Uwe Tellkamp - The Tower

In those sweltering, heat-weakened days Anne decided to abandon caution (for only strangers, Richard thought, could call it timidity or delusion) and to look the various swirling threats in the eye, threats others’ hands, mouths (printed mouths that spoke, at profuse length or in silence, on others’ behalf), had at their disposal. After the destruction of the Hispano-Suiza, thinking about which during many futile meetings, petty quarrels, the fight against woolly-headedness had made some things bearable for Richard, his rage had given way to depression, rebellion to resignation. Sometimes he went to the cellar and planed away aimlessly at a few planks. Sometimes in the morning he would stare at himself in the mirror and couldn’t look away; the water fizzed and bubbled in the basin, he hardly moved when it started to overflow. He bought flowers for Anne, drove round the country looking for something that might give her pleasure; but after she had responded with polite consideration to a water pump he’d painted bright yellow and installed in the garden, and a Steiff teddy bear, all he could think of was household implements. Now she attended the Schmücke group alone, although Arbogast had helped them to duplicate their article.

When the names Hungary, Budapest, acquired a conspiratorial, blue sound of freedom, Anne and Judith Schevola took over the job of duplication; instead of Party brochures, Judith Schevola was now running off copies of dissident articles. Richard observed Anne and was amazed to see how, in a short time, their apartment had become a kind of conspirators’ cell. Shoeboxes with photocopies of articles were piling up in the rooms (and were collected by tight-lipped young men after giving a password, once by André Tischer in an ambulance), strange books and strange people appeared; the latter were given food and drink, swiftly threw up their arms to rant on about some ideal social system or other (afterwards the sandwiches were all gone) or listened to others ranting, made intelligent or less intelligent objections, admired the grandfather clock and the remains of middle-class prosperity that a copy of ‘Chopsticks’, put on the piano for amusement, somehow gave an oppressively alien feeling that was only slowly warmed up by the solitude and quiet once they’d all left. There were break-ins, after which shoeboxes with the photocopied articles were missing and — an odd, primitive way of camouflaging the real reason — whole shelves of bottled fruit. One day Robert’s collection of football pictures had gone (photos inserted between the silver paper and the wrapper of a West German brand of chocolate that Alice and Sandor had for years included in their Christmas parcels) and for the first time for ages Richard, who in impotent despair had gone to the police, to Coal Island, finally to Grauleite to complain, fell ill (Clarens called it endogenous depression, he said nothing) and, while outside the almond trees were in flower and from the meadows by the Elbe the nutty scent of summer hay came through the joins in the lockable windows, spent two weeks of profound melancholy in Clarens’s clinic, along the corridors of which Frau Teerwagen shambled, a blank look on her face, where Richard saw Alexandra Barsano again with short-cropped hair, following without resistance the instructions of the nurses who accompanied her on her daily routine; where at night the insane screams from the suicide room chopped up the warm sleep of the other patients — until the duty doctor appeared, followed by a Valkyrie with a tray full of syringes, from which he took what he needed, as Richard knew from going with him on his rounds, as others would take spare parts off a conveyor belt; and ‘reestablished’ quiet — injected it back in, throat by throat. Richard had no visitors. His colleagues said nothing, no one wanted to know anything after he’d been discharged, not even the ever-inquisitive nurses. And Anne? She had no time. Said, ‘You’re back. Good.’ She didn’t make many telephone calls (they’d only have been able to exchange banalities), did a lot of organizing, was often out. Richard didn’t ask where it was all going to end. Perhaps Anne wouldn’t have answered that — so he could still hope he might get an answer from her. At weekends, when he wasn’t on duty, he had dinner, waited on by Adeling, in the Felsenburg with the pendulum ticking and the corals of paint on Kokoschka’s easel dustlessly gleaming in the foyer. Anne slapped something on a roll and went out to what she called her ‘work’: meetings somewhere in town, talks with representatives of East Rome and the Schmücke group. She too had packed a suitcase; it was next to Richard’s bag in the hall cupboard. The more the exodus via Hungary increased, the more tense Anne was as she sat on the veranda, where she immersed herself in articles copied in purplish print on poor paper. She had arranged contact between the Schmücke group and Pastor Magenstock, who was a friend of Rosenträger; Rosenträger was in a position to offer refuge to those in immediate danger. She talked to Reglinde, telling her she would have difficulties if she continued to live with them — Reglinde began to work as a courier, the zoo was a good, neutral meeting place (presumably no outsider would dare to search the gorilla enclosure); secret messages were exchanged beneath the somnambulistic clasp of the gibbons. What Anne was doing, what Magenstock, the members of the Schmücke group were doing, was illegal, the section in the Criminal Code was number 217. But she, who had previously held Richard back when it was a matter of something ‘political’, now hesitated no more. She seemed to know exactly what she wanted. He didn’t.

… up out of the deep sleep of time,

Meno wrote,

paper: was sucked down grumpily where the fullers were poking their rods, fulling mills felting the raw material, down the arm of the river to the paper republic, SS Tannhäuser sailed down the avenue of uniforms (and I remembered brass bands and military bands, the wide boulevards of the Atlantic city with winter and clouds sweeping across it like eider-duck nests, polar explorers sailing in the sky: the Chelyuskin and Nobile expeditions, greeted by children of October), the river raised and lowered the city as if it were on hydraulic stages, the water, brown, with smears of ice, heated up by remnants of cellulose and engine oil and the loudspeaker horns (encrusted, leaking, dented by body hammers) over the concreted bank that spewed into the effluent drain from a fertilizer factory, the foam: guano white, phosphates, swirling at the sluice, set off a vein of lemon yellow — was it the lemon-yellow Neva, crackling with rouble notes in the frost, was it the Moskva, was it the Elbian river that suddenly became transparent for the ships on the bottom, poisonous honey glowing with blossom? — ice floes creaked as they rubbed against each other, and in the early hours of the morning, when the brontosaurian, weather-beaten, thousand-headed tenements — with the sour smell of rumours and fear, of the sweat of having to hold their tongue, at night holding their breath at the beams of light, the stamp of boots, the corridors with the washing lines and vests frozen overnight into Eskimo salt cod, the blocked toilets in the communal apartments, the Moorish plaster arches in the rigging four metres up, rooms divided up by the backs of cupboards, curtains, trunks — seemed to melt back out of frozen blocks of graphite in the early hours of the morning, when the black lorries with the inscription ‘Meat’ had done their work, when the crows from the city parks had discussed what was to be done during the day (visit the slaughterhouses, see the frozen fountains of Bakhchisaray, blacken the portrait of Our Beloved Leader over the Admiralty, the Navy Museum), in the early hours of the morning the military marches started up, pumping four-four time out of the loudspeakers onto the main streets, where it lay like ooze, it must be the birthday of one of the bigwigs, one of the high priests from the Palace of Byzantium, red star over the sea of ice, it was going to be a morning full of trolley buses stopping, faces tense with joyful expectation, veterans with chests covered in chinking metal; a morning of the air force, Ulrich, envying the pilots their Poljot watches and the light blue on their peaked caps and collar patches, waved their flag with the propeller on it; I liked the navy uniforms, dark blue with gold buttons, liked the Raketa twenty-four-hour watches the submarine commanders wore, and then, when the commands from the loudspeakers died away, drumrolls and military marches faded, there was a second of silence, Atlantis holding its breath by radio sets in the factories, schools, universities, the inevitable Tchaikovsky melody rang out, played by the Bolshoi, then the Great Procession started to move, drum majors’ batons whirled in front of white-gloved drummers and shawm bands, on the gallery of the Red Pharaoh’s Mausoleum there was a flash of gold as the fanfares were raised. Mere dots, the royal household, sublimely blasphemous on the red granite blocks beneath which the Great Man lay, waved to the masses of workers marching past, to the electricity works on wheels, to the Taiga, the boreal forest of the rockets, the white-gloved commanders saluting on their tanks that creep past aligned on an invisible spirit level, the MIGs tying colourful birthday bows in the air, I remembered that the houses of Atlantis were rinsed through with military marches and Tchaikovsky, losing grain after grain of an old, half-forgotten substance, like salt being washed out of a level –