Uwe Tellkamp - The Tower

‘I don’t want her to worry, Aunt Barbara. Please don’t say anything to her.’

‘No, enoeff. Silent as the grave, that’s me. You know how a girl kisses and what else comes after … Red roses, sure, etc. etc. — all that has nothing to do with politics.’ Barbara sighed and in his mind’s eye he could see her splayed fingers with all the rings, he heard her bangles clunk against the receiver. ‘You’re only young once.’

Meno warned him. Christian had never seen his uncle so exasperated. He would have liked to talk to him about Hanna but no one in the family seemed ever to have asked why Meno’s marriage had failed.

‘If she informs on you? — From what you’ve told me you should be prepared for that.’

‘You really think she’d inform on me —’

‘Even though she’s in love with you, you mean? That kind of romantic stuff is Barbara’s cup of tea, not yours, Christian. What do you know about love? What do you know about what’s possible?’ Christian felt hurt; Meno seemed to sense it, he said, ‘They kiss you and they betray you. Both in the same breath. It doesn’t have to be like that, but sometimes it is and you can’t take any more risks. Perhaps Reina’s an exception. But only perhaps. What if you try it out, just to see, and walk straight into the trap?’

‘I like her very much … The way she walks, the way she moves and …’ Christian hesitated, watching his uncle out of the corner of his eye. ‘… her armpit,’ he concluded with a trusting smile. Meno burst out laughing. Christian felt as if a machete were cutting apart the flesh between his forefinger and middle finger.

‘Her armpit? And you call that love? That’s just sexual. It’s about time you started to learn that in this country you can’t behave like a little child.’

‘Now you sound like Father,’ Christian retorted indignantly. ‘Just because you and Hanna —’

‘Don’t talk about Hanna.’

Christian was sorry but he refused to apologize, he felt hurt.

‘We want the best for you, especially your father, but he won’t be able to help you any more if something else like the training-camp business should happen. If you let Reina know what you really think and she tells others … She doesn’t even have to do it with malicious intent. Perhaps just out of pride in you, out of naivety, or simply to get over an awkward pause in the conversation … Lots of things happen out of boredom. Do you want to risk your future for this girl? Have you absolute trust in Reina? Do you really know her that well, how she will react, what you mean to her? Does she know herself?’

‘So in your opinion I have to make a dossier on a girl before I can fall in love with her?’

‘That’s the way things are,’ Meno said coldly. ‘I understand your feelings better than you perhaps think. No, this country’s not the place to be young. I wouldn’t be talking to you like this if I didn’t know someone who’d gone through what I’m warning you against.’

‘Who was it?’

Meno prevaricated. ‘Later perhaps.’

‘No, now,’ Christian insisted.

‘Your grandfather Kurt,’ Meno said after a long hesitation.

‘Oma informed on him?’

Meno shook his head, started to speak then broke off. ‘No, the other way round. It was in the Soviet Union, at a terrible time. He told us children on his seventieth birthday. I don’t want you to talk to anyone about it.’

In the evening doors into the dream opened. In the evening the cast-off skins of the body were left behind after the magic word ‘Mutabor’ had been spoken. In January ’84 the dustbins were overflowing, ashes had to be tipped out on the snow beside them, sometimes the Tower-dwellers, on the initiative of a citizens’ meeting, would heave the dustbins up onto a lorry that took the ashes out into the woods. Newspapers piled up, were torn to shreds in gusts of wind sharp with frost. The District Hygiene Inspector’s office recommended putting a layer of lime over the garbage. The lime was distributed to designated individuals in each street from whom the inhabitants filled their buckets: ‘Causes severe eye damage. Keep out of reach of children.’

Andropov died.

‘So what now?’ the Tower-dwellers asked while they were queuing at the butcher’s, the baker’s or outside the Konsum. ‘The next juvenile lead will take the stage,’ they whispered with an apprehensive shrug of the shoulders.

Cigarette smoke, aquarian swirls of incense, eyes on the ceiling in the dim light of a guttering candle in an apartment somewhere in the Prenzlauer Berg district of Berlin. Shutters with the paint peeling off, cracks plugged with newspaper, putty rock hard and crumbling; the tiled stove is doing its best but plywood, fenceposts, mouldy coal are only enough for a few hours’ heat a day. Men in woolly pullovers with biblical beards, workers’ hands, beer mugs in their nicotine-stained fingers and a Karo or an F6 between their lips, are listening to a poet reading out poems typed on wood-pulp paper, hastily, making mistakes, deliberately avoiding pompous declamation, they’re all friends together, highfaluting stuff is not what’s required here. Judith Schevola is listening, observing, smoking. She has introduced Meno to this group, to which you only gain admittance after passing through several rear courtyards with bullet holes from the last war, after giving a password at the cautiously opened door with no nameplate, after submitting to partly furtive, partly openly aggressive scrutiny the newcomer has to accept: there are too many spies and instinct is not always infallible. Meno senses that he is a foreign body, but his presence is accepted, no one seems to be holding back in what they say because of him. The poet reads. They are poems with turned-up collars and flat caps pulled well down. He’s been published in one of the magazines lying on the table in the middle of the room, where the air is so thick with sweat and tobacco smoke you could cut it with a knife. Without the Communist Manifesto under one of its legs the table would definitely wobble; the Communist Manifesto performs this service alternately with a brochure about venereal diseases after protests from members of the audience committed to grass-roots democracy. The magazines all give off the fresh air of insubordination, have titles such as POE TRY ALL BUM, bones of contention, AND, POE TRY ALL bang , and are screen-printed on thin Czechoslovak copy paper at ten crowns per 2,000 sheets — solely for the church’s official use, thus avoiding the need to apply for permission to print. They lack a stapler that can reliably staple more than fifteen pages. There’s a lack of paper: the entry fee to the reading was a certain amount of writing paper that can — for the church’s official use — be stapled or folded into little booklets and filled with controversial articles on environmental issues in editions of between fifteen and fifty.

‘My hand for my product.’

And then? the Tower-dwellers ask.

Sarajevo calling, a wolf-cub waves to the viewers watching television. Skyscrapers, bare mountains surrounding a basin, a dreary urban landscape that is not sought out by any reporter accredited to the first Winter Olympics to be held in a socialist country nor recorded by the camera that cannot lie. Here is the ice rink, there the tracks of the cross-country ski run, the ski jump where Jens Weissflog from Oberwiesenthal flew on strictly parallel skis to gold and silver. Did people recall a summer’s day seventy years previously when a student was waiting on a street corner for the car of the heir to the Austrian throne? The Ice Queen sets out on her free programme. Her trainer stands behind the barrier, stony-faced, while her protégée, with fluttering miniskirt and Kirgiz eyebrows, inscribes flowing cursive periods on the ice. The exclamation marks of a triple toe-loop, pirouette flourishes, bouquets of roses in cellophane, Heinz Florian Oertel wallows in tulle and taffeta. Torvill and Dean dance to Ravel’s Bolero , a Swede runs up the slopes with skating steps. There is a smile on the fairest face of socialism.