The Tower: A Novel

by Uwe Tellkamp

  67

  Brown coal

  If you say open-cast mining, you say wind. The wind was always there. It came from all directions, bringing the smells of Samarkand, the yellow fog, the carbide dust and the quicklime from the lime works. When the cloud was low, the slim-waisted funnels of smog would swing like umbilical cords between rust-red placenta zones on the ground and lazy, genie-in-a-bottle cloud-foetuses; it would start at the edge of the mine, where even the weeds didn’t thrive, jump down, elegant and self-assured as a paratrooper, onto the lower, churned-up terrace, turn into a child splashing contentedly in the bathtub, push and shove the W50 and Ural lorries, making the tarpaulins billow out and, where they’d been attached too casually, tear off the hooks and flap up and down like the wings of trapped prehistoric birds; or it would blow buffers of dry soil at the lorries that were so fierce the drivers had to step on it even when going downhill. And they couldn’t see any farther than the inside of their windscreens, in front of them the brown grit, already containing coal, swirled, easily swallowing up the light of the headlamps so that vehicles coming towards them, now pushed by the wind and grabbed by their tarpaulin collars, emerged abruptly, immense, out of the booming darkness. To the roofs of their cabs the drivers had fitted special horns that reminded Christian of ships’ foghorns (he didn’t ask, perhaps that was what they actually were), but even the bellow from these throats, which could normally be heard kilometres away, broke off when the wind decided to swing round uphill. The wind would hop down exuberantly from terrace to terrace, but patiently spend time on each one of them, chewing and biting into lumps and bumps, smoothing out the track, a spiral going down in tighter and tighter hairpins, that the lorries, with the shifts on the lurching, bone-shakingly shuddering wooden benches on either side of the open back, slithered up and down. At the bottom, on the circular floor of the crater of the open-cast mine, the wind would sometimes pause for minutes on end. An almost arrogant pause, Christian thought, raising his head and listening in the gaseous darkness with its wash of white from the lights on the machines. The wind was waiting. Was it gathering its strength for an attack on the excavators as they moved with stolid finality? They pushed the wind up onto their shoulders, unconcerned. But the wind seemed at last to have found a challenge to clear the fun out of its rage (it reduced its strength), to hand out and receive the blows of a worthy opponent that make victory triumphant, radiant (like the cut through a valuable, incredibly irreplaceable early-Victorian sideboard that has been handed over to the circular saw); the wind returned, keeping, since for the moment it couldn’t get the better of the excavators, close to the ground, over which, if they wanted to shift their position, they had to move and needed to be as flat as a tabletop. Brutal as they were in the way they ripped into the layers of gley and seams of coal (the bucket chains ate into them as if they were Trinkfix cocoa powder), they were powerless to resist an incline: however ungainly it looked, an excavator, Christian had learnt, was a finely balanced system, even the slightest slope of the underlying surface could cause it to tip over. The wind dropped, ceremonially (somehow the idea of spats came to Christian in his seat high up on the excavator), and opened out like a Swiss army knife, only the tools the wind exposed were cudgels or, to be more precise … flails. On the one hand the furious and, in some respects admirable, choreography (only human beings were capable of the ruthlessness and obsessiveness with which the wind declared certain areas of the ground, and not always the most suitable ones, a threshing floor) made Christian feel like laughing (he suppressed it, he was afraid of this wind), on the other it stimulated, surprisingly for him, his boldness in a fit of vitality that was rare, but for that all the more violent and, because it was not free of cruelty, frightening: he jumped down from the excavator as quickly as he could and stood in the middle of the fight between the wind and the ground surface, lifted up his head to the bolts of air falling down from the night sky, as heavy and quiet as chandeliers, and screamed. That relaxed him. He thought of Burre, of Reina. And couldn’t resist singing out his own modest happiness against the deafening vehemence of calamity.

  He was the third man on the excavator. His job was to clean the bucket wheel. The soil above the coal was systematically removed, starting with the top edge of the overburden in which a channel a good metre deep, the length of the extended bucket-wheel arm, was cut out from right to left and, on the next level down, from left to right. Did one cut last twenty minutes, half an hour? Christian couldn’t say, he wasn’t allowed to wear his watch on the excavator. The bucket wheel stopped at the highest point and Christian, as nimble as an orang-utan once he had become accustomed to the work, would clamber up the struts, gratings and railed walkways to the front of the boom at the end of which, about fifteen metres from the body of the excavator, his work began: knocking off the clumps of soil stuck to the wheel. For that he used a pickaxe that the driver, at the beginning of the shift, sharpened in the crow’s nest of a workshop in the top storey of the excavator, as well as a butcher’s cleaver that was not a piece of standard equipment, brought for him by the second ‘man’ (a giant of a woman of indeterminate age in men’s work clothes, who kept her mittens on all the time, even while eating during breaks, and didn’t say a word), who demanded it back with a sullen grunt at the end of the shift. Christian hacked away like a murderer, on his back he could sense the eyes of the driver, who, from the lower cab, was examining the darkness above the calm glow of his cigarette; as a joke, the driver would switch on the wheel after precisely ten minutes, sometimes sooner, just for a try-out and ‘to wake him up’, as he said. Christian tried to stick to the interval between the chimes of the ten-minute clock but he couldn’t summon up the period of time that he thought had become part of him. When it wasn’t freezing, the soil that had been rolled flat against the bucket-wheel cover had the consistency of cork; the pick and cleaver bounced back off it and more than once the implement had slipped out of Christian’s hand and landed below, beside the crawler tracks, like a pathetically thin toy. When it was freezing the soil, in the minute it took him to get from the recreation room to the bucket wheel, became as hard as a tree trunk, and then Christian could only hack and split and cut the dark brown mass off in shavings and splinters, working as hard as he could, driven on by the fear of being caught by the wheel as it suddenly started to turn. Up there the wind went to work roughly, without the cajoling and, when they paused, hypocritical blandishments of its ground troops, without the boxing gloves of its dust-welterweights, which gave a muted sigh as a punch was landed, without the air cushions beneath their flat-footed leaps onto the conveyor belts for the overburden, above which tin lamps swayed like drinkers who had tried to slip out without paying being shaken by a strapping landlord. The ship’s doctor had told Christian about sailing ships in a storm, how the sailors were hanging on the yards, the raging sea twenty or thirty metres below them, balancing on footropes, clinging on to a recalcitrant sail that was furiously trying to burst its bonds and they were trying to reef, ‘one hand for the ship, one hand for your life’. That’s overdoing it, Christian thought, you’re not on a ship. But the idea helped, forced a breach in the reality, made it in an uncomplicated way more bearable. Water … and rats. The water gathered at the bottom of the open-cast mine, clearing it away was a task that was almost beyond the pumps, whose groans the wind occasionally released, a sound that seemed to Christian like the death throes of creatures that were active in the machines (enslaved and imprisoned by some modern curse) and for which Christian felt sorry because they had to drink just water all the time – which he took as further proof that there was also a gradual side to the tortures. The rats were fat and uninhibited and had the slippery suppleness of animals you had to hold tight between your two hands (feral cats, polecats, old toads); when the bucket wheel swung into the hillside and started its work as a mechanical mole, the driver, whose name Christian never learnt, only his nickname (‘Schecki’ or ‘Scheggi’ depending on the degree of alcoholic merrines
s), liked to shoot at them from his cab with an air rifle, his ambition being to hit them with a ‘clean’ shot – in the eyes or, which counted for more, in their slimy, pink, bare tails that would then ‘come to life’ as a whip with St Vitus’s dance – Schecki said in one of the few conversations he had with Christian; it had started with a vague wave of the hand in the direction of the top of the slope and a grunted ‘There used to be graveyards up there’, after Christian had found a half-decomposed foot in one of the buckets. Schecki grinned, took a sip of the rosehip tea the management distributed free to the workers, pressed the switch on the excavator radio and shouted ‘Food’ at the diaphragm; the reply was an irritated croak from Schanett’s (that was the name of the woman unloader) cab. Schanett left the wagon she’d just filled, slammed the cab door, bent over the boom and gave a shout confirmed by a panting whistle from the locomotive in front of the spoil wagons. She stomped into the recreation room, where it was Christian’s task to lay the table with four of the scratched plastic plates, with ‘Property of the Brown-Coal Combine’ on the back, and three sets of aluminium cutlery (Schanett ate with a butcher’s knife of her own) and to switch on the frying plate that stuck out from the wall next to the locker with Schecki’s change of clothes. When the plate was red-hot Schanett stood up, skewered a cube of margarine on the end of her butcher’s knife, slapped it down on the plate, which was bent up at the sides, where the margarine fizzed round (the surplus dribbled into a rusty Wehrmacht helmet Schecki had found in the spoil and fixed under the plate), took (without removing her mittens) four gammon steaks wrapped in newspaper out of her rucksack, let the blood drip off, chucked them angrily onto the plate, turned them, scattered pepper, salt and garlic over the sizzling meat out of a tin containing all three spices together and, when the steaks were ready, nodded Schecki and the engine driver, who were exchanging dirty jokes that were going round the mine, over with a contemptuous gesture. She would serve Christian herself, hesitating for a moment before giving the plate a push in his direction, sending it slithering across the table with sauce and blood splashing over onto the oilcloth fixed to it with steel clamps. They mostly ate at two in the morning and the plate cooled down as they did so. They all lived in the coal; the open-cast mine was only one of many that belonged together and formed a conglomerate of churned-up ground, mud, spoil heaps, coal seams stretching to the horizon with the excavators squatting on them like grasping treasure-seekers and the bloodsucking insects of the dumper trucks buzzing round. In the coal: somewhere in the darkness, which came either from above (the quickly turning sky) or from below (clay, gley, the oily shimmering puddles it was best to avoid), were the remains of a small town: fire walls, rotten fences, houses torn apart at an oblique angle, scraps of wallpaper with the shapes of furniture still visible, a Konsum branch, no longer open (Schecki, Schanett and the engine driver were self-sufficient, had a few cows and pigs, grew what they needed). Schanett lived on a farmstead, left over from a village, alone with her bedridden father, the former village butcher, with no electricity, no running water, not even one of the mine railways went out there. For the last hour of the night shift Christian took over the unloader. Schanett went, guided by her sense of smell and precise knowledge of the constantly changing tracks in the working area, past the palely lit wagons and the kilometres of conveyor belts, in order to be able to feed her stock at daybreak. Beside the window in the unloading cabin there was a poster, green islands in a green sea.

  Finale: Maelstrom

  Time fell out of time and aged. Time remained time on a clock with no hands. Time above was its passage, the sun shone on dials, indicated morning, noon, evening, indicated the days on calendars: past days, the present day, days to come. It leapt, it circled, it hurried off, a marble rolling down a narrow spiral track. But time below pointed to the laws and didn’t concern itself with human clocks. A country with a strange disease, young people old, young people not wanting to be adults, citizens living in niches, retreating into the body politic that, ruled over by old men, lay in deathlike sleep. Time of the fossils; fish were stranded when the waters receded, flapped mutely for a while, submitted, died motionless and fossilized: in the house walls, on the mouldering landings, they fused with documents, became watermarks. The strange disease marked faces; it was infectious, there was no adult who didn’t have it, no child who remained innocent. Truths choked back, thoughts unspoken filled the body with bitterness, burrowed it into a mine of fear and hatred. Hardening and softening were the main symptoms of the strange disease. In the air there was a veil through which one breathed and spoke. Contours became blurred, a spade was not called a spade. Painters painted evasively, newspapers printed lines of black letters; however, they weren’t what promoted understanding but the space between them … the white shadows of words that were to be sensed and interpreted. In the theatres they spoke in ancient metres. Concrete … cotton … clouds … water … concrete …

  but then all at once …

  Meno wrote,

  but then all at once …

  68

  For technical reasons. Walpurgis Eve

  Dances, dreams … Sleep became mushy, the early shift came and went, doors banged, from the rooms at the farther end of the corridor came Nip’s babbling, sending the duty NCO or his assistant to the nearest shop to get some schnapps (over in Samarkand, an hour on foot through mud and the proud lifelessness of no-man’s-land) … ‘To be sloshed for a whole week,’ Nip had said, ‘and then to get up as if nothing had happened, simply to lose, forget a whole week. Seven empty pages in the calendar and despite that you’re still there.’ – ‘That’s too much of a luxury, boss,’ said Pancake, who enjoyed the privilege of being allowed to sit on the edge of the mine crater playing tangos for the excavators; he took the right to address him by that title from the deals he set up with Nip. But the sergeant seemed to be taking him for a ride, threatening him with a ‘you know what, Kretzschmar’, so that Pancake had started to make a list that he added up now and then. Too much of a luxury: not to know what was going on for a week, then just to smooth out your uniform, ‘not even kings can do that. And anyway, I’d be there. I like shirkers. Boss.’

  Between the shifts, on the lemon-yellow linen that made the soldiers’ quarrelling somehow cosy, amid tobacco smoke, the clatter of dice, bored-frustrated card bids, Christian spent a lot of time thinking about things.

  ‘Do you think Burre was an informer?’

  ‘Course I do. What else could he do, Nemo?’

  ‘You’re not calling me Mummy’s Boy any more?’

  ‘No one who can stick out a summer in the carbide is that. Simple fact, simple conclusion. – That makes you feel good, does it? Applause is our food, as they say in the circus.’

  ‘I saw him outside the staff building. – You see a lot of people there, but not like that. It’s hard to say why, but I could imagine where he was off to.’

  ‘If I’d been him I’d have done just the same. You tell them this and that and you’re left in peace. It must be difficult to pin something on you after that.’

  ‘So what would you have told them about me?’

  ‘That you think too much for a convinced socialist brother. That makes you dangerous. A clever Dick who can keep his trap shut as long as you, who quietly observes and isn’t close to anyone, will never be satisfied with some provisional solution. He wants more. Freedom or justice, for example. And they’re always the ones who make difficulties.’

  ‘Perhaps you’re an informer?’

  ‘I’d get nothing out of it. Would ruin my business. I depend on my reputation and something like that always comes through, like damp through the wall.’

  ‘Still.’

  ‘Anyone else would have had that stuck in his ribs by now.’ Pancake pointed to the crowbar propped against the shed wall.

  Up to 29 December the winter was unusually mild; the cold arrived suddenly, Christian could see the puddles freezing over from the excavator, the rain abruptly turning into h
ail. The wires of the mine’s electric locomotives crackled. The wind blew cold dust at them.

  ‘Oh, brother’ – the foreman in charge of the shift adjusted his hard hat and looked in concern at the flurries of snow – ‘this really looks as if it’s going to be something. And that just before New Year’s Eve.’

  ‘Four o’clock sharp, Meno.’ Madame Eglantine’s cigarette-hoarse, guttural laugh drew one’s gaze to her eyes, which were as wide as a startled animal’s and had the vulnerable-seeming shine of chestnuts fresh out of their spiny shell, to her dress (natural-green linen with red felt roses sewn on with exuberant irregularity), to her melancholy gait, which didn’t appear to go with it, in cheap trainers or (in the winter) hiking boots that had been handed down to her, the laces of which she liked to leave untied: just a big girl, Meno thought as he followed her into the Hermes conference room, where another editor, Kurz, had already switched on the television for the live transmission of the ‘Ceremony of the Central Committee of the Socialist Unity Party to celebrate the seventieth anniversary of the founding of the German Communist Party’. But the picture vanished a few seconds later, the radiators crackled and went cold, the hum of the refrigerator in the hall ceased and Udo Männchen, the typographer, standing by the window, said, ‘Our life overall here is – underinstrumented. The whole of Thälmannstrasse’s dark. We ought to be publishing books in braille.’