Uwe Tellkamp - The Tower

Soon the bathtub was steaming. He refilled the boiler with water, thinking about the conservatory. Whenever Christian said anything about the conservatory, or about the House with a Thousand Eyes — in the school hostel after they’d finished their homework for the evening and the three of them were sitting in the lounge together and it was difficult to stay out of the exchange of information, the ‘who-are-you-then?’ and ‘where-do-you-come-from-then?’ — the response would be disbelieving looks, sometimes unconcealed doubt. He quickly sensed their scepticism and would change the subject before he got onto the details that really sounded fantastic and magical, didn’t mention Caravel, East Rome, Meno’s name for the house where he lived and where there was a room that could be reached both through the Langes’ apartment and by a spiral staircase that was hidden behind the salamander wallpaper in the hall, with chessboard tiles and light coming in through a sloping overhead window that the Langes, like the original owners, used as a conservatory. — ‘Oh come on now, with the shortage of accommodation, you don’t seriously expect us to believe that. Hasn’t your ship’s doctor had someone allocated to one of his rooms?’ Christian could hear his fellow boarders in Waldbrunn say as he got out of the bath and went back to the cabin, dressing as quickly as he could, the cold was so biting. — He hasn’t, but my uncle has. He shares the lower apartment with an engineer and his family; my uncle has one large room and two smaller ones. It’s an old villa, built by a soap manufacturer around the turn of the century; one family lived in the whole house then, and there were a few attic rooms for the maids. He would have had no idea that he would be expropriated one day — otherwise he might have made better arrangements to suit the Communal Housing Department. ‘Well now, isn’t he a little mocker, our Dresdener?’ It was Jens Ansorge who said that. The son of the general practitioner from Altenberg, he was in 11/2, Christian’s class, and sat right at the front of the row by the window; a little shorter than Christian, his hair blow-dried into a slightly dishevelled style, he had spoken with a conspiratorial grin and tugged at his large beak of a nose with relish. That meant: Don’t try to fool me, OK? Sometimes Jens watched him during classes; they both sat at the front, though Christian was alone in the row by the door, and he could feel Jens’s blue eyes, openly scrutinizing and challenging, going over his face, the clothes he was wearing, the Swiss walking boots that had been handed down to him by his father.

Christian was already on the stairs. He intended to go to the conservatory by the concealed door, but Libussa was just coming out of the kitchen, where she’d been warming up some rolls — the odour filled the hall. ‘Just come right in, Krishan, and help me carry the things into the conservatory. You know where everything is, the salt’s on the right in the wall cupboard.’ Libussa, holding the basket of rolls, her hair gathered in a bun, nodded to him. ‘The door’s open, but close it behind you or we’ll lose all the heat.’

Christian picked up the tea tray. The Langes’ apartment smelt of vanilla tobacco; the smoke seemed to have seeped right into the yellowing wallpaper and faded curtains that were hung over the doors for extra insulation. Christian lowered his head to go through the wooden-bead curtain into a little vestibule in which were a shoe tidy, key hooks, a hat rack on which were several of Libussa’s large hatboxes. The ship’s doctor, who was just coming out of the living-room door with the ash pan in his hand, blinked behind his horn-rimmed glasses when he saw Christian, but not in surprise at seeing him in their apartment, for he immediately said, in his tobacco-smoky voice, ‘Did it go well, did it go well, was your father happy with it?’ He said ‘fadder’, almost swallowing the ‘r’ — Lange came from Rostock. ‘Very happy, even.’ Christian then wished him a slightly embarrassed good morning, for Lange was in a rather strange get-up: striped pyjama trousers and a tweed jacket with a cigar peeping out of the breast pocket. ‘Right then, let’s get on with it, my son.’ Muttering to himself, he looked for a key on the hooks, the goatee on his chin and upper lip — which had retained its light-brown colour, in contrast to the rather tangled hair on his head — bobbing up and down as he did so.

The teacups were steaming; they were also heavy and the ball of his hand was touching the hot teapot; despite that, Christian didn’t go straight into the conservatory but cast greedy eyes on the pictures on the walls, mostly photographs of the ships on which Lange had been the doctor: the Oldenburg , a proud and tall full-rigged ship — when Christian asked about it Lange would growl, ‘She were a good ship’ in his Low German dialect, jutting out his chin and puffing smoke from a pipe that was curved like an upside-down question mark; passenger ships of the Hamburg — America Line; then, during the war, destroyers, menacing grey iron hulks. Harbours, the Torres Straits, the rocky coast of Patagonia, taken from a ship of the Laeisz shipping company’s nitrate line; a U-boat crew in the Second World War, the submarine surfaced beside a battleship, its sailors waving, the hatches open, the crew fallen in on deck, pennants, illustrated with the number of gross register tons they had sunk, fluttered above the bearded faces, and the captain was saluting, his hand raised casually and, as it seemed to Christian, slightly sceptically to his hat with its armed-forces eagle hanging askew. Scapa Flow — Captain-Lieutenant Prien salutes Rear Admiral Dönitz CUB — ‘Commander of the U-Boats,’ Lange had replied to Christian’s question about the abbreviation, and he stroked his thin beard, going on in his Low German, ‘An’ I knew Prien as well. ’e were the great hero back then. A German U-boat sinks the Royal Oak in Scapa Flow. Reception in the Reich chancellery, the Knight’s Cross, red carpet an’ all that. An’ then? Lost at sea for Führer, Folk and Fadderland. All lost at sea, my son. The seventh from t’left, on the big tub, that’s me.’

Beside the photos were sailors’ knots, carefully drawn by Lange on black cardboard and framed: bowline, clove hitch, carrick bend and bunting hitch. The ship’s doctor had taught him some of them — they were useful for fishing. The television, a Raduga, reflected the growing light and seemed to be staring at him. The stove gaped wide, the surround was spattered with ash — Libussa would go round later with the vacuum cleaner and wipe the bottles on the shelf beside the stove in which Lange’s ships dreamt of long voyages. Christian went into the conservatory.

‘Good morning, young man.’ The engineer turned up the right corner of his lip; it was perhaps intended to seem cool and detached, but to Christian it just looked funny since Stahl had a moon-face and just a few strands of hair on his head, which he combed straight back and plastered down with hair lotion. To make up for it, his eyebrows and the hair on his chest, sticking out like wool from his lumberjack shirt, were all the more bushy. Lange often used to tease him: Gerhart Stahl, he would say, was like a Soviet actor who played a sunflower-seed vendor on the runway of Baku airport in a TV series. A sly clown and an inventive rogue, he would always shake his head dubiously and waggle his eyebrows when the Moscow celebrities, who were returning from their summer holiday, took off in an Ilyushin — ‘I do not waggle my eyebrows,’ the engineer would object irritatedly. Dr Gerhart Stahl didn’t like the Soviet actor because he didn’t like the Soviet Union.

‘Slept well.’ It was a statement, not a question. He crushed Christian’s hand in his engineer’s paw, then leant down to the oil radiator and turned the control knob. Although the tall windows were no longer perfectly insulated and the conservatory was fairly big — there was plenty of room in it for the breakfast table, and they could sit round it without the palm trees in the tubs getting in the way — it was noticeably warmer there than in the Langes’ living room. The conservatory had a stove of its own, and the ship’s doctor would stoke it up before going to bed; it continued to heat the conservatory until after breakfast, by which time the stoves in the other rooms were going.