The Tower: A Novel (46 page)

A guitar chord cut off Ina’s reply, she shook her head and, as those on the dance floor separated, went over to Siegbert. Now Muriel was dancing with Falk, Verena with Fabian, the soldiers were skipping round Reina, who was dancing alone with her eyes closed. Neustadt sang about cobblestones, about mail inspector Alfred going to his night shift along dark dreary stree–heets with his briefcase and sandwiches, about the bit of sky above the back yard as blue as Milka chocolate – the dance floor bawled along – they sang the ‘Ash Song’. ‘No, it’s not what you think,’ André Pschorke shouted to the soldiers, ‘it’s about … Ash lies over the streets / People have it in their hair / Ash that’s the colour of sleep / Ash of the things that were … // Tell me, where has the dream gone / Everyone had at dawn / Did they all get rid of it / Like a baby that never gets born …’ Christian was impressed by the words, he scribbled them on a beer mat, making it obvious so that no one would get the wrong idea about him. They sang ‘Your Eyes’, a slow number with a lot of keyboard.

Schevola came, behind her the woman in the sari. ‘We’ve seen you’ve been drawing away industriously, may I have a look?’ she said to Heike. She opened the drawing pad, examined the drawing with brief glances,
like a craftsman checking the contents of a tool chest, turned over the pages. ‘You’re still at school?’

Heike jutted out her chin and twined a lock of hair round a finger, the woman in the sari presumably took it as a yes. ‘What do you want to do, after school?’

‘Paint,’ Heike said. The woman in the sari nodded. ‘If you want, you can come and see me. My name’s Nina Schmücke, during the day I sell fish, on Friday evenings we look at each other’s pictures and discuss them.’

‘You had the red picture in the art exhibition,’ Heike said.

‘For one day.’ Nina Schmücke handed back the pad. ‘Then someone with influence didn’t like it and it was taken down.’

‘It was very powerful,’ Heike said. ‘May I really come and see you?’

‘Have you something to write on?’

Heike turned the block over, Nina Schmücke wrote her address on it. Then the two of them sank into their own universe of painters’ names and pictures and painting techniques.

Schevola sat down beside Christian. ‘Shall we have a chat,’ she said to him in amused tones. She pointed vaguely in the direction of the steps. Neustadt were strumming furious protests.

‘What about?’ was the only thing that occurred to Christian. He said it no louder than normally, Schevola couldn’t have heard.

‘I presume you don’t dance?’

He shook his head, then he picked up another beer mat, wrote, ‘Would you tell the others I’ve left. The door’s open.’

How quiet it suddenly was: as if a space full of noise had been shut off and was no longer in operation here, dispersing and dissipating in the smells Christian once more perceived: from the park where a large bird flew off, startling him, from the garden, from the House with a Thousand Eyes. Bats were flitting between the treetops, visible as
angular shadows against the muddy sky. The barometer at home was on ‘set fair’ and Libussa had said there wouldn’t be any rain. Chakamankabudibaba emerged from the sweet briar beside the path, briefly touched his calf with his bottle-brush tail in a kind of condescending greeting noting his arrival, licked a front paw, sniffed at the depths of the garden, disappeared as silently as he had come. The Teerwagens were sitting on their balcony, a trickle of pop music was coming from open windows, perhaps it was
Here’s Music
with Rainer Süss, a popular show on Channel 1. Half past eleven, no, it wasn’t on at that time. It was unusually warm, he wondered about sleeping outside, then he remembered he still had to get the loungers out of the garden shed and pump up the air beds, he decided to do it right away. Everything was dark at the Kaminskis’ and the Stahls’, but when he went to the balustrade, below which the garden fell away steeply, he saw the Stahls sitting in the light of the coloured bulbs they strung up over the iron table in the summer. He went down, the engineer asked whether Sylvia had been quiet; Christian hadn’t heard anything, Sabine Stahl said she sometimes secretly watched television when they were down in the garden, the glow of the screen couldn’t be seen from down there. Christian said there could be problems with washing in the morning but Stahl replied that there were things young people had to put up with, he’d filled the tin bathtub in the garden. ‘Are you staying longer?’

‘A little.’

‘Meno told us you and your friends will have to go to the pre-military training camp soon?’

‘Yes.’

‘Keep your chin up. – Good night, Christian.’

‘Good night.’

The Stahls got up. Christian noticed the bulge in Sabine Stahl’s stomach. She smiled. ‘Meno will soon have to let us have the bedroom.’

They slowly made their way upstairs. Christian watched them leave,
two patches of brightness going up the steps to the house. The slight feeling of intoxication he’d had from the cocktails had gone; he poured himself a glass of punch, it tasted flat, he abandoned his glass. He switched off the lights, put out the lamp, sat down in the chair where the ship’s doctor had been sitting, stared up at the Chinese lantern swaying in the currents of air, a white sphere with a clown’s grin in red drawn on it in which burnt insects were to be found in the mornings. At night the garden was a mysterious realm, the crickets sawing their soporific ‘tsik-tsik’ into the distant noises of the city and the whispering of the trees, everywhere there seemed to be eyes opened, everywhere a hunt was on. A bug crawled onto the table, it had long, backward-curving feelers that seemed to be sieving the air, Christian, startled, stood up: that was something for Meno, not for him, Meno would certainly have had a Latin name ready at once and told him something about the habits of the bug. Christian was afraid of it, for him the creature was one of the night spirits, an eye with which nature looked at humankind.

He went to fetch the pump from the shed. Stahl had placed a lantern beside the tin bathtub, a yellow pinhead in the darkness dappled with the white moth-attracting plants: narcotic vibrations; he suddenly felt the need to dip a hand in the rainwater butt beside the shed; then the other hand: he was amazed how unpleasant it was if you only wet one. The hornets’ nest was empty, he remembered that Meno had told him that hornets lived for just one year and that the queens built new nests after they’d overwintered; also hornets, unlike wasps, didn’t go for human food; he could have told Reina that. When he looked up, the pinhead had gone. He found candles in the shed, matches as well, Meno probably used them when he worked out there. On a shelf were some apples from the previous year, on the windowledge cardboard cylinders of greenfly killer; there was a smell of fertilizer and rubber boots. The tin bathtub was in the lowest part of the garden, on a terraced piece of lawn with tomatoes and raspberries where Libussa toiled to keep them
clear of dog roses and the maple shoots that landed in the autumn like invading propeller troops from the mother trees below the end of the garden – beyond a rotten wooden fence there was a drop of several metres, the neighbouring plot was overgrown and didn’t seem to belong to anyone. Glow-worms whirred across the path Christian was slowly going down, twigs kept scratching his face; here were gnarled fruit trees, the Cellini apples Lange used to make cider and puree, Boscs, Russets and Orange Pippins; Lange’s particular pride, the old pear trees: Beurré Hardy, Gute Luise, one tree with Christian’s favourite variety, the red and yellow Comice, Meno preferred the cinnamon-red Madame Verté and the spherical Grüne Jagdbirne; in the cellar there were hundreds of jars of bottled fruit.

He waited. One woman’s and one man’s voice, then splashing and when they burst out laughing he recognized Ina and Siegbert; he squatted down and only stood up again when his legs started to hurt. The splashing again, they were laughing in the drawn-out way drunks laugh, Christian crept nearer and saw their milky bodies in the bathtub, they separated, murmured, came together, touched each other gently, as if they were two doctors sounding each other with the warmed membranes of their stethoscopes.

Yes, he thought, yes. You ought to be somewhere else. But he waited, avid and sad.

Then he went upstairs, fetched the loungers, put them up in Meno’s living room and saw to the air beds. His thoughts wandered hither and thither and the chirping of the crickets coming through the open balcony door was excessively loud. The desk lamp would attract insects, he switched it off, went outside for a breath of fresh air. All at once the garden was alien, the frothy, dark-blue tree shadows threatening, there was still pop music coming from somewhere, suddenly cut through by squealing, as if someone were being thoroughly tickled. How boring, how meaningless! And all these blooms and plants, pushing against each other like forces in a polite and unfair game, existed just as well
without him; this insight filled him with such consternation that he could no longer bear it on the balcony. The door opened. Verena switched the light on, started. ‘You gave me a fright. I didn’t know you were here –’

‘Where are the others?’

‘Still at the Bird of Paradise. Siegbert went off with Muriel and Fabian. Have you seen Reina?’

‘No.’

‘She left shortly after you. Christian … may I say something to you?’ She looked past him, he had to swallow. Verena wanted to go into the garden, to the iron table, but he said no, even though, for a moment, he felt a desire for revenge because he was expecting reproaches.

‘OK then, we can just as well stay here,’ she said.

‘No, I … Would you come? I’d like to show you Caravel. Just from outside –’

He hesitated, he turned away. ‘We won’t need to ring, I don’t want to go in … it’s not far,’ he said quietly.

They walked along Mondleite, deserted at night, it was dark now at the Teerwagens’ too. For a long time Verena said nothing and he didn’t urge her, recalled the walk with Meno in the winter, before the birthday party in the Felsenburg, how mysterious and full of stories the district had seemed, now it looked closed. There was something ghost-like about Verena’s dress over the streets that were like grey ribbons, she was wearing soft shoes, he couldn’t hear her steps. ‘I don’t think it was right of you simply to leave like that,’ she said when they’d already reached Heinrichstrasse, where the only lights were at Niklas’s and in number 12, the house with the wisteria, the scent of which mingled with that of the elderberry bush outside Caravel. ‘We’d so looked forward to this evening and then –’

‘This is where I usually live.’ Christian pointed over the arched gateway to number 11.

‘You
mustn’t be annoyed with me for telling you this.’

‘No.’

‘I don’t know if you realize yourself, but you have a way … We’re dancing, you sit in the corner. We’re enjoying ourselves, you’re pulling a face.’

‘Of course. My arrogance –’

‘You don’t need to be cynical. Please, you must understand, I don’t have to tell you all this –’

‘Well don’t do it then.’

‘Actually you’re pretty immature,’ Verena retorted softly. ‘Pity.’

‘But Siegbert, he’s mature.’

‘Let’s go back. You’ve gone into a huff just like a peacock. Won’t you listen to me for once! Or can’t you stand being criticized?’

They walked back in silence, not by Wolfsleite, where Muriel and Fabian lived; he didn’t know whether they’d given Verena their address or not.

He couldn’t leave it at that. ‘Out with it, then. What was it you wanted to say to me?’ he said when they reached Mondleite again.

‘Yes, that is arrogance,’ she said reflectively. ‘You call us into question, for to you everything we do’s too stupid … All the fun of a dance, how common; then the look on your face, like, Oh God, how I must suffer, no one loves me, I’m all alone in this world full of cheap rock music and stupid jigging about, no one understands me, I’m so misunderstood, in such a bad way!’

‘It’s certainly not Bach those guys are strumming –’ Christian was shivering with rage.

‘Yes, that’s what I’m talking about. This disparagement. And the arrogant twist of your lips when you express it, I don’t need a lamp to see it. But I like what they do ten times better than your spoilt –’

He broke in. ‘Oh, leave off.’

‘I think you’re a coward,’ Verena called after him.

‘I’m
not interested in what Fräulein Schevola thinks!’ Schiffner stood up and began to walk agitatedly back and forth. ‘I would like – no, I demand that that scene goes. We’re both just back from the congress, you heard the directives just as well as I did and now you present me with this!’ Schiffner threw the pages up in the air, they floated down slowly to the floor.

‘We’ll destroy the book if we insist on cutting that kind of scene,’ Meno replied quietly.

‘So what! Then she’ll just have to rewrite the stuff. Why else did she become a writer? Do you know how many drafts Tolstoy made for his books? Tolstoy! And Fräulein Schevola and you rabbit on about “destroying the book” …’ There was a knock at the door. ‘Come in,’ Schiffner roared. Frau Zäpter appeared in the doorway, small and apprehensive. ‘Barsano’s office have rung to say it starts at seven tonight.’ Schiffner nodded and waved Frau Zäpter out with a rough gesture. ‘What do you have to say about this, Josef?’

Josef Redlich lowered his head and nervously played with a ballpoint pen. ‘But it’s true, Heinz. Such … incidents did actually happen, we all know that, and our friends better than anyone –’ Schiffner cut him short. ‘Truth! As if literature had anything to do with truth! Novels aren’t philosophy seminars. Novels always lie.’

‘I don’t share your view on that,’ Josef Redlich ventured to object. ‘You know my opinion: literature that capitulates in the face of reality is not literature but propaganda. We’re not making propaganda, Heinz. Rohde let me have the manuscript, I agree with him. If we take that passage out we’ll be castrating the book. And it’s not the days of the Eleventh Plenary Session any more.’

‘That’s
clearly your opinion too?’ Schiffner leant over to Stefanie Wrobel, who avoided his eye. ‘I only know that passage, not the context –’

‘But I gave you the manuscript,’ said Meno, astonished.

‘I didn’t get round to it. Herr Eschschloraque has priority.’

‘All right, then, let’s try it,’ Schiffner said in conciliatory tones. ‘But on your head be it, Josef. I will make my objections known if Central Office rings up and there are difficulties. I bow to the will of the majority of my editors. But I can tell you both right now’ – Schiffner leant forward with his hands on the table and fixed his gaze on Josef Redlich and Meno in turn – ‘it’s your necks that are on the block. Of course the event Fräulein Schevola thinks she has to write about did occur. But the question is, to whose advantage is it if she does write about it? Our country has problems enough as it is, our friends as well, and she comes along with this old stuff. My God, who was it who started the war! That’s just the counterclaim, and she’s moaning and wailing just because a few Nazi women –’

‘They weren’t just Nazi women,’ Meno said even more quietly. ‘She portrays quite ordinary people.’

‘Do shut up, Rohde. It was these very people you describe as “quite ordinary” who elected the Nazis in 1933! They sowed the whirlwind and were surprised to reap a hurricane. The scene ought to be cut precisely because your objection is possible, but have it your own way, and don’t say I didn’t warn you. – I want three external reports, then it must go to the Ministry first of all; I want a translation for our friends and that has to go off before anything’s decided. This evening is the report on the congress; you’ll write it again please, Herr Rohde, and show it to me.’ He went over to his desk and handed his paper back to Meno. The pages were covered with corrections in red ink.

Meno looked back from the middle of the bridge to East Rome: a yellowish haze hung over the town, fed by the smoke from the factory
chimneys; the outlines of Vogelstrom’s house and the funicular creeping up the rise shimmered in the air; the slope above the Elbe drifted into the falling twilight like an island hedged round with a proliferation of roses. A smell of decay wafted over, perhaps the wind came from Arbogast’s Chemical Institute. Judith Schevola was waiting on the Oberer Plan. She told Meno about the evening in the House with a Thousand Eyes and the Bird of Paradise and he let her talk; his thoughts were already at Barsano’s reception that was being held in Block D, on Karl-Marx-Weg; it was the headquarters of the Party, the Schneckenstein, the former castle of an expropriated prince of the Wettin dynasty. Judith Schevola fell silent and surveyed Meno with furtive glances, Josef Redlich and Schiffner would have made the most of the situation and kept her on tenterhooks a while longer; Meno didn’t like these little games they played with authors, the revenge of those whose hard work in the background went unheeded and drew little thanks; he told her about the editorial discussion.

‘Three external reports,’ Schevola said quietly after a while, ‘and a translation for the Russians … That’ll take for ever. That means the book is dead, it won’t get through.’

‘I promise I’ll do everything I can.’

‘And what can you do?’ Schevola retorted in irritation. ‘You know just as well as I do how things work here. It’ll end up with you paying me an advance of ten thousand but the book won’t be published.’ That was common practice, Meno didn’t dispute the fact: the publishers would pay a so-called difficult author for a bogus edition of, say, ten thousand copies, but in reality only a few hundred were printed, to be locked away in the collections of non-approved books in a few libraries – and the author, although cheated, couldn’t even complain.

‘I’m prepared to go a long way,’ Meno said. ‘You’re very talented and I … I’m grateful that you trust me as your editor. Your writing is unusual. Very French. Elegant, light, roving, not ponderous like that of many German authors, especially those over here.’

‘It’s
the first time you’ve said that to me.’ Schevola turned away.

‘I’m not trying to cheer you up. It’s going to be hard work getting your book published. You’ve got enemies.’

‘Why?’

Meno accepted the naive astonishment he saw in her expression as genuine. ‘Why? You’re lively. You’re vivacious and passionate. You understand people, you express yourself in language that is worthy of the name. Put together, all this means that when people read you they have the feeling they’re reading something true. Not intended as propaganda.’

‘Something true, my editor says! That won’t buy me anything. I have the impression that that’s not what the reading public wants at all. They want entertainment, something to take their minds off things, otherwise stuff like Hermann Kant’s
Aula
wouldn’t have had such a success.’

‘You want to write best-sellers? You won’t. And in my opinion that’s not something for you.’

‘But the others are praised and courted, I’ll have to bow and scrape, suck up to VIPs …’

‘Listen,’ Meno broke in, ‘none of them is capable of writing a scene like the one in which your heroine says farewell to her father. You complain about your lack of success. Lack of success makes one sensitive. Sensitivity, along with background, is a writer’s great asset. Don’t let yourself be corrupted.’

‘Said the man with the steady income. It’s easy for you to talk of lack of success. True, I’ve got talent, as you say, but no one will know.’ He sensed she was tired and didn’t reply. They turned into Karl-Marx-Weg. At the gate to Schneckenstein they were stopped by soldiers who checked their identity cards and Meno’s briefcase. A sergeant phoned the castle, Meno and Schevola waited, there was no point in getting worked up about the process and pointing out that the check and phone call had already been carried out by the sentry posts when
they’d gone onto and left the bridge. The gate, a steel wall several metres high on rails, opened like a theatre backdrop and closed again behind them.

The drive was tarmacked, in earlier times carriages would have driven up the serpentine road, lit by spherical lamps, to the castle building. It was in the shadow of tall trees and noticeably cooler; Schevola was shivering and Meno gave her his jacket. ‘Do you know Barsano?’ he asked to prevent her from refusing it.

‘Only from a distance. And you?’

‘I’ve been up here a few times.’

‘You were born in Moscow, weren’t you?’

Meno looked at her in surprise. ‘How do you know that?’ She winked at him. ‘I like to know about people I have to deal with. – Did you know that Barsano’s father was one of the founders of the Comintern?’

‘And of the German Communist Party, together with Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht. The family emigrated to Moscow in thirty-three, they lived in the Hotel Lux, Barsano attended the Liebknecht School. His father died during the purges.’

‘I didn’t know that,’ said Schevola.

‘And never mention it. His mother and his brothers and sisters were arrested and he, as the son of an enemy of the people, was expelled from school and banished to Siberia. He slaved away in the mines and lost his left index finger. When we get there, behave as if you haven’t seen it.’

‘How long were you in Moscow?’

‘I don’t know exactly, I only have hazy memories. Sometimes I remember fragments of children’s songs. My brother was born in thirty-eight, he knows more. My sister was still in kindergarten when we came back. – Can you speak Russian?’

‘Only what I learnt at school,
Nina, Nina tam kartina
… and a little that has stuck in my mind from travels. – Why?’

‘Because
up there’ – he pointed to the castle – ‘they sometimes only speak Russian. Almost all of Barsano’s people are ex-Muscovites, and they send their children to school and university in Moscow.’

‘The Red aristocracy,’ said Schevola. ‘The ones in the West go to Paris and London and New York, here they go to Moscow. Paris … That’s the city where all the women wear gloves and white dresses with black spots. Oh well. Mustn’t it be great to be cured of your clichés. I’d still like to go there one day.’

‘You might perhaps be disappointed.’

‘Yes. The grapes will surely be sour. There’s one single reason I’d like to go there. In his novel
The Man Who Watched the Trains Go By
Simenon has his central character, Kees Popinga, write a letter to the police chief: “… he deliberately used paper with the letterhead of the bar”. So there are bars there that have their own writing paper! I think that’s wonderful. It sounds so matter-of-course … As if it often happened that people wrote letters in bars.’

‘You’re a dreamer and pretty trusting,’ Meno warned her with a smile. ‘You don’t know where I belong.’

‘No, I don’t know that,’ Schevola said after a while.

The castle was a neo-classical fort, the main building flanked by two octagonal towers, the Soviet flag flying on the left-hand tower, on the right-hand one the flag of the Workers’ and Peasants’ Republic. Meno and Judith Schevola crossed the gravel of the square outside the entrance; a head of Lenin in reddish stone was like a meteorite lying on the ground, the Tartar face staring with a faint smile at the trees in the park; Schevola couldn’t resist tapping it with her knuckles. ‘Solid,’ she said in surprise.

‘What did you think?’ Meno said, even more surprised. ‘Just imagine if it sounded hollow.’

They waited in the foyer. The dusty brass hands on the clock clicked onto seven. Max Barsano could be heard laughing from some way away, immediately the group of people waiting relaxed, the faces of
the Comrade General Secretaries in the two window-sized portraits on the walls either side of the entrance assumed encouraging expressions. Barsano stopped at the foot of the stairs, surveyed the assembled guests with a swift glance and, with an ‘Excuse me, comrades’, went up to Judith Schevola and clasped her right hand in both of his. ‘You’ve had your feathers ruffled, so I hear,’ he said to her in a sonorous bass voice that didn’t seem to go with his delicate figure, ‘doesn’t matter! That means it’s some good. Keep writing, tall oaks from little acorns grow and you’re someone who’s got what it takes to follow on from our great writers of the older generation.’ With that, he went past Meno to the author Paul Schade, who was proudly wearing his anti-fascist-resistance medal on his chest, and to Eschschloraque, who gave a thin smile and elegantly sketched a bow of the head as they shook hands; Schiffner, whom Barsano greeted next, looked embarrassed after the praise that had echoed round the foyer, Josef Redlich glowed with pleasure. ‘Just don’t get carried away,’ growled Paul Schade, the author of the revolutionary poem ‘Roar, Russia’, lengthy extracts from which were in the school readers of all their fellow socialist nations with the exception of the USSR, ‘we’ll deal with you later.’ Schade, who held an important position in the Writers’ Association, gave first Schevola then Meno a threatening look. Barsano turned to the two Londoners, father and son; Philipp in an elegant cream summer suit, still wearing his hat over his hair done up in a ponytail, something probably only he could get away with there. ‘Well, Herr Professor,’ Barsano cried cheerily, ‘I’ll send my barber round to you tomorrow. In the war those splendid locks would have been full of lice! – That’s young people for you,’ he said to his deputy, Karlheinz Schubert, who, at least a head taller than anyone else there, was doing the honours after Barsano in the cautious, slightly bent posture of people who are too tall. Barsano patted the Old Man of the Mountain on the shoulder, a gesture that would have seemed too hail-fellow-well-met and falsely jovial had it not been for the moment of hesitation that
seemed to beg his complicity, to ask whether the restrained pat on the shoulder was acceptable; not everyone saw it as a mark of honour, for some it was crudely chummy familiarity, others perhaps even felt it marked them out. Barsano greeted Meno; he put his left hand in the pocket of his poorly cut jacket – how much more elegantly dressed were the Londoners, Eschschloraque and Schiffner! – then took it out again as if he realized that things one hid attracted interest, tried to smile but broke off immediately when the conversations of the others, conventional as they were, just filling in time, died away. ‘How’s your father? Haven’t seen him for ages. Making preparations for a journey, is he?’

‘He’s giving illustrated talks. Most recently in the Magdeburg House of Culture.’

‘Aha, in the Magdeburg House of Culture. Just needs to go down the Elbe. I wouldn’t put it past him. Kurt Rohde gets in a canoe and paddles to Magdeburg.’