Uwe Tellkamp - The Tower

He had to become famous, then those at home would recognize him.

One evening in Waldbrunn, in a dark corner of his brain, overwrought with vocabulary and formulae, the plan for stage-by-stage progress appeared. Christian switched off the light and went to the window. Now the classroom was in darkness, just the metal of the chairs in the window row, which had been put up on the tables, wearily slurped the light from the lamp in the yard. He had no idea how late it was. The street lamps had come on long ago, the contours of the new district of Waldbrunn merged with the waves of the hill above Kaltwasser reservoir. Behind the two sports halls, low, standardized, glass-and-concrete buildings, was the ridge along which the F170 ran. The yellow headlamps of the long-distance lorries rummaged around over the rye-field on the ridge, the way from the school into the town.

The Great Man. Stage 1: Learning, studying, educating the mind — that was the stage Christian was on at the moment. Being highly educated was the first requirement for becoming a great man. A great man was, moreover, highly cultured as well and so when classes were over for the day (usually around 1 p.m.) Christian, instead of having lunch, would go to the club room and occupy the communal record player for an hour. It didn’t bother him in the least if others wanted to use the record player. Apart from him that was mostly only Svetlana — and she was an enthusiastic socialist, wanted to go to Lomonosov University in Moscow and listened to red singer-songwriters, for Christian ‘the pits’. Every minute the record player was on without that ‘nauseating stuff’ (as Christian, Jens and a couple of boys from the twelfth grade said) was a gain for culture. He saw himself as a serious, mature man and as such listened to classical music, though he was pretty much alone among the boarders with that point of view. Christian didn’t let that bother him: the others were philistines, how could they, coming from villages as they did, appreciate the profundity, the seriousness of a Bach, the serenity, the comic detachment of a Mozart, the emotional power of a Beethoven. Since Svetlana was a bit feeble-minded (an opinion he shared with several boys in his class), she didn’t need a record player. When listening, Christian would sit leaning back in his chair, with his legs up, a profoundly serious expression on his face when, for example, he was listening to Beethoven. Christian understood Beethoven’s outbursts of suffering … Like Christian, this titanic personality must have found himself surrounded by uncomprehending philistines and have had to struggle against them, his whole life long! Beethoven was a Great Man and Christian understood him, for he was cast in the same mould, definitely. Added to that, he really was affected by the music. He didn’t show it; it confused him and when he had the feeling that Svetlana or Siegbert was observing him, he would jump up and switch the record off, furious (leaving the record there, though — he was counting on their curiosity).

Stage 2: University studies. Naturally he would have to abandon them. A trifling university course could not satisfy him, the young scientific genius, the irrepressible hothead and tomorrow’s benefactor of mankind. He would even get poor grades at university: was that not the way it was, had he not read in many biographies of Great Men that they didn’t fit in? Did university courses not cover familiar territory — and wasn’t the reason a Great Man was great precisely that he broke new ground? Something that the simple-minded professors, trying to drum their long out-of-date knowledge into the ordinary minds of their students, could not of course see.

Stage 3: Nervous breakdown. That went with it. The tension the young Great Man is under is just too much. Even Mozart had sometimes gone off his rocker, so it was quite normal. Christian would have to go through terrible crises and consider suicide four times a day (it had to be four times, once or twice was too little, that happened in almost every family, three times sounded like a cliché, at four, Christian concluded, it somehow seemed more serious).

Stage 4: The Great Achievement, finally completed. Honours, prizes, applause would be heaped upon the young Faustian seeker after knowledge. Now the important thing was to remain modest (because of those who envied him and of the capricious deities of moments of inspiration) and not let himself be dazzled by all these externalities. The Great Man continues his research, restlessly, selflessly. He doesn’t care about the applause, all he cares about is his WORK. He makes a further discovery, even more revolutionary, more profound than the previous one. Petty-minded rivals who had begrudged him his success and shouted from the rooftops that the Great Hoffmann would soon be finished would crawl back into their holes. Remorsefully they would recant, shamefacedly admit their limitations. Triumphant jubilation.

So: down to work.

Love, Christian thought, would distract him from his studies.

Little touching habits, he hadn’t forgotten them and he would presumably always associate them with their childhood: back in the fifties, in the sandstone hills by the Elbe. Meno was waiting, among the crowds doing their Christmas shopping, outside the Intecta furniture shop in the Old Market arcades on the corner of Thälmannstrasse, and recognized Anne at once from a distance; the way she threw back the orange scarf with a will of its own that she wore over her coat and that kept slipping down off her shoulders as she hurried along, that spot of orange in the turbid swell of the shopping-bag-laden throng; then the way she nibbled at the fingertips of her gloves while still walking, as if she were trying to take them off; that she always ran the last bit, once they had seen each other, embraced him passionately with all her shopping, her net bags with vegetables, her packages dangling from strings (had he ever, since she was married and the boys were beyond kindergarten age, seen her with her hands unencumbered — he couldn’t remember), embraced him unconcerned at what others might think, Meno’s colleagues at the publishers, when she met him there (Dresdner Edition looked out onto the Old Market, Meno just needed to cross the square to get to the furniture shop), or her colleagues from Neustadt Hospital whom she sometimes gave a lift to do their shopping. Anne never introduced him, the women would nod and swarm out at the hurried, well-trained pace of mothers who, after the morning shift, their first job, were setting off in the few hours remaining until closing time on their second job, there must have been something in the newspaper, or the bush telegraph had spread a rumour about deliveries: ‘Attention, housewives, the Centrum store has preserving jars in stock’ (they were needed in the autumn, but they arrived during the winter, what should one do, wait? You always regretted it), on another day the rings for the preserving jars; ‘hairdryers have arrived’ (the particular kind shaped like flounders with the blue plastic casing and black muzzle that after a few minutes of jet-engine noises smelt of burnt flies), or ‘Everything for the Child’: baby bottles of Jena glass that didn’t crack when heated, nappies that would survive no more than three or four washes, pans for boiling nappies, thermometers for checking the water while boiling nappies, Milasan baby food, dummies, two or three of the priceless modern prams that, actually intended for export, had managed to find their way to a department in a store on the edge of town that was now under siege …

‘Mo.’

‘Anne.’

She kissed him on the cheek and took his hand, waving it merrily up and down as if they were a couple that had just fallen in love. The list: in his mind’s eye he could see Anne’s rough-looking handwriting, a dozen lines, of which a couple at the beginning had been deleted; but he liked going shopping with her, he was interested in all the apparently trivial little things that were needed to make daily life troubleproof: shoelaces, vacuum-cleaner bags, buttons, a darning mushroom (he had seldom seen a new one in the families he visited, everywhere he went the ones he saw were the bread-brown darning mushrooms from the pre-war Müller sewing-machine works in Dresden, riddled with the holes of countless needles), and Anne liked to have him with her, since he never grumbled on their expeditions that took them all round the city, he was able to summon up an interest in coffee filter papers or the varying quality of materials for suits, she trusted his judgement of dress patterns (she had done that, he recalled, when she was still a little girl) and she asked his advice when she needed to buy presents. It was Advent now and when he looked at the faces of the women in the Centrum store or the poorly stocked shops along Prager Strasse, he thought that they hated this time of the year: all the running round after a few ridiculous articles of, in general, mediocre quality, the hustle and bustle of the Christmas Market with its brass bands, the chimney-sweep figures made of prunes, the baked apples, hot, strong grog, moaning kids clinging on to their hands and men who didn’t have to bother with all that because they had to work (but the women had to as well) or were sitting with a beer in their local bar watching Sports Report or playing cards. Robert, for example, wanted some new football boots, the ones with screw-in studs, and Anne told him as they crossed the Old Market, heading for Prager Strasse, that she had asked Ulrich where she might find boots like that, ‘he says the best place would be in Dům Sportu in Prague, they have Bata boots, they’re better than ours, but to go all the way to Prague for a pair of football boots …? But when I think about it, why not? Perhaps I’d find something for Richard there and perhaps a decent shirt for Niklas, he’s always wearing the same ones and the cuffs are already frayed, I’m surprised Gudrun doesn’t say something about it, and his trousers ought to be let out a bit, they’re much too short for him … We’ll see. Perhaps I’ll manage to get to Prague. You could come too, we’ll go in the car and have a nice day out. And you can speak Czech.’