Uwe Tellkamp - The Tower

Niklas …

‘ Salve , Christian, come on in, I’ve got something for you.’ It was mostly Niklas who came when he rang the bell at the door with the peeling light-grey paint and the crooked ‘Tietze’ sign covered in verdigris. Gudrun seldom went to the door and when she did Christian knew it wasn’t a good evening to visit Niklas; then he would often see him already in the hall adjusting his beret in the mirror with the curving frame and silhouettes of Reglinde and Ezzo on the right and left (Zwirnevaden Studios, Steiner Guest House), putting on his coat and gloves, checking his midwifery bag, his car keys — then he had a house call, would wave him away: another time, as you can see, today’s not on.

‘You can always go and see Ezzo,’ Gudrun would say, ‘though he has to do his practice and you mustn’t distract him; when you’re there he doesn’t complete his daily quota. And I have to go out soon as well. — But there aren’t any pears for you to gobble up,’ she explained and Christian, feeling slightly awkward, wondered whether she meant it seriously or whether it was intended as a kind of hearty joke, which to his mind didn’t go with Gudrun’s delicate features (Niklas said he’d recognized them in drawings by Dürer) and her stage voice (she was an actress at the theatre), with her smell of preserved rhubarb, ears of corn and deer tallow cream. Or she said, ‘Use sea-sand and almond bran for your acne, I don’t want you to infect Reglinde or Ezzo’, and when Christian replied that his pimples weren’t infectious, gave him a sceptical look, as if he were knowingly telling a lie, but anyway certainly didn’t know enough about such matters to have an opinion that was worth listening to. Sometimes there were better-eyesight weeks when the Tietzes fed mainly on carrots, since Gudrun had read in a magazine at Schnebel’s, the hairdresser’s, or heard from a colleague at the theatre, that carrots contained a lot of vitamin A and that vitamin A was good for your eyesight; during those weeks their eyes were sharp but their stomachs rumbled. Gudrun discovered that sliced carrots absorbed the taste of the meat that was cooked with them in the frying pan — the better-eyesight weeks were followed by the weeks of carrotburgers. She was told that butter was harmful and read something in an old magazine about an outbreak of margarine disease: ‘Professor Doktor Doktor aitch see Karl Linser of the Charité Hospital in Berlin gave an interview, so there must be something to it’, and she immediately threw away all the margarine she had in the house. (‘Carcinogenic! You turn yellow!’) Every year, shortly before Christmas, a scientist (‘a specialist!’) would announce in the newspapers his discovery that bananas were harmful and oranges (except for those from Cuba) contained certain substances that could inhibit children’s growth and lead to constipation in adults (‘he describes it precisely, you can peel them as carefully as you like, there’s always a bit of pith left on the piece, it’s deposited at the pylorus in your stomach and eventually you’re completely blocked up, for the pith of the orange doesn’t get digested!’). No one apart from Gudrun believed these specialists and to the annoyance of her family she gave the West bananas in the yellow packets away to the Hoffmann children. ‘You’ll see what they do to you, you’ll grow up like little dwarves; go on then, eat them, if you don’t believe me, go and catch cancer. You’ll all be eaten away by cancer! You always have to know best.’

‘Oh, do stop your nonsense,’ Richard said, ‘it’s just a very obvious ploy. They don’t want to use their hard currency for tropical fruits, and to avoid criticism, they put this rubbish about. And you fall for it! If it really were true, all monkeys would die soon after they’re born, given the amount of bananas they polish off.’

‘Oh yes, you always know best. The man in the newspaper was a proper scientist and you’re not even a proper doctor.’

‘Oh, come on now!’

‘You just hack people about!’

‘Despite that, I do understand something of these matters,’ said Richard, hurt.

‘Because you get everything out of books, just out of books, most of the stuff in them is pure fabrication, just to get people so they’ll believe anything and so the writers can collect their royalties.’

‘Is that true, Meno?’ At such moments Richard would fold up the newspaper.

‘Physicists and medics are the worst,’ said Meno in a matter-of-fact tone. ‘They fabricate like nobody’s business and have no idea, none whatsoever. And moneygrubbers! Suck the publishers dry like vampires.’

Gudrun was not to be moved. ‘You two can make fun of me if you like, but I know what I know. I read recently that monkeys are monkeys because they eat nothing but bananas. You can let your children grow up into monkeys. Not me. And you, Meno, you haven’t even got any.’

‘ Salve ,’ said Niklas. ‘I’ve got something for you.’ Christian was eager to see what it was this time, a new record from Philharmonia, Trüpel’s record shop, picture postcards from Malthakus or a piece of Saxon sugar cake from Walther’s on Rissleite? Niklas loved surprises and put on a mysterious air, shuffled along in tattered slippers, one hand in the pocket of his baggy trousers, vigorously playing an air piano with the fingers of the other (or was he trying out fingerings on an imaginary viola fingerboard?), over the soft PVC of the hall to the ground-glass living-room door, illuminated with seductively warm light. Gudrun withdrew, either to the bedroom to learn her lines or to darn stockings, eight thimbles on her fingers making a soft, castanet-like noise, in the kitchen, where the cupboards hung crookedly and the window ledges were eaten away with black mould, where the paint on the pipes was blistering and embroidered recipes for Salzburg soufflé, pumpkin soup and a dish called ‘industrial accident’ (an exceptionally fragrant, disgusting-looking hotchpotch the children stirred with long spoons) could hardly cover the damp patches on the walls.

Then there began another session of what Christian was unwilling to call ‘teaching’, although there was a teacher, Niklas, and a pupil, Christian (only occasionally Ezzo or Reglinde as well, sometimes Muriel and Fabian Hoffmann, the children from the house on Wolfsleite); even though it was mostly the pupil who asked the questions and the teacher who gave the answers, ‘teaching’ didn’t describe it, that would have reminded Christian too much of Waldbrunn. The evenings with Niklas — and with the other Tower-dwellers Christian visited — had little in common with the lessons there. When Ezzo and Reglinde had time, Christian would bring his cello and they played string quartets, sometimes Gudrun would take the piano and they would go through a Mozart quintet or the ‘Trout’, the lilting theme of which would regularly send Gudrun into ecstasy and, humming along, she would get the utmost possible out of the yellowed keys of the Schimmel piano, which occasionally stuck in the top and bottom registers.

‘ Salve .’ In the living room the tiled stove was pumping out regular rings of heat, briquettes rumbled onto the grating, the wind howled in the chimney. Sometimes sparks flew out onto the metal plate under the stove door. The windows rattled and banged even when it was snowing and there was no wind outside; the wood in the frames had cracks, the old-fashioned bascule bolts were covered in verdigris and, as in many of the apartments up there, thick draught excluders made in the Harmony Salon workshop from remnants of wool and clothing were stuck between the windows on the sill. Niklas poured a glass of mineral water for Christian and a Wernesgrüner Pils for himself, stroked the threadbare corduroy of the three-piece suite, leant back and said, ‘Aah’ and ‘Right, then’ to the plaster frieze round the ceiling, to the paintings by Kurt Querner on the walls: stolid scenes from the Erzgebirge done in earthy colours, the Luchberg in melting snow; a lane in Börnchen with gnarled trees; one of the famous portraits of Rehn, a peasant farmer, bringing out his pinched features with the rich blue of his eyes, his hands, crooked and knotted like roots, that had always impressed Christian. As did the portrait of Reglinde in the corner with the honey-coloured wing chair: it was one of the painter’s last works, Reglinde at eleven or twelve, in a plain dress, a few dolls beside her that Christian remembered from winter theatre evenings at the Tietzes’ and the Wolfsleite Hoffmanns’ years ago; as he walked home Christian often wondered about Reglinde’s alarmed eyes in the picture.