Uwe Tellkamp - The Tower

The Christmas holidays were over. Alice and Sandor had returned to Ecuador, amazed at the ashes and snow, as they had said; amazed at an excursion to Seiffen, where the toymakers turned hoops of wood and cut sheep, cows and the pack animals of the Three Kings out of them, painted them and sold them, bright and new, at the Christmas Market. They’d seen a miners’ procession, breathed in the smell of ‘Knox’ incense cones and punch and, adding the East German marks they’d been forced to exchange to their West marks, they’d bought one of the tall, plain pyramids that were not sold at the Dresden Christmas Market but for which they had to knock at the low door of an Erzgebirge cottage and overcome the suspicion of the carver’s wife, who opened the door and regarded them in silence. And Dr Griesel, who lived on the upper ground floor of Caravel and kept the house register, said to Christian, with a sour expression on his face, ‘You can tell your father that it just won’t do … He told me nothing about that trip and his visitors are staying longer than intended. I shall have to report it.’

‘Oh, the clown can go to hell, he just moans all the time because he didn’t get our apartment. Yesyes, Herr Hoffmann, we’re always helping to heat your apartment,’ said Richard, imitating Dr Griesel’s fretsaw voice. ‘But he’s always leaving his Trabbi in my parking space.’

Their neighbour’s gaunt knuckle tapped the register with Griesel’s entries in his engineer’s script. ‘I am the house supervisor and it is my duty to keep this register. The declared length of visit has been exceeded. And recently you left the front door and the cellar door open and all the cats of the neighbourhood came in and shat on the sand, the next time you’ll clear it up yourself with your bare hands. And we don’t heat the whole neighbourhood, either.’

At school the pre-Christmas torpor had vanished. A hum of tension, of hectic activity, had returned. Upstairs and downstairs the new building, which, compared with the old school, a concrete block for almost 1,000 pupils, seemed full of light, was abuzz with pupils repeating vocabulary and theorems. In the corridors the PVC reduced the sound of hundreds of pairs of slippers — Waldbrunn was the smallest senior high in the GDR — to a soft shuffle. Maxim Gorki’s eyes glittered on a photo in the display case on the first floor, below it were a trumpet, a Pioneer’s neckerchief, a copy of a letter from Gorki to young people, a letter of greeting from the Wismut workers to the new senior high school and, something a lot of pupils stopped to look at, an agate, the polished surface of which was covered in milky rings and fiery patterns. It came from Schlottwitz, not far from Waldbrunn, where many such stones were found.

For Christian the classes with Herr Baumann turned out to be the fiasco he had feared. ‘Well, Christian, thinking again, are we?’ Herr Baumann would say sympathetically, his rosy-cheeked face under the scholar’s brow crinkling in amusement when Christian pondered an exercise on the following model: Calculate where A and B will meet when they are building a road towards each other with A laying concrete slabs of size α at rate x; B concrete slabs of size β at rate y. To hell with those exercises! To hell with mathematics and its five lessons a week! What if B was a boozer and deviated from the set line … Of course, there was no boozing in maths.

‘Thinking again, are we?’ Baumann smiled quietly and didn’t rate any of the busily scribbling pupils more highly than was necessary. ‘I’m giving you a B, Svetlana,’ he’d said recently when Svetlana Lehmann had to go up to the blackboard and, concealed behind one of the wings, wrestle with a vector calculation. ‘I’m giving you a B because I have to. A B means: good. So that means you’re good at maths. So sit back down. D’you know who was good at maths? René Gruber, he was good at maths.’ With that Baumann shrugged his shoulders and softly announced, ‘Now we’re going to put our folders in our desks and take out a piece of paper.’ The class sat there, paralysed with fear; only Verena had shining eyes. Yes, she was good at maths as well. When she did exercises, Herr Baumann didn’t smile and when, at the blackboard, she found another way of solving an equation and, in the middle of a tangle of formulas and unbelievably complicated-looking integrals and square roots, looked for help from Herr Baumann, who was sitting on the edge of the desk at the front, following, the rings of his blue irises, now devoid of gentleness, like two metal discs, he would answer, ‘What you were trying there was really elegant, Verena, but look at this’, then take a piece of red chalk and insert numbers in his copperplate handwriting in the gaps in Verena’s spiky lines. There were only two pupils whom he always addressed by the familiar ‘du’ — Verena and Heike Fieber, who sat next to Jens Ansorge at the front desk of the window row and during maths lessons held her freckled face in the sunshine that trickled over the hill with the motorway into the classroom. At such times Baumann would ask her, like a kindly grandfather asking his little granddaughter, ‘Well, Heike, dreaming? Or are you counting lorries?’ adding, ‘René Gruber could have looked out of the window. But, do you know, he didn’t.’ People didn’t talk about René Gruber at the Maxim Gorki Senior High School, it was an unwritten law. On the one hand René Gruber was undoubtedly a mathematical genius who had won both the GDR and the Eastern Bloc Mathematical Olympiad in Moscow — and that, as some malicious Waldbrunners said, despite the fact that his mother was on the check-out at the local Konsum, next door to the angling club, and his father a simple forestry worker. On the other hand when they sent René, on the basis of his achievements, his political reliability and his family background, as a working-class child to the International Mathematical Olympiad in New York, where he won a special prize for the most elegant solution, he did not return but accepted instead the offer of an American university. From then on he was regarded as an illegal emigrant and traitor. Baumann never used that word when he talked about René Gruber, and that struck Christian. The closer he came to retirement, the more exclusively Baumann’s interests were directed towards mathematics, the pure sphere of conclusive proofs and irrefutable, crystal-clear conclusions.

During classes in the laboratory cubicles Verena sat on the bench beside Christian, only separated from him by the row of instruments. Siegbert Füger teased him: ‘Hey, Christian, you seem impressed by Fräulein Winkler.’

‘Nonsense!’

‘You keep looking across at her.’

If even Siegbert Füger, who sat in the window row, noticed, then he’d have to be more careful. It meant Verena would probably have noticed too. That would explain her curt and tart remarks when he said ‘Good morning’ to her for the second time in a day — which, as he admitted to himself, he did out of both politeness and a certain maliciousness … Of course, the politeness was exaggerated and since Verena would nod the first time he said it, she couldn’t be deaf or not have noticed him in the throng of pupils. He wanted to hear her voice, for her voice, an alto whose vibrations already had undertones of a mature woman, fascinated him; he tried not to let it be obvious. His fascination was such that when she was nearby, he would tell dirty jokes to make Falk Truschler or Jens Ansorge laugh but in reality were directed at Verena in order to provoke her to protest or express her displeasure, and that he got to hear often enough … Sometimes then a particularly quick-witted reply would occur to him — at least he thought it was quick-witted; the way Jens and Falk fell silent seemed to confirm that. Verena would also fall silent and scrutinize him and he felt this eye contact, this deep shadow that had no coldness, as something delicious that far outweighed his embarrassment at his pimples. Stop, stay there! his eyes flickered, but he couldn’t interpret her look: had he, Christian, just thrown away his last chance and condemned himself to appear an incorrigible idiot in her eyes …? And after one such look Jens had the effrontery to tell him he should take advantage of the moment of stunned silence between them and kiss Verena. ‘You’d do that?’ Christian asked in disgust.