The Tower: A Novel (107 page)

The other man stood up, went to the window, scratched his unshaven cheek. ‘I’m still thinking what we should do with you. But I don’t think Schwedt is what is required. No. I think you need …’

Christian waited, unconcerned, his nerves weren’t much use any more.

‘… leave,’ the other man said. ‘I’m going to send you on leave. You have a few days left. Go and stay with your grandfather in Schandau. Though … you might do something stupid there. It’s better if you go to Glashütte.’ He took a pass out of one of the drawers, signed it, stamped it. ‘Perhaps you’d better not go via Dresden. There’s a country bus from Grün to Waldbrunn and you know how to continue your journey from there.’

Christian remained seated. The pass was on the table in front of him.

‘Just say thanks, Comrade Captain. We’re not that bad.’

Walpurgis-Night’s
Dream:

Meno wrote,

Climb aboard, Arbogast says, breaking a pencil in two and jamming a piece in the rudder. The airship rises, it’s rigid but light and I can see the city, Berlin, the government’s Copper Island. In front of it the ships are stuck in the wide, coagulated Liver Sea, their masts wrecked, their keels beyond dreams, on the isle the outline of a mountain becomes visible, a deposit of still-ticking clocks, behind it is the surging, sucking, swallowing Whirlscrew, the spiral, the downward reflection of the Tower. Blue skies over the Republic, real national-holiday weather. If I look through one of the eyepieces of the strange construction – a kind of huge microscope – fixed to the cockpit of the airship, I can see details; it’s 7 October, the anniversary of the founding of the Republic, a Pioneers choir is singing the song of the young naturalists: Our land has donned its Sunday best, the dew glints in its hair … The fields are full of flowers bright, the trees stand tall and strong, and whisper soft, for our delight – come hear their secret song. We approach. I don’t need the microscope to see that the roads are an extensive network of convolutions of a whitish substance, I can see the two hemispheres floating in the Liver Sea; the piece of screen above the brain, a TV weather map with the felt-pen circles of the areas of high and low pressure, has taken on the tent-grey of the dura mater; the cobwebby skin of the arachnoidea is covered with the rusted hedges of the hundred-year-old roses whose scent washes over the smell of fat from the state-owned fried-food outlets.
Neues Deutschland
, the organ of the Central Committee of the Socialist Unity Party, has appeared in a special edition, doves of peace, workers’ proclamations, flutter up from the paper, smiling, children-kissing soldiers wave. The official route, along which the cars with the foreign delegations will approach the centre with its rostrums and still-empty main streets for the procession, has been swept clean, the buildings freshly plastered up to the maximum height that can be seen from the official limousines and decked out with optimistic slogans. In the eyepiece nerve cells, with an auratic glow from psycho-cocktails, tropical plants spring up on the banks of the Spree,
the Palace of the Republic infiltrated by the furtive, lethargic blooms of flesh-red parasitic flowers, other nerve cells appear to have been shut out, avoided by nutrients and neurotransmitters, they decompose and, in a kind of retro-embryonic abandonment, are walled into the rhythm of the clocks on the mountain, layer by layer the calcareous deposit thickens round their cell membranes. The brain is old, an aged brain, the fine blood tubes supplying it crack like puff pastry when searching endoscopes – I am not the only one looking, the system has distrusting members of staff – follow a curve, arteriosclerotic plaques have been deposited, only allowing single red, oxygen-bringing blood corpuscles through. A gala performance! The Sandman arrives by helicopter. The Skat Court of Arbitration, cross-hatched by fibre roses of rising pain tracts, lays its cards on the table, Karl-Eduard von Schnitzler, the bosun of the Black Channel – its offbeat, jangling, vampire-drama theme tune is playing in the entrance hall of the Palace of the Republic, a lamp shop that today has spared no expense with the illumination – has turned into a naval shipworm, his chief propagandist’s mouth twisted in a grimace of hatred and torment, we can see him bore into the room of
Make a Wish
where Uta Schorn and Gerd E. Schäfer weave little anecdotes into their cosy chat, but that is not his destination, nor the jolly lads in blue from
Eight Bells, Sea Astern
singing sea shanties to the squeezebox and small talk, he traverses
Kati’s Ice Show
and disappears in the depths of the Book Ministry lodged in Wernicke’s Centre, the auditory word centre, drills into the crumbling mass of files and log books. Dance the samba with me, Samba, samba the whole night through. Dance the samba with me, For the samba brings me close to you, rings out over Alexanderplatz, the guests at the state reception turn to the culinary delights: ham from Wiepersdorf pigs that fed under the olive oaks there, venison between decoratively crossed Suhl rifles, parsley in the barrels, to go with it Edel brandy, lemonade for the fraternal Soviet delegation, wine from Meissen, pineapples and all the other things the TV chef recommends – Truth! Truth! the Minol oriole cried, and it is printed there, in the Party newspapers, the CENTRAL ORGAN and in the district newspapers, do
you see the wires, they’re as fine as cobwebs, touch them, a telephone will ring and a trembling editor will reply, and if it’s time for the drinking trough, every Thursday after the meeting of the Politburo (Tuesdays) and after the discussions of the Secretariat of the Central Committee (Wednesdays), then gather, you editors-in-chief of all the newspapers of Copper Island in the depths of the copper forest, of the mass organizations, with the head of the government press office, plug the functionaries into the machine, the apparatus: the linguistic punch unrolls its tongue = lingua! white-gloved robot hands pull, the linguistic punch starts up, trial run! there’s a clinking on the floor: empty word shells, tin headlines, paper streamers curl: THE MOST IMPORTANT CRITERION OF OBJECTIVITY IS COMMITMENT, COMRADE! TO BE OBJECTIVE MEANS TO COMMIT ONESELF TO THE LAWS GOVERNING THE PROGRESS OF HISTORY TO THE REVOLUTION TO SOCIALISM! The linguistic punch had a red button: the Lenin button that is now pressed: THE TRUE PRESS IS A COLLECTIVE PROPAGANDIST, AGITATOR, ORGANIZER!
–

(Emcee) ‘The State Opera ballet will now perform the polonaise from Tchaikovsky’s
Swan Lake
. For those of you watching on black-and-white televisions I will describe the pretty tutus of our comrade ballet dancers.’

An embrace here, an embrace there, outside a couple of demonstrators but they’re all singing and dancing, because it creates a good atmosphere, the head of the riot police mobile unit, with his office in the House of the Teacher doesn’t dare to order a large-scale operation to clear Alexanderplatz
. –

(Emcee) ‘Now comes the “Awake” chorus from Richard Wagner’s
Mastersingers
.’

(General Secretary) ‘Today the German Democratic Republic is an outpost of peace and socialism in Europe.’

(Gorbachev)
‘Anyone who comes too late …’

(The people, in chorus) ‘Freedom!’

(Minister of Police) ‘Most of all I’d like to go and give these scoundrels a thrashing they won’t forget in a hurry … No one needs to tell me how to deal with class enemies.’

(The people, in chorus) ‘Freedom!’

(Minister of Security) ‘Well, once he, Comrade Gorbachev that is, has left, I’ll give the order to move in and that’ll be the end of humanism.’

Porous zones, the brain switches off awake fields, the alpha waves of sleep can be seen. But this little attachment, the thyroid gland, the control centre of metabolism, never sleeps, a grey concrete palace with reflective or painted-on windows below which the lymph creeps along the slimy lactiferous duct, infested with enemies
–

… but then, all at once …

the clocks struck –

Gudrun said, ‘We step out of our roles.’ Niklas said, ‘
Fidelio
’s on at the Opera and at the prisoners’ chorus the people stand up and join in.’ Barbara said, ‘And Barsano’s sitting in the royal box, his mind elsewhere, and doesn’t join in.’ Anne, her face still beaten up, her wrists swollen from the blows with the truncheon, took a candle. Richard and Robert, who had saved up his leave for the last days before his discharge, checked whether the slogan ‘No violence’ was dry on the paper sashes they were going to wear. They went out into the street.

There were a lot of people out in the streets. All their faces showed the fear of the last few days, grief and unease, but also something new: they shone. Richard could see that these were no longer the dejected, slump-shouldered people of the previous years who slunk along, greeting and cautiously nodding to people but avoiding holding eye
contact for too long, they had raised their heads, still breathing apprehensively, but already full of pride that this directness was possible, that they could walk upright and declare who they were, what they wanted and what they didn’t want, that they were walking with increasingly firm steps and felt the same elemental joy as children who have stood up and are learning to walk. The Schwedes and the Orrés had linked arms with the inhabitants of Wisteria House, Hauschild, the coal merchant, came out of Ulenburg, the house next door to Caravel, with his wife and many children (‘like organ pipes’, Barbara said), looking as if they’d lit their whole winter’s supply of candles, Herr Griesel with his wife and Glodde, the postman, who’d just come home from work, locked his Trabant, the saw fell silent in Rabe’s, the carpenter’s, workshop, he whistled to his apprentices, took a candle stub out of the pocket of his corduroy trousers.

For a moment they hesitated – down Ulmenleite to the church or along Rissleite towards Walther’s bakery? The queue outside the shop began to precipitate, grew thin, dispersed, the assistants looked out, crumpling the skirts of their aprons in their hands, ‘Bring some rolls,’ one man shouted, hands waved, cries of ‘Join us, we need every man’, and Frau Knabe, pushing her intimidated husband forward, added, ‘That’s right – and every woman.’ Ulrich threw his Party badge away. Barbara put off an appointment with Lajos Wiener, who wrote on the door of his salon, ‘Closed due to revolution’. Frau von Stern, with a lunch box slung round her neck, thumped the ground with her heavy, gnarled walking stick: ‘In case anyone tries to tread on my toes. Oh, that I’ve been spared to see this, after October the seventeenth.’ And for Richard the day, that October day of 1989, suddenly became serious and simple, full of energy that seemed to bring out the hairline cracks in the clouds behind the trees, he saw the potholes, the futile blobs of asphalt, the perfunctorily patched cover of the old roads, which were now about to break out, like a snake sloughing, and even though twilight was already falling there came through the fissures
something of the overpowering freshness he’d felt as a boy when they were up to some prank, the sudden flash of one of those splendid ideas that infringed the norm but gilded his inner self with a nimbus of happiness and battlesong. ‘Hans,’ he said to his brother, who had come from Wolfsleite; ‘Richard,’ the toxicologist said, and that was all, even though they were their first words for a long time. Iris and Muriel rejected the candles Pastor Magenstock offered them, Fabian too, now a young man with his somewhat ludicrous hussar’s moustache, declined; they weren’t carrying candles, nor wearing Gorbachev badges, as so many were, they didn’t want better socialism, they wanted no socialism at all, and for their hopes they didn’t need a sermon, nor a candle chain. The Honichs too, as Richard had to admit, demonstrated courage, unrolling the GDR flag, the mocked and despised flag that here and there, as Richard was aware, had been disarmed by a circular cut; they joined the rest and were admitted, without anyone taking further notice of them.

They rang doorbells. Some didn’t come, some curtains twitched and were lowered again, some dogs started to bark and weren’t silenced, and Trüpel from the record shop, hobbled – sorry, sorry – past with a conveniently broken leg and an inconvenient plaster cast on it. Malivor Marroquin’s fancy-dress shop remained closed, no warning signs out in the street, no photo of the more and more confident demonstrators was taken by the white-haired Chilean.

… but then, all at once …

the clocks struck:

and Copper Island tips under the weight of the people, who take up position on the starboard side, the red-and-white checked tablecloths slither down to where foam and sea are gyrating in a funnel, the briquettes with a too high water content disintegrate
–

(Emcee,
handing out medals from a shoe box) ‘There you are. Medals! For exemplary achievements in socialist competition! There you are. Plenty of everything. There’s no charge!’

the giants on the Kroch skyscraper in Leipzig let their hammers thunder on the bell, Philipp Londoner sits in silence in the darkened room, the workers in the cotton mill switch off the machines and join the processions of demonstrators, 100,000 people marching into the centre on this Monday, to the rose-wreathed university, to the Gewandhaus, shining like a crystal in the twilight, the people trying out their voice, refusing to be put off, weary of all the lies and barred doors and windows
–

(Eschschloraque) ‘Mole, blind in the dark earth, morning noon and night, but without time, that was what made him afraid,
without time
. A ship with a mad captain and a mad crew, full of noise and rage between yesterday today tomorrow … a journey woven on the Big Wheel, which is still turning in the mist and we the kings at a board on which is marked in blood the rise and fall of empires, the eternal recurrence of what is eternally the same, and for a brief moment the suggestion of a sunbeam and lovers embraced by the executioner’s block of the beautiful new world, in which purity is an evil beauty and a black womb gives birth to a black womb’ –

‘We are the people’

(Eschschloraque) ‘Mole dreams the mole’s dream of sunlight and an open sky and digs and digs in the darkness, but he is not guided by his dream, only by his forepaws and following his nose, and he dreams he is the Lord of Creation, heaven earth stones created for him alone, Mole is the centre of the world and his burrowing race of blind diggers to whom the Mole-God promised immortality – but suddenly there are
doubts, a voice: the Mole is just a mole and nothing else, created the Mole-God as his mirror, a shadow image made of sound and delusion’ –