The Tower: A Novel (23 page)

‘Svetlana, you’re not being objective. We can’t work together like that.’ It was Dr Frank who said that, his lips grey, and Reina Kossmann hissed, ‘To suggest I accepted an easy position just to get a few extra plus points in my file –’

‘But it’s the truth! The most important thing for you lot is getting to college, your career, that’s why you join the Free German Youth committee. Not as secretary or agitator, where it really matters, of course … Would you be here if it didn’t bring any plus points? What we’re trying to realize in this country is a matter of complete indifference to you!’

‘Svetlana! We’ll get nowhere like this. Dr Frank is right, that is not objective. It is not correct. Not correct. To conclude we should hear what Verena has to say. Please calm down.’ It was remarkable how gentle Schnürchel could be, fatherly, as if he had to save an unruly favourite daughter from herself; his left hand had shot forward: as if
he wanted to grasp something, Christian thought. Perhaps it was a situation he had come across before, one he recognized.

‘What Reina said is right. I … had problems.’ Verena was pale now, she spoke quietly, her face turned away.

That evening Christian rang home. He had walked a long way, past the city castle, where there were still lights on, and past the cinema, along the embankment beside the Wilde Bergfrau to the tannery. The foaming, thundering river did nothing to calm him down, he kept seeing scenes from the afternoon in his mind’s eye and couldn’t clear his head. On the bridge he leant over the parapet and looked at the dark eddies with metallic spindles gliding through them at irregular intervals, but after a while he felt cold and the darkness was becoming a problem. A single lamp was hanging like a white pot above where the road along the embankment crossed the main road leading out that started at the bridge. He headed back into the town, towards the market, but went the wrong way and after an empty time found himself outside the cinema again, which confused him; but then he saw the telephone booth beside the path outside the porter’s lodge of the castle. The porter eyed him over a copy of
Morgenpost
. Christian strolled over to the telephone booth. That seemed to be enough for the porter, he turned back to his newspaper. The telephone in this booth was probably monitored. Nothing that might get us into trouble on the telephone, Anne had drummed into him. But perhaps things were different with this telephone … It was outside the Party headquarters. On the one hand. On the other there must be more telephones in the rooms of the dilapidated castle than anywhere else in Waldbrunn, so why would they need another one here … Was that not precisely the trap? They knew how people thought: hardly anyone used the telephone on the market square, in fact so far Christian had never seen anyone using it – everyone assumed that the booth would be monitored and since Security knew the way people thought, knew that even when someone made a call from there,
aware it was being monitored they would only say harmless things, Security might perhaps regard that booth as useless and leave it untapped, while here, smiling at how clever they were, people walked straight into the snare.

Or was the booth outside the castle perhaps after all a free space that the Party leadership could keep for themselves? Christian thought it over. How would he act if he were one of Them … He’d simply tap every line without further ado. Richard had often played ‘Think like your enemy’ with him and Robert and had said, ‘That’s unlikely, they can’t have so many people to listen in, they would need three shifts a day and that on every line, and even if they had the personnel they would hardly have the technology and tapes. There must be a few untapped lines in this country. That of the Comrade Chairman of the State Council will definitely not be one, nor that of the head of Security.’ – ‘Nor those of the telephone booths either,’ Christian had replied. – ‘Why not? It’s precisely those that are not very promising for them since no one says anything on a public line. Only idiots and foreigners would do that and they’re kept under surveillance round the clock anyway.’

Christian continued to think about it. There was just one reason to call from here and not from the phone at the market. This booth would probably be in working order.

‘Hoffmann?’

Christian could hear laughter in the background, his father’s voice, the Westminster chimes of the grandfather clock striking the quarter.

‘Hi, Mum, it’s me.’

‘Oh, is there something special, since you’re calling?’

Christian closed his eyes, so strange did those voices sound, as if they were sloshing round in an aquarium. ‘No … No.’ He couldn’t speak, not now, not on the telephone and, especially, not to his mother. When he’d had problems he’d never gone to his mother. Nor to Richard.
To Meno instead, whom he could hear in the background. That meant he couldn’t ring him either.

‘Has something happened, Christian?’ Now she was suspicious; he knew the concern in her voice.

‘No, not at all. I … just wanted to ask Robert something, is he there? It’s about the Tomita record …’

‘No, he’s gone to Uli’s with Ezzo.’

‘It can wait until the weekend. Is Niklas there?’

‘Yes, and Wernstein.’

‘All the best, Mum.’

‘Are you coming at the weekend?’

Christian gave a vague answer, but brightened up and told her about the history test and his B minus and how annoyed he was, told her about the reasons for that moderate grade, so that when he’d finished he had the feeling Anne wouldn’t ask any more questions.

Ridged like a karst landscape, a deposit of jagged piled-up ice floes, Coal Island lay before the four visitors, of which three showed their permits to the guard on the bridge before setting off – Richard took little Philipp down from his shoulders so that Regine could take him by the hand – across the Kupferne Schwester bridge to the government offices. Fog lay over East Rome, the whistle of Black Mathilda as it turned out of the tunnel and announced its approach to the power station sounded muffled. Even at this early hour the snow on the bridge had been trampled by many pairs of shoes; it was the first Thursday
in the month, the day the offices were open to the public. Meno shaded his eyes, the white was dazzling and he saw that it was the first sharp rays of the March sun setting off sparks on the steeply sloping, frost-encrusted roofs of the buildings and on their windows, now clear as water, now a confusing swirl, bursting apart like dewdrops on a cobweb, suddenly frozen in a multiple prismatic glare, sparks flickering up as a tangle of light and finding countless echoes in the deep fault-lines between the buildings: this had recalled the picture, the piled-up quartz slabs, yokes, ice crystals.

They had arrived before the offices opened and joined the queue that stretched from the portico of the entrance to where the Marx–Engels Memorial Grove, empty, an almost insurmountable obstacle for the human voice, spread out its concrete grey. Marx and Engels had bronze books in their hands and seemed to be reading them. Crows were perched on their heads and the soldier on sentry duty, who wasn’t allowed to move, kept trying to drive them away by clicking his tongue. A few of those waiting clearly felt sympathy for him and raised their hands to clap, but acquaintances who were less sympathetic and had their eyes fixed on the portico pushed them down. At ‘one hundred’ Richard gave up counting, opened his briefcase, checked that the report was still there (but who would have taken it away from him anyway, he’d packed and checked the briefcase himself before he left the house); Meno too had opened his worn attaché case and was rummaging around in the papers. Regine clutched the violin case to her and let go of Philipp, who immediately went over to the sentry at the Memorial Grove, who, as the clocks in the office building began to chime, stood to attention, shifting his machine gun with angular movements, staring fixedly in front of him from under his steel helmet and for the following hours, until he was relieved, would give no indication of whether he saw the queue, which was dispersing at the front, growing at the back, whether he saw anything at all: Philipp plucked at his uniform, made faces at him, but the only response was the restrained amusement
of a few of those waiting. The queue moved forward. There was a play of bluish, crimson and purple iridescence over the pepper-and-salt granite of the vestibule. A cord controlled access to the kiosk-like lean-to where a porter was sitting surrounded by telephones on retractable arms that were sliding out and back with deliberate slowness, like the tentacles of a sea anemone. Perhaps a faulty control, Meno thought.

The members of the public stated their business, opened their bags to be checked and were allowed through. Behind the porter’s lean-to there was a wall with clocks showing different times around the world; the name of the place was written on the clock face in black lettering: Jakarta, New York, London, Valletta, Moscow, Vladivostok, Lima, Peking and many others; little Philipp listened to the clicking of the hands and wanted to know who lived in all these places. The offices’ paternoster lifts opposite the clock-wall started to move.

‘We have to separate here,’ Richard said, pointing to the clocks. ‘Shall we meet at twelve?’

‘There’s a public-address system,’ said Meno. ‘If one of us has to wait longer they can put out a call for the others.’

‘So second floor, F wing,’ Regine reminded herself. ‘Come on, Philipp.’ She took the boy by the hand; he headed straight for one of the lifts. On the second floor they looked down from a rotunda into an air well. Employees in grey coats were hurrying to and fro, some pushing files in carts trundling along quietly; worn carpets swallowed up the footsteps, the clearing of throats behind the doors, the distant murmuring. Corridors radiated out from the rotunda, which had a glass chandelier in the Kremlin’s beloved icicle style hanging down into it.

‘Touch the knight,’ Philipp demanded and Richard lifted him up so that he could reach the stone figures on the balustrade of the rotunda. Men with shields and raised swords; most of the finely chiselled features expressed amazement, perhaps at being caught by surprise, that the sculptor had mixed, as if strained through a muslin cloth, with more profound liquids: a clear conscience, new negotiations seen in older
light, traces of a comic love of haggling; the weathered armour had strange spines on the shoulders and breastplates, they made Richard think of a rare disease through which the poor patient’s skin had developed horny spines, he tried to remember the name but only the prefix ‘ichthyo-’ occurred to him. Philipp couldn’t break off the spines and said with a laugh, as if to be on the safe side, ‘Ouch,’ when he touched one with the tip of his finger. The sculptor must have gone to great pains to make the stone so pencil-sharp. Now something was ticking, like the pendulum of a large metronome set at a slow tempo. Richard looked out of the window, it must be coming from outside, from the derricks beyond the offices, in the prohibited part of Coal Island.

Second floor, F wing. Corridors enlivened by threadbare red runners and smelling musty. The distant roar of a vacuum cleaner, the clatter of typewriters behind closed doors, queues outside open ones.

The thud of stamps, whispering, the creak of thick piles of paper having holes made by office punches, the hum of sewing machines. Certain files were sewn into the binders, something that had been taken over from the Soviet Union, where it had been the custom of the Okhrana, the Tsarist secret police, as Richard had learnt from a patient who worked on Coal Island.

‘And you think we can go straight to this office?’ Richard asked doubtfully. ‘Normally you have to go to Central Registration first.’ ‘The invitation is direct and I know where I have to go, I don’t need to go to Central Registration for that,’ Regine said. The official at the desk at the entrance to F wing knew better, however. ‘You’ve no slip from Central Registration, you can’t be allowed in just like that, Citizen Neubert –’

Regine protested that this registration was a pure waste of time, why should she register downstairs when her appointment was up here –

The official reminded her of the regulations, which she, as a citizen, had to observe!

Regine
shrugged her shoulders. Richard followed her, she hurried on ahead, unfazed by the junctions that led to other corridor systems, all of which looked the same. Not even the indoor plants on the window ledges were noticeably different: well-fed exotic plants with spoon-shaped, carefully dusted, fleshy leaves. One little copper watering can with a spout like an ibis beak per floor.

They passed a rotunda and Richard was already thinking they’d lost the way and gone back to the first – the same icicle chandelier with thousands of bits of opaque paste frippery dangling from it, the same pillars on the rotunda’s balustrade, the same threadbare reddish-pink runner – but the statues, although similarly armed with swords and shields, had different expressions on their faces. Amusingly, one of the stone knights had stuck his sword between his knees and was blowing his nose on a handkerchief. The sculptor, in whose name Richard was now interested, had done the folds with delicate meticulousness and kept them as thin as a communion wafer.

Central Registration was a hall with counters all round buzzing with voices, Job-like patience, the noise of conveyor belts. In the middle a Christmas tree, still decorated with snail-shaped decorations, Narva lemons and little wooden horses from Seiffen, was quietly shedding its needles and in cordoned-off solitude, which didn’t seem to bother the overalled messengers pushing their carts through the queues without looking anyone in the eye. Regine joined the queue at the counter with the letters ‘L, M, N’, Richard that at ‘H’ and when he looked round he saw Meno, who, like them, had been overhasty and had to register at the ‘R’ counter, which had the second-longest queue after ‘S, Sch, St’.

After an hour it was Richard’s turn. He had two pieces of business: in the first place he had to collect a second medical report on the case of a car tyre repairer who, although he was the sole specialist of that type in the southern area of Dresden, had been sent his call-up papers (upon which Richard, at the behest of Müller, whose Opel Kapitän
was sorely in need of such a specialist, had written a first report attesting the man’s absolute unfitness for military service because his left leg was ten centimetres shorter); in the second, the gas water-heater in Caravel was nearing the end if its life and Richard wanted to apply for a new one.

‘Fourth floor, E corridor, HM office – Housing Matters – forward slash, Roman two,’ the man behind the counter informed him. Regine also had two things to see to: firstly she had to get a certificate attesting that Hansi’s violin was not part of the state’s cultural heritage and that its export would not damage the interests of the state in any other way, secondly she had an invitation to a ‘personal discussion’ with the official in charge of her matter. ‘The valuation section is also on the fourth floor, though in B corridor, but we can go up together,’ Regine said. In the HM – Housing Matters – office Richard was told that the employee at Central Registration had made a mistake and that the office for requesting communal gas water-heaters was on the eleventh floor, G corridor, CHA – Communal Housing Administration – office, Arabic five. He went back to Regine. She was looking nervously at the clock. She had an appointment at nine thirty and there were about two dozen people waiting at the Valuation Section. Could Richard get the violin valued for her?

‘But you’ll have to get a certificate confirming that, my dear lady,’ a man in front of them in the queue warned her. ‘Firstly you’ll have to get a certificate confirming that you are the person requiring an article to be assessed, secondly that it belongs to you, thirdly that you have given this gentleman here the power of attorney. – I speak from experience.’

After he came back from the certification procedure Richard remembered that recently there had been certain rumours circulating about this valuation section. Wernstein had told him about one case that he had heard from a nurse who was engaged to an assistant doctor in Internal Medicine. A technician in the department had inherited a
Guarneri violin, but wasn’t sure if it was genuine and had had it examined here, at the Valuation Section. The instrument was actually a genuine Guarneri, a rarity on which her late aunt had quietly and modestly bowed her way through several decades in the ranks of the second violins in the Dresden Philharmonic; no one apart from the aunt, who was single, had known what a special instrument it was; the first mention of the name of the Italian instrument maker was in her will. In the Valuation Section a man in a grey suit had appeared who, after the evaluator had pored over a few catalogues, repeatedly looked inside the violin with a dentist’s mirror and, for safety’s sake, consulted a colleague, picked up the telephone and had a long conversation. A few days later the technician, who thought her worries were over, was sent a letter from the Coal Island finance department. She couldn’t pay the sum that was demanded in inheritance tax and so the violin was taken away from her. That was the story Wernstein had told; but Niklas Tietze, whom Richard asked, had also heard about it; as had Barbara, who had picked it up at Wiener’s, the hairdresser’s.

The evaluator glanced at Richard’s power of attorney, shuffled back to his table, which was covered in green billiard cloth, and started to study the violin.

At first he twisted and turned it with jaunty, elegant movements, the violin whirled, stopped – a look through a lens; more turning, a few pencilled notes; more turning. He didn’t look inside the body, didn’t open a catalogue. Scroll, pegbox, fingerboard, shape of the F-holes; then he put the violin under his chin, took the bow out of the case and began to play Bach’s Chaconne. He let its solemn, stately tones ring out clearly for a good minute, so that the other officials of the Valuation Section interrupted their work and listened to him. The muttering in the queue stopped, the crackle of sandwich wrappers, the rustling, the shuffle of feet. But no one clapped when he put the violin down. Richard observed his crisp, precise movements; there was no superfluous nor even jerky action; in his mind’s eye he could see his
father repairing a clock at his workbench in Glashütte, Malthakus sorting postage stamps, the same precise, finely adjusted movements, and that made him think.

The evaluator put a form in the typewriter and typed a few lines. Then he replaced the instrument and closed the lid. However much of an effort the violin maker had made – he spoke the name with mocking contempt – who, as far as the secrets of the ribs and purfling were concerned was at least more than just an amateur, his violins would never be part of the cultural heritage of the German Democratic Republic. There, he had it in writing. The evaluator stuck a revenue stamp on the certificate and pushed it across the flap in the door. Richard paid, was about to leave.

‘One moment.’

‘Yes?’

The evaluator removed his glasses and took his time cleaning them. ‘As you will be aware, the bow goes with the violin. I have only certified that the violin is not part of our country’s cultural heritage. You have to get that certified for the bow as well.’

‘Oh, right.’ Richard fiddled with the violin case, was going to take the bow out there and then.

‘Sir,’ the evaluator said, ‘I am a certified specialist for string instruments and bows; according to regulations, however, string instruments and their bows are to be submitted for assessment separately.’

‘But I’m here and you could, I mean it would save time, and there are other people waiting behind me –’