Uwe Tellkamp - The Tower

After a few minutes a weary-sounding voice came from the loudspeaker above the adverts and said something in a Saxon accent that Christian couldn’t understand; but the conductor stood up and carefully closed the door to his shed. Slowly, the round leather change-bag dangling over his well-worn uniform, he went to the driver’s cabin at the front — its many control buttons seemed pointless to Christian, since the funicular was steered by the cable and rollers and was brought to a halt automatically, if the cable should tear, by a sophisticated clasp mechanism. Perhaps the buttons were there for some other reason, perhaps for communication or for psychological purposes: the buttons must have some meaning, a function, and would demand knowledge, guard against monotony and work-weariness; moreover, halfway along, one of the cars had to move onto a siding to allow the other to pass. The cabin door closed behind the conductor with a crash; it was opened with a box spanner and was not connected to the cable for the other doors.

‘The train is about to depart,’ said the voice from the loudspeaker. The carriage remained motionless for a moment, then smoothly started moving, gliding out of the station. Christian turned round and watched the path and platform grow smaller, until all that remained was the oval of the tunnel entrance against the flinty green of the sky; gradually that grew smaller as well, and darkness pressed in from either side. For a short while, before the exit came into view, the only light was provided by the dim tunnel lamps and the headlights. Christian took a book out of his bag; his Uncle Meno had given it to him. He had hardly had time to look at it during the previous week: the pre-Christmas mood had spread round Waldbrunn, and though the lessons weren’t as strict as usual, preparations for the birthday party, and the daily bus journeys home to rehearse the Italian piece with the others, had taken up his time. Christian intended to read the book more thoroughly during the Christmas holidays. It was a fairly fat tome, printed on fibrous paper and bound in coarse linen; he knew the picture on the cover from a facsimile edition of the Manesse Manuscript he had seen in his uncle’s library and at the Tietzes’, in a particularly handsome and well-preserved example — Niklas, Ezzo’s and Reglinde’s father, often read it. The picture showed the legendary figure of Tannhäuser, a man with long red hair in a blue robe with a white cloak, a black cross on his breast; on either side above him were his coat of arms and a winged helmet, both black at the top and yellow below, above stylized tendrils with leaves; ‘Tanhuser’, as his name was written above the plate, had raised his left hand to ward off, or perhaps cautiously greet, someone or something; his right hand was holding his cloak. Christian opened the volume — Old German Poems , selected and edited with notes by Meno Rohde — and returned to the legend he’d been reading on the journey from Waldbrunn to Dresden. The lamp on the ceiling above him started to make a rasping noise, the page the book was opened at had a pale, grainy look and, with the gentle vibration of the carriage, the letters started to blur before his eyes. He couldn’t concentrate on the story of the Knight of the Golden Spur who had set out with seventy-two ships to free Queen Bride. The lamp went out. He put the book back in his bag, and felt for the barometer, a present for his father that he had collected from the former lodge of the Association of Elbe Boatmen. It was safely packed and cushioned in the bundle of dirty laundry that filled his bag.

In its slow but steady upward climb, occasionally jolted by unevennesses between the rollers, the funicular reached Buchensteig, the path that ran alongside the track, and continued parallel to it for a while, a few metres above the ground. You could see into lighted windows; an outstretched hand could easily have touched the passing carriage. At the top the Sibyllenhof restaurant, which had been closed for several years, came into view beside the second tunnel; its terraces stuck out like school slates that had been forgotten there by giant children years ago. The carriage would head straight towards the restaurant, only turning off into the entrance of the tunnel that led to the station shortly before it reached the bottom terrace. On some journeys Christian had dreamt of bygone banquets in the dark, uninviting rooms: of gentlemen pursuing cultured conversations, wearing starched shirts with jet buttons and watch chains over the pockets of their waistcoats; of flower sellers in pages’ uniforms, called to a table with the hint of a click of the fingers, to present ladies, wearing masses of jewellery which gave off fiery sparks under the bowls of the crystal chandeliers, with a rose; of dances for which the band struck up, the pale violinist with pomaded hair and wearing a chrysanthemum in his buttonhole … The light of the January moon slid over the roofs of the houses that sloped steeply down to Grundstrasse, making the ridges shine and giving the snowy gardens patches of powdery brightness which, with the white highlights of isolated, snow-covered sheds or stacks of wood, merged at the edges with the shadows cast by the bushes and trees.

Christian realized they were above the painter and illustrator Vogelstrom’s house, a grey castle that Meno called ‘Cobweb House’, sparking off in Christian’s mind a vision which, as he looked out of the window, his face close to the cold glass, lurked behind the everyday sobriety of the unapproachable windows and tall trees. In the towering mass of the Loschwitz slopes, on the other side of Grundstrasse, which was partly visible as a pale ribbon winding in the depths, the needles of moonlight were sucked into the darkness in front of the watch towers of East Rome and faded at the bridge, across which soldiers were heading for the checkpoint on Oberer Plan. The garden of Cobweb House was in darkness, sheltered from eyes and events, and Christian could hardly even see the tops of the pear and beech trees, with their dusting of snow and their filigree branches hanging like wisps of smoke over the depths; it flowed into the contours, the narrow cleft between the Buchensteig path and the battlements, like brightness in the cross-hatching on old, unfinished drawings. He saw the fountain, the almost completely overgrown driveway that curved round the weathered stone catfish on the fountain and led up over mossy steps; the beginning of a poem had been chiselled into the panel over the catfish, but the letters were blurred, already half erased. However hard he tried, Christian couldn’t remember how the poem went, but he could clearly picture the broken-off barbels of the catfish, its sightless eyes and the dark covering of moss; he remembered his superstitious fear of the beast, and also of the long-defunct fountain that gave off a graveyard chill when he went to see Vogelstrom with Meno, and his almost childish fear, which was only made greater by the strange conversations that took place between Meno and the gaunt painter in Cobweb House. But it was less the words and topics themselves that had seemed strange than the atmosphere of the house; with his childish understanding, the little that had been comprehensible to the boy of eleven or twelve seemed right and appropriate for the adult world that bent down to him from its heights. He could remember words such as ‘Merigarto’ or ‘Magelone’, words which, in his awakening surmise, seemed more like conjurations than concepts that meant something in the real world, words that touched him in a curious way and that he was never to forget, even though they had seemed less mysterious than the paintings in the gloomy hall of the house: idyllic landscapes, garden scenes with flute-playing fauns and naiads flooded with bright blue light, a Dutch-brown series of ancestors, serious-looking men and women with a flower, a nettle or — he had looked at this for a long time in astonishment — holding a golden snail. These paintings, fading away in the hall, which Vogelstrom and Meno only rarely glanced at as they passed them, seemed to have much more to do with those two words: the one for the island and the other the name of a girl who appeared out of the depths of time and disappeared back into them; he had noted them and repeatedly savoured their long-forgotten euphony in murmured soliloquies. Sound, too, had stayed with him from their conversations, like the babble of a stream from Vogelstrom’s studio, which was so cold in the winter that frost sent out tentacles towards the easels and the lozenge-patterned wallpaper, and the two men, Meno with Vogelstrom’s coat over his shoulders, Vogelstrom himself in several pullovers and shirts, hurried round the room with steaming breath, their voices scarcely distinguishable when they were in the library and Christian was looking at one of the ancestors’ portraits in the hall and listening; now and then there was the sound of cautious laughter, expressions of praise for, or disgust with, the tobacco they happened to be smoking. Sometimes Meno would call out and show him steel or copper engravings in musty-smelling tomes, the painter cautiously turning the pages, and it was probably then that they uttered the strange words that stuck in his ear, words he had never heard before, words like those two magical names.