The Tower: A Novel (38 page)

Revolving record
, Meno wrote,
for a few seconds Niklas Tietze’s hands remain over the bobbing undulation of the disc (and I heard the musical clock: Dresden … in the muses’ nests / the sweet sickness of yesteryear rests), it’s dark in the room, only the spotlight over the turntable is on and is dispersed, spun together and dispersed again by the rippling rotation, as if a manikin were sitting at a spinning wheel spinning straw into gold; Niklas takes the needle over the edge of the record, it still pauses, a tiny stiletto ready to strike, a little hook that would grab the music, as I imagined when I was a small boy, by the scruff of the neck, peel it, as I still sometimes think now, out of the groove like a copper engraver’s burin cutting hair-lines out of the metal plate; shadows wandering over the photographs on the music-room wall in Evening Star, where I’m visiting Niklas; photos: time captured in shade and light, pre-war Dresden, the interior of the second Semper Opera House, the chandelier seems to be covered in snow, the Belle Époque sitting in the boxes; then, framed and mischievous, his lady-killer dimples frozen in silver bromide, Jan Dahmen, the Dutch conductor of the Dresden State Orchestra; portraits of singers, Martha Rohs and Maria Cebotari, young, misty-eyed, Torsten Ralf in costume as Lohengrin, the Knight of the Swan, Mathieu Ahlermeyer as Don Giovanni, Margarete Teschemacher, all the photos signed in faded old German handwriting, we will hear their voices over the surge of the orchestra, over the rustling curtains of dust and oblivion that have settled on the moment of performance, music from the sound archives; voices, Magelone in the well of time; doors open in the faded wallpaper, stained from burst pipes, of the music room in 10 Heinrichstrasse, I remembered: the steam engines in the Museum of Transport were unmoving, the cars and railway carriages and the sedan chair of the town council sedan bearers, Anne and I holding father’s hand, he said: Come on, we’re going to practise our seeing; the Reichsbahn locomotives with their empty tenders and red-painted wheels, the wheels must keep on rolling for victory, the connecting rods spun no more yarns of speed and singing rails, the Blériot aeroplane was gathering dust in the wire fetters by which it was hanging from the roof of the hall, melting in the hiss of the record
–

Niklas Tietze was a strange man. He was a doctor, one of the rare GPs with their own practice; it used to belong to Dr Citroën and was on Lindwurmring, next to the Paper Boat, Bruno Korra’s second-hand bookshop, and the Roeckler School of Dancing. After deportation, which he was the only member of his extensive family to survive, and the end of the war, Dr Citroën had returned to Dresden and taken Niklas on as his pupil; he revered his teacher and had not changed anything in the practice after Citroën’s death, with the result that it quickly became old-fashioned. Meno hardly ever heard him talk about medical matters. His interest was in music, especially the Dresden Opera. There were hundreds of photos of singers and musicians, many with personal dedications to Citroën and Tietze, who were known throughout the city as music-lovers, hanging in the rooms of the practice and, like Citroën, Niklas preferred to play opera arias to his patients
rather than listen to their complaints. For him the present seemed to be one possibility among others in which one could live, and not the most pleasant; for which reason he avoided it. He possessed a lot of books, they were mostly slim volumes and bore the sign of a ship under full sail in a finely inscribed circle which made Meno wonder why the publishing house, if it had chosen the ship as its sign, was called ‘Island’ publishers: was the ship the island? the island a ship? did the island consist of books the ship was carrying as cargo? Niklas didn’t ask those questions, for the books were something different for him than for Meno: time capsules, their presence alone seemed comforting. In the evening, as the clocks struck and night had fallen, Niklas could sit on the chaise longue and take one of the Insel volumes out of the bookcase that was kept specially for them:
Mozart’s Journey to Prague
, with a cover of pale-blue silhouettes, Gothic script, the pages yellowed and with the mild smell of bread that old paper has, then he would leaf through it, get caught up in the story here and there, nod, adjust his large glasses with the square lenses, read in a murmur a few favourite passages he almost knew off by heart; no one was allowed to disturb him, not Gudrun, who was in the next room reading
Leben-Jesu
pamphlets or watching television, nor the children who were occupying themselves at the other end of the corridor.

Mused and listened
, Meno wrote,
sat leaning forward, his aquiline nose cut out of the darkness, a musician’s posture, attentive and at the same time waiting as if, instead of the notes he had anticipated in his inward ear and often played before, different passages had suddenly come, smuggled into the score on a whim of the demons of the opera, scattered over the familiar melodies as a goblin might drop sneezing powder over a devout and quiet congregation, in his mind’s eye he could see the conductor, Furtwängler, writing his cloud-quiver-script with his baton in the electrically charged air, tagged with treble and bass clefs, drum rolls and harp glissandos, over the heads of the orchestra waiting, spellbound, for their entry; the entry
melted out of his loops, somewhere in his conjurations a drop formed, ran into the musicians’ fingers, made the contact for the circuits, which were charged up to trembling point: that is, the entry was accepted, the leader decided to harvest it from Furtwängler’s arabesques: to pick it, and he, the leader who, like a herd stallion, had shaken off the paralysis, pulled the whole pack along behind him in a mighty, sonorous chord, the audience, deeply moved, nodded, put handkerchiefs to eyes, hands over left breasts, held its breath: Furtwängler! The way he’s done it again! The way he gets the orchestra to blossom out, inimitable, that softly cushioned precision, the severely delicate sound, hallowed German profundity! Who has mastered the violin bows, tamed the trombones, encouraged the viola and its often misunderstood elegies, knows the vagaries of the oboe reed, of the horn player’s plight when the water level rises in his French horn, Furtwängler reaching the moment of free will and with it the breath of the orchestra, sound comes into being: gauged with the fineness of precision scales
–

When Meno came it could happen that a conversation would develop about the book, which Meno thought overrated, and Fürnberg’s
Mozart-Novelle
, which he thought underrated and better written than the story by the more famous writer. ‘Fürnberg,’ said Niklas in his sonorous, slightly husky voice, ‘ “The Party, the Party, the Party’s always right” ’ and nodded reflectively. Meno gave him one of the eight copies of the little book that he’d bought before they disappeared off the shelves. Niklas leafed through it, praised the drawings by Prof. Karel Müller, Prague, conventional pen-and-ink vignettes, expressed appreciation of the classic Garamond type, was taken with the oval of faded green surrounding the silhouette embossed on the linen cover: Nice, very tastefully done, really: fine – they put their love into the books – and put it away ‘for later’.

However
, Meno wrote,
is it Furtwängler? Doors in the walls of the music room (and heard the musical clock: Dresden … in the muses’ nests / the
sweet sickness of yesteryear rests); there: the ‘Starvation Line’ after the war, the 11 as it pants its way up the Mordgrund laden with firewood and horse fodder, with double basses for the State Orchestra concerts in the ‘Culture Barn’ in Bühlau, the ‘Starvation Line’: like each one of its predecessors, shadows swallowed up in the whirlpool of time that set off up the hill from Neustadt Station pulling goods wagons full of washing, a weary animal, groaning under the burden, to whom the driver shortly before the summit of the climb mutters curses, encouragement, threats, his right hand on the control lever, his left on the brake wheel, his view restricted by the musical instruments lashed to the luggage van, the passengers travelling on the footboards, the musicians, who, in a tight cluster, are clutching the rail of the luggage van, the ‘Starvation Line’ on which it stinks of sweat and sour breath from rumbling stomachs, which won’t be silent in the ‘Culture Barn’ either, admission one briquette, the audience, hungry for culture, emaciated faces marked by deprivation, squeeze up close together, shivering in their uniform coats, in their often-mended trousers, made up out of rags or potato sacks, in Bruckner symphonies the trombonist is so weak his breath gives out; the record surges on, voices from the past will wake, already stained with the rust that has crept over the vinyl disc during the decades it spent resting ‘with the treasures’ – in Niklas’s record cabinet under the Gothic clock, we called it that because the little pendulum looked as if it was swinging in a tiny abbot’s parlour; ‘with the treasures’: hoarded in Trüpel’s archive, under the Philharmonia record shop or with Däne, the music critic of the
Sächsisches Tageblatt
, who every week in his apartment on Schlehenleite, in which music and paper had grown rampant, played samples of his discoveries to the Friends of Music; the rust in the voices the rose-rust fungus of the Dresden Opera and perhaps that’s Schuch, in a sea-green fantasy uniform, raising his baton, perhaps Hofmannsthal is sitting in the semi-darkness of one of the boxes in front of which reality has put on colourful clothes and a ship with huge yellow sails glides past the window of childhood, where the shadows play
–

‘For
later.’ After that Meno would sometimes go home depressed, hurt, telling himself that his gifts of books were basically unwelcome to Niklas, at least that was the impression Meno had; Niklas seemed never to read them and they didn’t talk about them the next time they met. He’s not a book person, Meno thought as he made his way home in the dark, he’s only interested in books as beautiful objects, things to fill up his bookcase, in precise rows and nice to look at behind glass, and what is important is that they must have a good binding and fine paper – not the content. Goethe is the most important author for him, but only because he’s the most important one for everyone up here and he’s the most important one for them not because they’ve grappled with him, studied and examined him, measured his sometimes hackneyed aphorisms against their own reality and experience, but because he’s recognized and sanctioned, because he’s the favourite yes-man of the bourgeois, which, deep down inside, is what everyone up here is, their chief councillor, generalissimo of opinion and prince of sentiment; because he’s king of their hoard of quotations. Basically, Meno thought, Niklas is only interested in music and in historical recordings of that music. The deader the better! And that’s what they’re all like up here, most of all they’d like to live in old Dresden, that delicate baroque doll’s house and pseudo-Italian wedding cake. They sigh, ‘The Frauenkirche!’ and ‘The Taschenberg Palace!’ and ‘Oh, the Semper Opera House!’ but never ‘Outside toilets! Those magnificent, cholera-friendly sanitary conditions!’ or ‘The Synagogue!’ or ‘What liberating living conditions they used to have, ten people in a tenement apartment!’ They never say ‘the Nazis’ but ‘the low-flying bombers’ and they love to quote Gerhart Hauptmann telling them it was a ‘morning star of youth shining on the world’ and that ‘anyone who has forgotten how to cry will remember at the destruction of Dresden’ and then Meno would thump a tree with his fist in exasperation. It was true and yet he was being unjust. How terribly vain you are, he thought. Just because he didn’t sufficiently appreciate the book you gave him. How very
seriously you take yourself … Not good at all, vanity impedes observation and doesn’t serve truth, Otto Haube used to say when we were using microscopes. When Meno encountered the Kaminski brothers he bade them an exaggeratedly cheerful ‘Good day’ and ignored their nods and smiles. He extended his return to his book- and silence-filled living room, made long detours in order to call up his hours with Niklas – Gudrun was seldom there, nor Reglinde or Ezzo – again.

And in writings about the depths of the ocean
, Meno wrote,
strange creatures appear outside the windows of the houses, Gempylus, the snake mackerel with eyes that look like metal discs staring in at the window; creatures with blind, milky spheres instead of eyeballs and long beards dangling like dead men’s bootlaces; the shadow of the thousand-armed creature, which writes the depths grey, Architeuthis, the giant that Poseidon chained and whose sucker-armed tentacles wrap themselves round the houses like tamarisks, penetrate the plaster and masonry like ivy, embrace them in order to suck, tie themselves on tighter with each year’s growth ring, edge forward with the same intensity that builds up the silence, scale by scale, into something else and with which the needle comes down after Niklas has wiped the yellow cloth over the disc one last time then turned the lever beside the counterbalance, and I had the feeling I saw a counter-movement at the same time, as if the needle over the revolving record were aspirating the air, which looked like a surface, deepening it to a navel, to a funnel the sides of which continued to grow the deeper the needle went, that had perhaps already stopped but, since the sides of the funnel were curving up and the gyrating current had already reached the part of the room beyond the little Moorish table, on which the record player stood, was touched by the counter-revolution of the disc, an electric fluid out of which single sparks flew; trickling neurotransmitters, as if there were a dam between two bodies which, if they approach within a certain distance of it, comes under immense pressure, cracks and begins to sweat out what it contains; the surface tension
of the water bending towards the approaching foreign body, an anticipated contact, the needle was swept away by the disc as it grew into a wave, a moment that Niklas awaited with bated breath, his hand still over the tone arm in a beseeching gesture, ready to intervene swiftly, while my eye was drawn by the intensifying hiss into the room, this beautifully cut room with the green wallpaper that went back to the woman who had built the house, a singer at the Dresden Opera; the wallpaper could well be as old as the century, the submarine fauna worked into the pattern showed glints of copper in the cloudy light that was feeling its way from the record player, Niklas never asked me about the animals I was familiar with from Ernst Haeckel’s
Art Forms in Nature
, how often as a student had I stood in the Jena Zoological Institute looking at the paintings, done with academic precision, delighting in the colours, the shapes of all the siphonophores, Portuguese men-of-war, of the
Desmonema annasethe
, which looked like a Belle Époque headdress floating behind the glass-fronted bookcases with bound volumes of specialist journals; the sapphire slipped into the track and, in the spark-spinning of the disc, in the travelling ripples of the light, all the Radiolarians and Amphoridea on the walls began to move, the crystalline floating monstrances and spiky little Gothic chapels deepened, as I was familiar with from Malthakus’s postcards, when the bell over the door had fallen silent and Malthakus, whom it had summoned, had returned to the back of the shop to bend over a catalogue and a stamp collection, his special magnifying glass, sometimes a watchmaker’s lens, over his eye, to estimate its value, London and Prague again, Herr Rohde? he asked when he greeted me, or would Rapallo do? I’ve recently acquired some decent stuff – and he would leave me by myself with half a dozen sepia picture postcards, a bay, Mediterranean vegetation, at the side a house with an oriel window on pillars with an ancient-Greek look, a statue in the garden, I still had snow on my hat and coat, felt I could still hear the street noises, the snow melted and as it liquefied the lines of the house, of the statue, melted too, the sails of the schooner in the bay began to flap, the
waves, which looked as if carved out of marble, broke and rolled foaming onto the beach – waves that swell with the orchestra’s first note ringing out from the nightshades of the music room
–