Uwe Tellkamp - The Tower

‘Only the little Libussa teaches me, Anne. But I don’t know if I’ll have the time.’

‘Then we’ll just have to go one Saturday.’

‘Imagine what things’ll be like at Hřensko. And at all the other crossings. We’d have to get some crowns as well.’

‘We’ve still got two thousand. Two thousand unreturned, illicit crowns. And they say Dům Sportu’s got a very good angling department. That’d be something for you. And for Christian.’

‘How’s he getting along? I was talking to him about the senior high school and he seems to be managing all right.’

‘He’s difficult at the moment, he’s not easy to deal with, sometimes he can get quite abusive … He absolutely has to have a new pair of shoes and there’s nothing out there in Waldbrunn. And then the school, you know, he has a lot of work to do; sometimes I think they’re demanding too much — or he does of himself, he’s very ambitious and Richard keeps on at him too … I often wonder whether he’s not too strict with Christian, everyone ought to do what they can and if they can’t, then it’s no use forcing them. Oh, look at these, they’re pretty’ — she held up a few embroidered oven cloths, but shook her head when she saw the price — ‘and he needs some new cello strings as well, do you remember how one snapped at the party? That was a great success, don’t you think? Richard keeps playing your records over and over again.’

‘Does he still want to be a great, famous doctor?’

‘Christian? Oh yes, he talks about it sometimes. I don’t like the way he puts so much emphasis on the “great and famous”; I mean, being a doctor’s enough, surely? Why great and famous? And if he doesn’t become great and famous, will his whole world collapse? Well, he doesn’t get that from me … Now just look at those stupid rotary eggbeaters. Scandalous it is, really scandalous. Listen,’ she called out to the assistant who was standing behind a pile of lurid plastic products for the modern housewife , frozen stiff, ‘I’ll show you something.’ She picked up one of the appliances, which consisted of three intermeshing whisks on a revolving plate with a crank-handle at the side, and set the whisks whirring. Anne turned the handle faster, the whisks got caught up in each other and whichever way she turned the handle, they still didn’t move. Eventually one of the whisks broke off. Anne dropped the broken machine on the counter. ‘And you sell this trash?’ The modern housewives who were standing round started to mutter dangerously.

‘You’ve broken that, you’ll have to pay for it,’ the assistant said. ‘Hey, you, don’t you dare run off, help, police!’

A District Community Policeman came. ‘What’s going on here, citizens?’

‘Comrade DCP, that woman there wrecked this eggbeater and now she’s refusing to pay for it.’

‘There’s no way I’m going to pay a single pfennig for this rubbish, it’s outrageous, I just thought I’d try out your goods so that you can see what your modern housewives have to make do with. A rotary beater, huh, turn it five times and it’s beaten itself to bits.’

‘Citizen, you’ve damaged the goods, the citizen assistant has a right to compensation.’

‘Did you hear that!’ The modern housewives who were gathered round expressed their indignation. ‘That crap costs a pile of money — and it’s not even any use for cracking your old man on the head.’

‘But this is riotous assembly!’ The DCP took out his notebook. ‘On the other hand … let me have a look.’ The assistant handed him a beater. Then another. One after the other they broke. The assistant was furious and started swearing at the custodian of the law. He lost his temper as well and started shouting that his wife too needed a reliable mechanical eggbeater for her pre-Christmas baking; Meno drew Anne away.

Well, really, she would say. Well, really, he would answer. They were already laughing.

There was a long queue outside the Heinrich Mann Bookshop on Prager Strasse; Anne, sniffing an opportunity, an unusual, unannounced delivery, immediately asked what they had. The man in front of her shrugged his shoulders and said he’d only joined the queue because there were so many in it already, he was just going to wait and see.

‘Some important novel, an illustrated art book?’ Anne asked Meno, then someone shouted that hiking maps had been delivered.

In the window of the music shop next to HO Kaufhalle a few violins were hanging, shining like wet sweets, together with a screaming-gold violin and a ukulele; inside they had guitar strings, double-bass end pins and a good dozen recently delivered Czech violin chin rests (of which Anne took one for Ezzo, you never knew), but no cello strings, though there was an implement for cutting clarinet blades that Anne, since Robert had only one, bought immediately: Robert’s clarinet teacher had a brother who was an oboist and he, as Anne knew, corresponded with a cellist in the Berlin Philharmonic, perhaps they could wangle something through him.

They headed back towards the Old Market, swept along in the crowds coming from the main station and from Leninplatz. The women wrapped in headscarves, many of the men wearing Russian fur chapkas, pedestrians dressed in grey and brown, hurrying along, hunched up, towards the city centre, to the shops under the concrete slabs of the Königstein and Lilienstein luxury hotels. There were groups of people waiting outside the Round Cinema, which looked like a powder compact with vertical stripes. Meno looked across at the display cases in the promenade outside the various cinemas: Bud Spencer was flexing his biceps on the posters, seeing that justice was done with a smile on his face, Flatfoot on the Nile was being shown. The boys wanted to see it, Robert had asked Meno to go with them and had enlisted Ezzo and Reglinde as well, while Muriel and Fabian were going to wait until it was on in the Tannhäuser Cinema. The clock on the Church of the Holy Cross struck five. Meno looked up at the windows of Dresdner Edition in the massive bulk of one of the buildings on the east side of the Old Market; the light was still on in the office of Josef Redlich, the senior editor, in the little room of the proofreader, Oskar Klemm, as well, Schiffner’s window was dark.

A number 11 arrived, the red-and-white, mud-bespattered Tatra cars discharged people going to the cinema and the Christmas Market, women, like Meno, with bulging shopping bags in either hand. Anne was carrying a duffelbag full of clothes that had to be taken to the dry cleaner’s to be mended; it was Friday, the VEB Service Combine in Webergasse was open until 7 p.m. but there was only one hour left to buy things needed for the weekend and to hunt for Christmas presents. Anne suggested they should split up, she gave him the duffelbag, she wanted to look for some socks for Arthur, who lived out in the deepest backwater as far as the supply of goods was concerned, and Emmy had asked for a wheeled tote for shopping, ‘and of course we’ll give her some money as well, her pension’s nowhere near enough, and have you any ideas about something for Gudrun? I did want to get some gloves for Barbara; there were some in Exquisit, but I didn’t get them right away and they’d gone, well, I’ll just have to see if I can get them somewhere else. I’ve already got something for Uli, and for Kurt. At the dry cleaner’s it’s the express service and if they’re difficult, I’ve made an appointment, Mo, the number’s pinned to one of the pieces of clothing. The umbrella needs a new cover and the two pairs of scissors need sharpening. Where shall we meet?’

‘This end of Webergasse, in an hour?’

‘See you then’, and she was off. Just like the old days, he thought, when we were kids playing cops and robbers and she would disappear in the woods; just a few branches swaying, a dusting of pollen from the spruce trees, an alarmed bird; an invisible door had opened and swallowed her up.