Uwe Tellkamp - The Tower

‘I presume you don’t dance?’

He shook his head, then he picked up another beer mat, wrote, ‘Would you tell the others I’ve left. The door’s open.’

How quiet it suddenly was: as if a space full of noise had been shut off and was no longer in operation here, dispersing and dissipating in the smells Christian once more perceived: from the park where a large bird flew off, startling him, from the garden, from the House with a Thousand Eyes. Bats were flitting between the treetops, visible as angular shadows against the muddy sky. The barometer at home was on ‘set fair’ and Libussa had said there wouldn’t be any rain. Chakamankabudibaba emerged from the sweet briar beside the path, briefly touched his calf with his bottle-brush tail in a kind of condescending greeting noting his arrival, licked a front paw, sniffed at the depths of the garden, disappeared as silently as he had come. The Teerwagens were sitting on their balcony, a trickle of pop music was coming from open windows, perhaps it was Here’s Music with Rainer Süss, a popular show on Channel 1. Half past eleven, no, it wasn’t on at that time. It was unusually warm, he wondered about sleeping outside, then he remembered he still had to get the loungers out of the garden shed and pump up the air beds, he decided to do it right away. Everything was dark at the Kaminskis’ and the Stahls’, but when he went to the balustrade, below which the garden fell away steeply, he saw the Stahls sitting in the light of the coloured bulbs they strung up over the iron table in the summer. He went down, the engineer asked whether Sylvia had been quiet; Christian hadn’t heard anything, Sabine Stahl said she sometimes secretly watched television when they were down in the garden, the glow of the screen couldn’t be seen from down there. Christian said there could be problems with washing in the morning but Stahl replied that there were things young people had to put up with, he’d filled the tin bathtub in the garden. ‘Are you staying longer?’

‘A little.’

‘Meno told us you and your friends will have to go to the pre-military training camp soon?’

‘Yes.’

‘Keep your chin up. — Good night, Christian.’

‘Good night.’

The Stahls got up. Christian noticed the bulge in Sabine Stahl’s stomach. She smiled. ‘Meno will soon have to let us have the bedroom.’

They slowly made their way upstairs. Christian watched them leave, two patches of brightness going up the steps to the house. The slight feeling of intoxication he’d had from the cocktails had gone; he poured himself a glass of punch, it tasted flat, he abandoned his glass. He switched off the lights, put out the lamp, sat down in the chair where the ship’s doctor had been sitting, stared up at the Chinese lantern swaying in the currents of air, a white sphere with a clown’s grin in red drawn on it in which burnt insects were to be found in the mornings. At night the garden was a mysterious realm, the crickets sawing their soporific ‘tsik-tsik’ into the distant noises of the city and the whispering of the trees, everywhere there seemed to be eyes opened, everywhere a hunt was on. A bug crawled onto the table, it had long, backward-curving feelers that seemed to be sieving the air, Christian, startled, stood up: that was something for Meno, not for him, Meno would certainly have had a Latin name ready at once and told him something about the habits of the bug. Christian was afraid of it, for him the creature was one of the night spirits, an eye with which nature looked at humankind.

He went to fetch the pump from the shed. Stahl had placed a lantern beside the tin bathtub, a yellow pinhead in the darkness dappled with the white moth-attracting plants: narcotic vibrations; he suddenly felt the need to dip a hand in the rainwater butt beside the shed; then the other hand: he was amazed how unpleasant it was if you only wet one. The hornets’ nest was empty, he remembered that Meno had told him that hornets lived for just one year and that the queens built new nests after they’d overwintered; also hornets, unlike wasps, didn’t go for human food; he could have told Reina that. When he looked up, the pinhead had gone. He found candles in the shed, matches as well, Meno probably used them when he worked out there. On a shelf were some apples from the previous year, on the windowledge cardboard cylinders of greenfly killer; there was a smell of fertilizer and rubber boots. The tin bathtub was in the lowest part of the garden, on a terraced piece of lawn with tomatoes and raspberries where Libussa toiled to keep them clear of dog roses and the maple shoots that landed in the autumn like invading propeller troops from the mother trees below the end of the garden — beyond a rotten wooden fence there was a drop of several metres, the neighbouring plot was overgrown and didn’t seem to belong to anyone. Glow-worms whirred across the path Christian was slowly going down, twigs kept scratching his face; here were gnarled fruit trees, the Cellini apples Lange used to make cider and puree, Boscs, Russets and Orange Pippins; Lange’s particular pride, the old pear trees: Beurré Hardy, Gute Luise, one tree with Christian’s favourite variety, the red and yellow Comice, Meno preferred the cinnamon-red Madame Verté and the spherical Grüne Jagdbirne; in the cellar there were hundreds of jars of bottled fruit.

He waited. One woman’s and one man’s voice, then splashing and when they burst out laughing he recognized Ina and Siegbert; he squatted down and only stood up again when his legs started to hurt. The splashing again, they were laughing in the drawn-out way drunks laugh, Christian crept nearer and saw their milky bodies in the bathtub, they separated, murmured, came together, touched each other gently, as if they were two doctors sounding each other with the warmed membranes of their stethoscopes.

Yes, he thought, yes. You ought to be somewhere else. But he waited, avid and sad.

Then he went upstairs, fetched the loungers, put them up in Meno’s living room and saw to the air beds. His thoughts wandered hither and thither and the chirping of the crickets coming through the open balcony door was excessively loud. The desk lamp would attract insects, he switched it off, went outside for a breath of fresh air. All at once the garden was alien, the frothy, dark-blue tree shadows threatening, there was still pop music coming from somewhere, suddenly cut through by squealing, as if someone were being thoroughly tickled. How boring, how meaningless! And all these blooms and plants, pushing against each other like forces in a polite and unfair game, existed just as well without him; this insight filled him with such consternation that he could no longer bear it on the balcony. The door opened. Verena switched the light on, started. ‘You gave me a fright. I didn’t know you were here —’

‘Where are the others?’

‘Still at the Bird of Paradise. Siegbert went off with Muriel and Fabian. Have you seen Reina?’

‘No.’

‘She left shortly after you. Christian … may I say something to you?’ She looked past him, he had to swallow. Verena wanted to go into the garden, to the iron table, but he said no, even though, for a moment, he felt a desire for revenge because he was expecting reproaches.

‘OK then, we can just as well stay here,’ she said.

‘No, I … Would you come? I’d like to show you Caravel. Just from outside —’

He hesitated, he turned away. ‘We won’t need to ring, I don’t want to go in … it’s not far,’ he said quietly.

They walked along Mondleite, deserted at night, it was dark now at the Teerwagens’ too. For a long time Verena said nothing and he didn’t urge her, recalled the walk with Meno in the winter, before the birthday party in the Felsenburg, how mysterious and full of stories the district had seemed, now it looked closed. There was something ghost-like about Verena’s dress over the streets that were like grey ribbons, she was wearing soft shoes, he couldn’t hear her steps. ‘I don’t think it was right of you simply to leave like that,’ she said when they’d already reached Heinrichstrasse, where the only lights were at Niklas’s and in number 12, the house with the wisteria, the scent of which mingled with that of the elderberry bush outside Caravel. ‘We’d so looked forward to this evening and then —’