Uwe Tellkamp - The Tower

‘I’ll make you the twenty stollen, Herr Doktor. But I need medicines for my mother.’

‘I’ll write you a prescription.’

‘No, no, they’re special ones from Dr Tietze. From over there. Made over here but for over there. And sent back from over there.’

They waited behind a tree on the top of the hillock overlooking the plantation and watched. The hide wasn’t to be seen, but the soldier was; he was wrapped up warmly and, Kalashnikov on his shoulder, was walking up and down in front of a gate in the fence. Now and then he flapped his arms, switched on a torch to illuminate the surroundings and rubbed his hands. He looked at his watch. On the hour he set off on his round.

‘I estimate he’ll be back in a quarter of an hour.’ Richard wet his index finger and held it up. The wind was against them, so wouldn’t carry their scent to Busse’s dog. Once the soldier was out of sight, Richard gave the sign; Wernstein stayed behind. In the shadow of the track he and Dreyssiger slipped across to the fence; Richard checked the tension of the wire and cut it apart almost soundlessly. A criminal act! he thought. But the tree has to go through it. I hope it’s not visible and I hope the idiot in uniform doesn’t shine his light on that spot when he comes back. They crept into the plantation, stood up with some difficulty among the closely planted trees. They hung up their Father Christmas coats on a branch — they’d only be a hindrance in there and get torn — and worked their way through to the middle of the plantation. The trees were thinner there and a white rectangle was dangling from every tree. Dreyssiger shielded his torch, cautiously shone it on them. The signs bore names, all of them those of high Party functionaries; the finest blue spruce was labelled with the name ‘Barsano’. It was about ten foot high and completely regular in growth.

The nurses on North Ward 1 opened the last batch of painkillers. Kühnast was sympathetic towards Richard’s problem — in principle. ‘We could run a special shift. The problem is that I wouldn’t have any staff. It’s only possible on a Saturday, our big shots are never around then.’

Richard rounded up his students and arranged a subbotnik . He loved the kind of extra-curricular activity that this Saturday voluntary shift would be. His opinion as a university teacher was that his students ought to know where they were studying, what they were studying and why they were studying. Germany had once been the world’s pharmacy and Dresden the cradle of pharmacology. The pharmaceutical factory, created by the amalgamation of the firms Madaus, Gehe and the von Heyden Chemical Factory, where acetylsalicylic acid — the basic material for aspirin, the most widely sold medicine in the world — was first produced on an industrial scale, had its main site in Leipziger Strasse, in Gehe’s former drugs and chemical finishing plant. The gutters hung crookedly, the windows wore cravats of ash, the smiles of award-winning workers on the photos along the works entry were eaten away by sulphuric cancer, as was the chalked ‘labourers of all kinds’ on the ‘We are looking for’ board hanging beside the porter’s lodge.

‘Psst!’ Dreyssiger held up his hand. They heard the cracking of the undergrowth and immediately scurried into cover.

‘Well, just look at that, it’s Magenstock!’ Richard ducked down. ‘Magenstock in person with one of his sons.’

The two of them headed straight for the best blue spruce, listened for a few seconds, during which Richard and Dreyssiger didn’t utter a word, and started to saw. Richard thought: should they jump up and say, Stop, we were here first? Dreyssiger was already doing that and striding over towards Pastor Magenstock. ‘Who are you?’ the pastor grunted. Dreyssiger shone his light on their faces. They had black make-up on, a kind of Indian war paint. ‘We were here first.’ Dreyssiger could hardly control his anger.

‘Oh, Herr Hoffmann,’ Pastor Magenstock murmured, pressing his hand to his heart. ‘So your questions were not without ulterior motive.’

With a wave of his hand Richard told Dreyssiger to switch his torch off. Hearts pounding, the four men listened. There was nothing to be heard apart from the whispering of the trees.

‘Herr Hoffmann, what you are doing is … in the interest of a clinic?’ Pastor Magenstock was breathing with difficulty. ‘You see, I’m doing this in the interest of my faith. The custom comes from the womb of Christianity.’

At that moment Wernstein’s warning hoot sounded. The men pulled themselves to their feet. Magenstock and his son ran over to Barsano’s spruce and furiously completed their sawing. A dog started to bark. ‘Come on, let’s go,’ Magenstock croaked with remarkable coolness. Dreyssiger grabbed the saw, in his panic Richard left the bolt cutters on the ground. Already they could see the swaying beam of a torch through the branches of the young trees. The four of them crashed unhesitatingly through the lower branches. ‘Stop there! Stop!’ and ‘Get them, Rudo!’ came the cries behind them. Magenstock’s son bent the twigs back as he dashed on ahead, and sent them smacking into his father’s face. The dog was barking, interspersed with Wernstein’s nonstop owl cries; how pointless, Richard thought, it sounds like a drugged cuckoo. ‘Stop there! Stoooop!’

‘It just won’t do, Herr Kühnast. You can’t let just any old people in here. There are hygiene regulations, there’s a schedule for machine running time —’

‘They would only have done non-skilled work,’ the chemist said. ‘We’ve had problems in packing for months.’

‘Nevertheless. If something gets broken or an accident happens, what then? Anyway, you should have agreed it with me first.’ The expression on Kühnast’s superior’s face changed. ‘On the other hand, you’re here now. Just come with me a moment, Herr Hoffmann’, and he took him to a broom cupboard full of typewriters. ‘All faulty! I’ve been trying to get a technician from your brother’s firm for eighteen months now. You’ll get your medicines. Once our machines have finally been repaired. And give your brother my best wishes.’

‘I’ll let you go, gentlemen. On one condition. One of you must play Father Christmas for my boys,’ the forester growled. ‘The little rascals don’t believe me any more.’ They tossed for it. Wernstein lost.

Richard took the First Party Secretary’s tree to Ulrich, who had agreed to send a technician to the pharmaceutical factory if he was given a Christmas tree with which his department won the coveted challenge cup in the socialist ‘Who has the best Christmas tree?’ competition — and the considerable money prize that went with it.

‘Will Dr Hoffmann please go to Professor Müller,’ came the announcement over the clinic’s Tannoy. Müller was walking agitatedly up and down. ‘If only Reucker wouldn’t give me those triumphant looks during meetings. I have to control myself, Herr Hoffmann, and I don’t like having to control myself.’ He twisted his lips in a sulky raspberry pout. ‘But it’s no use. I suppose we have to admit we’ve been beaten by the Internal Medicine lot this year. It’s beyond belief that Reucker is also the chairman of the Christmas Tree Inspection Committee.’

‘What? Not the Rector?’

‘Exactly. That’s the scandal.’

‘We’ve not given up yet.’

‘But as far as I can see all that’s left is the Christmas Market.’

‘They’ve got nothing but walking sticks that would make us the laughing stock of the Academy.’

Müller’s face lit up as an idea came to him. ‘And twigs, Herr Hoffmann, and twigs.’

But, at the inspection, with a cool gesture Reucker, the head of the Internal Medicine Clinic, took a screwdriver out of the pocket of his snow-white coat, searched for a while, during which Müller’s lips pressed together until they were no more than a slit, then screwed off one branch of the proudly upright, symmetrically built surgical tree. The nurses, doctors, diet cooks, nursing auxiliaries stood there, heads bowed; the crackle of their coats was audible. ‘The screw-tree does not grow in our land,’ said Reucker and he dropped the screw from high up into the hand of an assistant, who, engaged to a nurse from Surgery, gave a smug smile. In the house on Planetenweg they ate the best stollen in the world that evening.