Uwe Tellkamp - The Tower

unload, travel, pine twigs, parts of puzzles, bizarre, unsolved. The Elbe at Torgau was awake, Christian had never seen an awake river before, large clock face numbers were drifting down it. Could Muriel hear it? The reformatory was somewhere round here. Fields, filled with surf, bursting, crackling. Swill? Wind? Ready to pounce. The wind was grimy, heavy, little slowcoaches of graphite grease in it. ‘Alight!’ was ordered. Searchlights. Playing at knitting. The Elbe at Torgau was an awake river, a livingmost giant, no: it was whispering, shivering: a ‘listening-post giant’. With rotting boots. Yes, precisely, that was it, Pancake swirling piss-flowers over the ground covered in bird feathers: a bed linen factory (cambric; he knew the word from Emmy) in the vicinity. The river had eyeballs, one after the other. Then none again. Colour? Shoe-polish black. Keep a tight hold on it. Streaks of rotten-apple-brown, there where the crêpe-paper-grey fairy rings are dotted down. Forest honey, ever so glutinous. Just don’t try it. Flapping, swallowing: nightingale-box paint, that black. Swish, swish: trees crumbling in the star-swell, on the downriver bank where the company’s taken up position. Listen. A river like that is alive, sleeps, dreams, digests, tosses and turns, lives its giant’s life. What has it got to say?

It’s talking of the wheat.

Whispering of the ships it’s seen.

The haulers that pulled the barges upstream on chains. There were still milestones. The burlaks sang, the singsong of the barge-haulers, on the Elbe, the Volga. He recalled a picture by Ilya Repin, men in tattered clothes, greybeards and downy-faced youths, in broad harnesses dragging the ship upstream. They said, What do you want? — Music. To be alone in silence. The music of the river, the throaty murmuring down the ages. ‘To walk until you’re free, that is what you want,’ Christian chattered, unconcerned whether anyone could hear. The river wanted nothing. The river was a molten magnet, a baroque ship was stuck in it, wanted to sail on but the algae, the filth, the garbage from the towns made a slick round the bow, twisted round the throttled propeller. It couldn’t move forward, it couldn’t drift back. It was full of people, it was a city, you could see houses, electric cables, the entrails of the city. Dresden … the sigh went through the air, Dresden … a stranded ship, stuck in the past, clinging with every fibre onto the past that had never been as beautiful as the raptures you go into. Dresden … Christian took a mouthful of water. Am I a human being? What do you want? No one’s interested in what you want. Now orders will come and you will have to obey them. Now orders will be expected and you will have to give them. What is an order? How is it that there are orders anyway?

The river didn’t know. It stank of cellulose and sewage farms. Of solid glue and burnt animal skins, of shampoo from Wutha, yellow as marzipan, washing powders from Ilmenau and Genthin: IMI, Spee, Wofalor: don’t forget anything. Don’t forget anything. At Torgau the Elbe was a dead river; the water was rusty and if you threw a pfennig in, it floated for a long time.

Christian looked for a flat pebble and had a go at skimming: he heard the stone hit the water four times. It should have been five since seven times for a first try (and he hadn’t done it since he was a boy) would have been unrealistic. One too few, Christian thought. One too few is a broken leg: as the saying Anne had brought from childhood went.

The most disagreeable thing about a tank was that it gave you the feeling of being safe and sound. The company commander was pacing up and down in the preparation area, checking with the platoon leaders, the crews that were making their T55s ready for the underwater drive, known as a UD. Christian had been on one twice, for Pancake it was something new, he kept running over to the machines beside theirs. The Elbe at Torgau was wide and it was also more than a metre deep, the tanks couldn’t get across without assistance. The two underwater drives Christian had been on had been in daylight; this time they were to cross the river by night, an exercise everyone was afraid of. The preparation area was lit by several floodlights, it was a sandy clearing in a pinewood. The crews were working hurriedly, the commanders had to report their tanks as ready for UD in thirty minutes. All the things that had to be done! There was a lot Christian had had to learn; he had to know this, to be able to do that; he was the commander for whose orders the crew would wait if they didn’t know what to do next. He had to know what came next. He bore the responsibility for the crew and he would never have dreamt of being in such a tricky situation: hating the tank, the noise, the drill, the military life — but having to have mastered it because he was the commander. Technology, the principles of operation (why can’t I start a tank cold, why must the driver pre-heat the diesel and, if there’s an alert, why must I run to the tank hangar, in my pyjamas if necessary, in order to switch on the pre-heating battery?), writing surveys on tactical and strategic problems. Here as well, in the army, he was part of a Great Plan, of a great computation of mankind; here as well they used the words ‘collective’ (his crew was a ‘combat collective’) and ‘main task’.

He worked mechanically, starting in alarm when he lost concentration. He forced himself to think systematically, to go through everything step by step. Seals on the hatches exchanged for the sponge rubber ones? The loader and the gun pointer were sharply delineated shadows heaving the packed anti-aircraft machine gun onto the turret. Pancake had dropped down into his driver’s hatch, Christian heard the hum of the course indicator starting up — the device that made it possible to drive in a straight line under water. He climbed into the forward area, closed the drain of the mantlet over the cylindrical mounts, checked whether the breech wedge of the gun was closed, lashed down the turret and tightened the seal of the turret ring, which had turned out to be one of the trouble spots during previous underwater drives. Inspected and closed the filter fan next to the gun. Checked and closed the overflow slide on the rear wall of the forward area, below the heavy fragmentation and hollow-charge shells. He heard the voice of his platoon leader asking, ‘Why do we need that, Lance Corporal Hoffmann?’ — ‘In order to divert water that’s got in the drive into the forward area and pump it out from there, Comrade Lieutenant.’ — ‘And why must there be no water in the drive?’ — ‘So that it doesn’t get into the engine, Comrade Lieutenant.’ — ‘And why mustn’t any water get in? Irrgang?’ You’re the pupil and they’re the teachers Christian had sometimes thought during these instruction periods — only that here they ask about seventeen-disc dry clutches and epicycloidal gears; a school, the whole country’s a school! ‘Hey, Pancake, batteries charged up?’

‘As charged up as a sailor on shore leave. I’ve been thinking. I know the Stenzels. Trick riders from the circus.’

‘Checked lower compressed-air cylinder?’

‘One thirty kPa, enough. — Course indicator working, Comrade Mummy’s Boy.’

‘Level, earhole?’ Responding in kind, Pancake was probably grinning. Christian inserted the bilge pump.

‘Track cover plates secured, changed elephant’s rubber,’ the gun pointer shouted down the turret hatch. Elephant’s rubber — the muzzle cap on the gun. Funny words you learnt here. Close ejector plate, open dividing wall fans. What was the point of that thing there? A window between the forward area and the engine room that looked oddly like the black radiation trefoil printed on yellow: a diesel engine guzzled air and under water it couldn’t get it in the usual way through the slats in the drive-cover — they were sealed — but drew it in through the periscope tube, which was like a snorkel fixed on the loader’s side.