Uwe Tellkamp - The Tower

Hang him

No

It’s your turn, so

I don’t want to

Hang him, the Jew

I can’t

So you’ve got to learn, you coward, that’s an order

that was in the Ukrainian village. The captain drew his pistol and pointed it at the soldier, who saw the black hole of the muzzle aimed at his face. An order, and if you refuse to obey it, I’ll blow your brains out. And his comrades said to the soldier Come on. It’s only a lousy Jew. And they pulled the thin young man by the hair, he was a lad of twenty, the same age as the soldier, and his hat was lying in the snow and beside it his girl was whimpering, crept over to the captain and tugged at his coat, he pushed her away, she went back to him, he shot, she lay there. Then the soldier said I can’t. And the captain Oh yes you can, I’ll make you get a move on! Here! and threw the gallows rope over the branch of the lime tree beside the village well, its trunk had no bark any more, the sole lime tree, shot to a white ghost, from which the mayor and the doctor and the rabbi were dangling, it had gone round his comrades in turn, the captain hissed Get on with it, or, chambered a round and pressed the muzzle against the soldier’s forehead. And the person beside him threw his arms up and down and clutched at the empty air and tried to get to the captain and sank into the snow beside his girl and gently stroked her sleeve and shook her head. His comrades dragged him up and tied his hands behind him, put a cloth over his face. The soldier picked up the rope, his comrades lifted the lad onto the stool, pulled the noose tight, the soldier climbed onto a stool beside it, the captain made a sweeping gesture with his pistol, the soldier carefully wiped the snowflakes off the man’s collar. His breath was blowing the cloth out and sucking it in, and then he heard the man start to bleat, disjointedly and askew like a billy goat, ugly, as the soldier thought at that moment, and as he did his spittle moistened the cloth. That sounds so silly, I want to see his mug, take the rag off, the captain laughed. But then the soldier was already pushing the stool away

click,’

‘click,’ Eschschloraque murmured,

‘… up out of the deep sleep of time: the corridors, stream of dark, and the rats not only at night, envy sending its yellow mist creeping out, it penetrates all the cracks, it knows all the doors, in dreams, at night, by day, rolling out travel destinations, lighting magic lamps as the husband of Lady Greed, the Cold Councillor, and makes the whisper-buds grow in the field of thoughts’

DIARY

At Ulrich’s place. Richard and Anne there, a party for a few relatives. Ulrich worried. He’s aged. Problems at work, difficulties meeting planned targets. Talked about meetings in Berlin, with the Planning Commission. Since the international price of crude oil, and therefore of industrial products based on petroleum, had sunk sharply since ’86, the price we had to pay the SU for oil, according to the COMECON agreement, was well above the international level. That made our products more expensive — we could no longer sell them to the West with the necessary profit margin. On which we were totally reliant. At his factory they were compelled to use the wastage produced by their suppliers — which of necessity increased the wastage among their own products. Now we were suffering the consequences of not having released funds for investment. How often had his warnings been given a dusty answer by the Party Secretary? As a Party member, he was told, he couldn’t use that kind of argument … The department with which his firm had to cooperate for the electronic control units you need for modern typewriters now had to join in the great microchip madness. Consequently he had to procure his control elements elsewhere, at the moment from Italy. Which more or less swallowed up the amount of foreign currency one could earn with typewriters nowadays. Since, however, his firm was required to earn such and such an amount of foreign currency he, the managing director Ulrich Rohde, might possibly be faced with personal proceedings against him. In September ’88 the 1-megabit chip had been presented to the General Secretary in a grand ceremony — what the population at large didn’t know, however, but that he had learnt from Herr Klothe upstairs: that chip was a handmade specimen. What, he asked us, could one do with it? Attach the chip, as an existent reality, to the completely outdated machines, as an equally existent reality? In the hope that they would then automatically be transformed into manna-producing, miracle-working cybernetic beings? The state was subsidizing the 256-kbit chip to the tune of 517 marks per item, on the world market, on the other hand, it didn’t even cost two dollars any more. ‘And now I’m asking you, Richard, Meno, what conclusions should we draw from all this?’ Richard suggested buying bicycles. If everything should collapse, no electricity for trains, no petrol for cars, we could at least still get round on bikes. We ought to build up stocks of provisions that will keep and somehow secure them against looting, official raids and confiscation. Guard one’s valuables for which, as after the war, one could get at least something from farmers. Barbara should set aside material from which clothes could be made. I was instructed to acquire books that might be of interest to people from the West, for if our money was worthless and, as had happened before, subject to inflation, then the West German mark would be the sole currency. Anne and he, Richard, would see to medicines.

‘click click click,

the lighter,’ the Old Man of the Mountain said, ‘the snow covered the plains, covered the villages, Argonauts saw it in Colchis, on Mount Kazbek and Mount Elbrus, over which the swastika flag flew, the soldier caught typhus and his sister’s fiancé froze to death at Stalingrad. The frozen body of a wren lay in the snow. Aeroplanes went into a tailspin and fell into rivers that burnt. Scraps of songs, of bagpipe tunes to which the troops of Marshal Antonescu went into battle. Anti-aircraft batteries, artillery, the hoarse bark of Schmeisser machine pistols, the tumbleweed whispered, balls of weed driven by the wind. The taste of sunflower seeds, whores dancing in a front-line brothel, chewing up liquorice sticks between their mouths; horses with swollen bodies in the ditches, their eyeballs screwed into stillness. The slaughtered woman in the fancy-dress shop in the little town on the Narev, chests broken open, splintered cupboards that had been kicked in, one of his comrades laughed, went out into the front garden, shot the tea rose, that was waving in the wind, off its stalk, plucked the petals she loves me she loves me not, oh to hell with it, shit, comrades, stopped laughing, chambered a round in his Parabellum, picked up the woman’s cat, which was crouching in the corner, stuck the muzzle under its chin, squeezed the trigger.

click,

the torch of the military policeman going round the hospital in search of malingerers. Bullet lodged in the lungs, the doctor said, bending over the soldier. The clatter of instruments thrown into a dish, the smell of tobacco, long missed, a surgeon in blood-soaked overalls, a nurse holding a cigarette out to him in a clamp; the soldier remembers the sweet plant-smell coming from the anaesthetist’s mask. Field hospital, shots, Katyushas blotting out the light, a tent for the wounded burning down, screams will make him start from his sleep at night. The clatter of trains being shunted, the steam whistle of an engine cuts through the fever’s curtain of heat, Rübezahl’s mocking them. Retreat during the rasputitsa , the muddy season. Trucks got stuck, wheels spinning until they were completely enveloped in mud, had to be pulled out by horses and men. Yoke and bridle, soldiers and prisoners of war got into harness, tried to heave the baggage wagons out, their axles broke, the swingletrees of the forage carts broke. Mosquitos ate at their faces, crept into their ears, mouths, nostrils, bit their tongues, through their clothes, crept under their collars. Then the frost returns, it comes all of a sudden, the air seems to pause, is stretched, tautened, compressed, starts to crunch, is motionless for a while, then breaks like the neck of a bottle. The mud froze as hard as concrete, the bizarre ridges sliced through truck tyres and soles of boots. Retreat. Villages. Suitcases in the snow, locks forced open, letters, photos scattered