Uwe Tellkamp - The Tower

On the dot of eight he was at the garden gate of 8 Oktoberweg and rang the cracked bell that was held on with sticking plaster.

The nights, Christian felt, were far too short. He had just hit the stop button on his alarm clock to switch off its rattle, that burst of machine-gun fire in the world of a beautiful dream; but then there was the cold of the room in the grey half-light of dawn, the sound of Falk Truschler’s unmoved snoring in the lower bunk across from him — when would he learn to be on time? Never, Frau Stesny, the manager of the hostel, had said — the bed, table, a few chairs appeared, Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli’s ecstatic face on the black-and-white calendar that the girls and the boarders from the twelfth year in the room next door envied him for. From the other side! Jens Ansorge had assumed a crooked grin and waved his index finger. Schnürchel won’t like that at all. And indeed, during his round of the rooms Schnürchel, the Russian teacher, had demanded the calendar be removed. Christian left it there and only took it down on Saturdays, before Schnürchel came sneaking along to stick his face, chafed raw from his razor, into matters that, unfortunately, did concern him. It was Verena above all who was interested in the calendar and even more in the musicians whose pictures were on it. Verena the unapproachable, the mocker, the beauty. Christian had dreamt of her. Perhaps it was her hair, its colour the brown of instruments, that was what he had first noticed about her in the summer work-week that the future pupils at the Maxim Gorki Senior High School had had to complete; perhaps her eyes, darkly shining like the cherries on the gnarled tree in the garden of his clock-grandfather in Glashütte when they were overripe and their skins would burst open in the next shower of rain. It was probably a movement, however; she had dried her hair in the school library, where half of the boys were housed during the work camp; that afternoon he had been there by himself, lying on his camp bed; she had come in and asked if she might use the socket, the one over in the girls’ accommodation wasn’t working; and then, through the whine of the dryer, she’d wanted to know why he was lying there in the murky room, shutting himself off from all the things the others were doing. He lowered the book he was pretending to read, it was Goethe’s Elective Affinities and he found it deadly boring but it was far above the stuff the others read — if they read at all — and left no doubts as to its quality. She stared at him; he stared back, confused by her finely drawn, dark-red lips that were swelling into a provocative pout under his gaze, by the index finger with which she scratched her neck, by the fingernail blackened by a hammer blow that missed its target. The girls had been in the schoolyard repairing the desks, while the voice of Tamara Danz of the Silly rock group was bellowing out from the radio that Herr Stabenow, the boyish physics teacher, had set up by the flagpoles; suddenly the cry of pain and all the boys, apart from himself and Siegbert Füger, dashed over to Verena, who was sobbing. ‘Too dumb even to knock in a nail, these women,’ Siegbert had said, wrinkling his nose. ‘And look at them all running. And her, she’s going to make some man’s life a misery, I can tell you. Much too pretty. And sure to be as conceited as they come. My mother always says: “You can’t build a house with jewels, my lad.” And my mother knows what’s what.’

Christian peered down at Falk again. He was still snoring, though now he’d pulled his pillow over his ears.

He’d been struck by her at the very first meeting of the future pupils of the senior high school. The pupils had come with their parents. The Dacia with the Waldbrunn numberplate had parked beside the Lada from Dresden; Richard had noticed the first-aid kit on the rear shelf and the doctor’s special parking badge on the dashboard of the Dacia and immediately started a chat with his colleague: ‘Hoffmann.’ — ‘Winkler.’ — ‘Pleased to meet you.’ — ‘The pleasure’s all mine.’ — ‘Blahblah.’ — ‘Blahblahblah.’ Verena had waited, scrutinized the Dresden numberplate, the paved corner with the flagpoles and bust of Maxim Gorki, then cast Christian a quick glance so that Robert, with a grin, whispered, ‘Just look at that peach, man’, in his ear. The multipurpose room in the basement had been set up for the meeting. There was a piano, a Marx — Engels — Lenin poster in front of a lectern draped in red cloth, a table behind it, at which a few teachers were talking to each other, ignoring the chatter of voices. Most of the pupils knew each other already. Christian felt as if they were all looking him over, for he seemed to be the only one no one knew. When he came in there was just one seat left, by the entrance; sitting there was like being on show, which didn’t seem to bother Robert in the least, he just brazenly chewed his chewing gum and cast his eyes over the girls. Christian, on the other hand, was embarrassed; his acne had to choose that day of all days to blossom like a willow in spring. Verena’s family had sat in the back row, under the high tilt windows, so that Christian could observe Verena. She greeted some of the others in a friendly but, as it seemed to him, distant manner. The babble of voices gradually subsided. Furtive glances. Christian lowered his head and didn’t dare look at anything apart from his fingernails, his new watch or Baumann, the white-haired maths teacher who, from the lectern far away at the front, was giving an introduction to socialist education for young people; as he spoke, his apple-cheeked face seemed strangely roguish — as if he himself didn’t believe everything he was saying. But Christian sensed that one should trust that friendly appearance less than the flash of his clear and sharp rimless spectacles … Christian suspected he would never be in the good books of that archetypal schoolteacher with the flashing spectacles. His ability at maths was too awful. The dark-haired girl by the windows at the back, he thought, would definitely be good at maths, she would definitely be good at everything in school. A swot, no question.

‘So why do you shut yourself off from everything?’ the swot had asked on that afternoon during the summer work camp, in the school library, the hair dryer in her hand; only she and he in the room. ‘I suppose everything we poor benighted village kids do is too boring or too ordinary for a boy from the big city of Dresden?’ He wanted to make a quick-witted reply, but nothing occurred to him and that made him even more furious when immediately afterwards Verena, without waiting for an answer, shrugged her shoulders and went out.

A boy from the big city. How they’d secretly — and sometimes less secretly — mocked him, made remarks about his strange habits. He didn’t go for a shower with the others but always arranged things so that he was by himself; nothing in the world would have persuaded him to display his puberty-stricken skin to others; he didn’t go with them to the swimming pool in Freital and he preferred to pursue his own thoughts or dreams rather than seek out the company of the other boys. He only sensed something like understanding from Jens Ansorge and Siegbert Füger; at least they left him in peace. He had been pleased when he learnt he was to share a room in the boarders’ house with them. Even though he didn’t go with them when they went into the town, he did also look round Waldbrunn, by himself and in the evening, when he could be reasonably sure he wouldn’t meet the other pupils. Waldbrunn, the administrative centre of the eastern Erzgebirge; the F170 motorway wound its way above the school, descended into the river valley of the Rote Bergfrau, cut through the central district as it headed for the ridge of the Erzgebirge and the Czech border, which it reached just after Zinnwald. Simple, low houses, church and castle, each with a tower; in the distance, when you came by bus from Dresden, drove over Windhaushügel and down into Waldbrunn and the new housing appeared on the right, you could see the gleam of the Kaltwasser, the reservoir that dammed the second Waldbrunn river, the Wilde Bergfrau. To the left of the motorway was a potato field, during the work camp they’d picked potatoes, they got ten pfennigs a basket, hard work, they were picking the potatoes on piecework, their backs ached from all the bending and he, the boy from the big city, had been one of the worst, even a lot of the girls had managed more baskets than he did. In the evening of the two potato-picking days, he had crept into his camp bed completely exhausted; he’d had to put up with a few teasing, sarcastic, even contemptuous remarks. From the beginning he felt there was a gap between himself and the other pupils of that senior high school.