The Tower: A Novel

by Uwe Tellkamp

  Once the cold season begins the heating levels are announced daily on the radio. The heating levels apply to firms and institutions with buildings and plant that do not have functioning output regulators. They set maximum heating times: heating level 1 means the heating is on for at most four hours a day with the proviso that the room temperature must not exceed the limit – for offices, schools, cinemas and other social institutions that is 19–20°C. Heating level 0: no heating for any firms or institutions, special arrangements are in operation for certain buildings or spaces (e.g. hospitals). The date at which space heating starts (heating level 1) is determined by the director of the energy combine after consultation with the chairman of the District Energy Committee.

  ‘Learning from the Soviet Union means learning to freeze’ is the joke going round the queues outside Hauschild’s coal store.

  In the spring Josta broke up with Richard. She wrote him a letter: since he refused to divorce his wife, she had drawn the obvious conclusion; moreover there was another man now. She was going to get married. She and her fiancé would take action to prevent any attempt by Richard to see Lucie again, to influence her or to challenge their right to custody of the child. Her fiancé had connections. ‘Farewell.’

  One evening Christian saw his father come round the corner of Wolfsleite into Turmstrasse. Richard had dug his hands into his coat pockets and his eyes were on the ground. Christian’s first impulse was to hide behind one of the parked cars and wait until his father had passed, but Richard had already seen him. ‘Well, lad,’ he said, raising his shoulders like a large, skinny bird that felt cold. He seemed tired, he didn’t have his usual coolly searching look. ‘Problems?’ Richard went on, prodding Christian gently with his elbow without taking his hand out of his pocket.

  ‘Nah.’ Christian made an effort to make his voice sound unconcerned. ‘And you?’ He was alarmed at his familiarity, the forced joviality hung in the air. He’d never talked to his father like that before, as an equal, it just wasn’t done. He drew his head down into the collar of his parka.

  ‘Keep everything bottled up, hm?’ Richard said with a soft laugh. ‘Keep everything bottled up, that’s the way it is. The Hoffmanns and the Rohdes – we keep our mouths shut.’

  ‘Meno says, “A wise man –” ’

  ‘ “– walks with his head bowed, humble like the dust.” A Chinese proverb. He’s good at following it. The art of lying … You might perhaps find it useful some day, who knows?’

  ‘Are you going home?’

  ‘Not yet.’

  ‘Can I walk along with you?’

  Richard looked up, then he suddenly went to Christian and embraced him. ‘I have to walk a bit by myself, my lad. – Sorry I couldn’t do anything about the army. The guys at district headquarters promised they’d conscript you into the medical corps.’ But that hadn’t happened, Christian had been conscripted into an armoured division.

  ‘I’ll survive.’

  ‘You go that way, I’ll go this.’ Richard pointed in either direction along Turmstrasse.

  It’s a time for reading: Orwell is read, circulates in laboriously typed copies – transcripts by hand, such as the monks made, would be too easily recognized, cases were known in which State Security had sent registered mail to every household in one district in order to have a sample of handwriting on the receipt they could use for comparison, checked dictations done by children at school, students’ test papers, documents written by the spouse who hadn’t signed the receipt. It’s the time of the chain letters, of transfers, the time when poetry albums go from hand to hand in the classrooms and boys whose voices are breaking fill them with sparks of genius such as: ‘There’s no place like home’ or ‘Roses are red / violets are blue / sugar is sweet / and so are you.’ It’s busy at the post office: beside the buzzing long-distance booth – Herr Malthakus calling a philatelist who lives abroad; beside the booth for local calls – the mother of Frau Zschunke, the greengrocer, has been admitted to hospital; there’s a queue at the parcel counter to send solidarity parcels to Poland. Outside the church Pastor Magenstock has put up a list of items that are most urgently needed, which should be sent to make the long journey (because they fetch the highest prices on the Polish black market, though that reason doesn’t feature on the list, of course); addresses have also been attached to the notice. People have little trust in the officials of the German and Polish post, border control and customs, in dark hands in the interior of the People’s Republic of Poland. Coffee, sugar (whole shopping-bagfuls of one-kilo packets at 1.55 marks each are lugged there from HO Lebensmittel or Holfix), children’s clothes, cigarettes, flour. In the furrier’s section of Harmony Salon the clippings of fur are collected; ‘It’s all going to Poland,’ Barbara informs the children who ring at the door; the dressmakers do extra shifts to make the scraps into winter clothes that they proudly deliver to the parcel counter, where the assistant, wheezing asthmatically and wearing DVT-stockings and slippers with furry pink mice on them, is heaving weighty string-tied blocks up onto the scales with a regularity that usually only occurs at Christmas, writes the postcode on the wrapping paper with a blue wax crayon (zeros the size of hot-water bottles), brushes the completed dispatch form with glue and slaps it onto the parcel. There’s a smell of glue in the post office. There’s a smell of wet umbrellas drying in a plastic stand in the entrance; there’s a smell of Postmaster Gutzsch’s St Bernard, who’s lying, like a calf, on a blanket in the passage behind the counters. The special stamps to mark the forthcoming thirty-fifth anniversary of the founding of the Republic only have a faint smell of glue, and of Gutzsch’s extinguished cigar – he sometimes puts it down on the edge of the sponge used for moistening the glue on the stamps when he’s checking that both the recipient’s and the sender’s address on the envelope are written correctly; he draws one of the narrow-gauge railway series with the fine edging past his cigar across the wet sponge or takes a statue from Balthasar Permoser’s seasons series of stamps out of a folio-sized post office file and measures the space up meticulously before sticking down ‘Spring’ and ‘Summer’, then picking up the rubber stamp and thumping it down twice: pa-dum, first of all on the rich black of a pre-war Pelikan inkpad, then, joyfully, on the virgin stamp.

  Regine waited. Under the ricepaper lamp in the living room that Jürgen had made and decorated with pictures of flying fish, in the garden of the house in the street in Blasewitz that was named after a resolute woman who fought for socialism, by the woodland park where the children tobogganed and skated in winter and in summer the ice cream and lemonade vendors sold colourful refreshment – in the garden, surrounded by the statues Jürgen had carved out of the sandstone from the Lohmen quarry: a frieze of cubes with children beneath fruits, a female torso, two boys based on their children, Hans and Philipp, she sat and waited. She waited beside the telephone when Richard and Anne left the living room in Caravel to leave her alone with Jürgen’s voice, which, from the hubbub of the great light-spattered city of Munich far away at the other end of the crackling, hissing line, would say, accompanied by a further crackle, ‘Hi’; when they went for a walk so as not to hear Regine sobbing, not to witness the silence that could arise after four years of separation and that everyday matters could never quite cover over: How are the kids? Are they doing OK at school? Is there anything you want, what should I send you? – And you? Have you found a job yet? An apartment? My God, all that’s incredibly expensive. Regine waited when the lamplighter took his metre-long pole with the hook on the end off his black bicycle, inserted the hook in an eye in the grubby glass hexagon of a gas lamp, blew up a ball of light, one after the other in the streets of the district; she waited on the Thursdays when the ice cart came, drawn by two apathetic Haflinger horses, when the iceman’s attention-demanding loud bell rang out, as if hurt, through closed windows and undrawn curtains along the summer-quiet street, to announce with its shrill ‘Here I am!’ the delivery of fresh blocks of ice that the iceman took down from the ca
rt with a cramp-iron – shimmering like fish, glassily smooth, the hunks were put into the kitchen icebox, where, within a few days, they melted onto bowls hung underneath them; pre-electric chilling for butter and meat, milk and jam.

  It is the month of the workers’ celebrations. ‘Everyone out for the first of May’ was the wish expressed on a placard on the wall of the Dresden-Tolkewitz city graveyard.

  It is the time when every Wednesday at 1 p.m. the wail of a siren can be heard over the city, practising for the real thing, when at night the rattle of machine-gun fire from the Soviet training grounds all around the city penetrates their sleep, when by day the vapour trails of fighter-bombers circle round the blue sky, followed a few seconds later by the roar of jet engines. And what point is there in ignoring the fact that the coconut, well-known for its ability to migrate across oceans, is able to find its way up the Elbe and seems to exist in reality and all its fibrous hairiness, the size of a cannonball, on some of the fruit racks in Frau Zschunke’s shop one cold afternoon in May? The widowed Frau Fiebig first looks at Frau Zschunke, who lowers her eyes and nods. Then she looks at the other customers: long-suffering housewives, pensioners kept supple by all the running around, Herr Sandhaus, an ally. Ignoring the fact that they don’t stand a chance not to be, they decide to be fair: first of all the widow Fiebig secures two of the phenomena of existent reality for her basket and impresses on Herr Sandhaus that he’s not to take his eyes off it. Then she runs out into Rissleite, right in front of Binneberg’s café, where Dresden ladies indulging in nostalgia along with their cream cakes have already registered her hurried behaviour, makes a megaphone of her hands round her mouth and shouts three times ‘COCONUTS!’ out into the depths of the life of a socialist district that has no choice but to be the mode of existence of protoplasm (as Friedrich Engels wrote), which consists essentially in the constant renewal of the chemical constituents of that substance. The widow Fiebig’s cry does not go unheard and, since consciousness is a developmental product of matter, it is followed by the realization of the necessity of transferring one of the fibrous, tropical, travelling cadres in Frau Zschunke’s ‘dump’ from property of the people to private property. Meno, happening to be in the right place at the right time for once, has already secured one for the Hoffmanns in Heinrichstrasse and one for himself (that is, for the Stahls and their few-months-old baby) when Frau Zschunke, with an insistent, ‘One nut per nut, no more’, asks him to replace the excess specimen. As Meno bears the Hoffmanns’ coconut in the direction of Heinrichstrasse past a hundred-metre queue, from which dark looks speak of layers of consciousness that have supposedly been long since overcome, he has, for the first time for years, the feeling of having performed a solid, truly useful, unqualifiedly good deed deserving of praise – Judith Schevola’s book is subject to delay at Dresdner Edition, assessments cause ideological stomach ache; Meno is powerless to do anything about it. That evening the coconut, cleaned, defibred (Barbara: ‘Don’t throw the stuff away, Anne, who knows what we might be able to use it for?’) and scrubbed, is standing upright on the kitchen table before the disbelieving looks of the whole family. It’s a small kitchen, they’re crowded together, it’s stuffy. There are candles burning all round the coconut, another of Barbara’s over-the-top ideas, Meno thinks as he quietly enjoys his triumph.

  ‘Come on, Richard, crack the nut,’ Ulrich says teasingly. Robert is holding the Kon-Tiki book by the Norwegian ethnologist and adventurer Thor Heyerdahl, in case anyone should have any doubts that coconuts have eyes, which have to be bored out if delicious milk is to flow. Anne has put out bowls. A sip for each one of them. Richard picks up the corkscrew and digs it into one of the darker spots that could be one of the ‘eyes’ Heyerdahl talks about. Richard manages a few twists, pulls with all his might, the nut between his feet, and retrieves a fibrous plug and a bent corkscrew. The milk refuses to flow. Hesitantly Robert points out that Heyerdahl was talking about green nuts when he described himself and his men drinking coconut milk on the Marquesas. Barbara shakes the nut; it is as it was: round, compact and mute. The nutcracker from Seiffen beside the samovar, a carved wooden figure of a miner with a hinged lower jaw, is too small and breakable; more brute force is required, but Anne’s steak hammer is no use either, it just chips a few splinters of Sprelacart laminate off the work surface and Ina puts her hands over her ears because Ulrich is hammering away at it in blind fury. Richard goes out with Ulrich onto the balcony, where he keeps some tools and, using an anvil as a firm base for the nut, raises a claw hammer, the nut slips off to one side and hits Ulrich on the shin. Hasn’t Richard got a sledgehammer, he’s had enough now and he’s not going to let himself be beaten by a damn coconut, even if he has to drive the Moskvitch over it! Richard doesn’t have a sledgehammer. Neither the Stenzel Sisters nor their neighbour, Dr Griesel, own such a weighty argument but André Tischer has a cutting torch with which Ulrich threatens the coconut as a last resort. Richard has a vice. They tighten it until the spindle starts to bend. The nut, a tough nut to crack, has no intention of giving up. ‘We could throw the thing down from the balcony onto the pavement, really slam it down.’ – ‘But then the pieces would go all over the place and I’d like, no, Snorkel, I want to have drunk something like that for once in my life. Just imagine there’s some milk still in it and it goes all over the pavement flags.’ They try with a saw, but it won’t grip, keeps slipping off the smooth surface. ‘Perhaps it’s got a screw top and you just can’t see it,’ Robert ventures to suggest.

  Summer came. The twelfth grade have their final exams. Final parade: We wish you all the best for your future in our socialist society. Flowers, handshakes, one last visit to a disco together, booze and cigarettes, partying.

  Muriel was sent to a reformatory. She had been warned but she still insisted on saying what she thought in civics classes.

  Hans and Iris Hoffmann are accused of having failed in their upbringing, they are stripped of their parental rights. The guidelines say: ‘The aim of a reformatory is to overcome individualist personality developments, to smooth out peculiarities of thought and behaviour in children and young people, thus creating the basis for normal personality development.’

  Book 2

  GRAVITY

  37

  An evening in Eschschloraque House

  Jolting and creaking, illuminated by the murky light of the upper station and a few lamps in the interior of the car, the suspension railway left the passenger bay and sank on its rail under the horseshoe steel supports into the open and down towards the valley. It was a cool evening in late autumn. Judith Schevola was shivering in her thin coat, Philipp Londoner had lent her his scarf, which she had wound round her neck like a ruff so that only the tip of her nose and her coolly observant eyes were visible; with an oversized flat cap, such as UFA film stars used to wear with knickerbockers, her head threw a bat-like shadow.

  ‘If the guard at the top had asked to see my identity card one more time –’

  ‘– you’d have exploded.’ Pulling down the scarf, Schevola gave Philipp a mocking glance. ‘Perhaps he could tell that and decided not to risk it. Who knows, perhaps that’s a reaction that’s become more frequent recently from people who’ve been to see Barsano.’

  ‘They dismiss these things as if they were nothing. Barsano didn’t even look at the document. As if he were getting that kind of stuff daily now. He smiled and gestured towards the buffet like a … bourgeois old fogey. And you …’ He nodded at Meno. ‘… hang back, say nothing and keep your head down when one of your superiors –’