Uwe Tellkamp - The Tower

click,

the radio knob

Ideals! Not one, darling! not one

artillery fire, close combat, the white eyes of the Russian, then he’s on me, his panting breath and filthy collar tie, I see the sharp outline of a cloud over his knife

Not one was too much for you

the beads of sweat on the Russian’s brow, the soldier sees a birthmark and at the same time a scene from the puppet theatre he had as a child, the beautiful, colourful Harlequin’s costume, tries to thrash his legs around a bit, senses he’s going to succumb to the Russian, who’s working silently and is stronger than he is, suddenly the Russian throws his head back, his eyes widen, he opens his mouth

The German soldier’s absolute will to victory and fanatical determination will

opens his mouth in a toneless look of amazement, the captain has stabbed him from behind

Every inch of ground will be defended

blood comes pouring out of the Russian’s mouth, splashes over the soldier’s face

To the last cartridge, to the last man

You owe me a beer, sonny

the captain said, wiping the blade in the crook of his arm’

‘click,’

said Eschschloraque, ‘the radio knob

click, and in the evening we turned into glass: in Hotel Lux, fragile in the lips of a telephone, breathless in the creak of a lift: Those footsteps, where are they going? To your door? The night was an earthly process, we lay, rigid, on the diaphragm of a stethoscope, the night was Snakekeeper’s Empire’

DIARY

In the evening at Niklas’s. Talking about Fürnberg’s Mozart story — Niklas agrees with my assessment, which truly astounded me and made me wonder about my judgement of him — when Gudrun came in: we were to come and listen to the radio. We heard: death in Peking. Demonstrations. The Square of Heavenly Peace. On the Republic’s stations: dance music. Ezzo continued to practise stoically. Beautiful weather outside. Niklas on Ariadne under Kempe, but I left. The smell of wisteria in the street, from Wisteria House, as Christian calls it — how will he be doing? Shimmering blossom, the whole house seemed to be engulfed in flames of fragrance .

‘click,’

said the Old Man of the Mountain,

‘Six groschen worth of fat bacon

and graves in the snow, iron crosses with steel helmets and a rifle hung on them, open graves full of staring faces, machine-gun emplacements with gunners in white camouflage cloaks, arms round each other as if asleep

Six groschen worth of fat bacon

and in the Ruthenian forests they cut the leather off the bodies of those who’d been hanged, shot, throttled in order to boil it in snow-filled steel helmets to make it soft enough to chew and swallow down to still the hunger, like the lumps of tallow of which the cook still had a supply; boiled leather and tallow candles the soldiers ate, and the thin-stripped bark of the aspens

click,

went the lighter from the Sertürn Pharmacy, setting the torch alight, the soldier shook his head, raised his arm

What are you doing, are you trying to stop me setting this damn Jew-dump alight, sneered the deputy leader of the Buchholz NSDAP, pointing the torch at the Hagreiter House of the Rebenzoll Brothers, the richest merchants in the town, who had regularly invited the mayor, the medical officer, the pastor and the pharmacist to dinner; now the yellow star was emblazoned on the door and on the walls between the smashed windows

Where are the Rebenzolls

Where d’you think, where they belong, in the house there’s only the pack of relatives the mayor’s been protecting, that traitor to his people, he’s just as much of a milksop as you

You will not do it

The way you’ve always been

You will not do it, or

What

the soldier raised his gun, but the Buchholz NSDAP deputy leader, owner of the Sertürn Pharmacy, just gave a snort of laughter and shrugged his shoulders, on the upper floor a woman’s voice started pleading

Stop it, these people

Jewish vermin, loan sharks, they tried to shut me down with their exorbitant interest, so

No

Perish the lot of you!

and threw the torch, the house was set on fire immediately, the flames blazed up to the first floor, where terrified faces appeared, at once followed by a commotion in the house, clatter, screams, and the soldier looked his father in the face, that he no longer recognized, for a moment disconcerted by the grey hair and the hands hanging down helplessly

Would you raise your hand to your father

You set the house on fire

They’re only Jews

People! Human beings!

Have you joined the traitors now as well

Human beings!

You’re aiming your gun at me

Human beings!

I’ll put you down like a rabid dog, you’re not my son, you bastard

the soldier shot his father.’

Dresden squatted by the riverbank like an arthritic hermit crab, cocoon threads ran round the roughened edges of the blocks in the new development, the powdery grey of which fluttered at the almost halting footsteps of the passers-by and blanked them out as if in an overexposed photograph. The casing creaked and groaned. Meno stopped but no fissure rent the air. That returned his fear to him as something serenely elegant, the teardrop shape of the cross-section of an aeroplane wing had set off the heavy rotation of the concrete mixers in the town centre, flexing like the wings of an insect as it takes off into the flow matrices that for moments traced the air, even though it was so sluggish. He saw a wrecked boat-shaped pulpit, the viper-needles of the master compass frozen in the gesture of a sun-worshipper. In the waves of the heat-surf the monstrous, herpetic lips of the navigators spewed water lilies over the Old Market and the Zwinger, the syrupy brightness of Thälmannstrasse (and fairy tales as their almanac, a young fairy in clothes from VEB Damenmode scattered gladioli over the tower blocks on Pirnaischer Platz); the water lilies, with flowers boiled soft, swelled out towards the people so that he looked for the bottom of the sea on the chalky sky and not below, where bunches of cars held up at crossroads resembled flounders gasping for oxygen. The Elbe had laid aside its keel-scratched, wind-hackle-roughened clothes and was sunning its metal body, which he had never seen so smooth and bare. The sun, however, with its quivering scatters of birds electrically magnetized to and fro, was at its zenith; micro-impulses were constantly knocking at the taut quicksilver skin of the river on which circles, as fine as if drawn with dividers, appeared with the abrupt noblesse with which the yellow flowers of the evening primrose open at a specific moment of twilight, or the bathyscaph of the moth in which the mysterious, inexplicably immense metamorphosis takes place. While he was remembering that you could accelerate the opening of evening primrose flowers by removing the calyx-lobe from the tip of a bud close to bursting so that the compressed petals, rolled up and under tension, sprang open and the long sepals submitted to the eclosion, became redundant and slackened to a rigidity that was that of sprung mousetraps — while he was remembering that, he saw the eddies heading for encounters, making contact, the parabolas, visible echo waves, splintering into each other with the precision of sections of buildings in architectural drawings. And while he mused on the words of his physics teacher, which came back to him from the unimaginable remoteness of discontented provincial summers and with his musing chipped off a flake from a block of previously unknown nostalgia since his words, nameless, had traversed time, just as buoyant meteorological balloons cross considerable deeps when the lines tethering them to the seabed, eaten away by the mandibles of the zooplankton, the caresses of the sea veils, its own disintegration accelerated by growths and carbonization, finally break — while he heard the voice holding forth over the dutifully lowered heads of the pupils, telling them that even two wardrobes exert attraction on each other and in millions of years would have surmounted the space separating them in a typical bedroom of the Workers’ and ‘Peasants’ State, while he heard all this, interspersed with the muttered mockery of the boy next to him declaring that, with all due respect, such durability of wardrobes from the VEB Hainichen furniture factory was purely theoretical, he saw the town turn into an ear.