Uwe Tellkamp - The Tower

After the talk all four copies of the blue book that had been peacefully sleeping their life away in Bruno Korra’s Paper Boat second-hand bookshop on Lindwurmring were sold, even though the sly bookseller, recognizing the signs of the times, had immediately upvalued them from ten to 100 marks, and were now being photocopied by all the inhabitants of the district who had not had the good fortune to get hold of a copy; some of the secretaries at the offices of the Council for Mutual Economic Aid typed the books word for word on their machines, with up to five layers of carbon and writing paper that Matthes’s stationery shop put at their disposal, as it did the coloured ribbons from their allocation of black ones. The eyes of the Tower-dwellers, accustomed to grey, to the finest gradations of everyday grey, thirsted after colours, were exhilarated by the strange reliefs, the sun and star signs, the sea-blue of the glazed tiles of the procession street, which bore the name ‘May the enemy not cross it’ and went from the Marduk Temple through the Ishtar Gate, one of the eight gates of the inner city of Babylon, to the Akitu Temple. They turned the pages of the book reverently, and if they had one of the carbon copies, stapled and bound in Arbogast’s own printing and binding shop, that had had to do without the illustrations, they didn’t take less care, on the contrary, these had demanded people’s work, people’s time, and that of people they knew and saw every day. There were phone calls at late hours, a network connecting telephone receivers grew up in the district; people pointed out especially beautiful features, discussed the location of the Hanging Gardens in the city of Babylon; the women asked what kind of clothes Semiramis might have worn, whether the Nofretete cosmetics salon could manage to discover and exploit the refined secrets of Babylonian beautification; the men wondered whether Herodotus’s claim that the outer wall was so wide that a four-horse carriage could turn on it was not perhaps just a legend. The lights in the rooms stayed on, outside the acid, black-grained snow of a winter heated with poor-quality coal was falling and brows, smooth, lined, enthusiastic and down to earth, were bent over the colours and shapes of that long-vanished age, buried beneath sand and flood.

It disappeared as quickly as it had arrived. Hardly had a trip to Berlin, to the Museum Island, been organized than the imposing ziggurats crumbled, the charioteers on starflower wheels, the sun-kings in gold and lapis lazuli vanished; Herr Sandhaus, who had gone to the trouble of making the arrangements, stood on the station platform, bewildered, but apart from Meno only Herr Adeling arrived. ‘Is it all over with Assyria now, Herr Sandhaus? But, you know, for me it’s only just beginning, here in our Niniveh.’

The Babylonian fantasies faded away after the visit to the Museum of Ethnology in the Japanese palace. The thirst for knowledge of the Tower-dwellers demanded new material … Quietly amused, Meno watched the fashions change. After Mesopotamia they discovered the Phoenicians and Carthage; the ship’s doctor was in demand because of his ability to transfer plans of the ships of that seafaring nation with the most delicate of pens onto sheets of Polylux film, filigree masterpieces of the art of drawing ships of which Arbogast, from his antiquated alderman’s chair in the semi-dark, expressed his approval with nods and smirks of satisfaction. If only one could do that! Sail across the wide Mediterranean from Cyprus to Gibraltar and out into the open sea that the ancients feared. Model ships were made out of pinewood chip and balsa wood; Stationery Matthes didn’t know what was happening to him and where he could find all the materials that were in demand. You could use cork for balsa, the handles of fishing rods were made of cork — so sharpen your knives and get out your razor blades. Certain television programmes now enjoyed widespread popularity; Meno could tell that from the synchronized switch-over in the windows as he went home … films about heroes of the sea and explorers, bold privateers and adventurers; programmes such as She & He & 1,000 Questions, By Educationalists — for Educationalists and, popular with the Harmony dressmakers, who met for a hen party at Barbara’s, the advice programme for home sewing: From Head to Toe . Joffe, the lawyer, invited people round to an evening with Sandokan, the Tiger of Malaysia , whose smouldering eyes set not only Frau Fiebig’s heart on fire, and the Schlemm Hotel showed a video of Paul and Virginia , set on Mauritius, a shallow colonial love story that the men couldn’t watch without a bottle of beer and sidelong glances at their wives and their watches; afterwards people talked about Joffe’s privileges.

Meno pursued his own researches. It was the cell that occupied him, the smallest unit of life, a highly complex piece of organic machinery that Arbogast put at his disposal in the form of model blocks the height of a man, examples of Herr Ritschel’s skill. It was even possible to simulate a few chemical reactions … He wanted to write poems about them, hoping that would save Romantic poetry, which seemed stuck between antiquated rhymes on the one hand and rapturous effusions about nature (‘Beauty is truth’) on the other … There had been impressive publications from Hermes, an admirable essay on Georg Trakl by the Old Man of the Mountain that had brought a venomous attack from Eschschloraque … The union of science and literature (an old, rather humanist idea), a line of tradition, thin and often almost completely submerged, indicated by the names of Empedocles, Strabo, Rabanus Maurus, Jakob Böhme, Novalis, Annette von Droste-Hülshoff, Jakob Philipp Fallmerayer and Carl Ritter down to Jean-Henri Fabre and Gottfried Benn, had become a quiet fixation with Meno that took up his whole desk, by now shielded from prying eyes by metre-high bookshelves. The guiding star of these endeavours was called Goethe, as so often …

In 1987 Meno didn’t spend his summer holiday in his father’s house in Schandau but in the Museum of Zoology, which, as he discovered to his astonishment, hardly anyone in Dresden knew. There, in dusty cupboards with trays of butterflies bequeathed by Saxon collectors, on microscope tables covered in petri dishes, piles of periodicals, stuffed birds looking out sadly at the Elbe, in the fauna library, extensive but suffering from damp and degradation due to acid, Meno found a profusion of material for his investigations. Since his student days he hadn’t felt the initial joy of the good researcher — to look at nature without questioning or examining it, only differing from the way children see it in that the response is not astonishment but perplexity — so strongly as in the flow of those August days that already had a touch of autumnal clarity. The town was empty, the children were on holiday, even the cinemas, yawning with the melancholy of hot days, didn’t seem to believe the magic that flickered across their screens, caught in the dusty light of grumpily creaking projectors. The Elbe was grey and lethargic, like an elephant taking a bath. The spider manuscript and his university card for the Biology Department in Leipzig had opened the door to the collections for Meno and thus he sat, undisturbed by the staff, in the brooding quiet of a place behind untidy shelves full of the researchers’ silent dreams, which at night, after he’d gone, might possibly start to whisper about him — he sometimes thought — for uncatalogued collections, cases full of butterflies, of which one is ‘wrong’ because it’s been wrongly placed or catalogued, are like restless revenants thirsting after the neck of a scientist so that they can be released. There Meno sat and studied the cell. Cella , he read, the smallest unit of organisms that retain the fundamental properties of life, metabolism (Meno recalled a saying of his tutor, Falkenstein: metabolism is an investigation of different forms of gratitude), response to stimuli, ability to move and reproduce; most human and animal cells have a size of about 20–30μ; the human egg cell, on the other hand, was a giant of 0.2 mm, even visible to the naked eye. This egg cell rose out of the corpus luteum, a sun in the lunar cycle, guided by a complicated interplay of hormones (the word means ‘to stir up’) and wiped free by the fimbrias of the tubes, sucked into the Fallopian tube, the ovum headed off in the direction of the uterus, from where the counter cells, the flagellated combat swimmers of the sperm, were to be expected. What did all these things mean, what was their significance, organelles within the membrane that formed the boundary of the cell, serving as vascular skin? There was the endoplasmic reticulum, it looked like a layer of potato fritters hastily stacked on top of each other with the biosynthesis of protein going on between them, a bewildering multistorey, thousand-track space launch centre with deliveries and dispatches, construction, customization, repairs and dismantling; then there was the Golgi apparatus, the so-called internal network consisting of several double-layer membranes, folded convex/concave and stored behind each other, some extended to form caverns and vacuoles whose purpose was to package the secretions that they welded, so to speak, into vesicles that were sent out of the cell along special canals; there were the mitochondria, the tiny power plants in the cell protoplasm, compact smoked sausages, some also resembling rugby balls; and there was the mystery of how the egg knew about the seed (for that seemed to be the case, the egg cell seemed to emit attractants and control agents, indeed even sought out the seed cell by which it wanted to be fertilized; Meno had read in Nature that the principle of ‘first come, first served’ was clearly not unreservedly valid; the egg cell seemed to have some say in who for her came ‘first’ — not always the robust woodcutter who, as a muscle man, immediately set his drill to work to penetrate the membrame, sometimes she even let him do the work, only to pull in the soft good-for-nothing, the Bohemian, the charming lady-killer at the last moment, slamming the door in the hulk’s face); there was the mystery of connections, of meaning, that was beyond language.