Uwe Tellkamp - The Tower

‘Have you noticed that your sense of touch seems to get duller if your hearing’s worse?’ Niklas, Richard thought, was aware of the seriousness of the situation. ‘Ezzo must be stuck in the Academy of Music, Reglinde was going to see the New Year in with friends in Neustadt, Gudrun was supposed to be on stage — Meno! Hey, Meno! Have you seen Gudrun?’

Meno, who was getting off a lorry, shook his head. ‘She wasn’t on our bus. — You’re going to the military hospital?’

‘Herr Rohde!’ Barsano called from the gate with the red star and waved. ‘Come and help us — you speak Russian. I’ve got enough to do coordinating things. We can use you as an interpreter. Herr Hoffmann, Herr Tietze, will you please report to the duty doctor.’

A Forbidden Place, a place of dust, Meno thought, going through the gate that a confused sentry was trying to guard. NATURA SANAT was the greeting from the former ladies’ pool, in front of it, with a Kirghizian smile, the silver head of Lenin. The suspended walks were dilapidated, windowpanes shattered, art nouveau decoration faded, wind and rain had gnawed at the roof. From the eaves, off which many of the projecting rafters had broken away like teeth off one of those hand-sawn beauty-salon combs anointed with good wishes and promises, a proliferation of icicles was hanging down, heavy and dirty, as if they wanted to silence a music box, the gracefulness of which would have enlarged the cracks in the buildings and amplified the throb of the conveyor belts from the heating plant on the slope. On the covered walks outside the former patients’ rooms were the old tubs, crammed full of sticks of wood and newspaper. Spiders’ webs, like the ornaments on Tartar helmets, hung down from the carved wood, black, glittering with frost. But were they spiders’ webs? Meno thought he had been mistaken. None of the spiders’ webs he was familiar with were shaped like that, not even ones made over decades and with many layers, only to be destroyed in moments. They were lichens, long mossy growths, hanging down, sucked into the flesh of the arms of the trees at the outpost; felty beards of indefinite colour on the roofs that the woods seemed to be trying to draw back into their kingdom in a slow embrace. Barsano waved Meno over to join his deputy, Karlheinz Schubert, who led the way to Heinrichshof, a half-timbered villa that had belonged to the former owner of the sanatorium and now housed the hospital headquarters. The gentlemen’s massage room and the kitchen were empty, boarded up. Blocked gutters, missing roof tiles, clouds of dry rot building up on the woodwork of the corridors that had once been glazed, black mould creeping across the ceiling. Schubert said nothing, marched on with long strides that ate up the ground, as if he were afraid of missing his footing with short ones, past piles of dead leaves and snow that had been blown in, doors marked with Cyrillic letters and meticulously drawn numbers; glassy-eyed, he silently greeted the occasional patient they encountered, who glanced at the two men apprehensively. The musty smell of the corridors, the greeny-blue gloss paint that had been plastered over the walls to counter the damp and the pests that had taken up residence in them; the mosaics that had been shamelessly taken up from the floor where corridors crossed, only the odd pale tile left to suggest ancient Roman bathing scenes; on the other hand the dust-swathed chandeliers dangling in the fluctuating draughts over smashed windows were untouched; wall newspapers with the current editions of Pravda and the satirical magazine Krokodil — both present impressions and old memories that awoke many things in Meno’s mind. In a faltering voice Schubert asked Meno to wait; after a few minutes he came back, shaking his head: the lavatory basins had all been torn out, packed up and addressed to be sent home, and two soldiers were squatting over holes, a camp stool with the board on it between them, playing chess … But Karlheinz Schubert seemed to pull himself together and, pressing his lips into a thin line, reminded Meno that it was allies they were talking about, brother socialists. In Heinrichshof, where they had to wait, Meno looked at a framed silhouette hanging in the vestibule; it was, as he could see from the fine cut-out signature, one of Frau Zwirnevaden’s, showing scenes from Goethe’s poem ‘The Sorcerer’s Apprentice’ in which the apprentice himself, who was usually portrayed (by the author too) as in despair at his unbiddable creation, appeared to be waiting for his master’s return with cool interest.

The open-cast mine looked like an army camp. Soldiers had been transferred, were camping in hastily erected tents. To go by the rapid-rumour network, power supplies were unaffected in the north of the country and the capital. To the south of a line corresponding roughly to the course of the middle Elbe between Torgau and Magdeburg, the excavators were at a standstill, the houses in darkness, the supply chain collapsed; Samarkand no longer received its most important raw material and the huge power stations, coal-consuming tumours pumping energy into the life around that had knotted themselves with an abundance of veins into the lunar landscape, remained dark, unnourished, unexpectedly starving.

The soldiers went out on twelve-hour shifts — there weren’t enough tents, one shift could sleep while the other was working. Christian’s room now housed sixty men, the ten bunk beds had been given a third storey (for those on the top the gap between body and ceiling was so narrow that they couldn’t turn over) and there were only twenty lockers for the sixty men — some now had three padlocks on them, which didn’t contribute to the quiet in the room. Pancake and Christian shared bunk and locker; Pancake threatened to beat up anyone daring to claim room in the locker and the former circus blacksmith’s physical strength and violent temper made an impression on even the toughest types. A piece of soap, a cigarette, a letter not handed out on time could lead to a punch-up, and since the men came from other units and their officers were far away, Nip had no power over them. ‘Oh, go to hell,’ they said to him when, lying drunk in his room, he pointed to the mail (forgotten letters that should have been sent out, forgotten letters that should have been distributed) with a mournful, apathetic gesture; before his very eyes, which had taken on the dull this-ness of hard-boiled eggs, they wrote their names in the exit log, stole his schnapps and underpants, which, bawling and shouting, they hung on poles they stuck into the pile of spoil beside the shed — where they fluttered in the wind, exposed to everyone’s pity — or soaked them in miner’s hooch the brown-coal engine drivers sold to them, then roasted the spirit-infused item over a fire.

A shower tent had been put up, ten showers for a hundred filthy bodies, with the water coming in dribbles and ice-cold from the nozzles; the crudely chopped-up slabs of soap made no foam. Christian was revolted at the idea of fighting for a few jets of water in a cramped space, he hated the enforced removal of the last bit of privacy remaining to those who had managed to keep an individual self alive in the uniform and tried to keep it out of the compulsory ‘us’ of the army. Recalling the winter water from Kurt’s tank, he washed himself far away from the shed in one of the puddles that were steaming with cold.

On New Year’s Day the water in the tanker that supplied the units in the camp was frozen and there wasn’t enough to eat, a lorry with the meals had got stuck somewhere, the Komplekte had all gone long before Christian and Pancake arrived; to his astonishment Christian discovered that hunger existed. He’d never gone hungry. Not in Schwedt, not on the Carbide Island, certainly not at home, where everyone he knew groused but strangely enough had everything … acquired, of course, through contacts and endless chasing round , but bread cost onezerofour, a roll one groschen, milk had gone up from sixty-six to seventy pfennigs, but all that had always been available …