The Tower: A Novel (12 page)

Meno said yes.

‘It will be at one of their meetings. We will contact you. Two Mondleite, isn’t it?’ Again the smile appeared and again Meno had the impression it was a foreign body hanging on Arbogast’s waxen features. ‘Or do you have a telephone?’

‘Only
one that is used by all the tenants.’

‘Then we’ll write. We have nothing free for the rest of this year or next January, if I have remembered aright. But there should be something in February and certainly in March.’ Arbogast waved his stick up and down and clicked his tongue at Kastshey, who shook himself vigorously, sending out a whirling spray of white that plastered Arbogast’s face and spectacles with patches of snow. Then Kastshey dashed off. The Baron waved his stick angrily at his departing rear and left Meno without saying goodbye.

Our friend Arachne? An odd choice of words, and Meno, who was walking on, confused but also pleased by the meeting, would have spent a long time thinking it over had a squad of soldiers not appeared out of the snowstorm when he was level with Arbogast’s observatory. A corporal with a thick Saxon accent was in charge. ‘Right wheel! – March!’ The squad turned off the street onto the path that led to the bridge, followed by the bored and arrogant look of a first lieutenant. A few cars, which Meno only noticed now, were held up behind the soldiers. The soft snow absorbed the echoes of the noises, the voice of the corporal and the tread of the boots seemed to be packed in cotton wool.

‘Detachment – halt!’ the first lieutenant ordered. ‘Get the men to repeat the manoeuvre, Comrade Corporal. That wasn’t a precise right wheel. That was as slack as an old tart’s tits.’

More cars joined the queue, pedestrians too who had come out of Sibyllenleite and Fichtenleite and were on their way to work. They waited in silence as the squad performed an about-turn, stamping across the whole width of Turmstrasse as they did so. Meno watched them. Some of them waited with their chins jutting out aggressively, watching the soldiers’ manoeuvre out of eyes screwed up into narrow slits. Most, however, stood there with heads bowed, hands buried in their coat pockets, making patterns in the snow with the toes of their shoes. The driver of the car at the front of the queue looked at his watch
irritatedly several times, drummed with his fingers on the steering wheel. One of the cars behind sounded its horn impatiently. The lieutenant broke off the manoeuvre again and strolled, clapping his hands together behind his back, as if undecided what to do, towards the car whose horn had sounded. A brief exchange could be heard, imperious on the part of the lieutenant, abashed on that of the driver. The lieutenant returned, putting a notebook back into the inside pocket of his coat, nodded to the corporal, at which the squad continued the right wheel. When the soldiers set off down the path to the bridge, the traffic jam was released. Intimidated by the behaviour of the lieutenant, whom he would meet again at the control point at the end of the path, Meno checked the papers in his briefcase again: ID card, invitation from the old man, certified hectographic copy of the contract. He had a quick look around – anyone setting off along the path to the bridge was going to East Rome and there was very little that was regarded as more suspicious in the district than a visit ‘over there’, as they would say, their scorn expressed in the avoidance of its real name. People had no great opinion of that district, or of anything connected with it – in general people avoided Grauleite; it was on the corner of Fichtenleite and Turmstrasse and it was where the barracks for the guards stood – they were called ‘the Greys’ after the street name; there also, hidden behind some trees, was a concrete bunker with tall directional antennae on it. People said they oversaw all those who marched along Grauleite, they saw through all those who walked along Grauleite.

Three-metre-high walls ran along either side of the path to the bridge. After twenty metres there was a gate, the surrounds of which reached as high as the walls, and, beside it, a red-and-white-striped sentry box; the guard had shouldered his Kalashnikov as soon as Meno appeared and shouted, demanding to know what Meno wanted and to see his identity card. Then he pressed a bell push in the sentry box and the door opened.

‘Who are you going to visit?’ The lieutenant gave Meno, who was
standing at the window of the checkpoint holding his hat, an appraising look and, with a casual gesture, took off his gloves.

‘I have an appointment with Herr Georg Altberg, eight o’clock.’ Altberg was the real name of the Old Man of the Mountain, but hardly anyone in the literary world in Dresden used it when they talked about him among themselves. Meno was surprised at how strange the name sounded, unfamiliar and oddly unsuitable. The lieutenant stretched out a hand for a binder that he was given by a corporal who was sitting at a telephone table below a board with light diodes. Rumour had it that the binder listed every one of the inhabitants of East Rome, with their name, address, function and photo, making them easy for the duty officer to identify, so that no unauthorized person could slip in. The lieutenant ran his finger down the page and showed something to the corporal, probably a telephone number, since the latter immediately drew one of the beige phones to him, dialled and handed the receiver to the lieutenant, who, after a short exchange, nodded and pushed Meno’s identity card back out on the little turntable. ‘That’s in order, you may pass. Make out a permit for him Comrade Corporal. How long will your visit last?’ the officer asked, turning to Meno.

‘I can’t say at the moment, it’s a business meeting.’

‘Take a one-third form,’ the lieutenant ordered. The corporal took a form out of a pigeonhole that was full of neatly ordered papers, inserted it with a carbon and a sheet of paper in the typewriter and started to hack out the permit, letter by letter, on the machine beside the red telephone, which was on the far right, below the light-diode board. There were one-eighth, one-quarter, one-third, one-half and full permits; they were for fractions of twenty-four hours. As far as Meno knew, only residents had unlimited permits. He waited. The two-finger system of the corporal, a well-fed, sandy-haired lad with peasant’s hands, did not seem very efficient. If he mistyped a letter the whole process would begin again, and he would be given another chance to watch the typist’s tongue gradually make his cheek bulge
and the lieutenant twitch slightly every time the corporal hit a key. The officer was standing there quietly, sipping coffee out of a plastic mug, and observing Meno. The corporal then began to fiddle with the light-diode board. Behind him were a shelf with keys, a sealed cabinet, a portrait of Brezhnev with a black ribbon across the upper left corner. On the table beside the lieutenant was
Snow Crystal
, a volume of short stories by Georg Altberg.

‘Signature, one-third permit, eight-hour stay.’ The corporal rotated the form and a ballpoint pen through the window. ‘In the box under “Permit-holder”.’ Meno put his hat back on, picked up the pen but was so agitated that his signature came out as a scrawl. He folded the carbon copy and put it in his briefcase with his identity card. The barrier beyond the checkpoint was raised.

At the other end of the bridge a few soldiers were engaged in shovelling snow and knocking off ice. Meno pulled his hat down tighter and kept his coat collar up by fastening the button to the loop on the lapel; there was a bitter, raw wind, constantly blowing snow over the studded cast-iron plates on which he was walking, playing with the bare bulbs that hung down from the wires between the railings, which were well over six-foot high, plucking at the steel hawsers that secured the arch between the slopes as if they were harp strings, and producing a dark, singing sound, now and then shot through with a violent crack, as when ice breaks.

The milky early light over the point where the valley opened out in the direction of Körnerplatz and the Elbe had risen as far as the flanks of East Rome, casting a reddish glow over the ridge, which was saw-toothed with the tips of spruce trees; the citadel of the suspension railway towered up from it like an ancient triumphal arch. The light also revealed the funicular, where the cars were just going through the manoeuvre at the loop half-way up, the queue of cars on Grundstrasse below, Vogelstrom’s house, gardens covered with snow and the black blobs of the wood-stacks. Dirty grey smoke came from the chimneys
on most roofs; torn away by the wind, the fumes drifted through the air like scraps of dishcloth. Now and then the fog would open up and Meno could see the queue of cars creeping slowly towards Körnerplatz, a 61 bus wheezing as it struggled up the road, could make out the ice brush bristling with jagged prongs into which the White Nun over the wheel of the disused copper mill had frozen. Was anyone watching him from below? Recognizing him from his hat or his build? The railings were high and the bridge itself was over sixty feet above the ground, so it seemed unlikely. However, he still started to walk faster. The soldiers stood to attention and saluted as he passed. That alarmed him. Did he look like someone from East Rome, like an influential functionary with his briefcase, hat and coat? Had they recognized him? It wasn’t the first time he had been there, though his last visit had been almost two years ago – when he and Hanna had got divorced. If the soldiers had been recruits then and had been called up again as reservists, they might remember him. Or did they salute everyone who came across the bridge – just in case and out of fear of the vanity of some important or self-important man? Reflecting on this, Meno passed through the second checkpoint. A captain waved him through without asking to see his identity card. Perhaps the lieutenant had informed him and the captain, knowing him to be reliably alert, had decided he didn’t need to bother with a second check. Still, Meno was surprised. This laxity was something new. Even when he’d gone out with Hanna and they’d come back over the bridge, they had had to submit to two checks, and neither of the two officers had ever been put off by Hanna’s maiden name, under which she appeared in the binder and was careful to state. At that time the bridge had been the sole access to East Rome – the suspension railway had been out of use for months because of a structural defect – and it was only when Barsano himself, First Secretary of the local Party organization, had been double-checked every time he went across the bridge that the repairs to the suspension railway were carried out at undreamt-of speed.

Meno
was on Oberer Plan. The railway clock over the checkpoint clicked onto a quarter to eight. It wasn’t far to Oktoberweg, where the Old Man of the Mountain lived. The snowflakes were falling less thickly; the wind had eased off; the flags on the poles to the right of the checkpoint flapped sluggishly: the red flag with the hammer and sickle, the black-red-and-gold flag with the hammer and compasses in a wreath of grain, a white one with stylized portraits of Marx, Engels and Lenin. Guards were standing by the flagpoles, staring straight ahead, presenting their Kalashnikovs; the expression on their faces was impassive and yet, as he knew, they were watching his every move. He could feel the captain’s eyes behind the reflective glass of the window that looked out onto the square. He turned right, into Nadezhda-Krupskaja-Strasse, sticking close to the railings beyond which Oberer Plan fell away steeply, allowing a view of the lower parts of East Rome. Coal Island was wreathed in haze; a railway line ran along beside Majakowskiweg and its House of Culture; a squad of soldiers was busy shovelling snow off the track; clouds of steam were already coming out of the tunnel at the bottom of Majakowskiweg; in a few moments the narrow-gauge train would emerge from the cavity, give two brief whistles, presumably for the switchman at the little thermal power station on German-Titow-Weg, cross the valley in a curve and disappear into the other tunnel, which was not visible from Meno’s viewpoint. The driver was leaning out of the window; he straightened his railwayman’s cap and pulled his head back in as he passed the soldiers, who were now standing beside the track, smoking and leaning on their shovels. A man was squatting down on the tender, his face smeared with ashes and wearing a fur chapka with the earmuffs tied under his chin; smiling, his teeth gleaming, his hands in shapeless mittens that made them look like bears’ paws, he waved up to Meno. He felt uncomfortable about it and glanced at the soldiers, who had noticed the gesture and were now staring up at him as well; he stepped back a little, not only to get away from observation but also because
at that moment the engine was right underneath him, and he would otherwise have been standing in the thick cloud of steam full of particles of soot from the smokestack. So it was still the same: the ‘Black Mathilda’, as the train was called, supplied the power station and the households of East Rome with coal – a separate line that came from Coal Island for that district alone, from a mine that had officially been closed down but was secretly still in operation, as Hanna’s father had once told him. It was the same driver as well; he’d recognized his walrus moustache.

Nadezhda-Krupskaja-Strasse wound its way gently up to the top of the steep ridge. Yew hedges, trimmed into vertical walls, screened a row of two-storey detached houses, all with the same light-grey roughcast, each with a garage and, on the garden fence, a letter box in the form of a cuckoo clock decorated with sprigs of fir and little ‘year’s-end-winged-figures’ – as they supposedly said up here instead of ‘angels’, Meno recalled with a snort of laughter. Beside the neatly cleared and gritted garden paths each property had a Douglas fir, and each tree had one bird feeder and one fat-ball hanging from it; peering out of the snow round the trunk were garden gnomes, the three versions with pipe, with wheelbarrow and with spade – that gnome was balancing on the spade with both feet and a roguish smile on its face. There were two flags over the front door of each house: on the right the flag of the GDR, on the left that of the Great Socialist October Revolution. This had not changed either, was familiar to him from his time with Hanna. It was something else that was new. He stopped for a moment and listened. Muted, many-voiced barking could be heard, turning after a few seconds into loud howls. He had noticed the noise earlier, as he was watching the soldiers from Oberer Plan; the arrival of the narrow-gauge train had drowned it out. It sounded like the barking of young dogs, but he couldn’t be sure. When he reached the top of the ridge, he had a view of almost the whole of the district: the House of Culture with, in front of it, the massive sculpture of
Upright
Fighters for Socialism
brandishing their granite fists in the morning light; the avenue, paved with sandstone flags and lined with traffic cones, leading from the House of Culture to Engelsweg, a dead end with chestnut trees in which there was an HO supermarket, a chemist’s, a florist’s and an electrical store – for the East Rome housewives to do their shopping – and a men’s and a ladies’ hairdresser. The two chimneys on Gagarinweg belonged to the Friedrich Wolf Hospital and the Ivan V. Michurin restaurant complex, both of which were for the exclusive use of East Rome. Rising up from the wooded range of hills on the other side of the valley were the box-shaped storeys of Block A, a restricted area within the restricted area of East Rome; there, in the spacious bunkers protected by a company of guards, were the apartments of the top nomenklatura. The barking came from a kind of sports field below Block A, something he had not seen before. What, at his first, cursory glance, he could have taken for a teeming mass of black leeches turned out, when he had gone a little farther to a place where he had a better view, to be a cluster of black dogs, which, from that distance, looked no bigger than puppies. But the men beside them, wrapped up in protective clothing, armed with truncheons and blowing commands on referee’s whistles, were no bigger than children – it was just the perspective that made everything look smaller; the dogs’ hindquarters came up to the men’s hips. He would have liked to have had a pair of binoculars. But it was unthinkable to stand up here looking round East Rome with binoculars. In no time at all a squad in uniform would have appeared beside him, or a car would have detached itself from the shadow under one of the trees; he would have been asked what he was doing there, would have been invited to a shorter or longer interrogation in Block B, which, like the thermal power station, could not be seen from that viewpoint. The binoculars would have been confiscated; the two duty officers would have been reprimanded for not having noticed such a hostile, negative piece of equipment and impounded it. Laxity had appeared there too. He was surprised that
they had not demanded to inspect his briefcase at either checkpoint. Was that no longer necessary? Had they developed technology that made such crude methods unnecessary? Meno went on. Even without binoculars he was still being observed – he had spent too long staring at the dog-training field, a suspicious individual with a hat, coat collar turned up and a briefcase; it was uncertain whether the powers-that-be would react to his little bit of spying, but he certainly had no desire for closer acquaintance with Block B, nor for encounters with unknown men at work or at home. As he made his way to the Old Man of the Mountain, he took with him in his memory the runs that radiated out from the training field in all directions, the barbed-wire fences round it and the kennels underneath, the wooden puppets with arms spread wide into which the dogs – they seemed to be of the same breed as Kastshey – leaping up, sank their teeth, the climbing walls with the window slits that had been cut out of the scratched and splintered wood six feet above the ground. The dogs could reach them easily.