Uwe Tellkamp - The Tower

‘Oh, you’re going to inform on me, are you? All I can say is: best of luck. You’ll hear a quite different tune from those birds.’

‘Virtue, virtue! I’m asking you about virtue, my dear Altberg, and you come back to me with — virtues. Don’t keep making one thing into many — like people who break something.’

‘And what is it, in your opinion, my dear Eschschloraque? By the way, may I congratulate you on your costume. The ass’s head suits you down to the ground.’

‘I knew you’d allude to it. Well, not everyone will go down — or should one say sink — so low as you … To take pleasure in beauty and to have it at your command. That is what the philosopher says. So this is what I understand by virtue: to be able, full of desire for beauty, to acquire it for oneself. — Herr Ritschel, over here. Please. Surely our table gets its turn. I’d love to try the marbled electric ray looking up with such a resigned expression from your fish board.’

‘According to your logic, my dear Eschschloraque, every punter who buys a pretty whore is a very virtuous person. He’s full of desire for beauty and presumably he has enough money in his pocket.’

‘You’re cynical, Altberg. That’s not you. A cynic starts to die during his life.’

‘Excuse me if I laugh, my dear Eschschloraque, but, you and a paragon of virtue! That’s ac-tu-al-ly something for Arbogast’s joke collection.’

‘I’m a paragon of virtue as long as virtue is something useful. Come on now, Altberg, I’ve often been occupied with useful things.’

‘Useful but not good!’

‘Good because useful! Dig, miner, dig deep.’

‘And always with the mighty, my dear Eschschloraque: eat and carouse with the high and mighty, sit with them, be agreeable to them.’

‘Ah, but there’s more. You will permit me to continue, my dear Altberg? From the good alone will you learn what is good, the bad will rob you of what wits you have.’

‘Panties? Pioneer neckerchiefs?’

‘My husband, well, you know. In the morning I always think I’m married to a walrus. His hair stands on end, he takes the toothbrush glass, whips the toothpaste up into foam and gargles like nobody’s business. Then he blows out the whole lot through his stubble into the basin. I watch him and think: you’re wedded to something like that, cooped up in this marriage for thirty years. And then the constant changes of address. Free German Youth study year, extension course, advanced study in Moscow, Party Secretary in provincial holes, and I’d promised myself that we’d go to Berlin sometime … My friends have all got a house out in the country and a dacha and a car as well, most even two cars. And us? A three-room dump in a new development because he didn’t want to be in Block A and because a Party member has to set an example and he can’t stand the corrupt guys who can call themselves comrades and damage the Party’s reputation … Which means I’m sitting there asking myself, what have you made of your life, girl?’

‘The eye has a very simple anatomy, my dear Rohde. It’s as if you were to write something, in a letter say, in plain, clear language, as simply as possible, but the other person only reads what someone else’s lens system, an optical illusion, places over the sheet of paper as meaning — the one thing is written but the other is understood.’

‘Oh, if only I’d taken King Thrushbeard, oh, if only I’d taken that one.’

‘Those brain-dead bastards! Ideals? God, they never had any! They wanted to earn money, really live it up, perhaps even get themselves a car from the West, that’s the limit of their ambitions! Socialists? All they do is drag the idea of socialism through the mud!’

‘Be careful what you say, Philipp.’

‘That’s the worst thing about it, that you have to be careful what you say.’

‘Tell me where you stand —’

‘Herr Ritschel, a little more of your chemist’s punch, please. I’ll tell you one thing, Rohde. That business with the red comma — forgotten. I was even quietly amused by it.’

‘— and how you serve the land.’

‘I’m a man of the Enlightenment, that is: critical, ironic, an unbeliever perhaps. It’s possible I don’t even believe that I believe in nothing. You’re a Romantic and that means you contribute to capitalism. For longing and homesickness drive the world but the driving force is capitalism. Utopia is being at a standstill. That’s why I want the clocks not to chime, that’s why I’m for the winter. As a Romantic you think you’re renouncing the world, escaping from it. Nonsense! You’re driving it on … the pursuit of happiness, that’s what it says in the American constitution. A Romantic principle. And the motto of the empire of the self.’

‘Ladies and gentlemen, especially for you: songs by Karat! For all of you who love the “Rainbow”, Karat have lit the “ Magic Light”: Henning and Bernd have cast a spell on their strings, Micha has drummed out his heartbeat, Herbert and Ed given of their best. And of course, the floor is still there for those who want to dance.’

‘I’ve seen a picture, my dear Eschschloraque, ice floes coming up through the frozen surface of a lake; relics they were, the past in the here and now. Will there at some time be a society consisting entirely of things from the past?’

‘Such alarm, Herr Altberg? Don’t worry, I’ve no objection to anyone daring to think that there might be something different coming after socialism.’

‘There have been times when you’ve taken a quite different line, Eschschloraque.’

‘Come with me, Judith. It will be a great time, we’ll be making history …’

‘Just stories are enough for me. Break with Marisa.’

‘I can’t, I simply can’t. I love both of you. That’s the way it is … both of you, each in a particular way.’

‘Said Casanova: I have been faithful to all of them, in my fashion.’

‘You’re accusing me of bourgeois attitudes? And yourself, Judith?’

‘And what do you say, Master Kibitzer? Should I go with him? — You remain silent. You always remain silent.’

‘He’ll have his reasons, Judith. Come with me, I beg you.’

‘The floor is yours! Already a few bold couples are dancing their way into May.’

‘It is one of the mysteries of nature as well as of the state that it’s safer to change many things rather than just a single one —’

‘You’re suspicious tonight, Trude.’

‘Oh, you know, Ludwig, as far as thoughts are concerned, suspicions are like bats among birds — they’re always fluttering in the twilight.’

‘It’s a sickness that always eats away everything. Good evening.’

‘Ah, Herr Eschschloraque. How are your two machines coming on? Did you get the pencils I sent you?’

‘Clouds the mind, darkens the brow, distrusts sugar, calls it the sweetest of poisons, makes friends part and nourishes the nettle of suspicion. Crawls along beside time bent crooked … a forest of suspicion, full of dark creatures.’

‘That Eschschloraque — there were times when someone like that would have been arrested. What do you think? He comes from the past, doesn’t he? Yes … we ought to have been more alert. He’s absolutely convinced of his own greatness and immortality … Did you know, Rohde, that he’s had all his plays engraved on steel plates, from the Freital stainless-steel factory — in case there should be a fire? He has a bunker underneath his house and that’s where they’re kept.’

‘We can rely on the Japanese. They love German orchestras more than anything, above all our State Orchestra. Recently we had … perhaps you know this. It wasn’t in the newspapers. We had this toothbrush problem. A Russian artilleryman was drunk and fed up. And he — whee! — sent a little artillery rocket on its way. And of all places, it hit the main production plant of our toothbrush factory. There was no one in it, thank God, the workers on the night shift were playing cards.’