by Uwe Tellkamp
Christian had asked Malthakus, who collected not only stamps and postcards but also stories about the houses up there and the people who had lived in them: Caravel had belonged to Sophia Tromann-Alvarez, who was a native of Dresden; her husband, Louis Alvarez, had worked for the African Fruit Company in Hamburg, which was in partnership with the Laeisz shipping company, and had developed banana plantations in Cameroon, but later he had set up independently in the tropical fruit trade; after his early death in Africa, on an expedition with the Swedish entomologist Aurivillius, Sophia Tromann-Alvarez had returned to the city of her birth, had acquired Caravel and had spent her years of widowhood in memory of her husband and their time with the African Fruit Company; he could remember her well, she was tall and wore clothes made from floral cloth in exotic colours and went for walks with an umbrella and her three basenjis on a long lead, tapping the road audibly with her stick; her dogs bared their teeth and growled at every passer-by. There was a butterfly in Louis Alvarez’s display cases that Christian particularly liked looking at: Urania ripheus was written in Roman capitals underneath it and how delighted he was when Meno was with him and said, ‘Let’s practise a little.’ That meant something was going to be demanded of him, but that wasn’t what he was pleased about, for to describe to Meno something he’d observed was often to answer a question that had not been specifically asked, but indicated clearly enough with gestures: a wave of the hand, a raised eyebrow, the lower lip stuck out, and sometimes, as now when he was thinking about it in his unpleasantly warm sickbed, Christian wondered why he didn’t resent Meno’s demands, why he didn’t get angry with Meno when he gave him to understand, in a friendly but uncompromising way, that he was a poor observer and didn’t put his impressions into words precisely enough. He could feel resentful at school, even in subjects that didn’t attract him: he often got angry at the arrogant indulgence with which Baumann regarded his, admittedly poor, performance in mathematics; the feeling could be directed at classmates, for example recently when Svetlana Lehmann had rubbed his nose in a spelling mistake he’d made. Not with Meno, strangely enough – when Meno criticized him, it spurred him on to take the criticism to heart and correct it, he didn’t retreat, sulking, into a corner or harbour dark thoughts, as he had with Svetlana, who, though, had made sure as many as possible had heard what a howler the oh-so-self-assured Christian Hoffmann had made. With Meno it stayed in the family and his criticism was the admonition of his own inner voice, which Christian had suppressed in the hope of getting by without having to make an effort, spoken out loud. The point was not just to say: this is a medium-sized butterfly wing, but to respond to Meno’s question as to what that ‘medium’-size was related to by being more precise: this butterfly wing is matchbox-size. Then Meno said: Check your ideas of beauty; but when he told Christian with scientific coolness that it was a beautiful thing to be able to measure colours with a ruler, to fix something as softly ephemeral as this cyclamen-coloured moth from the central Congo in an inscribed circle and on a millimetre scale, then Christian felt reservations about following his uncle, a withdrawal, a loss of clarity: it was as if he were seeing a clear geometrical figure sharply drawn by thousands of quartz fibres focused in a beam, but suddenly some of those light fibres had broken off, giving the figure a slim parallelogram, frayed edges, jagged contours, and for a few moments Christian wasn’t concentrating on the moth any more but on Meno. At the sight of these butterflies in the display cases Alvarez had had constructed simply, but out of lignum vitae – they even had locks, but the keys had evidently been lost, none of the tenants had them – he was often caught up in a dream-like experience: he regarded the neatly arranged butterfly mummies and saw not only them, the specific outlines arranging themselves into the sense impression ‘moth’, the pigments, shades, patterns on the wing scales gleaming in the colours of scrap metal, but perceived, the longer he observed them, a kind of liquefaction in the area round the creature that seemed to him more exciting than Meno’s intention to describe here and now the butterfly, Urania ripheus, the Madagascan Sunset Moth, as exactly as possible. If Meno had said: to label it with words, Christian’s mind would perhaps not have needed to stray, but as it was, at the concepts Meno let fall with measured deliberation he was thinking of the pins the assistant preparing the butterfly had used to fix it, saw him in his mind’s eye place them with the delicacy of a precision engineer; but that was little in comparison with the delight Christian felt when, at a term such as ‘to impair’, which the tongue of his memory suddenly spoke, the Veronese green on the wings of the Urania moth suddenly started to move. This patch of Veronese green on an African butterfly, a diurnal moth, as Meno explained and Christian didn’t quite understand. His dictionary described moths as ‘night-flying butterflies’ so if this moth was diurnal, how come it was a moth and not a butterfly, but the scientists would presumably have their reasons for this apparent contradiction. A particular light at a particular moment, Meno’s face in profile: that was the experiment set-up that remained motionless as long as the catalyst had not been added; a state of expectation dripping with possibilities and Christian was excited by the idea that for precisely this chemical – as you might say – combination it was, of all words, the somewhat out-of-the-way ‘to impair’ that was the catalyst that, as if drip-fed from a pipette, released his state of inertia in a flash and made it pour into something new, which immediately, mysteriously, like the process of the coagulation of blood, calmed to form a new constellation. Dead-dry bodies behind display-case glass were transformed into prisms before widely varying realities: Urania ripheus was a symbol admonishing him in the darklight of a jungle, sleepy from treetops transliquefied with airglow, and ‘to impair’ was firmly sewn with threads of association to the green of the guiding wings, a colour of which Meno said ‘drunk to the last drop’ and Christian, remembering a visit to the Army Museum, ‘powder green’ because he couldn’t see anything moist about it, which it would have needed if it was to be connected to ‘drunk to the last drop’, at which Meno tilted his right hand, which had been reflectively under his chin, and held the palm horizontally upwards, which was as if to say: accepted, not bad, you could see it like that. This ‘you could see it like that’ was a touch different from the ‘if you say so’, which he expressed with the same gesture, but with a more slackened body, containing sadness that one couldn’t get through, perhaps only on that day, to the other person, that something seemed to have been confirmed, unfortunately, something that one had felt but had tried to banish from the temperature of the conversation, to stop the premonition from turning into the feared reality. ‘If you say so’ was, in the usage not just of Meno but of most of the Tower-dwellers Christian knew, a polite way of shutting oneself off, though initially only one door among many that were kept open, and even that door, if one had a closer look, was still ajar, the latch hadn’t clicked shut; and the perhaps politest form of these restrained little burials, expressed with a momentary lowering of the eyelids, was enthusiastic agreement. Magic was a word Meno did not like. He was in awe of what it stood for and what it expressed, only inadequately in his opinion and somewhat helplessly, ‘a label on a preserving jar in which the things are, if we remember’, as he said when Christian, furious at his own wordlessness and tortured by the effort to meet Meno’s demand for descriptive precision, tried to short-circuit it by using that word to characterize something that fascinated him in a way he still couldn’t explain. ‘You use it like a flyswatter, of course, walloping something on the head is one way of exorcizing it,’ Meno would comment, ‘but in doing that you just go round and round your own helplessness, as bad writers do who are not capable of generating a phenomenon – which would be the actual creative act – but are only able to talk about the phenomenon; to say “magic”, that is, instead of making something out of words that has it.’ At such moments Christian was overcome with a feeling of alienation and it oppressed him, he didn’t know why Meno had to be so strict and he couldn’t see the affect
ion in the relentlessness with which Meno kept him and his thoughts, which yearned to be elsewhere, tied to this display case, the contents of which, during the hour or more of Meno’s drill, no longer transmitted to him the breathtaking contact, the sense of a hunt, that he felt when he walked past and let his eye wander over the colourful pharaohs. That silent flash which hit him as he was about to walk past but something opened up, making a large gate sucking into it everything he’d been thinking of at that moment: school, a football match, the Tomita disc, his application for a place at medical school after he’d completed the eleventh year, sometimes the shape of a drop of milk that had been spilt or the figures on the numberplate of Tietze’s Shiguli. All that was drawn out of him, leaving him with eyes wide and mouth open – and even forgetting to breathe. Christian did sense that Meno wanted to get beyond this phase with him, the invisible lips that were whispering to him were to be sealed once more, the images invisible, but he saw no sense in letting the colours go dull and the little symphony of shapes go flat. Often it was Meno who broke off. In that second, when his uncle let his head drop and rubbed his closed eyes with his thumb and index finger, the affection returned all at once, as if it had just been pulled away, like a piece of elastic, and let go again. There must be something other than just being overpowered by a commander of the moment and that was what Meno appeared to be looking for with the instruments of his precision. It seemed to Christian to be a deliberate distancing of himself from deeply rooted convictions, precisely because they were deeply rooted convictions. Perhaps they could no longer bear their load, or Meno wanted to progress and saw it as greatness, not as capitulation, to pay any price for it. He sensed that the reason his uncle was so unrelenting with him was that he saw those convictions in him, Christian, as well, something that came back, unconcerned, and that he knew all too well himself and had long wanted to combat, from the perspective of a different conviction. Which, because it wasn’t innate, took on something of a heroic air. And could contain suspicion of the ‘language of the heart’, as Meno, wooden-lipped, called it, pronouncing the quotation marks as well. Perhaps it was an occupational disease of scientists and editors, for to Christian the ‘language of unsentimental observation’ that Meno wanted to set against it – did he really want that? – seemed alien, even though he sometimes thought about it, for ‘as big as a matchbox’ was indeed more vivid and more accurate than ‘medium’-sized. Yet what always fascinated him first were the colours and not the tones, what was apparent burnt its mark into him first and not what was obscure, and that seemed logical, for what was obscure would not have been obscure if you had perceived it immediately, so what mattered to him was what made an impression on him and the rarest and, of its kind, strangest moth that looked unremarkable left him unmoved if he saw one beside it that looked like a flying paintbox, even if, as far as its frequency was concerned, it was the cabbage white of the tropics. Meno criticized his attitude, he was less fond of those specimens that, as he put it, ‘have all their secrets, if they have any at all, stuck on their coats’. He preferred the unremarkable ones, of which Alvarez had also collected a few; they were hung in a second case outside the Stenzel Sisters’ floor, where the staircase came to the glass door. It was a place of grey brightness that diffused through the high window over the stairwell: a seven-petalled glass flower in the middle of which hung a candlestick like an excessively stretched stamen. It was a row of moths, wood-coloured saturniids with eyespots on their wings; ‘from the race of the God of Lead and there: those are their watermarks’ – Meno pointed to the grain of the paper-thin wings, which reminded Christian of the rings of ripples after a stone has been thrown into a calm pond. They seemed to continue across the individual butterflies, combining them into a larger picture, of which they were only a part, as if they were pieces in a jigsaw puzzle. They looked very alike, only when you looked closer did the tiny differences between the individual moths appear. ‘Those are the orchestral parts over which the composer took the greatest care, even though the audience hardly hears them; but they are the ones that are particularly important to him, and you can pay him no greater compliment than to listen carefully, for what is the point of music if not to be listened to. These patches of crimson, moss-green and lilac, this blue that’s so intense it could appear on a lemon: these are high points, such as Italian bel canto composers love, as do the average opera-goers, who don’t go to the theatre to listen but to see, to promenade during the intervals, to get annoyed at the prices of the sandwiches and cocktails, and to be seen; who know in advance the “famous passage” where the tenor gathers all his strength to weightlift the top C and what comes after it; but what I’m interested in are the inconspicuous tissues, disguises, transitions; camouflage and mimicry; the construction of the beds in which the motifs, those “beautiful”, sometimes all-too-beautiful princesses lie. I’m not just interested in the bel étage, but in the coal cellar as well, the kitchen and, to extend the image, the servants in the composition.’ Thus far Meno. Christian thought about it. In the same way as, all those years ago when they’d been visiting the painter, Vogelstrom, in Cobweb House, and he’d heard the names Merigarto and Magelone and not forgotten them since, something of these conversations with Meno stayed with him, continued to have an effect on him, he could feel it like a foreign body that had penetrated him and was changing him, and at times such as these he searched in order to isolate, feel, observe it, to see if it would be harmful or useful.
The Stenzel Sisters’ gramophone had fallen silent. The Westminster chimes sounded four times, then two strokes: two in the afternoon. Anne would be home from work soon and Robert back from school. Then there would be voices, noises, unrest; Caravel would drift back into a far-off dreamland, memories in Magellan’s telescope. Christian closed his eyes. He thought of Verena.
22
Enoeff
In the evening the Rohdes came over. ‘Ill, are we?’ asked Ina, bringing a whiff of Koivo deodorant with her and Christian felt ashamed that he hadn’t aired the room. Ina sat down on the edge of the bed, ran her eye over Robert’s footballs, Terence Hill and Ornella Muti, crossed her legs, jiggled her foot. She was wearing high-heeled court shoes, fishnet tights and a miniskirt. ‘And how are things?’
‘Not bad. And you?’
‘Lots of stress at the university. Useless room.’
Christian was sweating but he pulled the blanket up over his chin because he had a spot there. Voices sounded in the corridor; Ulrich came in. ‘What’s that Fernau prescribed for you, the drunken wretch?’ Ulrich stretched out his hand, his left hand, and, as so often, Christian fell for it and grasped the back of his hand; Ulrich liked that kind of joke.
‘Dad.’ Irritated, Ina raised her eyebrows, which had been plucked to thin arches. ‘That’s defamation, you know.’
‘Who cares … that schnappshound … I’m furious with him, furious, furious! I can’t tell you how furious I am. Look.’ He showed Christian his inflamed right index finger. ‘He treated it as a “swelling of unknown origin”, differential diagnosis: “result of an unremembered hammer blow” – does he think I’m off my head?’
‘Well, you should have gone straight to Uncle Richard.’
‘And now it hurts, it’s throbbing and I can’t get to sleep. I’ve put some aluminium acetate on it, but it’s not done any good … And I’m furious!’
‘Dad.’
‘It’s all right for you to talk, you’ve no idea what it’s like when you’re this furious … and your finger’s this sore!’ Ulrich slapped his right hand across his face, which was fleshy and dark blue from his heavy growth of beard. Ulrich was bald on top; lower down, his head was wreathed in thick, rampant Latin curls that Wiener, the barber, cursed because they blunted his scissors; he had hair on his back and on his impressive belly, which Christian knew because in the winter Ulrich liked to stomp around in the snow wearing bathing trunks, to fall down, howling, and make an angel, though he preferred to call it an eagle, that is to make f
an-shaped marks in the snow with his outstretched arms. Afterwards he would have a toughening-up shower with the garden hose, if it wasn’t frozen. His eyebrows were so thick they shone like two slugs; his only similarity to Anne and Meno was in the colour of his eyes: brown with green speckles. ‘Unremembered hammer blow, have you ever heard such a stupid diagnosis … Especially as I’m not left-handed.’ Ulrich started to stride up and down the room. ‘That lousy puffball, I’m furious. I’ve got this great fury inside me and I’m not going to let it go to waste!’ He looked for an empty space on Robert’s desk and slapped it several times with the flat of his left hand, accompanying it with strangled cries. ‘Out with it, out, out!’ He grasped the tops of the table legs and shook them, at the same time moaning with pain, for he was using his swollen index finger, squeezing the table leg as if it were one of the long Borthen potatoes he was determined to squash; he went red in the face from the strain of trying not to break anything while at the same time giving free rein to his fury, like a berserker whose frenzy threatens to increase because it is not allowed to be really frenzied and therefore provokes laughter.
