Uwe Tellkamp - The Tower

‘Do excuse me. Kastshey’s still rather rude. It’s difficult to teach this breed anything, but they’re good watchdogs. And anyone they’ve taken a liking to … Good afternoon, Herr Rohde.’ Arbogast tipped his cap with the stick with the gryphon handle. The Baron looked fresh and healthy; his usually grey face, which his steel-rimmed spectacles gave an extra touch of coolness to (now he was wearing glasses with tinted oval lenses, a Western pair), had a deep tan. The skin where his watch and ring had been was still white. Arbogast noticed Meno’s glance and, inviting him to walk along with the gesture of an expert guide, explained that that year, contrary to his habit, he had not taken off his watch before going on holiday, nor his ring, which he now hardly noticed during his everyday business; however, it did bother him while sailing. At the moment his boat was in Stralsund harbour. Had Herr Rohde received — ‘as promised’, Arbogast smiled — the packet of pencils? ‘No? Then it’s on its way, or arrived after you left. You’ve moved up, so to speak, there have been some changes in our Institute. I presume you’ve heard that already from Fräulein Schevola?’

Meno said no.

‘Some of my physicists, including Herr Kittwitz, have not come back from a conference in Munich. It caused quite a stir. I spoke up on their behalf to make sure they could go, but they abused my trust. That requires a certain lack of imagination or, to put it better, a fair amount of selfishness, just to clear off like that. They want to go to India. There’s a lot of poverty in India. And they shouldn’t think that all that glitters in the West is gold.’

You can talk, Meno thought but said nothing. He was surprised to hear that Kittwitz had left the country and he felt a stab of pain, for although he had only met the physicist once, he had sense of loss. Contemporaries form a cohort; they watch out for each other, even when the years pass and no one drops a hint.

‘You’ll be thinking I don’t practise what I preach.’ Arbogast pointed to a room with aquariums arranged according to themes, one was ‘The Baltic’, one ‘Symbiosis’, one ‘Poisonous Sea Creatures’. Kastshey was attracted to the ‘Harbour Basin’ aquarium in which wrasse and butterfish, codling with barbels on their lower jaw (they made Meno think of Lange’s goatee), turbot and mackerel were swimming round.

‘I don’t want to sound impolite, but for my part I’d love to travel and I think I’m not the only one who feels like that. I’m sure lots of people would like to see what the world outside is like for themselves, instead of getting it at second hand.’ Meno watched a cuckoo ray with dark blue spots rising up with calm shimmering movements.

‘Of course, there’s no disagreement on that, my dear Rohde. The people in charge should accede to those wishes. Privately I advised the General Secretary to do just that but I fear he’s forced to ignore the suggestion. Unfortunately. In their greed people would take the West for paradise and not return.’ Arbogast pointed to some sea anemones and their iridescent colours. ‘From our own cultures. We’ve had great success at trade fairs.’ He took Meno by the arm and walked on a few steps, as a ruler in affable mood might do with one of the ‘ordinary people’ when it’s politically opportune and there’s a camera nearby. ‘The country would empty, as it did before ’61. The time it took for people to realize their mistake would be enough for the useful and meaningful experiment of socialism to collapse. How are your affairs in Thomas-Mann-Strasse?’ That was where the Hermes offices were. Meno hesitated. Arbogast took a glasses case out of the inside pocket of his elegant, white-linen summer suit, swapped spectacles and, leaning forward, mouth slightly open, observed a red lionfish that was languidly fanning its fins. Its antennae, red-and-white-striped like a stick of candy, were erect.

‘We’ve been sidelined.’

‘Hmmm’ — Arbogast tapped the glass, the lionfish turned away — ‘that’s not the way to go about original projects. — You’re on holiday? In this area?’

‘On Hiddensee.’

‘Kloster? I guessed so. I can take you there.’

‘There are seven of us,’ Meno lied.

‘A nice number. Usually one too many and quarrels break out. No offence meant, you know I like jokes. There’s one they ought to put in the quarantine basin.’ A weever fish with half its tail-fin missing limped past. ‘Taking seven people wouldn’t be a problem on my boat.’ It was a proper yacht, Arbogast explained, and, of course, not only meant for pottering along the coast. His wife was there too, they were heading across the Baltic to the Soviet Union, he had authorization to enter their territorial waters, to sail at night and PM 19, permission to cruise to the land of their socialist brothers. Meno hesitated.

‘I can see I’ve caught you by surprise. But you must come to one of our evenings again. People are already asking if you’re coming. We have an interesting programme.’ Arbogast waved Kastshey over.

Hagstones warded off misfortune. There were some threaded on a faded clothesline over the door of the waiting room in the holiday season doctor’s bungalow, with dazzling white shells with holes bored in them between the stones. To take one off and keep it for later was to steal good fortune and that didn’t count; neither Christian nor Robert touched the chain. Genuine stones with a natural hole were difficult to find. In the grey-yellow sand of the lagoon they found empty ink cartridges, shards of glass, dried dog shit and, if they were lucky, a rusty key; but the white flints, smooth and round from the sea with a hole you could thread a string through, were rare. Mostly a hollow of varying depth had been ground into the stone. Boring it through didn’t count. The hole had to go right through, a talisman-eye for the view from Fuhlendorf beach across Bodstedt lagoon to the Darss, for the pearl-white balls enclosing the bathing area, the jetty with its boathouse, the fish-traps further out with cormorants and seagulls perching on them; to see through to the Baltic sky, to the reeds cradling the August of bleached hair and freckles. Anne thought the lagoon was too warm, too shallow, too unsavoury. Children with brightly coloured buckets built messy sandcastles, threw mud as they waded in the water while their mothers dozed under sunshades, paddled on air beds, dreaming they were on the Kon-Tiki, below them the 5,000 feet of the Humboldt Current full of bonitos and snake mackerel, above them clouds driven by the trade winds, before them South Sea islands. In the lagoon there were ruffe, roach and occasional eelpouts. For zander you needed a boat. Robert had brought his angling equipment and went for non-predatory fish, Christian took the spinning rod, attached a 0.35 mm green line and cast spoons and blinkers. Ruffe bit, little spotted guys with spiny fins and huge appetites, some were shorter than the blinker lure that they’d taken for their prey.

The summer season doctor — for three weeks in August that was, alternating daily, Richard Hoffmann and Niklas Tietze — lived with his family in the bungalow on the village street. A white flag with a red cross was unrolled and placed in the mounting beside a bug-plastered lamp. As soon as the inhabitants of Fuhlendorf, nearby Bodstedt and the communities as far as Michaelsdorf saw the flag they remembered various infirmities that couldn’t stand the long journey to the hospital in Barth and, silent and within their rights, occupied the plasticized-linen waiting-room chairs. There were four rooms in the bungalow, one of which served as the doctor’s surgery. Two WCs (private and patients’). The rooms each had two bunk beds at right angles to each other, two cupboards and a washbasin with a cold tap. If you wanted a shower, you packed your flip-flops, picked up your toiletry bag and went through the German Mail holiday camp, to which the bungalow belonged, into the shower shed beside the canteen kitchen, where you hung your things under one of the clouded mirrors in the corridor and waited on bleached duckboards, a potential source of athlete’s foot, in the cabins open to the corridor, surrounded by cheerful and cursing voices, for warm water to come.