Uwe Tellkamp - The Tower

and

truncheons came raining, pelting, whizzing down, a thudding like horse chestnuts on the roof of parked cars, the bizarre reality of the screams that answered them, people were kicked to the ground, trampled, hands raised in defence, but the rubber truncheons had tasted

fear and

blood and

blood and

lust

and

there were the toilets, Meno ran with the others, the herd, instinctive, opportunities. The toilets. The vault, blue tiles, the stench of ammonia cutting like a discus through the breath of those rushing in. Meno recoiled, the trap, what will you do if they lock them, ran out, he could see the expressions of the police, the index-finger arms. Out, out, outside the station, get out of the station. Tear-gas cartridges clattered on the ground, people ran away, a yielding zone yawned like a slit in taut skin, then the smoke swirled up. Water cannons squirted paths through the tangles of flight and free-for-all, mashed the paper, pushed it into slimy castles on the edge of the tracks. Meno looked up, saw video cameras, saw smashed station monitors; water was dripping down from the girders, filling the station with spray and gleaming metallic ribbons with which threads of blood interwove in slow motion.

— paper,

Meno wrote,

paper, the mountain of paper –

Christian was sitting in the quartermaster’s store, to which he now had a key, and roared as he bit his teeth into a fresh pack of soldiers’ underclothes. Sometimes he thought he was going mad. That the barracks, the tanks, the transfers from company to company were nothing but a dream, a long, unpleasant nightmare that yet must some time come to an end and he would be in bed, free, perhaps with the Comedian Harmonists singing on the Stenzel Sisters’ gramophone. Then he would go to the barracks library, a grotesque place watched over by a fat kindly woman with a granny apron and knitting (she knitted kidney warmers for the ‘young comrades’). Pale-gold trees shimmered along the barracks roads. The officers saluted jerkily, tension and fear on their faces. The political education classes had been doubled. The clichés trickled from their lips, covering the ground where they lay, invisible but attracting dust, despised, not taken seriously by anyone. There were exercises, work on the tanks, there were to be manoeuvres in the autumn. Christian was counting the hours to his discharge. Sometimes, even though he’d been in the army for almost five years now, he felt that he could no longer bear the few days of being locked in, would climb up onto the roof of the battalion building, the tar on which was still a malleable summery mass bubbling in the thermals between the black extractor fans, write letters that a kitchen assistant would smuggle out into a civilian postbox, read what Meno sent him (little Reclam paperbacks, Soviet fiction published by Hermes that had changed remarkably, suddenly there were blue horses on red grass). Most of the soldiers were now being sent out to work for various firms in Grün. Christian stood by a lathe, doing shifts as an assistant lathe operator. The soldiers wanted to go home but on the morning of 5 October they were given batons. Pancake laughed and asked Christian what he was going to do. Christian didn’t know, he couldn’t imagine, he didn’t want to imagine. Police came and trained them in their use on the regiment’s football ground. Attack from the left, attack from the right. Recognizing ringleaders, advancing in groups. For a while there was a rumour that Christian’s unit would be sent out with firearms. The soldiers were a motley crew brought together from companies that were left (sometime in the spring of ’89 disarmament had been decreed), from Cottbus, Marienberg, Goldberg, no one could keep track of the streams of transferees any longer. Nip was happy if he could scrape together enough clothes and food for all of them. The kitchen assistant was still allowed through the barracks gate and he brought new rumours, from Grün, where there was unrest in the metal works, from Karl-Marx-Stadt and Leipzig, from Dresden. In the evening they were ordered into lorries. No firearms! Rubber truncheons, summer combat fatigues, body protector, an extra ration of alcohol and cigarettes for each man. Most of the soldiers were silent, staring at the ground. Pancake was smoking.

‘I presume you don’t care,’ the man next to Christian said.

‘Get stuffed,’ Pancake said. He stuck his head out. ‘Nothing to be seen. No signs with place names.’

‘If we only knew where we’re going,’ a younger soldier said, he still had a year to go.

‘To Karl-Marx-Stadt,’ the man next to Christian said. ‘Makes sense, hardly anyone here comes from there.’

‘We’ve already gone past,’ Pancake said.

‘Have you swallowed a map?’ a corporal asked.

‘Plus an odometer.’

‘So it’s Dresden,’ the younger soldier said.

‘Beat up a few queers, something to look forward to for once,’ the corporal said. ‘Hey, Nemo, are there many queers in Dresden? I’m sure there’s loads of them there.’

‘Class enemies,’ Pancake prompted; someone gave him a light.

‘Do you believe what they told us? That it’s just hooligans and that kind of thing? From the West. And counter-revolutionary factions.’

‘And you’re one of them too, hmm? You just watch out,’ the corporal said menacingly. ‘Hey, Nemo, lost your tongue?’

‘Just leave him in peace,’ Pancake said casually.

‘I don’t let people threaten me, and I don’t let people run our state down,’ the corporal said.

‘Christ, what dark hole did you crawl out of?’ growled a sleepy voice from the seats by the driver’s cab.

‘So you’re going to fight,’ Pancake said.

‘Of course, they’re just a load of swine. It’s all they deserve.’

‘Then I’ll whack you over the head. The way you grunt.’

‘I’ll report you, Kretzschmar. You all heard what he said.’

‘You won’t report anyone,’ Christian said.

‘My view entirely,’ Pancake said. ‘No one here heard anything. Nichevo .’

‘They’re supposed to have hanged a policeman in Dresden.’

‘Fairy stories.’

‘They say Central Station’s closed. More damage than from the air raid.’

‘That’s what they tell you. And you fall for all that nonsense. Their fucking lies!’

‘Who said that? Who said fucking lies?’

‘And what if it’s true, eh?’

‘Can’t you lot just shut up,’ the sleepy voice said.

The soldiers fell silent, smoked, checked the numbers of the cars that overtook their convoy of lorries.

Dresden. Dismount.

They were in Prager Strasse. Christian saw the lights but they were something alien, unknown, he came from this town and yet didn’t seem to belong any more, and the objects, the buildings seemed to have come alive: the Round Cinema had coyly covered up the glass cases with the film posters, the Inter-Hotels stared arrogantly over the heads of the soldiers, the riot police, the trainee officers who were assembling, instructed by officers running to and fro, but also by bomber-jacketed civilians: shouts, orders, threats.

Crack down.

Hard.

The enemy.

Counter-revolutionary aggression.

Defence of the homeland of the Workers-and-Peasants.

In front of them people heading for Central Station. The soldiers formed squads of a hundred, hooked arms to make a chain. Christian was beside Pancake in the second row. From the station came a dull rhythmical knocking noise. ‘Forwaaard — march!’ the officers shouted. Christian could feel his legs turning to jelly, the same feeling as he’d had when judgment had been pronounced in the court, oh to be able to fly, to be able to do something that would put an end to the madness, to turn around and walk away, he was afraid and he could see that Pancake was afraid as well. The station was a gurgling, gobbling mechanism, an illuminated throat that swallowed footsteps, spewed out water, smoke and fever. Over there? Was that where they were going? Trams lay, helpless, like seeds in the swelling flesh of a fruit made up of human beings. A car was turned over and set alight, Molotov cocktails fizzed through the air like burning beehives that burst, throwing out thousands of deadly spikes of flame. The soldiers halted by the Heinrich Mann bookshop, closing off Prager Strasse. Christian saw Anne.