The Tower: A Novel

by Uwe Tellkamp

  From the other side, from the common room, the voice of singer-songwriter Gerhard Schöne could be heard; he was very popular with the girls. He, too, was singing about honesty … Christian lay there, motionless, tormented by his thoughts. Should he not have felt sorry for Falk? Especially when he wanted to be a doctor – a doctor for whom the feeling of contempt should not exist? Did he really want to be a doctor? Would that be just following the family tradition or did he genuinely want it of his own accord? And why had he felt contempt for Falk? He couldn’t say. He could find no answer to all these questions, no explanation.

  He listened in the darkness to see if the others in the common room had gone to eat, then he could go and have a shower in the gymnasium. He’d have to hurry because Frau Stesny would certainly notice his absence and knock at his door to call him for supper. He had to wait for the short period when there was no one in the corridor, then he could slip out of his room and have the showers to himself. It was risky and he had to be quick, quick with his shower as well, he always had to be aware that someone might come, even though there was no sports group using the gymnasium that day. He’d copied out the ‘Gymnasium Schedule of Use’ and learnt it off by heart.

  27

  Music en voyage. All our strength. The Writing Fairy

  On one of his walks Christian saw Siegbert waiting outside Verena’s house. He was looking up at the as yet unlit windows in Lohgerbergasse, which was behind the church. Christian, wrapped in thought and tired from hours of schoolwork, had not noticed him at first and almost walked straight into him; but he suspected Siegbert wouldn’t have welcomed that and turned off into the shadow of the church in time. He observed Siegbert, who seemed impatient, nervously smoking a cigarette. The shops would soon be closing, people with shopping bags were hurrying to the market square, Christian thought he recognized Stabenow in a man wearing a scarf and beret pushing a bicycle, and shrank back farther into the shadow of the protruding wall. Darkness fell quickly. There were no street lamps in Lohgerbergasse, light flickered on in the Winklers’ and some of their neighbours’ houses, scattering dull brightness over the cobbled street. Verena came out, nodded to Siegbert and the two went off together. Christian would most likely have followed them but at the end of the street they turned off along the Wilde Bergfrau; they would soon have noticed him on the long street by the riverbank that ran straight as far as the castle and allowed clear views. They were probably going to the cinema or the Vostok Youth Club, which was in a dilapidated building beyond the castle. It had a discotheque where they played a remarkably free range of music, even though it could be seen from the Party district headquarters. Or perhaps they were heading for the ‘Halls of Culture’, where Uhl, the music teacher, doggedly tried to open the eyes and ears of the citizens of Waldbrunn to the Serious Arts.

  Uhl, Christian thought, and again in his mind’s eye he saw Verena coming out and setting off with Siegbert. Uhl was a strange person, at odds with himself, liable to fits of rage, selfless, obsessive. With his glossy black hair, his sickle eyebrows and Wagner beard he looked like a Flying Dutchman from the opera. The pupils were afraid of him because of his unpredictability, his furious outbursts. A restless, often cynical person who could expose a pupil’s inability to sing until they were in tears. He was an excellent pianist, but his lips expressed his disdain for those before whom he had to perform, for their deaf ears. Music was everything to him, he loved it, so it seemed to Christian, more than he did some people; perhaps because everything it said was clear, a language in which there were no misunderstandings. He contorted his face when someone sang out of tune and smiled when, during a lesson, he put on one of the records he guarded like a treasure and Sviatoslav Richter played a piece from the Well-Tempered Clavier. Then another Uhl appeared, softer, milder, a wounded, aware man. In the ‘Halls of Culture’ there was, beside the big hall, another room, which Uhl called the ‘closet’, where, ‘in an intimate atmosphere’ as it said on the posters, there were performances of chamber music, illustrated talks – a few years ago Christian’s grandfather had been there to give an illustrated talk on Amazon Indians – and readings organized by the Dresden District Writers’ Association. These cultural evenings, above all the concerts and performances of chamber music organized by Uhl, enjoyed a good reputation, attracting people from the depths of the Erzgebirge and as far away as Karl-Marx-Stadt; the Waldbrunners were often in a minority in the audience. Subscriptions and tickets for individual events went out to Glashütte and Altenberg, the border towns of Zinnwald, Rehefeld and Geising, even hopped over the frontier to Teplice in the ČSSR, from where a married couple, fanatical concert-goers, regularly came, were posted to Freital and Dresden, from where season-ticket holders came by car and bus, went to Flöha, Freiberg, Olbernhau, to the Western Erzgebirge as far as Annaberg-Buchholz. All that was the result of Uhl’s efforts. During the school holidays there was an agreement with Waldbrunn’s city transport services that put a bus, a rickety IFA model that was no longer in service, plus a driver at his disposal to ‘undertake cultural work’ in the Erzgebirge district. Uhl never went on holiday, no one had ever heard him talk about the Baltic or Lake Balaton, of a Free German Trade Union hostel in Graal-Müritz or the Rest Home for Outstanding Teachers, no one had ever had a picture postcard of the Island of Rügen or the Müggelsee from him. In the summer holiday months and also in the autumn holidays Uhl and his wife, who was a music teacher in Glashütte, rattled round Erzgebirge villages in the IFA bus, generally known as ‘Oswald Uhl’s Music Bus’, also called ‘Music en voyage’ by more poetic humorists, ‘making Classical Music accessible’ to the children there. But Uhl would have mentioned it to Christian if there’d been a concert in the ‘Halls of Culture’, for he had not only grown fond of Christian because of his cello playing but also immediately included him in various of his ventures. Also Siegbert and Verena had been too casually dressed to go to a concert. Christian stood motionless, breathing for a few seconds as if he’d just done some heavy physical labour, then held his breath, only realizing he was doing so from his accelerating pulse.

  He was on his way to the library. Feeling strangely troubled he left his hiding place, went across the market square, past the church on the other side and the Luther memorial, turned into Seifensiedergasse, at the end of which was the town library, which was in a half-timbered house with maxims written on the gables, a weathercock and the bronze figure of Hans the Soapmaker over the door; it had previously been the guildhall of the soapmakers. He still had twenty minutes, the library shut at six. In the lobby, where they had the issue and return desk, the grey-haired librarian was talking to an apprehensive young member of the Thälmann Pioneers, who had brought back a series of ‘Digedags’ comics in what, from the sharpness with which the librarian was expressing her disapproval, must be a terrible state: ‘chocolate stains’ and ‘dog-eared pages’ she groaned as she leafed through the copies. She made a note on the boy’s file card and Christian knew that that was it for him, he’d never be allowed to borrow ‘Digedags’ comics from the library again. Sabine Winkler came and took the books Christian had brought back. She didn’t resemble her sister at all, no one who didn’t know would have associated the two of them. Sabine had blonde hair, hidden at the moment under a batik headscarf, outside she’d take it off and show everyone her Mohican hairstyle. She wore studded jeans, a biker’s jacket one of her father’s patients had given her in exchange for an invaluable ABBA disc and a less valuable one of Oscar Peterson from the Amiga jazz series with the orange ‘J’ on the sleeve, and a pair of men’s boots a couple of sizes too big she’d bought in the ‘For the Young Man’ section of the Centrum department store in Dresden. Sabine Winkler called herself the ‘first punk in the Godforsaken dump of Waldbrunn’. For her Christian, just like her sister and her parents, was a ‘bornor’, a ‘boringly normal person’. She called him Chris, which for him was the most horrible of his nicknames; it made him think of Chris Doerk, a pop singer of the 1960s who, with her
‘canned-roses’ voice, sang with the state-certified heart-throb of schmaltz, Frank Schöbel, and acted in two DEFA film comedies. Summer film festival on the Baltic coast, wicker beach chairs in orderly rows, the half-mast red ball of the storm signal. A tent cinema, food counter, buffet consisting of plastic dishes with limp cucumber salad. A provincial group playing in the communal dining room and in a book, Sally Bleistift in Amerika by Auguste Lazar, from the holiday-camp library he’d found a love letter … His memories were interrupted by Sabine: ‘Hey, Chris, we close in fifteen minutes and I’m buggered if I’m going to stay on later, like I did last time, just because you can’t get your arse in gear.’

  Christian nodded and went off to the farthest corner of the library, where the philosophers were sleeping. He tried to repress thoughts of Verena and Siegbert by forcing himself to study the titles of the books; they were extremely boring- and dry-sounding titles with lots of Latin words in them; he found what he was looking for, in a dusty corner with especially boring- and dry-sounding titles, but he needed a few of them to prepare for a big class test in civics in which they would probably be unable to ‘waffle’, but would have to ‘present facts’.

  ‘Hey, Chris, what’s up with you, you’re not yakking on at me the way you usually do!’ Sabine slammed the issue date on the stuck-in sheet inside his books. ‘My god, what dusty tomes we have in here!’

  On 1 May the flags were out all over Waldbrunn. A member of parliament and representatives of the district Party committee and of the local base of the Soviet armed forces were standing on the platform that had been set up in the market square; row upon row of the pupils of the Waldbrunn schools marched past the waving representatives of the people. The gigantic Karl Marx head, on which the Association of Young Artists of the Maxim Gorki schools had been working up to the very last minute, was shining on the canvas sheet rising several metres above the platform, a totem skull made from five kilograms each of gold and silver paint, a mythical ancestor on a sail, the sail of Thor Heyerdahl’s Kon-Tiki, Christian thought, who was walking in a row with Jens and Siegbert. A raft floating towards the sun. They swore at the weight of the banner, ten metres long with the slogan: ‘We dedicate all our strength to building up our socialist Fatherland’ and supported every two metres by a pole. When the wind freshened, the five pupils had to lean against the poles with all their strength, the banner billowed out and flapped like the wings of an unruly dragon. Drums rolled, at the front there was a band of cymbals and shawms with drummers and their oompah-oompah, Christian could see the staff whirling and gleaming. Now fanfares sounded beside the platform; Fahner shouted orders into the microphone and the praise of the future, in which there would be no more exploitation and oppression, never again, brightness for evermore, burst from a thousand young throats. Fahner proudly announced the statistics, the loudspeakers hummed; unmoved, as if separated from the procession by a glass wall, the church bells suddenly rang out; the schoolchildren were sweating.

  Now every lesson seemed to consist of demands. Frau Stesny looked at her charges with concern as they devoured their supper in silence, running their forefingers up and down the text of books on the table beside them. When she ordered lights out at ten o’clock, they switched off the lights in the rooms of the eleventh-grade classes and counted to a hundred, by which time Frau Stesny would be too far away to see that they’d switched them back on. Schnürchel demanded essays on Soviet films, sometimes they watched one in class: they were always about the Great Patriotic War, about patriotic women partisans, who, duty-bound, resolutely took up their rifles; about soldiers in an almost hopeless situation that they still managed to overcome thanks to their truly superhuman determination and their unwavering class consciousness. Engelmann fluttered and ploughed his way round the class, checking dates of the Comintern, the differences between absolute and relative truth, the role of productive forces in developed capitalist and socialist society. Uhl demanded they learn to sing ‘The Peat Bog Soldiers’ and ‘I Heard a Sickle Sweeping’. Dr Frank demanded presentations about the reproduction mechanism of ferns. Only Hedwig Kolb, who taught German and French, seemed not to demand anything. She would come into the classroom like an absentminded elf, stand wrapped in thought, her hand still on the door handle, unconcerned by the noise of the pupils hurrying to their desks, look in delicate puzzlement, the class register and material for the lesson clamped under her upper arm, at a patch of brightness on the floor, a little sunlit plate on which she’d perhaps discovered a few goblins sticking out their tongues at her; then she came to again, checked the distance to the teacher’s desk – she made Christian think of a gazelle that some magic spell had placed on a frozen lake – put down her books and took out a handkerchief with crocheted edges to clear her ever slightly runny nose. This was no explosive snort, no trumpet blast such as that made by Engelmann, who didn’t use a handkerchief of normal size but a red-and-white-checked flag that made his trouser pocket bulge as if he had an apple in it; with Hedwig Kolb it was a gentle clear-out, quiet and dry; there was a blue giraffe embroidered on the handkerchief that seemed to be begging their forgiveness. Christian recalled the different ways in which the class would fall silent: with Schnürchel abruptly, a silence that came after murdered noise; with Frank at first the noise grew even louder when he came in because as class teacher he was bombarded with questions and problems; Uhl mowed down the conversations with a thunderous ‘Silence!’ and it was only with Hedwig Kolb that it was a silence that opened up, as if the voices were a tangle of woodland plants that drew back as she stepped forward. The Writing Fairy picked up a piece of chalk and wrote the topic for the class on the board. The class waited; Hedwig Kolb turned round and let her clouded gaze tap along the rows of pupils, as if she had to ascertain whether the class was the same as at the previous day’s lesson, whether a few students had not suddenly changed into grown-ups who would stand up and, instead of talking about delicate things like poems that had to be treated with care, turn to serious activities of direct use to the national economy – hammer a nail into a piece of roofing felt, for example; her eye paused here and there, lingered reflectively above the head of a pupil, as a watering can pauses over flowers while the hand holding it hesitates: one more, two more, or even three more drops? Will they help or harm? Then the eye moved on, concealing its doubts in undifferentiated, though not indifferent, friendliness. Although Hedwig Kohl did not adopt an authoritarian pose, she possessed authority and was respected by the pupils. Things were different, however, with Frau Kosinke, the equally gentle, absentminded, forbearing English teacher. No one took her seriously, the pupils imitated her quirks behind her back and laughed at her. In the other subjects hierarchies had quickly established themselves within the class: Verena and Hagen Schlemmer, a taciturn, gangling beanpole with metal-rimmed glasses and skin that looked as if it was only just out of the home laboratory, were the best in mathematics, Schlemmer and Falk Truschler in physics, in which Verena seemed to have no interest whatsoever, Siegbert and Christian in English, Svetlana in Russian and civics, Reina Kossmann in chemistry, Heike Fieber was the pride and joy of the art teacher, Herr Feinoskar. With Hedwig Kolb, however, all the pupils showed a desire to shine; to write the best essay was difficult, there was a lot of rivalry, to be praised by Hedwig Kolb was like receiving an accolade. Christian’s essays had twice been adjudged the best, perhaps that was what had led to Verena’s allusions to his supposed snootiness. The first time was when they had to write about Büchner’s play Woyzeck; Christian had put the class-war interpretation to one side and showed himself more interested in power and impotence in the play, setting out his essay as a dialogue in blank verse to be acted out. Hedwig Kolb had asked him if she might keep the essay and put a hectograph copy on the noticeboard, which made Christian very proud. Verena, Svetlana and Siegbert too had been annoyed at this and made tart comments on his essay, especially on the lines that didn’t quite work … Siegbert had also twice had his essay adjudged the best; Verena once (‘R
eproducing impressions’, she’d written about a picture in the IX Art Exhibition, 1982, in the Albertinum in Dresden; Heike Fieber once, who in German and art woke from the trance-like daze in which she flowed through the other subjects. Like a large, velvet-fingered seaweed, Christian thought, like something transparent spreading out in a clear lake. Fluid, like the paint in a watercolour. Heike fascinated him, her thoughts seemed to run along different tracks from the usual ones. It occasionally happened that she put her hand up; Hedwig Kolb, taken aback by this unusual activity, immediately called on her to speak, but Heike ignored the question set and said, ‘I’ve just been wondering what the consequence would be if everyone had blue ears.’ Then her arm slowly sank down, she shook her shock of hair back into place, a characteristic gesture, as if she wanted to get rid of something, recurrent troubled dreams, something that ran counter to her snub nose and the hundreds of freckles on her face, she looked earnestly and thoughtfully at Hedwig Kolb, who, equally earnestly but with a hint of astonishment, looked back: ‘Yes, Heike … but is that possible, have you read something about that?’ In this essay Heike had taken the option of choosing a topic of her own and written: ‘Everything comes through juices. If something goes wrong, then it is because there is something wrong with the juices. Blood is a quite special juice, Goethe said. There is a vertical juice axis and a horizontal juice axis. Then there are the juice shops and there are also crimes against juice. WE LIVE IN THE AGE OF CRIMES AGAINST JUICE.’ There followed, in the middle of her essay, a drawing, a brilliant tangle of coloured lines, snakes with arrowheads pointing at each other – in the distance the scribbles resolved themselves in a sad bearded face. ‘We must fight against the crimes against juice’ was written underneath. Hedwig Kolb asked to be allowed to keep that essay as well. She had marked it ‘quite outstanding’ but didn’t put it on the noticeboard. In brackets she had added, in red lily-of-the-valley handwriting: ‘Unusual combination of word and image.’