Uwe Tellkamp - The Tower

‘We need something to eat, Nemo.’ Pancake wondered whether to take the Komplekte from one of the younger, weedy soldiers who had been in front of him in the queue, but others in the line of waiting soldiers behind them were doing that already, the tough ones were taking the food away from the less tough ones, the faster pursuers from the less fast ones running away, and whenever anyone protested against this law of the jungle, it was fists that decided who was in the right. ‘Any ideas, Cap’n?’

‘The woman who does the unloading on my shift,’ Christian said after a while spent searching hungrily through his memory, ‘lives on a farm somewhere in the coal. There’s sure to be something there.’

‘D’you know where it is?’

‘Not exactly,’ Christian said hesitantly. Schecki had pointed vaguely in a northward direction. ‘Torch and compass, perhaps we’ll find it. We could ask one of the railwaymen.’

‘Better not, Nemo. If we want to get something, then we don’t want anyone else in the know.’

‘We could knock.’

‘We could. But if she lives the way you say, she won’t open. — We have to be back before the shift starts. I don’t fancy being put away again.’

Doctor Varga lifted up the lamp, shortening the shadows on the walls of the cellar passage. The water on the floor didn’t seem to be getting any higher, it still hadn’t risen up the legs of the rubber boots they were wearing; also it was starting to freeze over so that the rats, which showed no fear in following them, had to go under water in some places; the dark bodies with the pointed noses covered in bristles paddled under the ice and didn’t panic even when one of the soldiers accompanying Varga and Meno tried to crush them under his heel. ‘Air-raid shelter,’ Meno read, a red arrow pointed to a steel door, the handle of which was draped in spiders’ webs. Notices in old German handwriting with Cyrillic scribbles over them on the cellar walls. The water started rising again.

‘Here, I think,’ Varga said, but he spread his arms out in front of the doors. ‘I don’t know exactly, I’ve never been down here before.’

‘ Voda — otkuda ?’ Barsano’s deputy asked. The soldiers shrugged their shoulders. With the butt of his Kalashnikov one knocked the padlock off one of the doors; the rats scurried towards it and vanished, it was impossible to see where. The soldiers dragged the door open, Varga said, ‘Let’s have a look’, and clicked on a rotary switch, light shot out of ceiling lamps encrusted with spiders’ webs only to be swallowed up by the darkness again with a muted ‘fatch’ that was reflected back from the depths of the room as a distorted echo — the teeming darkness filled with pecking and scraping noises into which Varba pushed his pit lamp. Meno thought: the ticking of thousands of clocks; but it was the legs of the brown rats, some heading purposefully, though with comical slithering, stumbling and waving of legs, for the depths of the room, while others were trying to recover their balance with desperately clutching claws; thousands of brown rats; there were so many black button eyes caught in the smoky light that they looked like a shower of sparks leaping across the room. It seemed to be very big, the far side couldn’t be seen. None of the men ventured inside, the soldiers grasped their rifles tight — the rats kept going towards their goal. The water wasn’t coming from there, although the floor was covered in a thick layer of ice. Meno took Varga’s lamp (the microbiologist had frozen, likewise the deputy, though he had managed to turn his head); by the faint light Meno could make out marks, lines forming a circle, the ice sounded as hard as porcelain; the strange ticking noise of the thousands of tiny feet had grown louder. But there was a goal there! A handball goal with a torn net, beside it posts and climbing ropes, wall bars, a pile of rubber mats — the gymnasts were there too. Frozen stiff in the ice, orthopaedic models were standing on the court in bent and contorted postures; they were carved from old wood that gleamed darkly in the light of Meno’s lamp, as if it had been rubbed smooth by the hands of generations of interested pupils.

The torches were kept off, Pancake waited until the grey of first light began to change objects back out of the cellar darkness: a chopping block with the axe sticking out, jars that the blanket of snow had cemented together, making them look like dully glittering molars in a white shimmer of swollen gums. He broke out one, a standard jam jar with a plastic lid, examined it in the meagre light, cut out a cone of the waxy pale contents, smelt it. ‘I don’t think anyone would conserve poison in jars,’ he whispered, holding out the cone to Christian. ‘Though time can poison many things.’

‘When I saw you for the first time I never thought you’d be giving me lines of verse. — That’s honey. Frozen honey.’

‘Artificial honey?’ Pancake wondered as he tasted it. He broke more jars out of the snow and put them into their bag. The jars seemed to have stayed airtight. ‘We’ve got to clear off. It’s too quiet for my liking. I’m surprised they don’t have a dog. I’d have one if I had to live out here.’

The dog jumped up on Christian in silence, pressed him against the wall by the cellar door, stayed on its hind legs, panting and flapping its chops, its front paws on his shoulders. A scythe blade curved round Pancake’s throat, drawing the alarmed blacksmith up the steps. Schanett crooked her index finger, beckoning them into the house, the scythe she hung on a peg over the door. The house was cold, the windows crooked, covered with fern-patterns of ice. Schanett led the way with a lantern, leaving it to the growling dog to push the two surprised burglars forward. More dogs appeared but Schanett shooed them away. The touch of the soft muzzle Christian could feel on his behind was like that of a rubber truncheon — a sign from stick to cloth, individual, biding its time; Christian was horrified at the thought that Schanett might report them and thus send them back to there ; in that case, he decided, he’d try to take the quick way out. They probably didn’t have a telephone here and of course there was no electricity … They seemed to be going down, there was a cellar smell to the air. The circle of light from Schanett’s lantern no longer reached the ceiling, a black vault with meat hanging down in pieces from the size of your finger to that of a man, all frosted over, some entirely encased in ice that seemed to be waiting, motionless, for contact with the floor; presumably the weight of all this and the yielding ground of the open-cast mine were making the house gradually subside. But that didn’t explain the vast height of the room that nothing suggested from outside — perhaps the house had been torn in half, the lower storeys were sinking while the roof stayed above ground. Meat; Pancake kept his head down. Dark-red flesh, with sinews running through, embedded in white fat; ice-bound kidneys; pig’s heads, glittering with rime, their open eyes giving them a strangely ironic expression; hearts close together, dotted with white lumps.

‘Come.’ The proofreader nodded to Meno. ‘Redlich,’ Klemm murmured, ‘as every year honest Josef Redlich faithfully bears the yoke, prepares for the Fair and … oh, Fräulein Wrobel, I didn’t think you were still here; the Beethoven quartets have fallen silent.’

‘You’re … going to the events?’

Instinctively they moved out of the light from the street lamp and as answer Oskar Klemm, a gentleman of the old school, offered his arm to Madame Eglantine — which she took even though, as Meno was aware, the ‘Fräulein’ annoyed her. Her face was pale, her eyes dark with doubts and fear; but her coat, her grandfather’s loden coat that had been altered to fit her, had felt patches of various colours in the form of soles of the feet, the toes of which were cheekily splayed. ‘May I tie your shoelaces? Just think of the consequences of a stumble, my dear.’