Uwe Tellkamp - The Tower

‘Ah, Herr Hoffmann.’ Sperber, seeing Anne out, bowed to her. ‘I have some good news for you. My efforts to get your son’s place at medical school reinstated will very probably be successful.’

‘Well, then, brother mine?’

‘Robert.’

‘Is there anywhere we can go in this hole? For an ice cream?’

‘There’s a bar here. If you’d like a beer.’ Robert drinking beer, little Robert — that’s the way it had always been, but not any more. Robert flicking his windproof lighter open with a resonant click and letting the flame that shot up play over the tip of a Cabinet.

‘Later perhaps.’

‘It’s … great that you’ve come.’

‘Hey, you’d never have said that before. Being conscripted must have done that to you. Not bad at all.’

‘Shut it, earhole.’

‘If you insist.’ Robert joked about the army. He’d been sent to join the medical orderlies in a barracks outside Riesa. ‘A real cushy number. My God, that really is a ridiculous outfit. Right turn, left turn, loaf about, wait, end up as a fat cabbage. You can’t take it seriously.’

‘Depends where you are.’

‘You must be doing something wrong to get caught like this all the time.’

‘How about passes?’

‘As many as you like,’ Robert boasted. ‘And my physical needs are well supplied too. I’ve got a nice little girl in Riesa. What about you?’

‘What d’you say to the old folks?’

‘Well parried, brother mine. They’re OK, there are others who’re much worse. It’s great that they’ve gone away on holiday. At last I can do as I like there. You don’t know how long I’ve wanted a place to myself and when I get one it’s at the same time as a sister, and I’ve been called up. You don’t smoke, right?’

‘Half-sister.’

‘Don’t take it to heart like that, brother mine. It happens. She’s called Lucie. Have you seen her?’

‘No.’

‘How would you, shut up here like this? I’ve not seen her yet either. But I am keen to see her. Really. And to be honest, in a way I’m looking forward to it as well. I’ve always wanted to have a little sister.’

781 years of Dresden: in 1987 one could see stickers with that number on the rear window of many cars; often next to the ‘L’ that officially stood for ‘Learner’, unofficially for ‘Leaver’. The number was a revolt against another number: 750 years of Berlin, an anniversary that was to be celebrated on a grand scale, a spasm of joie de vivre, pride that no one believed in any more; the tired, ailing body of the Republic was to be squeezed dry once more in order to extract from the putrid juices a cup of hemlock that, dribbled into the arteries of the capital, was supposed to transform sickness into life, exhaustion into hope and vigour …

Now Judith Schevola was no longer working at the cemetery in Tolkewitz, she had been sent to work at VEB Kosara, where she made hectograph copies of brochures in alcohol baths and by the Ormig process. Whenever he could, Meno, drawn in a way he couldn’t explain, would drive out to the factory and watch her. He recognized her from a distance by her bat cap as she came out of the factory gates with other workers. She swayed, kept close to fences along the paths and looked for something to hold on to in the streets, drunk from the alcohol fumes coning from the baths for the pieces that were being copied; passers-by frowned when they saw her, presumably thinking she was a drunk and once when she fell into the slush on a grey winter’s evening, no one went to help her until Meno, who had heard her muffled cries for help even from a distance, finally managed to pull her up out of the puddle. Judith didn’t recognize him, staggered as she resisted; no one took any notice of the two people despondently fighting with each other.

Meno took her home. She lived in Neustadt, in a one-and-a-half-room apartment giving onto a back yard; the corridor was created by the backs of cupboards, the half-room ended at a wall; she shared the plaster rosette for the chandelier. There was a screw across the larger room with cigarettes and cut-out poems and stockings hanging from it. The screw had a fine thread with (Judith had counted them) 5,518 turns, passed through the masonry and, braced with straps and pieces of wood outside, held the storey together.

‘What do you want from me?’ Judith muttered, dropping onto the bed.

‘Is there anything you need? Can I help you in any way?’

‘I’m beyond help. Oh, how self-pitying … Have you brought anything to drink? Thank you very much for accompanying me, Herr Editor, and now adieu.’

She was quickly getting clearer, Meno turned to leave.

‘If you could fill the jug, there’s a tap in the kitchen … Since you’re here, you can stay if you like. I’ve a record with Indian music, written for the living and the dead, just the right thing for you and me. Are you hungry?’

‘Yes.’

‘How stupid. I only asked out of politeness. So here’s my suggestion: first we eat nothing at all, then we go dancing.’

‘I can’t dance very well. — How are you? Are you working? Writing?’

‘We aimed so high and look at us now,’ Judith said after a while.

‘I find that too sentimental. You must write, times are changing and I don’t think your exclusion’s going to last long.’

‘I want something to drink.’

‘No.’

‘Are you trying to forbid me to get drunk?’

‘It won’t change anything and you not an immature kid any longer.’

‘Yes, Daddy.’ Judith Schevola felt under the bed, pulled out a half-full bottle of Kröver Nacktarsch and drank the wine in large swigs. She threw the bottle into a cardboard box beside the little stove where it broke on other glass things. Judith gave a hoarse laugh. Then she stretched out on the bed like a big cat. ‘Do you never feel you have to explode? To shake the stars down from the sky? Don’t you ever want to taste all the dishes at once, dance till you drop, drink till everything goes black, blow all your money at the casino, be stony broke, come back after a terrible hour and win everything and more back again? Do you never want to make a river flow upstream?’

‘I’m happy with a bath that works,’ Meno replied coldly.

‘To be able to fly, to be free, to be great, to be full of untamable power that can compel the elements … like the revolution.’

Meno remained silent.

‘But revolutionaries are always timid,’ Judith said bitterly.

The cocoons grew thicker and thicker, deeper and deeper the years. Whom were the clocks calling? In the evening the magic word ‘Mutabor’ was spoken, town and country set up dolls that looked outwards but the Tower-dwellers had long since gone down the stairs to their interests … A Urania evening had attracted a large audience for a talk on Mesopotamia; the lecturer, who had come specially from Berlin, from the Pergamon Museum, had used a slide projector to cast coloured shadows on a screen in the darkened lecture room of Arbogast House that had roused not only the widowed Frau Fiebig to enthusiastic astonishment. The lecturer signed a few square blue books and left, but his subject remained and ramified and, as if it were tinder, set off discussions and quiet studies in the evening drawing rooms. But the books left behind by the lecturer were also beautiful to look at: there was a reproduction of a relief of the Ishtar Gate on the cover. White lions strode over a frieze of daisies against a timeless azure background; Frau Fiebig said it gave you a shiver, ‘the eternities since then and what has remained’. Suddenly never-heard names appeared, forming little white clouds at the mouths of those waiting for rolls outside Wachendorf’s bakery; Ashurbanipal, Ashurnaspiral I, Ashurnaspiral II and Hammurabi buzzed to and fro, and anyone who did not want to be ‘behind the times’ had to know something about them. In Guenon House research into old Dresden was broken off and they turned to those ages full of mythical men clad in animal skins and with long, rectangular beards, bracelets, hairnets and war-smocks that left their calves and upper arms free and more than once caused Frau Fiebig to exclaim, ‘Those muscles, my God, what muscles those men had’, to which Herr Sandhaus retorted, ‘Yes, my dear, and with them they quite happily cut their enemies’ heads off.’ ‘Yes, but what de-cisive virility, what a proud, lusty culture, a culture with muscle ,’ Frau Fiebig replied, ‘and don’t you think there’s something both delicate and muscular about this cuneiform script? When I imagine our newspapers written like that, I’d immerse myself in them more. I think even fibs would be diff’rent in cuneiform script, they’d be quite diff’rent, I think.’