Uwe Tellkamp - The Tower

Or was the booth outside the castle perhaps after all a free space that the Party leadership could keep for themselves? Christian thought it over. How would he act if he were one of Them … He’d simply tap every line without further ado. Richard had often played ‘Think like your enemy’ with him and Robert and had said, ‘That’s unlikely, they can’t have so many people to listen in, they would need three shifts a day and that on every line, and even if they had the personnel they would hardly have the technology and tapes. There must be a few untapped lines in this country. That of the Comrade Chairman of the State Council will definitely not be one, nor that of the head of Security.’ — ‘Nor those of the telephone booths either,’ Christian had replied. — ‘Why not? It’s precisely those that are not very promising for them since no one says anything on a public line. Only idiots and foreigners would do that and they’re kept under surveillance round the clock anyway.’

Christian continued to think about it. There was just one reason to call from here and not from the phone at the market. This booth would probably be in working order.

‘Hoffmann?’

Christian could hear laughter in the background, his father’s voice, the Westminster chimes of the grandfather clock striking the quarter.

‘Hi, Mum, it’s me.’

‘Oh, is there something special, since you’re calling?’

Christian closed his eyes, so strange did those voices sound, as if they were sloshing round in an aquarium. ‘No … No.’ He couldn’t speak, not now, not on the telephone and, especially, not to his mother. When he’d had problems he’d never gone to his mother. Nor to Richard. To Meno instead, whom he could hear in the background. That meant he couldn’t ring him either.

‘Has something happened, Christian?’ Now she was suspicious; he knew the concern in her voice.

‘No, not at all. I … just wanted to ask Robert something, is he there? It’s about the Tomita record …’

‘No, he’s gone to Uli’s with Ezzo.’

‘It can wait until the weekend. Is Niklas there?’

‘Yes, and Wernstein.’

‘All the best, Mum.’

‘Are you coming at the weekend?’

Christian gave a vague answer, but brightened up and told her about the history test and his B minus and how annoyed he was, told her about the reasons for that moderate grade, so that when he’d finished he had the feeling Anne wouldn’t ask any more questions.

Ridged like a karst landscape, a deposit of jagged piled-up ice floes, Coal Island lay before the four visitors, of which three showed their permits to the guard on the bridge before setting off — Richard took little Philipp down from his shoulders so that Regine could take him by the hand — across the Kupferne Schwester bridge to the government offices. Fog lay over East Rome, the whistle of Black Mathilda as it turned out of the tunnel and announced its approach to the power station sounded muffled. Even at this early hour the snow on the bridge had been trampled by many pairs of shoes; it was the first Thursday in the month, the day the offices were open to the public. Meno shaded his eyes, the white was dazzling and he saw that it was the first sharp rays of the March sun setting off sparks on the steeply sloping, frost-encrusted roofs of the buildings and on their windows, now clear as water, now a confusing swirl, bursting apart like dewdrops on a cobweb, suddenly frozen in a multiple prismatic glare, sparks flickering up as a tangle of light and finding countless echoes in the deep fault-lines between the buildings: this had recalled the picture, the piled-up quartz slabs, yokes, ice crystals.

They had arrived before the offices opened and joined the queue that stretched from the portico of the entrance to where the Marx — Engels Memorial Grove, empty, an almost insurmountable obstacle for the human voice, spread out its concrete grey. Marx and Engels had bronze books in their hands and seemed to be reading them. Crows were perched on their heads and the soldier on sentry duty, who wasn’t allowed to move, kept trying to drive them away by clicking his tongue. A few of those waiting clearly felt sympathy for him and raised their hands to clap, but acquaintances who were less sympathetic and had their eyes fixed on the portico pushed them down. At ‘one hundred’ Richard gave up counting, opened his briefcase, checked that the report was still there (but who would have taken it away from him anyway, he’d packed and checked the briefcase himself before he left the house); Meno too had opened his worn attaché case and was rummaging around in the papers. Regine clutched the violin case to her and let go of Philipp, who immediately went over to the sentry at the Memorial Grove, who, as the clocks in the office building began to chime, stood to attention, shifting his machine gun with angular movements, staring fixedly in front of him from under his steel helmet and for the following hours, until he was relieved, would give no indication of whether he saw the queue, which was dispersing at the front, growing at the back, whether he saw anything at all: Philipp plucked at his uniform, made faces at him, but the only response was the restrained amusement of a few of those waiting. The queue moved forward. There was a play of bluish, crimson and purple iridescence over the pepper-and-salt granite of the vestibule. A cord controlled access to the kiosk-like lean-to where a porter was sitting surrounded by telephones on retractable arms that were sliding out and back with deliberate slowness, like the tentacles of a sea anemone. Perhaps a faulty control, Meno thought.

The members of the public stated their business, opened their bags to be checked and were allowed through. Behind the porter’s lean-to there was a wall with clocks showing different times around the world; the name of the place was written on the clock face in black lettering: Jakarta, New York, London, Valletta, Moscow, Vladivostok, Lima, Peking and many others; little Philipp listened to the clicking of the hands and wanted to know who lived in all these places. The offices’ paternoster lifts opposite the clock-wall started to move.

‘We have to separate here,’ Richard said, pointing to the clocks. ‘Shall we meet at twelve?’

‘There’s a public-address system,’ said Meno. ‘If one of us has to wait longer they can put out a call for the others.’

‘So second floor, F wing,’ Regine reminded herself. ‘Come on, Philipp.’ She took the boy by the hand; he headed straight for one of the lifts. On the second floor they looked down from a rotunda into an air well. Employees in grey coats were hurrying to and fro, some pushing files in carts trundling along quietly; worn carpets swallowed up the footsteps, the clearing of throats behind the doors, the distant murmuring. Corridors radiated out from the rotunda, which had a glass chandelier in the Kremlin’s beloved icicle style hanging down into it.

‘Touch the knight,’ Philipp demanded and Richard lifted him up so that he could reach the stone figures on the balustrade of the rotunda. Men with shields and raised swords; most of the finely chiselled features expressed amazement, perhaps at being caught by surprise, that the sculptor had mixed, as if strained through a muslin cloth, with more profound liquids: a clear conscience, new negotiations seen in older light, traces of a comic love of haggling; the weathered armour had strange spines on the shoulders and breastplates, they made Richard think of a rare disease through which the poor patient’s skin had developed horny spines, he tried to remember the name but only the prefix ‘ichthyo-’ occurred to him. Philipp couldn’t break off the spines and said with a laugh, as if to be on the safe side, ‘Ouch,’ when he touched one with the tip of his finger. The sculptor must have gone to great pains to make the stone so pencil-sharp. Now something was ticking, like the pendulum of a large metronome set at a slow tempo. Richard looked out of the window, it must be coming from outside, from the derricks beyond the offices, in the prohibited part of Coal Island.