Uwe Tellkamp - The Tower

She was a few metres away, one of a group of people outside the bookshop and was haranguing a policeman. The policeman raised his baton and hit out. Once, twice. Anne fell down. The policeman bent down and continued to beat her. Kick her. Was immediately backed up when someone from the group tried to stop him. Anne had put her arms over her face like a child. Christian saw his mother lying on the ground, being kicked, thrashed, by a policeman. Lamps slid by like divers. There was an empty area round Christian, a lost darkness into which all the silence and protection and obedience that had gathered inside him slipped. He took his baton in both hands and tried to rush at the policeman, to beat him until he was dead, but someone was holding Christian, someone had wrapped his arms round Christian, someone was shouting, ‘Christian! Christian!’ and Christian shouted back and howled and thrashed about with his legs and wet himself out of impotence, then it was over and he was slumped in Pancake’s vice-like grip like a puppy that has had its neck broken, they could do what they liked with him, he wanted nothing but to be in the future, he wanted nothing but to be elsewhere, Pancake carried him to the rear, Christian was sobbing, Christian wished he were dead.

He was taken back to the barracks’ where the following day he was interrogated by an official of the sealed and barred doors. He studied Christian’s file, rested his chin on his hands woven into a loose mat, said, ‘Hm, hm.’

Christian had been given an injection, a tranquillizer, from the doctor at the Med. Centre. He said (thinking as he did so of Korbinian and Kurtchen: We’ll see each other again. You’re not going to get out of here. Farewell and forgive us): ‘Schwedt’, said it in a matter-of-fact voice.

The other man stood up, went to the window, scratched his unshaven cheek. ‘I’m still thinking what we should do with you. But I don’t think Schwedt is what is required. No. I think you need …’

Christian waited, unconcerned, his nerves weren’t much use any more.

‘… leave,’ the other man said. ‘I’m going to send you on leave. You have a few days left. Go and stay with your grandfather in Schandau. Though … you might do something stupid there. It’s better if you go to Glashütte.’ He took a pass out of one of the drawers, signed it, stamped it. ‘Perhaps you’d better not go via Dresden. There’s a country bus from Grün to Waldbrunn and you know how to continue your journey from there.’

Christian remained seated. The pass was on the table in front of him.

‘Just say thanks, Comrade Captain. We’re not that bad.’

Walpurgis-Night’s Dream:

Meno wrote,

Climb aboard, Arbogast says, breaking a pencil in two and jamming a piece in the rudder. The airship rises, it’s rigid but light and I can see the city, Berlin, the government’s Copper Island. In front of it the ships are stuck in the wide, coagulated Liver Sea, their masts wrecked, their keels beyond dreams, on the isle the outline of a mountain becomes visible, a deposit of still-ticking clocks, behind it is the surging, sucking, swallowing Whirlscrew, the spiral, the downward reflection of the Tower. Blue skies over the Republic, real national-holiday weather. If I look through one of the eyepieces of the strange construction — a kind of huge microscope — fixed to the cockpit of the airship, I can see details; it’s 7 October, the anniversary of the founding of the Republic, a Pioneers choir is singing the song of the young naturalists: Our land has donned its Sunday best, the dew glints in its hair … The fields are full of flowers bright, the trees stand tall and strong, and whisper soft, for our delight — come hear their secret song. We approach. I don’t need the microscope to see that the roads are an extensive network of convolutions of a whitish substance, I can see the two hemispheres floating in the Liver Sea; the piece of screen above the brain, a TV weather map with the felt-pen circles of the areas of high and low pressure, has taken on the tent-grey of the dura mater; the cobwebby skin of the arachnoidea is covered with the rusted hedges of the hundred-year-old roses whose scent washes over the smell of fat from the state-owned fried-food outlets. Neues Deutschland , the organ of the Central Committee of the Socialist Unity Party, has appeared in a special edition, doves of peace, workers’ proclamations, flutter up from the paper, smiling, children-kissing soldiers wave. The official route, along which the cars with the foreign delegations will approach the centre with its rostrums and still-empty main streets for the procession, has been swept clean, the buildings freshly plastered up to the maximum height that can be seen from the official limousines and decked out with optimistic slogans. In the eyepiece nerve cells, with an auratic glow from psycho-cocktails, tropical plants spring up on the banks of the Spree, the Palace of the Republic infiltrated by the furtive, lethargic blooms of flesh-red parasitic flowers, other nerve cells appear to have been shut out, avoided by nutrients and neurotransmitters, they decompose and, in a kind of retro-embryonic abandonment, are walled into the rhythm of the clocks on the mountain, layer by layer the calcareous deposit thickens round their cell membranes. The brain is old, an aged brain, the fine blood tubes supplying it crack like puff pastry when searching endoscopes — I am not the only one looking, the system has distrusting members of staff — follow a curve, arteriosclerotic plaques have been deposited, only allowing single red, oxygen-bringing blood corpuscles through. A gala performance! The Sandman arrives by helicopter. The Skat Court of Arbitration, cross-hatched by fibre roses of rising pain tracts, lays its cards on the table, Karl-Eduard von Schnitzler, the bosun of the Black Channel — its offbeat, jangling, vampire-drama theme tune is playing in the entrance hall of the Palace of the Republic, a lamp shop that today has spared no expense with the illumination — has turned into a naval shipworm, his chief propagandist’s mouth twisted in a grimace of hatred and torment, we can see him bore into the room of Make a Wish where Uta Schorn and Gerd E. Schäfer weave little anecdotes into their cosy chat, but that is not his destination, nor the jolly lads in blue from Eight Bells, Sea Astern singing sea shanties to the squeezebox and small talk, he traverses Kati’s Ice Show and disappears in the depths of the Book Ministry lodged in Wernicke’s Centre, the auditory word centre, drills into the crumbling mass of files and log books. Dance the samba with me, Samba, samba the whole night through. Dance the samba with me, For the samba brings me close to you, rings out over Alexanderplatz, the guests at the state reception turn to the culinary delights: ham from Wiepersdorf pigs that fed under the olive oaks there, venison between decoratively crossed Suhl rifles, parsley in the barrels, to go with it Edel brandy, lemonade for the fraternal Soviet delegation, wine from Meissen, pineapples and all the other things the TV chef recommends — Truth! Truth! the Minol oriole cried, and it is printed there, in the Party newspapers, the CENTRAL ORGAN and in the district newspapers, do you see the wires, they’re as fine as cobwebs, touch them, a telephone will ring and a trembling editor will reply, and if it’s time for the drinking trough, every Thursday after the meeting of the Politburo (Tuesdays) and after the discussions of the Secretariat of the Central Committee (Wednesdays), then gather, you editors-in-chief of all the newspapers of Copper Island in the depths of the copper forest, of the mass organizations, with the head of the government press office, plug the functionaries into the machine, the apparatus: the linguistic punch unrolls its tongue = lingua! white-gloved robot hands pull, the linguistic punch starts up, trial run! there’s a clinking on the floor: empty word shells, tin headlines, paper streamers curl: THE MOST IMPORTANT CRITERION OF OBJECTIVITY IS COMMITMENT, COMRADE! TO BE OBJECTIVE MEANS TO COMMIT ONESELF TO THE LAWS GOVERNING THE PROGRESS OF HISTORY TO THE REVOLUTION TO SOCIALISM! The linguistic punch had a red button: the Lenin button that is now pressed: THE TRUE PRESS IS A COLLECTIVE PROPAGANDIST, AGITATOR, ORGANIZER! –