Uwe Tellkamp - The Tower

When Richard was on night duty, the telephone rang and he set off with an orderly and a driver, he recalled the apartment in which his retired boss had given a farewell meal for the doctors and a few nurses — the long-serving workhorses, as Müller used to say; the apartment that seemed to consist entirely of crystal, even the front door greeted the visitor with palm trees and a bird of paradise engraved on the frosted glass, followed by glass hall-stands, crystal-clear mirrors, display cases with glass flowers by Blaschka & Blaschka of Dresden, who had supplied their fragile, handblown works of art to zoological and botanical collections from Harvard to Vienna, the dandelion-clock weightlessness of Eucalyptus globulus,

the telephone rang, the nurse in Casualty held out the phone to him.

‘Frau Müller, for you, Herr Doktor’,

or volvox algae, enlarged until they were clearly visible, fragile radial sketches, Richard was reminded of the microscopy courses when he was a student, ‘Eucalyptus globulus, habitat Australia and Tasmania’, Müller, shaking a glass of water with ice cubes, had explained,

‘Yes? Hoffmann’,

‘Yes,’ said Edeltraut Müller,

and while Richard was looking for a formulation that sounded less off-hand than What’s wrong, What can I do for you? she said, ‘Come. Now’,

after taking a sip of water Müller had patted his lip with his signet ring and Richard had been confused by the opulent clarity, the single-minded transparency of the apartment, confused that Müller was something like a representative of the Blaschkas, he spoke for them, and for Richard the two things didn’t fit together: Müller’s choleric rule in the clinic, the contemptuously violent cut with which he opened up his patients’ abdominal walls, his silent, vigorous advance into the depths, passing by, uninterested, anything that wasn’t relevant — and these glass anemones, freshwater polyps, cacti with cat’s-tongue flowers, irises in ballet poses; preparations of hardened, unhearing delicacy in the flexible, aerosol-light fluid that came spurting out of the lead crystal chandeliers and wall candelabras as if out of atomizers, and Müller, Richard recalled, turned away in embarrassment, perhaps also fearful, at compliments, raised-eyebrow assessments of the cost of this crystal druse, as if his self-confidence in the clinic had only been outward show, as if a man’s ability to assert his will, his decisiveness, were called into question if the one who possessed, or claimed to possess, those qualities lived in an apartment filled with watery light, burgeoning silence and glass flowers, and perhaps Müller was sorry he’d invited his colleagues, had quietly regretted not having satisfied the custom of giving a leaving party by holding it in the clinic — or did vanity and the need to show off outweigh caution; this Now-I-can-be-myself, ladies and gentlemen, this So this is me the way I never wanted you to see me while I was still in employment, but now everything’s different, now I’m retired, now I’ve escaped from you and can do as I like, can even brag unpunished, and out of relief at that I request the pleasure of your company to enjoy your little, agreeable defeat?

when Richard set off and they were speeding along in the Rapid Medical Assistance van to Schlehenleite on the Elbe slope above the Blue Miracle, he could still hear the words of Grefe, the junior doctor, who had come out of one of the patients’ rooms in Casualty in the fluttering, already somewhat tatty white habit of the duty doctor, still traces of plaster on his forearms and the backs of his hands: ‘The surgeon’s illness, Dr Hoffmann, pensioned off — and that’s it?’,

‘Come. Now’,

but her voice had sounded calm, controlled, not strained, not trying to maintain her composure for the emergency response physician, as often happened when they were on call,

Richard recalled the long table with the, now emeritus, professor at the head, his relaxed, inviting gestures, and the way Trautson had tapped a glass with his fork to request silence for a speech, below the one painting in the apartment, the picture of a loaf of bread,

‘I don’t know, Dr Grefe, your aunt just said, “Come. Now”, is there someone here who can replace you?’ But Dr Grefe was already being called for the next urgent case,

amid the sound of the engine’s rpm angina, its whooping-cough chug-chug when the driver changed gear on a climb and double-declutched, Richard recalled that loaf painted in oils on the wall over the top end of the table, creaking (so immediate it seemed) like a carriage wheel, with a casual dusting from the lavish excesses of flour piled up beside it, partly in absolutist pointed cones, partly in churned-up heaps, as if the painter (strangely enough one didn’t think of the baker) had dug his fists into it; a loaf with its crust burst open in the form of a starfish with, coming out of the cracks, the soft, nutritiously steaming dough, giving the brown (chitin-brown, acorn-brown, double-bass-brown, tree-trunk-brown, rock-brown) crust stuttering outlines, jagging out ridges, here raising a plate that would splinter when you bit on it, there a tumour of crust swelling in a thin network of pores surrounded by the crumb that recalled the growths on gnarled beeches,

‘Bread, Herr Hoffmann. The man painted nothing but bread, bread all the time. It was his speciality, so to speak, and even if there’s something odd about obstinately sticking to one single subject, at least he achieved genuine mastery in that, as you will admit. The King of the Loaf’,

‘But a king at least,’ Dreyssiger broke in mockingly,

‘A king who is truly powerful, you never experienced the war, young man’,

Richard recalled before Niklas Tietze opened the door to the Müllers’ apartment or, rather, dragged it open across broken glass that crunched and crackled under his feet,

Richard saw Niklas’s stethoscope through the gaps between the splinters still left in the front door, then his face, serrated by fragments of the bird of paradise and palm leaves hanging down like icicles, saw, silently observed by neighbours, Niklas’s hands, his bow tie, his Sunday suit that he wore when going to Däne’s Friends of Music,

‘Yes,’ Niklas said, ‘she came to fetch us, we’d been listening to Mozart and … it’s not far for her, we were still chatting’,

‘What happened?’ Richard saw the ruins, the smashed mirrors, the clothes stands in pieces, the thousands of glints shooting up from fragments of glass in the light of the few remaining bulbs,

‘He was sent a letter demanding he declare everything,’ Niklas said, waving the orderly and driver, who’d pushed their way with the stretcher through the rapidly growing crowd of onlookers, through to the back,

Joffe, the lawyer, came out of one of the rooms, hesitantly and with much shaking of the head — he was wearing checked slippers — seeking gaps in the piles of broken glass,

‘The police and forensic have been informed, everything will have to be cordoned off here, I couldn’t do more than that, Herr Hoffmann, this kind of thing isn’t my field’,

‘Thirty-nine ampoules of regular insulin, Dr Tietze immediately injected some glucose intravenously but I fear we were too late,’ Edeltraut Müller said, tapping a needle then pumping up a blood-pressure sleeve round Müller’s right arm, feeling in the crook of his arm with the stethoscope and slowly releasing the column of mercury with the knurled screw while Richard checked the pupil reaction with a torch: both pupils fixed; checked breathing, pulse, circulation and examined the two kidney dishes, in the one on the left the broken ampoules and two ampoule saws, a compress; in the one on the right the glass syringe with the injection cannula still attached,