Uwe Tellkamp: The Tower

‘Is he provocative?’

‘He certainly is.’

‘Be careful. They’re the worst. I know the type. You always have the feeling they can see through you — you can’t look them in the eye, you become nervous, make mistakes. And that’s the mistake.’

‘That’s true, about being seen through. He has such a piercing look, whenever he looks at me I always think he can read my thoughts.’

‘But he can’t. Don’t let tricks like that make you nervous.’

‘ “A wise man walks with his head bowed, humble like the dust.” ’

Meno looked at Christian in surprise.

‘I made a note of it, Meno.’

The snow, criss-crossed with sledge tracks, reflected the sparse light from the lamps; it covered the garden walls, and the roofs of the few cars that were parked by the pavement, with thick caps. On the left, the houses of Holländische Leite appeared, almost all of them belonging to the Baron’s Institute: Baron Ludwig von Arbogast, who in the district was generally called by his inherited title and whose huge premises on Unterer Plan, to which Holländische Leite led, were referred to, half admiringly, half suspiciously, as ‘the Institute’. The Baron was the sponsor of the school Christian had attended until the previous summer, and whenever he had seen the Baron, he recalled a conversation between Meno and his father: how to reconcile Arbogast’s soigné appearance — he wore bespoke suits and carried a stick with a silver handle — with the weathered and grey, but still clearly legible, inscription over the central building of the Institute: FOR SOCIALISM AND PEACE; and ‘baron’, the title that was clearly written on the boards and signposts in the Institute gardens, with the workers’ state. It was a question Christian would have liked to ask his civics teacher.

The lights were still on in the Institute buildings on Turmstrasse. Arbogast’s little observatory, which had not been open to the public for ages, even though a sign in front of it promised a ‘People’s Observatory’, was shielded by a sweet chestnut that stretched its branches far out over the footpath. A sundial with its gnomon was rusting away in the ivy that covered the crumbling plaster. Meno was the person Christian would have thought most likely to have had a look inside the door at the rear of the observatory; he had often observed him when astronomy and astrology cropped up in conversations: his uncle adopted an attitude somewhere between latent amusement and concealed interest and scrutinized the newspaper cuttings and pamphlets the guests had brought, quietly leaning against the wall in a corner, his round-bowled pipe in his mouth, listening to his brother, Ulrich, animatedly discuss astronomy in Far Eastern antiquity.

‘I was reading your book just now.’

Smoke rose in thick clouds from the bowl of his pipe. ‘Strange old things,’ Meno muttered at the crossing of Turmstrasse and Wolfsleite. ‘Hardly anyone knows them any more. The censors, probably, and the Old Man of the Mountain. The book brought me a thumping great letter from him, from East Rome to West Rome, so to speak. Took three days to arrive when all the old man needed to do was to walk across the bridge. But they said he was ill. — Otherwise people tended to look askance at me because of it.’

‘The book doesn’t provide an answer to the question of how the steel was tempered.’

‘Eisenhüttenstadt doesn’t appear in it.’ Meno waved his pipe. ‘Nor does Parsifal represent a clear revolutionary proletarian standpoint, and in general the class-consciousness of the knights leaves much to be desired.’

‘And the Merseburg Charms are much too formalistic?’

‘It’s not quite that bad any longer.’

‘The Lay of Hildebrand, the beginning?’ Christian gave his uncle a pleading look. Meno took another suck at his pipe and began to recite. Fascinated as always, Christian listened to the pleasant timbre of his voice, the stage diction; he was strangely moved by the ancient language and its power, especially the ‘I heard tell / that in single combat / two warriors did meet’ of the beginning and by the ‘sonandfather’ of the fourth line. As they walked on slowly, Meno continued to recite beyond the opening, had already reached the thirteenth line, ‘all great folk I ken in this kingdom’; as he walked on, nodding his head to the rhythm of the lines, he spoke of the wrath of Odoacer, of Theoderic and the torc wrought of the Emperor’s gold that had been given to him by the king, the lord of the Huns, and how father and son fought ‘till their shields were shattered, slashed by their swords’. A light breeze had sprung up, and the trees on either side of the street began to sway, snow drifted down from the branches. They had now reached Wolfsleite, and the broad bulk of Wolfstone lay there like a ship with lights ablaze; in the ‘bassoon’, as the octagonal extension was called, the ‘story-lamp’ was smoking: so they’ll be telling each other stories, Christian thought, and in his mind’s eye he saw his uncle, the toxicologist Hans Hoffmann, explaining monkshood and woody nightshade, which he grew in the ‘bassoon’ himself, to Fabian and Muriel; he thought of Malivor Marroquin, the white-haired Chilean who ran the fancy-dress shop and a photographic studio next door — when he was fourteen, Christian had had to go there to have his photograph taken by Marroquin, for his ID card; quotations from Lenin’s works lined the walls of the staircase that led up to the heavy Ernemann plate camera, and they were mutely scrutinized by the queue of boys and girls with their neatly combed hair; at the top the Chilean shouted, ‘Plizz lukk at liddel gold-finsh, plizz lukk naow’, at which one had to direct one’s gaze at a little red bird that was clipped to the edge of a screen with a clothes peg.

‘There’s a soirée tomorrow,’ Meno said, pointing to Dolphin’s Lair, the house opposite Wolfstone, which looked delicately and flimsily built, with the curve of the roof like an upper lip and the large scroll over the coving of a wall. ‘Soirée’ meant that Frau von Stern had sent out invitations in copperplate script on hand-made paper, invitations to share her memories of the Winter Palace and Dresden Castle, for she had been a lady-in-waiting.

The Italian House was on Wolfsleite as well; Ulrich, Christian’s other Rohde uncle, and his family lived there. Ulrich was a director of one of the state-owned companies; his wife, Barbara, worked as a furrier and ladies’ tailor in the Harmony Salon on Rissleite. Sometimes Christian would go to see the Rohdes, for some more or less valid reason, so that he could have a good look at the staircase and landing, and the art nouveau details in their apartment. No side of the house was like any of the others. The stairwell stuck out at the front, like the bow of a ship, the shape emphasized by four windows, a single one higher up and three a little lower down, as in a gallery. The lone upper window, over which the roof described an elongated curve, was like an oversized keyhole. Christian put his bag down and went in through the double doors, each shaped like the prow of a gondola, to switch the light on. The portico, an Oriental-looking pavilion set in the masonry, was lit by the hall windows, which had been decorated, as in Dolphin’s Lair, with flowers and plants. Dame’s violets wound their way up the storeys as far as the keyhole window, interrupted by a keystone between the floors that was adorned with two facing sandstone spirals. And to the left, on the side of the jutting-out stairwell that faced Turmstrasse, a decrepit oriel was squatting on its corbel; it belonged to the Rohde apartment. In many places, the plaster revealed the bricks that had been eaten away by time and rain.

‘Shall we ring? — No,’ Meno murmured. ‘Come on.’ They continued on their way, Meno head bowed, hands in his coat pockets, hat pulled down over his face.