Uwe Tellkamp - The Tower

(Emcee) ‘The State Opera ballet will now perform the polonaise from Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake . For those of you watching on black-and-white televisions I will describe the pretty tutus of our comrade ballet dancers.’

An embrace here, an embrace there, outside a couple of demonstrators but they’re all singing and dancing, because it creates a good atmosphere, the head of the riot police mobile unit, with his office in the House of the Teacher doesn’t dare to order a large-scale operation to clear Alexanderplatz . –

(Emcee) ‘Now comes the “Awake” chorus from Richard Wagner’s Mastersingers .’

(General Secretary) ‘Today the German Democratic Republic is an outpost of peace and socialism in Europe.’

(Gorbachev) ‘Anyone who comes too late …’

(The people, in chorus) ‘Freedom!’

(Minister of Police) ‘Most of all I’d like to go and give these scoundrels a thrashing they won’t forget in a hurry … No one needs to tell me how to deal with class enemies.’

(The people, in chorus) ‘Freedom!’

(Minister of Security) ‘Well, once he, Comrade Gorbachev that is, has left, I’ll give the order to move in and that’ll be the end of humanism.’

Porous zones, the brain switches off awake fields, the alpha waves of sleep can be seen. But this little attachment, the thyroid gland, the control centre of metabolism, never sleeps, a grey concrete palace with reflective or painted-on windows below which the lymph creeps along the slimy lactiferous duct, infested with enemies –

… but then, all at once …

the clocks struck –

Gudrun said, ‘We step out of our roles.’ Niklas said, ‘ Fidelio ’s on at the Opera and at the prisoners’ chorus the people stand up and join in.’ Barbara said, ‘And Barsano’s sitting in the royal box, his mind elsewhere, and doesn’t join in.’ Anne, her face still beaten up, her wrists swollen from the blows with the truncheon, took a candle. Richard and Robert, who had saved up his leave for the last days before his discharge, checked whether the slogan ‘No violence’ was dry on the paper sashes they were going to wear. They went out into the street.

There were a lot of people out in the streets. All their faces showed the fear of the last few days, grief and unease, but also something new: they shone. Richard could see that these were no longer the dejected, slump-shouldered people of the previous years who slunk along, greeting and cautiously nodding to people but avoiding holding eye contact for too long, they had raised their heads, still breathing apprehensively, but already full of pride that this directness was possible, that they could walk upright and declare who they were, what they wanted and what they didn’t want, that they were walking with increasingly firm steps and felt the same elemental joy as children who have stood up and are learning to walk. The Schwedes and the Orrés had linked arms with the inhabitants of Wisteria House, Hauschild, the coal merchant, came out of Ulenburg, the house next door to Caravel, with his wife and many children (‘like organ pipes’, Barbara said), looking as if they’d lit their whole winter’s supply of candles, Herr Griesel with his wife and Glodde, the postman, who’d just come home from work, locked his Trabant, the saw fell silent in Rabe’s, the carpenter’s, workshop, he whistled to his apprentices, took a candle stub out of the pocket of his corduroy trousers.

For a moment they hesitated — down Ulmenleite to the church or along Rissleite towards Walther’s bakery? The queue outside the shop began to precipitate, grew thin, dispersed, the assistants looked out, crumpling the skirts of their aprons in their hands, ‘Bring some rolls,’ one man shouted, hands waved, cries of ‘Join us, we need every man’, and Frau Knabe, pushing her intimidated husband forward, added, ‘That’s right — and every woman.’ Ulrich threw his Party badge away. Barbara put off an appointment with Lajos Wiener, who wrote on the door of his salon, ‘Closed due to revolution’. Frau von Stern, with a lunch box slung round her neck, thumped the ground with her heavy, gnarled walking stick: ‘In case anyone tries to tread on my toes. Oh, that I’ve been spared to see this, after October the seventeenth.’ And for Richard the day, that October day of 1989, suddenly became serious and simple, full of energy that seemed to bring out the hairline cracks in the clouds behind the trees, he saw the potholes, the futile blobs of asphalt, the perfunctorily patched cover of the old roads, which were now about to break out, like a snake sloughing, and even though twilight was already falling there came through the fissures something of the overpowering freshness he’d felt as a boy when they were up to some prank, the sudden flash of one of those splendid ideas that infringed the norm but gilded his inner self with a nimbus of happiness and battlesong. ‘Hans,’ he said to his brother, who had come from Wolfsleite; ‘Richard,’ the toxicologist said, and that was all, even though they were their first words for a long time. Iris and Muriel rejected the candles Pastor Magenstock offered them, Fabian too, now a young man with his somewhat ludicrous hussar’s moustache, declined; they weren’t carrying candles, nor wearing Gorbachev badges, as so many were, they didn’t want better socialism, they wanted no socialism at all, and for their hopes they didn’t need a sermon, nor a candle chain. The Honichs too, as Richard had to admit, demonstrated courage, unrolling the GDR flag, the mocked and despised flag that here and there, as Richard was aware, had been disarmed by a circular cut; they joined the rest and were admitted, without anyone taking further notice of them.

They rang doorbells. Some didn’t come, some curtains twitched and were lowered again, some dogs started to bark and weren’t silenced, and Trüpel from the record shop, hobbled — sorry, sorry — past with a conveniently broken leg and an inconvenient plaster cast on it. Malivor Marroquin’s fancy-dress shop remained closed, no warning signs out in the street, no photo of the more and more confident demonstrators was taken by the white-haired Chilean.

… but then, all at once …

the clocks struck:

and Copper Island tips under the weight of the people, who take up position on the starboard side, the red-and-white checked tablecloths slither down to where foam and sea are gyrating in a funnel, the briquettes with a too high water content disintegrate –

(Emcee, handing out medals from a shoe box) ‘There you are. Medals! For exemplary achievements in socialist competition! There you are. Plenty of everything. There’s no charge!’

the giants on the Kroch skyscraper in Leipzig let their hammers thunder on the bell, Philipp Londoner sits in silence in the darkened room, the workers in the cotton mill switch off the machines and join the processions of demonstrators, 100,000 people marching into the centre on this Monday, to the rose-wreathed university, to the Gewandhaus, shining like a crystal in the twilight, the people trying out their voice, refusing to be put off, weary of all the lies and barred doors and windows –

(Eschschloraque) ‘Mole, blind in the dark earth, morning noon and night, but without time, that was what made him afraid, without time . A ship with a mad captain and a mad crew, full of noise and rage between yesterday today tomorrow … a journey woven on the Big Wheel, which is still turning in the mist and we the kings at a board on which is marked in blood the rise and fall of empires, the eternal recurrence of what is eternally the same, and for a brief moment the suggestion of a sunbeam and lovers embraced by the executioner’s block of the beautiful new world, in which purity is an evil beauty and a black womb gives birth to a black womb’ –