Uwe Tellkamp - The Tower

Time fell out of time and aged. Time remained time on a clock with no hands. Time above was its passage, the sun shone on dials, indicated morning, noon, evening, indicated the days on calendars: past days, the present day, days to come. It leapt, it circled, it hurried off, a marble rolling down a narrow spiral track. But time below pointed to the laws and didn’t concern itself with human clocks. A country with a strange disease, young people old, young people not wanting to be adults, citizens living in niches, retreating into the body politic that, ruled over by old men, lay in deathlike sleep. Time of the fossils; fish were stranded when the waters receded, flapped mutely for a while, submitted, died motionless and fossilized: in the house walls, on the mouldering landings, they fused with documents, became watermarks. The strange disease marked faces; it was infectious, there was no adult who didn’t have it, no child who remained innocent. Truths choked back, thoughts unspoken filled the body with bitterness, burrowed it into a mine of fear and hatred. Hardening and softening were the main symptoms of the strange disease. In the air there was a veil through which one breathed and spoke. Contours became blurred, a spade was not called a spade. Painters painted evasively, newspapers printed lines of black letters; however, they weren’t what promoted understanding but the space between them … the white shadows of words that were to be sensed and interpreted. In the theatres they spoke in ancient metres. Concrete … cotton … clouds … water … concrete …

but then all at once …

Meno wrote,

but then all at once …

Dances, dreams … Sleep became mushy, the early shift came and went, doors banged, from the rooms at the farther end of the corridor came Nip’s babbling, sending the duty NCO or his assistant to the nearest shop to get some schnapps (over in Samarkand, an hour on foot through mud and the proud lifelessness of no-man’s-land) … ‘To be sloshed for a whole week,’ Nip had said, ‘and then to get up as if nothing had happened, simply to lose , forget a whole week. Seven empty pages in the calendar and despite that you’re still there.’ — ‘That’s too much of a luxury, boss,’ said Pancake, who enjoyed the privilege of being allowed to sit on the edge of the mine crater playing tangos for the excavators; he took the right to address him by that title from the deals he set up with Nip. But the sergeant seemed to be taking him for a ride, threatening him with a ‘you know what, Kretzschmar’, so that Pancake had started to make a list that he added up now and then. Too much of a luxury: not to know what was going on for a week, then just to smooth out your uniform, ‘not even kings can do that. And anyway, I’d be there. I like shirkers. Boss.’

Between the shifts, on the lemon-yellow linen that made the soldiers’ quarrelling somehow cosy, amid tobacco smoke, the clatter of dice, bored-frustrated card bids, Christian spent a lot of time thinking about things.

‘Do you think Burre was an informer?’

‘Course I do. What else could he do, Nemo?’

‘You’re not calling me Mummy’s Boy any more?’

‘No one who can stick out a summer in the carbide is that. Simple fact, simple conclusion. — That makes you feel good, does it? Applause is our food, as they say in the circus.’

‘I saw him outside the staff building. — You see a lot of people there, but not like that. It’s hard to say why, but I could imagine where he was off to.’

‘If I’d been him I’d have done just the same. You tell them this and that and you’re left in peace. It must be difficult to pin something on you after that.’

‘So what would you have told them about me?’

‘That you think too much for a convinced socialist brother. That makes you dangerous. A clever Dick who can keep his trap shut as long as you, who quietly observes and isn’t close to anyone, will never be satisfied with some provisional solution. He wants more. Freedom or justice, for example. And they’re always the ones who make difficulties.’

‘Perhaps you’re an informer?’

‘I’d get nothing out of it. Would ruin my business. I depend on my reputation and something like that always comes through, like damp through the wall.’

‘Still.’

‘Anyone else would have had that stuck in his ribs by now.’ Pancake pointed to the crowbar propped against the shed wall.

Up to 29 December the winter was unusually mild; the cold arrived suddenly, Christian could see the puddles freezing over from the excavator, the rain abruptly turning into hail. The wires of the mine’s electric locomotives crackled. The wind blew cold dust at them.

‘Oh, brother’ — the foreman in charge of the shift adjusted his hard hat and looked in concern at the flurries of snow — ‘this really looks as if it’s going to be something. And that just before New Year’s Eve.’

‘Four o’clock sharp, Meno.’ Madame Eglantine’s cigarette-hoarse, guttural laugh drew one’s gaze to her eyes, which were as wide as a startled animal’s and had the vulnerable-seeming shine of chestnuts fresh out of their spiny shell, to her dress (natural-green linen with red felt roses sewn on with exuberant irregularity), to her melancholy gait, which didn’t appear to go with it, in cheap trainers or (in the winter) hiking boots that had been handed down to her, the laces of which she liked to leave untied: just a big girl, Meno thought as he followed her into the Hermes conference room, where another editor, Kurz, had already switched on the television for the live transmission of the ‘Ceremony of the Central Committee of the Socialist Unity Party to celebrate the seventieth anniversary of the founding of the German Communist Party’. But the picture vanished a few seconds later, the radiators crackled and went cold, the hum of the refrigerator in the hall ceased and Udo Männchen, the typographer, standing by the window, said, ‘Our life overall here is — underinstrumented. The whole of Thälmannstrasse’s dark. We ought to be publishing books in braille.’

‘You suggested that last time and the joke doesn’t improve with age,’ growled Kurz. Frau Zäpter brought in candles, a Christmas stollen, home-made gingerbread. ‘I was just going to make tea anyway.’

‘Why else would we have a spirit stove?’ said the managing clerk, Kai-Uwe Knapp. ‘I’d even filled it — man is a creature that can learn from past experiences.’

‘How romantic,’ Miss Mimi and Melanie Mordewein, who was sitting next to her, sighed simultaneously; Miss Mimi had got the tone so exactly, so caustically right that the laughter came slowly and remained just an expression of admiration.

Putting on white gloves, Niklas tipped the record, a flexible EMI pressing given him by one of his State Orchestra patients, out of its sleeve and the paper protective covering lined with foil, held the disc between middle finger and thumb (his index finger supporting it on the red label with the dog listening to his master’s voice coming out of a gramophone horn), started to stroke it with extra-soft carbon fibres, which looked like a collection of seductive women’s eyelashes, in an aluminium brush from Japan (another present from a musician patient), which was said to remove the dust more gently and yet more thoroughly than the yellow cloth that VEB Deutsche Schallplatten put in with its Eterna albums, slowly and pensively combed the fine sound track until Erik Orré, who was free that evening and had been talking to Richard about duodenal ulcers, said, ‘That’s enough, Niklas, I think you’ve gained its trust now.’ The Schwedes (she, an operetta singer squinting with charming helplessness through lenses as thick as the base of a bottle; he, with handsome Clark Gable looks, Richard thought, a toothbrush moustache, a cardigan, worked in the branch of the Council for Mutual Economic Aid on Lindwurmring; the women there, as Richard knew from Niklas, called him by his first name, Nino) were standing by the window, both holding a tulip glass of beer; Nino said, ‘If it keeps snowing like this we’ll be switching on our water-pipe heater again, Billie.’