Uwe Tellkamp - The Tower

In Meno’s apartment it smelt of books, tobacco and plants. He’d left the door with the pointed arch open for Chakamankabudibaba. Reina went out onto the balcony, leant into the climbing roses growing in profusion on the trellis from the conservatory up to the windows of the Kaminski twins. There was a sheet of paper stuck in the typewriter: ‘Greetings, make yourselves at home. If anyone happens to have forgotten their toothbrush, there are two new ones on the top shelf of the bathroom cabinet. Light bulbs (should one go, it’s been happening quite often recently) are in the hall cupboard. I’ve put out towels and soap. If there aren’t enough, ask Libussa Lange. Two can sleep in my bed; there are loungers in the shed, also a pump for your air beds. Please don’t forget Chakamankabudibaba, there’s ground beef and mackerel in the fridge, in the newspaper with the smiling Secretary General. Have a good time. Meno Rohde.’

The ten-minute clock chimed. Siegbert examined the engravings on the signs of the zodiac, Verena perused the titles in the bookshelves, Falk peeped down the microscope.

‘Pity we’re not going to meet your uncle,’ Verena said. ‘Great books.’

‘Just have a look at those floorboards.’ Heike was drawing again: the grain of the larchwood, knots, patches of sunshine.

‘I think they’re waiting for us,’ Reina shouted. When Christian went out he saw Libussa by the garden shed, waving. He held up both hands: ten minutes. Libussa nodded. Reina leant over the balustrade, Christian was amazed at all the freckles on her arms.

‘Do you go there often?’ She wasn’t looking at him; shading her eyes with her hand, she pointed at a pale blue mountain in the hazy distance.

‘The Wilisch,’ Christian said. ‘Not often any more.’

‘Sorry about what happened at Kaltwasser reservoir.’ She looked away, there was a scar on her neck.

‘Where did you get that?’

Reina brushed her hair over it. ‘Accident.’

‘Just a minute —’ He picked a dog rose and put it in her hair. It didn’t stay there, he tried again. Then he felt alarmed, looked down at the city, the curve of the Elbe by Blasewitz, a glider was slowly circling in a thermal. Reina didn’t say anything; he went back into the room.

‘Is that your uncle?’ Verena and Falk were standing looking at the photos and pointed at the one with Kurt Rohde and Meno on a botanical expedition.

‘My grandfather. The boy’s my uncle.’ He picked up the photo of Hanna. ‘His divorced wife, my Aunt Hanna. And on this one here there’s my mother, Meno and my other uncle, Ulrich. The father of Ina we met just now. — If you like I can show you round the house.’

But he told them nothing about the djinn, as they walked round the corridors, nothing about the secrets of the runner in the hall and the leaden shadows that appeared in the mirror in the evening when Meno’s living-room door was open. Heike described the toucan as ‘wicked’. The ten-minute clock struck.

‘We ought to go down.’ Christian saw that the key to the door in the salamander wallpaper wasn’t in the lock. Verena avoided his eye, he decided to say nothing about the spiral staircase and the conservatory, nothing about the photos; though Falk and Siegbert seemed to have discovered them, for they were calling out to the others from the stairs that they really ought to see this. Reina had stayed in the living room.

Fabian and Muriel were sitting between a lantern and a paper moon in front of the dog roses that completely obliterated the other garden smells in that part; they had presumably sat there deliberately, opposite Libussa and Alois Lange, whom they knew: for as long as he had known them there had been something formal, an element of studied affection, in their behaviour towards each other that they didn’t want to expose to the hurried looks of strangers for a casual judgement. Whenever he saw Fabian, his long hair and the unusual shirts he affected — with frills and much-too-long cuffs that he turned back — Christian thought: All he needs is a wig, a sword at his side and a three-cornered hat to go with them and he’d be a vicomte from one of those epistolary novels full of perfume and poison from the second half of the eighteenth century; Barbara had grown thoughtful at one of their Sunday lunches, because Ina’s expression had darkened at Fabian’s name, had said ‘enoeff’ and that in her opinion Fabian was ‘on the other side’, of which his shirts — theatre props, fancy dress — were more than just a cautious indication, and she thought that his parents ought to talk to him about it even though in their place she wouldn’t have been overly worried, after all, that kind of thing did happen and Fabian was only fourteen or fifteen, nothing was finally settled yet. At that Ina had bent her head over the bowl of stewed fruit and snorted. Moreover, she went on, in his own way he had taste, as did his sister. Then Fabian raised one hand to rest his chin on it elegantly while with the other he gave his sister a caterpillar and closed her hand over it. They wanted to be artists; ‘Yes,’ Meno had said without smiling in response to Barbara’s look of exasperation, ‘that’s the result of a youth spent among aromas, poems and conversations about Chopin’s nocturnes, that’s what one dreams of after reading a passage in which Hermann Hesse meditates on evening clouds in the Ticino. Perhaps Hans talks about poisonous plants too much as well.’ — ‘But Iris Hoffmann’s an engineering draughtswoman with Pentacon.’ — ‘True,’ Ulrich had said in response to Barbara’s interjection, ‘but you have to admit that there is something about those theatrical evenings in their house, and Cuddles only forgot her lines twice in the role of the almost-mute; they were great, those evenings, and the beer was good!’ Muriel was sitting with her legs crossed, she was wearing button boots from the days of Lucie Krausewitz’s youth, saved from the wardrobe of the Albert-Theater, which had been destroyed during the bombardment of Dresden, together with a peach-yellow double-breasted suit with black stripes that could have been worn in The Importance of being Earnest or by Maurice Chevalier in one of his roles, a beret right on the back of her head. They went to school dressed like that and were the strangest pair in Robert’s class; but since they were twins and Muriel held the school record for the sixty-metre sprint and Fabian saved penalties spectacularly as goalkeeper for the Fürnberg High School handball team, they were left in peace. And Robert told them that some pupils secretly envied them their things: it was the period of Wisent and Boxer jeans, status-symbol clothes from ‘the other side’ or from Exquisit, compared with which there was a certain odd dignity about the things Fabian and Muriel wore. Siegbert scrutinized the pair of them and they scrutinized him; Fabian’s eye kept coming back to the purple button, Siegbert’s to Muriel’s hair, gleaming black like a wire coil. Lange pulled a yarn out of his sailor’s kitbag, it was about conserved hydrangeas and their use as an antidote to seasickness, at which Siegbert remarked that that was new to him.

‘Christian,’ Alois Lange said, ‘be a good lad and get my logbook from the conservatory. — I’ll prove it to you.’ Lange had spent a quarter of an hour talking about classes of cruisers and types of submarines with Siegbert, to the annoyance of the girls, who had helped Libussa with the punch she had started with strawberries from Hortex; the glass bowl cast an elliptical shadow on the table, the fermenting sweetness attracted wasps and moths; Reina was afraid of the hornets from the nest in the garden shed.

The Kaminski brothers were sitting in the conservatory by the light of a miner’s lamp, they were chatting quietly, windows open, smoking, gave Christian a friendly grin to which he didn’t respond. ‘Hello, how’s your application for university? Are you looking for something particular?’ He saw that they were leafing through Lange’s logbook, went over, without looking at them, stretched out his hand wordlessly.