by Uwe Tellkamp
Christian and his companions went in with the early shift along a passageway barely lit by fluorescent tubes, past a porter’s lodge with flowery wallpaper, through a barrier with a ‘No smoking’ sign over it. Conversations ceased, silent and hunched up, driven on by Staff Sergeant Gottschlich’s ‘At the double’, the prisoners hurried into the factory. It was already light, the air already oppressive, it was going to be a hot day. The company waited in a yard that the tall grey-dusted buildings on either side turned into a well-shaft. Cylinder drums, running diagonally across the yard, turned slowly, workers in blue-grey clothes and hard hats were running to and fro on gratings above the drums. Water was pouring over the drums, it seemed to come directly from the Saale. The drums boomed and rumbled as if boulders were turning round inside them. Strange noises came from the buildings – a shrill, dangerous-sounding hum, as if a special kind of stinging insect were being held captive; as if there were a new breed of long-extinct Meganeura dragonflies or carboniferous hornets behind the closed doors. The buildings were grey: mud-grey, the colour of lead dust, carbide dust that had settled in thick layers on pipes, walls, stairs, even on the windows, simple openings with flapping rags made in the walls. What Christian saw was a coral reef of muck and in every second during which the rust-brown cylinder drums turned and smoke from the chimneys crept up under the clouds, darkening the sky, dust was trickling, falling, crackling in fresh layers on the old ones hardened by wind and weather. Christian looked across at a woman parking her red Simson moped by a furnace and heading off towards a square brick tower at the back – he saw the outline of her shoes in the dust, at first cut sharply into the yielding layer but soon powdered over with the dust drifting down, the sharp edges blurred, gradually the footmark filled in, became invisible. After a ten-minute wait there were epaulettes of grey powder on Pancake’s shoulders, their caps, boots were snowed up; Staff Sergeant Gottschlich wiped his wristwatch clean. The dust got between their teeth, in their eyes, making them inflamed, rubbed against their groin until it was raw. And then there was the wind. The wind, ferreting round, bringing unrest, the blind marshal of the weather. Like a dark-grey djinn rising out of an unsealed bottle, a spiral of dust swelled up over the carbide factory; at ground level, where clumps of grass stuck up like the mops of hair of people buried in the carbide powder, the spiral was as slender as a boa, rising up, against the wagons on the goods line behind the factory, like a trombone that twisted and turned, spreading out its bell above the furnaces lining the top of the locomotive.
Pancake accepted it with a shrug of the shoulders. He’d heard that work in the carbide factory was well paid and when a foreman came to instruct them in their work he brightened up and started to haggle. Gottschlich was occupied elsewhere and the prisoners were left to themselves and the carbide people. Christian saw the bars on the windows of the furnace shed where the foreman took them. Here, not far above the ground, the windows were of glass, wiping them had left bright smears, like bull’s-eye glass, slim triangles of dust had built up in the corners.
‘But you can pay me extra.’ Pancake smiled. Aha, so he’d only kept his self-assurance hidden. He was a smart lad, knew when it was better to keep your head down and say nothing. To play the repentant: Christian hadn’t believed his ‘reformed character’ act. In the evening he would often talk about prisons he’d been in. There were people, even ones as young as Pancake, who saw the country from the prison perspective, with ‘bars before their eyes’. They’d been round the prisons of the Republic, knew the guards, their preferences and weaknesses, knew whether you could bribe them and what with. Pancake didn’t know Schwedt and Carbide Island, but they knew him, as Christian discovered. Pancake had immediately come to an understanding with Gottschlich, each sensed a ‘brother’ in the other. Chance, sometimes just the accident of birth, could decide what dress you wore: dark blue or striped. The only difference in expression was whether you hit people as per the law or not. That was something Christian had had to learn: that you didn’t waste words. A punch was quicker than a word and who was right was not sorted out by discussion, at least not by oral discussion. Do you want it in writing? To get something in writing. That meant something different in there from outside, that had to be learnt as well.
‘We’ll see,’ the foreman said. Pancake raised his head, had a quick look round.
‘You can look after it for me. I’ll collect it when I’m out again. You won’t lose out on it.’
‘For the moment you get your seventeen per cent.’ The prisoners were entitled to 17 per cent of the normal wage, if they reached their targets. If the foreman was open to discussion like that, the situation regarding the workforce must be bad and with that their prospects of reaching the planned targets. Christian was put in the Gustav furnace shop.
Carbide. He had heard of the substance, seen the film Carbide and Sorrel, knew that Grandfather Arthur’s Wanderer bike had a carbide lamp; but he had no idea exactly how it worked. That was now explained to him by Asza Burmeister, the tapper of furnace 8 in Gustav furnace shop, an oldish worker who had been ‘in carbide’ for twenty-two years, had trained as a carpenter and had also been to sea. He took a piece of carbide and poured some water over it. ‘Y’see, Krishan,’ (he called him the same as Libussa, which pleased him) ‘now that makes acetylene. It’s welding gas, that is, welding gas. An’ now when I hold my cigar against it,’ (he smoked Jägerstolz cigars) ‘there’s a bang an’ it lights up. That’s the way a carbide lamp works. Only no bang, it shouldn’t go bang.’ Asza spoke very quickly, it was difficult to follow him, he often repeated individual words, rolled his ‘r’s in a dialect Christian had never heard before. ‘I’m a Sudeten lousewort,’ Asza said, avoiding a direct answer. Asza: an unusual name, but Christian didn’t ask. He couldn’t ask many questions. Questions were forbidden. Conversations were forbidden, fraternization. The workers and the prisoners should have as little as possible to do with each other, but the prisoners had to be trained, that was where the problems started. Gottschlich was supposed to keep a check but, as Christian soon realized, appeared only rarely. That had two reasons and they were: heat and dust. What is heat? Asza, if he hadn’t been so taciturn while working (during the breaks he would sit, left leg over a chair, with his Jägerstolz and a bottle of rhubarb juice, which was available to the carbide workers at a reduced price, muttering ‘Piraeus, Faroes, Bordoh’ – the harbours he’d seen), Asza could have said, heat, brother, you can’t explain it. The furnace has a white heart and each heartbeat comes flying like a red-hot iron. The shift lasted twelve hours. That had its good side for afterwards the prisoners didn’t have to go to the ploughland as they called the training ground: drill, assault course, tactics, instruction in protection. On the other hand it was twelve hours in an atmosphere Christian would not have thought imaginable. When Ron Siewert, the Free German Youth secretary of the Thälmann work team, came over from the furnace next to theirs Christian would only see him when he was two or three metres away. Along with Asza, King Siewert, as he was known, was the best furnace tapper: no absences, no dawdling, no boozing at work, no negligence. Negligence was bringing carbide into contact with water; negligence was not wearing a hard hat; negligence was working without wearing welder’s goggles. Siewert would appear out of the greenish haze of dust (hanging lamps on completely encrusted wires that looked as if they were inside the wreck of the Titanic), open his beard and shout to ask Asza how the furnace was to be run.
Carbide. The word pursued Christian into his sleep, for here he didn’t dream. When he got back from his shift, he was all in. He flopped onto his bunk and fell asleep. Pancake had to shake him awake when Gottschlich did his rounds.
Carbide. What was it? Trees (there were meadows along the banks of the Saale that were reduced to ash) were living beings, they felt heat and cold, growth and decline, they blossomed and withered. But this, this grey stuff, this carbide? Time consists of water, the future of carbide, they said in Samarkand. The furnace was several storeys h
igh and it produced carbide, carbide, always the dazzling white melt when Asza burnt a hole in the skin of the viscous carbide with the flame cutter, directed along caterpillar tracks, so that it would run along the ‘fox’, as Asza called the tapping spout, into the ‘walrus’ (the water-cooled cylinder drum). Christian thought, I can’t stick this out. Christian thought, Meno would say, There, you see, that’s completely unironic. Christian thought, if only you were like Pancake. Keep your head down. Always fall on your feet. Take things as they come with a shrug of the shoulders. He doesn’t get worked up about being locked up here but about the fact that he earns so little money. What sticks in his craw is the 17 per cent wages, not the hundred per cent Carbide Island. Still, Christian had become smarter. To be smarter meant keeping your trap shut. A few of the others in the cells still hadn’t become smarter, still talked about error and misfortune, wanted consultations with their lawyer, and appeals and visits. But no visits were allowed on Carbide Island. They moaned instead of sleeping. They were damaged. They ended up in the U-boat. There everything was as per regulations.
Carbide. When the wind turned to the south, it blew the dust onto the island. Roses grew against the southern wall. Christian would have liked to know what colour they were. They had no scent. The flowers looked as if they were made of plaster. Even the leaves and shoots had a light-grey dusting, a stucco-like beauty heavy with sleep.
Asza said, ‘Anyone who sticks it out for a whole summer in the carbide will stay.’ Carbide. What was it, what did they need it for? Christian learnt: it needed coke and quicklime, the mixture was called Möller. A round furnace was charged with it. Christian had assumed the furnaces here would work in the same way as the stove at home with coal on a grating through which the ash fell into the ash pan underneath. But he had never seen – never mind heard – a stove anything like this furnace. Three Soderberg electrodes, several metres high and arranged in an equilateral triangle, jutted down into the furnace, were electrically charged and, since the material from which they were made formed resistance, became hot, creating an arc with a temperature of up to 3,000°C. In it the Möller reacted to produce calcium carbide. The arc was dazzling white and hummed in the furnace opening that Asza called the nostril of hell. The hum was accompanied by the thump of the coke-crusher, since, before they were put in the mixing tower to be made into Möller, the coke and limestone had to be of a certain particle size. It sounded as if a herd of bison were stampeding across the shed, a knocking and rattling, sometimes a deafening clatter, as if goods wagons full of sheet metal were being tipped out. The furnaces used an immense amount of electricity – so much that on some days in Halle-Neustadt the lights went out when the early shift started and high-rise blocks stood there in the semi-dark like angry mountain trolls. Furnace 8 was a vicious dragon. Asza knew it well and respected it. When Asza burnt open the carbide crust, it sounded like a record arm being pulled right across the record, potent and dangerous, and it wasn’t always carbide that shot out into the ‘fox’, there were impurities, residues of quicklime and coke that ought not to be there. The shift supervisors knew that and kept quiet about it; they were under pressure from the targets and twenty-two tappings per shift were the norm, twenty-two times the white-hot snot had to pour out of the dragon’s nostrils. But the god of industrial processes had blocked them with lumps. Even at 2,200°C the molten mass of the Möller tended to form lumps and the chemical reaction threatened to come to a halt. Preventing this was Christian’s job. With iron poles several metres long that they called rods he poked around in the glowing mass. What did such an iron pole weigh? Enough for it to be too heavy after half an hour. There was a steel thermometer beside the steps up to the top of the furnace, over the years it had been covered by more and more layers of flue dust and now looked more like a stalactite than a thermometer. When he was standing at the furnace using the rod, Christian had the feeling he was being smelted into a new kind of creature, a cross between an otter (sweat, the side away from the furnace) and a broiling fowl (facing the opening). The heat made you tired, despite that you had to be alert. Sometimes hot oil would spurt out of a leaky pipe, land on your tough cotton clothing and sparks would spray out from the burner, setting the cloth alight. Once Asza was in flames but Ruscha, the second tapper (they worked in fours per furnace and shift), calmly threw a blanket over him and smothered the blaze. Pancake, working the rods with Christian, had leapt aside in alarm. The dust made your throat scratchy and this was soon followed by the cough, a never-ending retching and barking to clear out the dust; it was worse over in the chlorine works, Asza said, over in the chlorine works they exceeded the officially permitted level of air contamination by 100 per cent. The heat made you thirsty.
‘Some time ago,’ said King Siewert, ‘they used to give us vitamins, fresh fruit, oranges – but now? Rhubarb juice! Rhubarb juice all the time! Nothing but rhubarb juice every day!’
‘But you’re in the Party,’ Ruscha said, ‘you tell those up there what it’s like here. Where’s Monkeydad?’ Monkeydad was what they called the departmental Party Secretary. ‘Sitting at his desk but never gets his arse off it. Polishing up his speeches … You tell him, King.’
‘I do, I do! But they never tell you anything. I’m none the wiser when I come out than when I went in.’
‘They’re driving the furnaces to rack and ruin. If one of them should blow up, then Yuri Gagarin here’ll be in the landing capsule; some red-hot communists at last.’
For their thirst there was rhubarb juice, pressed by VEB Lockwitzgrund. The juice was brought on a cart by a woman, ‘Rhubarb-juice Liese’. Of indefinite age, though already a pensioner, she sold the juice throughout Samarkand in order to supplement her pension. She was thin and bent as she walked, probably from the advanced stages of osteoporosis, and Christian never saw her other than in the same old-fashioned black dress, to which the yellow hard hat with the retort emblem of Samarkand formed a jarring contrast. People said that Rhubarb-juice Liese was not quite right in the head, she had lost her husband and her son in the war and had been raped, not by the Russians but by a Canadian unit. She had worked in ‘the chlorine’, which had left her with a rusty laugh that could be heard during the breaks, when the furnaces (contrary to regulations) were shut down and the noise fell to a bearable level. With a trembling, claw-like hand she gave out the bottles of rhubarb juice and took the money, which she kept in a leather conductor’s bag, giving it a long and thoughtful look. She stopped in front of Pancake, who was resting next to King Siewert, and felt his face, which confused him; he frowned in irritation.
‘She fancies you,’ Ruscha joked.
‘Oh, shut your gob.’ Pancake stood up, walked away from Rhubarb-juice Liese.
‘You just be careful, she’s got the evil eye,’ Asza said. ‘I once went to see a fortune-teller in Piraeus, she had just the same look.’
‘So that’s why you’re still here! Twenty-two years!’ Ruscha tapped his forehead. ‘Only a nutcase would stay in carbide for so long.’
‘And you?’ Pancake had come back and looked Ruscha up and down contemptuously.
‘I’m not here to improve my mind, chum, but to make money. I do my twelve hours –’
‘And all the rest can go to blazes, eh?’ King laughed.
‘There’s fire everywhere,’ Ruscha replied, shugging his shoulders.
Christian sat on one side in silence, listening to their stories, mostly about carbide and women, and trying to get some rest. He sensed that he wasn’t taken seriously. Pancake, the former blacksmith with the strength of an ox, they did take seriously. Not him. He was one of the ‘white collars’ as the workers contemptuously called the management. He worked like them, they didn’t make things easy for him, they didn’t help him. Despite that, he wasn’t one of them, there remained an insurmountable barrier. He hardly took part in the conversations at all, perhaps it was his silence that made the others so reticent. One day, however, Ruscha stood up and strolled over to Christian, who was dri
nking his rhubarb juice. ‘What I wanted to ask, mate – you don’t happen to belong to the firm, do you?’
‘Sit down, Ruscha,’ Pancake said.
‘Wouldn’t be the first time they’d dumped a stoolie on us,’ he said threateningly.
‘Not everyone likes shootin’ his mouth off like you,’ Asza said. ‘Just be happy we’ve got the lad, or do you want to do extra shifts again?’
‘If the dough’s right …’
‘The class standpoint can go to hell …’
‘Rhubarb juice, rhubarb juice, I’ve got the very best rhubarb juice,’ said Liese, praising her wares.
Once Christian had settled in, he began to observe Asza, Ruscha and the other workers and spent a lot of time thinking about them. Ron Siewert lived in a high-rise block in Halle-Neustadt, which was cut through by a four-lane motorway connecting Samarkand with the rest of the Orient. He got up at four for the early shift, went to bed at eight in the evening. His apartment was tiny, he and his wife had one child; his grandparents lived in a little room. Dumper trucks were going round and round the building day and night, the paths consisted of wooden planks. The children played on the piles of rubble or in the rubbish containers by the huge central shopping mall. White and decked out with flags, it was stuck in a sea of mud. Asza dreamt of going to sea again, as he had done when he was young. He wanted to go round all the harbours he’d been to again, in an ocean-going yacht with a four-man crew. He lived in Halle-Neustadt as well, Housing Complex 2, Block 380, House 5, apartment 17.
