Uwe Tellkamp - The Tower

If you looked at it long enough a hand seemed to be sending out watchwords from the hidden depths — they remained motionless, still beneath the surface that presented an unambiguous exterior but their outlines could be made out, could be filled in by interpretation. Hands mostly did quite sensible things. Tied shoelaces in the morning, spooned up soup at lunchtime, cracked open a bottle of beer in the evening and rested. The life of a hand consisted of clenching and stretching for sensible gestures. Richard remembered a patient he’d had many years ago, at the time she’d been fifteen, both her forearms had been torn off in an accident. One night, he’d been on duty in A&E, the neighbours had rung up. She’d gassed herself.

‘I think your wife will be able to be treated as an outpatient. Save us a lot of paperwork. Would you like to operate yourself?’

He nodded. Hands trained you to be economical, at least the operating surgeon. There was no surplus skin. You couldn’t, as was otherwise usual and possible, cut out a generous area round the wound. Microscope. Magnifying spectacles. The hospital was excellently equipped. Frau Barsano was aware of that, which, Richard thought, was why she said nothing. The silence during an operation, thirsting, sucking you in. Absolute concentration; consciousness focused and sharpened to the point of attention, picking out tiny indentations of interest like a diamond drill. In between: slumps, demands on energy, rallying, a spatter of distractions. You could give way for a while, for a while you could leave the burning glass to your cooperator as it crawled maddeningly slowly over the situation, mercilessly revealing, followed by the blade exploring the wound. Hands had their own kind of slumber, but also of ecstasy. That was mostly connected, Richard thought, with the word ‘to attain’: food and light, skin and control-panel knobs, silence, apprehensiveness and prophecies, things made tangible by a child’s drawing.

‘Glass,’ Frau Barsano said, picking up a splinter.

Anne’s hand. If I cut this here, she’ll have no feeling any more there, in this lobular area on the short muscle that bends the thumb. Responsibility. Power. Sometimes he enjoyed, sometimes he feared that power, the thoughts that it seemed to suggest to him and that he found unworthy of a doctor. But they were there, whispered by thin, venomous lips and he had to employ a valuable part of his forces to repress them. Did that happen to other surgeons as well? They didn’t talk about it. Perhaps out of fear of being seen as a bad doctor, without a vocation. One who didn’t correspond to the cliché most patients had of a noble person in a white coat. It depended on what one did. He recalled his conversation with Weniger: to be free. They were free to do what helped people. He looked at Anne’s hand, it was injured, slender and thus, in a discreet way, pleading; a hand that insisted: That’s the way it is, a commitment, startled at its irrevocable nature and yet in the secret of dignity: This is it, my hand (and to hold back the shadows with it); Anne’s hand: small from grief and time, unique …

He felt incapable of continuing the operation. Emotion, sentimentality, despair: overpowered by a mixture that repelled him, he asked Frau Barsano to continue on her own.

It was still light when they stopped outside Sperber’s house on Wolfsleite. With astonishment Richard heard the intoxicatingly sweet, hallucinatory calls of the blackbirds, free of tribulation, somehow selfish in their calm, their self-assurance, he thought, also … merciful. As Anne raised her hand to the bell without any explanation — Richard now felt that sense of shame that disputes one’s right to explanations — raised it, the hand with its dressing that she hardly felt the need to protect any longer, there was something about the white of the plaster, from which Anne stuck out a comical-looking finger (a hard shaft piercing its way through the air, silent and saucy) to press the bell for an absurdly long time, something indocile that didn’t belong in the evening even though it passed through it amazingly close — now, as Anne let her arm drop in front of the trunk of an elm tree, conscientiously slowly yet casually — a white that rendered down its dryness and took on another quality: the indocile, shrewd white an electric socket would have had in the black bark of the tree. Richard walked up and down. When Frau Sperber opened the door, Anne asked him to wait. ‘And please don’t behave badly in such a … theatrical manner. It’ll take half an hour, perhaps an hour, depending.’ The lawyer waved to them from the front door, came towards Anne, arms outstretched, a serious smile on his face (it didn’t even seem disagreeable, Richard thought), looked at her hand, appeared to be considering, took the silk handkerchief out of the breast pocket of his suit (it seethed a lemon yellow and breathed a sigh of relief), dipped it in a barrel of rainwater and washed Anne’s fingers clean with obscene care. Then all three went in without paying any attention to Richard. After a few minutes he rang the bell.

‘It’s nice you’re still here,’ Frau Sperber said. ‘Won’t you come in?’

‘Where are they?’ Richard forced the woman up against the row of coat hooks where Anne’s coat was hanging.

‘In the cellar. Please don’t disturb them. It’s locked anyway. My husband doesn’t like being disturbed when he’s doing it.’

‘In the cellar?’

‘It’s dry, it’s been converted, with a bar and a fire. My husband loves that cellar.’

‘Will you tell my wife at once that I’m waiting for her and want her to come up.’

‘Would you help me?’ Frau Sperber waved Richard into the kitchen. On the worktop was a large bunch of carrots. ‘There’s going to be carrot salad, my husband really likes that. And I can’t manage with these peelers. If I have to cut up more than two carrots, my hands go numb.’

‘Spare me all this nonsense and tell my wife. At once.’

‘I can’t do that. He’s the only one who has a key to that door.’

‘Then I will call the police.’

‘I don’t think you should do that, Herr Hoffmann. In the first place you wouldn’t have a chance against him. Secondly, your wife, as it appears, went with him of her own free will.’

‘And you?’

‘We have a modern marriage, Herr Hoffmann. Enlightened and tolerant. We have our arrangements, I don’t want you to think me the injured wife. And I must add that I prefer it if I know the women; it means I can more easily work out whether they’ll do him good. Your wife’s very nice, a really pleasant, likeable person.’

‘You don’t say.’ Richard tried in vain to sit down on one of the bar stools round the centrally placed worktop. ‘Where did you get that huge extractor hood?’

‘No problem for my husband. He actually wanted to buy a new one and give this one to your wife, who also admired it, but your kitchen’s too small. — And I’d like to say I’m delighted to see you, Herr Hoffmann. My husband has great respect for you. Shouldn’t we call each other “ du ”?’ She wiped her hands on a tea towel with windmills on it. ‘Evelyn.’

‘Oh, don’t try that on me.’ Richard went out of the house. He wandered round the streets, happened to end up in Ulmenleite. The church was still open. Pastor Magenstock was skipping. Richard watched for a while. Magenstock, eyes closed and seeming not to notice him, was turning slowly, with quick, low hops to and fro, the rope swinging fluently and making a whistling sound. Meditating, Richard thought. And even though the sound of the skipping behind him didn’t suggest it, he found the offertory box by the door and felt the need to make a donation but, when he searched through his pockets, could only find the twenty-pfennig piece he kept for emergencies. He put it in.