The Tower: A Novel (53 page)

Green water splintering off the paddle-wheels, atomizing into spray that drifted along the steamer, swirling into the wide channel at the stern in which the wake of the grinding, pounding boat fanned out and gradually disappeared. Christian was standing by the rail in the bows,
holding his face up to the wind, which smelt of grass and cellulose – the industrial area of Heidenau, with its factory chimneys and effluent pipes from which grey sludge sloshed into the Elbe, slipped past. The boat was full of people on a day out, the excited chatter of children from school holiday camps and the irritated admonishments of those in charge of them; walkers with rucksacks who kept to one side, as did the few inhabitants of the Elbe Sandstone Hills: recognizable from their faces worn from hard work, their unfashionable clothes; the women wore headscarves, the men flat, brown leather caps.

The windows glittered in the newly built district of Pirna-Sonnenstein, huge concrete blocks that had been rammed into the foothills of the Elbe Sandstone range above the little market town with its church. After Pirna the wind freshened and the broad valley of the Elbe narrowed, hemmed in on either side by steep hills. The sandy yellow of abandoned quarries mingled with the light green of the birches and the dark green of the conifers in the Elbe woods. Now it smelt of summer: dry air, cow dung, wild dill in the meadows, diesel and grease from the boatyards, sun cream mixing with sweat into an oily film. He tried to stop thinking about the training camp. He’d sent off his application to do medicine in Leipzig, there’d been an interview at the university. One of the three examiners, a GP, had leafed through his file and asked why he wanted to be a doctor? The question didn’t catch Christian unawares; outside was Richard, who had prepared several answers for him. Christian wanted to decide between them himself. Because I would like to be a famous medical scientist, he’d thought, and for a moment he felt a great urge to say it just like that, the truth and nothing but the truth. ‘Because I would like to work in medical research eventually,’ he’d said.

‘Aha, so you want to become famous,’ the second examiner, a psychologist, had replied with an ironic smile.

‘… That too. Yes.’

‘Well, at least you’re honest, young man,’ the third examiner, a
professor of Internal Medicine, had commented. ‘Do you know what we mostly get to hear? – Because I want to help people. Sometimes even humanity, then it becomes interesting again. If you’d said something like that, and with your file, we’d have rejected you. As things are, we’ll support your application. – How’s your father, by the way? We were at university together. Off you go, now, and tell one of those silly geese who want to help people to come in.’

He closed his eyes, listened to the thump of the engines for a while. He shivered when the steamer entered the shadow of the cliffs. Cumulus clouds were building up. The blue skies of summer, the blue skies of air raids, he recalled; Grandfather Kurt’s words.

Above Wehlen the rocky pinnacles of the Bastei rose up from the river; parties of tourists pushed their way to the stern rail, pointing up, waving. Christian didn’t wave, there were countless sparks flitting across the cliffs, he had to screw up his eyes and shade them with his hand. The Elbe passed Rathen in a wide curve, cut like a steel blade between Lilienstein and Königstein, the bases of the hills wooded, above them sandstone bluffs with steep, cleft walls on which myriads of swifts nested.

He reached down for his suitcase, suddenly feeling the need to test out the strength of his grip on the straps; it was with satisfaction that he felt the crumpled resistance of the leather that he couldn’t squash beyond a certain degree however much effort he put into it. A dragonfly landed on the handrail hardly a metre in front of him. He was fascinated: how these creatures, invisible in flight, could come to an abrupt halt and be as if switched on: blue needles with a double pair of transparent, filigree wings, and Christian would have liked to catch the dragonfly to see if the spurs of skin felt like cellophane, whether you could cut yourself on them. It shot off, with no preparation, like the tick of a second hand.

Schandau came in sight, the bridge, the dusty station, the rails and electric cables seeming to shimmer in the heat, an engine was puffing
away below the signal box, sleepers stacked up on trestles and overgrown with weeds. The spa promenade with hotels, pennants from the regatta and chains with lanterns along the bank by the car park, behind it, hidden by the houses on the market square, the domed tower of St John’s. Christian breathed out. No one was waiting for him at the quay. A brass band greeted the passengers, gleaming on the terrace of the Elbe Hotel between blue-and-white sunshades and waiters calmly serving and clearing away food and drink. He weighed the suitcase in his hand. He hadn’t been expelled. He had the second-best results for his year and had even managed to congratulate Verena.

Lene Schmidken had seen him as he put his suitcase down and looked up at the house: the curtains were drawn, the skylights in the shingle roof closed; Pepi, Kurt’s Alsatian, came whizzing round the corner and sat down in front of him, panting, giving him a man’s-best-friend look.

‘So you still remember me, you old rascal. How’s things?’ He fondled Pepi behind the ear. The dog bounded over in great leaps to Lene Schmidken, who came hobbling along leaning on a stick; she seemed to be a head shorter than at his last visit. ‘D’you want something to eat, lad? Or take your case up first?’ She rummaged round in her apron pocket and took out the key from where it would have been refusing to acknowledge the presence of clothes pegs, eucalyptus sweets, rubber rings for preserving jars.

‘How long you staying for?’

‘Don’t know for sure. Two, perhaps three weeks. Depends when Grandad’s coming back.’

‘The beginning of September’s what he told me.’ She took a sweet out of her apron and he put it in his pocket, just in case.

‘It’d be nice if you could look after the rabbits. And Pepi. Come over for lunch, my lad. There’s
guvech
. An’ Hussar’s toast tomorrow. You like that.’

‘Thanks,
but I’m not hungry just now.’

Holding on to his arm, Lene Schmidken sat down on one of the steps, shaking her head at the heat and the anti-thrombosis stockings the doctor had prescribed for her. ‘
Ischtenem!
They look like stuffed vine leaves. And – have you got a place at university?’

‘We’re only told when we go back to school. Some friends might come to see me. Grandad doesn’t have to know. Please?’

Lene Schmidken nodded, stood up with a groan. ‘He’ll find out anyway. If you need a bath I’ll get the tub out of the wash-house. Kurt should have filled the water tank, the old wood butcher. Keep the
priculic
, that black vampire, away from me.’ She jabbed Pepi with her stick.

‘Did Grandpa leave any other messages?’

‘No. All he could think about was his journeys. A real bundle o’ nerves, ’e was. I thought ’e’d drop down dead when they sent ’im that letter refusing his application. Like a bear with a sore ’ead, ’e was, the old spindleshanks. Few weeks later the acceptance came.’

‘He didn’t say anything about that.’ Surprised, Christian turned back to Lene.

‘He still didn’t have no passyport, ’dentity card,
papuci
for trav’lin’ in. Keeps it all locked up inside hisself. Then came another refusal. The Amazon’s out, Danube delta’s OK. And now ’e’s down there with the
Lippengabors
.’

‘With the what?’

‘Polenta-guzzlers. Total goulash. With the gyppos.’

‘But they’re not all gypsies, Lene.’

‘Oh, leave it, lad.’ Leaning her head a little to one side, she shuffled off to her house, where for years she’d lived alone in a Transylvania of the mind – and speech.

He was afraid of the death masks, the garishly coloured, roughly carved faces, then he would turn the television on or the radio, go to places
out of their reach: the rabbit hutches by the compost heap, the earth closet in the yard at the back – it housed fly-demons and photographs of Baltic flatfish that did nobody any harm. When twilight fell with the smell of meadows and blue shadows, the things in the house seemed to conspire against Kurt’s travels and to go back; clay figures, a spatula for flatbread, crowns of bird feathers went back to the Cayapa Indians in Ecuador, copper bowls and blowpipes with curare-tipped arrows back to the Amazon, straight into the murmuring of a tribe planning a hunt. Christian had brought a biochemistry textbook with him, but in the house it became ineffective, his interest died away with the hours that he heard the voices from the colourful lips. The house, the summer in the Elbe Sandstone Hills, carried him away from the events of the previous months; he drifted away from them like a boat and they remained on the shore. Kurt seemed to be there when he went up into the loft, rummaged round in the boxes that stood there, dry and dusty among fragilely balancing stacks of junk. He could hear Kurt commentating on the rolls of film on the shelves: rain dance of the Crao Indians, 16 mm camera. Stories of travels in a folding canoe on Norwegian fjords, long before the war. Adventures hunting in the polar sea. In his mind’s eye Christian could see Kurt’s gnarled hands, his sparse gestures accompanying the stories in the smoke of the garden fire and cigars, he could see Ina, who had embarrassed Fabian and himself with her daring summer dresses, made in the Harmony Salon workshop, Muriel with her eyes closed, Meno poking the fire.

After a few days Christian stopped shaving. Lene said nothing about the light-brown woolly tufts on his cheeks, the brigand’s moustache, the stubbly hair gradually turning shaggy again. A week later the others arrived: Reina with a rucksack and a case full of cosmetics that made Christian laugh, at which she recoiled; but perhaps it was his unkempt hair that had startled her and not the washbasin he handed
her, nor the earth closet he pointed out in the yard. Siegbert and Falk immediately started fooling around, both grabbed masks that immediately started emitting jungle roars; Pepi came jumping up at them, yapping angrily, Verena squealed, she was frightened of dogs.

The days blurred at the edges, turned into time. The sun cut up across the sky over the mountains. The tips of the bracken flushed red, the hollows were haunted by misty ghosts until the August heat drove them away. Cocks crowed from the village but Christian was awake before them and listened to the breathing of the others, who slept more soundly than he, even though it was hot on the air beds and the air in the room, unmoving despite the wide-open windows, was stifling. He looked at the girls, sleeping there before him, Verena in her nightdress despite the heat, Reina stripped to the waist, she was lying on her front, the sheet had slipped down to her waist. Then he got up and went out, the alarm clock said four, ten past four; Pepi wearily raised his head when Christian went past his kennel, decided he could nudge him with his nose and wag his tail: Bit early for food, he seemed to be trying to say as the meat flopped into his bowl, but OK, since it’s you. Christian filled the bucket Kurt had left by the water tank, washed himself, pouring the water over his naked body; that was what Kurt did, what Meno did and what he had done for as long as he could remember. In the winter it was an icy whiplash, tearing his tiredness apart; now the water was lukewarm and smelt of cress. He warmed it up for the girls with an immersion coil.

Meno came, bringing provisions, and settled in his old room in the attic, where, on a desk made of bare planks, there was a Fortuna typewriter, clunky as a Konsum cash register, surrounded by phials of liquid ammonia, a microscope, a bowl with ‘Carlsbad Insect Needles’, entomologist’s collecting jars: this was where he retired to when he was free and wanted to do his own work. His birthday wish had been for quiet and company, so Verena and Reina took him some flowers as a late present: the eighth of the eighth had disappeared somewhere in
the far blue yonder down the Elbe. Christian waved away questions about the pre-military training camp and the possibility of being expelled from school. They were drifting. Spreading out their arms they drifted on the compressed light glazing the hills and only disappearing in the gorges. After they’d breakfasted Meno said, ‘You must be both plant and animal. Be alert, keep your ears and eyes open. A body has boundaries but they will dissolve if you wait and trust.’ They went for walks early in the morning. The Falkenstein was obscured by haze. The jagged Schrammstein cliffs were still dark as lead, beyond them rose the Grosser Winterberg then, to one side in the distance, the regular cone of the Rosenberg: Rů žová hora, Meno murmured; that was already in Bohemian Switzerland. Leaning over the rocks, they looked down at the curve of the Elbe below Schandau. In those early hours the river seemed to have to expand, at the bend it was wrinkled, bright as a newly minted coin in the middle alone; barges engraved lines on it. Verena and Falk were each trying to outdo the other in finding names for the varying shades: liquorice, pitchblende, mocha, chemist’s-bottle brown, with a shimmer of oil and splodges of purple when the sun had risen a little higher. Once, from the Postelwitz bank, they saw dead fish floating down the river, so many it looked as if the Elbe had been paved with metal bars. With a stick Meno pulled a few over, they were roach, unnaturally large. ‘Cadmium.’ They flaked to pieces when Meno pushed them back into the current. The girls turned away.

The clefts were fern-dark and full of a stench that only the midday heat would disperse. The cliffs were mossy, covered in brown iron stains and yellow patches of sulphur, as slimy as a toad’s skin. Sometimes Meno’s ‘Careful!’ came too late and Christian, who wanted to show off a bit to the others, watched in alarm as the scree tumbled down into the gorge. They didn’t take marked routes but followed Meno, who walked in front, silent and avoiding tourist paths and popular viewpoints: the Bastei, from where one could see far out over the
countryside, the fields dotted around, the plain with its wide-open spaces in which the jagged-backed table mountains – Königstein, Lilienstein – seemed to be like prehistoric animals resting. At first they couldn’t manage more than ten to fifteen kilometres a day, came home too exhausted to follow Meno’s explanations. He was different here, no longer the calm, pipe-smoking publisher’s editor from the House with a Thousand Eyes who listened to music with Niklas and Richard in the evening, went to talks in the Urania group, gossiped about literature with Josef Redlich or Judith Schevola. This was where he had grown up, where he once more assumed the swift, sinewy gait of the mountain-dweller, the keen senses that Christian admired: there were the tracks of a pine marten that Meno was puzzled no one else had noticed; here the remains of a pine cone but they couldn’t tell which animal had nibbled at it; strange noises came from a tree plantation, outside which they waited, with ants crawling all over them, so long it was like torture: in the twilight a bird, black with a bright-red crown, was settling on a branch, a black woodpecker that no one, apart from Meno, had seen before.