he felt that he could no longer bear the few days of being locked in, would climb up onto the roof of the battalion building, the tar on which was still a malleable summery mass bubbling in the thermals between the black extractor fans, write letters that a kitchen assistant would smuggle out into a civilian postbox, read what Meno sent him (little Reclam paperbacks, Soviet fiction published by Hermes that had changed remarkably, suddenly there were blue horses on red grass). Most of the soldiers were now being sent out to work for various firms in Grün. Christian stood by a lathe, doing shifts as an assistant lathe operator. The soldiers wanted to go home but on the morning of 5 October they were given batons. Pancake laughed and asked Christian what he was going to do. Christian didn’t know, he couldn’t imagine, he didn’t want to imagine. Police came and trained them in their use on the regiment’s football ground. Attack from the left, attack from the right. Recognizing ringleaders, advancing in groups. For a while there was a rumour that Christian’s unit would be sent out with firearms. The soldiers were a motley crew brought together from companies that were left (sometime in the spring of ’89 disarmament had been decreed), from Cottbus, Marienberg, Goldberg, no one could keep track of the streams of transferees any longer. Nip was happy if he could scrape together enough clothes and food for all of them. The kitchen assistant was still allowed through the barracks gate and he brought new rumours, from Grün, where there was unrest in the metal works, from Karl-Marx-Stadt and Leipzig, from Dresden. In the evening they were ordered into lorries. No firearms! Rubber truncheons, summer combat fatigues, body protector, an extra ration of alcohol and cigarettes for each man. Most of the soldiers were silent, staring at the ground. Pancake was smoking.

  ‘I presume you don’t care,’ the man next to Christian said.

  ‘Get stuffed,’ Pancake said. He stuck his head out. ‘Nothing to be seen. No signs with place names.’

  ‘If we only knew where we’re going,’ a younger soldier said, he still had a year to go.

  ‘To Karl-Marx-Stadt,’ the man next to Christian said. ‘Makes sense, hardly anyone here comes from there.’

  ‘We’ve already gone past,’ Pancake said.

  ‘Have you swallowed a map?’ a corporal asked.

  ‘Plus an odometer.’

  ‘So it’s Dresden,’ the younger soldier said.

  ‘Beat up a few queers, something to look forward to for once,’ the corporal said. ‘Hey, Nemo, are there many queers in Dresden? I’m sure there’s loads of them there.’

  ‘Class enemies,’ Pancake prompted; someone gave him a light.

  ‘Do you believe what they told us? That it’s just hooligans and that kind of thing? From the West. And counter-revolutionary factions.’

  ‘And you’re one of them too, hmm? You just watch out,’ the corporal said menacingly. ‘Hey, Nemo, lost your tongue?’

  ‘Just leave him in peace,’ Pancake said casually.

  ‘I don’t let people threaten me, and I don’t let people run our state down,’ the corporal said.

  ‘Christ, what dark hole did you crawl out of?’ growled a sleepy voice from the seats by the driver’s cab.

  ‘So you’re going to fight,’ Pancake said.

  ‘Of course, they’re just a load of swine. It’s all they deserve.’

  ‘Then I’ll whack you over the head. The way you grunt.’

  ‘I’ll report you, Kretzschmar. You all heard what he said.’

  ‘You won’t report anyone,’ Christian said.

  ‘My view entirely,’ Pancake said. ‘No one here heard anything. Nichevo.’

  ‘They’re supposed to have hanged a policeman in Dresden.’

  ‘Fairy stories.’

  ‘They say Central Station’s closed. More damage than from the air raid.’

  ‘That’s what they tell you. And you fall for all that nonsense. Their fucking lies!’

  ‘Who said that? Who said fucking lies?’

  ‘And what if it’s true, eh?’

  ‘Can’t you lot just shut up,’ the sleepy voice said.

  The soldiers fell silent, smoked, checked the numbers of the cars that overtook their convoy of lorries.

  Dresden. Dismount.

  They were in Prager Strasse. Christian saw the lights but they were something alien, unknown, h
e came from this town and yet didn’t seem to belong any more, and the objects, the buildings seemed to have come alive: the Round Cinema had coyly covered up the glass cases with the film posters, the Inter-Hotels stared arrogantly over the heads of the soldiers, the riot police, the trainee officers who were assembling, instructed by officers running to and fro, but also by bomber-jacketed civilians: shouts, orders, threats.

  Crack down.

  Hard.

  The enemy.

  Counter-revolutionary aggression.

  Defence of the homeland of the Workers-and-Peasants.

  In front of them people heading for Central Station. The soldiers formed squads of a hundred, hooked arms to make a chain. Christian was beside Pancake in the second row. From the station came a dull rhythmical knocking noise. ‘Forwaaard – march!’ the officers shouted. Christian could feel his legs turning to jelly, the same feeling as he’d had when judgment had been pronounced in the court, oh to be able to fly, to be able to do something that would put an end to the madness, to turn around and walk away, he was afraid and he could see that Pancake was afraid as well. The station was a gurgling, gobbling mechanism, an illuminated throat that swallowed footsteps, spewed out water, smoke and fever. Over there? Was that where they were going? Trams lay, helpless, like seeds in the swelling flesh of a fruit made up of human beings. A car was turned over and set alight, Molotov cocktails fizzed through the air like burning beehives that burst, throwing out thousands of deadly spikes of flame. The soldiers halted by the Heinrich Mann bookshop, closing off Prager Strasse. Christian saw Anne.

  She was a few metres away, one of a group of people outside the bookshop and was haranguing a policeman. The policeman raised his baton and hit out. Once, twice. Anne fell down. The policeman bent down and continued to beat her. Kick her. Was immediately backed up when someone from the group tried to stop him. Anne had put her arms over her face like a child. Christian saw his mother lying on the ground, being kicked, thrashed, by a policeman. Lamps slid by like divers. There was an empty area round Christian, a lost darkness into which all the silence and protection and obedience that had gathered inside him slipped. He took his baton in both hands and tried to rush at the policeman, to beat him until he was dead, but someone was holding Christian, someone had wrapped his arms round Christian, someone was shouting, ‘Christian! Christian!’ and Christian shouted back and howled and thrashed about with his legs and wet himself out of impotence, then it was over and he was slumped in Pancake’s vice-like grip like a puppy that has had its neck broken, they could do what they liked with him, he wanted nothing but to be in the future, he wanted nothing but to be elsewhere, Pancake carried him to the rear, Christian was sobbing, Christian wished he were dead.

  He was taken back to the barracks’ where the following day he was interrogated by an official of the sealed and barred doors. He studied Christian’s file, rested his chin on his hands woven into a loose mat, said, ‘Hm, hm.’

  Christian had been given an injection, a tranquillizer, from the doctor at the Med. Centre. He said (thinking as he did so of Korbinian and Kurtchen: We’ll see each other again. You’re not going to get out of here. Farewell and forgive us): ‘Schwedt’, said it in a matter-of-fact voice.

  The other man stood up, went to the window, scratched his unshaven cheek. ‘I’m still thinking what we should do with you. But I don’t think Schwedt is what is required. No. I think you need …’

  Christian waited, unconcerned, his nerves weren’t much use any more.

  ‘… leave,’ the other man said. ‘I’m going to send you on leave. You have a few days left. Go and stay with your grandfather in Schandau. Though … you might do something stupid there. It’s better if you go to Glashütte.’ He took a pass out of one of the drawers, signed it, stamped it. ‘Perhaps you’d better not go via Dresden. There’s a country bus from Grün to Waldbrunn and you know how to continue your journey from there.’

  Christian remained seated. The pass was on the table in front of him.

  ‘Just say thanks, Comrade Captain. We’re not that bad.’

  Walpurgis-Night’s Dream:

  Meno wrote,

  Climb aboard, Arbogast says, breaking a pencil in two and jamming a piece in the rudder. The airship rises, it’s rigid but light and I can see the city, Berlin, the government’s Copper Island. In front of it the ships are stuck in the wide, coagulated Liver Sea, their masts wrecked, their keels beyond dreams, on the isle the outline of a mountain becomes visible, a deposit of still-ticking clocks, behind it is the surging, sucking, swallowing Whirlscrew, the spiral, the downward reflection of the Tower. Blue skies over the Republic, real national-holiday weather. If I look through one of the eyepieces of the strange construction – a kind of huge microscope – fixed to the cockpit of the airship, I can see details; it’s 7 October, the anniversary of the founding of the Republic, a Pioneers choir is singing the song of the young naturalists: Our land has donned its Sunday best, the dew glints in its hair … The fields are full of flowers bright, the trees stand tall and strong, and whisper soft, for our delight – come hear their secret song. We approach. I don’t need the microscope to see that the roads are an extensive network of convolutions of a whitish substance, I can see the two hemispheres floating in the Liver Sea; the piece of screen above the brain, a TV weather map with the felt-pen circles of the areas of high and low pressure, has taken on the tent-grey of the dura mater; the cobwebby skin of the arachnoidea is covered with the rusted hedges of the hundred-year-old roses whose scent washes over the smell of fat from the state-owned fried-food outlets. Neues Deutschland, the organ of the Central Committee of the Socialist Unity Party, has appeared in a special edition, doves of peace, workers’ proclamations, flutter up from the paper, smiling, children-kissing soldiers wave. The official route, along which the cars with the foreign delegations will approach the centre with its rostrums and still-empty main streets for the procession, has been swept clean, the buildings freshly plastered up to the maximum height that can be seen from the official limousines and decked out with optimistic slogans. In the eyepiece nerve cells, with an auratic glow from psycho-cocktails, tropical plants spring up on the banks of the Spree, the Palace of the Republic infiltrated by the furtive, lethargic blooms of flesh-red parasitic flowers, other nerve cells appear to have been shut out, avoided by nutrients and neurotransmitters, they decompose and, in a kind of retro-embryonic abandonment, are walled into the rhythm of the clocks on the mountain, layer by layer the calcareous deposit thickens round their cell membranes. The brain is old, an aged brain, the fine blood tubes supplying it crack like puff pastry when searching endoscopes – I am not the only one looking, the system has distrusting members of staff – follow a curve, arteriosclerotic plaques have been deposited, only allowing single red, oxygen-bringing blood corpuscles through. A gala performance! The Sandman arrives by helicopter. The Skat Court of Arbitration, cross-hatched by fibre roses of rising pain tracts, lays its cards on the table, Karl-Eduard von Schnitzler, the bosun of the Black Channel – its offbeat, jangling, vampire-drama theme tune is playing in the entrance hall of the Palace of the Republic, a lamp shop that today has spared no expense with the illumination – has turned into a naval shipworm, his chief propagandist’s mouth twisted in a grimace of hatred and torment, we can see him bore into the room of Make a Wish where Uta Schorn and Gerd E. Schäfer weave little anecdotes into their cosy chat, but that is not his destination, nor the jolly lads in blue from Eight Bells, Sea Astern singing sea shanties to the squeezebox and small talk, he traverses Kati’s Ice Show and disappears in the depths of the Book Ministry lodged in Wernicke’s Centre, the auditory word centre, drills into the crumbling mass of files and log books. Dance the samba with me, Samba, samba the whole night through. Dance the samba with me, For the samba brings me close to you, rings out over Alexanderplatz, the guests at the state reception turn to the culinary delights: ham from Wiepersdorf pigs that fed under the olive oaks there, venison between decoratively cro
ssed Suhl rifles, parsley in the barrels, to go with it Edel brandy, lemonade for the fraternal Soviet delegation, wine from Meissen, pineapples and all the other things the TV chef recommends – Truth! Truth! the Minol oriole cried, and it is printed there, in the Party newspapers, the CENTRAL ORGAN and in the district newspapers, do you see the wires, they’re as fine as cobwebs, touch them, a telephone will ring and a trembling editor will reply, and if it’s time for the drinking trough, every Thursday after the meeting of the Politburo (Tuesdays) and after the discussions of the Secretariat of the Central Committee (Wednesdays), then gather, you editors-in-chief of all the newspapers of Copper Island in the depths of the copper forest, of the mass organizations, with the head of the government press office, plug the functionaries into the machine, the apparatus: the linguistic punch unrolls its tongue = lingua! white-gloved robot hands pull, the linguistic punch starts up, trial run! there’s a clinking on the floor: empty word shells, tin headlines, paper streamers curl: THE MOST IMPORTANT CRITERION OF OBJECTIVITY IS COMMITMENT, COMRADE! TO BE OBJECTIVE MEANS TO COMMIT ONESELF TO THE LAWS GOVERNING THE PROGRESS OF HISTORY TO THE REVOLUTION TO SOCIALISM! The linguistic punch had a red button: the Lenin button that is now pressed: THE TRUE PRESS IS A COLLECTIVE PROPAGANDIST, AGITATOR, ORGANIZER! –

  (Emcee) ‘The State Opera ballet will now perform the polonaise from Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake. For those of you watching on black-and-white televisions I will describe the pretty tutus of our comrade ballet dancers.’