The Tower: A Novel (24 page)

‘According to regulations string instruments and bows are to be submitted for assessment separately.’

Richard lost his temper. ‘Now listen … what nonsense! You’ve just played the violin yourself. – And to do that you used the bow, otherwise you wouldn’t have been able to play it. Please have a look at it and put your stamp on the bumph –’

‘Are you threatening my colleague?’ another official asked, looking
Richard disparagingly up and down. ‘In our state all citizens are equal before the law. Are you demanding special treatment? Who do you think you are?’

‘Just check his bow, this is ridiculous,’ a man behind Richard muttered. ‘I’ve got nothing against all citizens being equal and that, but I’ve got a violin and a bow to be assessed as well, so I’ll have to go to the back again too, and who knows how many others will be in that situation today. A load of nonsense!’

‘Yes, nonsense,’ Richard agreed. ‘I’m going to make a complaint.’

‘If you want to have the bow certified, please go to the back of the queue,’ the first evaluator said with official politeness. There was no point in continuing to object; if he did so Richard would have only been inconveniencing Regine, who would have had to come back another day. Richard stood aside, took a sandwich out of his briefcase, thinking about a bomb, and joined the queue at the back.

After the bow had been checked (‘not one of Tourte’s, not one of Pfretzschner’s, not one of Schmidt’s’), Richard went to the second floor, F corridor, to find Regine. Going up and down the stairs, he encountered acquaintances, said hello to Frau Teerwagen here, to Frau Stahl from the House with a Thousand Eyes there, had a brief chat with Clarens.

‘Not on duty either, Hans?’ Clarens shrugged his shoulders in silent impotence. ‘What’re you here for?’

‘Gas water-heater, report, favour’ – Richard waved the violin. ‘And you?’

‘Vehicle licensing office, increased coal allocation, burials office.’

‘Who’s died?’ Richard shouted from one staircase to the other. The psychiatrist waved his question away. ‘Let’s just say: hope, my friend, hope!’ and, smiling and waving goodbye, he slid back into the stream of supplicants, applicants, messengers and officials.

‘Where are you going?’ The attendant outside F corridor asked to see Richard’s identity card.

‘I’m
waiting for someone.’

‘This is solely for people wanting to emigrate, those are the only ones I can let in.’

‘But as I said, I’m just waiting for someone, surely that isn’t forbidden?’

‘Hm. Who are you waiting for?’

‘Frau Regine Neubert.’

The attendant leafed through his documents. ‘Your name? – We could sort the matter out in the following way: I give you an entry permit. You leave your identity card here, you’ll get it back when you leave. You have one hour, then you must come and report to me again.’

Richard looked up, it was rare to be addressed in such a friendly manner here.

‘Hmm, Dr Hoffmann.’ Immersed in thought, the attendant riffled through the lists of names, one sheet after the other.

In F corridor the sewing machines were buzzing behind the doors. Here the queue stretched out into the rotunda. Richard, not finding Regine, stood by a window and waited, not without receiving suspicious, not to say hostile, looks – a man with a violin who didn’t join the queue, what was he doing here?

‘Hey, you there,’ a woman barked, ‘there’s no jumping the queue here. We all want to get out.’ Richard was about to reply that he had no intention of jumping the queue when a door was flung open and a woman stormed out, swearing and cursing loudly. ‘I’m Alexandra Barsano, you’ve presumably heard the name, this will cost you dear,’ she shouted back in through the open door. Soothing words were to be heard from inside. The waiting queue observed the scene that was being played out in front of them in silence. Richard remembered: years ago there had been photos in the press showing the powerful Party Secretary of the district, one arm proudly round the shoulder of his daughter; but the young woman, who was getting more and more worked up, swaying as if drunk and waving her arms around,
clearly had nothing to do with the young girl in the old photos any more. A few shaggy black strands were hanging down either side of a Mohican hairstyle, the spikes of which were a lurid yellow, otherwise her head was completely shaven. Her eyes ringed in black, skull-rings on her fingers, a slashed leather jacket with a ‘Swords into Ploughshares’ symbol sewn on the back, leather trousers, studded belt; over her shoulder Alexandra Barsano had, attached to clinking silver chains, a chimney sweep’s weight. As she turned round, Richard saw the Party badge on her lapel. A man in a grey suit approached.

‘You’ll hear from me,’ Alexandra Barsano snarled. The man in the suit drew her to one side, talking to her quietly all the time. The door to the office slammed shut, opened briefly, someone hung an ‘Office closed’ sign on it. Alexandra Barsano ran to the door and hammered on it with her fists. Two men in uniform appeared and led her away, she didn’t resist, the chimney’s sweep’s weight hit her in the back. The man straightened his suit, ran a comb through his hair, jutted out his chin to the queue: ‘The office is closed.’

The muttering from the people in the queue grew louder.

‘I will have any troublemakers arrested for resistance to the authority of the state. Is that clear? This office is closed, shut, for the rest of the day.’ The man in the suit strode off. In disbelief, those in the queue waited for a while longer, then dispersed, grumbling and cursing. The daughter of our District Secretary at the office for exit permits, Richard was thinking, still dazed by the scene, when the office door opened and Regine came out, pale and tear-stained. Beside her was Philipp holding a packet of Ata out of which there came a trickle of white scouring powder. ‘Come by yourself the next time, Citizen Neubert.’ During a long discussion, in the course of which she had been strongly advised to divorce her husband, since he was a traitor and they had ‘proofs’ that he went to brothels in Munich, Philipp had wandered over to the washbasin of the soundproof discussion cubicle and, with scrubbing brush and duster, set off an Ata snow-fest in the whole room. The
door slammed shut; as he walked away Richard could hear coughing inside.

The first censor, Meno thought, as he adjusted his tie in the mirror over one of the washbasins there were at regular intervals along the corridor. He was somewhere in the depths of the east wing of Coal Island. Up there, on the top floor, it was quiet; it was an area one needed a special permit to enter. Schiffner had made one out for Meno and signed it.

‘Come on in now,’ the writer Eschschloraque called, roguishly beckoning Meno with his index finger from the end of the corridor. Although the reddish wood of the purlins allowed a soft, reassuring light to filter into the corridor, Meno was somehow reminded of a visit to Frau Knabe, his dentist; in her practice, at least in the vestibule, there was the same forbearing, forgiving, peach-soft brightness (the mistake was that time passed, Meno had the impression that the ministering spirits, who camouflaged the anterooms of the pain-inflicters, knew this); even though the smell of coffee and cigarettes dribbled out of the keyholes of the doors he passed, the feeling of having to go down a tunnel with no turn-off came just as promptly as in Frau Knabe’s practice – only Meno had not expected the
dramaticus
(Eschschloraque wrote mostly plays). Today, on Schiffner’s behalf, he was supposed to be seeing all four senior assessors of the Dresden branch of the Ministry of Culture’s publishing section; he had previously only negotiated here with two of them, Albert Salomon, whom people called ‘Slalomon’ because of his reports that took account of every twist and turn of political developments, and Karlfriede Sinner-Priest, who was known as Mrs Privy-Councillor.

‘Do come in, Rohde. Do you like tea? – Good to hear. Tea drinkers are mostly good people to talk with. They’re intelligent murderers into the bargain and they mostly have something to say. I need that for one of my plays, you should know. Is it not much more effective when a torturer sips a cup of tea than when he just downs a beer?’

‘Aren’t
you making it too easy for yourself if you have the said torturer drinking tea. The critics will say, “Oh God, a torturer drinks beer, a proletarian touch! How does a crafty author avoid that? He makes him drink tea. That is such an unsurprising surprise, Herr Eschschloraque, that it’s become a cliché.” ’

‘You may well be right, my dear Rohde. Should I go back to beer, then? What our critics don’t realize is that this beer has been through all the pipes of the directorial drinks department and has reached a second innocence, a higher innocence so to speak. I would avoid the cliché by renewing the cliché … Hm. Interesting tactic, but you’d have to get the torturer to deliver a soliloquy on the innocence of beer. Despite that, I feel I can manage a tea. I can give you Earl Grey.’

‘I’ve brought a lemon, Herr Eschschloraque.’

‘Is it to have an acid taste? Acid corrodes but you don’t make anything wrong with it. I could have my torturer drink cocoa instead … Or a fizzy drink. Lemonade. I prefer people who love lemons to those who love melons, for example, basically a melon is nothing more than sugar and water and despite all the seeds is only the principle of the bellows transferred to horticulture. Anyway, you don’t need to offer me anything apart from arguments, up to now I have nurtured the illusion of being incorruptible. Sit down and let’s continue.’

Eschschloraque made the tea and started the ‘Conjuration of Snakes’ as the presentation of manuscripts and discussion of reports was called among the editors. Meno looked round, listened and observed Eschschloraque. He asked which manuscripts Meno was thinking of fighting for. Meno knew the ritual, made a gesture that could mean everything and said nothing: keep your cards close to you chest, editor. If you name a writer, the other person might hate him and finish him off with a smile. If you deliberately name a wrong one, in order to mislead them, the other person might be happy with that and confirm the name with a smile. Cover your flanks and protect your king – and
be aware that your queen can never be brought into action too soon. Sacrifice a pawn, if it’s a knight or bishop that’s threatened, sacrifice your queen so that the last pawn can checkmate the king. And remember, the other person has studied your wiles and knows your ruses.

‘Right, then I will give you two names for which I will fight in the publishing plan. Let’s not fool ourselves, Rohde. You have fourteen titles, twelve of them are’ – Eschschloraque glanced through the telescope by the window of the room that was stuffed full of books and papers – ‘the way they are. Two will cause offence: Altberg’s essays and Eduard Eschschloraque’s slim volume of writings full of wittily mendacious truths and classic pesticide for the romantic rodents gnawing away at the vineyard of literature. You know just as well as I do that one of these projects has to die.’

But Eschschloraque’s smile vanished when he continued. Meno left his tea untouched and let his eyes wander round the room while the playwright, who seemed to Meno like a mixture between a clown and a sharp-witted old woman, exercised his wickedly mocking tongue on the more or less characteristic qualities of those colleagues whose manuscripts he had reported on in his quality of assessor. A copper engraving of Goethe on the wall, the old Weimar edition of his works in a glass-fronted bookcase, a bust of Goethe on the dramatist’s desk between a Soviet pennant and a signed portrait of Stalin; in front of them two neatly aligned typewriters: a black Erika and beside it a sign, like those saying ‘Reserved’ in restaurants, bearing the inscription ‘Mortal’; a second sign, beside the other typewriter, made by Rheinmetall, with ‘Immortal – when I’m fresh’; by this time Meno had shifted sideways up to the table and didn’t need to bend back much as the playwright strode up and down. ‘Hoary expressions, Rohde! And always with heartfelt’ – Eschschloraque drew the exclamation mark in the air with his finger – ‘good wishes … why not liverfelt or lungfelt once in a while? We all have to breathe, why should good things always have to come from the heart? Most people’s ticker is a clock, not a
heart. The liver: the body’s chemical factory. Its potions and juices are much richer.’

His sarcastic thrusts broke off as if he’d hit a barrier when Eschschloraque got round to the Old Man of the Mountain’s book.

Meno was astonished at the seriousness, the knowledgeable, almost solemnly expressed love that warmed Eschschloraque’s remarks on those essays; he wouldn’t have believed Eschschloraque capable of it, wouldn’t have expected it of him. ‘Do you know what I see, my dear Rohde, when I look through this telescope? I see a classical land and Altberg is one of Goethe’s children. Goethe. Goethe! After all, he’s the father – and all the criticism merely the twitching of frogs’ legs.’ He had never, Eschschloraque went on, read such essays on writers and their works. That was European, indeed world, class.

Meno couldn’t believe his ears. Eschschloraque, that captious critic, that occupational shadow who ruthlessly pursued every careless slip, who openly spoke up for Stalin and the Stalinist system, for whom Richard Wagner’s music was a crime, the man was standing there by the door, disarmed, all his mockery, his caustic wit gone. ‘Don’t gawp like that, that’s your blasted lemon. Hm. So we’ll live and pray and sing, and tell old tales and laugh at gilded butterflies … but he misunderstands matters when he says that their relationships with each other are always created by people alone. Have you never encountered lifeless people? Have you never thought about the idea that you might have different shadows that take alternate shifts? – Now you know,’ Eschschloraque said brusquely, ‘or at least you think you do. The manuscript submitted by Eschschloraque needs to be revised and improved. It cannot be recommended for publication at the present moment. And now out you go, you’ve stolen enough of my precious time as it is. You’ll have it all in writing – and no sly tricks, Rohde.’

‘Left leg shorter by twelve centimetres,’ Dr Pahl wrote on the form and closed the handbook on assessing fitness for military service. ‘The
man is entirely unfit for military service. At ten centimetres he could have been conscripted as a naval wireless operator or staff clerk without having to go through basic training. Of course, that leaves the question of what we do if there’s an appeal or if the orthopaedist for the regional military command should read the file. He’d immediately want to know what remedial measures were being looked at. Are there orthopaedic shoes with the soles built up by twelve centimetres?’