Uwe Tellkamp - The Tower

Niklas talked about productions from the past. The sound of the ‘abbot’s clock’, of Ezzo’s violin exercises in the adjoining room, of Gudrun declaiming, ‘Oh, who is the villain, speak’, of the chimes of the grandfather clock with the brass face fading away over the carpet, in front of the ceiling-high bookcase with Dehio art books, alphabetically arranged biographies of musicians and volumes of correspondence from Europe’s past, all mingled with names from the heyday of opera and music, which for Niklas was a German art, with all due respect to the Beatles and ABBA, about whom he could talk knowledgeably at the evening meetings of the Friends of Music. ‘The pentatonic scale … now, when the orchestra plays in Japan, they can’t get enough of our music. Mozart on the pentatonic scale, well, OK. America has its dschezz and Dschordsch Görschwin, it has Börnschtein’s West Said Schdori and Nyu York … Great, great. People are always saying the Germans are the nation of poets and philosophers, I would say they’re the nation of musicians. In no other area is the Germans’ contribution so unique as in music. Leaving aside Verdi and Berlioz, Puccini and Vivaldi … there’s not much left! A few Russians, Tchaikovsky, Mussorgsky, Borodin, but that’s a special case, that’s already peripheral. Shostakovich as well and Prokoviev, Stravinsky, but he’s too abstract, it comes from his head, not his heart … No, music is a German art and that’s that.’

Niklas talked about the singers of the Dresden Opera, about the great conductors of the past. Outside the rain would beat against the windows, the snow swirl, the flakes, a hundred eyes sticking to the panes, slowly melt. In the summer Christian and Niklas would sit on the veranda, beside the music room. It smelt of the white-painted wooden furniture that came from Gudrun’s parents’ house, of the tobacco from Niklas’s pipe that he would smoke with relish on mild evenings with open windows, the humming of the bees, orange and blue sunset streaks and the call of the blackbirds. In the winter Christian would listen to Niklas, to the wide sweep of his memories bringing the past to life again, in the living room and the music room, where Niklas would first of all sit by the telescope table, then, when it was time to listen to music, on the chaise longue in front of the mirror that had turned a watery grey. The record on the turntable of the hi-fi machine with the imitation beech veneer would start to revolve and they listened to the singers Niklas had been talking about. Then, Christian felt, something happened to the room: the green wallpaper with the pattern of protozoa and diatoms seemed to open up; the Viennese clock acquired a human face; the yellow artificial rose under the glass cover on the escritoire in the corner where Niklas wrote his letters in ink on hand-made, deckle-edge Spechthausen paper, seemed to grow rampant and branch out, the way it happened in silhouette films in the Tannhäuser Cinema in which shadow plants (roses? thistles? neither Muriel nor Christian nor Fabian knew) twined round a castle; the photos of the singers on the walls were no longer close, looked as if they had floated up from the cabins of ships that had sunk; the rasping sound of the stylus sounded like the swell of the sea. Niklas sat leaning forward, tense, caught up in the sweep of the melodies, the entries. Christian observed his uncle surreptitiously; he too seemed to be part of the world of the tides, the murmur of the sea from days long past, not the present; sometimes Christian was even slightly startled to hear his uncle talk of everyday matters such as snow chains for the Shiguli or Dynamo Dresden’s last game; in this world of the thousand little things and the curse of climbing the stairs to the offices of public officials he seemed to be merely a visitor, wrapped in the cloak of a kind fairy. Christian had to feel his way back into his everyday world when he said goodbye to Niklas, had to find his way back as he went home (Caravel was diagonally opposite), often taking detours, his head full of the names of singers and composers, anecdotes from the life of the State Orchestra during previous decades, full of pictures of German cathedrals and features of pre-war Dresden.

And with Malthakus it was the stamps, the historical postcards with the landscapes, that the dealer’s narrative commentary turned into little living tableaux; the albums with stamps from distant countries: ‘papillons, 100 différents’, ‘bateaux, 100 différents’; butterflies from Guyana and Réunion, Gabon and Senegal; ship motifs: ‘République du Bénin’, Indochina, São Tomé e Príncipe; triangular stamps from Afghanistan joined by a perforated line at the hypotenuse that the dealer patiently explained: ‘The ship here with the red-and-white striped sails is a cog of the Hanseatic League’ (Christian knew it from an engraving on the glass door of the staircase at Caravel); ‘the one on the other side, with the blood-red sails, a Venetian merchantman’; then he rotated the globe and tapped his finger on the places that sounded legendary to the ears of the Heinrichstrasse and Wolfsleite children — Benin, previously the Kingdom of Dahomey, a narrow country on the west coast of Africa, capital — capital? I ought to know that. Quick, open the atlas. What is the capital of Benin called? But they got stuck in Togo, a former German colony bordering Benin; Togo was interesting too and then they discovered countries such as the Ivory Coast and Upper Volta, the capital of which (they all loved its name and could remember it later when they played ‘name — city — country’: Ouagadougou; Sinbad and his crew would certainly have been to Ouagadougou; everything was different in Ouagadougou).

Knowledge, knowledge. Names, names. Brains soaked it all up like sponges until they were dripping with knowledge that they didn’t release since these sponges couldn’t be squeezed. Knowledge was what counted; knowledge was the closely guarded treasure of those who belonged up there.

Those who knew nothing seemed to count for nothing. There was hardly any insult that was worse than ‘ignoramus’. At weekends there were anatomy lessons with Richard (he particularly enjoyed testing them on the bones of the wrist, having taught them a mnemonic verse: ‘A tall ship sailed in the moonlight bright — lunate — Triangulated a pea-shaped rock one night — triquetral, pisiform — The captain and his mate, each on a trapeze — trapezium, trapezoid — Dived head over heels, caught the hook with ease — capitate, hamate’) and talks on famous doctors: Fabian, Muriel, Robert and Christian, who intended to study medicine, sat in Richard’s study and revised their notes: ‘When did Sauerbruch start to work in Munich? — Late summer 1918. — Name three forerunners of surgery of the chest and one of their achievements. — Bülau. Bülau drain. Rehn. First open-heart operation. Mikulicz. Mikulicz line, clamp; operation on the oesophagus in the chest, made possible by Sauerbruch’s low-pressure chamber. Sauerbruch’s teacher in Breslau.’ Muriel and Fabian seemed to join in more out of habit (there was also tasty food from Anne); Christian admired Sauerbruch, was fascinated by the stories about Robert Koch’s heroic rise, dug his way through Ärzte im Selbstversuch , Bernt Karger-Decker’s book with its scary bright-orange wrapper about doctors who tried remedies out on themselves, through the many volumes of the biographical series Humanisten der Tat that took up a whole shelf in his father’s bookcase, opened, full of trepidation, the anatomical atlases, where thousands of Latin names indicated meticulously described parts of the body — ‘Do we have to learn all this at medical school?’ — ‘That’s on the syllabus in the first two years, in addition you get biochemistry and physiology, chemistry, biology, biophysics, mathematics for doctors and, unfortunately, Marxism — Leninism still,’ Richard replied. Christian refused to be put off by Anne’s concerned objections (‘Let them go out and play, Richard, you’re stuffing them full of books; you’re going too far and I don’t think it’s good for them’) and devoured as much knowledge as he could. He too wanted to be famous and recognized by Richard and Niklas, Malthakus and Meno, the Tower-dwellers, his name too must shine out: Christian Hoffmann — the great surgeon, the man who conquered cancer. The first person from the GDR to win a Nobel Prize, applauded in Stockholm. After that he would probably get out, accept the offer of an English or American elite university. Or study economics and become director of a concern after all, like Ulrich? A clear desk every morning, the secretary brings papers that can determine the future state of a whole country, your signature, please, Comrade Director. Comrade — unfortunately that was unavoidable. Christian examined his own feelings about it: no, no scruples. If it meant you could become a director. Or a scientist like Meno. An insect specialist and umpteen insect species will end in H for Hoffmann. A physicist puzzling over the foundations of the world! Ezzo saw himself as an astronaut. Sinbad and Tecumseh were good. Chingachgook, the big snake. To be a trapper like Leatherstocking. To be a cellist on the world stage, to thunderous applause — but Christian sensed, and his teacher had indicated, that his talent wasn’t up to that; it was enough to get by with, certainly; you could surprise the presidents of countries when, as the Nobel Prize winner for … (whatever) you picked up your cello and played one of Bach’s suites. Fabian, much taken with Lange’s stories, was drawn to the tropics, wanted to become a ship’s doctor and a second Albert Schweitzer. Robert would say, ‘You’ve all got a screw loose’, and go fishing or to watch football with Ulrich. Muriel was getting difficult, talked more about love than about science and art. Christian read.