Uwe Tellkamp: The Tower

The yellow curtain was drawn over the door with the pointed arch. It led out onto a balcony that seemed to dream over the grounds of the House with a Thousand Eyes in the summer, like a fruit on a tall plant bending with motherly pride over the garden blooming all around; then the doors and windows of the room would be left open until it was dark to let the light and odours pour in from the garden. Christian looked at the clock: four forty-six; soon, five sonorous chimes would drift round the room and the whole house. Ever since he was a child, Christian had been fascinated by the strange design of the clock; he’d often stood looking at it as Meno explained the mechanism of the pendulum and the movement: the clock struck every ten minutes, once at ten past, twice at twenty past, three times at half past and so on; six times for the full hour, which struck momentously after a short pause; at midnight or noon, eighteen chimes rang out. But what impressed Christian most was the second dial below the clock face: a brass ring, tarnished in places, with the signs of the zodiac engraved round the edge; a symbol of the sun travelled round the zodiacal circle, indicating sidereal time. Constellations had been embossed on the ring, and the engraver had made the main stars somewhat larger than the others and connected them by needle-point lines. The Serpent-Bearer, the Hair of Berenice, the Northern Crown, the Whale — Christian remembered how enchanted he’d been by the names and their Latin translation when Meno recited them in a low, almost wistful voice, pointing to the engraved signs as he did so — for the first time one evening about ten years ago, the names had trickled into his seven-year-old’s ear like some indeterminate but pleasant substance, and they had given him his first sense that in the adult world, which was also the world of the incomprehensible giant that was standing beside him, a giant who lived in very different regions and whom his mother called Brother dear or Mo, that in the adult world there were very interesting, very special things, secrets; and in his child’s mind something must have happened or, hidden away, have grown and suddenly burst open: since that day, Christian had never forgotten the words, their strange, peculiar sound. Ophiuchus. Coma Berenices, Corona Borealis, Cetus. He quietly repeated the names. The clock struck four fifty. It’ll only take a few minutes to get down there, Christian thought, there’s still plenty of time, the party only starts at six, no need to rush. — He only found out that Meno had been using Latin later, from Ulrich, he thought, or from Niklas, on that evening at the Tietzes’ when they were talking about legends.

He went to the table beside the crammed bookshelves his father had made out of plain boards, examined the books and periodicals piled up on top of each other. Even here there had hardly been any changes since his last visit: an issue of Nature with a newspaper wrapper was still lying beside several specialist biological periodicals, all covered with a fine layer of dust, and a few fairly well-thumbed copies of Weimarer Beiträge . Beside them was that day’s edition of Die Union , the paper of the CDU, neatly folded, the grainy paper smelling of newsprint. Curious, Christian fingered a leather-bound book, opened it and read the title: The Ages of the World , F. W. J. Schelling; the book beside it had the same author and was also bound in leather: Bruno, or On the Natural and the Divine Principle of Things . Christian picked it up; it was a quarto volume, and a cloud of dust rose from the marbled edges when he blew on it. It still wasn’t clean, so Christian took out his handkerchief, but as he was trying to hold both covers, the pages suddenly fanned out and a few pieces of paper escaped; as he bent down to retrieve them, the book fell onto the floor. Chakamankabudibaba shot up as if he’d had an electric shock and looked at him with green eyes. Christian hastily picked up the scattered pieces of paper and put them back in the book. But they might now all be in the wrong place, so he put the volume back on the table and tried to rectify his clumsiness by opening the book at random: when you did that a book would often open at frequently consulted pages. That didn’t seem to be the case here: it was virgin paper, with none of Meno’s usual underlinings or notes in the margins. Despite that, Christian inserted one of the slips of paper, repeated the process, several times opening the book at the page where he had just inserted the first note, but finally he had all the pieces of paper back in. Feeling apprehensive, he replaced the books in their original positions.

The cat had closed its eyes again and put its head back on its paws, just the tip of its tail was slowly curving to and fro, as if there were another cat inside the visible, cinnamon-coloured Chakamankabudibaba, one that was not yet asleep and was watching the young man, who was listening anxiously by the table, with intense concentration. The six bulbs radiating from the cone-shaped lamp spread a canopy of diffuse brightness over the desk and the cat in its chair. In the distant gloom, the books on the shelves that went up to the ceiling, the plants in the corner by the stove, seemed to be looking at Christian, as if even at this late hour they had been called up from an Otherrealm and whoever had called them had forgotten to say the magic word that would allow them to return. The clock too seemed to be looking at him with both its time-circles. There was no sound to be heard, apart from the regular tick-tock, the rattle of the shutters when the wind got under them and the draught in the stove. Christian went into the kitchen and took a pair of work gloves out of the coal box under the oven, checked whether the bolts on the damper and the ash-pan were closed properly and tightened up the screws a little. He could feel the heat of the metal, even through the heavy material of the gloves; he couldn’t touch the tiles around the stove door without having to draw his fingers away immediately. Yet it was still only moderately warm in the living room; the House with a Thousand Eyes was old — the windows didn’t fit tightly any more, there were cracks in the wood, and the heat seeped out into the corridor.

His father had made the desk, as a wedding present for Meno, with all the meticulousness and attention to detail he showed in matters of craftsmanship. The wood still seemed to smell of the forest, even though the desk had been under the large window for seven years and had absorbed the odour of tobacco. Richard had built it across the corner; the desktop was more than three metres long, and he had managed to make it fit both the cramped proportions of the room and the space by the window — to the right was the arched door leading out onto the balcony, to the left a solid larch cupboard that the previous owners had left because it was simply immovable: it wouldn’t go through the door, it had originally had to be lifted in through the window by a crane. Meno had arranged two workplaces on the desk: one for his slide preparations, dissecting instruments, specialist periodicals and microscope; the other for his typewriter and manuscript folders. Christian switched on the table lamp but didn’t touch anything, and he was careful not to get too close to the desk, Meno’s holy of holies. He looked at the photos: the three Rohde children in their parents’ lounge in Bad Schandau; Meno dissecting in the Zoological Institute of Karl-Marx University, Leipzig; as a boy of eleven or twelve, already wearing his hair with a parting, collecting botanical samples with his father, the ethnologist, near Rathen; a photo of Hanna, Meno’s ex-wife. Beside them were piles of letters, newspaper cuttings, writing paper covered in Meno’s fine, flowing, yet difficult-to-read handwriting — for many of the letters he still used the old German script which had not been taught nor generally used for a long time. Christian saw a few books published by Dresdner Edition, for whom Meno worked. It was an imprint of the Berlin Hermes-Verlag and published books the like of which could not be found on the shelves of any of the bookshops Christian knew: leather-bound de-luxe editions, hand-printed on the best-quality paper, of works such as The Divine Comedy, Faust and other classics, most with illustrations. The larger part were earmarked for export to the ‘Non-Socialist Economic Area’. Many of the few remaining copies went to acquaintances and friends of the managing director or to book collectors in the higher reaches of the Party; Christian had never seen one of these books on sale in a Dresden bookshop, and even if he had, they would have been well beyond his means — the copy of The Divine Comedy that Meno possessed cost as much as a doctor’s monthly salary.