The Tower: A Novel (67 page)

‘All right, then, since it’s you. I don’t want people saying I was stingy at my daughter’s wedding.’

‘Nah, you’ve never been a penny-pincher, have to give you that,’ Helmut Hoppe said, his Saxon accent becoming thicker and thicker. ‘How long did it take to put all this stuff together, eh? An’ what did y’use t’ grease their palms, the bastards? I s’pose a few mattress springs must’ve changed hands. But you’re tryin’ to wriggle out of it, Uli boy, you’re changin’ the subject again. I don’t think the old geezer would’ve liked that, him bein’ a friend of all the nations, like. Now out with it, the recipe f’ this voddy. By the way, chief’ – Helmut Hoppe turned to Herr Honich – ‘your suckin’ pig’s great, I c’d gorge myself on it, I really could.’

‘Right then. You take spirit, ninety-six proof, to which you add distilled water to the desired amount. Add one sugar cube and three drops of pure glycerine. Seal the bottle.’

‘Thass all?’

‘Then some blackberry leaves picked in the spring.’

‘Why picked in the spring?’

‘That’s when they’re full of juice, I assume. You put them in a little bottle with pure alcohol. Close the bottle and leave it in the warm sun on the windowsill for ten days.’

‘An’ what if it rains for ten days? Y’ll be left wi’ no’hing but vinegar.’

‘You put three drops of that extract in the big bottle.’

‘Jus’ three drops? Sounds a bit acupuncturic, ’f y’ask me. An’ then?’

‘The vodka’s ready.’

‘Ready?’

‘Ready.’

‘Don’ b’leeve it.’

‘It’s true.’

‘Reelly ready?’

‘Really.’

Helmut Hoppe regarded his glass. ‘Well yeh, now y’say so, the taste of a few blackcurrants does come through. Did y’hear Weizsäcker’s speech?’

‘No.’

‘I did.’

‘And?’

‘Hm. More’n three drops o’ blackcurrant in there. Great guy, a real Fed’ral Preziden’ he is. Looks impressive, no’ like the bigwigs here. I wonder what’s goin’ t’ happen in the Soviet Union now. They’ll have t’ keep off the blackcurrants now, so t’ speak. Y’r uncle Shoe-ra ’ll be drinkin’ water ’stead o’ vodker. Hey, look, the dancin’s startin’.’

Richard, sitting beside Niklas at a table at the far end, only heard snatches of what people at the top were saying. He observed Josta, who, to his relief, was sitting a long way away from Anne, with Wernstein’s friends at a table under the blossoming pear trees. Lucie didn’t look round at him. The man cut up her food for her, wiped her mouth, raised his forefinger two or three times, at which she nodded and lowered her head. Richard would have most liked to get up and knock the guy flat, it took a great deal of self-control to appear uninvolved, to sip his wine and feign interest in what Niklas had to say about the re-election of Ronald Reagan, Michel Platini’s goals at the European Championships, the sudden disappearance of touch-up spray for cars from the stores (there’d been a film called
Beat Street
, following which trains had been sprayed with graffiti). Anne threw him a glance now and then, which made him even more annoyed, and when Herr Scholze and Alois Lange appeared, telling jokes, he excused himself and got up. As Richard was heading for the iron table, someone pulled him into the bushes. It was Daniel.

‘Awkward situation, isn’t it?’ The boy grinned. He’d shot up, at fourteen he was almost as tall as Christian. ‘How about a little deal?’

‘What kind of deal?’

‘Well, I won’t go up, tap my glass with a spoon and tell things about you and my mother – and you shell out a hundred marks for that.’

Richard said nothing.

‘I’m serious,’ the boy said with a smile. ‘I really feel like going up to your wife and whispering things to her.’

‘You do, do you?’ Richard looked round.

‘Don’t worry, there’s no one here. Apart from a damn tomcat perhaps. Your wife would be delighted.’

‘She already suspects something,’ Richard replied, weary and horrified.

‘But you’re not sure. Are you willing to take the chance? It’d be great to drop a bomb like that in the middle of a wedding.’

‘So Lucie’s got a louse of a brother.’

‘Hey, don’t you dare touch me! Come on, let’s get this over with before someone comes. I get a hundred marks or –’

Richard looked in his wallet. ‘I’ve only got a fifty with me.’

Daniel looked surprised, seemed to become uneasy, then he noticed Richard’s wristwatch. ‘Then give me that.’

‘No.’

‘Hand it over.’

‘No. It’s a family heirloom, my oldest son’s going to get it.’

‘Lange and Sons,’ Daniel read, tilting his head to the side. ‘Now I’m going to have it, otherwise in two minutes you’re a dead man, I promise.’

Richard stared at Daniel. ‘Can’t we discuss this?’

‘Not interested.’

‘We could meet some time.’

‘Give me the watch.’

‘OK, my friend. But what do I tell my wife when she asks me where it is? She saw me putting it on.’

‘I don’t care. Think something up. Tell her it was stolen.’

‘Which would be more or less the case.’

‘In the Sachsenbad, for example. When you went swimming one Thursday.’

‘And I put it on today, before her very eyes? Come on.’

‘Then it was stolen here. Perhaps by the bridegroom before he sailed off to Cuba.’

‘Then I’d go straight over to her and we’d turn everything upside down. She’d probably also suspect you’ve got it. She was watching you before, in the church. And do you really think I wouldn’t notice if someone stole the watch off my wrist?’

‘Then you can bring it to the Sachsenbad for me next Thursday, then you could say it was stolen there.’

‘In that case that’s the end of your blackmail here. And if your
attempted blackmail comes up, I might have to get divorced – but you’ll end up in the juvenile court.’

Daniel hesitated, broke off a twig, twisted it into little pieces. Richard’s anger had gone, now he felt sorry for the lad. ‘Why do you need the money?’

‘I did something stupid,’ Daniel said after a while.

‘Does Josta know about it?’

‘No. Nor her new guy either.’

Richard observed the boy. There was something funny about a blackmail attempt from someone whose voice was breaking. Suddenly Daniel took a step towards him and threw his arms round him.

‘There I am, walkin’ in Saxon Swizz’land, and su’nly I’m under this huge rock, a real whopper. An’ I says to myself, if that comes down you won’t be able to catch it all at once. Have a drink, Meno, then we’ll go an’ dance.’ Helmut Hoppe swayed slightly when he stood up. He went to fetch a bottle, checked the glasses on the table, as if he were trying to work out the course of an obstacle race, looked at the label, then the metal spout in the neck of the bottle, pulled it to one side, like a flag being kept away from enemy hands, and sent clear, curving jets of schnapps spouting over glasses, trousers and shoulders.

‘I’ve been reading your books,’ Meno said to Ulrich, who raised an ironic, wait-and-see eyebrow as he licked a few splashes he’d wiped off his suit, ‘and, as I see it, in the final analysis everything’s a question of energy. Brown coal’s our primary source of energy. But you have to be able to get at it. If I’ve understood the tables in the paper correctly, it costs more to clear away a unit of overburden than the same unit of brown coal brings in?’

‘Economics –’ Ulrich started to reply, but Honich broke in. ‘Where’d you read that?’

‘In a memorandum from the Economic Secretariat of the Central Committee.’

‘An internal document,’ Ulrich said. ‘It mustn’t go any farther.’

‘But they’ll have reserves of which we here know nothing.’ Honich nodded earnestly. ‘Some things are difficult to understand, but the comrades on the Central Committee are no fools and so far we’ve overcome all difficulties. The unity of economic and social policy –’

‘– costs more than we can afford,’ Ulrich said.

‘Surely you don’t mean that seriously?’

‘I do, and it’s no secret, ask in your organization. Ask the men with whom you do your exercises. Only recently I was at a meeting of the Planning Commission and people were speaking just as openly.’

‘Aha, private tuition again, is it?’ Gerhart Stahl asked, seeing their looks of dismay, also fear, as he walked past. ‘Just be careful what you say, the sky isn’t blue, even if that’s the way you see it, but red, and Moscow’s a long way away.’

‘Please refrain from these constant hostile remarks, Herr Stahl. I warn you, there’ll come a time when you suffer the consequences.’ Pedro Honich turned back to Ulrich Rohde and Helmut Hoppe. ‘You’re right, there are shortcomings. I’m not blind, even if Herr Stahl thinks I am. But just think what we’re aiming for, what our country has achieved so far, what ruins had to be cleared away, and what it could achieve if our people … These childhood diseases could be eradicated, we could work together on building a future where truly socialist life could blossom –’

‘D’you know what an economy is?’ Helmut Hoppe downed a schnapps. ‘I need a dustpan – an’ I can choose one from half a dozen, even if it looks like my wife. And d’you know what a planned economy is? When there’s not even any dust.’

‘Excuse me, but it’s always the same old story. Are things really that bad for you? If I look at the spread set out here, the presents for the couple, and compare it with what we used to have – What are you complaining about?’

‘OK then, y’re right there. That’s true. When I was young I
sometimes didn’t have a car; an’ my Traudel an’ me couldn’t go sailin’ off to Cuba either, all we knew about Cuba was the Cuba crisis.’

‘I’m pinning my hopes on Gorbachev,’ Pedro Honich said. ‘I think he’s a good man.’

‘Openness, glasnost. If he’s for openness, great, but what’s being opennessed? That brown coal makes a mucky mess? You know that anyway, you don’t need to read about it in the paper as well. And perestroika an’ perfume both begin with a P, as my Traudel says.’

‘If all members of the working class were to talk like you …’

‘Oh, knock it off. I come from a firm that’s an existent reality. And the way things go there’s as follows: people go to work and after work there’s nothin’ left in the shops. So they do their shoppin’ during work hours. And I’m the foreman, am I to forbid them from doing that? ’s what I do masel’. We make things that aren’t there, an’ if there is something there, we make a queue. An’ even the Comrade Chairman of the State Council said there’s a lot more c’d be got out of our enterprises.’

‘That’s why we have the problems we have,’ Pedro Honich replied. Malivor Marroquin slipped past, taking photos. Hoppe put his schnapps glass calmly down on the table. ‘I’ve been awarded the “Activist of Socialist Work” medal several times,’ he said, slowly and emphatically, his strong dialect disappearing, ‘and as for Uli, he’s even got the “Hero of Work”. Are you trying to tell me what things are like in my firm?’

‘Over here,’ Kurt Rohde shouted from the balcony. ‘The king of the dance floor gets a kiss from the bride, the queen one from the bridegroom.’

Josta and her husband left, Richard went into the summerhouse. In one corner Robert was kissing one of Ina’s fellow students. Richard was taken aback for a moment, then said, ‘Don’t mind me, I’ll be gone in a minute.’ He checked the foot pump for the air beds. When he looked up he saw that the girl’s blouse was undone. ‘Is this something serious between you? I mean, I’m going to have to change the nameplate on our apartment door anyway. – Are you on the pill?’

‘Are you always that direct?’ The girl, flabbergasted, was smoothing her hair. Robert put his hand in his pocket and held up a packet of Mondo condoms.’

‘Hm, I didn’t want a practical demonstration,’ Richard muttered. ‘Just be careful, sometimes the things burst.’

A yellow leather glove atop a fencepost, beside it a note wrapped in cling-film: ‘I lost the other one here. Reward for the finder: this left glove’, a pair of scissors on a garage window ledge, the rusty nautilus at Philalethes’ View. Christian looked up at the sky, which was turning a darker blue from the south. A few boys were preparing to play football and were arguing about names: ‘I’m Pelé.’ – ‘Rubbish, you’re Zoff and you’re in goal.’ – ‘But I’m Beckenbauer.’ – ‘OK, then I’m Rummenigge.’ Some men had lugged buckets of water out to wash their cars and were discussing the look of the sky, arms akimbo. Others were standing in their slippers by the street letter boxes nodding, waving away remarks, tapping the newspaper they’d brought with the back of their hand. The elms along Mondleite drew in their green, then released it, like old ladies letting out their breath after the tensest moments of a tragic opera; the wind died down, freshened again, sending blossom and winter ash swirling up in fine sashes – undecided, like a child playing with sand and getting bored. The first raindrops spattered the brightness of the street with blots of slate-grey. Christian went back to the House with a Thousand Eyes, while the sky looked like a swimming pool of ink edged with flailing treetops; in the gardens tables were hurriedly cleared away or covered with plastic sheets, portable radios and children brought under cover. A little dog came running down a garden path yapping angrily, whirling round at the gate on its tiny paws. How mysterious it all was.

The dance; without interrupting a single number, the band from the Roeckler School of Dancing retired, instrument by instrument, to the shelter of the tarpaulin under the canopy of oak leaves: first the
cello, then the violin; last of all the grand piano, together with the pianist on his chair, was rolled under the trees. Then the rain fell so heavily that the paper streamers over the sweet briars tore and there was a moment of uncertainty. But Herr Adeling stayed standing in the doorway, ramrod straight in his tails and white shirt, which was gradually becoming transparent, in his left hand a tray with champagne glasses, over his right a napkin hanging down like a dead stoat. Gudrun held Niklas tighter; Herr Honich, the best dancer, stuck it out with Traudel Hoppe; Barbara and Ulrich threw off their shoes, for puddles were already forming. ‘Kalimba de luna’, ‘Über sieben Brücken musst du geh’n’, ‘Goodbye, Ruby Tuesday’. Meno watched the rain gradually taking over from the champagne in the glasses until the contents were like clear water. To whoops and cheers Gudrun Tietze and Pedro Honich were crowned the best dancers. But they went unkissed: Ina and Thomas Wernstein had gone.