Uwe Tellkamp - The Tower

‘Sounds familiar. Is that irony?’ Philipp asked in an ironic tone, nodding to Meno.

Eschschloraque surveyed his son with an indulgent look. ‘You know the word impertinence, you look through the lens of contempt but you do not honour the word investigation and you do not like the word improve, my son. What do you know about those times …? I didn’t need to save my skin, as you put it. I was and am a professed supporter of the order established by Stalin and I’ve never made a secret of it. — And “secret” in that expression,’ he said turning to Meno, ‘is a neuter noun, not masculine as I read recently in one of your publications. The corruption of the times is increasing, for it is the corruption of morals, and morals, like vegetables, start to go bad in little details.’

‘Details, is it? Nicely formulated. Always nothing but words, Father. What’s your opinion of the murders, to mention one of those, er, “little details”? Or do you deny them? The chistka ? Did it never happen? All imperialist propaganda?’

‘No. In the big picture, the murders were necessary. Desperate times must not leave you desperate for means. The Soviet Union was surrounded on all sides, what should the Moustache do? What would you have done in his place? Waited until civil war had torn the land apart? Waited until the fascists conquered Moscow?’

‘I would have thought about whether the good things that were written on the standards were worth the evil they were starting to cost. He had the old Bolsheviks killed, his comrades from the revolution. He wasn’t concerned about the country, about the well-being of the people, all he was concerned about was power.’

‘He trampled the idea of socialism underfoot!’ Philipp exclaimed in agitation. ‘Are you out of your mind, Eddi? Am I in the company of madmen?’

‘Ah, now we’re back with the repetitions,’ Albin said. ‘You said that the last time you were here.’

‘Trampled the idea of socialism underfoot … Huh, that’s the way children talk who know nothing of the harsh hand of time, who do not know that the gap between weal and woe crushes those who hesitate indecisively.’

‘Just listen to my father! So strong the iron hand of time that right can only flourish in the land if we do wield the baneful sword of wrong, of wrack and ruin …’

‘How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to have a thankless child.’

‘Should I thank the hand that strikes me?’

‘You hate the hand that feeds you.’

Albin stubbed out his cigarillo, lit a new one, at the same time offering his finely tooled leather case around but only Judith felt like trying one. ‘England hath long been mad, and scarred herself; the brother blindly shed the brother’s blood, the father rashly slaughtered his own son, the son, compelled, been butcher to the sire. — I have a letter. A charming, truly informative letter, a carbon copy of it, to be precise; I always carry it with me, although that’s not necessary, since I know it off by heart. A document. Listen.’ Albin leant back, blew out smoke and began to recite: ‘ “My son is the offspring of a musician and a writer and will therefore, as far as genetics allows us to judge, also seek to make his mark in the world of art and it was thus my duty as a caring father not only to show him my love, to assert it with words, but to prove it by (the uncomprehending majority will have little sympathy but we have drunk of dragon’s milk) — by doing something that was designed to make a life beside my shadow possible: I have disowned him, he will have acquired injuries but that has not, as far as I can tell, killed him; pain and sorrow: that is the propitious foundation for an artist; now he has something to write about, he does not need to live from hand to mouth, as would probably have been the case had I made things too easy for him. But that is the most important thing for an artist: his works. So as a good father I had to see to it that he had something to work on. He has strength and needed something he can fill with that strength; that I have given him, and to say that doesn’t look like a father’s love is a petty-bourgeois way of thinking and suggests the lack of a sense of particularities, also the lack of a sense of the laws that determine one’s fate that I, in less high-flown Romantic fashion, prefer to call the shape of one’s life. You may rest assured, my esteemed friend, that I do not willingly lay bare these confessions, but recently you adopted a posture such as certain heroes do in certain melodramas when they brandish their swords and mostly wish to find out what their names are (as if that would change anything). Selah.” ’

Eschschloraque waited, no one said anything. He calmly spread his arms. ‘So? What am I? A pipe-smoking jackal?’

‘But you smoke cigarettes. No, no. You’re right.’

‘You say I’m right?’

‘Why not? I wouldn’t like to have a son like me. I’m in favour of the death penalty, but I hate Stalinism.’

‘My God,’ Philipp murmured. ‘You’re both mad.’

‘That is the remark of someone who doesn’t know life and doesn’t know it because he doesn’t know himself and he doesn’t know himself because he has never been compelled to get to know himself.’ It wasn’t clear whom Eschschloraque was addressing, his son or Philipp. Both stared into space.

… but the tram set off, leaving behind it Simmchen’s clockmaker’s shop, Matthes’s stationer’s, the ticking wall clocks at Pieper’s Clocks, 8 Turmstrasse, the babble of voices in Wiener’s hairdressing salon, where Colonel Hentter fought out old battles with polystyrene heads and curlers for little boys waiting for a fifty-pfennig haircut and ladies under the hairdryers leafed through yellowing copies of Paris Match ; Christian did not turn round and look back at the street, he thought, I’m coming back; Malthakus bent over his stamps, photographic series from the former German colonies on New Guinea: names such as Gazelle Peninsula and Blanche Bay, Empress Augusta River and Bismarck Archipelago, which Siegbert, looking up from his comic books of seafaring adventures, had told him was where Corto Maltese and Captain Rasputin had met Lieutenant Slütter; Christian closed his eyes so as not to see the children, satchels on their backs, trotting along to Louis Fürnberg High School, past the recycling depot, the clink of empty bottles in plywood boxes, the blue one-ton scales you weren’t to rest your hand on when the tied-up bundles of newspapers were being weighed, a wooden flap separating the customers from the blue-coated woman in charge of waste paper; in his mind’s eye Christian could see the chemist’s and Trüpel taking a record out of its sleeve and showing the silky black disc to a customer, shiny as a top hat and recommended by the Friends of Music; the train set off, on the right the Schlemm Hotel disappeared — there Ladislaus Pospischil would be serving widows sticky, richly coloured liqueurs to go with their memories of pre-war splendours, all Viennese elegance as they spooned up their cake; the bus stop kiosk was left behind with its numbers of Filmspiegel , under-the-counter copies of the magazines Für Dich and the Neue Berliner Illustrierte with a black-and-white photo of Romy Schneider, beside Deutscher Angelsport and Sputnik and FF Dabei , in which Heinz the ‘awkward customer’ told amusing stories about the Night of the Celebrities in the Aeros Circus; the Tannhäuser Cinema disappeared on the left, at that time of day there was no boy standing looking at the posters for Once upon a Time in the West and Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger that Robert and Ezzo were to go and see again and again until they could join in the dialogue, until they knew what Hyperborea was where the mysterious people of the Arimaspi lived and until they gave up trying to be able to reproduce Sinbad’s fabulous throw — his dagger nailed the mosquito that had been swollen by Zenobia’s magic juice to the doorpost of the cabin — with their penknives; the sanatorium was left behind, the Soviet soldiers strolling around in bandages, hobbling along on crutches, Lenin’s silver-plated plaster head in the middle of the spa gardens, the heating plant with the conveyor belts spilling ash, the Kuckuckssteig path below Arbogast’s chemical laboratory