Uwe Tellkamp: The Tower

— The Great Clock struck and the sea rose up in front of the windows, the rooms with the fern-pattern wallpaper and the frosted chandeliers, the stuccoed ceilings and fine furniture, inherited from a vanished middle-class past hinted at by the berets of the monument curators, the measured gestures of ladies eating cakes in the Italian cafés, the florid and chivalrous greeting ceremonies of the pursuit of art in Dresden, the hidden quotations, the mandarinesque, pedagogical, allusive rituals of the Friends of Music, the stately free-skating programmes of middle-aged gentlemen on the rinks; left over in the gently rolling hills of the Elbe valley in houses under the Soviet star, left over like the pre-war editions of Hermann Hesse, the cigar-brown Aufbau Verlag volumes of Thomas Mann from the fifties, jealously guarded in second-hand bookshops, where the undersea light commanded reverence from every customer that entered, paper boats that housed fossils slowly poisoning themselves with memories, tended pot-plants and kept the compass over the creaking floorboards unwaveringly pointing to Weimar, left over in the roses growing round the island, across the faces of the clocks that were rusting away, their pendulums cutting though our lives between the poles of silence and non-silence (it was one or the other, mere ‘noise’ or ‘sound’ it was not). We listened to music, the records were called Eterna, Melodia, they could be bought from Herr Trüpel, in the Philharmonia record shop on Bautzner Strasse or in the Art Salon on the Old Market Square … the Great Clock struck

— Dresden … in the muses’ nests / the sweet sickness of yesteryear rests

— Searching, in the night the Great River, woods turned into lignite, lignite formed seams beneath the houses, the pit-moles burrowed their way forward and dug out the coal, conveyor belts carried it to the stokers, to the power stations with their volcanic vents, to the houses, where the acid smoke went up out of the chimneys, eating away walls and lungs and souls, transforming wallpaper into toad’s skin; the wallpaper in the rooms, peeling off and blistering, yellowed and criss-crossed by the excrement threads of the bugs; when the stoves were lit, the walls seemed to sweat, secreting nicotine that had been collecting there since the old days; if it turned cold the windowpanes froze over, the wallpaper was covered in rime, ferny smears and oily ice (like fat in an unwashed frying pan banished to an unheated lumber room). A golden bird, which sometimes croaked in our dreams, watched over everything, the Minol oriole, and when the clocks struck, our bodies were stiff and captive, the roses grew

wrote Meno Rohde,

the Sandman sprinkled sleep

The electric lemons from VEB Narva decorating the tree were faulty, flickered on and off, erasing the silhouette of Dresden downstream. Christian took off his mittens, which were damp and covered with little balls of ice on the wool of the palms, and rubbed his almost numb fingers rapidly together, breathed on them — his breath a wisp of mist dispersing across the blackness of the entrance, hewn out of the rock, to the Buchensteig, which led up to Arbogast’s Institutes. The houses of Schillerstrasse disappeared in the dark; a cable ran from the nearest, a half-timbered house with bolted shutters, into the branches of one of the beeches that grew over the passage through the rock, where an Advent star was burning, bright and motionless. Christian, who had crossed the Blue Marvel — Loschwitz suspension bridge — and Körnerplatz, continued on his way out of the city, towards Grundstrasse, and soon reached the cable-car railway. The shutters were down over the windows of the shops he passed — a baker’s, a dairy, a fish shop; half in shadow already, the houses were gloomy and had ashy outlines. He felt as if they were huddling together, seeking protection from something indefinite, as yet unfathomable, that might float up out of the darkness — just as the January moon had floated up out of the darkness over the Elbe when Christian had stopped on the deserted bridge and looked at the river, the thick woollen scarf his mother had knitted pulled tight round his ears and cheeks against the icy-keen wind. The moon had risen slowly, detaching itself from the coldly sluggish mass of the river, which looked like liquid earth, to stand alone over the meadows with their willows wreathed in mist, the boathouse on the Old Town bank of the Elbe and the range of hills disappearing in the direction of Pillnitz. The clock on a distant church tower struck four, which surprised Christian.

He took the path up to the funicular railway, put his travel bag on the bench by the gate that closed off the platform and waited, his mittened hands in the pockets of his military-green parka. The hands of the station clock over the conductor’s shed seemed to move forward very slowly. Apart from him, there was no one waiting for the funicular, and to pass the time he examined the adverts. They hadn’t been cleaned in a long time. One was for the Café Toscana on the Old Town bank of the Elbe, another for Nähter’s, a shop farther along towards Schillerplatz, and a third for the Sibyllenhof Restaurant by the station at the top. In his mind Christian began to go through the fingering and melodic line of the Italian piece that they were going to play at his father’s birthday party. Then he looked into the darkness of the tunnel. A faint light was growing, gradually filling the cavity of the tunnel like water rising in a fountain, and at the same time the noise increased: a slate-like crackling and groaning, the steel-wire guide cable creaked under the load; jolting, the funicular approached, a capsule filled with an undersea glow, and two headlight eyes lit up the line. The hazy outlines of individual passengers could be seen in the carriage with, in the middle, the blurred shadow of the greybeard conductor — he had been on this section for years, up and down, down and up, always alternating, perhaps he closed his eyes to avoid the sight of the all-too-familiar scenes, or to see them with his inner eye and then repress them, to exorcize ghosts. But he could probably see by hearing, every jolt during the journey must have been familiar to him.

Christian picked up his bag, took out a groschen and spent the remaining moments contemplating the coin: the oak leaves beside the crudely cut ten, the tiny, worn year with the A underneath it, the obverse with the hammer, compasses and the wreath of grain, and he thought back to how often they, the children of Heinrichstrasse and Wolfsleite, had copied the embossed surface of these coins by placing them under a piece of paper and rubbing them with a pencil — Ezzo and Ina had been more skilful at it, and keener than him, back in the days of their childhood dreams of adventurous lives as forgers and robbers, like the heroes in the films at the Tannhäuser Cinema or in the books of Karl May and Jules Verne. The funicular, braking softly, came to a halt, and the doors, graded in height and sloping, released their passengers. The conductor got out, opened the gate and a narrow entrance beside it for the passengers who were going up. The gate had a coin-box attached, and Christian dropped his fare in and pulled down the lever on the side; the ten-pfennig piece slipped out of the rotating disc and joined the others on the bottom. Instead of the groschen, the local children sometimes put in flat stones that had been ground smooth by the Elbe and which they called ‘butties’, or buttons — much to the annoyance of their mothers — who were sorry to lose them, for the little aluminium coins were easy to get while buttons, on the other hand, were difficult to find. The doors were closed; if you wanted to get into the carriage in the winter, you had to pull a cable to open them; they closed as soon as you let go. The conductor had gone into his shed, poured himself a coffee and watched the passengers hurrying off, disappearing like shadows round the corners to Körnerplatz or Pillnitzer Landstrasse.