Uwe Tellkamp - The Tower

‘First of all hand over that bag.’ Rogalla let his braces snap back. ‘Let’s see what the earhole’s brought from home.’

‘Permission to speak, Comrade Sergeant.’ Christian, who had learnt to get changed in no time at all at the cadet training school, stood to attention before Ruden, who, with a wave of the hand, graciously granted permission. ‘My leave was sanctioned by Comrade Staff Sergeant Emmerich.’

‘In exchange for a Polski Fiat exhaust manifold, yes, we know. And here it is.’ Rogalla held it up then continued to rummage round in the bag he’d put on the table. ‘An earhole doesn’t get leave for that. You could’ve written a letter and had the thing sent. Instead you get leave and go home to Mum while your elders and betters have to sweat away for you.’

‘Took over your section, junior,’ squawked Thilo Ebert, a lance corporal in his third half-year, playing with the locknut on his key ring. It was Ruden who allocated nicknames to crew members in their first two half-years. Since he wanted to study classical languages, they were Greek and Latin; Thilo he’d dubbed Musca, the fly, since only someone with the brain of a fly would think of swigging anti-freeze. ‘That is, arsehole, if you’re going off on leave you don’t do it secretly, on the quiet, like you did, only after we’ve given you permission to dismiss.’

‘Oh, boy,’ Rogalla whispered, delighted, ‘was that Musca wafflin’ on about junior? Hey! Apples! And cake!’

‘You’ve only been here for fourteen days, earhole, and for twelve of those you’ve had to manage without us, which I’m sure you thought was a great shame.’ When he laughed Ruden exposed a broken front tooth. ‘Because we were off on those shitty manoeuvres. We were workin’ our arses off while you were stuffin’ yourself. You were sharp enough to slip away, of course. You knew well enough we wouldn’t have let you go.’

‘God, I can’t stand smart-arses,’ said Corporal Jens Karge, known as Wanda, fourth half-year of service. ‘You can take those fatigues off again, Lehmann.’

‘Hoffmann,’ Christian ventured to correct him.

‘Lehmann, I said. Black overalls on. You’re to go with this ignoramus — what’s this useless sod called?’

‘Irrgang,’ Rogalla, who had tipped the whole contents of Christian’s bag out on the table, told him. ‘But this Burre’s even worse. He really has a screw loose.’ He took a piece of paper out of his trouser pocket. ‘Just listen.’ He struck a pose and began to declaim in orotund tones. ‘ “WERE IT NOT —” ’

‘Eh? Werrit?’ Ebert put his hand to his ear.

‘ “Were — it — not.” And all in capital letters. It’s poetry, you philistine. “WERE IT NOT FOR LOVE, THERE WOULD NOT BE / ANY VENEREAL DISEASES / WERE IT NOT FOR LOVE WE WOULD HAVE / HARDLY ANYTHING TO SAY / WERE IT NOT FOR LOVE / I WOULD NOT BE / AND THAT WOULD BE / A FUCKING NUISANCE.” ’

Ruden went to the door. ‘Popov!’

‘Wassit?’ came a weary voice from the driving instructors’ room.

‘Burre’s been at the grass again. Special treatment.’

‘Again?’ shouted Corporal Helge Poppenhaus, fifth half-year and therefore number two.

‘Now to you.’ Ruden took a drink from the brandy bottle they called a ‘tube’, which was on Rogalla’s place at the table. ‘We have to check whether you’re smuggling booze.’ He took a knife and began to cut up the apples. ‘There are the most incredible hiding places. I knew a guy who’d discovered that exactly sixteen tubes would fit in a tank barrel. And in such a way that they didn’t get broken when it was driven. He was a clever lad and that set him up for the rest of his term.’

‘I knew a guy, was called Johannes Ruden, and he let helium balloons with returnable bottles hanging from them float up to the ceiling,’ said Rogalla. Ruden tapped Christian on the forehead. ‘You say you want to study medicine. The titless nurses at the med centre are drunk all the time. They smuggle in booze in those horse syringes before they ram them in our arses with anti-tetanus.’ He handed round the apples, which were eaten with relish.

‘Well he didn’t inoculate mine,’ Lance Corporal Ebert moaned. ‘Dry as my granny’s tit. A real dimwit he is.’ He dropped the core, giving Christian a disappointed look. ‘We’re your comrades, we share everything. You could’ve thought of us. In your place I’d ’ve baked a cake that was at least fifty per cent.’

‘Guys like you’ll drink tank juice anyway.’ The next moment Ruden hit out, Christian slumped down, couldn’t breathe for a moment, then there was excruciating pain in his liver, the room started to turn golden. A kick from a boot brought him back to consciousness. ‘Pick up the cores!’ Ruden pulled Christian up and hit him on the ear with the flat of his fist. It was like an explosion, an eruption of red. ‘What’s that you said? I can’t understand a word.’

‘Yes … Comrade Sergeant.’

‘I can’t hear anything.’ Again Ruden’s fist hit his ear. Christian, staggering, tried to resist but Ruden was an ox of a man, the muscles stood out like cords on his forearm.

‘Yes …’ Christian threw up his arms to ward off the blow. Rogalla and Karge put on whiny voices, ‘Please don’t hit me, Daddy.’

‘We can’t hear anything! Bucket practice!’ Ebert bawled. Rogalla and Karge grabbed Christian and dragged him into the toilets. A few soldiers, who were smoking by the company ashtray, watched. The duty NCO was writing, the duty NCO’s assistant was demonstrating polishing the corridor floor to a group of rookies who were doing their basic training there. Ruden lifted a lavatory lid and pushed Christian’s head down.

‘Yes, Comrade Sergeant!’ Christian shouted as loud as he could. Karge and Ebert were leaning against the wall laughing. Rogalla pulled the chain.

‘We’ll get round to you, Fräulein Schevola, never fear. As you are trying to interrupt me again, I would like to point out that general courtesy, not only among colleagues, demands that we listen to each other and allow everyone to finish. I will continue with my report. — I call it The Screw . Now, many of our colleagues did not grow up with a pencil in their hand, even less a silver spoon in their mouth, but holding a mains tester, a mason’s trowel, a wrench. Now I’m sure you’ll agree with me when I say that to be “in work” doesn’t just mean you are in a works but also that you are working on something. The writers of our country are in work; they are laying foundations, raising structures with the mind and only some of them, who do not know — or have forgotten — what axle-grease smells like, who do not know what the honest handshake of the team leader or the heat from the run-off of a blast furnace feels like, some colleagues, that is — and there are only very few of them — seem to be no longer aware what this our country is, what it stands for and who the people are who are building it up. We writers are respected in this our country. We are not at the mercy of the lying capitalist press that poured out its venom over my last novel, The Silent Front — claiming I was a dubious character who took liberties with the reality of our times and merely spread propaganda, who put clichés in the mouths of allegedly cardboard comrades, if not one of the tribe of the bores, as Herr Wiktor Hart put it … Our reviewers are not paid puppets of Springer and Co., our reviewers are members of the working class, for whom we write, to whom we owe the privilege of following the trials and tribulations of our times in our writing … The screw, then, that inconspicuous but interesting component of construction without which we would not be able to meet in this fine setting, without which this lectern, with the manuscript of my talk in the middle, would not be a lectern but just a pile of planks; the screw that holds together the chairs on which a few of our colleagues are tilting back precariously, it is the screw, small but beautiful, that I want to look at more closely … it is also there in the postbox, where letters are posted, love letters, dead letters, letters of condolence, letters to the editors of the Western press that concern us, but did not come to us beforehand. Letters from four colleagues whose literary achievements, though varying, have always been recognized by us, who could have no complaints as far as the publication of their books is concerned, for which ways of producing second editions were always found, so that the idea of censorship, that keeps popping up in letters from colleagues, became an all-too-frequently touted commonplace that even the expressive pen of our esteemed colleague David Groth could not render less ill-fitting … He hides behind generalized accusations, distorts what I say — your turn will come, Herr Groth — and with the publication of his letter places himself outside the laws of our state. He infringes the statutes of the Association to which he belongs and omits to mention the advantages he enjoys from it in his letter that was printed by the vociferously anti-socialist Springer Press … Not a word about the journeys for which he was granted permission, but loud protests at the cancellation of a journey by a colleague that would have resulted in a reading in the Bavarian parliament, where the worst attacks against us come from … You are trying to give me a lesson in morality, Herr Groth, while you publish your novel Trotsky , the literary quality of which can at best be described as dubious, in which you twist facts from the history of our Soviet friends in the worst possible way and which authors of undoubted literary quality such as my friend Eschschloraque and our colleague Altberg have described in letters to me as muckraking trash, in the West, circumventing the laws of the land! Yes, circumventing the laws of the land — you know the address of our copyright office as well as we, the members of the Association committee and all our other colleagues here present do. And it is not at all scandalous — you should choose your words more carefully — if I object to your insinuation that our colleagues Rieber and Blavatny have only been “dragged” here to face this “tribunal”, as you choose to call our annual general meeting, because they are communists who have not abandoned rational thought … In a letter to me — to return to the postbox — Blavatny called a lady colleague a “blood-and-soil bardess” because grass and soil appear in one of her poems. Is it your opinion that I may not describe that as the shameful nonsense, as the slanderous calumny it is? Where are these standards, Herr Groth, that you demand of us? Censorship? Oh dear. Anyone who calls the state planning and direction of publishing censorship should not let the words “cultural policy”, which he is supposedly so concerned about, pass his lips. The truth is that he rejects the very idea. Critical voices among our writers are being silenced? I look round and see so many familiar faces, not one of which does not belong to a critical voice. But there are critical voices that want to work effectively in our country and for our society, and do not feel, at every trifle, that they have to pass on a “subversive piece” — or whatever it’s called — to some has-been Western correspondent, because otherwise they wouldn’t be noticed … Herr Blavatny, who came to us from Nuremberg, got nowhere at home, then nowhere here, because you don’t get anywhere in a publishing house with your Party membership card but with a manuscript that is worth something. Rejected by the experienced editors of Hermes-Verlag, he immediately thought up some story of repression and state despotism, used it to dress up his feeble product and offered it for sale on the other side, where they of course also recognized its inferior quality but were, as ever, interested in news from the supposed darkness over here. A screw can be large or small and, as I remember from my apprenticeship, the very small ones are called grubs. We on the committee are not the kind of people to hurl abuse. We do not shy away from debate or openness. Our Soviet comrades show us the way and, although we do not have to follow them in everything, for now and then conditions are different, now and then a Moscow nut doesn’t fit one of our screws, we are united in matters of principle. Hölderlin says, “To be gentle at the right time, that is good, to be gentle at the wrong time, that is ugly, for it is cowardly.’ And in a further letter, in which he thanked me for bringing to his attention, in a review in Neues Deutschland , the dangers threatening his undoubted talent, Herr Rieber wrote that he felt strengthened by my honest remarks for, as a solitary desk worker, who did not always sense the homely presence of the Association, one was all too often desperately groping in the dark … And you, my esteemed colleague, write in another place that without the West writers here would find no response? There I must charge you with untruth. In this our country sensibly expressed questions receive sensibly expressed answers, that is in the nature of our society. It is also in the nature of our society to handle screws properly, for it is the society of the working class that is familiar with tools and the means of production. Here, in contrast to other social systems, they are turned to fasten things together, but not warped or stripped. We are building according to our plans.’