Uwe Tellkamp - The Tower

There were five of them; the other four on B shift were all philosophers, though from different schools, and would spend the whole night in silent but bitter arguments, hastily scribbled in pencil on rough paper, about alienation in a Developed Socialist Society.

‘Richard.’

‘Anne.’

‘Can I have a word with you?’

Richard stepped back from the vice, in which there was a part for the gas water-heater, improvised and filed to size from a constructional drawing Stahl, the engineer, had made for him. ‘Shall we go out?’

‘Not necessary. The people who’re listening to us know just as much as we do. Or would you like a breath of fresh air? I couldn’t last ten minutes in the stuff you breathe in this cellar.’

Upstairs, in the living room, she said, ‘I can’t take any more, Richard. For a long time I’ve watched and said nothing. But this Reina, this student … it’s too much. We’ — Anne suddenly laughed — ‘ought to have an argument now but, you know, I don’t want to, I … I just don’t have the strength.’

‘Yes, Anne,’ Richard murmured. He touched a few things, sofa cushions, the edge of a cupboard. ‘Is Reglinde in?’

‘She’s gone out. The letter on the table’s from Robert.’

‘I know, I … I’ve read it. He seems to be doing quite well.’

‘Better than Christian. But you always say that Christian tends to exaggerate a bit, with his, what d’you call it … bragger, braggerdosho, I can’t get the word right.’ Again she laughed.

‘Robert, yes, he’s never had that many problems. And yet — perhaps he doesn’t say anything simply because Christian’s already, in a way … that’s Christian’s style and perhaps Robert doesn’t want to be the same.’

‘The grandfather clock, Richard, can’t you stop it? I can’t stand the tick-tock, it hurts. Shall I get you something to drink?’

‘I can do that.’

‘You won’t be able to find anything. What were you going to say?’

‘It meant nothing to me, Anne.’

She nodded and went out. Richard heard her busying herself about the kitchen, there was a chink of ice cubes in glasses, he stopped the pendulum of the grandfather clock. It resisted, started to get back into rhythm with micro-oscillations, Richard had to take off one of the lead weights, he put it down carefully inside the clock case. He heard a clatter in the hall, the dull thud of a fall. Anne’s right hand was full of splinters of glass.

‘We’ll have to go to the clinic.’ He thought for a moment, then rang Friedrich Wolf Hospital.

‘Barsano. Yes, you can use the room. I’ll have everything made ready.’

‘You gave yourself away back at the wedding, you know,’ Anne said. Richard was driving the Lada, wasn’t concentrating, thought it would have been better to take a taxi — No, taxis were rare, they might have had to wait hours for one. Oddly enough, it had never occurred to him to call an ambulance. Anne was staring at her bandaged hand. ‘When I asked you whether you knew the boy, you said: No, perhaps the son of a patient. How did you know he wasn’t the son of Wernstein’s friend?’

‘She’s our senior secretary,’ Richard replied wearily. The red needle flickered restlessly over the the elongated numbers on the speedometer. He was driving on automatic pilot, as if another being inside him were doing it, a matchstick man made of a few nerves and linked muscles. How alien and yet important all this was: the dashboard, the trees along the street, the key in the ignition.

‘Then you shouldn’t have said perhaps . By the way, I’ve seen Lucie. Pretty girl, there’s a lot of you about her.’

Everything was ready at the hospital. Frau Barsano offered to assist Richard.

Anne’s hand. My wife’s hand, he thought. White and bloodless (a nurse had taken the bandage off), it lay in the dazzling, mocking light of the operating lamp.

A hand — what it does is one thing. A piece of body, a body itself, an assistant at performances; eloquent, undisguised truth. What it prevents, perhaps simply by not moving, is another. He found both interesting. He loved hands. Hands were stimulants, gave him pleasure. He had studied hands: the sea-lily femininity of Botticelli’s women’s fingers (they were fingers, but weren’t they what made hands?); hands that were obstinately convinced of something; hands as if in despair at their size and at their incessant, steady moving away from childhood; creamed and uncreamed hands, alluring and mossily unfathomable hands; the hands of women gardeners, tanned by sap, and of stokers in which coal dust has lodged and can’t be washed off; he had seen the hands of a butterfly expert (who had called them feeble fools); his father’s hands examining a clock: all these (now ghostly-seeming) hands with the trace element of tenderness. Hands that had gone numb, fingers as fragile as a quail’s bones, and had transformed cities. Hands of peasant women, gnarled, a weave of harshness and cold and a life of hard work, Querner had painted them: they seemed to be made more of wood than of flesh, the fingers were crooked with gout and arthritis and blows: blows warded off and blows handed out. At the same time Richard thought hands were sometimes curious, the fact that there were two of them seemed to take away something of their value, of their gleaming precision. Why do Cyclops have only one eye? So that its look is more threatening, so that there’s less distraction. One hand, two hands: around another person’s body — or neck — to clasp from both sides, to caress in stereo; to murder. Lines of bitterness. Some looked restless from unchangeableness. There, that scar — do you remember? On our honeymoon, it was the way the travels of our youth were: no great distance, Rheinsberg and Havel, reachable on our Berliner motor scooter: apples lit from behind, grainy with the nocturnal dew, pumpkins in the windows, the size of grapefruit, striped like the trousers of Turks in operas, some beige with green growths, some like fluffed-up turbans, others pear-shaped, yellow and dark green, a sharply drawn boundary between the colours. The breakdown on the way, Anne letting the second screwdriver slip.

‘You’ve made yourself unsterile, Herr Hoffmann. The edge of your hand was on the tap.’

He’d found reading hands satisfying even when he was a junior doctor; others might see it as a challenge, tormenting, abrasive, for him it was taking something that was packed, carefully and willingly encircling it, peeling off its coverings, full of inhibitions, fear of nakedness — but it was there, softly throbbing, demanding to be known. And no one had explained what cutting into a hand meant (oh, that word: ‘to grasp’). To cut into one’s own wife’s hand; five fingers, the constriction where the wedding ring had been (the nurse had had to use soap and a silk thread to take it off); the ball of the thumb; the pulse of the two main arteries, that couldn’t be felt now; the palm of the hand with lines and grooves and a cloud of superstition; pale, brittle-looking nails; so that the hand on the green sheets looked like an anaesthetized stoat with its winter fur, ready for dissection. No one told you how to deal with the irrevocability, the absence of irony at the moment of the cut: Here I am, the hand seemed to say, there’s no turning back, I have to trust you. So make me well again. What you are capable of will have to be enough. Of course there was experience, but there was always something lurking in the background, always the suspicion that with this patient it didn’t necessarily have to work the way it had in a ‘similar case’ the previous day; always the fear that the ‘knowledge’ would vanish at an abracadabra. As in any task without an escape hatch.