Uwe Tellkamp - The Tower

For quite a while Christian stood looking at the things on the desk, things he automatically connected with the House with a Thousand Eyes, and with Meno, when he thought of him from far away, during one of the long bus journeys to and from Waldbrunn or at school.

He switched the light off again, stood there for a few minutes in the gloom, listening, and then took Chakamankabudibaba into the kitchen and put him down on the kitchen bench, which annoyed the cat — it wasn’t as cosy there as in the living room next door. Chakamankabudibaba arched his back, meowed plaintively and jumped down to his feeding bowls. The milk in the dish beside the food bowl was sour, and there was a piece of meat floating in it. Christian poured it all down the toilet, washed the dish and filled it. Then he fetched the barometer and wrapped it in the gift paper.

As he went upstairs he suddenly heard voices. Perhaps Libussa, Lange’s wife from Prague, had visitors; but then he recognized the voices of Annemarie Brodhagen and Professor Dathe, the famous director of the East Berlin Zoo — Libussa had switched on the television and was watching Zoos round the World . For a moment Christian felt a twinge of envy: hearing the popular professor with the clear enunciation reminded him that the last episode of Oh, What Tenants — a Danish series in which many of the ‘Olsen gang’ appeared — was on that evening, a series he loved and had grown up with. He frowned as he switched on the stair light — a bronze flower with a bulb in it; the petals were bent.

He didn’t like big celebrations, as his father’s fiftieth birthday that evening would in all probability be; he preferred to be alone. It wasn’t that he was unsociable — his dislike of company was connected with his appearance. If there was one thing Christian felt ashamed of, it was his face, precisely what people looked at when they looked at you. Although his face was basically attractive and expressive, it was covered in acne and he felt horribly embarrassed at the thought of all the people who would give him searching, mocking or even revolted looks. It was precisely that expression, revulsion, which he feared; he had seen it often enough. Someone would turn round, look at him, and, unable to conceal their shock, or even repugnance, would openly show their reaction for a fraction of a second. Then they would control themselves, realize that Christian would presumably feel hurt if they gawped at him like that and quickly select a different expression, one that was as incurious as possible, from the stock of expressions people use when they meet someone they don’t know. But in fact it was precisely this incurious expression that hurt Christian even more; for him it was the admission that the other person had seen his disfigurement and was now ignoring it. Christian usually felt these slights so deeply that he burnt with shame. He tried to divert his thoughts from that as he slowly went up the stairs, but the closer he came to the cabin, where his dark suit and, certainly, his good English shirt would be awaiting him, the more and more uneasy he felt at the prospect of the party: all the questions people were bound to ask, mainly just for form’s sake, about how things were going at school, the well-meant advice that would follow, but above all playing his cello; even though he knew his part well, the mere thought of appearing in public made him uncomfortable.

The lamplight spread out palely over the worn stairs, hardly reaching the lower ones. The disagreeable questions and the attention focused on him were one thing, he thought, as he felt the banister, the irregularities and the grain that had been familiar since childhood. The other was the delicacies he was looking forward to, and not just since his breakfast in the hostel that morning — the same eternal constipating bread made of wheat and rye flour from the Konsum in Waldbrunn, spread with Elbperle mixed-fruit jam, syrup or black pudding — but ever since it had been agreed that the party would be held in the Felsenburg; after the small Erholung, it was the best restaurant for miles around. It wasn’t easy to even get a table in the Felsenburg, never mind to reserve the room for a large birthday gathering — as so often, it had only been made possible through connections: not long ago, the chef had been a patient of Christian’s father’s.

The ten-minute clock struck twenty past five. Professor Dathe’s voice had sunk to a low mumble; perhaps Libussa had only opened the living-room door for a moment, to see who had come into the building or to get something out of the kitchen. Since the new tenants in the top-floor apartment had arrived, the ‘Alois?’ or ‘Herr Rohde?’ that she unfailingly used to shout downstairs, however quietly you opened the door, was no longer to be heard. Christian stopped half-way up the stairs and imagined that he could hear Libussa’s high, rather husky voice, the rolled ‘R’ when she spoke his uncle’s surname, the slightly palatal ‘O’s which caused most visitors who didn’t know her to wonder where she came from. As far as he knew, she had worked as a secretary for the VEB Deutfracht shipping company and had moved to Dresden with her husband many years ago. The two of them could be seen together on some of the photographs on the staircase walls: a tall woman with a bony physique, shoulder-length hair and dark, fragile-looking eyes that seemed too big for her slim, heart-shaped face, and which regarded the observer with an expression somewhere between irritation and weariness; the lean man in the white uniform, with a searching look, hands casually stuck in his pockets and half turning away, so that the bright light of a summer’s day in Rostock harbour, some time in the fifties or sixties, left a patch of dazzling brightness on his shoulder, blending it into the background. In that picture, Christian thought, they looked like lovers who had been caught out, but perhaps they were both standing stiff as a poker because they were trying to fit in with the photographer’s idea of what a snapshot for the work team’s diary or the local section of the Baltic News should look like. On the picture beside it they were laughing, both had rucksacks slung over one shoulder and their hair was already grey; Libussa was pointing with her trekking pole into the vague distance: To Špindlerův Mlýn was written in thin handwriting on the mount; Christian had leant forward a little to decipher it. The edges of the photos were perforated, like postage stamps, and they all had the mildly dusty, shallow exposure that one got with ORWO black-and-white film.

The photos on the opposite wall, on the other hand, were quite different, and they had always aroused Christian’s admiration, and Robert’s and Ezzo’s when they were here: they were familiar with their sepia tones from the UFA film programmes that were hidden in a suitcase in the loft at Caravel — in those you could see film stars, hair precisely parted, surrounded by a faint nimbus, looking up confidently at wild mountainsides; there was no Piz Palü on the stairs, however, no dashing Johannes Heesters, but the Gulf of Salerno; the Naples coast road, the Posillipo; and Genoa harbour with the tall, massively castle-like lighthouse above it. In the past, the second flower lamp at the bottom by the entrance had worked, so that there was good light for looking at the pictures; there must be a fault in the wiring somewhere under the plaster since it still didn’t work with new bulbs. When he had been staying here, Christian had often crept down during the night to look at the photographs with a torch, sometimes with one of the miner’s lamps that were lying unused in the shed. He especially liked the three Italian ones and would marvel as he looked at them again and again, would stand there, as he did now, and let his eye wander over patches of light, houses and ships that seemed to have sprung from the sea. He went up the rest of the stairs to the top, each one creaking with a different, familiar sound. There was a dead bulb in the flat ring of lights on the upper landing as well, and the others flickered when he turned them on briefly, so as not to stumble over the coal boxes beside the Langes’ kitchen and the cabin. A strip of light could be seen under the door to the Langes’ living room; Professor Dathe had fallen silent, and a measured male voice, perhaps an announcer, had taken his place.