The Tower: A Novel

by Uwe Tellkamp

  During classes in the laboratory cubicles Verena sat on the bench beside Christian, only separated from him by the row of instruments. Siegbert Füger teased him: ‘Hey, Christian, you seem impressed by Fräulein Winkler.’

  ‘Nonsense!’

  ‘You keep looking across at her.’

  If even Siegbert Füger, who sat in the window row, noticed, then he’d have to be more careful. It meant Verena would probably have noticed too. That would explain her curt and tart remarks when he said ‘Good morning’ to her for the second time in a day – which, as he admitted to himself, he did out of both politeness and a certain maliciousness … Of course, the politeness was exaggerated and since Verena would nod the first time he said it, she couldn’t be deaf or not have noticed him in the throng of pupils. He wanted to hear her voice, for her voice, an alto whose vibrations already had undertones of a mature woman, fascinated him; he tried not to let it be obvious. His fascination was such that when she was nearby, he would tell dirty jokes to make Falk Truschler or Jens Ansorge laugh but in reality were directed at Verena in order to provoke her to protest or express her displeasure, and that he got to hear often enough … Sometimes then a particularly quick-witted reply would occur to him – at least he thought it was quick-witted; the way Jens and Falk fell silent seemed to confirm that. Verena would also fall silent and scrutinize him and he felt this eye contact, this deep shadow that had no coldness, as something delicious that far outweighed his embarrassment at his pimples. Stop, stay there! his eyes flickered, but he couldn’t interpret her look: had he, Christian, just thrown away his last chance and condemned himself to appear an incorrigible idiot in her eyes … ? And after one such look Jens had the effrontery to tell him he should take advantage of the moment of stunned silence between them and kiss Verena. ‘You’d do that?’ Christian asked in disgust.

  ‘Of course, you idiot. Anyone can see the girl fancies you,’ Jens roared.

  ‘Not that big-city peacock,’ she retorted.

  Christian flared up. ‘How do you know that?’ he demanded. How pretty she looked now.

  ‘You play the cello in the cellar, everyone can hear it, you … poseur! Our gifted artist always immerses himself in his music just as 11/1 has finished and he can achieve the greatest effect, especially on Kerstin Scholz!’

  It was true. Christian often found himself thinking of Kerstin Scholz, especially of her figure, when he was practising in the cellar. And that brought a certain intensity to his exercises.

  ‘Oh, how I suffer,’ Verena mocked, ‘but only in front of the others.’

  ‘So you do listen?’

  ‘Don’t kid yourself!’

  He found her sauciness impressive … ‘Oh, you know, you … pretty little thing,’ was his lame retort. Jens pretended he was going to be sick. Verena went bright red. Falk grinned. She turned away without a word.

  Herr Schnürchel was strange in a way that made Christian go along with Schnürchel’s games. Christian thought, in the evening: he smiled when you finally got the Moscow pronunciation of the letter shtsha right. Creamy like a soft ice. On the one hand Herr Schnürchel crept round the hostel and school corridors with suede-soft steps, put on his dusting gloves with pleasurable meticulousness and with an expression of dismay turned up lots of dirt, complained about Christian’s black-and-white calendar and Jens Ansorge’s magnetic tapes with suspiciously invisible music – Christian knew that Jens listened to the German New Wave music from the West – on the other hand Schnürchel would have nothing to do with the linguistic slovenliness of previous Russian teaching and came to every lesson with a pannier brimful of Russian words that he would tip out at his hard-pressed pupils’ Heiko fountain pens. Christian was intrigued by this other side of Schnürchel, his ambition was aroused. Every morning – Russian was generally one of the first two classes – his eye would survey Schnürchel’s cheeks, so closely shaved they looked gangrenous, the horse nostrils of his narrow nose with the red ball at the tip, his black hair that he smoothed down with sugar water; it was divided by a parting as precise as the edge of a folder. Herr Schnürchel would sit at his desk, ready to pounce, his eyes wide open with a look that was too penetrating for seven o’clock in the morning and made even Svetlana Lehmann lower her eyes. Herr Schnürchel wore Präsent 20 suits with razor-sharp creases, his shirts and ties were striped and always had a badge pinned to them, a pennant with the hammer and sickle on it. When he sat down, he crossed his feet and tilted his chair impatiently so that the white flesh of his calves could be seen above his striped socks and garters.

  One day in March, during the history class, he wrote a question on the board and told them to put their books and folders away in their desks. An unannounced class test. 1983, the Karl Marx Year. Wall newspapers had been covered with articles on the prophet-bearded philosopher, gradually obliterating the black-edged Brezhnev portraits. On 1 May, International Workers’ Day, there was to be a ‘Karl Marx procession of the pupils of the high school and senior high school’, Principal Fahner had announced at assembly. Schnürchel’s question was: ‘By what can we tell that the victory of socialism over capitalism proceeds according to certain laws. Base your argument on Marx’s theory of history.’ Without hesitation the pens started to scribble. Christian was annoyed; he was badly prepared. Every grade was important – the final grade was the average of all the individual grades and anyone who, like Christian, wanted to study medicine had to be close to an A at the end of the eleventh year, since it was that year’s report with which you applied for a place at university. He started to break the question down into its component parts. ‘By what’ and ‘according to laws’ and ‘Marx’s theory of history’ seemed to be the key words. Marx’s theory of history … Nothing came to mind, however hard he tried. He remembered the history room at the Louis Fürnberg High School where a few pictures on the wall, with an arrow underneath running from darkness to light, showed the history of humanity: primitive men with raised spears facing a mammoth, hairy women gathering fruits, the boys sharpening arrows or chipping hand axes; then Roman heads, slaves bowed low under the yoke, the glint of the Spartacus uprising already in their eyes … In the Middle Ages peasants in revolt brandished their scythes; then the picture from the days of the French Revolution with the bare-breasted figure of Liberty storming the barricades (her breasts had been worn flat by pupils who liked to get physically to grips with history); then came the age of the bearded heads: Marx, Engels, Lenin, and then nothing more, there was no wall left, the arrow of time stopped at the corner. There were always lots of pieces of chewing gum there … When someone asked the question ‘What next?’ a dreamy look would come over Frau Dreieck, the history teacher and principal of the high school, and she would give an answer containing a lot about light and air, making Christian think of Pioneer camps … the transition of imperialism, the orchid stage (flourishing on decaying ground) of capitalism, into socialism that somehow switched to or somehow softened into communism … He regularly pondered that ‘somehow’. The word ‘switched’ made Christian think of ‘setting the points’, a concept that frequently occurred in civics lessons; and now he had to set his points, in the direction of writing down his thoughts … Somehow. But what thoughts? Should he describe his amazement at the arrow of history ending in the corner of the classroom? Or would he be on the right lines (to continue the image), if he thought of a very ripe pear in his grandfather’s garden in Glashütte? Was history like the fruit, hanging proud and heavy with juice before the eyes of a humanity thirsting after water and sweetness? You could make excellent fruit brandy from pears like that … So was socialism the pear and communism the brandy distilled from it? Fruit brandy for everyone. And the hangover the next morning … ? Did that follow according to some law? The pear ripens, pests nibble at it and hollow it out, maggots leave a capitalist parasitical trail of waste matter, but then … If you ate you had to go to the bog, that too was a law of nature. Marx’s theory of history. Christian looked around for help, but he
was sitting by himself and couldn’t crib from anyone. Herr Schnürchel was sitting, feet crossed, at the teacher’s desk, rocking back- and forward in his chair, his basilisk stare fixed on Verena. Verena wasn’t writing. She seemed to be taking a break or pursuing some thought that her pen would record in a few seconds. Verena was staring out of the window. As far as Christian could tell, the sheet of paper in front of her was white. Her neighbour, Reina Kossmann, was squinting over at her irritatedly. Verena wasn’t writing. When the bell rang, Christian had gleaned four pages from the treasure-house of memory. Verena handed in a blank sheet.

  17

  Long-distance calls

  Spring had arrived quietly, its pale fingers of sunshine had wiped away the snow along the F170 so that the fields round Possendorf and Karsdorf seemed to be covered in dirty sheets. There were still days of cold, but they merely suspended the rout of winter; the snow was sickening, beneath the crust there was a dripping, sintering, trickling, water-druses formed, quicksilvered, licked away at bridges between hollows, sought each other out, wove rivulets. Icicles hung from the school roof, like rows of glassy eels hung up to dry, drops tocked, pinged and clacked in melodious antiphony; Jens Ansorge would have liked to record it and work it up into a ‘Song of the Thaw’. What he had in mind was Tomita’s music based on Mussorgsky’s Pictures from an Exhibition that the Japanese sound artist had arranged in the witches’ kitchen of his synthesizer and published with Amiga. How the others envied Jens that record! It had just come out and could not be bought in any record shop in the whole area, not even in Philharmonia. The owner, Herr Trüpel, had anticipated Christian’s request and told him even as the ‘clong’ of the shop-door bell was still sounding that ‘Herr To-mitta’s disc’ was no longer in stock, not even ‘for the freaks’. As he spoke he had given Christian a blank stare from blue eyes that were much enlarged by gold-rimmed glasses with round lenses. Not even under the counter? That was asked more out of naivety than cheek; Herr Trüpel simply raised his left eyebrow and hesitated a moment before he looked under the counter, stood up ramrod-straight and said, ‘No.’ One had to make do with cassettes. Without a word Herr Trüpel placed one on the counter in front of Christian. ‘That will do.’ And collected the retail price of 20 marks – for an ORWO magnetic tape cassette.

  Thaw in the Erzgebirge. The grey of the shingle roofs emerged like a stony skin, old and worn out, dulled by the lashing of wind and rain. The air lost the metallic smell of snow. In the higher villages the roads often became impassable, washed away by torrential mountain streams. The bark of the fruit trees lining the tracks across the fields was black and shiny with the moisture; the trees on the slopes of the Windberg and the Quohrener Kipse were like peasant women hunched from work.

  When the class went on a study outing on Tuesdays during the double biology lesson with Dr Frank, Christian kept apart from the other boarders in his house in order to avoid having to talk to them. He kept his senses awake to all impressions: this was his father’s and Uncle Hans’s country, this was where Arthur Hoffmann, his clock-grandfather, lived. And it was Verena’s country. They walked along the banks of the Kaltwasser, the Wilde Bergfrau, explored the upper reaches of the Rote Bergfrau with the tributaries that washed out the earth from underground veins of copper that gave it the reddish colour from which its name came, and Christian would think: she’s seen this, she went for walks here, perhaps she learnt to swim here, perhaps just here where the bank curves. He never asked her, didn’t dare to, fearing one of her tart or dismissive answers. But he observed her all the more closely, stared at every plant she looked at for any length of time, registered every whispering huddle, every outburst of laughter when the girls got together, casting mocking glances at the boys scattered around. Most often, he imagined, he seemed to be the target of these secret conclaves so that for a while he kept away from Verena, even sought out Dr Frank, their class teacher, as if he could think of nothing more interesting than the flora associated with a stream in the eastern Erzgebirge. He was familiar with most of the plants from his many walks with Meno and Grandfather Kurt. Dr Frank asked cautious questions about him. If Christian seemed about to say too much, he left him in peace. Then Frank would walk on by himself, well ahead of the pupils, and come back when he found something interesting. He would never force it on them or explain it just to show off his knowledge but seemed almost shamefaced in asking the pupils to pay attention. Dr Frank was a calm man with medium-length, greying hair that looked shaggy and had a half-hearted parting – less, so it seemed to Christian, because Dr Frank felt the need to have his hair combed than because it was usual and you had to have your hair done in some way or other anyway. He had grown up in Schmiedeberg, a small town to the south of Waldbrunn that huddled up against the Erzgebirge motorway, low, nondescript houses set in the delightful countryside of the catchment area of the Wilde Bergfrau dominated by the factory buildings and chimneys of VEB GISAG Ferdinand Kunert, where most of the inhabitants of Schmiedeberg worked. Frank had not only completed a PhD but a DSc as well, the only schoolteacher in the whole country with that qualification, so it was said. The Technical University of Dresden had even offered him a professorship but, since he wanted to abandon neither his pupils nor Schmiedeberg, he had declined. Christian knew that his father had spoken to Frank and that it was Frank’s intervention with the district education department that had led to an exception being made to the usual selection procedure. He ought to have attended one of the senior high schools in Dresden but since those had the reputation of being particularly dogmatic ideologically, Richard was happier to see his son in Waldbrunn.

  Frank was a Party member. In one of their first chemistry lessons he remarked that if he should meet someone who had attended the school and his classes at the expense of the people of the German Democratic Republic but then gone to the West, he would cross over to the other side of the road. As he spoke, he had given Christian a look of veiled melancholy with flashes of shy warmth.

  Frank was doing research into left-handedness. The days when left-handed pupils were rigorously made to write with the right hand were not long since past. Frank himself was a left-hander who had had his ‘polarity’ reversed and it seemed to disturb him, for he mentioned it several times, paused, broke off. Sometimes he would pick up a piece of chalk with his left hand, turn away as if he had been caught out, and when he turned back to the blackboard, the chalk was in his right hand.

  Frank knew plants and animals, the wooded gorges as far away as the Karl-Marx-Stadt district, showed the pupils the abandoned tin mines outside Altenberg, the boggy Georgenfeld moors where the sundew grew. He knew the Kahleberg, from where you could see the ČSSR and on which, as on the whole ridge, the only trees were isolated, damaged spruces. The class went for several walks there, for just a few hours each time since the wind, which swept the yellowish fog over the Erzgebirge, grew stronger in the afternoon. At first the fog caused an irritation in the throat and difficulty swallowing, then coughing and red-rimmed eyes. Dr Frank, who also taught chemistry, knew where the fog came from.

  One Tuesday at the end of March the history tests were handed back. Herr Schnürchel meandered round the room, giving out their essays, briefly commenting on them: ‘Svetlana, nice, clear class standpoint, very good deduction, A’, ‘Siegbert, confused the Gotha Programme with the Anti-Dühring, still a C’, ‘Christian’ – Schnürchel’s eyes fixed on him and he felt as if he were being cut open by their oxyacetylene-torch look – ‘too many empty words but you bring out Marx’s theory of history well, B minus’, then he sat down, intertwined his fingers and contemplated the remaining sheet of paper. Christian looked out of the window so that he had Schnürchel’s profile in view but avoided eye contact; Heike Fieber was playing with her fuzzy hair, Reina Kossmann had placed her hands on her desktop, her shoulders hunched up, her face and Verena’s two bright patches in the light flaking from the neon tubes in this still misty early morning that would probably brighten up into a sunny day. Schnürch
el’s voice flashed out and seemed to hit Verena physically, as gently as a lizard’s tongue: ‘Why didn’t you tell me you didn’t feel well?’

  ‘I … didn’t feel unwell.’

  ‘No.’ Schnürchel nodded, as if he’d expected that answer, but Christian could see neither satisfaction nor irritation in his expression. ‘If there is something you have to tell me …’

  The whole class seemed to be concentrated round Verena’s seat, a chorus of intense silence not daring to ask, What’s going to happen?, crouching now in expectation of a blow, straining every nerve to absorb its force. Suddenly Christian could hear Uncle Niklas’s voice: In this country you have to be able to afford everything, see him turn round unhurriedly in the music room of Evening Star and take a sip of coffee. What he had said lodged in his mind, continued to work, returned as a vivid, nasty thought that took root when Verena’s face showed no signs of unease, was just paler than usual, which could come from the neon light; her coal-black eyes, alert, almost cold, fixed on Schnürchel’s. Could she afford it? No, that was absurd. If she could, it would be the equivalent of exposure, and They could have no interest in that, no more than in stupidity. Pupils who were involved supposedly had certain gaps or nonsense entries in their column in the class register. Their parents’ professions were not entered if they belonged to Them, or just the bare name was there. But that was not the case with Verena. Father: Johannes Winkler, doctor, District Clinic, Waldbrunn; Mother: Katharina Winkler, organist and choirmaster, Protestant church, Waldbrunn; Siblings: Sabine, librarian, District Library.