Uwe Tellkamp - The Tower

He had a collection of postcards that he would often look at in the evening, by the light of his reading lamp. They were sepia and coloured views of distant places with exotic-sounding names that stimulated his imagination: Smyrna, Nice. You could see the white horses of the Mediterranean as it broke on the Promenade des Anglais, a clay pot with an agave on the left, on the right edge the row of fashionable hotels along the Promenade lined with palm trees. ‘Salerno, Piazza M oLuciani’ on a photograph that at the edges merged into the yellowing white of the postcard; as if wiped away by the erasing fingers of time. However, the ones that led to the profoundest daydreams, farthest removed from reality, were a series of views of Constantinople that he had been allowed to select from duplicates in Herr Malthakus’s stamp and picture postcard shop in Dresden. A leaden blue sea: ‘Vue de l’Amirauté sur la Corne d’Or’; ‘Vue de Beycos, côte d’Asie (Bosphore)’; ‘Salut de Constantinople’; ‘Le Selamlik. Revue militaire’ with a crowd of black, cube-shaped carriages dotted with the red fezzes of the crowd. Those were the places where one ought to be, to live. When he looked at the cards Christian dreamt, dreamt of adventures, of conversations between pirates overheard in harbour taverns that would enable him to save beautiful women who had been abducted. Constantinople. Salerno. The Bosphorus. And ‘la Corne d’Or’ was the Golden Horn. That was where heroes lived, that was where adventure was. And what did he have? Waldbrunn. He would walk round the little town but with the best will in the world he couldn’t find any sailing ships such as there were on the pictures of Constantinople, the fairy-tale city. No muezzin called from the dark, bastion-like church on the market square and Herr Luther, in blackened sandstone on which the pigeons perched and left white theses, proclaimed, ‘A safe stronghold our God is still’ in chiselled letters. None of the women queuing at the butcher’s or the baker’s on the market square were anything like Princess Fatima, who, in gratitude for her rescue from the hands of the negro Zurga, would marry the adventurer Almansor — that was Christian’s alias in the Orient. But to get married: Christian, standing on the bridge over the Wilde Bergfrau as it foamed over smooth round stones the size of footballs, shook his head. He would never get married, never, never, as long as he lived. An adventurer had adventures, a hero was solitary; with Fatima he had an affair that, as in the films he saw at the cinema, ended in the sunset, wild, painful and sadly beautiful. He looked across at the tannery: in the past the Wilde Bergfrau had powered it with its steely clear water; now it housed a museum. In the autumn he had enjoyed following the course of the Wilde Bergfrau, had thrown red maple leaves into it and, head bowed and hands clasped behind his back, watched them bobbing up and down; had Verena seen him like that, a glint of mockery at his poses would have crept into her eyes again. It seems that in the big city people mature earlier, she would have cried, as she had on the afternoon when their unit had gone to the cinema at the end of the street that ran along the bank of the Wilde Bergfrau, beyond the castle that now housed the local Party headquarters. Her eyes had flashed and she had rolled her hair round her index finger, and he, in his fury, had thought: You don’t understand, you silly Waldbrunn goose; I’ve just come from Constantinople and not from your east Erzgebirge dump with its paved marketplace and ten hunchback houses round it; it’s the flutter of Sinbad’s sails I can hear, not that of the wings of the few provincial Trabbis puttering past us. If you only knew that Sinbads don’t drive Trabbis.

‘Knife.’

The operating-theatre nurse handed Wernstein the scalpel.

‘Adjust light, please.’

Richard was enjoying himself: he had handed this operation over to Wernstein and taken the role of assistant himself and now he was actually treating him as a junior physician. If you’re going to do something, you might as well do it properly. He reached up and focused the light of the lamp on the operating area that was framed in green cloths. ‘There you are, sir.’

Wernstein cut open the fascia. He didn’t respond to the joke; his tension was evident as he tried to widen the cut with his finger. The houseman, Herr Grefe, who was standing at the other side of the operating table holding the retractors, grinned behind his mask; the movement of his mouth that stretched the material of his mask and the wrinkles at the corners of his eyes indicated it.

‘I bet you anything you won’t manage the fascia with just your finger.’

‘We’ll see.’ Wernstein took a deep breath, asked the anaesthetist to add the antibiotic drop by drop.

‘Which fascia are we actually talking about here?’

Grefe, whom Richard had asked, started. ‘Fascia … er … the fascia …’

‘Lata,’ Wernstein said after a while. ‘The fascia lata. But that’s not the entire truth. What I’m trying to force apart here with my fingers but am never going to manage to open like a can of beans is … the tractus iliotibialis. Where did you do your preliminary study?’

‘In Leipzig.’

‘There’s a motto over the entrance to the anatomical lecture theatre there.’

You had to know that if you were working under Dr Hoffmann. The anaesthetist, who was just looking over the edge of the guard cloth, smirked.

‘Anatomia — clavis et clavus medicinae.’

‘The key and the rudder of medicine,’ Nurse Elfriede, who handed the operator the instruments, translated in a dry voice. ‘Young man, for the last fifteen years all Leipzig students have been asked that question in this operating theatre.’

‘Are you suggesting I’m starting to bore you?’

Nurse Elfriede rolled her eyes. ‘I’ll give Dr Wernstein the scissors rather than answer that. You know that you’re our guiding light, Dr Hoffmann.’

Muttering, Wernstein got down to work and started to cut open the fibrous tissue. — How difficult he finds it to admit I was right. Now he’s sawing away at it after all. But, dammit, I was just the same. Smiling to himself, Richard staunched the flow of blood. At the same time he was irritated by the houseman. These young people, they came to an operation and had no idea! If we’d dared do that in the old days … He thought of a few of the surgeons under whom he’d developed his technique, eruptive characters inclined to outbursts of rage if things didn’t go precisely the way they expected; most of them came from the operating bunkers and field hospitals of the war, from the mills of unimaginable carnage. With Grosse the assistants had to prepare everything; once they’d finished he would make his way, godlike, eyes half closed, unapproachable, as if in a trance, gently waving his hands still moist from disinfection, to the operating table, have someone help him into his gown and gloves before silently holding out his hand for the scalpel that the operating-theatre nurse placed in it with due reverence. Woe to any assistant who was unable to answer one of the questions he would suddenly fire off into the silence. The boss wouldn’t look at him again, his career with him was over.

‘Thread.’ Richard tied off a bleeding vessel. With decisively made cuts Wernstein deepened the incision, felt for the fracture. His every movement, the elegance and assurance with which he handled the instruments, his finely gauged sense of when it was necessary to proceed with caution and when he could work more purposefully, his feeling for the hidden dangers of an operation, for all the deviations from operational and anatomical theory when, suddenly reduced to a blind man in a pitch-dark tunnel, you had to rely on instinct alone — all that spoke of the talent, intuition and outstanding technical ability of a born surgeon. Richard had always been surprised at how varied things could be in his profession. As a student he had assumed there was no difference between one doctor and another, more specifically between one surgeon and another. Everything was done according to the textbooks and surgery seemed to be something like ticking off boxes in a catalogue: every patient was a human being and what the human being the surgeon was interested in was could be seen in the meticulous drawings in Spalteholz’s and Waldeyer’s handbooks of anatomy. That’s where the problem lies, these are the anatomical conditions, off we go. Practice had taught him otherwise. There were surgeons who worked incredibly slowly, who were afraid of every vessel, every little mucous membrane and, as they operated, transmitted this sense of fear to all those around them and who yet, for all their caution, had no better, sometimes even worse results than their apparently more casual colleagues. Richard remembered Albertsheim, his fellow assistant with Uebermuth in Leipzig. Albertsheim, whom they called Guarneri, for when he had a good day his intuition and his speed combined with perfect technique were as astonishing as a Guarneri violin. At such times Albertsheim would reach heights that Richard never reached, and presumably never would reach, and that had drawn cries of admiration even from Uebermuth. If he had a bad day, however, he operated ‘like a drayman’ and it was said that on his bad days Guarneri had also made ‘drayman’s violins’, which had led to the nickname, which didn’t even annoy Albertsheim — on the contrary, he cultivated his artist’s pose. On the other hand he had never managed to develop even an average feel for diagnosis, he could hardly distinguish crepitations in the lung from a pleural effusion, the slightly metallic rasp over a tubercular cavity from the wheeze of an asthmatic lung. But those were clinical skills, they were the business of the Internal Medicine specialist, of whom he would speak, like many a surgeon, with mild condescension — as if clinical knowledge were superfluous for a surgeon. Nor was he interested in further developments. ‘Great surgeons make great incisions,’ Albertsheim had said, mocking Richard, who had his doubts about this absolute principle of these surgical monarchs, since he had found that great incisions can also cause great infections. Wernstein was not like that. What was it Albert Fromme, the first rector of the Medical Academy, had said? A surgeon has the heart of a lion and the hands of a woman. And now the houseman was moving the retractors of his own accord. Wernstein and Richard looked up simultaneously.