Uwe Tellkamp - The Tower

‘Are you coming? We’re going for a swim.’ Judith Schevola, a rainbow-bright beach bag, made from strips of cloth sewn together, hanging from her left forefinger, came into the room without waiting for Meno’s answer, pushed the carriage of his typewriter until it went ‘pling’, opened, after having hung her bag on the line-space adjuster, the cupboard and started to rummage through Meno’s things. ‘I would have bet you’d have several of these things. One to dry, one to use, one as replacement. What did I say?’ In triumph she held up three pairs of swimming trunks. ‘How can you sit in here in weather like this — doing what? Don’t tell me you’re writing? Poems?’ Her gravelly laugh had become less husky, the sea air was obviously doing her good and she seemed to be smoking less. ‘You can’t write in here. These crocheted lampshades, these tablecloths, one square red, one square white, the same on the bedspread, red square, white square and always tiny little squares.’ She switched on the room radio. ‘You can hear the sea!’ she commented on the froth of noise interspersed with a swirl of hissing and crackling, occasional deep-sea Scandinavians and snatches of Tchaikovsky, abruptly clear then breaking off, coming from the loudspeaker grille under the faded photograph of the chairman of the trade union. Meno looked at Judith’s bare feet, which, as she walked, no: tripped, produced cheeky facial expressions at the back of the knees of her frayed jeans. She went over to the washbasin, smelt the Fa soap (a present from Ulrich), sniffed at his aftershave, peered at his bushily splayed shaving brush, unscrewed the top of his toothpaste tube, squeezed out a blob onto her index finger and quickly rubbed it round her mouth, not seriously cleaning her teeth. Then she gargled, spat out, said ‘Big nose’ to her mirror image, stuck out her tongue at the fascinated and flabbergasted Meno. ‘Come on, then. What are you waiting for? For the house dragon to come and give us a lecture on socialist morality?’ From Lietzenburg there was a path through dog roses and thickets of sea buckthorn. There was a smell of henbane. Lizards were sunning themselves on broken steps and only gave way hesitantly to a cautious foot. Philipp Londoner and the Old Man of the Mountain were already on the beach. Philipp had built a stockade of sand and put a windbreak between the walls. Now he was busy making the names of the users by laying pebbles in the sand, he’d already done SCHEVOLA and ALTBERG. He was sitting there, naked and tanned, immersed in this, as Judith Schevola declared with a laugh, very German activity, wearing a straw hat underneath which his long hair was blowing in the wind. The Old Man of the Mountain was naked too. Meno had some objections to naturism, and even more to the uninhibited way Schevola went about it. With a few quick movements she was undressed, just keeping her rubber sandals on; the beach was stony, as everywhere along this stretch of the coast. Meno observed her. Her lips curved in a malicious grin, she smeared sun cream all over herself with obvious pleasure. Was one not exposed to enough indiscretion in this country? The naked body was a mystery and should remain so. The same naked body was untouchable when bathing, when flirting it haunted your imagination; he thought you lost something when it was presented unveiled, however attractive it might be. It had been seen, there was no room for the imagination any more. In the House with a Thousand Eyes, alone in the thick foliage of the garden on a warm summer morning, nakedness was something different. Meno stared at Schevola’s beach bag, Philipp at his pebbles, the Old Man of the Mountain pursed his lips and occasionally pretended he had to shake his ears out.

‘Would one of you gentlemen be so good as to rub oil over my back?’

Philipp threw his pebbles on one side, Meno avoided the Old Man of the Mountain’s eye; he scratched the silvery mane on his chest, put his head on one side and, with intricate excuses and verbose self-irony, did it himself.

The water was cold, light green in the shallower areas, with a slight peppermint flavour. Meno put up stoically with Judith Schevola’s attempts to splash water all over him. She seemed to be disappointed that he didn’t squeal. The water in the tank at home in the Elbe Sandstone Hills wasn’t any warmer. Philipp was a good swimmer, he wanted to go out to the Cape and beyond, the Old Man of the Mountain warned him that there were unpredictable whirlpools and the coastal police — he nodded at the concrete tower on the Dornbusch hills — didn’t like to see swimmers heading out for the open sea. So for a while they played with Lührer’s dark-blue Nivea ball.

Meno went for a swim, did the crawl with long, regular strokes. The sun had the sharp clarity of a burning glass. He saw the Cape. There was a cordon of stones round it to break the waves, the spray was thundering against them. Once long since. The Mandelstam lines came back to mind, he and Anne had learnt them off by heart; he’d come across them again in a Reclam volume called Finders of Horseshoes that Madame Eglantine had lent him; the book was printed on poor paper and came armed with a whole battery of afterwords against expected objections. He died in 1938, in the gulag. Now there was Gorbachev and no one had forgotten. To distant lands you sail. The ball splashed in the water beside him, Schevola shouted something to him; Meno punched it back in the direction of the shouts. He propelled himself gently backwards with his arms, sensed he was getting into deeper water, it was darker, colder. ‘ Bessoniza. Gomér. Tugije parussa ,’ he murmured to himself. Lay with his face down, saw the ripples in the sand, finely ribbed, as if drawn with rakes or sculptor’s combs, at an enticing depth already, he was surprised he didn’t feel afraid. They shouted, he wanted to go a bit further. He suddenly felt his pulse accelerate and that made him go a bit further. He felt himself being pulled down, as if by filaments, caressingly, blue-washed hair, then slender, delicate fingers; for a moment he was disorientated, he struck out and only realized from the rising wall of water that it was in the wrong direction; he dived, the mountain thundered over him, carried him back into the light green of classical antiquity, now he was swimming frantically, for it came back from the beach, mingled with the breakers heading for the shore, forward and back were struggling against each other, on the surface waves grabbed him by the neck, pushing him towards the beach, below currents heading out to sea had taken a fancy to him; he wasn’t making any progress. He dropped into a vertical position: no bottom; the lumps of rock stuck in the clean sand, the seaweed and shells looked deceptively near.

Once he was out, he hoped no one could tell what he’d felt. He waved away Philipp, who’d had his suspicions. Felt Schevola’s mockery at his back and was grateful to the Old Man of the Mountain for interrupting his ‘philosophical sandwalk’ (shoulders hunched, bronzed, slightly paunchy stomach, ribs sticking out and duck-like flat feet with toes marking the sand well in front of the rest of the foot) and starting to argue about the conditions for a game of volleyball; Schevola, Meno could see over his shoulder, seemed to go along with that, at least she still possessed some tact, then. Meno wrapped a towel round his waist, stuffed a towel under the towel, checking that his skirt was unlikely to fall down. His trunks were hanging over his skin like a sodden nappy. He shivered in the wind, which had become sharper, crumpled briefs, shirt and trousers up into a balanceable bundle and slipped over towards the dunes. No volleyball after all, he saw out of the corner of his eye. The Old Man of the Mountain had returned to his reflective walk, Schevola, Philipp and Lührer were stretched out on beach towels by their sand fortress, looking to the right and left, Schevola down; but now — the rubber strap of Meno’s left flip-flop had slipped to a painful position between his longest toe and his big toe — she raised her head. Meno skipped up the dune. The place where the marram grass was particularly tall and thick was already occupied by a courting couple. Skipping was strenuous, he tried to run, but with the tightly tied towel he was holding with one hand while the other was clutching the bundle of clothes he could only manage little, ridiculous waddling steps. By now Schevola was openly devoting her full attention to him. That annoyed him. He wasn’t a specimen to be studied. Now he was skipping again, jumping without looking. Too late it occurred to him that he could have used their sand fortress. He was so annoyed that he didn’t pay attention to the stones stuck in the sand, brown, smooth and rounded, like darning mushrooms. His foot slipped. Meno folded at the waist, stuck out his free leg behind him, obstinately holding on to his towel with his right hand and waving his left to compensate. But the bundle made him unbalanced, for a while he whirled it around in the air, finally dunked it in the sand. As he struggled to right himself, he found himself performing a gymnastic position on one leg, wobbling, his arm and other leg forming a downward slanting line and the towel flopped over, allowing the sun to shine on the Herr Editor’s derrière, pale as two white loaves. ‘Oh, spiders!’ he muttered, using the favourite curse of Mr Fox from the children’s Sandman television programme.