The Tower: A Novel (16 page)

You had to learn your lessons, relentlessly, tirelessly, endlessly, if one day you wanted to be one of the great ones – that, too, was a lesson Christian had learnt. Niklas, Ulrich and Richard had little time for anything but the best and the most significant; Ezzo, when he played a piece, was told that this or that violinist had done it better, that he still lacked this or that ‘in order to really move the listener, not just to play the notes but to fill them with life; there’s still no depth to it’.
Christian had learnt this when Richard had taken out his old school reports and silently tapped an A grade in a subject where Christian had a B; a C was already a minor disaster and he didn’t dare imagine what would happen if he got a D, or even an E, the maximum credible catastrophe. Nor did he dare imagine what would happen if he didn’t get a place at medical school.

‘Being a doctor,’ Richard said, ‘is the best, the most wonderful profession there is. It’s a clearly defined, beneficial activity, the results of which can be seen immediately. A patient comes with a complaint. The doctor examines him, makes a diagnosis, starts the treatment. The patient goes home healed, relieved of pain, able to start work again.’

‘If he hasn’t died,’ Ulrich retorted. ‘Has it never struck you that hospitals are often next to graveyards? And next to ones where the gravediggers are shovelling out holes all the time, at that. – It’s the economy where the best jobs are, my lad. There you’re creating things of material value. Let’s say you’re producing lavatory seats. You don’t have to grin, it’s time someone undertook a defence of the lavatory seat. Despised it may be, but everyone needs that oval, even if no one talks about it. By the way, did you know it’s called
le couvercle
in French? You won’t be in the limelight if you manufacture kuverkles, definitely not, but woe betide you if they’re out of stock. The economy is real life. And you’ll make a packet there!’

‘You and your stupid jokes, don’t confuse the boy, Snorkel,’ Barbara said reproachfully. ‘The economy! Which one are you talking about? The socialist economy? Don’t make me laugh.’

‘You may laugh, my little ball of fluff, but I tell you that the economic laws also operate in …’

‘Richard’s not that far off the mark. The boy has to learn something solid. I always thought he should be a tailor. I think he has a natural talent for tailoring. A feeling for material seems to run in the Rohde family … Meno has a feel for it too. – Just don’t be anything connected with books, Christian. That’s all crap, isn’t it, Meno?’

‘Not
entirely. Though there’s a certain amount of shit there too.’ Meno hardly took part in these discussions at all, concentrating on his supper while the others argued.

‘Rubbish! I know writers, they come and moan to me. They want to write that the sky is blue, but they have to write that the sky is red. A suit always has two sleeves, here just as in the West. And it has buttons. One of these … scribblers! asked me whether I knew the people who make buttons, he’d like to make buttons, nothing but buttons.’

‘As a doctor you really are a
general
practitioner. You have to be able to do everything. You even have to know a bit about the economy. And lots of doctors I know are artistically inclined. Art, craftwork, culture: everything comes together in the doctor. You can go into research, as Hans has. Toxicologists are always needed. You can even, if you study history along with medicine, become a medical historian, we have a chair in the Academy. A well-paid professor, with a nice situation in the Faculty of Medicine, well away from the ideologists. He sits there writing books all day.’

‘Well I think the nicest thing of all is still music,’ said Niklas.

When he was staying with his parents, Christian liked to go for a walk by himself in the evening. He didn’t see many people, mostly the district lay in profound silence. More clearly than ever he sensed the melancholy and solitary atmosphere of the old villas with their pointed gables and steep roofs, lit by the Advent stars on the balconies and in the oriel windows, by the meagre light of those street lamps that were still working. Snow fell, snow melted, sometimes it rained as well. Then he would hear his steps echoing on the wet flagstones of the pavement and feel that these houses concealed something, an insidious disease, and that this disease was connected with the inhabitants.

He often went to see Niklas, whom he liked very much, and he would look forward to the visit to his uncle well in advance, during the last class, during the monotonous sway of the journey from Waldbrunn
to Dresden. If they had agreed on eight o’clock, he would be walking restlessly round the streets an hour beforehand, looking at the lights and asking himself what the inhabitants behind the windows might be doing, whether, at the sound of the bells from the city, at the striking of the clocks, which was audible through the windows, they too might be thinking of the disease, for which he could still not find a name, however hard he tried. He’d once talked about it with his Uncle Hans. Hans had given him a surprised look, shrugged his shoulders and answered, with an ironic smile, ‘We’re being poisoned, that’s all’, had added, ‘And Time, how strangely does it go its ways’, and placed his index finger to his lips. Christian had not forgotten that. It was a quotation from
Der Rosenkavalier
, it was sung by the Marschallin; and Christian believed that this Marschallin was still alive, somewhere here in one of the houses, and was whispering about time, even possessed it, like an essence, and fed it into the clocks in the slow, patient manner of a spinner at her spinning wheel from which there went a thread: time, dripping, trickling in the wallpaper, scurrying in the mirrors, time weaving its visions. On one of these evenings with Niklas in the music room of Evening Star, the needle of the record player kept jumping out of the groove and playing the same passage again and again, Tannhäuser, Christian imagined, kept raising his arm and singing the praises of Venus in her mountain grotto, at which point the needle would go no farther, seemed to hit a barrier that knocked it back and made it mechanically repeat the same melody to a rustle of tremolando violins, rippling harps and the crepitation of the record, that had been made during the Third Reich, a probe into a long-vanished theatre, scratched and, as Christian sometimes thought when he was sitting listening with Niklas, pervaded with the crackle of air-raid warnings on the wireless and the radar of the bombers approaching Dresden. But in the same way as the needle kept jumping back, until Niklas got up and put an end to the echoes, multiplying the minnesinger’s
earnestness so that he slipped into ham acting, copy after copy thrown out like a jiggling marionette in an endless loop, so the days in the city seemed to Christian, repetitions that made you want to laugh, each day a mirror image of the previous one, each a paralysing copy of the other. Then he thought of Tonio Kröger, the bourgeois from the city with the draughty, gabled streets, the warehouses and churches, the Hanseatic merchants with a cornflower in their buttonhole and the ships sailing past their counting houses up the Trave. He had no idea what had made him think of that, the sight of the house called Dolphin’s Lair perhaps, or his happy anticipation of a musical evening with Niklas. It was a long time since Christian had read the story. Meno thought highly of it; sometimes, at their soirées, they would talk about Thomas Mann. As Christian walked round the sparsely lit streets that smelt of snow and the ash from lignite, he felt as if he were Tonio Kröger himself; true, he didn’t quite have the right style, since he wasn’t the son of strait-laced Lübeck patricians. He would presumably have had to go in and out of the Gothic vaults of the Kreuzschule in Dresden as well. Yet he still had that feeling and the longer he walked, the more Tonio Kröger seemed to take possession of him, as if he were the right mask for the district up there, protection against something Christian couldn’t define but that seemed to cause the morbid atmosphere of the houses all around, their silent decline, their sleep.

Niklas …

‘
Salve
, Christian, come on in, I’ve got something for you.’ It was mostly Niklas who came when he rang the bell at the door with the peeling light-grey paint and the crooked ‘Tietze’ sign covered in verdigris. Gudrun seldom went to the door and when she did Christian knew it wasn’t a good evening to visit Niklas; then he would often see him already in the hall adjusting his beret in the mirror with the curving frame and silhouettes of Reglinde and Ezzo on the right and left (Zwirnevaden Studios, Steiner Guest House), putting on his coat and
gloves, checking his midwifery bag, his car keys – then he had a house call, would wave him away: another time, as you can see, today’s not on.

‘You can always go and see Ezzo,’ Gudrun would say, ‘though he has to do his practice and you mustn’t distract him; when you’re there he doesn’t complete his daily quota. And I have to go out soon as well. – But there aren’t any pears for you to gobble up,’ she explained and Christian, feeling slightly awkward, wondered whether she meant it seriously or whether it was intended as a kind of hearty joke, which to his mind didn’t go with Gudrun’s delicate features (Niklas said he’d recognized them in drawings by Dürer) and her stage voice (she was an actress at the theatre), with her smell of preserved rhubarb, ears of corn and deer tallow cream. Or she said, ‘Use sea-sand and almond bran for your acne, I don’t want you to infect Reglinde or Ezzo’, and when Christian replied that his pimples weren’t infectious, gave him a sceptical look, as if he were knowingly telling a lie, but anyway certainly didn’t know enough about such matters to have an opinion that was worth listening to. Sometimes there were better-eyesight weeks when the Tietzes fed mainly on carrots, since Gudrun had read in a magazine at Schnebel’s, the hairdresser’s, or heard from a colleague at the theatre, that carrots contained a lot of vitamin A and that vitamin A was good for your eyesight; during those weeks their eyes were sharp but their stomachs rumbled. Gudrun discovered that sliced carrots absorbed the taste of the meat that was cooked with them in the frying pan – the better-eyesight weeks were followed by the weeks of carrotburgers. She was told that butter was harmful and read something in an old magazine about an outbreak of margarine disease: ‘Professor Doktor Doktor aitch see Karl Linser of the Charité Hospital in Berlin gave an interview, so there must be something to it’, and she immediately threw away all the margarine she had in the house. (‘Carcinogenic! You turn yellow!’) Every year, shortly before Christmas, a scientist (‘a specialist!’) would announce in the newspapers his discovery that bananas were harmful and oranges (except for those from
Cuba) contained certain substances that could inhibit children’s growth and lead to constipation in adults (‘he describes it precisely, you can peel them as carefully as you like, there’s always a bit of pith left on the piece, it’s deposited at the pylorus in your stomach and eventually you’re completely blocked up, for the pith of the orange doesn’t get digested!’). No one apart from Gudrun believed these specialists and to the annoyance of her family she gave the West bananas in the yellow packets away to the Hoffmann children. ‘You’ll see what they do to you, you’ll grow up like little dwarves; go on then, eat them, if you don’t believe me, go and catch cancer. You’ll all be eaten away by cancer! You always have to know best.’

‘Oh, do stop your nonsense,’ Richard said, ‘it’s just a very obvious ploy. They don’t want to use their hard currency for tropical fruits, and to avoid criticism, they put this rubbish about. And you fall for it! If it really were true, all monkeys would die soon after they’re born, given the amount of bananas they polish off.’

‘Oh yes, you always know best. The man in the newspaper was a proper scientist and you’re not even a proper doctor.’

‘Oh, come on now!’

‘You just hack people about!’

‘Despite that, I do understand something of these matters,’ said Richard, hurt.

‘Because you get everything out of books, just out of books, most of the stuff in them is pure fabrication, just to get people so they’ll believe anything and so the writers can collect their royalties.’

‘Is that true, Meno?’ At such moments Richard would fold up the newspaper.

‘Physicists and medics are the worst,’ said Meno in a matter-of-fact tone. ‘They fabricate like nobody’s business and have no idea, none whatsoever. And moneygrubbers! Suck the publishers dry like vampires.’

Gudrun was not to be moved. ‘You two can make fun of me if you
like, but I know what I know. I read recently that monkeys are monkeys because they eat nothing but bananas. You can let your children grow up into monkeys. Not me. And you, Meno, you haven’t even got any.’

‘
Salve
,’ said Niklas. ‘I’ve got something for you.’ Christian was eager to see what it was this time, a new record from Philharmonia, Trüpel’s record shop, picture postcards from Malthakus or a piece of Saxon sugar cake from Walther’s on Rissleite? Niklas loved surprises and put on a mysterious air, shuffled along in tattered slippers, one hand in the pocket of his baggy trousers, vigorously playing an air piano with the fingers of the other (or was he trying out fingerings on an imaginary viola fingerboard?), over the soft PVC of the hall to the ground-glass living-room door, illuminated with seductively warm light. Gudrun withdrew, either to the bedroom to learn her lines or to darn stockings, eight thimbles on her fingers making a soft, castanet-like noise, in the kitchen, where the cupboards hung crookedly and the window ledges were eaten away with black mould, where the paint on the pipes was blistering and embroidered recipes for Salzburg soufflé, pumpkin soup and a dish called ‘industrial accident’ (an exceptionally fragrant, disgusting-looking hotchpotch the children stirred with long spoons) could hardly cover the damp patches on the walls.

Then there began another session of what Christian was unwilling to call ‘teaching’, although there was a teacher, Niklas, and a pupil, Christian (only occasionally Ezzo or Reglinde as well, sometimes Muriel and Fabian Hoffmann, the children from the house on Wolfsleite); even though it was mostly the pupil who asked the questions and the teacher who gave the answers, ‘teaching’ didn’t describe it, that would have reminded Christian too much of Waldbrunn. The evenings with Niklas – and with the other Tower-dwellers Christian visited – had little in common with the lessons there. When Ezzo and Reglinde had time, Christian would bring his cello and they played string quartets, sometimes Gudrun would take the piano and they would go through a Mozart quintet or the ‘Trout’, the lilting theme of which would
regularly send Gudrun into ecstasy and, humming along, she would get the utmost possible out of the yellowed keys of the Schimmel piano, which occasionally stuck in the top and bottom registers.