The Tower: A Novel (6 page)

‘Hey, Christian, that parcel from the other side we lugged in last week, I bet the old folks have guzzled it all already.’

‘Perhaps Aunt Alice and Uncle Sandor brought that stuff …’

‘It’s a possibility … And what else did you see? Tell me’ – Robert leant back a little more; he’d spoken rather loudly, so Christian put his finger to his lips and hissed ‘Shh!’ at his brother – ‘tell me, did you just look or did you …’

‘No, I didn’t, there wasn’t enough time, just a few grains of rice and
then Theo Lingen appeared and glared at me as if I were a criminal, really, Robert.’

‘How are things at the Spesh?’

Ezzo went to the Special School for Music in Mendelssohnallee. ‘Oh, as usual. School’s a bore. Physics is the only subject that’s fun, we’ve got Bräuer, you two must know him.’

‘Why?’

‘Of course you do, Robert, he’s the strict guy who visited us a couple of years ago. The one that looks a bit like Uncle Owl, you know, on kids’ TV, in
Pittiplatsch und Schnatterinchen
.’

Ezzo smirked. ‘Yes, that’s the one. But he’s great. Does fantastic experiments. Apart from that … Christmas is coming.’

‘And the Wieniawski?’

‘Hellish difficult piece. Don’t make me think about it. On Tuesday it’s my major again, I’ve really got work my arse off.’

‘… my father gave me strength and height, my earnest application, my mother dear my humour bright and Fromme – not only him – my joy in operations …’ Müller declaimed, earning a round of applause. ‘I hope the literary specialists in the audience will forgive my distortion of Goethe’s famous lines; all I can say in my defence is that it is in a good cause. But to come to the point – and what’s the point of birthdays if not presents – we in the clinic, Herr Hoffmann, spent a long time thinking about this. We are all, of course, aware of your love of classical music – when the nurses see a trolley heading for your operating theatre, where you are about to operate to, say, a violin concerto, they say the patient is “going to face the music”.’ He cleared his throat, seeming to expect applause which he then waved down. ‘Since, as your wife was good enough to divulge to me, we will have the opportunity to enjoy a piece of classical music later on, we, that is your colleagues, the nurses and I, have thought of something different. Your love of painting and the fine arts is also well-known in the clinic, so we
organized a little collection, the result of which is the object which I now ask these gentlemen to please bring from the adjoining room.’

Two junior doctors went into the side room and returned with a large, slim, carefully tied-up parcel.

‘Dad on the throne of trauma surgery,’ Robert whispered to Christian, ‘and instead of a sceptre he’s holding a scalpel …’

Herr Adeling brought in the easel. By this time Wernstein had unpacked the picture, apart from a last layer of tissue paper, and he placed it on the easel that Herr Adeling, furiously wielding a gigantic duster, had cleared of chalk powder. Wernstein stepped back. Müller thrust out his chin and pursed his lips in a raspberry-coloured pout – a pose, well known to every junior doctor in the Surgical Clinic, with which Professor Müller would conclude the moment of hesitation to which all surgeons are subject before they make the first incision into the still-inviolate skin lying before them, pale in the glare of the spotlight. With solemn tread he made his way over to the easel and, with a vigorous but well-calculated tug, at the same time giving Richard, who had stood up and was beside him, a malicious smile, pulled the tissue paper away from the picture. It wobbled a little, but Herr Adeling, who probably knew the easel well and had followed Müller’s actions with raised eyebrows, had unobtrusively positioned himself behind it and, with a sideways twist with which one avoids giving offence during a fit of coughing, he surreptitiously supported the easel with his left hand, now in a white glove, during Müller’s revelatory tug, while simultaneously covering two dry coughs with his still ungloved right hand before urgent business sent him hurrying off in the direction of the foyer.

‘A watercolour by one of our most important painters, who unfortunately died too young: Kurt Querner. There you are.’

Richard Hoffmann, almost a head taller than Müller, had slumped in on himself, his dark-blue eyes, which Robert had inherited, were staring in disbelief.

‘His
Landscape during a Thaw
– Professor, that can’t be … so it was you?’

‘Herr Wernstein was so good as to travel to Börnchen for us and acquire this watercolour.’

‘But … I’m flabbergasted. Frau Querner told me that this picture was only to be sold after her death … It meant so much to her husband … And then it wasn’t there any more, we were told it had been sold after all … Anne, come here, our favourite picture.’

‘Our surprise for you.’

‘But’ – in his agitation Richard ran his fingers through his short, sandy hair; it had a blond strand at the crown, which Christian also had in the same place – ‘but Professor, colleagues, that must have cost a fortune! I can’t possibly accept it.’

‘As I said, there was a collection, so it was spread among us. By the way, there is an interesting perspective to the picture when it is seen
à contre-jour
as you might say …’

‘
À contre-jour?
’ Taken aback, Richard walked round the picture.

‘For Richard Hoffmann – gratefully, Kurt Querner,’ Müller read out loud. ‘He knew that this was the picture you liked best. You and your wife had “crept round it too often”, as he put it. If he wanted to give it to anyone, it was you, and when Frau Querner heard about our plan, she allowed herself to be persuaded.’

Most of the guests had stood up and were crowding round the picture. As his father shook the hands of his colleagues from the Academy in thanks, addressing each by their first name and hugging them, Christian could see that he was moved.

‘Just accept it, Richard,’ said Weniger, a senior doctor from the Gynaecological Clinic. ‘You can hang it up in your living room, next to that bird in the buff with the magnificent horse’s arse,’ he went on, deliberately falling into a local accent, ‘that’s a kind of landscape too. Pardon my French, Anne.’

The doctors, many of them surgeons or orthopaedists, were amused.
The women turned away or put their hand or a handkerchief over their mouth to hide their giggles.

Anne had given Ezzo and Christian a sign. They slipped past the throng round the picture, fetched their instruments from the adjoining room and set up their music stands in front of the piano.

‘Your father’s happy as a sandboy,’ Ezzo whispered to Christian.

‘He’s been after that picture for years, I can tell you.’ Robert sucked calmly at the cane blade of his clarinet. ‘And you can imagine what it was like when he heard it had gone. National mourning, lousy mood, frosty evenings. Well, I can see everything’s hunky-dory for the old man again. I’m sure that means there’ll be another Sunday trip out there or a visit to an art gallery … Oh God, art galleries.’

Reglinde, Ezzo’s eighteen-year-old sister, was already sitting at the piano and had opened her score. She shook her head. ‘You really are crazy. The way you talk!’

‘Just give me an A,’ Robert replied, unmoved, taking the reed out of his mouth and slotting it into the mouthpiece.

‘Did you see it? Even framed!’ Christian, warming up with a few runs on the cello, looked across at the picture; Niklas Tietze, Reglinde and Ezzo’s father, the local GP, emerged from the group round it. He had chosen the Italian piece and was taking the viola part.

‘The money they must have in the Academy!’ Robert muttered. ‘Always assuming they didn’t quietly take it out of the Solidarity Fund or the account of the Society for German–Soviet Friendship. But if I want a new fishing rod, there’s no way it can be afforded. “Go and collect waste paper and bottles, you get ten pfennigs apiece for them at the SERO collection point, and anyway, when we were your age …” ’

‘Hi, you guys, everything OK?’

Christian embraced ‘Uncle’ Niklas, as he was called by the Hoffmann children, like ‘Aunt’ Alice and ‘Uncle’ Sandor, although Niklas Tietze was Richard Hoffmann’s cousin on his mother’s side.

‘We’ll
have to play everything
presto
, Uncle Niklas. Ezzo and I are starving.’

‘Your mother’s baked a fantastic cake. You must have a piece of it afterwards.’

‘But I’m sleeping at Meno’s tonight. – Apple cake?’

‘And a cherry pie – with a marzipan base and meringue topping, very thin and the cherries lovely and sour …’ Niklas sucked his upper lip and gave an appreciative ‘Mmmm …’ He picked up his viola, which Ezzo had brought from the adjoining room, and put it on the piano.

‘Right, Anne will give us the sign any minute now. Then, as agreed: first the fanfare, then “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow”, then off we go.’ Niklas rosined his bow, played over the open strings and adjusted the tuning slightly while his eyes, behind the immense spectacles he always put on for playing, quickly ran over the notes.

‘Tatata-taa!’ rang out from the instruments as Anne came and sat down next to Reglinde. When they played ‘For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow’, even Herr Adeling, who had reappeared by the door, joined in; as he sang he tapped the tips of his fingers together precisely in time to the music and at the final ‘and so say all of us’ his falsetto even outdid Müller’s trained guttural voice.

Then they played the Italian piece, a suite from the baroque period, originally for flute but Niklas has arranged the flute part for clarinet. Christian was tense. Once more he could feel the eyes of everyone on him. Reglinde had switched on the wall lamp over the piano and, since he was sitting diagonally behind her, the strong light fell on his face, revealing with merciless clarity the very thing he most wanted to hide. During the previous week’s rehearsals, everything had been calm and secure, but playing here, in front of an attentive, though probably well-disposed audience of fifty, was a quite different matter from practising in the Tietzes’ quiet house, where ‘Aunt’ Gudrun had brought sandwiches during the intervals and he and Ezzo had got so high they’d tried to play the piece at double the speed. There were three pairs of
eyes that weighed especially heavily on him: his father’s, Meno’s and those of his cousin Ina, Ulrich and Barbara’s pretty nineteen-year-old daughter … He curled up inside himself and kept his eyes focused on the music. He mustn’t let himself be distracted. – Where did she get that dress? Pretty daring, those bare shoulders, he thought, before he stormed up the mountain of semiquavers at the beginning of the courante – Oh yes, the dress she’d made together with Reglinde, pause, legato, da-da-dada … Strange: while during rehearsals his greatest fear had been the fast, technically difficult passages and the slower, more melodious ones had come out better, now the opposite was the case: he was happy when the furioso bars came, he played almost every one securely, as if in a dream, and his heart started to pound at every harmless sequence of minims and crotchets. At a piano passage his bow began to tremble, the note was ‘frayed’, as his cello teacher would have said, which brought him a glance from Ezzo, who, as the best in his class in the Special School, was impeccably positioned and playing with the luscious bowing that had already attracted attention among experts …

‘I can do that too,’ Christian told himself in irritation; he stretched a tenth and slammed his bow down on the string. A trickle of rosin floated down. – Yes! Sounds like a cathedral bell, does my cello … There was a ‘Ping!’ Ezzo and Robert started, which made Robert look odd, as he was in the middle of a cantabile passage, and at the same moment Christian realized that the A-string of his cello was bobbing up and down in a huge corkscrew spiral and he had no time to replace it. Niklas looked at him over the rim of his glasses and improvised while Reglinde, the only one who was completely relaxed, began to reduce the tempo imperceptibly … Christian had never been in such a tight situation. All the passages that, before his misfortune, he could have played fairly comfortably had suddenly turned into technical hurdles. Out of the corner of his eye he saw that Ina had her head in her hand and her shoulders were twitching with suppressed laughter.
Silly cow! he roared inwardly, and in his fury he swept through a passage at such speed that Ezzo and Niklas looked up in alarm, and even Reglinde, who had her back to him, half turned round. – Yesyesyes! he exulted when he managed to play a passage on the D-string alone, in a position he hadn’t practised for this piece. In the surge of melodies he saw Niklas’s aquiline nose glow redder and redder, and tiny beads of sweat had started to gather on Ezzo’s forehead, just as they had on his waxy-pale, fleshy nose; Ezzo was adjusting his violin on its chin rest much more often than he had during rehearsals and the fiery red violinist’s mark on his neck became visible – both, as Christian knew, unmistakable signs of nervousness. Anne, who was turning the pages for Reglinde, behaved as if nothing had happened. He wasn’t bothered about anything any more – it was bound to end in disaster – and strangely enough, it was just at that point, in the middle of the rather rocking bourrée, that the title of an obscure book from his parents’ library came to mind:
The Gallant Blundering in the Labyrinth of Love
– the A-string sundering in the labyrinth of music was what his overwrought mind made of it before he set his fingers dancing over the remaining three strings and, remarkably and unexpectedly, everything went well apart from a couple of little slips. Applause.

‘Phew.’ Ezzo nodded, waggled his hand, wiped his brow and fiddled with the nut on his bow. They bowed. Niklas, who was standing behind Christian, gave him a complimentary tap on the shoulder with his bow.

Robert snorted. ‘That looked really funny! I kept telling myself, just keep your eyes on your music, man …’

‘I’d like to see you if one of your keys flew off, but that can never happen with your
wind
instruments,’ Christian hissed back, putting profound contempt into ‘wind’. The feud between strings and wind was an age-old rivalry that would never be resolved.

‘That was close,’ said Reglinde. ‘When you suddenly accelerated in the allegro, I thought I was never going to get into it. And that on this jangly old piano.’