by Uwe Tellkamp
Verena an informant … He sought her eyes, he must have given her a horrified look, her eyes slid away.
‘Perhaps you want to tell me afterwards.’ Schnürchel’s words were not a question but a closing statement. His stripy socks, his crossed feet – not funny at all.
‘I didn’t feel unwell.’ Verena’s voice was jagged, she had to clear her throat.
‘Verena.’ This time Schnürchel answered quickly, Christian sensed the surprise in the class at the restrained warmth of his tone. ‘Then I will have to call a meeting of the FGY leadership and inform your class teacher.’ Verena remained silent, and Christian couldn’t understand her, turned his head towards the door and whispered, ‘Why? Why?’ with a pointless intensity. He felt another burst of suspicion and thought he could also see it in Jens Ansorge’s expression, in Siegbert Füger’s thin smile, Reina Kossmann’s now chalk-white face.
The meeting of the FGY committee was arranged for three o’clock, after the last class, in the Russian room surrounded by pictures of Sputnik and the Artek Pioneer camp on the blackboards, sponsorship letters from their related Komsomol organization and a plaster bust of Maxim Gorki. The rest of the class waited outside.
Agenda, taking the minutes – Falk Truschler took out a pencil and paper – Dr Frank’s freckled hand opening and closing. ‘Go on, please.’ He nodded to Verena, who was staring to one side, the sheet of paper, blank apart from her name and the exercise, before her. ‘I didn’t know what I should write.’ Her voice was clear, tone curt, with a touch of contempt; Christian looked up but only met Frank’s eyes, the light brown of which he for some inexplicable reason now found disagreeable, as he did his helplessly opening and closing hand. ‘Then you had a blackout.’ Frank stated it in a murmur, it wasn’t a question. ‘That can happen.’
‘In this case you will have to be given an E.’ Schnürchel had spoken hesitantly but before Frank had stopped speaking. Again there was the silence, like something that couldn’t be switched off. Christian was wearing the blue Free German Youth shirt, as were Falk Truschler and Siegbert Füger and Svetlana Lehmann: Herr Schnürchel had asked all the boarders in the class to put them on.
‘I don’t agree with the way this discussion is going. In my opinion Verena has a negative attitude to the question set and didn’t answer it for that reason. It wouldn’t be the first time.’
Verena looked up and scrutinized Svetlana with startled fascination.
‘Yes, you got up to the same kind of thing back at the high school. Just like your sister.’
‘Svetlana –’
‘In my opinion it’s deliberate provocation, Dr Frank.’
‘I don’t believe that.’ Reina Kossmann, the treasurer on the committee, shook her head. ‘She said something to me beforehand.’ Verena had felt ill because of something that happened once a month –
‘She said she didn’t feel unwell,’ Svetlana insisted. ‘I’d be interested to know what standpoints the two of you have. My view is that the committee should pass a resolution and present it to the principal.’ Svetlana thought for a moment, tapped her lips with her finger. ‘To both principals. And to the Party committee.’
At this Siegbert Füger joined in: Svetlana couldn’t simply say ‘I don’t believe her’; in that case not only Verena, Reina too, would be under suspicion of lying, he himself didn’t know Verena from the high school but from sports lessons with Herr Schanzler here, there’d been a collision when they were playing dodgeball. Her lip had bled, but she hadn’t fainted, as usually happened, Verena was the kind of person who would just grit her teeth, as she had before the history test.
What did he mean by ‘as usually happened’, Reina wanted to know, straightening her back, it was the boys who were the quickest to start moaning and wailing, for example at the potato harvest. Christian remained silent because he could see in his mind’s eye Verena’s face contorted with pain after she’d hit her thumb with the hammer, but since Falk Truschler said nothing – he had to take the minutes – Svetlana fixed her eyes on him, while Dr Frank folded a piece of paper up small and Schnürchel took a tube out of his briefcase, squeezed out an inch of transparent cream and rubbed it over his hands. There was a pleasant smell of herbs.
‘Your position, Christian?’ At that moment he found himself thinking of Svetlana’s curly hair. It was beautiful and of a brown colour he couldn’t quite find a word for. ‘She isn’t in condition to do a test if she feels ill.’
‘She should have said so beforehand, of course. – That was her mistake,’ Schnürchel said reflectively. ‘We can’t withdraw the E grade. Not a good start, but I think that in your case it will just be a blip. There are oral tests as well and apart from this you’re good to very good.’
‘That’s all you have to say?’ Schnürchel’s contribution seemed to have gone right past Svetlana, like an insect you ignore because you’re concentrating on something. She fixed her eyes on Christian and it seemed to him that she was having to make an effort, her eyelids were fluttering almost imperceptibly, her look wasn’t steady. ‘Pity that the best positions were already taken, hm? The deputy Free German Youth secretary, the clerk and the treasurer. That would have done for acceptance at medical college, wouldn’t it? But the way things are … As agitator you’d have to show real commitment, wouldn’t you? Nail your colours to the mast.’
‘Svetlana, you’re not being objective. We can’t work together like that.’ It was Dr Frank who said that, his lips grey, and Reina Kossmann hissed, ‘To suggest I accepted an easy position just to get a few extra plus points in my file –’
‘But it’s the truth! The most important thing for you lot is getting to college, your career, that’s why you join the Free German Youth committee. Not as secretary or agitator, where it really matters, of course … Would you be here if it didn’t bring any plus points? What we’re trying to realize in this country is a matter of complete indifference to you!’
‘Svetlana! We’ll get nowhere like this. Dr Frank is right, that is not objective. It is not correct. Not correct. To conclude we should hear what Verena has to say. Please calm down.’ It was remarkable how gentle Schnürchel could be, fatherly, as if he had to save an unruly favourite daughter from herself; his left hand had shot forward: as if he wanted to grasp something, Christian thought. Perhaps it was a situation he had come across before, one he recognized.
‘What Reina said is right. I … had problems.’ Verena was pale now, she spoke quietly, her face turned away.
That evening Christian rang home. He had walked a long way, past the city castle, where there were still lights on, and past the cinema, along the embankment beside the Wilde Bergfrau to the tannery. The foaming, thundering river did nothing to calm him down, he kept seeing scenes from the afternoon in his mind’s eye and couldn’t clear his head. On the bridge he leant over the parapet and looked at the dark eddies with metallic spindles gliding through them at irregular intervals, but after a while he felt cold and the darkness was becoming a problem. A single lamp was hanging like a white pot above where the road along the embankment crossed the main road leading out that started at the bridge. He headed back into the town, towards the market, but went the wrong way and after an empty time found himself outside the cinema again, which confused him; but then he saw the telephone booth beside the path outside the porter’s lodge of the castle. The porter eyed him over a copy of Morgenpost. Christian strolled over to the telephone booth. That seemed to be enough for the porter, he turned back to his newspaper. The telephone in this booth was probably monitored. Nothing that might get us into trouble on the telephone, Anne had drummed into him. But perhaps things were different with this telephone … It was outside the Party headquarters. On the one hand. On the other there must be more telephones in the rooms of the dilapidated castle than anywhere else in Waldbrunn, so why would they need another one here … Was that not precisely the trap? They knew how people thought: hardly anyone used the telephone on the market square, in fact so far Ch
ristian had never seen anyone using it – everyone assumed that the booth would be monitored and since Security knew the way people thought, knew that even when someone made a call from there, aware it was being monitored they would only say harmless things, Security might perhaps regard that booth as useless and leave it untapped, while here, smiling at how clever they were, people walked straight into the snare.
Or was the booth outside the castle perhaps after all a free space that the Party leadership could keep for themselves? Christian thought it over. How would he act if he were one of Them … He’d simply tap every line without further ado. Richard had often played ‘Think like your enemy’ with him and Robert and had said, ‘That’s unlikely, they can’t have so many people to listen in, they would need three shifts a day and that on every line, and even if they had the personnel they would hardly have the technology and tapes. There must be a few untapped lines in this country. That of the Comrade Chairman of the State Council will definitely not be one, nor that of the head of Security.’ – ‘Nor those of the telephone booths either,’ Christian had replied. – ‘Why not? It’s precisely those that are not very promising for them since no one says anything on a public line. Only idiots and foreigners would do that and they’re kept under surveillance round the clock anyway.’
Christian continued to think about it. There was just one reason to call from here and not from the phone at the market. This booth would probably be in working order.
‘Hoffmann?’
Christian could hear laughter in the background, his father’s voice, the Westminster chimes of the grandfather clock striking the quarter.
‘Hi, Mum, it’s me.’
‘Oh, is there something special, since you’re calling?’
Christian closed his eyes, so strange did those voices sound, as if they were sloshing round in an aquarium. ‘No … No.’ He couldn’t speak, not now, not on the telephone and, especially, not to his mother. When he’d had problems he’d never gone to his mother. Nor to Richard. To Meno instead, whom he could hear in the background. That meant he couldn’t ring him either.
‘Has something happened, Christian?’ Now she was suspicious; he knew the concern in her voice.
‘No, not at all. I … just wanted to ask Robert something, is he there? It’s about the Tomita record …’
‘No, he’s gone to Uli’s with Ezzo.’
‘It can wait until the weekend. Is Niklas there?’
‘Yes, and Wernstein.’
‘All the best, Mum.’
‘Are you coming at the weekend?’
Christian gave a vague answer, but brightened up and told her about the history test and his B minus and how annoyed he was, told her about the reasons for that moderate grade, so that when he’d finished he had the feeling Anne wouldn’t ask any more questions.
18
Coal Island
Ridged like a karst landscape, a deposit of jagged piled-up ice floes, Coal Island lay before the four visitors, of which three showed their permits to the guard on the bridge before setting off – Richard took little Philipp down from his shoulders so that Regine could take him by the hand – across the Kupferne Schwester bridge to the government offices. Fog lay over East Rome, the whistle of Black Mathilda as it turned out of the tunnel and announced its approach to the power station sounded muffled. Even at this early hour the snow on the bridge had been trampled by many pairs of shoes; it was the first Thursday in the month, the day the offices were open to the public. Meno shaded his eyes, the white was dazzling and he saw that it was the first sharp rays of the March sun setting off sparks on the steeply sloping, frost-encrusted roofs of the buildings and on their windows, now clear as water, now a confusing swirl, bursting apart like dewdrops on a cobweb, suddenly frozen in a multiple prismatic glare, sparks flickering up as a tangle of light and finding countless echoes in the deep fault-lines between the buildings: this had recalled the picture, the piled-up quartz slabs, yokes, ice crystals.
They had arrived before the offices opened and joined the queue that stretched from the portico of the entrance to where the Marx–Engels Memorial Grove, empty, an almost insurmountable obstacle for the human voice, spread out its concrete grey. Marx and Engels had bronze books in their hands and seemed to be reading them. Crows were perched on their heads and the soldier on sentry duty, who wasn’t allowed to move, kept trying to drive them away by clicking his tongue. A few of those waiting clearly felt sympathy for him and raised their hands to clap, but acquaintances who were less sympathetic and had their eyes fixed on the portico pushed them down. At ‘one hundred’ Richard gave up counting, opened his briefcase, checked that the report was still there (but who would have taken it away from him anyway, he’d packed and checked the briefcase himself before he left the house); Meno too had opened his worn attaché case and was rummaging around in the papers. Regine clutched the violin case to her and let go of Philipp, who immediately went over to the sentry at the Memorial Grove, who, as the clocks in the office building began to chime, stood to attention, shifting his machine gun with angular movements, staring fixedly in front of him from under his steel helmet and for the following hours, until he was relieved, would give no indication of whether he saw the queue, which was dispersing at the front, growing at the back, whether he saw anything at all: Philipp plucked at his uniform, made faces at him, but the only response was the restrained amusement of a few of those waiting. The queue moved forward. There was a play of bluish, crimson and purple iridescence over the pepper-and-salt granite of the vestibule. A cord controlled access to the kiosk-like lean-to where a porter was sitting surrounded by telephones on retractable arms that were sliding out and back with deliberate slowness, like the tentacles of a sea anemone. Perhaps a faulty control, Meno thought.
The members of the public stated their business, opened their bags to be checked and were allowed through. Behind the porter’s lean-to there was a wall with clocks showing different times around the world; the name of the place was written on the clock face in black lettering: Jakarta, New York, London, Valletta, Moscow, Vladivostok, Lima, Peking and many others; little Philipp listened to the clicking of the hands and wanted to know who lived in all these places. The offices’ paternoster lifts opposite the clock-wall started to move.
‘We have to separate here,’ Richard said, pointing to the clocks. ‘Shall we meet at twelve?’
‘There’s a public-address system,’ said Meno. ‘If one of us has to wait longer they can put out a call for the others.’
‘So second floor, F wing,’ Regine reminded herself. ‘Come on, Philipp.’ She took the boy by the hand; he headed straight for one of the lifts. On the second floor they looked down from a rotunda into an air well. Employees in grey coats were hurrying to and fro, some pushing files in carts trundling along quietly; worn carpets swallowed up the footsteps, the clearing of throats behind the doors, the distant murmuring. Corridors radiated out from the rotunda, which had a glass chandelier in the Kremlin’s beloved icicle style hanging down into it.
‘Touch the knight,’ Philipp demanded and Richard lifted him up so that he could reach the stone figures on the balustrade of the rotunda. Men with shields and raised swords; most of the finely chiselled features expressed amazement, perhaps at being caught by surprise, that the sculptor had mixed, as if strained through a muslin cloth, with more profound liquids: a clear conscience, new negotiations seen in older light, traces of a comic love of haggling; the weathered armour had strange spines on the shoulders and breastplates, they made Richard think of a rare disease through which the poor patient’s skin had developed horny spines, he tried to remember the name but only the prefix ‘ichthyo-’ occurred to him. Philipp couldn’t break off the spines and said with a laugh, as if to be on the safe side, ‘Ouch,’ when he touched one with the tip of his finger. The sculptor must have gone to great pains to make the stone so pencil-sharp. Now something was ticking, like the pendulum of a large metronome set at a slow tempo. Richard looked out of
the window, it must be coming from outside, from the derricks beyond the offices, in the prohibited part of Coal Island.
Second floor, F wing. Corridors enlivened by threadbare red runners and smelling musty. The distant roar of a vacuum cleaner, the clatter of typewriters behind closed doors, queues outside open ones.
The thud of stamps, whispering, the creak of thick piles of paper having holes made by office punches, the hum of sewing machines. Certain files were sewn into the binders, something that had been taken over from the Soviet Union, where it had been the custom of the Okhrana, the Tsarist secret police, as Richard had learnt from a patient who worked on Coal Island.
‘And you think we can go straight to this office?’ Richard asked doubtfully. ‘Normally you have to go to Central Registration first.’ ‘The invitation is direct and I know where I have to go, I don’t need to go to Central Registration for that,’ Regine said. The official at the desk at the entrance to F wing knew better, however. ‘You’ve no slip from Central Registration, you can’t be allowed in just like that, Citizen Neubert –’
