The Tower: A Novel (64 page)

‘May I?’ Sperber, the lawyer, pointed to the empty chair beside Richard that was usually reserved for the theatre doctor’s partner. ‘Your wife’s not coming, of course.’

‘How do you know?’

‘One knows one’s cases, one knows one’s colleagues cases,’ Sperber said with a smirk. ‘And one’s friends’ problems. You discussed Frau Neubert’s case with me … Oh, that’s not a breach of client confidentiality. A certain exchange of information is necessary, we have to work together if we want to have material we can use against the prosecuting counsels – what do you think of it?’ Sperber’s gesture took in the whole auditorium, which was gradually filling up; people were standing at the balustrades, craning their necks in the stalls, expectant faces filled with pride; many had handkerchiefs in their hand. ‘Is that not something special our little country’s managed to achieve?’ Sperber asked without waiting for an answer. The standard expression was ‘our state’ or ‘our socialist GDR’ (an odd adjective, Richard thought, as if there were another one); at ‘our little country’ Richard pricked up his ears.

‘If you like, you can come and visit us sometime. The invitation includes your wife too, of course,’ the lawyer hastened to add. ‘We would be delighted to have the opportunity to get to know you better. One moment.’ He fished a visiting card out of his little leather handbag and pressed it into the right hand Richard, nonplussed, held open. ‘The
Freischütz
isn’t really my thing, all that Romanticism and merrymaking at the shooting competition on the village green. A beautiful dream
for which we’re gathered here and every one of us will understand in their own way. But the music’s admirable and for our lord and master’ – Sperber nodded cautiously in the direction of the official box – ‘it’s probably just the right thing. Only last Saturday he shot a twelve-pointer. Will you excuse me for a few minutes.’

Sperber went off, appearing up in the VIP box a few moments later, where a prolonged session of handshaking began.

The train was late; now, after all the rush, they were standing on the platform, waiting. This would have been the time to say farewell but the station announcement had talked of an hour’s delay. The light in the Mitropa café was pale, slimy; cockroaches scuttled across the tables as if caught in the act. On the menu was soup as green as weathered copper, mixed-vegetable stew, schnapps and beer. Hans felt nauseated, wanted to go out again. Meno bought a packet of Marie biscuits. ‘Do you like reading?’ he asked Hans outside.

‘It all depends. Most of all Karl May.’

‘Here, take this. You might get bored on the journey.’ He handed him a volume of Poe’s stories, illustrated by Vogelstrom.

‘I’m sure I won’t, but thanks.’ Hans took the book and stuck it in the inside pocket of his coat.

‘Isn’t it cold?’ Regine moaned when they came back. ‘I hope nothing goes wrong now.’

‘Do you know why there’s a delay?’ Meno asked. Regine, in tears again, turned away.

‘Frozen points. The train’s coming from Rostock,’ Anne replied. They’d made a kind of bed on the suitcases for Philipp, covering him with various articles of clothing, but he wasn’t asleep, he was staring up at the arched ceiling with little spikes of crusty ash hanging down, intestinal hairs of a Gulliver in the land of Lilliput; hundreds of pigeons were roosting on the crossbeams, heads under their wings, packed close to each other so that none could be a danger to the others during
the night, Meno thought, they probably kept each other warm as well. The loudspeakers over the platform crackled, a woman’s voice in broad Saxon extended the delay into an indefinite period. Regine put her hand over her mouth and leant forward, it looked as if she were covering a yawn, but she was screaming into her hand. Hans took Regine to one side, they walked up and down. There was no one apart from them waiting on the platform. Railway police were checking a few drunks on platforms some way away.

‘Scream, if you want,’ Anne said, ‘it won’t bother me, let people hear it.’

‘So that they can arrest us after all?’

‘Hans,’ Regine begged him softly.

‘I didn’t mean it like that.’ There was steam coming out of Anne’s mouth, Meno looked at his sister closely. She’d pulled her orange scarf right up to her eyes, perhaps out of embarrassment; she was wearing a chapka Barbara had made and buttoned down the earflaps. Meno filled his pipe. Now Anne took Regine’s arm, they were walking round and round, discussing how to deal with her effects. The Vietnamese tea chests could be sent to Jürgen’s address in Munich; Anne was to take the money for it from the sale of the furniture Regine had had to leave behind.

‘What did you have in mind?’

Regine turned to face Meno, who was sniffing the strong vanilla smell of his tobacco. A suspicious expression appeared on Hans’s face, though Meno had only asked out of curiosity and to pass the time. ‘Doesn’t matter.’

‘Richard thinks that as soon as you’re over there you should bring an action against the state for confiscating your paintings, even though there’s no chance of success, of course.’

‘The paintings have gone, Anne, and Jürgen’s sculptures too. That’s the price we had to pay.’

‘Ebony.’ Sperber examined the grandfather clock beside the lacquered door and the two delicate chairs where Arbogast and Joffe were sitting chatting. ‘What do you, as an expert, say?’ he asked, turning to Richard, who was standing beside him, glancing uneasily now and then at the door with the shining ‘Box’ over it. ‘I often went to see your father in Glashütte. He has an excellent collection and was so kind as to advise me on the purchase of various pieces. You admired some of them the last time you came to see me.’

The door was opened, the General Secretary let Barsano and the ex-Federal Chancellor go in first. Richard looked at the buffet, there were servants in ceremonial livery, frozen in bows. On the tables with damask cloths were butter knives with rounded blades. Looking at the butter knives, then the Comrade Chairman’s brightly shining face and his neck, stiffened by a snow-white, starched collar, Richard started in horror as it occurred to him how well suited to being cut through or hanged such necks seemed, even those of the ex-Chancellor and Barsano; yet they consisted of the same substance – vulnerable human flesh – as the necks of so-called ordinary people and Richard automatically started looking for a mark that branded them. Perfidious, forbidden thoughts!

‘I’m familiar with that look you have on your face at the moment, half pleasure, half horror,’ Sperber whispered. ‘It’s the expression associated with crime.’

‘Is that intended as a joke, Herr Sperber?’

‘I like to think I have some knowledge of human nature’ – the lawyer gave a brief smile – ‘and you get a thrill out of taking risks. There’s some attraction in having a conversation like this here. And I have to say such thoughts are not unknown to me. It’s the fear of the crime they might commit that drives young people into my profession. I’m interested in the depths people can sink to. I have quite a collection.’

‘How do you collect them?’

‘Not in the form of deep-sea charts or sections of the seabed, as you
might assume. – Don’t shake his hand, if you’re introduced to him. He doesn’t particularly like that, and he’s the one who determines the degree of familiarity.’

‘You feel sorry for them.’ Anne nodded in the direction of soldiers standing guard by a tank transport train.

‘What are you going to do?’ Regine asked as Anne looked in her purse.

‘Take them something to eat.’

‘But they’re Russians.’

‘They get cold too. Come with me, Mo, I can’t carry it all myself.’

They went to the Mitropa café, bought tea, potato soup with sausage and rolls; Meno and a grumbling waiter with cigarette burns in his snow-white jacket carried the teapot. The soldiers were standing by an outside track on the other side of the station. Suspicious, almost fearful, they felt for their Kalashnikovs when Anne showed them the bowls they’d brought. Meno said in Russian that they’d brought them something to eat, tea to warm them up. The soldiers, children’s faces with shaven heads and caps pushed back, looked longingly at the tea, but were hesitant about coming closer; one ran to the front of the train where an officer had jumped down from a carriage and was knocking the dust off his flat-peaked cap. They conferred. A second officer appeared, clearly of a higher rank than the first, for he reported to him. The second officer took his cap off, scratched his head, turned his hat in his hand for a while, went back, knocked on the carriage. After a while a third officer appeared, to whom the second reported this time.

‘Well, I’ll get back to my place of work,’ the waiter said. ‘I simply can’t believe it. And anyway, I’ve just got over a cold. No offence meant.’

He stuck his hands in his pockets and strolled off. The three Soviet officers exchanged glances. The soldier facing Meno and Anne stood,
motionless, with neutral, apprehensive expressions, now and then giving the bowls, Anne’s coat, Meno’s shoes a quick glance. The waiter returned, walking between two tracks. ‘What’s going on here, citizens?’

Silent and unannounced, a train arrived at Regine’s platform. Anne put the bowls down on the ground and was about to run over.

‘Stop!’ one of the policemen shouted, fiddling with his revolver belt. ‘Where are you going, citizen?’

‘Our friends are over there … the train –’

‘That’s the through train to Munich,’ the other policeman said. ‘What business is it of yours?’

‘We were accompanying our friends –’

‘And were going to try to emigrate illegally, I presume.’

‘What?!’ Meno exclaimed, completely baffled. The superior Soviet officer went over to the policemen and pointed at the bowls, the pot of soup, the tea.

‘What a load of nonsense!’ The waiter threw up his hands in despair.

‘We must ask you to follow us.’ The first policeman went in front of Meno and Anne, the second grasped the arm of the waiter, who was laughing. Across the station Regine and Hans were shouting and waving. When a whistle sounded they set off running, stumbling and encumbered with their thirteen pieces of luggage, Hans stopped once to put Philipp, on his shoulders, who, as far as Meno could tell, was merrily directing them with his little arms.

‘We will investigate what your true intentions in the vicinity of the Soviet armed forces were. Move!’ the first policeman ordered.

The Hoffmanns’ barometer indicated ‘changeable’. The first three days of May were cold. There was hail and snow, then the sun appeared, pale and still half asleep; suddenly, as if it had come to an abrupt decision, it climbed out of bed, full of energy. On the fourth the bees started to swarm. Waves of dandelions broke over the gardens on the slope above the Elbe. Bird cherry and sweet cherry blossomed. On the thirteenth Meno entered plum and pear in Libussa’s spring calendar, two days later the Cellini apples. When Meno looked out towards Pillnitz from the Langes’ conservatory, the white blossom covering the still winter-dark trees was like down from thousands of torn pillows.

One Sunday in the middle of May a wedding party was standing outside Pastor Magenstock’s church waiting for the bride and groom to appear. After a glance at her watch, one at Pastor Magenstock’s calming gesture, one at the sky, Barbara wailed that there was a jinx on the wedding: where were the two of them? And now the first drops were starting to fall, thick and soft as slugs, on Ulmenleite.

‘Doesn’t matter,’ Niklas said, opening the Tietzes’ family umbrella with demonstrative casualness over Gudrun and Reglinde; his own aristocratic pepper-and-salt thatch, still giving off the scent of Wiener’s birch hair lotion (it made Meno think of a Russian track across the fields with exultant larks and the obligatory horse-drawn cart), he sheltered under the porch, from which a blob occasionally spattered down. Pastor Magenstock was proud of the birds’ nests and all the spiders’ webs. They were all God’s creatures, he’d insisted to Barbara, to which Barbara had retorted that the Lord would do better to think of the dressmakers and their wearisome wedding preparations and did it not bother him that the stuff stuck to the soles of your shoes and was
thus trodden in all over the church? His Reverence had made a slight bow. Pastor Magenstock, as Meno was aware, had his own ideas about caring for his flock and what it meant to be a shepherd in difficult times. The ship of Christianity was heading for dangerous depths and sometimes when, in the dark of the night, Pastor Magenstock turned to the picture of Brother Luther – his countenance afire, the hammer of the fenceposts, lion of the Scriptures and flail of disputes – seeking a draught from the spirit of his strength, all he could hear was the familiar clatter of the loose shutters and the breathing of his seven loved ones.

Ulrich shook back the sleeve over his wristwatch, spread his arms wide, startling Josta and her husband (a fellow student of Wernstein’s, Richard had learnt, who was staring at a saint looking up in improbably mild ecstasy in the aisle of the church), rubbed his chin that, like all the male chins in the wedding party (even Robert’s and Ezzo’s, Ulrich had insisted because of the photos), had been shaved by Lajos Wiener himself with a heavy, blue-ground Solingen blade, stropped on Russia leather. All Ulrich said was ‘Oh, for Heaven’s sake’ (he wasn’t wearing his Party badge, Meno had established) spat out through clenched teeth, at which Barbara’s teacher Noack, the white-haired furrier from the Brühl, exchanged looks of concern with Barbara’s brother, Helmut Hoppe, a pastry cook at Elbflorenz, and pointed to the sky as a first rumble of thunder was heard.

‘But it’s true’ – Ulrich looked up at the sky with a shrug of the shoulders – ‘can’t stand criticism, eh?’

‘But surely Herr Kannegiesser will make it?’ Anne’s question sank into the unfathomable discretion of Pastor Magenstock’s face. Who knew whether the organist/choirmaster’s F9 could still manage the climb from the Mordgrund, past the Soviet army hospital and up to Turmstrasse?

‘I’m going to get in the car and go to meet them.’ Ulrich, furious, jutted out his chin and squeezed his key ring in his fist. ‘They must be somewhere. But I don’t suppose it would occur to your daughter and our son-in-law to find a telephone kiosk and call us?’

‘You never give us a call when you’re late. – Perhaps they’ve secretly run off.’ She’d seen a thing or two herself, Barbara said in horrified tones, in her life in and around Dresden.

‘Of course.’ Helmut Hoppe took out a hip flask. ‘Just you have a sip of egg liqueur, sister. Made it ourselves, it tastes better than the stuff from the other side. The eggs come straight from the farmer to our Rationalization Department and if it’s a long day, and it’s always a long day in the Rationalization Department, they rationalize this tasty little sauce.’

‘Here they are,’ Christian said. The fact that he was there was due to a promise he’d been able to give, after correspondence with Meno, to the sergeant in his new unit who dealt with requests for leave. ‘Private Hoffmann,’ Staff Sergeant Emmerich, known as Nip, said, ‘you’re an earhole in the second six months of your term and earholes don’t actually go on leave, but if you happen to have a Polski Fiat exhaust manifold …’ Meno had provided one.

Ina got out of the car, laughing. Wernstein and Dreyssiger, his best man, looked like dyers; both were stripped to their vests and shivering, despite the heat; their arms were smeared black up to the elbows. Ina was carrying their white shirts and tails.

‘For Heaven’s sake, child, what’s happened?’

‘Engine fault, mother-in-law.’

‘How stupid can you be! You should have left the car and taken a taxi.’

‘We tried, there were none available. And hitching a lift didn’t work either, there weren’t any cars to hitch.’

‘And what do you look like?! Can the pair of them get washed here, Herr Magenstock?’

‘We’ve only got cold water in the church. We’ll slip over to my house.’

Christian watched Ina as the three of them, followed by Magenstock, came back out of the parsonage; she still hadn’t calmed down and had
to hold on to the fence to give her exhausted body a few moments to gather strength such as happens in ripples between contractions or after the relief of vomiting in cases of gastroenteritis. Then she lifted her head and looked Barbara in the face: in moments of great agitation it resembled a horrified jackdaw. Limp and groaning, she raised her right hand and put it to her forehead, then she was once more shaken by convulsive laughter. Wernstein and Dreyssiger each hooked an arm under hers, Pastor Magenstock tried to hold an umbrella over the bride. The organist’s wife had rung up while they were in the parsonage to say her husband was ill, Dr Fernau, who was still with her, had said he must stay in bed, but she’d spoken with Herr Trüpel, who was already on his way to the church with a selection of records.

‘And there he is now, our sunshine man.’ Ulrich grinned.

‘A good thing we’ve got these excellent umbrellas. Do we feel smug! Magnificent.’ Helmut Hoppe licked a drop of egg liqueur off the rim of his hip flask and observed with interest Rudolf Trüpel as he fluttered along towards them in the now pouring rain like a water rail, bent under the weight of his case of records.

Many times before when Kannegiesser was ill, the owner of the Philharmonia record shop had helped to provide a solemn setting for weddings, baptisms and funerals. Meno remembered Christmas services with toccatas and fugues struck up by a player who sought release in music and showed no consideration for a parish choir on a Silbermann or Arp Schnitger organ in a hurricane of thunderous sound that aroused sinners’ consciences the moment Rudolf Trüpel, with quiet satisfaction and educational aggression, let them resound from the Japanese hi-fi equipment donated by members of a twinned parish in Hamburg with a concern for quality. Meno recalled his father telling him when he was a child about the Abode of Rest, as if Rest were a woman with a tenancy agreement and a list of the house rules, and when he remembered the domes of St Basil’s Cathedral on Red Square, he thought that was where she lived and not in the Arbat district and not in the office of
the director of the Lubyanka where a telephone screamed even when silent. The onion dome of St John’s in Schandau had had the same effect on him; now, however, in Ulmenleite the chain of associations broke off. The wedding party outside the church was getting restless (Barbara with discontentedly furrowed brow), for one of Bach’s funeral chorales after another was ringing out with the force of an alpenhorn blown next to the ear of a sleeping infant.

‘Great choir,’ Niklas said, ‘could be the Thomaskirche. It’s the Gewandhaus orchestra, the violins speak Saxon, but not that of Dresden.’

A further attempt brought melancholy, obstinacy and God with open arms.

‘Some marriages are like that,’ Helmut Hoppe said. ‘Anyone it makes think of egg liqueur is a rogue.’

‘You and your suggestive remarks,’ Helmut Hoppe’s wife Traudel sighed. ‘Can’t you keep them to yourself, at least at your niece’s wedding.’

‘Nah. It’d be nice if the wedding could get going. Oh look over there now. There’s a man shrugging his shoulders and spreading his arms. I know that from work. It means we’ll just have to improvise.’

The congregation was waiting inside the church while Herr Trüpel conferred with Pastor Magenstock. As far as Meno understood, Trüpel’s son must have swapped the contents of the record cases (baptism, wedding, funeral) round. Magenstock nodded, thought, adjusted his spectacles. Reglinde shook her head categorically. She had graduated from the school of church music but not taken up a post as organist/choirmaster. At the moment she was working in the zoo as an assistant keeper. Robert had an idea and as the wedding party entered the church, after the bride and groom and Pastor Magenstock, a choir, singing in canon, improvised Mendelssohn’s ‘Wedding March’ from the gallery: Trüpel conducted, Niklas’s bass imitated the organ, Gudrun the high
voices, Ezzo and Christian hummed delicate arabesques while two of Ina’s fellow students and Robert intoned the melody. Pastor Magenstock welcomed the bridal couple, family and friends. ‘We now begin this service in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost.’

‘Amen.’

‘Let us pray with the words of psalm thirty-six: Thy mercy, O Lord, is in the heavens and thy faithfulness reacheth unto the clouds …’

‘So there’s nothing doing under water, you can lie as much as you like down there,’ Helmut Hoppe whispered to Barbara, who was sitting in front of Meno.

‘I don’t believe in it myself, but enoeff. Blaspheming in church brings bad luck.’

‘… in thy light shall we see light. Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Ghost. As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end.’

‘Amen.’

Pastor Magenstock gave the choir a sign. A safe stronghold our God is still, a trusty shield and weapon – Trüpel conducted with feeling and zest. The voices of Noack, the furrier, and the Stenzel Sisters rose up, thin and quavering. Richard kept his eyes on the ground. Meno knew that he only went to church services as a favour to Anne and, that day, his niece. Kurt Rohde would come later and wait outside for Malivor Marroquin, who was to take the wedding photos. The hymn began to die away in embarrassed tatters; Trüpel brought the choir in again to bolster up the tailing off in the pews below and bring it to a conclusive end. Pastor Magenstock went up into the pulpit and began his sermon on the text chosen for the wedding ceremony. ‘But he that doeth truth cometh to the light, that his deeds may be made manifest, that they are wrought in God.’

Richard observed Lucie. She had scattered flowers with other children. Now she was sitting between Josta and the husband he didn’t know, surreptitiously dangling her legs. Daniel was lounging next to
Josta, blowing bubbles with his chewing gum, and kept turning his head round.

‘What a badly behaved boy,’ Anne whispered. ‘Why does he keep grinning at you? Do you know him?’

‘No. Perhaps a patient’s son.’

Richard listened to the sermon for a while, then let it go in one ear and out the other when Magenstock brought in his third parable: the kingdom of heaven was like unto a net that was cast into the sea, and gathered of every kind; the good were gathered into vessels, the bad were cast away. That made Richard think. Wasn’t there a hymn that said: Whatever thou may be, come to Him and He will welcome thee? So the kingdom of heaven had to fish out its own inhabitants … Did that mean the little fish felt no desire to swim into heaven and had to be dragged up out of their stupidity and into paradise? But if it was so splendid up there why did the fish not go of their own accord? All that seemed familiar to him. He watched Magenstock, who was in the pulpit, preaching with joyful fervour. It also brought back the scene in the forest when Wernstein, Dreyssiger and he had tried to steal a Christmas tree. A hymn started, he didn’t join in; too proud to pretend. He didn’t know any of these hymns and Ina, he thought irritably, hadn’t thought of making copies of the words for those who didn’t know them. And, of course, there weren’t even enough hymn books. Ulrich seemed to be able to keep up pretty well … Interesting. The Stenzel Sisters didn’t need a hymn book. They stood up straight in their row giving those beside them, doctors from the Academy, their noses plodding along the lines of a shared hymn book, looks of restrained puzzlement. As Ina Wernstein was putting the ring on her husband’s finger (with a grin, as Richard could tell from his view diagonally behind her: Wernstein’s fingernails were still dirty from the engine oil), Barbara shouted for help, scrabbling around wildly in her cleavage; a scorpion had fallen on her, she said, running out of the church, Ulrich behind her. ‘An earwig,’ he whispered when they came back.

‘Our father, who art in heaven.’

Richard resolved to ask about Wernstein’s family; the wedding party seemed to consist of just the Rohde wing and a few of Wernstein’s colleagues from the Academy and his student days.

‘Plizz lukk at liddel gold-finsh, plizz sink she fly naow, you smile.’ Outside the church door, in the damp light of a returning sun, Malivor Marroquin was adjusting their positions for the photo. Kurt Rohde kissed Ina on both cheeks, looked Wernstein up and down, turning his face either way as he did so, gave him a brief but hearty pat on the shoulder; Meno thought: he likes him, all the rest is embarrassment. Typical Tower-dweller. They do have the big emotions but they play them down, they prefer to make them look ridiculous rather than admit to them; to show them all too openly would seem like an affront to them, indiscreet, an infringement of the inviolable inner sphere. To speak the secrets out loud is to lose them, anyone who is lavish with the big emotions doesn’t respect them; they avoid kitsch and prefer to tone down the grand gesture; they are afraid of the things that are important to them being sold off cheaply. Marroquin held up his light meter, adjusted the three thumbscrews on the wooden tripod legs that looked like propellers which were about to join forces to lift the scratched, bulky camera case with its brass-bound lens and black cloth up into the air, leaving the baffled photographer standing there with the torn-off cable release in his hand. Marroquin had closed off the street with two warning triangles (‘Photography in progress’). He wasn’t put off when cars started to hoot, waggled a warning index finger at them as he threw his red flag of a scarf in a challenging gesture over his coat, the pockets of which, added by Lukas, the tailor, according to Marroquin’s instructions, were crammed with pieces of photographic equipment and accessories that might turn out useful in the usual kind of session (‘What do you think, how is it to be? – No idea, you’re the expert’): false noses, paper chrysanthemums, for children a Makarov cap-pistol. Marroquin wore a beret with a badge pinned
to it over his long white hair that was engaged in philosophical discussion with the bewitching May breezes; on the badge were the words ‘
No pasarán’
between exclamation marks, one inverted, one normal, that looked to Meno like two quarrelling fists and had a strangely ironic effect (why two exclamation marks, wasn’t one enough?); at least he couldn’t repress a smile when he imagined Party slogans between the belligerent punctuation marks.