Uwe Tellkamp - The Tower

‘Don’t swear. You know, I’m not that worried about Robert. He’s quieter and somehow … more sensible. At school he says the things they want to hear, keeps his thoughts to himself, then comes home and switches over. But Christian … Your boss mustn’t hear that Christian has told a joke about Brezhnev, especially now, when he’s hardly been dead a month and they don’t know whether they’re coming or going and fly off the handle at the least thing … You know all that. And Christian does too. But sometimes I really feel it’s like talking to a brick wall. And then you don’t even know whether that restaurant’s been bugged all over the place …’

‘Oh, you can be sure of that.’

‘So why don’t you behave accordingly, then? I did have a word with you about it only this afternoon, and Christian yesterday! But I can talk till the cows come home, it’s still no use. The boy’s old enough, you say, but when you and your friends encourage him like that … He’s only seventeen, for God’s sake, he must feel it’s a challenge when he listens to you lot … But I think he’s not yet old enough to assess such situations properly.’

‘You’re right, Anne. I should have been more cautious. Oh … all this ducking and diving …’

‘Moaning won’t change it.’

‘That Müller … I saw very clearly that he was boiling with rage and didn’t kick up a big fuss only because he was our guest. Manfred will have to watch out too. I know for a fact that his boss and Müller can’t stand each other, but … A comrade’s a comrade, and when it comes down to it, dog doesn’t eat dog. Oh, Anne, I’ve been living in this state for thirty-three years and I still don’t know when it’s time to keep my mouth shut.’

Anne looked at him, gave his arm a squeeze.

‘That’s why I love you. Come on, then, it’s too late to do anything about it now.’

Richard sensed that she was depressed and wanted to change the subject. ‘Hey, what are we going to do about sleeping arrangements? I thought Sandor and Alice could stay in the Little Room …’

‘My dear, we sorted that out ages ago.’ She shook her head in amusement. ‘You men always think of these things in such good time, don’t you? It’s amazing. If these things were left to you, we’d be in chaos in no time at all. Alice and Sandor are going to have to sleep with Kurt in the children’s room, they can move back into the Little Room tomorrow. Regine and Hansi in the living room, Emmy in the Little Room. Your mother needs to sleep by herself and anyway, you can’t expect her to put up with the hard sofas in the living room; it doesn’t bother Regine and the young lad. And they’ll have the telephone in there, in case the call comes very late. Hey, Robert, Ezzo, stop that, you almost hit us. I don’t want anything to get broken, d’you hear?’

‘Yesyes,’ the two shouted happily, sweeping snow off the top of the walls into each other’s faces.

Christian was thinking about Regine, who was a friend of his parents. Jürgen Neubert, Regine’s husband, had left the country illegally two years ago to go to Munich. Since then they could only meet in Prague, once a year, after great difficulties, Jürgen always afraid of being arrested. Regine had applied for an exit visa, and since then her telephone had been cut off. She had to use Anne and Richard’s line to speak to Jürgen. The call might be put through at four in the morning, you never knew when beforehand, which was why Anne had taken the precaution of making up beds for Regine and her son.

‘Aha,’ Richard murmured outside Caravel, taking the key out of his coat pocket. The light was on in the living room, the windows of which, with their flying buttresses, could be seen from the street. That was the sign that Regine was still waiting for her husband’s call.

The first light of day was crouching at the window when Christian woke. He listened. Everything was quiet in the house, but he knew that Meno liked to get up early and spend lauds — as, like the monks, he called the hour between five and six — at work or meditating in the gradually waning darkness of the living room, which was still reasonably warm from the previous evening. In the summer Meno would sit on the little balcony watching the return of the garden, the branches and flowers being outlined in the flush of dawn, Lange’s pear trees still dark, the pears still not released from the twilight; watching and perhaps listening as he, Christian, was listening now. The rusty tick of Meno’s Russian 3ap alarm clock, the faint green glow of the fluorescent lines under the numbers and on the hands. It was shortly after seven. Christian got up and put on the dressing gown Anne had laid out for him. The stove had gone out during the night; the room was so cold his breath came out like a cloud of smoke and there were ice patterns on the window. The light was on in the bathroom, and he heard Libussa singing one of her Czech folk songs; when she sang, her voice sounded like a little girl’s. On the landing it was even colder than in the cabin, there was a glitter of frost on the coal box. He hurried back into the room, swung his arms round, did knee bends, then some shadow boxing with an invisible opponent who, in his mind’s eye, took on the features of his Russian teacher, and then, after a blow full in the face, the puffy red face of his civics teacher, a jab, a straight right, a straight left, a right hook and then one to those thick, always slightly parted lips with the curve of the red-veined jug-like nose above them — there was a knock at the door. ‘Krishan,’ he heard Libussa shout, ‘the bathroom’s free now, breakfast’ — she pronounced it ‘prek-fest’ — ‘is in the conservatory, d’you hear.’

Kri-shan. That was what Libussa called him; he liked it. The civics teacher had burst under the force of his punches. Panting, Christian flung open the window. It had continued to snow during the night; the garden, which fell away steeply below the window, lay under a thick white blanket, and the summerhouse, where Meno often used to work, sometimes even sleep in the warmer seasons, looked as if it were covered in icing; the sandstone balustrade on either side, which separated the upper garden from the lower, wilder part, just peeked out of the snow; a stone eagle was perched on the balustrade and its wings, delicately carved and elegantly outspread, seemed to be carrying a pile of folded white towels. Fresh animal tracks criss-crossed the snow. A flock of crows was busying itself about the huge stack of wood that Meno, the ship’s doctor and Meno’s next-door neighbour, the engineer Dr Stahl, had piled up the previous autumn. In front of the rhododendrons, which covered the left-hand side of the balustrade almost completely, several bird feeders were hanging from some clothes poles; countless birds were fluttering round and squabbling. He closed the window and went to the bathroom.

At weekends they had a communal breakfast in the House with a Thousand Eyes. It was Libussa, who was very sociable, who had introduced the custom. They took it in turns to provide rolls, butter, milk and jam; in the summer they often had breakfast in the garden, in the lower part, at a table in the middle of a wild, romantic tangle of bushes, out of sight of prying eyes; a weathered set of steps led down to it.

A jet of boiling hot water shot into the tub with the lion feet. There were fine cracks in the enamel. There were traces of black mould in the joins between the tiles, on the ceiling with the layers of peeling paint, on the wood of the windowsill, which had been leached grey by soapy water; the mould was an intruder in all the houses Christian knew up there, and it was impossible to eradicate entirely, no matter how much time people spent airing rooms, brushing on fungicides or painting white lead or spar varnish over it