The Tower: A Novel (31 page)

Veroonicaa, Veroonicaa … The Stenzel Sisters were small and shrivelled, like old princesses, in the summer they always wore short skirts so that you could see their white calves with the angular lines of their muscles, their thick hill-walkers’ socks rolled down over their ankles. The sisters’ heads were covered in fine, soft hair that was so thin their parchment-pale scalp shone through; they braided it into buns the size of tennis balls on the back of their head, holding them together with hairnets, green, blue and red, that had shopping lists, reels of thread and safety pins stuck in them. They would greet him with ‘Krest-yan!’ when he went up the stairs to look at the photographs behind the glass door; and there was Magellan again, on the landing outside the two second-floor apartments, and his ship, this time on the Hoffmanns’ floor, a caravel with a high afterdeck, lateen sails and gossamer shrouds etched on the frosted glass of the door, the waves under the ship’s hull snaking back like a Malay dagger or Poseidon’s locks, dolphins swimming transparently to the walnut frame of the door that separated the landing from the cylindrical stairwell; and when it was dark and the apartment door was open, the lines of the ship were filled with the corridor light, it was as if an etching needle were engraving constellations on a black sheet of metal: the Ship, the Dolphin; in the glass door of the upper ground floor there were a wind rose and a
Hanseatic cog; a windjammer and a relief etching of the Atlantic and South America with a fine broken line running round Cape Horn as far as Chile on the floor of the Stenzel Sisters and young André Tischer, who had moved in only recently … and alone, at that, a lad who was hardly twenty and his own apartment already, no wonder that there were rumours about him going round. He was the son of a high official, people said, who had gone off the straight and narrow, which you could tell from the fact that he had a boxer that he took for walks without a lead or a muzzle, always wearing black leather and his hair either close shaven or long and shaggy – a drop-out! Aunt Barbara declared, I tell you: he’s a drop-out! – a studded belt and cowboy boots, that made Robert green with envy, for where, ‘damn it all!’, was there even the least hint of boots like that in the whole of Dresden – so there! He’ll be one of the ‘Firm’, Niklas opined, he can’t even say hello, that in itself’s a symp-tom! – On top of that every Sunday an opera singer came to see him, cleaned the stairs for him with a steaming hot cloth that slapped on the steps like a great big eel, then went up, at which there was some crashing followed by a profound silence, a silence that Anne tried to fill with an embarrassed expression, a loud clatter of crockery, the noise of the radio and the abrupt observation that there wasn’t enough coal, at which Robert said, ‘If you insist’, and went to fetch some coal; a silence in which, slowly and irrefutably, the asthmatic creak of a bedstead arose, to be joined by the intense quivering of the Hoffmann’s hall light and, finally, the urgent cries of a female voice that sounded as if it belonged to a coachwoman who, thrown to and fro on the box seat of a carriage by wild horses and a bumpy road, still managed, screaming, to hold her course, accompanied by the yowling of the boxer and the rhythmical groans of the mattress springs, intermingled with the grunts of a coachman from a rival firm, ‘Last orders’, ‘Closing time’, the cry of the nightwatchman, and sometimes the opera diva would squeal because the dog was trying to rescue its master. Some thought André Tischer was a mysterious West German
because he didn’t speak in dialect, but Richard waved that away and told a quite different story: young Tischer was the son of a couple who were both doctors and had lived in Blasewitz; one day, about a year ago, when the parents were sleeping after a strenuous period on duty, André’s younger brother had been playing with matches and set the house on fire, André had been away with friends; the neighbours, a violinist in the state orchestra and the aforementioned opera singer, had noticed the fire and tried to put it out; in vain. At first André, who had no relatives, had been taken in by the opera singer, but then the city had allocated him this apartment. He was currently working as an ambulance driver at St Joseph’s Hospital.

Voices, upstairs: sometimes the Stenzel Sisters would sing in their husky soprano voices, O take my hand, dear Father or All glory be to God on high, it sounded like cautiously establishing contact with a child and when the windows were open it could happen that Griesel would take the electric cable out of the cellar that gave onto his garden and attach it to the frog-like lawn mower. He might be thinking of the quotation about the shepherd feeding his flock, and if the shepherd looked like Pastor Magenstock, it could be all the more unforgivable for little lambs to put their hands together and pray, accompanied by mellifluous tones and blue-eyed unctuousness from the pulpit; for grown-ups to turn childish. The Stenzel Sisters went in armour-like clothes to hear Pastor Magenstock’s Sunday sermon, having taken off the rusty brooches – orchid flowers studded with paste gems, cranes’ crests dotted with red glass beads – they usually wore on their much mended crêpe-de-Chine blouses: It is a sin to enter the Lord’s House adorned with anything other than His Sign, and raised their wrinkled and gnarled rheumatic fingers according to that strict and chaste command that impressed Christian; and the Stenzel Sisters went to church with, on their breast, just a large, plain silver cross that would softly tap their blouse buttons to the rhythm of their energetic steps. With peaceful smiles on their faces, they nodded to those who came towards
them then swung away to avoid them. – Yes, Saxon melancholy, it does exist! Christian heard Aunt Barbara say in a whisper, when they encountered the sisters, and her fingers would open like the seed capsule of old woman’s purse; she silently nodded her head and could be thinking of neglected duties, of opportunities beckoning from the sisters’ flat hats, from the veils of wide-meshed muslin with white spots the size of moths, under which their red lipstick blazed, from their hairnets and their mauve-gloved hands raised in greeting; Aunt-Barbara-secrets smouldering in the teeth-revealing smile, in the sketched nod of the heads. The sisters would straighten the pictures on the staircase with delicate, touching carefulness, as if they came from lovers or brothers in spirit; on Saturday mornings, once they’d finished their exercises – Kitty, the oldest sister, would do her ‘Müllers’, as she called her exercises after a gymnastics teacher from before the war, in the Hoffmanns’ garden – once their down pillows and quilts were airing on the windowsills, they would go down the stairwell to clean the paintings and display cases; for that they used dusters made of ostrich feathers (‘the best there are, Krest-yan, from Renner’s old department store’), that were discoloured and felted from forty years of trapping bits of fluff; it was only when it came to cleaning materials that the sisters were more modern, they would let one drop of Fit plop into the cleaning water, that was sufficient for the elaborate frames of bronzed limewood irreverently riddled with wormholes which, after washing, were rubbed with bergamot oil – as were, on the top floor, the leaves of a dieffenbachia, which was turning a palish green from lack of light, and the frames of the signed photos – and Christian sometimes wondered, when he was fetching coal, for example, and saw one of the Stenzel Sisters dusting a picture, whether she was interested in what was to be seen inside the frame, or whether the important thing for her wasn’t to dust, to look at the frame, but to immerse herself in memories for a while, for which she wanted to be alone, away from her sisters for an hour.

Christian
had asked Malthakus, who collected not only stamps and postcards but also stories about the houses up there and the people who had lived in them: Caravel had belonged to Sophia Tromann-Alvarez, who was a native of Dresden; her husband, Louis Alvarez, had worked for the African Fruit Company in Hamburg, which was in partnership with the Laeisz shipping company, and had developed banana plantations in Cameroon, but later he had set up independently in the tropical fruit trade; after his early death in Africa, on an expedition with the Swedish entomologist Aurivillius, Sophia Tromann-Alvarez had returned to the city of her birth, had acquired Caravel and had spent her years of widowhood in memory of her husband and their time with the African Fruit Company; he could remember her well, she was tall and wore clothes made from floral cloth in exotic colours and went for walks with an umbrella and her three basenjis on a long lead, tapping the road audibly with her stick; her dogs bared their teeth and growled at every passer-by. There was a butterfly in Louis Alvarez’s display cases that Christian particularly liked looking at:
Urania ripheus
was written in Roman capitals underneath it and how delighted he was when Meno was with him and said, ‘Let’s practise a little.’ That meant something was going to be demanded of him, but that wasn’t what he was pleased about, for to describe to Meno something he’d observed was often to answer a question that had not been specifically asked, but indicated clearly enough with gestures: a wave of the hand, a raised eyebrow, the lower lip stuck out, and sometimes, as now when he was thinking about it in his unpleasantly warm sickbed, Christian wondered why he didn’t resent Meno’s demands, why he didn’t get angry with Meno when he gave him to understand, in a friendly but uncompromising way, that he was a poor observer and didn’t put his impressions into words precisely enough. He could feel resentful at school, even in subjects that didn’t attract him: he often got angry at the arrogant indulgence with which Baumann regarded his, admittedly poor, performance in mathematics; the feeling could be directed at classmates,
for example recently when Svetlana Lehmann had rubbed his nose in a spelling mistake he’d made. Not with Meno, strangely enough – when Meno criticized him, it spurred him on to take the criticism to heart and correct it, he didn’t retreat, sulking, into a corner or harbour dark thoughts, as he had with Svetlana, who, though, had made sure as many as possible had heard what a howler the oh-so-self-assured Christian Hoffmann had made. With Meno it stayed in the family and his criticism was the admonition of his own inner voice, which Christian had suppressed in the hope of getting by without having to make an effort, spoken out loud. The point was not just to say: this is a medium-sized butterfly wing, but to respond to Meno’s question as to what that ‘medium’-size was related to by being more precise: this butterfly wing is matchbox-size. Then Meno said: Check your ideas of beauty; but when he told Christian with scientific coolness that it was a beautiful thing to be able to measure colours with a ruler, to fix something as softly ephemeral as this cyclamen-coloured moth from the central Congo in an inscribed circle and on a millimetre scale, then Christian felt reservations about following his uncle, a withdrawal, a loss of clarity: it was as if he were seeing a clear geometrical figure sharply drawn by thousands of quartz fibres focused in a beam, but suddenly some of those light fibres had broken off, giving the figure a slim parallelogram, frayed edges, jagged contours, and for a few moments Christian wasn’t concentrating on the moth any more but on Meno. At the sight of these butterflies in the display cases Alvarez had had constructed simply, but out of lignum vitae – they even had locks, but the keys had evidently been lost, none of the tenants had them – he was often caught up in a dream-like experience: he regarded the neatly arranged butterfly mummies and saw not only them, the specific outlines arranging themselves into the sense impression ‘moth’, the pigments, shades, patterns on the wing scales gleaming in the colours of scrap metal, but perceived, the longer he observed them, a kind of liquefaction in the area round the creature that seemed to him more
exciting than Meno’s intention to describe here and now the butterfly,
Urania ripheus
, the Madagascan Sunset Moth, as exactly as possible. If Meno had said: to label it with words, Christian’s mind would perhaps not have needed to stray, but as it was, at the concepts Meno let fall with measured deliberation he was thinking of the pins the assistant preparing the butterfly had used to fix it, saw him in his mind’s eye place them with the delicacy of a precision engineer; but that was little in comparison with the delight Christian felt when, at a term such as ‘to impair’, which the tongue of his memory suddenly spoke, the Veronese green on the wings of the Urania moth suddenly started to move. This patch of Veronese green on an African butterfly, a diurnal moth, as Meno explained and Christian didn’t quite understand. His dictionary described moths as ‘night-flying butterflies’ so if this moth was diurnal, how come it was a moth and not a butterfly, but the scientists would presumably have their reasons for this apparent contradiction. A particular light at a particular moment, Meno’s face in profile: that was the experiment set-up that remained motionless as long as the catalyst had not been added; a state of expectation dripping with possibilities and Christian was excited by the idea that for precisely this chemical – as you might say – combination it was, of all words, the somewhat out-of-the-way ‘to impair’ that was the catalyst that, as if drip-fed from a pipette, released his state of inertia in a flash and made it pour into something new, which immediately, mysteriously, like the process of the coagulation of blood, calmed to form a new constellation. Dead-dry bodies behind display-case glass were transformed into prisms before widely varying realities:
Urania ripheus
was a symbol admonishing him in the darklight of a jungle, sleepy from treetops transliquefied with airglow, and ‘to impair’ was firmly sewn with threads of association to the green of the guiding wings, a colour of which Meno said ‘drunk to the last drop’ and Christian, remembering a visit to the Army Museum, ‘powder green’ because he couldn’t see anything moist about it, which it would have needed if it
was to be connected to ‘drunk to the last drop’, at which Meno tilted his right hand, which had been reflectively under his chin, and held the palm horizontally upwards, which was as if to say: accepted, not bad, you could see it like that. This ‘you could see it like that’ was a touch different from the ‘if you say so’, which he expressed with the same gesture, but with a more slackened body, containing sadness that one couldn’t get through, perhaps only on that day, to the other person, that something seemed to have been confirmed, unfortunately, something that one had felt but had tried to banish from the temperature of the conversation, to stop the premonition from turning into the feared reality. ‘If you say so’ was, in the usage not just of Meno but of most of the Tower-dwellers Christian knew, a polite way of shutting oneself off, though initially only one door among many that were kept open, and even that door, if one had a closer look, was still ajar, the latch hadn’t clicked shut; and the perhaps politest form of these restrained little burials, expressed with a momentary lowering of the eyelids, was enthusiastic agreement. Magic was a word Meno did not like. He was in awe of what it stood for and what it expressed, only inadequately in his opinion and somewhat helplessly, ‘a label on a preserving jar in which the things are, if we remember’, as he said when Christian, furious at his own wordlessness and tortured by the effort to meet Meno’s demand for descriptive precision, tried to short-circuit it by using that word to characterize something that fascinated him in a way he still couldn’t explain. ‘You use it like a flyswatter, of course, walloping something on the head is one way of exorcizing it,’ Meno would comment, ‘but in doing that you just go round and round your own helplessness, as bad writers do who are not capable of generating a phenomenon – which would be the actual creative act – but are only able to talk about the phenomenon; to say “magic”, that is, instead of making something out of words that has it.’ At such moments Christian was overcome with a feeling of alienation and it oppressed him, he didn’t know why Meno had to be so strict and he couldn’t see the
affection in the relentlessness with which Meno kept him and his thoughts, which yearned to be elsewhere, tied to this display case, the contents of which, during the hour or more of Meno’s drill, no longer transmitted to him the breathtaking contact, the sense of a hunt, that he felt when he walked past and let his eye wander over the colourful pharaohs. That silent flash which hit him as he was about to walk past but something opened up, making a large gate sucking into it everything he’d been thinking of at that moment: school, a football match, the Tomita disc, his application for a place at medical school after he’d completed the eleventh year, sometimes the shape of a drop of milk that had been spilt or the figures on the numberplate of Tietze’s Shiguli. All that was drawn out of him, leaving him with eyes wide and mouth open – and even forgetting to breathe. Christian did sense that Meno wanted to get beyond this phase with him, the invisible lips that were whispering to him were to be sealed once more, the images invisible, but he saw no sense in letting the colours go dull and the little symphony of shapes go flat. Often it was Meno who broke off. In that second, when his uncle let his head drop and rubbed his closed eyes with his thumb and index finger, the affection returned all at once, as if it had just been pulled away, like a piece of elastic, and let go again. There must be something other than just being overpowered by a commander of the moment and that was what Meno appeared to be looking for with the instruments of his precision. It seemed to Christian to be a deliberate distancing of himself from deeply rooted convictions, precisely because they were deeply rooted convictions. Perhaps they could no longer bear their load, or Meno wanted to progress and saw it as greatness, not as capitulation, to pay any price for it. He sensed that the reason his uncle was so unrelenting with him was that he saw those convictions in him, Christian, as well, something that came back, unconcerned, and that he knew all too well himself and had long wanted to combat, from the perspective of a different conviction. Which, because it wasn’t innate, took on something of a
heroic air. And could contain suspicion of the ‘language of the heart’, as Meno, wooden-lipped, called it, pronouncing the quotation marks as well. Perhaps it was an occupational disease of scientists and editors, for to Christian the ‘language of unsentimental observation’ that Meno wanted to set against it – did he really want that? – seemed alien, even though he sometimes thought about it, for ‘as big as a matchbox’ was indeed more vivid and more accurate than ‘medium’-sized. Yet what always fascinated him first were the colours and not the tones, what was apparent burnt its mark into him first and not what was obscure, and that seemed logical, for what was obscure would not have been obscure if you had perceived it immediately, so what mattered to him was what made an impression on him and the rarest and, of its kind, strangest moth that looked unremarkable left him unmoved if he saw one beside it that looked like a flying paintbox, even if, as far as its frequency was concerned, it was the cabbage white of the tropics. Meno criticized his attitude, he was less fond of those specimens that, as he put it, ‘have all their secrets, if they have any at all, stuck on their coats’. He preferred the unremarkable ones, of which Alvarez had also collected a few; they were hung in a second case outside the Stenzel Sisters’ floor, where the staircase came to the glass door. It was a place of grey brightness that diffused through the high window over the stairwell: a seven-petalled glass flower in the middle of which hung a candlestick like an excessively stretched stamen. It was a row of moths, wood-coloured saturniids with eyespots on their wings; ‘from the race of the God of Lead and there: those are their watermarks’ – Meno pointed to the grain of the paper-thin wings, which reminded Christian of the rings of ripples after a stone has been thrown into a calm pond. They seemed to continue across the individual butterflies, combining them into a larger picture, of which they were only a part, as if they were pieces in a jigsaw puzzle. They looked very alike, only when you looked closer did the tiny differences between the individual moths
appear. ‘Those are the orchestral parts over which the composer took the greatest care, even though the audience hardly hears them; but they are the ones that are particularly important to him, and you can pay him no greater compliment than to listen carefully, for what is the point of music if not to be listened to. These patches of crimson, moss-green and lilac, this blue that’s so intense it could appear on a lemon: these are high points, such as Italian bel canto composers love, as do the average opera-goers, who don’t go to the theatre to listen but to see, to promenade during the intervals, to get annoyed at the prices of the sandwiches and cocktails, and to be seen; who know in advance the “famous passage” where the tenor gathers all his strength to weightlift the top C and what comes after it; but what I’m interested in are the inconspicuous tissues, disguises, transitions; camouflage and mimicry; the construction of the beds in which the motifs, those “beautiful”, sometimes all-too-beautiful princesses lie. I’m not just interested in the
bel étage
, but in the coal cellar as well, the kitchen and, to extend the image, the servants in the composition.’ Thus far Meno. Christian thought about it. In the same way as, all those years ago when they’d been visiting the painter, Vogelstrom, in Cobweb House, and he’d heard the names Merigarto and Magelone and not forgotten them since, something of these conversations with Meno stayed with him, continued to have an effect on him, he could feel it like a foreign body that had penetrated him and was changing him, and at times such as these he searched in order to isolate, feel, observe it, to see if it would be harmful or useful.