The Tower: A Novel

by Uwe Tellkamp

  Meno was on Oberer Plan. The railway clock over the checkpoint clicked onto a quarter to eight. It wasn’t far to Oktoberweg, where the Old Man of the Mountain lived. The snowflakes were falling less thickly; the wind had eased off; the flags on the poles to the right of the checkpoint flapped sluggishly: the red flag with the hammer and sickle, the black-red-and-gold flag with the hammer and compasses in a wreath of grain, a white one with stylized portraits of Marx, Engels and Lenin. Guards were standing by the flagpoles, staring straight ahead, presenting their Kalashnikovs; the expression on their faces was impassive and yet, as he knew, they were watching his every move. He could feel the captain’s eyes behind the reflective glass of the window that looked out onto the square. He turned right, into Nadezhda-Krupskaja-Strasse, sticking close to the railings beyond which Oberer Plan fell away steeply, allowing a view of the lower parts of East Rome. Coal Island was wreathed in haze; a railway line ran along beside Majakowskiweg and its House of Culture; a squad of soldiers was busy shovelling snow off the track; clouds of steam were already coming out of the tunnel at the bottom of Majakowskiweg; in a few moments the narrow-gauge train would emerge from the cavity, give two brief whistles, presumably for the switchman at the little thermal power station on German-Titow-Weg, cross the valley in a curve and disappear into the other tunnel, which was not visible from Meno’s viewpoint. The driver was leaning out of the window; he straightened his railwayman’s cap and pulled his head back in as he passed the soldiers, who were now standing beside the track, smoking and leaning on their shovels. A man was squatting down on the tender, his face smeared with ashes and wearing a fur chapka with the earmuffs tied under his chin; smiling, his teeth gleaming, his hands in shapeless mittens that made them look like bears’ paws, he waved up to Meno. He felt uncomfortable about it and glanced at the soldiers, who had noticed the gesture and were now staring up at him as well; he stepped back a little, not only to get away from observation but also because at that moment the engine was right underneath him, and he would otherwise have been standing in the thick cloud of steam full of particles of soot from the smokestack. So it was still the same: the ‘Black Mathilda’, as the train was called, supplied the power station and the households of East Rome with coal – a separate line that came from Coal Island for that district alone, from a mine that had officially been closed down but was secretly still in operation, as Hanna’s father had once told him. It was the same driver as well; he’d recognized his walrus moustache.

  Nadezhda-Krupskaja-Strasse wound its way gently up to the top of the steep ridge. Yew hedges, trimmed into vertical walls, screened a row of two-storey detached houses, all with the same light-grey roughcast, each with a garage and, on the garden fence, a letter box in the form of a cuckoo clock decorated with sprigs of fir and little ‘year’s-end-winged-figures’ – as they supposedly said up here instead of ‘angels’, Meno recalled with a snort of laughter. Beside the neatly cleared and gritted garden paths each property had a Douglas fir, and each tree had one bird feeder and one fat-ball hanging from it; peering out of the snow round the trunk were garden gnomes, the three versions with pipe, with wheelbarrow and with spade – that gnome was balancing on the spade with both feet and a roguish smile on its face. There were two flags over the front door of each house: on the right the flag of the GDR, on the left that of the Great Socialist October Revolution. This had not changed either, was familiar to him from his time with Hanna. It was something else that was new. He stopped for a moment and listened. Muted, many-voiced barking could be heard, turning after a few seconds into loud howls. He had noticed the noise earlier, as he was watching the soldiers from Oberer Plan; the arrival of the narrow-gauge train had drowned it out. It sounded like the barking of young dogs, but he couldn’t be sure. When he reached the top of the ridge, he had a view of almost the whole of the district: the House of Culture with, in front of it, the massive sculpture of Upright Fighters for Socialism brandishing their granite fists in the morning light; the avenue, paved with sandstone flags and lined with traffic cones, leading from the House of Culture to Engelsweg, a dead end with chestnut trees in which there was an HO supermarket, a chemist’s, a florist’s and an electrical store – for the East Rome housewives to do their shopping – and a men’s and a ladies’ hairdresser. The two chimneys on Gagarinweg belonged to the Friedrich Wolf Hospital and the Ivan V. Michurin restaurant complex, both of which were for the exclusive use of East Rome. Rising up from the wooded range of hills on the other side of the valley were the box-shaped storeys of Block A, a restricted area within the restricted area of East Rome; there, in the spacious bunkers protected by a company of guards, were the apartments of the top nomenklatura. The barking came from a kind of sports field below Block A, something he had not seen before. What, at his first, cursory glance, he could have taken for a teeming mass of black leeches turned out, when he had gone a little farther to a place where he had a better view, to be a cluster of black dogs, which, from that distance, looked no bigger than puppies. But the men beside them, wrapped up in protective clothing, armed with truncheons and blowing commands on referee’s whistles, were no bigger than children – it was just the perspective that made everything look smaller; the dogs’ hindquarters came up to the men’s hips. He would have liked to have had a pair of binoculars. But it was unthinkable to stand up here looking round East Rome with binoculars. In no time at all a squad in uniform would have appeared beside him, or a car would have detached itself from the shadow under one of the trees; he would have been asked what he was doing there, would have been invited to a shorter or longer interrogation in Block B, which, like the thermal power station, could not be seen from that viewpoint. The binoculars would have been confiscated; the two duty officers would have been reprimanded for not having noticed such a hostile, negative piece of equipment and impounded it. Laxity had appeared there too. He was surprised that they had not demanded to inspect his briefcase at either checkpoint. Was that no longer necessary? Had they developed technology that made such crude methods unnecessary? Meno went on. Even without binoculars he was still being observed – he had spent too long staring at the dog-training field, a suspicious individual with a hat, coat collar turned up and a briefcase; it was uncertain whether the powers-that-be would react to his little bit of spying, but he certainly had no desire for closer acquaintance with Block B, nor for encounters with unknown men at work or at home. As he made his way to the Old Man of the Mountain, he took with him in his memory the runs that radiated out from the training field in all directions, the barbed-wire fences round it and the kennels underneath, the wooden puppets with arms spread wide into which the dogs – they seemed to be of the same breed as Kastshey – leaping up, sank their teeth, the climbing walls with the window slits that had been cut out of the scratched and splintered wood six feet above the ground. The dogs could reach them easily.

  On the dot of eight he was at the garden gate of 8 Oktoberweg and rang the cracked bell that was held on with sticking plaster.

  8

  Picture postcards

  The nights, Christian felt, were far too short. He had just hit the stop button on his alarm clock to switch off its rattle, that burst of machine-gun fire in the world of a beautiful dream; but then there was the cold of the room in the grey half-light of dawn, the sound of Falk Truschler’s unmoved snoring in the lower bunk across from him – when would he learn to be on time? Never, Frau Stesny, the manager of the hostel, had said – the bed, table, a few chairs appeared, Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli’s ecstatic face on the black-and-white calendar that the girls and the boarders from the twelfth year in the room next door envied him for. From the other side! Jens Ansorge had assumed a crooked grin and waved his index finger. Schnürchel won’t like that at all. And indeed, during his round of the rooms Schnürchel, the Russian teacher, had demanded the calendar be removed. Christian left it there and only took it down on Saturdays, before Schnürchel came sneaking along to stick his face, chafed raw from his razo
r, into matters that, unfortunately, did concern him. It was Verena above all who was interested in the calendar and even more in the musicians whose pictures were on it. Verena the unapproachable, the mocker, the beauty. Christian had dreamt of her. Perhaps it was her hair, its colour the brown of instruments, that was what he had first noticed about her in the summer work-week that the future pupils at the Maxim Gorki Senior High School had had to complete; perhaps her eyes, darkly shining like the cherries on the gnarled tree in the garden of his clock-grandfather in Glashütte when they were overripe and their skins would burst open in the next shower of rain. It was probably a movement, however; she had dried her hair in the school library, where half of the boys were housed during the work camp; that afternoon he had been there by himself, lying on his camp bed; she had come in and asked if she might use the socket, the one over in the girls’ accommodation wasn’t working; and then, through the whine of the dryer, she’d wanted to know why he was lying there in the murky room, shutting himself off from all the things the others were doing. He lowered the book he was pretending to read, it was Goethe’s Elective Affinities and he found it deadly boring but it was far above the stuff the others read – if they read at all – and left no doubts as to its quality. She stared at him; he stared back, confused by her finely drawn, dark-red lips that were swelling into a provocative pout under his gaze, by the index finger with which she scratched her neck, by the fingernail blackened by a hammer blow that missed its target. The girls had been in the schoolyard repairing the desks, while the voice of Tamara Danz of the Silly rock group was bellowing out from the radio that Herr Stabenow, the boyish physics teacher, had set up by the flagpoles; suddenly the cry of pain and all the boys, apart from himself and Siegbert Füger, dashed over to Verena, who was sobbing. ‘Too dumb even to knock in a nail, these women,’ Siegbert had said, wrinkling his nose. ‘And look at them all running. And her, she’s going to make some man’s life a misery, I can tell you. Much too pretty. And sure to be as conceited as they come. My mother always says: “You can’t build a house with jewels, my lad.” And my mother knows what’s what.’

  Christian peered down at Falk again. He was still snoring, though now he’d pulled his pillow over his ears.

  He’d been struck by her at the very first meeting of the future pupils of the senior high school. The pupils had come with their parents. The Dacia with the Waldbrunn numberplate had parked beside the Lada from Dresden; Richard had noticed the first-aid kit on the rear shelf and the doctor’s special parking badge on the dashboard of the Dacia and immediately started a chat with his colleague: ‘Hoffmann.’ – ‘Winkler.’ – ‘Pleased to meet you.’ – ‘The pleasure’s all mine.’ – ‘Blahblah.’ – ‘Blahblahblah.’ Verena had waited, scrutinized the Dresden numberplate, the paved corner with the flagpoles and bust of Maxim Gorki, then cast Christian a quick glance so that Robert, with a grin, whispered, ‘Just look at that peach, man’, in his ear. The multipurpose room in the basement had been set up for the meeting. There was a piano, a Marx–Engels–Lenin poster in front of a lectern draped in red cloth, a table behind it, at which a few teachers were talking to each other, ignoring the chatter of voices. Most of the pupils knew each other already. Christian felt as if they were all looking him over, for he seemed to be the only one no one knew. When he came in there was just one seat left, by the entrance; sitting there was like being on show, which didn’t seem to bother Robert in the least, he just brazenly chewed his chewing gum and cast his eyes over the girls. Christian, on the other hand, was embarrassed; his acne had to choose that day of all days to blossom like a willow in spring. Verena’s family had sat in the back row, under the high tilt windows, so that Christian could observe Verena. She greeted some of the others in a friendly but, as it seemed to him, distant manner. The babble of voices gradually subsided. Furtive glances. Christian lowered his head and didn’t dare look at anything apart from his fingernails, his new watch or Baumann, the white-haired maths teacher who, from the lectern far away at the front, was giving an introduction to socialist education for young people; as he spoke, his apple-cheeked face seemed strangely roguish – as if he himself didn’t believe everything he was saying. But Christian sensed that one should trust that friendly appearance less than the flash of his clear and sharp rimless spectacles … Christian suspected he would never be in the good books of that archetypal schoolteacher with the flashing spectacles. His ability at maths was too awful. The dark-haired girl by the windows at the back, he thought, would definitely be good at maths, she would definitely be good at everything in school. A swot, no question.

  ‘So why do you shut yourself off from everything?’ the swot had asked on that afternoon during the summer work camp, in the school library, the hair dryer in her hand; only she and he in the room. ‘I suppose everything we poor benighted village kids do is too boring or too ordinary for a boy from the big city of Dresden?’ He wanted to make a quick-witted reply, but nothing occurred to him and that made him even more furious when immediately afterwards Verena, without waiting for an answer, shrugged her shoulders and went out.

  A boy from the big city. How they’d secretly – and sometimes less secretly – mocked him, made remarks about his strange habits. He didn’t go for a shower with the others but always arranged things so that he was by himself; nothing in the world would have persuaded him to display his puberty-stricken skin to others; he didn’t go with them to the swimming pool in Freital and he preferred to pursue his own thoughts or dreams rather than seek out the company of the other boys. He only sensed something like understanding from Jens Ansorge and Siegbert Füger; at least they left him in peace. He had been pleased when he learnt he was to share a room in the boarders’ house with them. Even though he didn’t go with them when they went into the town, he did also look round Waldbrunn, by himself and in the evening, when he could be reasonably sure he wouldn’t meet the other pupils. Waldbrunn, the administrative centre of the eastern Erzgebirge; the F170 motorway wound its way above the school, descended into the river valley of the Rote Bergfrau, cut through the central district as it headed for the ridge of the Erzgebirge and the Czech border, which it reached just after Zinnwald. Simple, low houses, church and castle, each with a tower; in the distance, when you came by bus from Dresden, drove over Windhaushügel and down into Waldbrunn and the new housing appeared on the right, you could see the gleam of the Kaltwasser, the reservoir that dammed the second Waldbrunn river, the Wilde Bergfrau. To the left of the motorway was a potato field, during the work camp they’d picked potatoes, they got ten pfennigs a basket, hard work, they were picking the potatoes on piecework, their backs ached from all the bending and he, the boy from the big city, had been one of the worst, even a lot of the girls had managed more baskets than he did. In the evening of the two potato-picking days, he had crept into his camp bed completely exhausted; he’d had to put up with a few teasing, sarcastic, even contemptuous remarks. From the beginning he felt there was a gap between himself and the other pupils of that senior high school.

  He had a collection of postcards that he would often look at in the evening, by the light of his reading lamp. They were sepia and coloured views of distant places with exotic-sounding names that stimulated his imagination: Smyrna, Nice. You could see the white horses of the Mediterranean as it broke on the Promenade des Anglais, a clay pot with an agave on the left, on the right edge the row of fashionable hotels along the Promenade lined with palm trees. ‘Salerno, Piazza Mo Luciani’ on a photograph that at the edges merged into the yellowing white of the postcard; as if wiped away by the erasing fingers of time. However, the ones that led to the profoundest daydreams, farthest removed from reality, were a series of views of Constantinople that he had been allowed to select from duplicates in Herr Malthakus’s stamp and picture postcard shop in Dresden. A leaden blue sea: ‘Vue de l’Amirauté sur la Corne d’Or’; ‘Vue de Beycos, côte d’Asie (Bosphore)’; ‘Salut de Constantinople’; ‘Le Selamlik. Revue militaire’ with a crowd
of black, cube-shaped carriages dotted with the red fezzes of the crowd. Those were the places where one ought to be, to live. When he looked at the cards Christian dreamt, dreamt of adventures, of conversations between pirates overheard in harbour taverns that would enable him to save beautiful women who had been abducted. Constantinople. Salerno. The Bosphorus. And ‘la Corne d’Or’ was the Golden Horn. That was where heroes lived, that was where adventure was. And what did he have? Waldbrunn. He would walk round the little town but with the best will in the world he couldn’t find any sailing ships such as there were on the pictures of Constantinople, the fairy-tale city. No muezzin called from the dark, bastion-like church on the market square and Herr Luther, in blackened sandstone on which the pigeons perched and left white theses, proclaimed, ‘A safe stronghold our God is still’ in chiselled letters. None of the women queuing at the butcher’s or the baker’s on the market square were anything like Princess Fatima, who, in gratitude for her rescue from the hands of the negro Zurga, would marry the adventurer Almansor – that was Christian’s alias in the Orient. But to get married: Christian, standing on the bridge over the Wilde Bergfrau as it foamed over smooth round stones the size of footballs, shook his head. He would never get married, never, never, as long as he lived. An adventurer had adventures, a hero was solitary; with Fatima he had an affair that, as in the films he saw at the cinema, ended in the sunset, wild, painful and sadly beautiful. He looked across at the tannery: in the past the Wilde Bergfrau had powered it with its steely clear water; now it housed a museum. In the autumn he had enjoyed following the course of the Wilde Bergfrau, had thrown red maple leaves into it and, head bowed and hands clasped behind his back, watched them bobbing up and down; had Verena seen him like that, a glint of mockery at his poses would have crept into her eyes again. It seems that in the big city people mature earlier, she would have cried, as she had on the afternoon when their unit had gone to the cinema at the end of the street that ran along the bank of the Wilde Bergfrau, beyond the castle that now housed the local Party headquarters. Her eyes had flashed and she had rolled her hair round her index finger, and he, in his fury, had thought: You don’t understand, you silly Waldbrunn goose; I’ve just come from Constantinople and not from your east Erzgebirge dump with its paved marketplace and ten hunchback houses round it; it’s the flutter of Sinbad’s sails I can hear, not that of the wings of the few provincial Trabbis puttering past us. If you only knew that Sinbads don’t drive Trabbis.