Uwe Tellkamp - The Tower

Order and security:

But the paper, the snow-shower of scraps, falling asymmetrically, colourful as a circus. Meno worked his way through the crowd to the station exit, clutching his ticket and his case; duty called but didn’t entice him, here something beyond the usual thesis-and-antithesis games was happening, also beyond the usual answers. Luise, his undaunted mother, would perhaps have said: It’d be reckless not to stay here. The noises in the station: cavernous, with slithery, aimless echoes: was that like the way the outside world flooded into our hearing, the still unfiltered acoustic stream splashing, breaking against our eardrums, making the malleus, incus and stapes vibrate: Morse signals to the endolymph contained within the membranous labyrinth of the tympanic canal? The town was the ear, the station jutted out into the cochlea: the helix, oscillations, particles of sound rolling about, knocking, some as fine as dust, just scratching at the acoustic threshold of perception, others full of themselves, vibratory amplitudes of the authorities. Cinderella’s peas, then a clicking, a hailstorm of glass raining down, as if a hole had been punched in the store of a marbles factory, meanwhile a basic rhythm was getting into shape, boomboom! boomboom! the crude, martial, theatrical solemnity of Siegfried’s journey down the Rhine to death — perhaps the police had been trained, or was it mere chance. (But did mere chance exist in uniform in this country?) Hitting their truncheons against their plastic shields, they shooed the people in droves out of the station. Meno was carried along with them. The exits spewed out those fleeing the police, at the same time sucking in, as a whale’s stomach factory does plankton, a crowd curious to see what was going on, the background body of which was gathering in Prager Strasse and, after crossing the tram tracks on Wiener Platz, headed for the northern entrance to the station. Two forces; they collided under the Radeberger sign (now mute and dull on this plumage-grey morning), forming a buffer zone of kicking, of gesticulations, of archaic fear and relief, a remarkably soothing ring, bubbling up like batter, with thorny wound ruptures shooting off in places where the stitches burst between the battering wedges, which immediately blunted each other with the force of thrust from behind: as Meno saw in units of time of hallucinatory alertness that had nothing to do with his attempts to keep his balance in the swirling tumult, nor with his ticket that, in mortal fear, like a fish flapping in the air, was a vague promise screwed tight in a grip that was being jogged every moment; that had nothing to do with the thought that he didn’t want to leave but to stay there, daring. I’m staying here. I want to see. I want to see (with my own eyes) what is going to happen here. Curiosity? A maternal gene that had so far remained silent, that had started to flash hesitantly on the Rohdes’ partisan horizon and wanted to have an effect? Paper, floating, hissing, tramped on, scrunched up out of rage or joy. People trickling to the passageways. Suddenly shouts: the train! the train! Fields of swimmers desperately doing the crawl. The train was said to have arrived. Where! Where? The train! The expected train, from Prague; the train to freedom. The train. Freedom! some cried at the camouflage-coloured turbine that started to throb, greedily and dangerously: batons beat out their rhythmical Clear off! Clear off! The train had not arrived. Immediately the people slipped back into waiting postures, many awake with pain and furious, even more drained and disappointed; backpacks slumped down onto paper-strewn platforms. The train didn’t come.

Berlin had called Dresden. The district had called the Administration of the Academy, the heads of the city hospitals, the transfusion centres. The management had called the wards. That was where the instruction had ended, was noted and kept quiet about. Have extra supplies of stored blood ready: the blunt terms of the message. In the breaks between operations Richard walked round the clinic to get his conflicting emotions under control. He went down into the basement, where the nurses and doctors were smoking, whispering, exchanging rumours about the unrest at Central Station, the situation in Prague. He went out into the park, where it was monastic and autumnal, where the statues on the fountain were frozen in remarkably graceful attitudes, which must have demanded a great effort from the sculptor, for their grace was beyond this world and yet was not a lie. It wasn’t even kitschy; the statues seemed to feel at ease and that must have cost the greatest effort. It was the grace of lunatics. Christian had written, ‘What should I do if they order me? You’ve always tried to bring us up to be honest, but you lied yourself. What you said about moral cowardice, all those years ago outside the Felsenburg (it was loud enough, perhaps we boys played so happily so that we didn’t have to hear everything) — the lessons with Orré, your warnings and reproaches in the training camp, do you remember? What should I do? The barracks is on stand-by, no day-passes or leave, the telephone lines out have been closed down, there are no newspapers any more. If they give me the order: Hit them! — what should I do? I’m giving this letter to the cook in the hope that it will get to you and that your reply, if you should (can?) send me one will reach me.’ Richard kept the letter with him. Never before had Christian written one like that to him. He’d avoided the word: father. And Anne? Richard hadn’t shown her the letter. What had happened, what had happened to him, to them? Time, time, came the whisper from the branches with the copper-art foliage. The wind smelt of coal.

Someone had thrown a stone, a cube of black-and-white granite from the cobbles that fitted nicely in the hand; there could have been a commentary on its flattened parabolic trajectory, like a ball that even at the player’s run-up, at his crisp, explosive shot, the experienced reporter suspects will become the goal of the year, analysed again and again in countless action replays, demonstrated by fathers, who were there, to their sons on male-bonding Sundays (or would there come a time when there were videos in this country?); Meno watched the stone descend over the phalanx of transparent shields, which reflected the clinical fluorescent light, and appear to lose height and its curve turn into a dotted line, as on airline pilots’ maps, before it would hit its target and, in a strange reflection, make the line of its trajectory flash up again, the electric-fast click of the bolt again confirming the alignment of the sights

and

shouts, the drumming of batons, sheer lust. Kettling, scurrying, boring. Thousands had come back from Schandau on foot, driven partly by the police, partly by other authorities, partly in resignation after days of camping by the tracks

and

rioters, the scum of every day on their faces cracking open to show the white undercurrent of hatehatehate, they stripped wood off scaffolding, broke bottles into deadly jagged crowns, suddenly had an armful of cobblestones that they hurled at the advancing power of the state, shields cracked, visors split open, windowpanes shattered, glittering theatrically, into splinters that seemed to salt the ground, howling was the response. Meno was standing pressed against a pillar, incapable of moving

and

yet they came closer, the gangs and cordons and rubber truncheons at the ready, Describe the rutting and attack ceremonies of red deer, went through Meno’s mind, he still had his case, not his ticket any more, just a scrap of paper, someone had torn it out of his hand

and

the black dogs, barking, their gums very pink, their teeth very white and dripping saliva, pulled on their leads, shaking their handlers with the power of their black haunches, strange engravings of their claws on the smooth, hard floor of the station concourse, loops and scrolls, perhaps flowers, dog roses, Meno thought