The Tower: A Novel (3 page)

Christian remembered that it was in Cobweb House that he had first heard something about Poe; Meno and Vogelstrom had been looking at illustrations to one of Poe’s stories. He particularly remembered one print – Vogelstrom’s needle had etched an elaborate picture of a castle rising up into the darkness of the nocturnal countryside; then one of Prince Prospero and his retinue of a thousand ladies and knights in the castle with the welded bolts on the doors; he saw them again, as he had all those years ago under Vogelstrom’s thin, slim-fingered hand, strolling and chatting, as if the company were alive and playing their merry games, while outside the plague was raging, devastating the land, as if Prospero were passing through the rooms amid the frenzy of a masked ball – music swelled, and the chimes of the ebony clock in the black chamber echoed and faded in the vastness of the castle, and in the six other chambers the people were dancing, for Prince Prospero would not countenance sadness, and the cries of the despairing populace could no longer be heard over the music, the singing and laughter, the barking of the dogs outside the gates.

The carriage was slowing down, coasting the last few metres. Lost in his thoughts and memories, Christian had hardly noticed it enter the upper tunnel, which, with its whitewashed walls, was brighter than the lower one, he had merely glanced automatically, but without really taking anything in, at the upper station with its cheerful bright paint and gracefully curving roof, the red-brick building with the neon sign:
Funicular Railway
, the machine room and the waiting room where you could examine photographs of earlier models and technical details in a glass display case. The funicular came to a halt, shuddering gently. The doors opened with a clatter. Christian slung his bag over his shoulder and, still immersed in thought, went up the shallow steps of the station towards the exit gate.

The conductor shuffled off in the direction of the waiting room, felt for a button concealed in the wall; there was a buzz, the gate opened and Christian went out. He was home, in the Tower.

‘Great that I caught you. I was thinking I’d have to come back again.’

‘Meno! You’ve come to meet me?’

‘Anne has had to find somewhere else for Robert and you to stay tonight. You’re sleeping at my place.’

‘So many guests?’ Christian only asked so that he could hide his delight behind a casual-sounding question. He already knew. The vast amount of baking ingredients that had been procured during the last few weeks and piled up in the larder of Caravel indicated the number of guests they expected for the birthday party – and had convinced him that coming home to stay in Caravel, except to take part in the rehearsals that would take place mainly at the Tietzes’, would be ill-advised; that is, if he didn’t want to irritate Anne, in her nervous state, by hanging about, or risk exposure to her suspicious gaze and end up, once excuses were no longer possible, being sent off to Konsum or Holfix larded with shopping lists, or to face never-ending stacks of dishes in the kitchen.

‘There
were at least thirty of us for coffee this afternoon and the official celebrations only start later; more people are sure to be coming then.’

They were walking along Sibyllenleite.

‘And where’s Robert sleeping?’

‘At the Tietzes’.’

So his brother would be spending the night in Evening Star. Christian put his mittens back on and thought of the House with a Thousand Eyes, where he would be spending the night, in a quite different atmosphere from that at home in Caravel.

‘I decided to come and meet you so that you didn’t go home first. Anne has already taken your cello with her to the Felsenburg.’

Christian nodded and looked at his uncle, who had taken his hat off and removed the snowflakes with a few flicks. ‘Since when have you been wearing that?’

‘Anne bought it for me in Exquisit. Said it ought to suit me. A good style too.’ Meno looked at the writing on the sweatband. ‘A delivery arrived from Yugoslavia. Anne said people were queuing all the way back to Thälmannstrasse, at least fifty metres. They didn’t have one for your father.’ He put his hat back on. ‘Did everything work out with the barometer?’

‘As agreed. Two hundred and fifty marks. Lange even cleaned it up and polished it again.’

‘Good. Shall I take your bag?’

‘Oh, it’s not that heavy, but thanks, Meno. Apart from the barometer, it’s only dirty laundry.’

They came to Turmstrasse, the main through-road of the district, and from which it derived its popular name of the ‘Tower’. Meno walked with more measured steps than Christian; he had taken out a briar pipe with a curved stem and a spherical bowl and was filling it from a leather pouch. Christian raised his nose and sniffed, sucking in the vanilla fragrance that mingled with the aroma of figs and cedar-wood.
Alois Lange, a former ship’s doctor and Meno’s neighbour in the House with a Thousand Eyes, got a box of the tobacco every year from the deputy chairman of the Copenhagen Nautical Academy, and he gave half to Meno – the ship’s doctor had once saved the deputy chairman’s life and thus, to the annoyance of Lange’s wife, Libussa, there was never a shortage of tobacco in the House with a Thousand Eyes. A match flared up, illuminating Meno’s lean, pale features and bluish five-o’clock shadow; the reflection flickered in his brown eyes, which were warmed by a few flashes of green – they were Anne’s eyes, and those of her other brother, Ulrich, the eyes of the Rohdes; Christian had inherited them too.

‘Did you get through all right? The Eleven was cancelled this morning. It was an hour before the replacement came. The curses at the stop’ – Meno sucked at his pipe to get it going – ‘would have been something for “Look & Listen”. And the Six had a diversion.’ His pipe still wasn’t going, he lit another match.

‘I noticed.’

‘Anne was going to ring you, but the lines didn’t seem to be working or something, I don’t know what was broken again – she couldn’t get through at all.’ His pipe was finally going, and he blew out puff after puff of smoke.

‘Yesterday it snowed like mad higher up, the snow’s more than a metre deep in Zinnwald and Altenberg, I was getting worried the bus wouldn’t go. Near Karsdorf we had to get out and help the driver shovel the snow away. The brushwood barrier in the fields had fallen over, and all the new snow had been blown onto the road.’

Meno nodded and gave his nephew, who was almost as tall as he was and was tramping through the powder snow a little in front, a thoughtful look. ‘How are things at school? Are you managing?’

‘Pretty well so far. People stare at me a bit because I’m from Dresden. Civics is as usual.’

‘And the teacher? Is he dangerous?’

‘Hard
to say. He’s also our principal. If you just regurgitate what he says, you’re left in peace. The Russian teacher’s pretty devious. One of the quiet types, very observant, a Party fanatic. There’s something feline about him, he creeps round the corridors and checks on us in the hostel. Today he turned up in white gloves and felt in all the corners to see if they were really clean. I’m sure everyone in the next room missed their bus – he found an apple core under the lockers, and they had to clean the place again.’

‘Is he provocative?’

‘He certainly is.’

‘Be careful. They’re the worst. I know the type. You always have the feeling they can see through you – you can’t look them in the eye, you become nervous, make mistakes. And that’s the mistake.’

‘That’s true, about being seen through. He has such a piercing look, whenever he looks at me I always think he can read my thoughts.’

‘But he can’t. Don’t let tricks like that make you nervous.’

‘ “A wise man walks with his head bowed, humble like the dust.” ’

Meno looked at Christian in surprise.

‘I made a note of it, Meno.’

The snow, criss-crossed with sledge tracks, reflected the sparse light from the lamps; it covered the garden walls, and the roofs of the few cars that were parked by the pavement, with thick caps. On the left, the houses of Holländische Leite appeared, almost all of them belonging to the Baron’s Institute: Baron Ludwig von Arbogast, who in the district was generally called by his inherited title and whose huge premises on Unterer Plan, to which Holländische Leite led, were referred to, half admiringly, half suspiciously, as ‘the Institute’. The Baron was the sponsor of the school Christian had attended until the previous summer, and whenever he had seen the Baron, he recalled a conversation between Meno and his father: how to reconcile Arbogast’s
soigné
appearance – he wore bespoke suits and carried a stick with a silver handle – with the weathered and grey, but still clearly
legible, inscription over the central building of the Institute: FOR SOCIALISM AND PEACE; and ‘baron’, the title that was clearly written on the boards and signposts in the Institute gardens, with the workers’ state. It was a question Christian would have liked to ask his civics teacher.

The lights were still on in the Institute buildings on Turmstrasse. Arbogast’s little observatory, which had not been open to the public for ages, even though a sign in front of it promised a ‘People’s Observatory’, was shielded by a sweet chestnut that stretched its branches far out over the footpath. A sundial with its gnomon was rusting away in the ivy that covered the crumbling plaster. Meno was the person Christian would have thought most likely to have had a look inside the door at the rear of the observatory; he had often observed him when astronomy and astrology cropped up in conversations: his uncle adopted an attitude somewhere between latent amusement and concealed interest and scrutinized the newspaper cuttings and pamphlets the guests had brought, quietly leaning against the wall in a corner, his round-bowled pipe in his mouth, listening to his brother, Ulrich, animatedly discuss astronomy in Far Eastern antiquity.

‘I was reading your book just now.’

Smoke rose in thick clouds from the bowl of his pipe. ‘Strange old things,’ Meno muttered at the crossing of Turmstrasse and Wolfsleite. ‘Hardly anyone knows them any more. The censors, probably, and the Old Man of the Mountain. The book brought me a thumping great letter from him, from East Rome to West Rome, so to speak. Took three days to arrive when all the old man needed to do was to walk across the bridge. But they said he was ill. – Otherwise people tended to look askance at me because of it.’

‘The book doesn’t provide an answer to the question of how the steel was tempered.’

‘Eisenhüttenstadt doesn’t appear in it.’ Meno waved his pipe. ‘Nor does Parsifal represent a clear revolutionary proletarian standpoint,
and in general the class-consciousness of the knights leaves much to be desired.’

‘And the Merseburg Charms are much too formalistic?’

‘It’s not
quite
that bad any longer.’

‘The Lay of Hildebrand, the beginning?’ Christian gave his uncle a pleading look. Meno took another suck at his pipe and began to recite. Fascinated as always, Christian listened to the pleasant timbre of his voice, the stage diction; he was strangely moved by the ancient language and its power, especially the ‘I heard tell / that in single combat / two warriors did meet’ of the beginning and by the ‘sonandfather’ of the fourth line. As they walked on slowly, Meno continued to recite beyond the opening, had already reached the thirteenth line, ‘all great folk I ken in this kingdom’; as he walked on, nodding his head to the rhythm of the lines, he spoke of the wrath of Odoacer, of Theoderic and the torc wrought of the Emperor’s gold that had been given to him by the king, the lord of the Huns, and how father and son fought ‘till their shields were shattered, slashed by their swords’. A light breeze had sprung up, and the trees on either side of the street began to sway, snow drifted down from the branches. They had now reached Wolfsleite, and the broad bulk of Wolfstone lay there like a ship with lights ablaze; in the ‘bassoon’, as the octagonal extension was called, the ‘story-lamp’ was smoking: so they’ll be telling each other stories, Christian thought, and in his mind’s eye he saw his uncle, the toxicologist Hans Hoffmann, explaining monkshood and woody nightshade, which he grew in the ‘bassoon’ himself, to Fabian and Muriel; he thought of Malivor Marroquin, the white-haired Chilean who ran the fancy-dress shop and a photographic studio next door – when he was fourteen, Christian had had to go there to have his photograph taken by Marroquin, for his ID card; quotations from Lenin’s works lined the walls of the staircase that led up to the heavy Ernemann plate camera, and they were mutely scrutinized by the queue of boys and girls with their neatly combed hair; at the top the Chilean shouted, ‘Plizz lukk at liddel
gold-finsh, plizz lukk naow’, at which one had to direct one’s gaze at a little red bird that was clipped to the edge of a screen with a clothes peg.

‘There’s a soirée tomorrow,’ Meno said, pointing to Dolphin’s Lair, the house opposite Wolfstone, which looked delicately and flimsily built, with the curve of the roof like an upper lip and the large scroll over the coving of a wall. ‘Soirée’ meant that Frau von Stern had sent out invitations in copperplate script on hand-made paper, invitations to share her memories of the Winter Palace and Dresden Castle, for she had been a lady-in-waiting.

The Italian House was on Wolfsleite as well; Ulrich, Christian’s other Rohde uncle, and his family lived there. Ulrich was a director of one of the state-owned companies; his wife, Barbara, worked as a furrier and ladies’ tailor in the Harmony Salon on Rissleite. Sometimes Christian would go to see the Rohdes, for some more or less valid reason, so that he could have a good look at the staircase and landing, and the art nouveau details in their apartment. No side of the house was like any of the others. The stairwell stuck out at the front, like the bow of a ship, the shape emphasized by four windows, a single one higher up and three a little lower down, as in a gallery. The lone upper window, over which the roof described an elongated curve, was like an oversized keyhole. Christian put his bag down and went in through the double doors, each shaped like the prow of a gondola, to switch the light on. The portico, an Oriental-looking pavilion set in the masonry, was lit by the hall windows, which had been decorated, as in Dolphin’s Lair, with flowers and plants. Dame’s violets wound their way up the storeys as far as the keyhole window, interrupted by a keystone between the floors that was adorned with two facing sandstone spirals. And to the left, on the side of the jutting-out stairwell that faced Turmstrasse, a decrepit oriel was squatting on its corbel; it belonged to the Rohde apartment. In many places, the plaster revealed the bricks that had been eaten away by time and rain.

‘Shall we ring? – No,’ Meno murmured. ‘Come on.’ They continued
on their way, Meno head bowed, hands in his coat pockets, hat pulled down over his face.

On Mondleite the elms were stretching out their skeleton branches against the sky. It began to snow. The flakes gusted and drifted across the road, which hardly had enough room for the Ladas, Trabants and Wartburgs that squeezed up against the very edge, here and there shouldering aside the broken, weather-beaten fences, overgrown with brambles. The mantles of the lamps that were still working began to flutter, reminding Christian of the visions he’d had during evening walks of carriages appearing outside the silent houses that had withdrawn into the past, emerging from the nocturnal haziness of Mondleite and Wolfsleite on winter evenings such as this and driving up or away, inaudible in the snow – ladies with ermine muffs got out after a zealous servant had opened the carriage door, the horses snorted and shuffled in their harnesses, scenting oats and sugar, their home stable, and then the gate with the two sandstone balls on the pillars and the spiral lady’s tresses ornament carved on the arch opened, cries rang out, a chambermaid hurried down the steps to take the luggage … Christian started when he heard a barn owl screech. Meno pointed to the oak trees by the House with a Thousand Eyes, which had come into view, half hidden behind the gate and the massive copper beech. It stood at the side of a wider stretch of road, into which Mondleite led, and which, where the oak trees grew, formed a sharp bend between Mondleite and Planetenweg. Meno took out the key, but the house still seemed far away to Christian, inaccessible, woven into the beech tree branches as if in a large coral in the night. The shriek of a barn owl came from the park that fell away steeply from Mondleite and was separated from the garden of the House with a Thousand Eyes by a line of Bhutan pines, whose resinous fragrance mingled with the metallic smell of the snowy air. ‘Here we are, then.’