by Uwe Tellkamp
‘You must excuse me, this is urgent, it won’t take a minute.’ The lawyer still didn’t look up. Behind his desk, on the wall and on a shelf, a collection of clocks were ticking, all good pieces as Richard, with the practised eye of a clockmaker’s son, could tell. A few framed prints by the painter Bourg, spidery drawings with heavy cross-hatching; Richard recalled the Black Plants in the corridor of his brother’s house. Above a washbasin a little mirror at tie-knot level. A comfortable-looking sofa with a table and chairs, probably reserved for important visitors, or for Sperber himself when he was reading the newspapers: there were stacks of the Frankfurter Allgemeine, Die Zeit and the Süddeutsche Zeitung on the table; clearly Sperber belonged to the restricted group who were permitted to subscribe to Western newspapers – and who could afford to. A Querner was hung over the sofa. Sperber seemed to collect Russian nesting dolls as well, one of the wall shelves, otherwise packed with files, was kept free for them. A tiled stove, the tiles with blue windmills in the Delft style. Framed diplomas and letters of thanks in free spaces on the wall beside the clocks; a certificate for the Patriotic Order of Merit in gold.
Sperber waved what he’d been writing dry, put it in the outbox, took two loose-leaf files out of a drawer. ‘I don’t want to waste either your time or my time, Herr Hoffmann, so let’s get down to business right away. I have two cases here. I can do something for one of them. Our system of justice is remarkable. It is rare for two similar cases – such as that of your son and this one here – to be judged in the same way. If I win one, I will lose the other. That has often happened to me. So I will pass on the case I don’t accept, that is only sensible. A different lawyer – another chance. Unfortunately not all my colleagues have my experience; which is why – there’s no point in beating about the bush – so many clients turn to me. So which case do you think I should pass on?’ He put his splayed fingers on each of the files and looked at Richard expectantly.
‘Not my son’s,’ Richard replied after a while.
‘You see, the other father gave me the same answer. Put yourself in my position … What should I do? That father wants your child to lose, this father wants the other’s child to lose …’
‘If it’s a question of your fee –’
‘It’s not a question of my fee, Herr Hoffmann. It’s a question of time.’
‘But couldn’t, I mean … your time, isn’t that a question of your fee … you love clocks.’
Sperber smiled. ‘We’re not even going to start talking about that kind of thing. I became a lawyer because I love justice. Where would we be if the dispensation of justice went with those who are able to pay more. No. I decide this in my own way.’ He took out a coin. ‘Heads or tails for your boy?’
‘Are you being serious?’
‘Certainly,’ Sperber replied. ‘And before you condemn me, I would ask you to put yourself in my place. I have time for one case – given that, how do we choose in a way that is reasonably fair? So, heads or tails?’
‘May I … go out for a moment?’
‘No, stay here. In the first place I haven’t unlimited time for you and in the second all the thoughts and fundamental considerations you will go through outside won’t make it any easier. Heads or tails?’
‘Heads,’ Richard murmured. Sperber tossed the coin and it was as if through a veil of mist that Richard saw it fall back down onto the table, onto the rubber pad, bounce up, come to rest balanced on its edge, slowly roll down the table, tip over and disappear.
‘Shit,’ Sperber said. ‘That doesn’t count, of course. We have to find it, though, I always use that one for tossing a coin.’
Richard remained seated, unable to move, while Sperber crawled round the desk looking for the mark coin. ‘So there you are!’ he cried, after a certain amount of crashing and banging, and appeared, red and panting, from under the desk, triumphantly holding up the coin. ‘Right then. That’s not going to happen again.’ The coin spun, this time Sperber caught it and slapped it onto the back of his other hand. ‘Heads,’ he said, ‘so you have got me for your boy. – Would you like to know the name in the other case? – I can understand that. Though it would have been more honest if you had wanted to know.’ Sperber seemed to be wondering whether he should tell him the name anyway but changed his mind, put the other file back in the drawer. ‘I think Christian has a good chance of coming out of this unscathed and I don’t imagine it will have much effect on his prospects of going to university either.’
While this was going on, Meno was exploring the island. Beyond the park, which was well tended – agaves and orange trees in tubs, fountains, gravel footpaths – a wilderness began: spruce and beech trees were wreathed in creepers, lepidodendrons grew closer and closer together the farther Meno went, masses of leaves tumbling on top of each other, tangled lianas round moss-encrusted giants, tree ferns, leguminous species: it was the vegetation of past geological periods; he was in a brown-coal forest. How quiet it was; it was so quiet that it struck him that there were still no birds calling, no mosquitos buzzing, that he could hear his watch ticking. The ferry terminus was on the other side, to the north the arm of the river widened out into a lake. When Meno went to the shore he saw pipes under the surface, on the opposite bank, amid a wall of swamp cypresses with their high aerial roots, they curved upwards, supported on pylons, they’d been coated with camouflage paint. Meno put his hand in the water – bathtub temperature – before listening again and watching the almost imperceptible tug of the river, the silent forest of swamp cypresses. Rays of the sun slanted down on the surface, like lancets of light operating carefully and filling the water with metallic fire; the edge of the woods merged with the sky to create an active osmotic layer with an iridescent greenish tinge – smoky flowers, steaming waters – ferns, bloated horsetails seemed to sit up, like sleepers awakening, on the ground of more distant alluvial islands. On a tree stump jutting out into the water not half a metre away from him Meno saw a cocoon, a horned butterfly larva the size of his hand, shaped like a sea snail and, to go by the movements that could be seen, the occupant must be close to emerging. Meno stood there, fascinated and confused. The cocoon burst open, feelers groped, twitched in the currents of air, the olfactory stimuli, the scents of danger, then the body pushed its way out, the eyes appeared over the edge of the pupa, little baskets gleaming like tar, then the front legs, still uncertain, the wings, still tied up and folded like umbrellas half out of their covers. The lines of the tracheae could be distinguished, one wing broke out. Veronese green, moonspots, motes of rusty red on the body: a uraniid, a day-flying moth from the tropics. Cheered up, Meno walked back.
Outside the court building he met Joffe. The fat lawyer recognized him, looked in the direction from which Meno had come and waved him over. ‘You mustn’t talk about that, Herr Rohde,’ he said in his guttural voice, oiled by elegant addresses to the jury and countless The Law and You programmes, ‘there’s an explanation for everything. You’ll have seen the pipes. Well, they’re for district heating. They leak a little, the heat gets out, that’s all. In winter the snow doesn’t lie here – and we have some rare birds among the winter visitors. – You’ve come with Herr Hoffmann?’
‘I’ve just had a little walk. Herr Hoffmann has an appointment with Sperber –’
‘I know,’ Joffe broke in. ‘By the way, since I’ve happened to run into you – before long Herr Tietze will be going to Salzburg with the State Orchestra as their accompanying doctor. He shouldn’t take on any errands for Frau Neubert, make that clear to him.’ Surprised, Meno said nothing. The lawyer seemed irritated by his incomprehension. ‘Herr Neubert intends to meet Herr Tietze in Salzburg and to give him money for his wife, with whom your brother-in-law is on friendly terms, as I know. Herr Tietze should leave the money where it is if he wants to avoid getting into trouble.’ Joffe gave Meno a searching look, seeming to enjoy the effect of what he’d said. His expression became friendly again. ‘About that little business with Herr Eschschloraque, has h
e’ – Joffe waved his hand as if to ward off annoying insects – ‘that nonsense with the comma he wanted to foist on you, you know what I mean?’
‘He hasn’t said any more about it to me.’
‘Oh, good, very good. I heard about the matter and thought that one should do something to prevent Herr Eschschloraque from doing anything rash. Vindictiveness is ugly, I think, and unworthy of a communist.’
‘Thank you.’
Joffe laughed, making his shoulders shake. ‘Ah well, my dear Rohde, one does what one can. A very good evening to you.’
35
Dresdner Edition
When Meno got up for his lauds he felt tired, washed out. At night the temperature only fell by a few degrees. Sultry air was hanging over the garden, virtually no cooling breeze came from the river. A marshy smell was loitering on the slopes above the Elbe. Sometimes Meno could hear the Kaminski twins laughing, the heat didn’t seem to bother them, in the evenings they would walk up and down by the parapet with the eagle, spick and span in their white cotton slacks and white shirts, murmuring, perhaps they were revising for an exam. When the sultry heat became unbearable, Meno would sleep in the summerhouse, wash in the rainwater butt and run naked, with rubber slippers on his feet, round the garden to get dry. Water was starting to be rationed; the city council had posted notices that curled up on the trees like the locks of a wig: no washing with running taps, cars to be washed with a bucket only, gardens only to be watered with a watering can.
He took the 11 to work. In the morning, when the passengers were squashed together, the tram stank of sweat (nylon shirts, the fabric of the future) and over-applications of perfume, all the sliding windows and vents in the roof were wide open, the airstream was cooling; on the stretch between Mordgrundbrücke and the Pioneers’ Palace, where the road was lined by the outliers of Dresden Heath, you could breathe fragrant air. Meno got out on Dr-Kulz-Ring and walked to the Old Market; the Dresdner Edition offices were in the block beside Holy Cross Church – gambrel roofs, historicizing architecture from socialist town planning; you went in by a hall lit by 1950s lamps with cone-shaped shades and smelling of Frau Zäpter’s coffee, Josef Redlich’s tobacco and the used air from the office refrigerator. Josef Redlich suffered during those dog days. With a morose expression he would stick manuscripts in the editors’ pigeonholes, close the window in his little room, which looked out onto the Old Market – too much noise, too much pitiless light on typescripts, he wanted nothing to do with dissecting rooms, microscopes, halogen lamps, shook his head at Meno’s activities. ‘Aren’t you going to put your stethoscope on as well, Herr Rohde?’ And he would point to stacks of paper, chalky white under the lampshades, which seemed to be projecting X-rays. At that time of the year the Old Market shimmered like a layer of salt with dead car-fish strung out along it; the oddly skiddy noise of the trams in Ernst-Thälmann-Strasse interrupted the rumble of traffic between the post office and Pirnaischer Platz in an unpleasantly irregular rhythm. Josef Redlich wanted the blinds shading his room before he sat down to his literature – and before the telephone, a black toad squatting on a tray on an extending shelf, started to disturb him. On some mornings the temperature had already risen to over thirty degrees, then even Oskar Klemm, the proofreader, would loosen his tie, the consumption of ice cream, of which there was always a supply in the refrigerator, could lead to shortages and Josef Redlich would cover the floor of his room with colourful plastic tubs that he filled with cold water and walk up and down with bare feet – clasping his hands behind his back and puffing away at his cheap cigars (Meno could never find out what brand they were, Redlich took them out of a leather case; Madame Eglantine said: railway-embankment harvest), sometimes contemplating a corn on his left middle toe, thinking, ‘The things it’s seen, all the countries its walked round with me’, and musing in the dreamily abstracted Josef Redlich manner with its Lichtenberg quotations. Sometimes he would lean back in his chair, his waistcoat stretching over his potbelly, though without a single button flying off, his pocket watch, still on its chain, lying open on the table in front of him, the cuffs of his white starched shirt with the impeccably smooth sleeves (he had them ironed, he had been a widower for a long time and had two wedding rings on his right ring finger) turned back, the veins stuck out on his hands dangling down, over his spherical head he’d draped a wet handkerchief, the corners of which protruded like a flying squirrel. At moments like that he looked as if he’d had a stroke, but when Meno came over, a look of concern on his face, he would wave him away wearily, ‘Oh, Herr Rohde, I still have some prose to order around, but just look at me … rarely can a mind have come to a standstill more majestically.’
Josef Redlich would never have given his personal taste the status of objective authority. That was what the West German tsars of the arts pages with ambitions to educate the nation did – for example, the great panjandrum of critics, Wiktor Hart, whose articles Josef Redlich read with fixed cigar, on which the ash grew to a structurally ominous length; then he would put the pages (numbered copies) aside, tap the ash off his cigar and declare, ‘We ought to take him seriously’, or ‘His argumentation is ringfenced, if you’ll forgive the expression; a fence is made by its fundamental component, the slat, being repeated time and time again; it is unclear whether the desire for variety is out of place here’, or ‘He doesn’t understand poetry at all, he confuses it with the exclamation marks in the margins of our biographies’, look across at Meno, happily expecting contradiction, which wasn’t long in coming, for Meno enjoyed reading the reviews, which were written with fervour, and were knowledgeable and positively obsessed with the desire to champion literature; Hart made no concessions as he delivered judgement, an advocate of common sense (that did not, of course, always produce the desired results in literature, that vague art of feelings, contradictions and dreams: half-mad authors had created half-mad immortal works; this or that representative of the most socially committed realism nothing but crystal-clear whimsies); he was a weather god who could cut up rough at a neglected nuance and stood guard before his holy place – though he himself never used that expression, nor a word such as soul, he would mock it, reject it, put it in inverted commas, scenting waffle. He understood a lot, it seemed to Meno, and he possessed the chief virtue of the born critic: he didn’t enjoy panning a book (though such reviews were enjoyable to read) and he disposed of the whole palette of praise. Hart was vain, but he was vain for literature and he was capable of putting his vanity on one side and leaving some matters unmentioned out of tact or discretion; and Meno always felt that, basically, he didn’t want to make a fuss about himself, there was an unspoken ‘That’s not done’ and much quiet knowledge of human nature. Everyone who was able to get his reviews read them immediately, but not everyone in publishing enjoyed that privilege, copies went to Schiffner, the senior editors and Party secretaries, at Dresdner Edition to Kurz alone among the editors; Meno owed the fact that he could read them to the sympathy Josef Redlich clearly felt for him (that, moreover, was mutual). Everyone who read Hart either nodded vigorously or vented their feelings with gestures of outrage, no one remained indifferent to him, especially not the authors he dealt with. Eschschloraque wished for Moscow conditions ‘in which I could have had this individual taken care of’. The Old Man of the Mountain thought Hart was ‘magnificent, he panned one of my books, you know, but I can see that he was right’, and Schiffner said, ‘An important man, unfortunately. He helps our work, when he praises us, he helps our work, when he pans us; we are dismayed he doesn’t come to our aid, when he ignores us.’
The typographer, Udo Männchen, suffered from the heat more actively than Josef Redlich; he would emerge from his graphic studio at the end of the corridor more frequently than usual, tear at his shock of fuzzy hair, hold up his glasses to the light, then dangle them resignedly. Fanning himself with one of his outer garments (Indian-Hawaiian-Buddhist – shirts they were not) that had the look of the theatre about them, he would shout down the co
rridor, ‘Dante! I’ll use the Dante Antiqua, since it’s sizzling.’
‘Quiet!’ the proofreader, Oskar Klemm, cried from the office diagonally opposite.
‘Or perhaps not the Dante after all.’ Udo Männchen put his glasses back on, let his arms hang down.
‘Eschschloraque, king of the ornamental fish, is a classicist; but the decline began with Dante. – What do you think, Herr Rohde, should we, as men of profound feeling, not use Dante, of all fonts, for him?’
‘He’d notice,’ Meno said with a smile.
‘Notice, oh yes, he would that. And he’d grab me and rumple me, he’d curse me – Männchen, he’d say menacingly, you did that on the wings of wrong! Intellectually speaking, the solecism you managed to perpetrate there is elementary, my dear Männchen. As far as I’m concerned, your reputation – O editor! Now something bad is coming. A dirty word, a non-literary word. Impossible to represent graphically – is shit.’
‘He wouldn’t use it, Herr Männchen.’
‘No, I have to agree with Meno there.’ When she heard Männchen, Stefanie Wrobel liked to go and fetch a cup of coffee or an ice cream. ‘We have it on good authority that a single so-called four-letter word can take him two to three hours.’
