Uwe Tellkamp - The Tower

‘But we’ve got tickets, we have the right to go through,’ Josef Redlich said. He was stopped, a policeman brusquely ordered him to show his ID and open his luggage. Confused, he lifted up his briefcase with the documents for Hermes’s autumn meetings, a swift gesture of surprise, the policeman leapt back and raised his truncheon. Meno and Madame Eglantine, who was chewing a frankfurter, stepped between them and were grabbed by several policemen, who pushed them into the station, where they managed to prove their bona fides. More people were waiting there. Most, Meno learnt, had come from Bad Schandau, where they had hoped to take one of the emigrants’ trains or get to Prague but had been forced back by police or men in bomber jackets. Since midday, passport- and visa-free travel to Czechoslovakia had been suspended, that to Poland had not been reintroduced. Now the bitter joke in the town was that the only way of leaving the country was feet first.

The police were wearing helmets with visors; they were uncertain and watchful in their movements, like pilots who had made a good landing but in the wrong place and were therefore only half heroes. Punks were camped in front of the station flower shop. A bevy of nuns was following a yellow umbrella waving the message ‘Jesus lives’ above the heads of the waiting crowd. Outside the telephones near the exit to the tram stops for the 11 and 5, usually, when Meno went to Berlin, an area with bunches of people buzzing with impatience as they besieged the booths, an exclusion zone had formed round a huge patch of vomit, a beige ejaculation fraying outward, still seething with explosive energy, a paint bucket slopped out in a wild, Expressionist gesture. Josef Redlich took off his hat to it. In the Mitropa a crush, tobacco-smoke-filled air, yeasty looks over the red-and-white checked oilcloth covered in splotches of sauce, plastic plates, restaurant cups with a green rim. Outside, clusters of people, the three had difficulty pushing their way through to their platform. Overfull wastepaper baskets knocked down. Pigeons, fluttering, agitated, the whale skeleton of the concourse stretched over a chalk reef given a daily coat of whitewash. Josef Redlich examined the trains, explained details. Electric engines, diesel engines, on the outer tracks fossils from pioneering days expelling smoke from their nostrils like angry buffaloes. The little man seemed uncertain what to do, jiggled his case, kept tugging at his hat. ‘What do you think of all this, Herr Rohde?’ He stared at the smooth, putty-grey floor covered in beer bottles and crumpled newspapers.

‘I don’t know,’ Meno said evasively. They had to be careful, that was all he could say. He’d always liked Redlich, that ‘honest soul’ as he was called at Hermes, who ‘did what he could’.

‘What about you?’ Madame Eglantine asked, flicking cigarette ends down onto the rails with the toe of her shoe.

‘I don’t know either.’ Josef Redlich shivered as he raised his shoulders.

‘Something has to change, surely you know that,’ said Madame Eglantine.

‘But where is it going to lead, Frau Wrobel, where, that’s the question,’ Josef Redlich replied quietly. ‘You went to Holy Cross Church, the two of you and Herr Klemm. The boss has put that on the agenda. As if there were still time for such kindergarten disciplinary measures. — Do you play cards?’

On the opposite platform a cloud of paper swirled up, a sweeping machine rattled past like a bug being chased. Immediately the balance of the waiting crowd shifted, a patter of feet, excited shouts, a baby whimpering, a train wasn’t in sight yet but one just had to come since the crowd were invoking it so intensely, ‘Wishes become Reality’, Meno read in an advert torn out of a West German magazine. But all that came was an orange shunter. The driver jerked his head when the crowd’s disappointment was expressed in whistling. The police were there at once. Groups of three or four advanced, grabbed protesters, dragged them back, the main force swallowed up those who’d been arrested, here and there a shaking head, arms protesting and thrashing could be seen before disappearing in a hail of truncheons. Suddenly perceptible air pressure, swirls bouncing forward and back, the power cables over the platforms humming like the taut wires of an egg-slicer; protests flickered up out of the acoustic mush of voices, single cries slit the human cocoon of uniforms and civilians outside the exits swelling and subsiding, then swelling again. The Berlin train drew in with a provoking lack of urgency. The cries now splashed over onto that platform, Redlich and Madame Eglantine hopped into the carriage before those dashing along the platform, Meno was pushed away by the panicking knot of people the police were shoving from behind. And more bits of paper falling, a hail of scraps, some descending as if in slow motion onto a bench, Meno could make out ‘H. Kästner, condoms supplied discreetly by mail order’, exchange requests, outboard motors, laxatives. Redlich’s horrified seal’s face sank in the compartment window, in front Madame Eglantine’s hand stretched out over the platform to Meno, really to me, he thought in the buffeting and tussling, her mouth torn in a strange grimace between the desire to shout and her throat’s refusal, the loudspeakers looked blind in the snowstorm of paper that, repeatedly kicked up by furious boots, dodging shoes, was a confetti revue dancing onto the ash-brown stage of the ballast and sleepers. Meno didn’t manage to get on the train. Whistles, the guard’s baton, a hoarse ‘Close doors’. Someone knocked his briefcase over, another man tripped over it, collided with Meno, who was trying to get his case away from the trampling feet. ‘Can’t you watch out? Fucking idiot!’ the guy shouted and drew his arm back for a punch. Meno ducked and it landed on a policeman behind him, who, like a fat, spoilt child who suddenly feels the flat of his mother’s hand, clutched his cheek and uttered a whiny, flabbergasted ‘Oww!’ Meno grinned. Two policemen plucked him out of the crowd, he was hit, in the pit of the stomach (which, since he had a travel chess set in his coat pocket, wasn’t particularly painful), then in the kidneys (at which his round-bowled pipe broke with a crack of regret), several blows, not delivered quickly but with a searching deliberation that took his breath away, then led off, together with the man who made the unfortunate punch and was bleeding from both eyebrows. There was the clatter of glass breaking, howling, pigeons shredding the air with their wings. Meno’s briefcase was left behind. A train drew in on the next platform, clearly the one expected from the Leipzig depot that was to collect those who’d occupied the embassy; it was stormed with shrill cries of panic intermingled with the screech of loudspeaker warnings and police megaphones demanding the station be cleared. In the station concourse boys were kicking balls of paper at the barricaded Intershop.

‘Clear off, man,’ the policeman said.

‘But my briefcase —’

‘Buzz off.’

(Eschschloraque) ‘But people, when they’re free, what do they do with their lives? If their aspiration is to be happy, what is then the expression of that happiness? They go hunting! The favourite pastime of the aristocracy, which had the most leisure, was to go hunting. And ordinary people have their own ordinary kind of hunting: they go fishing. What are you going to achieve with your revolution? An increase in the number of anglers. That’s all. The improved lot of the workers will consist in being able to devote themselves to that simplest form of hunting. And liberty, equality, fraternity for just that? Gosh!’

(Altberg) ‘Now you’re the one being cynical.’

(Eschschloraque) ‘I’m simply trying to avoid idealizing. Don’t make human beings more interesting than they are … Things are often too easy in life and art often imitates it as well, so what then?’