The Tower: A Novel (10 page)

‘A great success, great success … and all the grub they laid out for us poor starving Zone-dwellers! … further proof for us of what a thoroughly decadent society imperialism is and how magnificent its death-throes are …’ Niklas waved his hand dismissively, and when they asked him what exactly they’d had to eat, his only reply was to close his eyes and give a real Dresden ‘Ooooh’, an expression that combined wonderment and stupefaction with acknowledgement of the limited nature of local catering. ‘But no one’s going to match what you’ve put together this evening that soon, even if it’s the boss of VEB Delikat himself.’

Then Niklas talked about
Il Seraglio
, which had been performed recently in the Dresden theatre. Here he was in his element, going into detail, vivid detail, imitating the gestures of the Japanese conductor, who, according to the withering verdict of the majority of the orchestra, had no idea about music; he also recounted anecdotes that were going round the theatre. The ice cream and desserts had all been finished; everyone was cheered up by the good food, the company and Niklas’s stories. They left at around eleven.

The left-over food and drink were packed up.

‘I’ll make up a special parcel for Regine and Hansi, they’ll be hungry.’

‘Yes, good idea, Anne. I’ll see to the presents.’ Richard went to the
easel. Meno helped Anne and Adeling pack up the food. ‘How are things with Regine?’

‘Not very good, I think. She doesn’t say that, but she doesn’t look well. They’re giving her a lot of hassle, Hansi gets it at school as well.’

‘How long’s she been waiting now?’

‘Since nine this morning. When I left, around five, the call hadn’t come, nor when Richard left. They won’t have managed it since then either, otherwise they would have come.’

‘What should I do with the cold meat? Have you any wrapping paper?’

‘Wait a minute.’ Anne went over to Adeling, who went out and reappeared shortly after with a roll of greaseproof paper.

‘How long is it since Jürgen went?’

‘Two and a half years. Terrible. When I imagine what it would be like if Richard were in Munich or Hamburg, Mo, and I was stuck here all by myself with the children … No, I just don’t want to think about it.’

Outside it was bitterly cold. The air seemed to be grasping their cheeks and the tips of their noses with sandpaper fingers. It had stopped snowing. Canopies of light hung over the crossings, the only places where the street lamps were still on; the pavements lay in darkness, with a touch of faint moonlight here and there; the houses were black blocks with glassy outlines. Meno supported Grandmother Emmy and was carrying most of the presents in a bag; Richard, walking alongside Anne, had the picture, she the barometer, Christian his cello; the Tietzes were far ahead of them, each with some kind of bag containing wrapped-up food over their shoulder.

‘Well, little nurse, who tended me with devoted care?’ said Richard, teasing his wife. ‘Didn’t you blush!’

‘And he bowed to me into the bargain, your well-informed Herr Professor Müller. He could at least have asked you how things were before confusing me – at your birthday party in front of fifty
people! – with that Nurse Hannelore.’ Anne shook her head in outrage. ‘I wasn’t even a student nurse at that time and certainly not in Halle.’

‘It was well meant, as a compliment.’

‘Well meant, compliment – you know what you can do with your compliment …’ Angrily Anne kicked a snowball that was lying on the path out of the way.

‘Aren’t you angry! Come here, my little lambkin.’ Richard grabbed her and gave her a kiss.

‘Watch out with the picture … And don’t call me your “little lambkin” – you know very well I can’t stand it. Of course I’m annoyed. I just hope he gets stomach ache from all the cakes he stuffed himself with.’

Anne looked across at the children, who were running in the road and laughing as they threw snowballs at each other. Emmy and Meno were some distance behind, then came Kurt Rohde with Barbara and Ulrich; Alice and Sandor were behind them.

‘There’s one thing I ask of you, Richard: you mustn’t talk so openly when there are so many people present, some of whom we don’t know very well. We know, of course, what the Tietzes’ views are, and Meno’s. But you know that Ulrich is a Party member.’

‘Yes, and why? Because otherwise he wouldn’t have been made managing director. He didn’t join from conviction. He’s got eyes in his head, he’s still in his right senses.’

‘Still. You’ve a tendency to get louder and louder the more you get worked up about a subject. Can you vouch for every one of your colleagues? You see.’

‘Müller showed a dangerous reaction to a joke Manfred made. We were at the buffet, Christian had just told one about Brezhnev and along came Müller to give us a slap on the wrists: that mockery of a great man whom our Soviet brothers had lost was uncalled for and that we should be aware of our position and stuff like that.’

‘You
see, that’s just what I mean. And he was standing quite far away, I was watching you. You must think of things like that, Richard, promise me that. You must learn to hold your tongue. You encourage Christian and you know what he’s like, that he takes after you in this respect. The boy’s bound to think: If my father thinks he can get away with it, so can I.’

‘I don’t believe that’s what he thinks. You underestimate him. But you’re right, my feelings keep running away with me. I’m not one of your devious lickspittles and I don’t want to bring up my boys to be like that, goddammit,’ Richard said in a voice strained with fury.

‘Don’t swear. You know, I’m not that worried about Robert. He’s quieter and somehow … more sensible. At school he says the things they want to hear, keeps his thoughts to himself, then comes home and switches over. But Christian … Your boss mustn’t hear that Christian has told a joke about Brezhnev, especially now, when he’s hardly been dead a month and they don’t know whether they’re coming or going and fly off the handle at the least thing … You know all that. And Christian does too. But sometimes I really feel it’s like talking to a brick wall. And then you don’t even know whether that restaurant’s been bugged all over the place …’

‘Oh, you can be sure of that.’

‘So why don’t you behave accordingly, then? I did have a word with you about it only this afternoon, and Christian yesterday! But I can talk till the cows come home, it’s still no use. The boy’s old enough, you say, but when you and your friends encourage him like that … He’s only seventeen, for God’s sake, he must feel it’s a challenge when he listens to you lot … But I think he’s not yet old enough to assess such situations properly.’

‘You’re right, Anne. I should have been more cautious. Oh … all this ducking and diving …’

‘Moaning won’t change it.’

‘That Müller … I saw very clearly that he was boiling with rage
and didn’t kick up a big fuss only because he was our guest. Manfred will have to watch out too. I know for a fact that his boss and Müller can’t stand each other, but … A comrade’s a comrade, and when it comes down to it, dog doesn’t eat dog. Oh, Anne, I’ve been living in this state for thirty-three years and I still don’t know when it’s time to keep my mouth shut.’

Anne looked at him, gave his arm a squeeze.

‘That’s why I love you. Come on, then, it’s too late to do anything about it now.’

Richard sensed that she was depressed and wanted to change the subject. ‘Hey, what are we going to do about sleeping arrangements? I thought Sandor and Alice could stay in the Little Room …’

‘My dear, we sorted that out ages ago.’ She shook her head in amusement. ‘You men always think of these things in such good time, don’t you? It’s amazing. If these things were left to you, we’d be in chaos in no time at all. Alice and Sandor are going to have to sleep with Kurt in the children’s room, they can move back into the Little Room tomorrow. Regine and Hansi in the living room, Emmy in the Little Room. Your mother needs to sleep by herself and anyway, you can’t expect her to put up with the hard sofas in the living room; it doesn’t bother Regine and the young lad. And they’ll have the telephone in there, in case the call comes very late. Hey, Robert, Ezzo, stop that, you almost hit us. I don’t want anything to get broken, d’you hear?’

‘Yesyes,’ the two shouted happily, sweeping snow off the top of the walls into each other’s faces.

Christian was thinking about Regine, who was a friend of his parents. Jürgen Neubert, Regine’s husband, had left the country illegally two years ago to go to Munich. Since then they could only meet in Prague, once a year, after great difficulties, Jürgen always afraid of being arrested. Regine had applied for an exit visa, and since then her telephone had been cut off. She had to use Anne and Richard’s line to speak to Jürgen. The call might be put through at four in the morning,
you never knew when beforehand, which was why Anne had taken the precaution of making up beds for Regine and her son.

‘Aha,’ Richard murmured outside Caravel, taking the key out of his coat pocket. The light was on in the living room, the windows of which, with their flying buttresses, could be seen from the street. That was the sign that Regine was still waiting for her husband’s call.

The first light of day was crouching at the window when Christian woke. He listened. Everything was quiet in the house, but he knew that Meno liked to get up early and spend lauds – as, like the monks, he called the hour between five and six – at work or meditating in the gradually waning darkness of the living room, which was still reasonably warm from the previous evening. In the summer Meno would sit on the little balcony watching the return of the garden, the branches and flowers being outlined in the flush of dawn, Lange’s pear trees still dark, the pears still not released from the twilight; watching and perhaps listening as he, Christian, was listening now. The rusty tick of Meno’s Russian
3ap
alarm clock, the faint green glow of the fluorescent lines under the numbers and on the hands. It was shortly after seven. Christian got up and put on the dressing gown Anne had laid out for him. The stove had gone out during the night; the room was so cold his breath came out like a cloud of smoke and there were ice patterns on the window. The light was on in the bathroom, and he heard Libussa singing one of her Czech folk songs; when she sang, her voice sounded like a little girl’s. On the landing it was even colder than in the cabin, there was a glitter of frost on the coal box. He
hurried back into the room, swung his arms round, did knee bends, then some shadow boxing with an invisible opponent who, in his mind’s eye, took on the features of his Russian teacher, and then, after a blow full in the face, the puffy red face of his civics teacher, a jab, a straight right, a straight left, a right hook and then one to those thick, always slightly parted lips with the curve of the red-veined jug-like nose above them – there was a knock at the door. ‘Krishan,’ he heard Libussa shout, ‘the bathroom’s free now, breakfast’ – she pronounced it ‘prek-fest’ – ‘is in the conservatory, d’you hear.’

Kri-shan. That was what Libussa called him; he liked it. The civics teacher had burst under the force of his punches. Panting, Christian flung open the window. It had continued to snow during the night; the garden, which fell away steeply below the window, lay under a thick white blanket, and the summerhouse, where Meno often used to work, sometimes even sleep in the warmer seasons, looked as if it were covered in icing; the sandstone balustrade on either side, which separated the upper garden from the lower, wilder part, just peeked out of the snow; a stone eagle was perched on the balustrade and its wings, delicately carved and elegantly outspread, seemed to be carrying a pile of folded white towels. Fresh animal tracks criss-crossed the snow. A flock of crows was busying itself about the huge stack of wood that Meno, the ship’s doctor and Meno’s next-door neighbour, the engineer Dr Stahl, had piled up the previous autumn. In front of the rhododendrons, which covered the left-hand side of the balustrade almost completely, several bird feeders were hanging from some clothes poles; countless birds were fluttering round and squabbling. He closed the window and went to the bathroom.

At weekends they had a communal breakfast in the House with a Thousand Eyes. It was Libussa, who was very sociable, who had introduced the custom. They took it in turns to provide rolls, butter, milk and jam; in the summer they often had breakfast in the garden, in the lower part, at a table in the middle of a wild, romantic tangle of
bushes, out of sight of prying eyes; a weathered set of steps led down to it.

A jet of boiling hot water shot into the tub with the lion feet. There were fine cracks in the enamel. There were traces of black mould in the joins between the tiles, on the ceiling with the layers of peeling paint, on the wood of the windowsill, which had been leached grey by soapy water; the mould was an intruder in all the houses Christian knew up there, and it was impossible to eradicate entirely, no matter how much time people spent airing rooms, brushing on fungicides or painting white lead or spar varnish over it

Soon the bathtub was steaming. He refilled the boiler with water, thinking about the conservatory. Whenever Christian said anything about the conservatory, or about the House with a Thousand Eyes – in the school hostel after they’d finished their homework for the evening and the three of them were sitting in the lounge together and it was difficult to stay out of the exchange of information, the ‘who-are-you-then?’ and ‘where-do-you-come-from-then?’ – the response would be disbelieving looks, sometimes unconcealed doubt. He quickly sensed their scepticism and would change the subject before he got onto the details that really sounded fantastic and magical, didn’t mention Caravel, East Rome, Meno’s name for the house where he lived and where there was a room that could be reached both through the Langes’ apartment and by a spiral staircase that was hidden behind the salamander wallpaper in the hall, with chessboard tiles and light coming in through a sloping overhead window that the Langes, like the original owners, used as a conservatory. – ‘Oh come on now, with the shortage of accommodation, you don’t seriously expect us to believe that. Hasn’t your ship’s doctor had someone allocated to one of his rooms?’ Christian could hear his fellow boarders in Waldbrunn say as he got out of the bath and went back to the cabin, dressing as quickly as he could, the cold was so biting. – He hasn’t, but my uncle has. He shares the lower apartment with an engineer and his family; my uncle
has one large room and two smaller ones. It’s an old villa, built by a soap manufacturer around the turn of the century; one family lived in the whole house then, and there were a few attic rooms for the maids. He would have had no idea that he would be expropriated one day – otherwise he might have made better arrangements to suit the Communal Housing Department. ‘Well now, isn’t he a little mocker, our Dresdener?’ It was Jens Ansorge who said that. The son of the general practitioner from Altenberg, he was in 11/2, Christian’s class, and sat right at the front of the row by the window; a little shorter than Christian, his hair blow-dried into a slightly dishevelled style, he had spoken with a conspiratorial grin and tugged at his large beak of a nose with relish. That meant: Don’t try to fool me, OK? Sometimes Jens watched him during classes; they both sat at the front, though Christian was alone in the row by the door, and he could feel Jens’s blue eyes, openly scrutinizing and challenging, going over his face, the clothes he was wearing, the Swiss walking boots that had been handed down to him by his father.

Christian was already on the stairs. He intended to go to the conservatory by the concealed door, but Libussa was just coming out of the kitchen, where she’d been warming up some rolls – the odour filled the hall. ‘Just come right in, Krishan, and help me carry the things into the conservatory. You know where everything is, the salt’s on the right in the wall cupboard.’ Libussa, holding the basket of rolls, her hair gathered in a bun, nodded to him. ‘The door’s open, but close it behind you or we’ll lose all the heat.’

Christian picked up the tea tray. The Langes’ apartment smelt of vanilla tobacco; the smoke seemed to have seeped right into the yellowing wallpaper and faded curtains that were hung over the doors for extra insulation. Christian lowered his head to go through the wooden-bead curtain into a little vestibule in which were a shoe tidy, key hooks, a hat rack on which were several of Libussa’s large hatboxes. The ship’s doctor, who was just coming out of the living-room door
with the ash pan in his hand, blinked behind his horn-rimmed glasses when he saw Christian, but not in surprise at seeing him in their apartment, for he immediately said, in his tobacco-smoky voice, ‘Did it go well, did it go well, was your father happy with it?’ He said ‘fadder’, almost swallowing the ‘r’ – Lange came from Rostock. ‘Very happy, even.’ Christian then wished him a slightly embarrassed good morning, for Lange was in a rather strange get-up: striped pyjama trousers and a tweed jacket with a cigar peeping out of the breast pocket. ‘Right then, let’s get on with it, my son.’ Muttering to himself, he looked for a key on the hooks, the goatee on his chin and upper lip – which had retained its light-brown colour, in contrast to the rather tangled hair on his head – bobbing up and down as he did so.

The teacups were steaming; they were also heavy and the ball of his hand was touching the hot teapot; despite that, Christian didn’t go straight into the conservatory but cast greedy eyes on the pictures on the walls, mostly photographs of the ships on which Lange had been the doctor: the
Oldenburg
, a proud and tall full-rigged ship – when Christian asked about it Lange would growl, ‘She were a good ship’ in his Low German dialect, jutting out his chin and puffing smoke from a pipe that was curved like an upside-down question mark; passenger ships of the Hamburg–America Line; then, during the war, destroyers, menacing grey iron hulks. Harbours, the Torres Straits, the rocky coast of Patagonia, taken from a ship of the Laeisz shipping company’s nitrate line; a U-boat crew in the Second World War, the submarine surfaced beside a battleship, its sailors waving, the hatches open, the crew fallen in on deck, pennants, illustrated with the number of gross register tons they had sunk, fluttered above the bearded faces, and the captain was saluting, his hand raised casually and, as it seemed to Christian, slightly sceptically to his hat with its armed-forces eagle hanging askew.
Scapa Flow – Captain-Lieutenant Prien salutes Rear Admiral Dönitz CUB –
‘Commander of the U-Boats,’ Lange had replied to Christian’s question about the abbreviation, and he stroked his thin
beard, going on in his Low German, ‘An’ I knew Prien as well. ’e were the great hero back then. A German U-boat sinks the
Royal Oak
in Scapa Flow. Reception in the Reich chancellery, the Knight’s Cross, red carpet an’ all that. An’ then? Lost at sea for Führer, Folk and Fadderland. All lost at sea, my son. The seventh from t’left, on the big tub, that’s me.’

Beside the photos were sailors’ knots, carefully drawn by Lange on black cardboard and framed: bowline, clove hitch, carrick bend and bunting hitch. The ship’s doctor had taught him some of them – they were useful for fishing. The television, a Raduga, reflected the growing light and seemed to be staring at him. The stove gaped wide, the surround was spattered with ash – Libussa would go round later with the vacuum cleaner and wipe the bottles on the shelf beside the stove in which Lange’s ships dreamt of long voyages. Christian went into the conservatory.

‘Good morning, young man.’ The engineer turned up the right corner of his lip; it was perhaps intended to seem cool and detached, but to Christian it just looked funny since Stahl had a moon-face and just a few strands of hair on his head, which he combed straight back and plastered down with hair lotion. To make up for it, his eyebrows and the hair on his chest, sticking out like wool from his lumberjack shirt, were all the more bushy. Lange often used to tease him: Gerhart Stahl, he would say, was like a Soviet actor who played a sunflower-seed vendor on the runway of Baku airport in a TV series. A sly clown and an inventive rogue, he would always shake his head dubiously and waggle his eyebrows when the Moscow celebrities, who were returning from their summer holiday, took off in an Ilyushin – ‘I do not waggle my eyebrows,’ the engineer would object irritatedly. Dr Gerhart Stahl didn’t like the Soviet actor because he didn’t like the Soviet Union.

‘Slept well.’ It was a statement, not a question. He crushed Christian’s hand in his engineer’s paw, then leant down to the oil radiator and turned the control knob. Although the tall windows were no longer
perfectly insulated and the conservatory was fairly big – there was plenty of room in it for the breakfast table, and they could sit round it without the palm trees in the tubs getting in the way – it was noticeably warmer there than in the Langes’ living room. The conservatory had a stove of its own, and the ship’s doctor would stoke it up before going to bed; it continued to heat the conservatory until after breakfast, by which time the stoves in the other rooms were going.

‘What a lovely prek-fest!’ Libussa clapped her hands together with joy. ‘Krishan, Gerhart, let me remind you of that before you start eating like horses. We can thank God that at least we can get enough rolls and bread in this country. When I think back to the war …’ She went round filling their second cups with hot milk that she got from a collective farm beyond Bühlau, on the Schönfeld plateau; very little fat had been taken out of the cow’s milk – it was more like white soup than milk and Christian found it nauseating; but Libussa thought he didn’t have enough muscle, and that he was at the stage that would decide ‘whether he would turn into a man or a pencil’. Therefore she refused to be put off by his expression and filled his cup.

‘Thanks again for the roses, Libussa.’ Meno, who had switched on Radio Dresden, bent over a tub with Maréchal Niel roses. ‘All the wives were envious of them and insisted I give them the address of the market garden. Did I perhaps get the flowers from the Rose Gorge or from Arbogast’s greenhouses? How did I manage to bribe the grower?’

The ship’s doctor came in. He’d put on a dressing gown and was carrying Chakamankabudibaba, who blinked in the light, arched his back and climbed into a basket that was next to a magnificent sago palm. Lange and Stahl rubbed their hands expectantly and licked their lips. There was the smell of tea, coffee, freshly made cocoa, there were preserved quinces and cherries, plum jam and forest honey, and beside the basket of rolls covered with a cloth was one of Libussa’s specialities: apricots that had been dried to make a kind of firm pastry and cut into thin strips that Christian (who kept squinting over at the plate,
bringing a grin from Stahl, whose chair was much closer to the delicacy) thought would do a lot more to promote his growth and physical development than hot cow’s milk. Libussa and her husband put their hands together for grace: ‘By Thy hands we all are fed, give us, Lord, our daily bread.’ Radio Dresden was broadcasting a poem by a senior functionary of the Writers’ Association who had fought valiantly for socialism. Meno listened, a pained look on his face, while Christian and the others, unmoved, helped themselves to what was on the table. The poem was about ideals, a bright future, Lenin and Marx, about heroic deeds on the building site of tomorrow, about shaping communism and ‘About you, comrade, blithely breakfasting, / free of the cares of those / on guard!’ Stahl paused as he was cutting his roll open. ‘Tell me, Meno, do you have to read that kind of stuff every day? O blithely breakfasting book-editor …’