The Tower: A Novel (15 page)

‘By the way, I’ve read your piece about spiders. Arbogast was good enough to make a hectograph copy for me. I assume he’s invited you to one of our Urania meetings? He intended to do that, he said so in the accompanying letter.’

‘I ran into him this morning and, indeed, he did invite me.’

‘What do you think of him?’ At this question the Old Man of the Mountain gave Meno a quick, cold glance.

‘I don’t know him and I don’t think one should draw any half-baked psychological conclusions from the fact that he sets store by his “von”, has a walking stick with a silver gryphon handle and an untrained dog. They’re just labels.’

‘And that, you think, is the same as the Spreewald pickled gherkins the label on the jar promises us, without the piece of paper telling us how they taste! A good answer. A cautious answer.’ The Old Man of the Mountain laughed quietly. ‘You don’t trust me. You secretly despise me and react like a fox that has scented the hunter.’

‘What you are insinuating is not the case, Herr Altberg,’ Meno replied indignantly. ‘Why should I despise you? What would make me do that? Please believe me.’

‘I know that earlier on you said you consider a better society possible … the fair social order in which people can be happy.
Égalité, Fraternité
… the ideals of 1789, in other words the socialist kingdom of heaven. It comes from Paris, as we see. In Antiquity hope was an evil …
Égalité
, hmm. Soon it’ll be the year of people who are more equal than all the rest.’

‘You read Orwell?’ Meno said with a faint smile. ‘If you’re trying to test me –’

‘It would be a poor testing technique to quote the class enemy first
of all in order to lure you out of your reserve; as it happens I’ve had a sniff of that as well. You have a sense of humour, Herr Rohde, I like that. Humour is an unmistakable sign …’ Of what? Meno didn’t ask when the old man broke off abruptly.

‘1940, the official letter with swastika and stamp. Romanticism and bureaucracy, there’s nothing worse, Herr Rohde. Conscription papers for those born in 1922, of which I am one. Report to the barracks; I was delighted to do it, I was an unconditional supporter of National Socialism, blond, blue-eyed and six foot tall, I had nothing to fear from it, I belonged to the race of the chosen ones, that was setting out to conquer the world … and would conquer the world, for me there was no doubt about that. And that was quite right for the others were inferior; it had been hammered into us that they did not share our beliefs, our values: decency, loyalty unto death, honour. I was part of it, a hussar a hussar thou shalt be with dolman and sabre and sword-knot, the villages will burn, but thou but thou, my little Guards officer …’

The old man walked up and down in front of Meno, giving him reflective, searching looks. He sat down at the desk and opened the manuscript. Then he started to talk, with many a ‘well then’ and ‘act-u-al-ly’ (‘act-u-al-ly you should never say act-u-al-ly, no, not ever’) and, something at which Meno was quietly amused, ‘No, that ain’t it, nope’ with a nod whenever he was trying to remember a line from a ‘book poem’. ‘Wrong quotation … here I am trying to spice up my account and, to stick to the image, have picked out cardamom instead of salt again, you must forgive a man who lives like a monk as far as culinary matters are concerned.’ As he spoke he twisted his mouth in a wide grin. His housekeeper brought a tray with a bottle of Nordhäuser schnapps, frosted with the cold. Meno said no thanks, Altberg filled both glasses with trembling hand.

‘Let’s
go.’

‘But you’re an ill man, Herr Altberg.’

‘Just a failure, Herr Rohde, just a failure.’

They got out at Neustadt Station, stood there in the station forecourt watching the pigeons and the trains. Perhaps Altberg was hoping the noises would accept him even if the ground wouldn’t; he pressed the soles of his shoes into it, perhaps to trigger off recognition or at least a greeting in the putty-grey humps, cracked like elephant skin. Perhaps. Soldiers walked past, travellers with the weary, hostile memories they had of the uniforms and of those they seemed to mark: Meno sensed that in the eyes of these other people the uniform and those wearing it were not – perhaps: could not be – two different things. ‘But how proudly the colours fade,’ said Altberg; Altberg said, ‘D’you know, Herr Rohde, I sometimes used to think that, in order to be less alien, I ought to find something even more alien, and that could only be a place where, from the memories of somewhere I’d travelled through in one of my daydreams, I’d often wished I could be. You will know it, but walk with me for a while.’

Meno took the letter about the
Old German Poems
from the shelf beside the ten-minute clock, put some more coal in the stove, read both letters once more before sitting down at his typewriter.

–
The very fragility of the vestibule
, Meno wrote,
frightened me, we waited, even though the worn banister still seemed to be the same, the foot scraper, the grating with the steel slats that spring round, the sign above it Please wipe your feet; the damp patches on the walls, the high door shielded
with dulled white lacquer.Suddenly you seemed changed to me. P. Dienemann, Succrs. I read but, while I was listening to you, I had nothing to say to someone good enough to hide their own name behind a philosophy of life going by the name of Succrs. White-haired, cigar-puffing Herr Leukroth certainly did have a taste for it: a few photos over his daughter’s desk showed the antiquarian bookshop on König-Johann-Strasse before the air raid, showed letters with Dienemann’s letterhead that had gone round the world under exotic postmarks and returned, showed a signed portrait of Gerhart Hauptmann, the writer from Obersalzbrunn, that you kept on looking at. Perhaps Leukroth would even have hung over the Local History section a ‘Dresden Succrs.’ sign, as you insisted on calling it, handwritten, of course, in the iron-gall ink that was rusting through the index cards on which his staff (just for his sake?) kept track of their stock. For the present, sir, I thought I heard the voice of Herr Leukroth say, is nothing yet. And I saw him shaking his head as he took the books of the old man in the beret, who had gone in through the door marked No Entrance in front of me and now, at the remarks of the old man chewing on his cigar as he roughly leafed backwards and forwards through them, hunched his shoulders or, rather, let them slump, like a collapsing soufflé, in resignation. What do you say, young man? Herr Leukroth grouched to you, making a dog-ear in a page that had been given a dismissive wave. – Right then. – So. You can take ’em home again, Dresden, Herr Leukroth declared, can manage without your presence. At this the old man shook his head, muttered Ye gods and turned to leave. One moment, Herr Leukroth, waist-high on a ladder, gestured, tell me, do you really want to lug those all the way home? For five marks you can leave them here with me, books to books, since you’re here already. And with trembling fingers (he had Parkinson’s disease) he took a coin from a jar of five-mark pieces with a strip of adhesive tape on it on which Taxi Money was typed. Behind cotton curtains with a pattern of moss-green flowers cans of food were sleeping, pyramids of floor polish towered up, writing paper from the VEB Weissenborn paper factory was turning yellow and slumbering away on one side were cardboard boxes full
of handmade, deckle-edge Königstein paper which Herr Leukroth printed owls on and sent, covered in his Parkinson’s handwriting, with Christmas greetings to good customers; you showed me examples on which was written To be prepared is everything, Your antiquarian bookshop P. Dienemann Succrs. Herr Leukroth revealed to me one day that the assistant in the chiffon blouse with a paper rose on the collar (always a similar one, never the same), who wrings her hands with a careworn look, is in the habit of coming to the shop by taxi every morning and he is in the habit of leaving by taxi. The five-mark piece (the beret-hatted gentleman gladly clenched it in his fist) gave most of his clients the feeling they had got away with something again; it was a heavy, handsome coin, minted to celebrate the XX th birthday of the Republic and, like the twenty-pfennig piece, was not made of aluminium. You and I, Herr Altberg, were still in the vestibule, the matt-white lacquered door in front of me, beneath my feet the foot scraper that didn’t have any steel slats, instead there was a coconut mat that was covered with a floorcloth in the damp season and steamed all day long when the bookshop was open. Please wipe your feet carefully. The carefully was carefully underlined. Fräulein Leukroth, the daughter of the current owner, would certainly be sitting at her desk in the corridor between the two rooms of the bookshop, writing, now and then dipping her steel nib into a little pot of iron-gall ink from VEB Barock and carefully wiping off the superfluous drops on the glass rim. I suspected she was in contact with important minds of the past, for the scratch of her pen on the paper, which was yellowing at the edges, and the ink would be bound to seem familiar to the souls of the dead, residing perhaps somewhere in the wide expanses of the void, more probably, however, here, in the steps between and inside the books, and have the power to call them up; it must be possible to get them to leave the heavens above Dresden and swirl back down into King Solomon’s bottle, and then all that would be needed would be a cotton curtain, with a pattern of moss-green flowers (Fräulein Leukroth had a dress of the same material), over the light from the window for the soberly effective conjuration; in the twilight and the night, when the woodcut Book Fool in
the corner of the adjacent room would come to life and, together with his employees, take over the bookshop, Fräulein Leukroth would, so I thought, have no choice but to disappear with the ghosts that had been conjured up. That was until one day when the assistant at the elderly cash register in the front room of the shop, opposite the No Entrance door, waved me over and, raising her eyes to the heavens, accidentally on purpose let me see a note from Fräulein Leukroth: It would be welcome, gratifying even, if you would be good enough to see to it that the porcelain flower gets one over the eight to drink. For some particular reason the water, with which, despite the request, she had nonetheless to be economical, had to be stale. – We stood in the vestibule, listening. It must have been a Monday, for all that I could hear behind the matt-lacquered door was the murmur of my memories, not the voice of the lady with the paper rose telling a customer off for not treating Rororo paperbacks with due care and attention, Herr Leukroth shuffling along beneath the sacrosanct dimensions of a plaster cast of Goethe’s Jupiter head enthroned above the bookcase doors with little filigree keys in the locks that also wore adhesive-tape ties, also with typed inscriptions – Classics! Apply at counter to inspect! The command was obeyed, for an unauthorized touch would have created a different kind of silence; also, I thought, the keys must be linked to an invisible alarm: to Fräulein Leukroth’s nervous system turned inside out and stretching into the bookshop, perhaps also to the whispering of some telltale benign spirits conjured up by the scratch of a pen. It must have been a Monday, for Dienemann Succrs. was ‘Private’ and ‘Private’ shops were closed on Mondays, I knew that from Walther’s and Wackendorff’s bakeries, Vogelsang the butcher’s and the cobbler Anselm Grün. The floorcloth wasn’t steaming; deliberately ignored, it was drying out into the grey of a shark’s fin that had been washed up on the coconut mat. No icy silence from within when someone interrupted Fräulein Leukroth in her inky activity to ask about the books in the glass-fronted case beside her desk: behind a curtain with a pattern of moss-green flowers were, guarded by pharmacists’ bottles, Hermann Hesse books of the old S. Fischer Verlag, linen-bound in faded
blue with gold-embossed lettering, Unger Gothic typeface, and those of the GDR Aufbau Verlag, linen in artificially faded lime green, sand-coloured wrappers, Garamond typeface, and when a train went past, the pharmacists’ bottles took over the trembling that sent out its jagged rays from the core of Fräulein Leukroth’s silence: Books by Hermann Hesse, sir. And for Fräulein Leukroth, who didn’t even turn her head, no further explanation was necessary. – Oh, Hermann Hesse, the potential customer insisted: – Most certainly! and: I will tell you straight away, Fräulein Leukroth said; – I presume you’re not selling them? – Listen, said Fräulein Leukroth, terminating the discussion, after Hermann Hesse! there is! no more literature! then carefully, while the prospective customer shrugged his shoulders, realizing he had not passed one of the usual Dresden tests of worthiness, wiped off a superfluous drop of ink from her steel nib on the rim of the Barock jar. And you, Herr Altberg, were listening. And I was watching as you opened the books, chatted with the assistants, advised Fräulein Leukroth about pharmacists’ mixtures for skin problems and illnesses caused by radiation from outer space, as you gave Herr Leukroth, who approached, withdrew, approached again with one of your volumes of essays in his hand, a signature; you seemed confused, perhaps you hadn’t imagined you yourself could be an object of interest for P. Dienemann Succrs.; I found it touching that I could observe you, one of my stern teachers, in a carefree moment. There is much that you have taught me – without realizing it, I have never had the courage to tell you; for I cannot pretend that I understand you. I suspect that our impressions of life, which I am unwilling to call experiences, since I don’t know whether anything is ever repeated, lie too far apart. I see us standing in the vestibule outside Dienemann’s antiquarian bookshop, you told me about the beginnings of the German Democratic Republic, about your hopes and dreams, about the dawn you greeted joyfully and for which, after the thousand-year darkness, you were prepared to do, to give, everything. You fell silent; I was listening. Gramophone records had eaten their way into the walls. Voices did not come together. The line from the fishwives’ song: Shark thou sea-green officer, slipped through the matt-lacquered and
the connecting portal, disappeared into the bookcase beside Goethe’s Jupiter head, behind the table whose overhanging offerings of books worried the wooden fool. There was a little key in that case as well: Romantics, ditto! was typed on the tape. And as you remained silent, Fräulein Leukroth raised her head and listened on her part: even if no one was ‘rooting round cluelessly’ (as the assistant in the chiffon blouse would quietly groan after she’d followed a customer to see what he was up to, only to find, manically and fearlessly rummaging in the second rows, behind eternal revenants such as Karl Zuchardt’s
Stirb du Narr! –
never read, notoriously in stock – or Sienkiewicz’s
Quo Vadis?
ditto, an intellectual robber baron by the name of Georg Altberg); could there be someone who wasn’t standing the accepted Dresden viewing-metre away from the books, head respectfully tilted to one side in order to examine the titles, chin in his right hand and that supported by his horizontal left arm? Fräulein Leukroth listened. Was it time for her medicine? It would be welcome, if the staff of this establishment were more economical in their use of brown paper; old newspapers are just as good for wrapping books, for which reason I, as you are aware, always bring a supply. The subjunctive ‘were’ was carefully underlined
.