Uwe Tellkamp - The Tower

‘Later, young man, it’s our turn now. The stories are massively exaggerated, but not bad otherwise, he should discuss them with your uncle.’

Christian went to the window: ‘Herr Lange?’

‘Oh, no sense of humour.’ They gave him the book. ‘It’s OK,’ they shouted into the garden.

There was a ring at Meno’s door. ‘Oh, he’s got visitors,’ Judith Schevola said when Christian opened the door. ‘You are —’

‘His nephew.’

‘Herr Rohde and I — we’re working together. He’s my editor.’

‘Do come in.’

‘I don’t want to disturb …’

‘Aren’t you Judith Schevola?’ Verena came from the house and, when Judith Schevola nodded in surprise, said, ‘I’ve read everything of yours, pity I haven’t got a book with me or I’d have asked you to sign it.’

‘There’s punch in the garden,’ Christian said.

‘What are you celebrating?’ Schevola asked, following the two others. ‘Is it someone’s birthday?’

Verena kept talking to her, full of enthusiasm, Lange had no chance with his sailor’s yarns and made a gesture of cheerful resignation. Siegbert and he withdrew with the logbook and lantern, and soon the smoke eddies of Copenhagen vanilla tobacco were feeling their way to the iron table where the others were sitting bombarding Schevola with questions.

‘How does a conference like that go?’

‘Do you really want to know?’ Schevola smiled. ‘Rhubarbrhubarb …’

‘I think I’ve heard that before.’

‘And: whisperwhisperjeerjeer. — What do you like reading best?’

‘At school? The Adventures of Werner Holt ,’ Siegbert shouted. ‘At last a book that’s fun to read.’

‘That doesn’t surprise me. And Hermann Kant: Die Aula ?’

‘Dishonest shit!’

She laughed. ‘That was clear.’

‘And you’re a real writer?’ Reina wanted to know.

‘I write books, yes. But whether I’m a real writer … Sometimes I think I’ll never be one.’

‘Well I enjoyed your books,’ Verena said. ‘You can really get into them, and the people you describe … it’s as if they’re alive. — I think you like them a lot, even the awkward ones,’ she added quietly. Schevola rummaged round in her handbag, fished out a packet of cigarettes. ‘May I?’ she asked Libussa.

‘Of course, child. Meno thinks a lot of you and, believe me, he has his opinions about authors.’

‘I can imagine.’

‘Do you often suffer,’ Verena hesitated, ‘I mean … You’re so successful, my sister works in a library and your books are frequently asked for and everyone I know likes you —’

‘Self-doubt? — Yes, I do. It’s an affliction, success and praise make no difference. You know, in the evening you’re alone in your room and the great authors, the masters, are watching you from the walls, their books are silent on the shelves and you’re sitting over a sheet of paper, scribbling away —’

Verena’s face lit up. ‘I like you, may I say that to you? And I thought I was the only one who always had such thoughts.’

Schevola glanced at her, blew smoke at the paper moon. ‘Nice here.’

‘Sometimes I think of this as Eichendorff’s garden,’ Christian said. ‘The one in his story about the good-for-nothing, near Vienna, the Countess’s castle and it all ends happily ever after?’

Ina arrived, they could see from afar that she was frustrated. ‘Damn, damn, damn! We didn’t get in. It was a different bouncer. And d’you know who’s on? Neustadt! ’

‘That’s why it’s so full today.’

‘Is it the Bird of Paradise Bar you’re talking about?’ Schevola asked. And when Libussa nodded: ‘Could I use your telephone?’ Schevola stubbed out her cigarette and went up with Christian. Five minutes later she came back down. ‘How is it then? Who’s coming?’

‘Wow, how did you manage that?’ Falk said in astonishment.

‘Vitamin C. Right then?’

Ladislaus Pospischil’s Bird of Paradise Bar was living off its earlier reputation. In the sixties the notoriety of disrepute had shone over its parquet dance floor that bands with acceptable names, gawky youths in crocodile-yellow shoes and suits from VEB Herrenmode, authenticated by string ties, had filled with Bill Haley’s and Elvis Presley’s incendiary music, after two or three numbers the mirror wall was showing nothing but smears of colour and the outlines of bodies, was sweating condensation among the smoke from Karo cigarettes and the exudations of 500 squealing, wildly jigging bodies and warm champagne stirred with the finger. Cheap beer went flat as excited conversations were held on table telephones with pulsating red lights. In the men’s toilet there were glasses of sugar water for dishevelled duck’s-arse haircuts, between the mirrors was a warning about sexually transmitted diseases and couples that spent two hours over the same cocktail wanted mostly to listen. Representatives of order and rebels had subjected each other to hostile scrutiny across Sprelacart laminate tables, many a Dresden marriage had been arranged by the cigarette spirit in the private booths that could be closed off with bird-patterned curtains made by Tashkent weavers. Since it had been nationalized, it had gone downhill, Pospischil was no longer its owner but senior employee; the smugglers’ cave in the Schlemm Hotel ran out of smugglers.

Christian had never been there before. The deafening noise that suddenly enveloped him like a rubber wall, the screaming, laughing stream of people, drifts of smoke and beer fumes in the air that lay on his skin like a warm, damp nappy, the cramped, claustrophobic room with the throng heaving like heavy, dark water in a tank with a few lantern buoys drifting on it; the jerky movements of the dancers on the small floor in front of the band that seemed to him like the desperate flounderings of non-swimmers: all that repelled him and he was glad to find a seat in the corner of the bench Schevola had reserved. Beside them were soldiers in their uniforms, squinting longingly at the girls, glasses of cheap champagne in their hands. ‘Poor sods,’ said Muriel pityingly, after a glance at their epaulettes, and asked the ugliest one to dance; a flush immediately twitched across his face, spreading a few fractions of a second later to the others, as if there were a connection between them, the hope of a similar piece of good fortune; but Verena and Siegbert were already on the dance floor, Ina had dragged Fabian up and Reina, after a glance at Christian, Falk; Heike simply shook her head when one of the soldiers attempted an awkward bow, and Schevola was at the bar, flanked by a man with a ponytail and a big bushy beard and a woman in a sari-like dress.

The music was booming out of the loudspeakers; when the drummer sent his sticks flashing over his skins the impact of the sound was physically painful, Christian would really have liked to put his hands over his ears. He wondered whether the others felt the same, no, they were dancing and laughing in high spirits, expressions of liberation on their faces, and enjoyment. Libussa and Alois Lange stepped onto the floor, the bandleader smiled, leant over the mike and announced, ‘Grandad and Grandma Lange’ — a real cheek, Christian thought, and how did the guy know them — as ‘twist legends from the lejjen-derry days of the old Bird of Paradise’, then the rhythms of ‘Let’s Twist Again’ ripped out and, urged on by cheers and raised arms, Libussa and Alois put on a brilliant twist that no other couple on the floor could match; we can’t dance any more, Christian thought, and: This just can’t be true. He’d never seen the pair of them like that before and yet he imagined he knew them well. Instinctively he dismissed what he was seeing, two white-haired people who, at a click of the fingers and a few bars of rousing music, had cast off their age like a straitjacket that had nothing to do with them and into which an abusive, imperious power had forced them. Christian was shocked to observe them and began to sense that we only knew as much of other people as they were prepared to reveal. This observation hurt him, made him jealous — after all, it was ‘his’ people who were showing Verena, Siegbert and the others something they’d never shown him; they were seeing them for the first time, and in a light they had no idea was new. New for him — suddenly he couldn’t help laughing: You’re behaving like one of those artists Meno sometimes talks about; they imagine people belong to them and feel insulted when they behave differently from the way they’d assumed in their plans.