Uwe Tellkamp - The Tower

‘Just sounding brass,’ Richard muttered.

‘And a gold tiepin,’ Clarens murmured, taking Richard by the arm and pointing to the rowans along the road, which were being covered in hoar frost before their very eyes.

‘I found the meeting pretty wearying,’ Clarens said. ‘Difficulties, jealousies, constant psychoses … Leuser’s coprolalia, and the full-timer a blindissimus realitensis totalis .’ The psychiatrist made a dismissive gesture. In such situations he preferred to go to the laundry, he said, there were always some overalls or other to be collected, the steam reminded him of his childhood and the busy little irons were so soothing. God, the suicides, the lunatics, including Party secretaries and other psychiatrists!

Richard went to the wards. Nurse Lieselotte was waiting with the cart for the rounds. ‘Your son’s here.’

‘Christian? What’s happened?’ — The alarm of the trauma surgeon whose thoughts immediately go to broken bones, blunt-force traumas, traffic accidents and injuries from machines.

‘No, it’s only me.’ Robert came out of the nurses’ room with an expression of gentle consideration well beyond his years.

‘Coffee?’ Nurse Lieselotte turned her searching look away from Richard’s face, which was gradually recovering its normal colour; he nodded, still confused, shyly embraced Robert. Patients at the other end of the corridor, in dressing gowns, taking little steps as they pushed stands with infusion bottles, stopped.

‘The nurses say you’re doing your rounds; can I come too? I’ve got a coat.’ On his index finger Robert held up a dissecting-room coat that closed at the back, threadbare from washing; they kept some on the ward for forgetful students.

‘I thought you were at school? Have you no classes?’

‘Finished. Came back on the bus, thought: let’s have a look at what Richard does.’

Like the time when Josta was in hospital in Friedrichstadt and Daniel had called her by her Christian name; it must have become general by now, Richard thought. Oh well. Nurse Lieselotte brought his mug with the coffee, a stethoscope, reflex hammer and protractor for Richard.

There were eight patients in the first ward. As they entered they were hit by the smell of sickness, a smell Richard, since his student days, had inhaled more often than what people call ‘fresh air’; the smell of sickness: that mixture of urine, faeces, pus, blood, medication and serum in the bandages and drain bottles, the smell of cold sweat on unshaved skin (they were in a men’s ward, with the women the smell was more of urine titrated with the sickly sweet, over-camomiled efforts of a cosmetic industry that had the humility of a poor relation), of cognac, a breeding ground for bacteria, medicinal spirit and vinegar (the dusting water in which the student nurses and nursing auxiliaries dipped their cloths to clean bedsteads, strip lights, bedside tables); the smell of PVC, wiped with Wofasept; of something age-old that seemed to incubate in the walls of the wards, in the white, washable oil-based paint with an olive-green stripe chest-high — where the arms are bound during arrests, where the respiratory trees branch, where the heart is. Seven of the eight patients had tried to sit up in their beds and had remained in this stand-to-attention position, as the nurses called it, one hand on the bar of the bed trapeze, rusty steel painted tooth-yellow and sagging under the weight; the eighth patient was in a body cast, his arms and trunk immured in the white suit of armour that had square windows over his wounds to allow drains (perforated plastic tubes as thick as your finger and bent like a shoemaker’s awl) to draw off the secretions from the wounds. His left leg, also in plaster, was held up in the air on the stirrup of a Kirschner wire bored into the ankle bone and pulled down, via a cord and pulley, by iron discs, the white paint of which had completely flaked off. His head, from which a pair of eyes looked with quiet anxiety at the nurse and Richard, was in Crutchfield tongs that, fixed in the skull above his ears, were stretching his cervical vertebrae, also via a pulley and weights. The optician, second bed on the left, immediately repeated his offer of marriage to Nurse Lieselotte, who, he said, would never lack for spectacles; moreover, he went on, it was pointless wasting time and money on the poor guy with the skull-hoops, who, he added with the crude humour of some patients, was going to kick the bucket anyway. His own leg, on the other hand, healed? when? And from Nurse Lieselotte, whose stony looks were clearly the visual equivalent of a thumbs-down, he ordered a sledgehammer so that he could finally smash the eternal brass band music of the sky pilot (second bed on the right, a priest, pale as a fish fillet, who had broken his lower leg while removing two bugs, one from the confessional and the other from the Saviour’s crown of thorns) and the revolutionary hymns of the comrade community policeman (third bed on the right, midfacial fracture, at the moment he was on the bedpan behind a screen; on his bedside table were the two Karls, May and Marx), he couldn’t stand any more of their ideological warfare.

‘Well, young man, fresh out of college?’ First bed on the right, a professor of Slav linguistics, emigrated from the Sudetenland to escape the Nazis, emigrated from the Sudetenland to escape the Czechs. Two lacerated arms laboriously emerged out of the white cover made from guinea pig skins: injuries from sabre-slashes (long-established jealousy between long-established rival sword collectors).

‘My son. He simply came straight from school in Waldbrunn to the ward here, wanted to see what kind of thing I did.’

‘Really proud of him, our doc. Start ’em young, my old man used to say,’ the riverboat engineer in the fourth bed on the right cried, closing a catalogue of toupees and waving two mangled fingers; he was twenty-two and still wore his hair long, even though a considerable part of it had been caught up in the rotor of his engine and a patch of scalp the size of his palm had been torn off. The light went out.

‘Good night.’ Third bed on the left, a forklift truck driver from Kofa, the Dresden canned food factory; craniocerebral trauma after falling, drunk, from the dam of Kaltwasser reservoir. In the ward room the late shift were sitting in the dark, a nurse lit candles; in the light of the flame her face looked calm; the objects in the circle of brightness had an unreal, rapt, Christmassy air about them. Nurse Lieselotte hurried to the end of the ward and unlocked the medicines cupboard, where she kept some torches and replacement batteries. The Intensive Care Unit! Richard thought, but already Kohler had come running in through the door followed by Dreyssiger, beams of light moved over the walls of North I. Dreyssiger cried, ‘The operating theatre, they’re down there, nothing’s working. The heart — lung machine’s stopped.’

The telephone was still working. Richard called the ICU. No one answered. ‘What about the anaesthetists, can they keep the oxygen going?’ he asked Dreyssiger over his shoulder.

‘No.’ Just ‘no’, it was Kohler who had said it in an expressionless, impassive tone. ‘If the emergency generator won’t start up’

‘— if it starts up’

‘— they’ll have to insufflate with a bag valve mask’

‘— why’s it not starting up’

‘Just like in the war,’ said one of the nurses anxiously; it was Gerda, who was almost seventy.

‘Africa.’

‘And what do things look like in the operating theatre?’

‘Like Africa. I just told you.’

‘— it’s just not starting’

‘Bananas, jungle.’

In the ward room it smelt of eucalyptus oil, Kohler had knocked the medicine basket off the table.