by Uwe Tellkamp
So you’ve got to learn, you coward, that’s an order
that was in the Ukrainian village. The captain drew his pistol and pointed it at the soldier, who saw the black hole of the muzzle aimed at his face. An order, and if you refuse to obey it, I’ll blow your brains out. And his comrades said to the soldier Come on. It’s only a lousy Jew. And they pulled the thin young man by the hair, he was a lad of twenty, the same age as the soldier, and his hat was lying in the snow and beside it his girl was whimpering, crept over to the captain and tugged at his coat, he pushed her away, she went back to him, he shot, she lay there. Then the soldier said I can’t. And the captain Oh yes you can, I’ll make you get a move on! Here! and threw the gallows rope over the branch of the lime tree beside the village well, its trunk had no bark any more, the sole lime tree, shot to a white ghost, from which the mayor and the doctor and the rabbi were dangling, it had gone round his comrades in turn, the captain hissed Get on with it, or, chambered a round and pressed the muzzle against the soldier’s forehead. And the person beside him threw his arms up and down and clutched at the empty air and tried to get to the captain and sank into the snow beside his girl and gently stroked her sleeve and shook her head. His comrades dragged him up and tied his hands behind him, put a cloth over his face. The soldier picked up the rope, his comrades lifted the lad onto the stool, pulled the noose tight, the soldier climbed onto a stool beside it, the captain made a sweeping gesture with his pistol, the soldier carefully wiped the snowflakes off the man’s collar. His breath was blowing the cloth out and sucking it in, and then he heard the man start to bleat, disjointedly and askew like a billy goat, ugly, as the soldier thought at that moment, and as he did his spittle moistened the cloth. That sounds so silly, I want to see his mug, take the rag off, the captain laughed. But then the soldier was already pushing the stool away
click,’
‘click,’ Eschschloraque murmured,
‘… up out of the deep sleep of time: the corridors, stream of dark, and the rats not only at night, envy sending its yellow mist creeping out, it penetrates all the cracks, it knows all the doors, in dreams, at night, by day, rolling out travel destinations, lighting magic lamps as the husband of Lady Greed, the Cold Councillor, and makes the whisper-buds grow in the field of thoughts’
DIARY
At Ulrich’s place. Richard and Anne there, a party for a few relatives. Ulrich worried. He’s aged. Problems at work, difficulties meeting planned targets. Talked about meetings in Berlin, with the Planning Commission. Since the international price of crude oil, and therefore of industrial products based on petroleum, had sunk sharply since ’86, the price we had to pay the SU for oil, according to the COMECON agreement, was well above the international level. That made our products more expensive – we could no longer sell them to the West with the necessary profit margin. On which we were totally reliant. At his factory they were compelled to use the wastage produced by their suppliers – which of necessity increased the wastage among their own products. Now we were suffering the consequences of not having released funds for investment. How often had his warnings been given a dusty answer by the Party Secretary? As a Party member, he was told, he couldn’t use that kind of argument … The department with which his firm had to cooperate for the electronic control units you need for modern typewriters now had to join in the great microchip madness. Consequently he had to procure his control elements elsewhere, at the moment from Italy. Which more or less swallowed up the amount of foreign currency one could earn with typewriters nowadays. Since, however, his firm was required to earn such and such an amount of foreign currency he, the managing director Ulrich Rohde, might possibly be faced with personal proceedings against him. In September ’88 the 1-megabit chip had been presented to the General Secretary in a grand ceremony – what the population at large didn’t know, however, but that he had learnt from Herr Klothe upstairs: that chip was a handmade specimen. What, he asked us, could one do with it? Attach the chip, as an existent reality, to the completely outdated machines, as an equally existent reality? In the hope that they would then automatically be transformed into manna-producing, miracle-working cybernetic beings? The state was subsidizing the 256-kbit chip to the tune of 517 marks per item, on the world market, on the other hand, it didn’t even cost two dollars any more. ‘And now I’m asking you, Richard, Meno, what conclusions should we draw from all this?’ Richard suggested buying bicycles. If everything should collapse, no electricity for trains, no petrol for cars, we could at least still get round on bikes. We ought to build up stocks of provisions that will keep and somehow secure them against looting, official raids and confiscation. Guard one’s valuables for which, as after the war, one could get at least something from farmers. Barbara should set aside material from which clothes could be made. I was instructed to acquire books that might be of interest to people from the West, for if our money was worthless and, as had happened before, subject to inflation, then the West German mark would be the sole currency. Anne and he, Richard, would see to medicines.
‘click click click,
the lighter,’ the Old Man of the Mountain said, ‘the snow covered the plains, covered the villages, Argonauts saw it in Colchis, on Mount Kazbek and Mount Elbrus, over which the swastika flag flew, the soldier caught typhus and his sister’s fiancé froze to death at Stalingrad. The frozen body of a wren lay in the snow. Aeroplanes went into a tailspin and fell into rivers that burnt. Scraps of songs, of bagpipe tunes to which the troops of Marshal Antonescu went into battle. Anti-aircraft batteries, artillery, the hoarse bark of Schmeisser machine pistols, the tumbleweed whispered, balls of weed driven by the wind. The taste of sunflower seeds, whores dancing in a front-line brothel, chewing up liquorice sticks between their mouths; horses with swollen bodies in the ditches, their eyeballs screwed into stillness. The slaughtered woman in the fancy-dress shop in the little town on the Narev, chests broken open, splintered cupboards that had been kicked in, one of his comrades laughed, went out into the front garden, shot the tea rose, that was waving in the wind, off its stalk, plucked the petals she loves me she loves me not, oh to hell with it, shit, comrades, stopped laughing, chambered a round in his Parabellum, picked up the woman’s cat, which was crouching in the corner, stuck the muzzle under its chin, squeezed the trigger.
click,
the torch of the military policeman going round the hospital in search of malingerers. Bullet lodged in the lungs, the doctor said, bending over the soldier. The clatter of instruments thrown into a dish, the smell of tobacco, long missed, a surgeon in blood-soaked overalls, a nurse holding a cigarette out to him in a clamp; the soldier remembers the sweet plant-smell coming from the anaesthetist’s mask. Field hospital, shots, Katyushas blotting out the light, a tent for the wounded burning down, screams will make him start from his sleep at night. The clatter of trains being shunted, the steam whistle of an engine cuts through the fever’s curtain of heat, Rübezahl’s mocking them. Retreat during the rasputitsa, the muddy season. Trucks got stuck, wheels spinning until they were completely enveloped in mud, had to be pulled out by horses and men. Yoke and bridle, soldiers and prisoners of war got into harness, tried to heave the baggage wagons out, their axles broke, the swingletrees of the forage carts broke. Mosquitos ate at their faces, crept into their ears, mouths, nostrils, bit their tongues, through their clothes, crept under their collars. Then the frost returns, it comes all of a sudden, the air seems to pause, is stretched, tautened, compressed, starts to crunch, is motionless for a while, then breaks like the neck of a bottle. The mud froze as hard as concrete, the bizarre ridges sliced through truck tyres and soles of boots. Retreat. Villages. Suitcases in the snow, locks forced open, letters, photos scattered
click,
the radio knob
Ideals! Not one, darling! not one
artillery fire, close combat, the white eyes of the Russian, then he’s on me, his panting breath and filthy collar tie, I see the sharp outline of a cloud over his k
nife
Not one was too much for you
the beads of sweat on the Russian’s brow, the soldier sees a birthmark and at the same time a scene from the puppet theatre he had as a child, the beautiful, colourful Harlequin’s costume, tries to thrash his legs around a bit, senses he’s going to succumb to the Russian, who’s working silently and is stronger than he is, suddenly the Russian throws his head back, his eyes widen, he opens his mouth
The German soldier’s absolute will to victory and fanatical determination will
opens his mouth in a toneless look of amazement, the captain has stabbed him from behind
Every inch of ground will be defended
blood comes pouring out of the Russian’s mouth, splashes over the soldier’s face
To the last cartridge, to the last man
You owe me a beer, sonny
the captain said, wiping the blade in the crook of his arm’
‘click,’
said Eschschloraque, ‘the radio knob
click, and in the evening we turned into glass: in Hotel Lux, fragile in the lips of a telephone, breathless in the creak of a lift: Those footsteps, where are they going? To your door? The night was an earthly process, we lay, rigid, on the diaphragm of a stethoscope, the night was Snakekeeper’s Empire’
DIARY
In the evening at Niklas’s. Talking about Fürnberg’s Mozart story – Niklas agrees with my assessment, which truly astounded me and made me wonder about my judgement of him – when Gudrun came in: we were to come and listen to the radio. We heard: death in Peking. Demonstrations. The Square of Heavenly Peace. On the Republic’s stations: dance music. Ezzo continued to practise stoically. Beautiful weather outside. Niklas on Ariadne under Kempe, but I left. The smell of wisteria in the street, from Wisteria House, as Christian calls it – how will he be doing? Shimmering blossom, the whole house seemed to be engulfed in flames of fragrance.
‘click,’
said the Old Man of the Mountain,
‘Six groschen worth of fat bacon
and graves in the snow, iron crosses with steel helmets and a rifle hung on them, open graves full of staring faces, machine-gun emplacements with gunners in white camouflage cloaks, arms round each other as if asleep
Six groschen worth of fat bacon
and in the Ruthenian forests they cut the leather off the bodies of those who’d been hanged, shot, throttled in order to boil it in snow-filled steel helmets to make it soft enough to chew and swallow down to still the hunger, like the lumps of tallow of which the cook still had a supply; boiled leather and tallow candles the soldiers ate, and the thin-stripped bark of the aspens
click,
went the lighter from the Sertürn Pharmacy, setting the torch alight, the soldier shook his head, raised his arm
What are you doing, are you trying to stop me setting this damn Jew-dump alight, sneered the deputy leader of the Buchholz NSDAP, pointing the torch at the Hagreiter House of the Rebenzoll Brothers, the richest merchants in the town, who had regularly invited the mayor, the medical officer, the pastor and the pharmacist to dinner; now the yellow star was emblazoned on the door and on the walls between the smashed windows
Where are the Rebenzolls
Where d’you think, where they belong, in the house there’s only the pack of relatives the mayor’s been protecting, that traitor to his people, he’s just as much of a milksop as you
You will not do it
The way you’ve always been
You will not do it, or
What
the soldier raised his gun, but the Buchholz NSDAP deputy leader, owner of the Sertürn Pharmacy, just gave a snort of laughter and shrugged his shoulders, on the upper floor a woman’s voice started pleading
Stop it, these people
Jewish vermin, loan sharks, they tried to shut me down with their exorbitant interest, so
No
Perish the lot of you!
and threw the torch, the house was set on fire immediately, the flames blazed up to the first floor, where terrified faces appeared, at once followed by a commotion in the house, clatter, screams, and the soldier looked his father in the face, that he no longer recognized, for a moment disconcerted by the grey hair and the hands hanging down helplessly
Would you raise your hand to your father
You set the house on fire
They’re only Jews
People! Human beings!
Have you joined the traitors now as well
Human beings!
You’re aiming your gun at me
Human beings!
I’ll put you down like a rabid dog, you’re not my son, you bastard
the soldier shot his father.’
Dresden squatted by the riverbank like an arthritic hermit crab, cocoon threads ran round the roughened edges of the blocks in the new development, the powdery grey of which fluttered at the almost halting footsteps of the passers-by and blanked them out as if in an overexposed photograph. The casing creaked and groaned. Meno stopped but no fissure rent the air. That returned his fear to him as something serenely elegant, the teardrop shape of the cross-section of an aeroplane wing had set off the heavy rotation of the concrete mixers in the town centre, flexing like the wings of an insect as it takes off into the flow matrices that for moments traced the air, even though it was so sluggish. He saw a wrecked boat-shaped pulpit, the viper-needles of the master compass frozen in the gesture of a sun-worshipper. In the waves of the heat-surf the monstrous, herpetic lips of the navigators spewed water lilies over the Old Market and the Zwinger, the syrupy brightness of Thälmannstrasse (and fairy tales as their almanac, a young fairy in clothes from VEB Damenmode scattered gladioli over the tower blocks on Pirnaischer Platz); the water lilies, with flowers boiled soft, swelled out towards the people so that he looked for the bottom of the sea on the chalky sky and not below, where bunches of cars held up at crossroads resembled flounders gasping for oxygen. The Elbe had laid aside its keel-scratched, wind-hackle-roughened clothes and was sunning its metal body, which he had never seen so smooth and bare. The sun, however, with its quivering scatters of birds electrically magnetized to and fro, was at its zenith; micro-impulses were constantly knocking at the taut quicksilver skin of the river on which circles, as fine as if drawn with dividers, appeared with the abrupt noblesse with which the yellow flowers of the evening primrose open at a specific moment of twilight, or the bathyscaph of the moth in which the mysterious, inexplicably immense metamorphosis takes place. While he was remembering that you could accelerate the opening of evening primrose flowers by removing the calyx-lobe from the tip of a bud close to bursting so that the compressed petals, rolled up and under tension, sprang open and the long sepals submitted to the eclosion, became redundant and slackened to a rigidity that was that of sprung mousetraps – while he was remembering that, he saw the eddies heading for encounters, making contact, the parabolas, visible echo waves, splintering into each other with the precision of sections of buildings in architectural drawings. And while he mused on the words of his physics teacher, which came back to him from the unimaginable remoteness of discontented provincial summers and with his musing chipped off a flake from a block of previously unknown nostalgia since his words, nameless, had traversed time, just as buoyant meteorological balloons cross considerable deeps when the lines tethering them to the seabed, eaten away by the mandibles of the zooplankton, the caresses of the sea veils, its own disintegration accelerated by growths and carbonization, finally break – while he heard the voice holding forth over the dutifully lowered heads of the pupils, telling them that even two wardrobes exert attraction on each other and in millions of years would have surmounted the space separating them in a typical bedroom of the Workers’ and ‘Peasants’ State, while he heard all this, interspersed with the muttered mockery of the boy next to him declaring that, with all due respect, such durability of wardrobes from the VEB Hainichen furniture factory was purely theoretical, he saw the town turn i
nto an ear.
In those sweltering, heat-weakened days Anne decided to abandon caution (for only strangers, Richard thought, could call it timidity or delusion) and to look the various swirling threats in the eye, threats others’ hands, mouths (printed mouths that spoke, at profuse length or in silence, on others’ behalf), had at their disposal. After the destruction of the Hispano-Suiza, thinking about which during many futile meetings, petty quarrels, the fight against woolly-headedness had made some things bearable for Richard, his rage had given way to depression, rebellion to resignation. Sometimes he went to the cellar and planed away aimlessly at a few planks. Sometimes in the morning he would stare at himself in the mirror and couldn’t look away; the water fizzed and bubbled in the basin, he hardly moved when it started to overflow. He bought flowers for Anne, drove round the country looking for something that might give her pleasure; but after she had responded with polite consideration to a water pump he’d painted bright yellow and installed in the garden, and a Steiff teddy bear, all he could think of was household implements. Now she attended the Schmücke group alone, although Arbogast had helped them to duplicate their article.
When the names Hungary, Budapest, acquired a conspiratorial, blue sound of freedom, Anne and Judith Schevola took over the job of duplication; instead of Party brochures, Judith Schevola was now running off copies of dissident articles. Richard observed Anne and was amazed to see how, in a short time, their apartment had become a kind of conspirators’ cell. Shoeboxes with photocopies of articles were piling up in the rooms (and were collected by tight-lipped young men after giving a password, once by André Tischer in an ambulance), strange books and strange people appeared; the latter were given food and drink, swiftly threw up their arms to rant on about some ideal social system or other (afterwards the sandwiches were all gone) or listened to others ranting, made intelligent or less intelligent objections, admired the grandfather clock and the remains of middle-class prosperity that a copy of ‘Chopsticks’, put on the piano for amusement, somehow gave an oppressively alien feeling that was only slowly warmed up by the solitude and quiet once they’d all left. There were break-ins, after which shoeboxes with the photocopied articles were missing and – an odd, primitive way of camouflaging the real reason – whole shelves of bottled fruit. One day Robert’s collection of football pictures had gone (photos inserted between the silver paper and the wrapper of a West German brand of chocolate that Alice and Sandor had for years included in their Christmas parcels) and for the first time for ages Richard, who in impotent despair had gone to the police, to Coal Island, finally to Grauleite to complain, fell ill (Clarens called it endogenous depression, he said nothing) and, while outside the almond trees were in flower and from the meadows by the Elbe the nutty scent of summer hay came through the joins in the lockable windows, spent two weeks of profound melancholy in Clarens’s clinic, along the corridors of which Frau Teerwagen shambled, a blank look on her face, where Richard saw Alexandra Barsano again with short-cropped hair, following without resistance the instructions of the nurses who accompanied her on her daily routine; where at night the insane screams from the suicide room chopped up the warm sleep of the other patients – until the duty doctor appeared, followed by a Valkyrie with a tray full of syringes, from which he took what he needed, as Richard knew from going with him on his rounds, as others would take spare parts off a conveyor belt; and ‘reestablished’ quiet – injected it back in, throat by throat. Richard had no visitors. His colleagues said nothing, no one wanted to know anything after he’d been discharged, not even the ever-inquisitive nurses. And Anne? She had no time. Said, ‘You’re back. Good.’ She didn’t make many telephone calls (they’d only have been able to exchange banalities), did a lot of organizing, was often out. Richard didn’t ask where it was all going to end. Perhaps Anne wouldn’t have answered that – so he could still hope he might get an answer from her. At weekends, when he wasn’t on duty, he had dinner, waited on by Adeling, in the Felsenburg with the pendulum ticking and the corals of paint on Kokoschka’s easel dustlessly gleaming in the foyer. Anne slapped something on a roll and went out to what she called her ‘work’: meetings somewhere in town, talks with representatives of East Rome and the Schmücke group. She too had packed a suitcase; it was next to Richard’s bag in the hall cupboard. The more the exodus via Hungary increased, the more tense Anne was as she sat on the veranda, where she immersed herself in articles copied in purplish print on poor paper. She had arranged contact between the Schmücke group and Pastor Magenstock, who was a friend of Rosenträger; Rosenträger was in a position to offer refuge to those in immediate danger. She talked to Reglinde, telling her she would have difficulties if she continued to live with them – Reglinde began to work as a courier, the zoo was a good, neutral meeting place (presumably no outsider would dare to search the gorilla enclosure); secret messages were exchanged beneath the somnambulistic clasp of the gibbons. What Anne was doing, what Magenstock, the members of the Schmücke group were doing, was illegal, the section in the Criminal Code was number 217. But she, who had previously held Richard back when it was a matter of something ‘political’, now hesitated no more. She seemed to know exactly what she wanted. He didn’t.
