Uwe Tellkamp - The Tower

After a few days Christian stopped shaving. Lene said nothing about the light-brown woolly tufts on his cheeks, the brigand’s moustache, the stubbly hair gradually turning shaggy again. A week later the others arrived: Reina with a rucksack and a case full of cosmetics that made Christian laugh, at which she recoiled; but perhaps it was his unkempt hair that had startled her and not the washbasin he handed her, nor the earth closet he pointed out in the yard. Siegbert and Falk immediately started fooling around, both grabbed masks that immediately started emitting jungle roars; Pepi came jumping up at them, yapping angrily, Verena squealed, she was frightened of dogs.

The days blurred at the edges, turned into time. The sun cut up across the sky over the mountains. The tips of the bracken flushed red, the hollows were haunted by misty ghosts until the August heat drove them away. Cocks crowed from the village but Christian was awake before them and listened to the breathing of the others, who slept more soundly than he, even though it was hot on the air beds and the air in the room, unmoving despite the wide-open windows, was stifling. He looked at the girls, sleeping there before him, Verena in her nightdress despite the heat, Reina stripped to the waist, she was lying on her front, the sheet had slipped down to her waist. Then he got up and went out, the alarm clock said four, ten past four; Pepi wearily raised his head when Christian went past his kennel, decided he could nudge him with his nose and wag his tail: Bit early for food, he seemed to be trying to say as the meat flopped into his bowl, but OK, since it’s you. Christian filled the bucket Kurt had left by the water tank, washed himself, pouring the water over his naked body; that was what Kurt did, what Meno did and what he had done for as long as he could remember. In the winter it was an icy whiplash, tearing his tiredness apart; now the water was lukewarm and smelt of cress. He warmed it up for the girls with an immersion coil.

Meno came, bringing provisions, and settled in his old room in the attic, where, on a desk made of bare planks, there was a Fortuna typewriter, clunky as a Konsum cash register, surrounded by phials of liquid ammonia, a microscope, a bowl with ‘Carlsbad Insect Needles’, entomologist’s collecting jars: this was where he retired to when he was free and wanted to do his own work. His birthday wish had been for quiet and company, so Verena and Reina took him some flowers as a late present: the eighth of the eighth had disappeared somewhere in the far blue yonder down the Elbe. Christian waved away questions about the pre-military training camp and the possibility of being expelled from school. They were drifting. Spreading out their arms they drifted on the compressed light glazing the hills and only disappearing in the gorges. After they’d breakfasted Meno said, ‘You must be both plant and animal. Be alert, keep your ears and eyes open. A body has boundaries but they will dissolve if you wait and trust.’ They went for walks early in the morning. The Falkenstein was obscured by haze. The jagged Schrammstein cliffs were still dark as lead, beyond them rose the Grosser Winterberg then, to one side in the distance, the regular cone of the Rosenberg: Rů žová hora, Meno murmured; that was already in Bohemian Switzerland. Leaning over the rocks, they looked down at the curve of the Elbe below Schandau. In those early hours the river seemed to have to expand, at the bend it was wrinkled, bright as a newly minted coin in the middle alone; barges engraved lines on it. Verena and Falk were each trying to outdo the other in finding names for the varying shades: liquorice, pitchblende, mocha, chemist’s-bottle brown, with a shimmer of oil and splodges of purple when the sun had risen a little higher. Once, from the Postelwitz bank, they saw dead fish floating down the river, so many it looked as if the Elbe had been paved with metal bars. With a stick Meno pulled a few over, they were roach, unnaturally large. ‘Cadmium.’ They flaked to pieces when Meno pushed them back into the current. The girls turned away.

The clefts were fern-dark and full of a stench that only the midday heat would disperse. The cliffs were mossy, covered in brown iron stains and yellow patches of sulphur, as slimy as a toad’s skin. Sometimes Meno’s ‘Careful!’ came too late and Christian, who wanted to show off a bit to the others, watched in alarm as the scree tumbled down into the gorge. They didn’t take marked routes but followed Meno, who walked in front, silent and avoiding tourist paths and popular viewpoints: the Bastei, from where one could see far out over the countryside, the fields dotted around, the plain with its wide-open spaces in which the jagged-backed table mountains — Königstein, Lilienstein — seemed to be like prehistoric animals resting. At first they couldn’t manage more than ten to fifteen kilometres a day, came home too exhausted to follow Meno’s explanations. He was different here, no longer the calm, pipe-smoking publisher’s editor from the House with a Thousand Eyes who listened to music with Niklas and Richard in the evening, went to talks in the Urania group, gossiped about literature with Josef Redlich or Judith Schevola. This was where he had grown up, where he once more assumed the swift, sinewy gait of the mountain-dweller, the keen senses that Christian admired: there were the tracks of a pine marten that Meno was puzzled no one else had noticed; here the remains of a pine cone but they couldn’t tell which animal had nibbled at it; strange noises came from a tree plantation, outside which they waited, with ants crawling all over them, so long it was like torture: in the twilight a bird, black with a bright-red crown, was settling on a branch, a black woodpecker that no one, apart from Meno, had seen before.

After a week even the pale-skinned Reina was brown. They now managed to keep up with Meno without collapsing, half dead, onto their air beds in the evening. Lene did the cooking, the girls the shopping, the boys chopped wood for the winter. Ravenous, they fell on the Transylvanian dishes with the strange-sounding names like wild animals. In the evening Meno went out alone or typed on his Fortuna in his room; they stayed close to the house, just once Reina and Christian went back into the woods at twilight. They took Pepi with them and torches.

‘The way you toss your hair back, it’s so affected,’ she said, imitating him to his annoyance.

‘I’m not doing it out of vanity but because the quiff irritates me. I don’t like it when it falls down over my forehead.’

‘Then cut it off.’

‘So my hair all sticks up.’

‘It does that already. Doesn’t look bad at all. I’d leave it, if I were you.’

‘Why?’

‘Verena likes it better too.’

‘How do you know?’

‘Do you really not like being called “Montecristo”?’

‘Not particularly.’

‘But it sounds so serious when I say “Christian”. And when it sounds so serious I can’t help laughing and I don’t really want to do that. — Have you heard whether you’ve got a place at Leipzig yet?’

‘No. What about you?’

‘I don’t know whether chemistry’s right for me,’ Reina said after some hesitation.

‘But you like it so much. Frank thinks very highly of you. You’re the best in chemistry, by a long chalk. It annoyed me.’

‘Really? Well, I think that’s great.’ Reina laughed, exuberantly kicking away a pine cone. ‘You’re so ambitious and always studying … do you know what they said about you?’

‘No. But I’m sure you’re going to enlighten me.’

‘Svetlana says you’ve got a screw loose. Verena thought the way you shut yourself off was a kind of immature reaction, compensation for some family traumas or other …’