Uwe Tellkamp - The Tower

‘— more like Russia. Russia, so’

‘Africa.’

‘Oh do shut up.’

‘— or can you hear something? It’s not starting up.’

‘The emergency plan will come into force.’

‘Funny that the telephone’s still working.’

‘Comes via a relay station, low voltage. Everything can be dead all round, they’ll still get a tone,’ Dreyssiger said.

‘Africa. Central Congo.’

‘We must go to the ICU,’ Richard said. ‘Nurse Lieselotte, will you please call in all available staff. Robert, you’re coming with us, we can use anyone who can give a hand now.’

They ran to the Intensive Care Unit. Cones of light blazed up, stamping meal carts, nurses’ legs, distraught faces out of the deep-sea darkness of the clinic, somewhere a bedpan clattered onto the floor. Someone was thumping on the lift door, ghostly footsteps echoed in the stairwell. The Medical Academy was a concentrated mass of black stone; there was still light on in Nuclear Medicine, as there was in Administration. Shadowy figures could be seen dashing to and fro. In the ICU a string of torches was hanging over the insufflation beds, candles had been lit. The duty anaesthetist was just switching to pressurized oxygen, the compressor for room-air insufflation, which came out of the walls, had stopped working, as had the monitors over the patients’ heads. ‘An unstable patient, Herr Hoffmann.’

‘Still no current in the emergency generator sockets.’ One of the nurses was transferring cables. ‘What a mess.’

Richard looked at the noradrenaline drip. The patient attached to it seemed peaceful, like a figure in a painting by one of the Old Masters: a scene in a cave. One nurse was constantly measuring his pulse, another his blood pressure. The slightest bit too little or too much and his condition would be up and down like a roller coaster, they had to take countermeasures, that tied staff down.

‘CVP?’ the anaesthetist asked, pressing one of the patient’s fingernails, checking the recapillarization time. One nurse bent down to the venotonometer that measured the central veinous pressure.

‘We could use a man,’ the anaesthetist said. ‘It could take some time until ours get here. Most don’t have a telephone.’

‘What’s it like in the operating theatre, have you heard anything?’ Richard asked.

‘Your boss’s broken off the operation. Insufflation’s continuing manually. One patient in the recovery room — another doctor who can’t get away. And the neurosurgeons want to start on a tumour. Haha.’

Kohler stayed at Intensive Care; Richard, Dreyssiger and Robert went to the A&E. The corridors, also lit by strings of torches, were jam-packed with moaning patients on stretchers; ambulance sirens wailed and died away. No one seemed to be coordinating things, doctors and nurses were rushing to and fro. Porters brought more and more new patients; doors were flung open and slammed shut; exasperated voices from the treatment rooms called for bandages, nurses, drugs. The waiting area by the desk, behind which Nurse Wolfgang was dealing with complaints and demands with a stoical expression on his face, looked like a field hospital. Faintly lit by the candles on the desk, injured people were sitting on the floor, rocking to and fro; a young girl had been laid on a blanket, pale, she endured the lamentations of two older women in silence. Forcefully and with words of comfort, Dreyssiger pushed his way through to the desk. Patients in A&E wheelchairs were either sitting in silence or waving their arms around, most probably with ankle injuries; as he passed Richard glanced at the swollen joints, trying to repress the wave of images, memories of his injuries during the 13 February air raid, the screaming, whimpering wounded who were waiting with him amid detonating bombs, the machine-gun rattle of an isolated Wehrmacht unit, the heat from the burning surgical and paediatric clinics; at that time the Academy had still been called the Gerhard Wagner Hospital, after the Reich doctors’ leader.

‘Have you seen any of the technical guys?’ Nurse Wolfgang called to Dreyssiger. ‘It’d help if they got a cable laid.’

‘X-rays possible?’

‘No. No CAT scanner either.’

‘Then close down,’ said Richard. ‘We can’t deal with all this. We can’t operate.’

‘I’ve called regional headquarters, Herr Hoffmann. They say all the Dresden hospitals want to close down.’

‘But not all of them can have a power cut?’

‘They’re not sending us any multiple traumas, that’s all I managed to get out of them.’

‘Who’s coordinating things?’

‘Grefe. But he can’t get out of the plaster room.’

‘Are there any beds at all?’

‘No.’

Dreyssiger went into a treatment room. Richard picked up the phone. ‘I’m sure the boss will turn up soon, until then I’ll coordinate the surgical clinics. — The line’s busy.’

‘Eddi!’ Wolfgang shouted, waving vigorously to a brawny man in the blue overalls of Technical Services. Eddi was its head, he was a former boxer, there was a punchbag in his office and on the walls, between bunches of boxing gloves, were photos of famous welter- and heavyweights. Eddi panted, ‘The diesel! Someone’s siphoned off the diesel from the emergency generator.’

‘Nonsense.’

‘I’m telling you, Wolfgang. And there’s no reserve, it’s enough to drive me mad.’

‘There must be a few fuckin’ litres of diesel somewhere in the hospital! People are stuck in the lift.’

‘It’s being seen to. We’ll have to jack it up. Internal and Gynaecological’ve got diesel but they need it for their own generators.’

‘Dad,’ Robert said, he’d squeezed himself into a corner behind the desk, ‘there’s some people from the Western Channel 2 out in the car park. Four big diesel lorries, I saw them when I came up to your ward.’

Eddi said, ‘Touch wood’, and he and Robert ran off.

‘Are you just standing around or is someone going to see to us?’ a man in a leather hat said in a querulous voice through the sliding window of the enquiry desk. ‘Oh, Herr Hoffmann.’ Griesel took a step back. ‘I’d no idea it was you, neighbour. I can’t believe how long we have to wait here.’ Suddenly his expression changed. ‘Wouldn’t it be possible …’

‘All patients have equal rights,’ Richard said, a bit too loud for Griesel’s liking.

‘It caught me out on the way home from work, you see …’ Griesel went on in placatory tones and bowing in an ingratiating manner. ‘Our house hasn’t been hit, by the way.’

Emotions a doctor couldn’t afford to permit himself bubbled up like boiling milk inside him as he watched Griesel push his way through the patients back to his chair; hatred and contempt for that man, the conditions, the whole system. To pay them back in their own kind, to be able, just once, to retaliate to power with power, to have an outlet for the impotent rage piling up inside him day after day! He goes to the back of the queue, Richard felt like saying, Wolfgang would have understood and probably approved. The deep-rooted, feared esprit de corps of health professionals. Richard didn’t say it. All patients have equal rights. The welfare of the sick is the final law, that was what was written in Latin on a board in the entrance to Accident and Emergency: Salus aegroti suprema lex .

A commotion outside the entrance, floodlight beams flashing to and fro, powdery snow coming in through the door. Eddi and an auxiliary brought in Robert, who was holding his arm.

‘I slipped and fell. Stupid.’ Robert shrugged his shoulders. ‘It’s all frozen outside. But we’ve got the diesel.’

His wrist was swollen but his hand didn’t show a bayonet deformity, as with a fracture in a typical position. Robert gave a quiet cry when Richard examined it.