The Tower: A Novel (2 page)

The electric lemons from VEB Narva decorating the tree were faulty, flickered on and off, erasing the silhouette of Dresden downstream. Christian took off his mittens, which were damp and covered with little balls of ice on the wool of the palms, and rubbed his almost numb fingers rapidly together, breathed on them – his breath a wisp of mist dispersing across the blackness of the entrance, hewn out of the rock, to the Buchensteig, which led up to Arbogast’s Institutes. The houses of Schillerstrasse disappeared in the dark; a cable ran from the nearest, a half-timbered house with bolted shutters, into the branches of one of the beeches that grew over the passage through the rock, where an Advent star was burning, bright and motionless. Christian, who had crossed the Blue Marvel – Loschwitz suspension bridge – and Körnerplatz, continued on his way out of the city, towards Grundstrasse, and soon reached the cable-car railway. The shutters were down over the windows of the shops he passed – a baker’s, a dairy, a fish shop; half in shadow already, the houses were gloomy and had ashy outlines. He felt as if they were huddling together, seeking protection from something indefinite, as yet unfathomable, that might float up out of the darkness – just as the January moon had floated up out of the darkness over the Elbe when Christian had stopped on the deserted bridge and looked at the river, the thick woollen scarf his mother had knitted pulled tight round his ears and cheeks against the icy-keen wind. The moon had risen slowly, detaching itself from the coldly sluggish mass of the river, which looked like liquid earth, to stand alone over the
meadows with their willows wreathed in mist, the boathouse on the Old Town bank of the Elbe and the range of hills disappearing in the direction of Pillnitz. The clock on a distant church tower struck four, which surprised Christian.

He took the path up to the funicular railway, put his travel bag on the bench by the gate that closed off the platform and waited, his mittened hands in the pockets of his military-green parka. The hands of the station clock over the conductor’s shed seemed to move forward very slowly. Apart from him, there was no one waiting for the funicular, and to pass the time he examined the adverts. They hadn’t been cleaned in a long time. One was for the Café Toscana on the Old Town bank of the Elbe, another for Nähter’s, a shop farther along towards Schillerplatz, and a third for the Sibyllenhof Restaurant by the station at the top. In his mind Christian began to go through the fingering and melodic line of the Italian piece that they were going to play at his father’s birthday party. Then he looked into the darkness of the tunnel. A faint light was growing, gradually filling the cavity of the tunnel like water rising in a fountain, and at the same time the noise increased: a slate-like crackling and groaning, the steel-wire guide cable creaked under the load; jolting, the funicular approached, a capsule filled with an undersea glow, and two headlight eyes lit up the line. The hazy outlines of individual passengers could be seen in the carriage with, in the middle, the blurred shadow of the greybeard conductor – he had been on this section for years, up and down, down and up, always alternating, perhaps he closed his eyes to avoid the sight of the all-too-familiar scenes, or to see them with his inner eye and then repress them, to exorcize ghosts. But he could probably see by hearing, every jolt during the journey must have been familiar to him.

Christian picked up his bag, took out a groschen and spent the remaining moments contemplating the coin: the oak leaves beside the crudely cut ten, the tiny, worn year with the A underneath it, the obverse with the hammer, compasses and the wreath of grain,
and he thought back to how often they, the children of Heinrichstrasse and Wolfsleite, had copied the embossed surface of these coins by placing them under a piece of paper and rubbing them with a pencil – Ezzo and Ina had been more skilful at it, and keener than him, back in the days of their childhood dreams of adventurous lives as forgers and robbers, like the heroes in the films at the Tannhäuser Cinema or in the books of Karl May and Jules Verne. The funicular, braking softly, came to a halt, and the doors, graded in height and sloping, released their passengers. The conductor got out, opened the gate and a narrow entrance beside it for the passengers who were going up. The gate had a coin-box attached, and Christian dropped his fare in and pulled down the lever on the side; the ten-pfennig piece slipped out of the rotating disc and joined the others on the bottom. Instead of the groschen, the local children sometimes put in flat stones that had been ground smooth by the Elbe and which they called ‘butties’, or buttons – much to the annoyance of their mothers – who were sorry to lose them, for the little aluminium coins were easy to get while buttons, on the other hand, were difficult to find. The doors were closed; if you wanted to get into the carriage in the winter, you had to pull a cable to open them; they closed as soon as you let go. The conductor had gone into his shed, poured himself a coffee and watched the passengers hurrying off, disappearing like shadows round the corners to Körnerplatz or Pillnitzer Landstrasse.

After a few minutes a weary-sounding voice came from the loudspeaker above the adverts and said something in a Saxon accent that Christian couldn’t understand; but the conductor stood up and carefully closed the door to his shed. Slowly, the round leather change-bag dangling over his well-worn uniform, he went to the driver’s cabin at the front – its many control buttons seemed pointless to Christian, since the funicular was steered by the cable and rollers and was brought to a halt automatically, if the cable should tear, by a sophisticated clasp mechanism. Perhaps the buttons were there for some other reason,
perhaps for communication or for psychological purposes: the buttons must have some meaning, a function, and would demand knowledge, guard against monotony and work-weariness; moreover, halfway along, one of the cars had to move onto a siding to allow the other to pass. The cabin door closed behind the conductor with a crash; it was opened with a box spanner and was not connected to the cable for the other doors.

‘The train is about to depart,’ said the voice from the loudspeaker. The carriage remained motionless for a moment, then smoothly started moving, gliding out of the station. Christian turned round and watched the path and platform grow smaller, until all that remained was the oval of the tunnel entrance against the flinty green of the sky; gradually that grew smaller as well, and darkness pressed in from either side. For a short while, before the exit came into view, the only light was provided by the dim tunnel lamps and the headlights. Christian took a book out of his bag; his Uncle Meno had given it to him. He had hardly had time to look at it during the previous week: the pre-Christmas mood had spread round Waldbrunn, and though the lessons weren’t as strict as usual, preparations for the birthday party, and the daily bus journeys home to rehearse the Italian piece with the others, had taken up his time. Christian intended to read the book more thoroughly during the Christmas holidays. It was a fairly fat tome, printed on fibrous paper and bound in coarse linen; he knew the picture on the cover from a facsimile edition of the Manesse Manuscript he had seen in his uncle’s library and at the Tietzes’, in a particularly handsome and well-preserved example – Niklas, Ezzo’s and Reglinde’s father, often read it. The picture showed the legendary figure of Tannhäuser, a man with long red hair in a blue robe with a white cloak, a black cross on his breast; on either side above him were his coat of arms and a winged helmet, both black at the top and yellow below, above stylized tendrils with leaves; ‘Tanhuser’, as his name was written above the plate, had raised his left hand to ward off, or perhaps cautiously
greet, someone or something; his right hand was holding his cloak. Christian opened the volume –
Old German Poems
, selected and edited with notes by Meno Rohde – and returned to the legend he’d been reading on the journey from Waldbrunn to Dresden. The lamp on the ceiling above him started to make a rasping noise, the page the book was opened at had a pale, grainy look and, with the gentle vibration of the carriage, the letters started to blur before his eyes. He couldn’t concentrate on the story of the Knight of the Golden Spur who had set out with seventy-two ships to free Queen Bride. The lamp went out. He put the book back in his bag, and felt for the barometer, a present for his father that he had collected from the former lodge of the Association of Elbe Boatmen. It was safely packed and cushioned in the bundle of dirty laundry that filled his bag.

In its slow but steady upward climb, occasionally jolted by unevennesses between the rollers, the funicular reached Buchensteig, the path that ran alongside the track, and continued parallel to it for a while, a few metres above the ground. You could see into lighted windows; an outstretched hand could easily have touched the passing carriage. At the top the Sibyllenhof restaurant, which had been closed for several years, came into view beside the second tunnel; its terraces stuck out like school slates that had been forgotten there by giant children years ago. The carriage would head straight towards the restaurant, only turning off into the entrance of the tunnel that led to the station shortly before it reached the bottom terrace. On some journeys Christian had dreamt of bygone banquets in the dark, uninviting rooms: of gentlemen pursuing cultured conversations, wearing starched shirts with jet buttons and watch chains over the pockets of their waistcoats; of flower sellers in pages’ uniforms, called to a table with the hint of a click of the fingers, to present ladies, wearing masses of jewellery which gave off fiery sparks under the bowls of the crystal chandeliers, with a rose; of dances for which the band struck up, the pale violinist with pomaded hair and wearing a chrysanthemum in his buttonhole … The light of
the January moon slid over the roofs of the houses that sloped steeply down to Grundstrasse, making the ridges shine and giving the snowy gardens patches of powdery brightness which, with the white highlights of isolated, snow-covered sheds or stacks of wood, merged at the edges with the shadows cast by the bushes and trees.

Christian realized they were above the painter and illustrator Vogelstrom’s house, a grey castle that Meno called ‘Cobweb House’, sparking off in Christian’s mind a vision which, as he looked out of the window, his face close to the cold glass, lurked behind the everyday sobriety of the unapproachable windows and tall trees. In the towering mass of the Loschwitz slopes, on the other side of Grundstrasse, which was partly visible as a pale ribbon winding in the depths, the needles of moonlight were sucked into the darkness in front of the watch towers of East Rome and faded at the bridge, across which soldiers were heading for the checkpoint on Oberer Plan. The garden of Cobweb House was in darkness, sheltered from eyes and events, and Christian could hardly even see the tops of the pear and beech trees, with their dusting of snow and their filigree branches hanging like wisps of smoke over the depths; it flowed into the contours, the narrow cleft between the Buchensteig path and the battlements, like brightness in the cross-hatching on old, unfinished drawings. He saw the fountain, the almost completely overgrown driveway that curved round the weathered stone catfish on the fountain and led up over mossy steps; the beginning of a poem had been chiselled into the panel over the catfish, but the letters were blurred, already half erased. However hard he tried, Christian couldn’t remember how the poem went, but he could clearly picture the broken-off barbels of the catfish, its sightless eyes and the dark covering of moss; he remembered his superstitious fear of the beast, and also of the long-defunct fountain that gave off a graveyard chill when he went to see Vogelstrom with Meno, and his almost childish fear, which was only made greater by the strange conversations that took place between Meno and the gaunt painter in
Cobweb House. But it was less the words and topics themselves that had seemed strange than the atmosphere of the house; with his childish understanding, the little that had been comprehensible to the boy of eleven or twelve seemed right and appropriate for the adult world that bent down to him from its heights. He could remember words such as ‘Merigarto’ or ‘Magelone’, words which, in his awakening surmise, seemed more like conjurations than concepts that meant something in the real world, words that touched him in a curious way and that he was never to forget, even though they had seemed less mysterious than the paintings in the gloomy hall of the house: idyllic landscapes, garden scenes with flute-playing fauns and naiads flooded with bright blue light, a Dutch-brown series of ancestors, serious-looking men and women with a flower, a nettle or – he had looked at this for a long time in astonishment – holding a golden snail. These paintings, fading away in the hall, which Vogelstrom and Meno only rarely glanced at as they passed them, seemed to have much more to do with those two words: the one for the island and the other the name of a girl who appeared out of the depths of time and disappeared back into them; he had noted them and repeatedly savoured their long-forgotten euphony in murmured soliloquies. Sound, too, had stayed with him from their conversations, like the babble of a stream from Vogelstrom’s studio, which was so cold in the winter that frost sent out tentacles towards the easels and the lozenge-patterned wallpaper, and the two men, Meno with Vogelstrom’s coat over his shoulders, Vogelstrom himself in several pullovers and shirts, hurried round the room with steaming breath, their voices scarcely distinguishable when they were in the library and Christian was looking at one of the ancestors’ portraits in the hall and listening; now and then there was the sound of cautious laughter, expressions of praise for, or disgust with, the tobacco they happened to be smoking. Sometimes Meno would call out and show him steel or copper engravings in musty-smelling tomes, the painter cautiously turning the pages, and it was probably then that
they uttered the strange words that stuck in his ear, words he had never heard before, words like those two magical names.

The lamp above him flickered on again. From above, out of the darkness below the tunnel and the Sibyllenhof, the descending funicular crept towards them, reaching the loop where the track split and one could move out of the way of the other. The driver was a motionless shadow in the passing capsule, which had no passengers, and he replied to the greybeard conductor’s greeting with a brief nod before the carriage continued down and disappeared from view.