Uwe Tellkamp - The Tower

‘Hi, you guys, everything OK?’

Christian embraced ‘Uncle’ Niklas, as he was called by the Hoffmann children, like ‘Aunt’ Alice and ‘Uncle’ Sandor, although Niklas Tietze was Richard Hoffmann’s cousin on his mother’s side.

‘We’ll have to play everything presto , Uncle Niklas. Ezzo and I are starving.’

‘Your mother’s baked a fantastic cake. You must have a piece of it afterwards.’

‘But I’m sleeping at Meno’s tonight. — Apple cake?’

‘And a cherry pie — with a marzipan base and meringue topping, very thin and the cherries lovely and sour …’ Niklas sucked his upper lip and gave an appreciative ‘Mmmm …’ He picked up his viola, which Ezzo had brought from the adjoining room, and put it on the piano.

‘Right, Anne will give us the sign any minute now. Then, as agreed: first the fanfare, then “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow”, then off we go.’ Niklas rosined his bow, played over the open strings and adjusted the tuning slightly while his eyes, behind the immense spectacles he always put on for playing, quickly ran over the notes.

‘Tatata-taa!’ rang out from the instruments as Anne came and sat down next to Reglinde. When they played ‘For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow’, even Herr Adeling, who had reappeared by the door, joined in; as he sang he tapped the tips of his fingers together precisely in time to the music and at the final ‘and so say all of us’ his falsetto even outdid Müller’s trained guttural voice.

Then they played the Italian piece, a suite from the baroque period, originally for flute but Niklas has arranged the flute part for clarinet. Christian was tense. Once more he could feel the eyes of everyone on him. Reglinde had switched on the wall lamp over the piano and, since he was sitting diagonally behind her, the strong light fell on his face, revealing with merciless clarity the very thing he most wanted to hide. During the previous week’s rehearsals, everything had been calm and secure, but playing here, in front of an attentive, though probably well-disposed audience of fifty, was a quite different matter from practising in the Tietzes’ quiet house, where ‘Aunt’ Gudrun had brought sandwiches during the intervals and he and Ezzo had got so high they’d tried to play the piece at double the speed. There were three pairs of eyes that weighed especially heavily on him: his father’s, Meno’s and those of his cousin Ina, Ulrich and Barbara’s pretty nineteen-year-old daughter … He curled up inside himself and kept his eyes focused on the music. He mustn’t let himself be distracted. — Where did she get that dress? Pretty daring, those bare shoulders, he thought, before he stormed up the mountain of semiquavers at the beginning of the courante — Oh yes, the dress she’d made together with Reglinde, pause, legato, da-da-dada … Strange: while during rehearsals his greatest fear had been the fast, technically difficult passages and the slower, more melodious ones had come out better, now the opposite was the case: he was happy when the furioso bars came, he played almost every one securely, as if in a dream, and his heart started to pound at every harmless sequence of minims and crotchets. At a piano passage his bow began to tremble, the note was ‘frayed’, as his cello teacher would have said, which brought him a glance from Ezzo, who, as the best in his class in the Special School, was impeccably positioned and playing with the luscious bowing that had already attracted attention among experts …

‘I can do that too,’ Christian told himself in irritation; he stretched a tenth and slammed his bow down on the string. A trickle of rosin floated down. — Yes! Sounds like a cathedral bell, does my cello … There was a ‘Ping!’ Ezzo and Robert started, which made Robert look odd, as he was in the middle of a cantabile passage, and at the same moment Christian realized that the A-string of his cello was bobbing up and down in a huge corkscrew spiral and he had no time to replace it. Niklas looked at him over the rim of his glasses and improvised while Reglinde, the only one who was completely relaxed, began to reduce the tempo imperceptibly … Christian had never been in such a tight situation. All the passages that, before his misfortune, he could have played fairly comfortably had suddenly turned into technical hurdles. Out of the corner of his eye he saw that Ina had her head in her hand and her shoulders were twitching with suppressed laughter. Silly cow! he roared inwardly, and in his fury he swept through a passage at such speed that Ezzo and Niklas looked up in alarm, and even Reglinde, who had her back to him, half turned round. — Yesyesyes! he exulted when he managed to play a passage on the D-string alone, in a position he hadn’t practised for this piece. In the surge of melodies he saw Niklas’s aquiline nose glow redder and redder, and tiny beads of sweat had started to gather on Ezzo’s forehead, just as they had on his waxy-pale, fleshy nose; Ezzo was adjusting his violin on its chin rest much more often than he had during rehearsals and the fiery red violinist’s mark on his neck became visible — both, as Christian knew, unmistakable signs of nervousness. Anne, who was turning the pages for Reglinde, behaved as if nothing had happened. He wasn’t bothered about anything any more — it was bound to end in disaster — and strangely enough, it was just at that point, in the middle of the rather rocking bourrée, that the title of an obscure book from his parents’ library came to mind: The Gallant Blundering in the Labyrinth of Love — the A-string sundering in the labyrinth of music was what his overwrought mind made of it before he set his fingers dancing over the remaining three strings and, remarkably and unexpectedly, everything went well apart from a couple of little slips. Applause.

‘Phew.’ Ezzo nodded, waggled his hand, wiped his brow and fiddled with the nut on his bow. They bowed. Niklas, who was standing behind Christian, gave him a complimentary tap on the shoulder with his bow.

Robert snorted. ‘That looked really funny! I kept telling myself, just keep your eyes on your music, man …’

‘I’d like to see you if one of your keys flew off, but that can never happen with your wind instruments,’ Christian hissed back, putting profound contempt into ‘wind’. The feud between strings and wind was an age-old rivalry that would never be resolved.

‘That was close,’ said Reglinde. ‘When you suddenly accelerated in the allegro, I thought I was never going to get into it. And that on this jangly old piano.’

Anne took Meno and Christian to one side. ‘I think we should give it to him afterwards, when there’s just the family. I don’t know a lot of the guests very well; I don’t want it made that public. Agreed?’

Richard made a short speech of thanks. His final words brought a grin from Christian and Ezzo: ‘But now, colleagues and friends, eat your fill.’

‘You can rely on that!’ Ezzo chortled, already on the edge of his chair. But still he hesitated — because everyone else was hesitating. Clearly no one had the courage to be the first at the buffet and therefore liable to be suspected of a lack of good manners. Müller, playing delicate trills in the air with the fingers of his right hand, was already jutting out his chin purposefully and pouting his lips when Emmy got up and set off for the buffet with short but nimble steps — forgetting the walking stick that Richard took over to her. ‘Thank you, young man,’ she cried, but the last word was drowned out by the noise of chairs being pushed back. Very few, Christian observed, replaced their chairs at the table — Niklas did, demonstratively taking his time over it, carefully placing his long, slim hands on the exact point of the chair back that precluded any misunderstanding; Niklas even had to lift the chair slightly, the calm and precision of his orderliness in stark contrast to the precipitate and distasteful rush of the others; he even replaced Gudrun’s and Ezzo’s chairs and nodded to Christian, who had also stood up. Then Niklas strolled to the buffet; Ezzo unobtrusively shifted his weight, leaving a gap between himself and Gudrun, who was standing in front of him. If you closed your eyes for a moment, you could still see the thirty-centimetre gap well to the front of the queue, and when you opened them again, the gap was filled by Niklas. Either as the result of a general tendency to observe successful manoeuvres or of an unconscious but necessary part of the atmosphere, the phenomenon was repeated when Müller too left his seat. He moved no more quickly than his position permitted — a position that had, so to speak, vanished into thin air, though not because he was not on official business — and after elegantly and, with an obliging smile, giving his wife his arm, he first headed back to Landscape during a Thaw rather than towards the buffet. Wernstein and another junior doctor at the buffet exchanged glances and the doctor in front, who worked more closely with Müller, took his time moving forward, thus allowing Professor Müller and his wife, Müller patting his lip with his signet ring and bending his ear to his wife, to join the queue … Christian had gone to say hello to his father and wish him a happy birthday and was now standing behind him, pretty near the end of the queue. Adeling and another waiter had taken the lids off the dishes and the room was now filled with enticing aromas. There was the clatter of crockery and cutlery, muted conversation. Weniger, a senior doctor in his late forties with receding hair and red, shovel-like hands, and a slim, grey-haired doctor called Clarens, with glasses and a sparse beard, were standing with Richard discussing medical matters, the main topic being the forthcoming ‘Health Service Day’.