The Tower: A Novel (48 page)

‘Buckwheat groats,’ Philipp Londoner groaned to Eschschloraque, whom he’d asked how his play was progressing and the nightwatchman question was developing.

‘You’re all far too spoilt,’ Paul Schade snapped. ‘During the time of struggle we old revolutionaries sometimes roasted rats and in Spain we lived on dry bread for weeks! And in the concentration camp we’d have been glad of a bowl of buckwheat groats, I can tell you. You of the Young Guard should be carrying the revolution forward!’ His
reproachful look took in Philipp Londoner and Judith Schevola, who were in front of him in the queue.

‘A very valuable pedagogical hint,’ the Old Man of the Mountain agreed, filling his bowl with a portion indicating either genuine appetite or his openness to memories. Paul Schade turned away contemptuously and fished out a bottle of Z.ubrówka vodka. ‘Don’t think you can butter me up like that, Comrade Altberg. Spare me your comments and honour us with your presence at an Association meeting for once instead. – And you,
Herr
Eschschloraque, been travelling in the West again?’

‘
Comrade
Eschschloraque … I’m ap
paul
ed to be so misunderstood.’ With that Eschschloraque turned away and started to mix a long drink, a ‘Gentle Angel’, for himself and Philipp Londoner: one part curaçao, one part champagne, one part orange juice. Karlheinz Schubert poured himself a glass of vodka,
Sto gramm
, murmured, ‘Na zdravje’ and downed it in a few appreciative gulps. The Old Man of the Mountain told him he’d regret it on an empty stomach but Barsano’s deputy just pulled a face and poured himself another glass. Barsano gave the control desk a kick, telling those around that Arbogast had installed the thing, it was getting worse and worse, he’d completely forgotten which was the button for the projectionist, but he was already at the door waiting for Barsano to say what he wanted.

The kasha smelt and tasted of wall filler, the Old Man of the Mountain was the only one who hadn’t finished when Barsano went round personally pouring vodka he’d spiced with ginger and nutmeg, a little sugar and cinnamon, the ‘concertina’ mixture, of which Meno had unhappy memories from previous visits. Barsano grinned as he filled Meno’s glass to the brim. ‘Y’spend too much time at y’r desk, comrade. Can’t take a drink. Well, I’ll treat you to a real one. Y’r mother could take her drink, a revolutionary through and through she was. There you are, get that down you and you’ll see splendid … whatsit.’ Meno had little desire to see splendid ‘whatsit’, the last time it had been
a porcelain oval in Barsano’s personal toilet; at least that had revealed to Meno that the District Secretary must be a great fan of the ‘Digedags’ and ‘Abrafax’ series of children’s comics, huge piles of which were stacked on a ledge in the middle of the glazed tiles with the panorama of ‘Our World of Tomorrow’: blond children were sitting on the arms of full-bosomed tractor drivers waving to their fathers, who were zooming across the cloudless sky in jet aeroplanes; on the left-hand side was a lab full of microscopes and retorts with well-known scientists in gleaming white coats bending over them; magnetic suspension railways, an underground chicken farm, viaducts on several levels with futuristic cars gliding along them; deserts and steppes were transformed into blooming landscapes by canals; on the right-hand wall star-cities on distant planets were to be seen, orbited by spaceships and glass-roofed island resorts; and on the floor was a Lenin quotation, in the original Russian: ‘So let us dream! But on condition that we seriously believe in our dream, that we observe real life most precisely, that we connect our observations to our dream, that we conscientiously work to realize what we imagine! Dreaming is necessary … VLADIMIR ILYICH LENIN.’

‘To the Great Socialist October Revolution,’ Barsano cried, raising his glass. Schubert and Paul Schade uttered a ‘Gorko, gorko’, as was usual in the Soviet Union – ‘Bitter, bitter – and downed with good cheer / as if it were water clear’. Judith Schevola didn’t seem to be bothered by the ‘concertina’ either. After his glass had been filled, Meno had quickly gone over to the cabinet with the presents from delegations of friendly governments; there was a carpet from the Frunze Military Academy on which the heads of Marx, Engels and Lenin had been sewn with tiny glass beads beneath crossed Kalashnikovs; a model of the Moscow television tower in malachite; a Bulgarian wine cask Young Communists had made by sticking halves of clothes pegs together and with folk designs burnt into it, and a ‘Cup
of Friendship between the Nations’ in the form of a brass amphora, from Greece; that was what Meno was heading for; he didn’t want to make the acquaintance of Our World of Tomorrow again; pretending to suffer from a coughing fit, he poured his ‘concertina’ into the Friendship between the Nations; it swirled round in it. ‘To the memory of our great Comrade Vladimir Ilyich Lenin’, ‘… to the good health of our great Comrade Yuri Vladimirovich Andropov’, ‘… to the Party’, ‘… to world revolution’.

Judith Schevola wasn’t even swaying when all the toasts had been drunk. Paul Schade gave her a tap of appreciation on her shoulder, ‘Great girl! I’ll venture a dance with you’, and Schiffner, a beatific smile on his face, patted her cheek.

By that time Ritschel had finished his work in the film theatre. The projectionist, with several rolls of film over his shoulder, went up some stairs into the projection room; behind a little window the size of an embrasure in a castle wall was an ancient Ernemann projector, as Meno knew from the Londoners, whom Barsano quite often invited to his film evenings. The film theatre was not solely used for Barsano’s personal hobby, films were previewed there, decisions were taken as to whether a film could be shown to the general public or not. The light went out once the District Secretary and those he wanted with him in the front row had dropped into their seats, the machine began to rattle, a shaft of light with motes of dust floating in it cast the opening images onto the screen, which had risen as if by magic; at first a white pane with rounded edges was to be seen with black scratches scurrying over it, figures appeared in cross-hairs, a crackly, quivering countdown, Barsano and Paul Schade shifted expectantly from side to side in their seats.

Garden
smells, the fragrance of the rhododendrons, of jasmine opening, pale-faced, in the evening, white mouths of the murmuring twilight, and blue, ochre, water-tinted currents, fanned by the breeze; the secrets of the cuckoo-striped grass that deepened to purple at the edges, suddenly the call of a bird from the top of a maple full of trickling green, elderberry, its whispers sounding as if someone were pouring sand,

a leaf, a gleaming paddle, carried up by a thermal, it whirled back down and stopped on the branch from which it had fallen off, so that you looked at the street to make sure the passers-by weren’t walking backwards, as in silent films; the sudden flash of bicycle spokes as a boy turned a bike propped up on the curb; dissonance: a thistle in a meadow with fruit trees,

cats slumbering on stacks of wood behind sheds, first two, then three, then another grey one, a brown one stretching on brown wood and there: a tabby, dozens of cats sitting in the sun, at a stubbornly respectful distance from each other, no cat looked at another, none was lying parallel to another or behind another’s back, they looked past each other at angles that seemed precisely calculated, however minimal they were, and more and more kept appearing, as silently as outlines on a developing photograph, some might be touchable, some not; as if the colony were made up out of different June days and through a disruption of the normal course of time all the cats that had sat on this spot over the last hundred years had become visible,

then summer came.

‘We would prefer not to see you for the time being,’ Josta had written after her discharge from hospital and it was that ‘we’ – which included
Daniel and Lucie as well, who didn’t understand what had happened – that disturbed Richard and increased the melancholy that often, after the peaceful enticement of spring, its vulnerable and non-assertive green, befell him in the hot months. The summer was demanding, driving, everything was going full throttle, a hectic, sweat-soaked hustle, the sky seemed to be turning like a millstone, weighing down on treetops and roofs, honing the river to a shining blade; the blossoms didn’t calm down at all, they had no time, or so it seemed, and burst open, pumping aggressive white out onto the streets that, around midday, beneath a pebble-grey sun scratched like old films, was swirled up into streaks of heat then withered and, when the blossoms, crackling, fell onto the paths, billowing up like clouds of plaster dust. Richard went swimming on Thursdays – despite the heat he preferred the indoor to outdoor pools – circled round Josta’s house, found the shop where Frau Schmücke sold fish. ‘The boy’ll be on holiday soon,’ she said in response to his cautious enquiry when the shop was empty and the tench in the glass tank sank lethargically back down to the bottom, ‘it looks as if they intend to go away. The little girl doesn’t laugh any more. By the way, someone came for the children, I didn’t need to look after them. – A woman,’ she added, ‘I don’t know her. From the city’s Family Welfare Office, she said.’

The boys from the eleventh grade went to the training camp. Christian brought home a light-green uniform and a gas mask he’d been given and had a pair of black boots over his shoulder. ‘It’s only two weeks,’ he said to Anne, who was concerned. The uniform came from a depot, stank of mothballs; Robert, who was unhappy that his brother was back in Caravel for the holidays, threw the windows wide open: ‘That stuff’s stinking out the whole pad! And by the way, bro, some tart keeps calling, is she the one from Waldbrunn? Reina, she says she’s called, Reina Kossmann.’

‘You mind your own business,’ Christian said. He went to Wiener’s to have his hair cut short. ‘Might as well go the whole hog’ – he went
in his uniform and boots, his cap under one of the epaulettes. Wiener said nothing as he worked and the customers fell silent, avoided his eye. Only when Colonel Hentter, formerly an officer on the general staff of Rommel’s Afrika Corps, stood up and put his hand on Christian’s shoulder did Wiener and his assistants look up. ‘We thought we’d paid,’ Hentter said, ‘I saw lads like you die like flies at El Alamein. And then you turn up here in that outfit. Go home and only put it on when you have to.’

Christian was disappointed that the colonel hadn’t understood. He wasn’t wearing the uniform out of pride but because he wanted to be pitied, perhaps out of defiance too, a masochistic ‘look-at-me’ feeling, the public exhibition of suffering. The Russians were still in Afghanistan. Poland was still under martial law. He couldn’t bear the idea of running around free with the uniform lying as a reminder in the room. The moment he’d been given his kit, a shadow had fallen across his freedom, the days until he was to leave had been poisoned – and he felt a need for dignity: outwardly he conformed, inside himself he said, ‘I’m wearing these clothes, I even have short hair, I’m doing more than is required and despite that you have no power over me.’ He covered up the real reason: he put on the uniform earlier in order to make the moment of departure more bearable.

Richard saw Christian when he came back from the barber’s, could that lanky beanpole with the bright red scalp, blond hair shorn to shoe-brush length, really be his son? Anne, who’d been working in the garden and had just put the watering can down by the rose beds next to the gate, cried out, lifted up her hands, the doors of Tietze’s Shiguli slammed shut, Richard saw Niklas in a white coat, waving, the watering can fell over, running slowly in flowery patches over the paved path. Christian waved back, stopped in front of Anne, spoke to her shaking his head, she didn’t react, he picked up the can and watered the roses, which rustled in the heat like crêpe paper.

The
carriages were crammed full, the Railway had only put a few special compartments at their disposal, in which schoolboys in light green from Dresden and the surrounding area were sitting squeezed up together, supervised by their teachers. The embracing, the shedding of tears and the surreptitious passing of love letters was over, doors slammed, a conductor blew a piercing whistle and raised his baton for departure, slowly, like a steamroller inching its way between the ash-grey platforms, the train began to move, leaving behind the people – waving, running alongside, blowing kisses, reaching for the flailing arms of particularly delicate boys still tied to their mother’s apron strings – who so clearly fell into the categories of ‘parents’ and ‘girlfriend’ that Christian couldn’t accept this concentration of sentimentality and angrily refused an apple Falk offered him; he didn’t like these farewells, they didn’t make it any easier, tear-stained faces didn’t make the inescapable any less inescapable. For the first time in his life he’d forbidden his mother something: to drive him to the station; he’d done it so curtly that he was now suffering pangs of conscience. Anne had slapped him, the first time for many years, he’d seen her horrified expression but had still gone out slamming the door behind him. Pigeons flew up, Christian squeezed into his corner and looked at the glass arch at the end of the beer-brown station concourse, there were reefs of bird droppings hanging from the steel girders. After Siegbert and Jens had gone on enough about Christian’s haircut, they invited him to play cards, they played for eighths of a pfennig and Christian lost a few ten-pfennig pieces. Sitting opposite were boys from the School of the Cross, whispering to each other, watching them sleepily. Their school had an elitist reputation, the choir, under their choirmaster, Rudolf Mauersberger, had become famous all over the world, its classical curriculum made exceptionally high demands on the pupils; recently the school had been decried as ‘Red’ and, so it was said, its singing had also suffered. Still: to be a Crossian was special, it counted for something in Dresden; the ladies at their coffee mornings raised their
eyebrows, grandmothers clasped their hands and exclaimed, ‘Oh no, oh no!’ with happiness if their grandchild had made it through those august portals. Meno was an Old Crossian, as was Christian’s Uncle Hans, and both Muriel and Fabian were down to go to the senior high school there. The Crossians frequented the Café Toscana, where they displayed the bored-blasé expression that had been characteristic of them for generations and that, as reliably and incestuously as a transfusion with your own blood, as Meno said, established them in the bourgeoisie of Dresden Island. Christian envied them their self-assurance. Siegbert ignored the boys in the other compartments, he’d brought a stack of ‘Compass’ adventure stories and started to read one as soon as they got bored with cards. Falk took his guitar out of its case. Now the Crossians perked up. ‘Hey, that’s great, shall we play something together?’ With an elegantly casual gesture a sun-tanned boy with shoulder-length hair indicated an accordion on the luggage rack. ‘And you can get your horn out, Fatso.’

‘D’you think I’m a queer, or what?’ The one addressed as ‘Fatso’, fair-haired and thin as a rake, grinned and shook his fist at him.

‘That’s not the one I mean, blockhead!’ The sun-tanned boy took his accordion down. ‘Crossians –
viva la musica!
’ Raising an eyebrow, he turned to Falk. ‘Can you play?’

‘Can you read music?’

‘Can you do irony?’ the sun-tanned Crossian replied to Christian.

The Crossians wanted to sing the Latin ‘Carmina Burana’, but had to do it by themselves since no one else knew them. Falk accompanied them on his guitar, the fair-haired Fatso blew his trumpet with feeling. The only ones they all knew were the hymn of the Italian labour movement, ‘Bandiera rossa’, and the German equivalent, ‘Side by Side We March’, and as no one wanted to sing those, the Crossians once more
started on part-songs. The sun-tanned boy played his accordion and conducted with nods of the head.

The train meandered through Lusatia, a landscape of stone houses with half-timbered upper storeys, the palatal ‘r’, sleepy villages and gently rolling fields stretching away to the horizon; here potatoes were called ‘apern’ and many of the place names on the signs were in two languages, German and Sorb. When the train travelled slowly you could hear the skylarks singing over the pale yellow of the wheat; there was a smell of sweat and dust and sweetened rose-hip tea. From the front compartment came the clack of the conductor’s revolving ticket punch, Christian leant forward, Stabenow’s youthful voice could be heard, he was giving an enthusiastic lecture on something or other and sitting round him were Hagen Schlemmer and a few more of those keen on physics whose eyes still lit up at names like Niels Bohr and Kapitza. Stabenow too was wearing the training-camp uniform. Dr Frank supervised the civil-defence course for girls at the senior high.

The camp, two and a half acres with huts, flagpoles and parade ground, was on the edge of the little town of Schirgiswalde, surrounded by green hills high up on which were detached houses with closed roller-shutters and single miniature spruce trees; they looked artificial, like the scenery for a model railway. The Waldbrunners were greeted by a corporal who showed them the hut they’d been allocated: two communal rooms, each for ten boys, double bunk beds, reveille at six, exercises, at the double to wash in the central washroom, bed-making and cleaning of rooms, breakfast at seven, then training.

‘Any free time?’

‘Name?’ The corporal drew himself up to his full height in front of Jens Ansorge, who was standing in the doorway chewing gum. ‘And take that chewing gum out when you’re talking to me.’ – ‘Ansorge.’ The corporal wrote it down. ‘You’re not on holiday here, just you
remember that. You’re on toilet duty first, Ansorge. Report to me afterwards. Understood?’

Jens said nothing.

‘Have you understood, knucklehead?’

‘Uhuh.’

‘Heels together, hand at your cap and: Yes, Comrade Corporal. – We’ll be practising that.’

The days began with an ear-piercing whistle followed by Corporal Hantsch’s bellowed, ‘Platoon Nine – Up! Prepare for morning exercises.’ Then one or two morose, tousled heads would appear, yawns, sighs, grins of disbelief at not being woken at home, in their own cosy bed, by a loving mother to the smells of tea and breakfast but by him, the corporal who’d been seconded from a motorized infantry unit to Schirgiswalde and thought this was the direct extension of a National People’s Army barrack square where he could drill the arrogant, pampered senior-high puppies with their affected airs to his heart’s content. During morning exercises, which consisted of running at the double interspersed with bunny hops, press-ups and knee bends on the parade ground, Christian observed Hantsch: for the first time in his life he had encountered a person who took obvious pleasure in ordering others about, demonstrating his power by trying to find their weaknesses and, when he’d found them (Hantsch seemed to possess an unerring instinct for that), by exposing them for his own satisfaction and his victim’s torment. It was brazen and it disturbed Christian that Hantsch didn’t seem to know (or didn’t want to know) the limit beyond which humiliation began. Naturally Hantsch realized that Christian, after morning exercises, when they had to run, bare-chested, to the washroom, tried to drape his towel round him like a toga in order to hide his acne – which didn’t work because the towel was much too short – that he always tried to find a place at the back of the row so that the others wouldn’t see his bad skin. Hantsch made the platoon halt, came up to Christian, looked him up and down with an expression of surprise and
disgust and said, ‘Christ, no woman’s going to want to fuck you. Platoon about turn!’ All the boys turned round, Christian closed his eyes, but he could feel the eyes of the others burning into his body. ‘Hey, now he’s so red the pimples are almost invisible. It’s really revolting, man, don’t you wash yourself properly, can’t you do anything about it?’ Putting on a concerned expression, Hantsch ordered them to turn back and move on. In the washroom he stood behind Christian, watching how he washed. ‘And your willy?’

‘In the evening, Comrade Corporal,’ Christian said through clenched jaws, giddy with rage.

‘You leave the thing stinking all day, you dirty dog.’

‘Leave him in peace,’ Falk muttered. Hantsch slowly turned his face towards him, everything went quiet in the washroom. Hantsch shrugged his shoulders. ‘What do I care? Senior-grade students, huh!’ He blew down his nose in contempt.