The Tower: A Novel (70 page)

‘I call on Eduard Eschschloraque to speak.’

‘’Tis hard to speak the truth when / falsehood rules the world. / Who would seek the sun that scorches? / Desert with no shade and no oasis, / the pure and unresponding slate, / the mirror whose reflection’s just a void? / One thing alone is meaningless and sad, / two it takes for question and response, / each to fortify the other’s weakness. / Now I will play the devil’s advocate / and in this gath’ring pose some awkward questions, / such as: What is freedom / when all barriers fall? / For does not Goethe say about the law: / That it alone can give us freedom? / What is our constitution that, like a ring of iron, / binds both tongues and human flesh, / that ages and expires? / What is the boundless ocean for the ship / that’s guided by the hand / of the figurehead atop the prow?’

‘Wow! Off by heart.’

‘ “They are bad people – and yet good musicians,” / Brentano said, inverting the set phrase in
Ponce de Leon
. / And did we not begin / to get on with each other / but then: “What do you think of him … between ourselves? / A gem-encrusted toad but decomposing. / There he is, watch out. – Eschschloraque, my friend, / it long has been my wish to tell you how / deeply I admire your sh— … shows, / your bravery as well to see / the spirit of the age as water in the loo / and
all that floats thereon worth being flushed away.” / – Hypocrisy, for instance. / In my hands you see a catalogue / of class enemies and nicely printed / by a nasty publisher in the West. There / among them is our dear own Günter Mellis / and others of the fauna of our state. / They should be punished, yes. / But I demand the same for Mellis and his ilk / for swine are those who call another swine / and have themselves their snouts deep in the trough.’

‘Outrageous! Off! Off!’

‘The time is out of joint / but faithful I remain unto our fathers’ ways, / hold close to the laws, which makes our dreams unbounded / and people in accord. / Sweet honey often comes from bitter combs! / Order must have order of its own, / discord ne’er was by discord o’erthrown. – By the way, Herr Schade, you should check your German. “A weapon that planes out pencil shavings” – language like that is a monkey with fleas picking at it.’

‘Herr Rohde, Herr Groth, as chairman of this meeting it is my duty to point out that it is our minutes secretaries who are taking everything down in shorthand. After Herr Eschschloraque’s contribution, that was, as ever, both witty and helpful, the last person to speak before the break will be Judith Schevola. After that the buffet will be set out at the rear entrance.’

Dietzsch, the sculptor, kicked the lock, one of the rifle-brown, bug-shaped pieces ‘from the good old days’ such as were occasionally available for special customers from Iron-Feustel’s by Rothenburger Strasse; a lock with a shackle as thick as your finger that only snapped
open after the fourth or fifth blow with a cross-pein hammer, ‘like a crocodile’s jaw that has just overcome the resistance of some chewing gum,’ Dietzsch said; Richard thought the comparison childish and enjoyed it; the painter clicked the lock open and shut a few times, it must be a good feeling, security, quality, parts that smoothly fitted together; some people became prison guards for that feeling. Stahl had gone back a little way, which surprised Richard – wasn’t he interested in what Dietzsch wanted to show them and that they’d driven several kilometres to see? The quarry was in Lohmen, a small place near Pirna. Dietzsch had made a great fuss about it and adopted the expression of someone who decides he’s really going to show people something; ‘I know about your hobby, Dr Hoffmann, and you did a great job operating on that carpal-tunnel thing; I think I’ve got something for you.’ Now Stahl was watching two sculptors working at the other end of the quarry. ‘Jerzy, our Pole, and Herr Büchsendreher,’ Dietzsch called out to him, pointing to a rock above them on which bearded faces had been painted.’ Jerzy’s work, art is a weapon, but he wouldn’t harm a fly.’

Stahl shaded his eyes with his hand, surveying the rocky outcrops, the thick brushwood above them. ‘Tell me, is there only the one way in here, through the gate at the front?’ Stahl didn’t turn round to Dietzsch, but studied the dumper trucks, tackle on stands over sandstone blocks, rails leading from the gate to a few goods wagons brooding forlornly in the sun, lowered his hand, then put it back to shade his eyes when Dietzsch replied; the sun was pouring its dazzling light over the unworked blocks lying around and the separate sculptures.

‘Yes, and normally it’s locked. We’re not particularly keen on having visitors, you know, especially not unannounced ones. Sometimes children come in and have even managed to wreck some sculptures. They climbed over the gate. We’ve welded barbed wire onto it and since then we’ve had no problems.’

‘How
do we get in, then? Through the bushes?’

‘There’s no way through. Jerzy tried but couldn’t get farther than a couple of metres. – If we do the deal, you’ll get a key from me. You could get in at the weekend as well, usually there’s no one here then. We’ve got electricity, water you’d have to bring yourself; we are connected up, but it’s shut off at weekends.’ Dietzsch slammed back a bolt, opened the shed door, ushered Richard and Stahl in first. Their eyes had to adjust to the dim half-light. The sculptor shooed away a few hens that had presumably got in through the dilapidated roof. The large space was partitioned off into separate areas in which there was a jumble of sculptures, orange boxes, petrol cans, tools, at the side on the left bales of straw, horse collars and a shapeless something underneath a tarpaulin. Dietzsch pulled it off. ‘It’s yours – for five thousand marks, I thought.’

‘Hispano-Suiza.’ Stahl leant over the radiator.

‘One moment.’ Dietzsch tugged at a shutter, the light suddenly pouring in dazzled them.

‘A vintage car.’ Stahl slowly walked round it. Richard stood behind the sculptor, always behind the seller, that was Arthur’s tactic when he was going to buy or swap a clock; never be the first to say something about the goods on offer, if you have to speak, then a vague, casual remark to get your voice under control, to disappoint expectations, reduce tension, no give-away gestures, no indifference that could be seen as feigned.

He could go on and on for hours about bodywork
, Meno wrote,
mere covers – though of course he would never have called them that – for technology that meant nothing to me and which (like most of his guests, I assumed, especially the women) I found boring; what I didn’t find boring was the way he, a surgeon, raised his hands and indicated shapes, tenderly and bashfully as if it were women’s bodies that the doctor in him was looking at, with a professional eye and yet receptive; names rained down on our poor heads,
only Robert seemed to be really taken with the subject, returning the names to his father like table-tennis balls. ‘Saoutchik – did you hear that, Meno? Isn’t that a name, a sound that sends shivers down your spine? Maybach and Duesenberg, Rolls-Royce and Bugatti – don’t they sound like extinct gigantic beasts? This construction drawing, look at the interplay of the lines, so elegant and clear, if you ask me what poetry is, Meno, this is it! If I were a painter, I’d paint construction pieces like that. Gerhart Stahl, I’m calling you by your full name because you understand me. We use all these things every day but hardly anyone apart from a professional reflects on them at all. What, for God’s sake, is a brake? Do you think it’s a matter of course that the steering wheel’s on the left? Can you imagine that there were coachbuilders who covered the bumpers in leather. Do you know how it is and what it means to touch a bumper like that? I have heard that in a museum in Washington there’s a piece of stone from the Moon and no one can go past without touching it – does it feel the same as stone from the Earth? Oh my God, am I going to get some extraterrestrial disease, are there unknown rays in this thing? A leather-covered bumper, that’s the skin of an animal on a machine that is going to vibrate with power. Forged muscles, veins of copper, joints of stainless steel. A giraffe-skin pattern on a bonnet, tough dark-blue paintwork on a Horch, a Daimler-Benz, a Bugatti La Royale, an Isotta Fraschini Tipo 8B with Landaulett-De-Ville bodywork from the Milan coachbuilder Castagna. And what do we have? A hat on wheels by the name of Dacia, a sardine tin transformed into a frog by the name of Saporoshez, a petty-bourgeois’s dream with the aerodynamics of a snow plough by the name of Wartburg; we have a stuttering loaf of army bread by the name of Polski Fiat, a whining abomination by the name of Trabant, known as the cardboard racer, a two-stroke with steering-column gear lever, with jolts and toxic exhaust, but non-standard the earmuffs we ought to be wearing when we’re rattling at 70 kph to the Baltic coast with the feeling we’re inside the throat of a screaming baby!’ That, said Richard, was the theme of his Christmas lectures to students. Only Robert and Ulrich showed any interest, Christian, arms crossed, stared at the floor as if he
found it embarrassing to see his father in the role of an enthusiast, Barbara picked fluff off the sleeves of her blouse, Niklas and Gudrun examined the colour pictures of cars Richard slid across the table, then returned to the pieces of cake on their plates
–

‘A vintage car, yes,’ Richard said.

‘Not any old vintage car,’ Dietzsch said, ‘a Hispano-Suiza H6B, 1924, right-hand drive, six-cylinder engine with 6.5 litres cubic capacity, rear-wheel drive and a top speed of a hundred and thirty kph.’

‘Mechanical servo-brake back-up,’ Richard said.

‘Doesn’t work all that well in reverse,’ Dietzsch said. ‘Rolls-Royce improved it. Basically normal drum brakes. The inner drum is linked to the drive shaft by a worm shaft.’

‘And thus gives torsion to the whole system,’ Richard said. ‘The shaft rotates anti-clockwise, thus moving the cable drums for the front wheels and the levers for the rear.’

‘One cable drum is missing,’ Dietzsch said.

‘The car’s yellow,’ Stahl said.

‘The leather’s black,’ Richard said.

‘Double-quilted leather from Provençal cows, tanned with plant extract and upholstered with horsehair,’ Dietzsch said. ‘That yellow’s interesting, I had to rack my brains about it. For grapefruit yellow it’s too rich, for banana yellow the scent’s lacking, neither cadmium nor Indian yellow, sulphur’s too loud, it’s not the shade of gamboge or buttercups, not nankeen yellow, not Naples yellow or Hansa yellow, not egg yolk yellow, not saffron yellow.’

‘But?’ Stahl said.

‘The closest is Vatican yellow,’ Dietzsch said. ‘Vatican flag yellow. Papal yellow.’

‘What kind of bird is that?’ Stahl tapped the figure on the bonnet; it was attached over a sideways-on rhombus with a winged Swiss cross.

‘A stork,’ Richard said.

‘Aha,
a stork,’ Stahl said.

‘Have you anything against storks?’ Dietzsch said.

‘No,’ Stahl said.

‘Oh yes you have,’ Richard said. ‘ “Aha, a stork” – it sounded like: all animals with wings are blackbirds, if they’re flying at twilight they’re bats, if they’ve a splash of red on their breasts they’re robins.’

‘There are two tyres missing, the exhaust’s hanging loose and can I have a look at the engine?’ Stahl said.

‘There’s a story to the stork,’ Dietzsch said.

‘Obviously,’ Stahl said.

‘Then I won’t bother,’ Dietzsch said.

If a museum, then the Museum of Transport
, Meno wrote,
or an art galley; at Anne’s insistence he went to the 1984 Klee Exhibition in the Albertinum, outside which the Dresdeners formed 200-metre-long queues in the winter slush; with Ulrich to the Francke Foundations in Halle to see a collection of medical preparations. Richard knew every nook and cranny of the Museum of Transport. Sometimes he went there with Father, the Museum of Transport was one of their common interests. Kurt would say, ‘Look over there, Richard’, Richard would say, ‘Look over there, Kurt.’ Both would say, ‘Oh come on, Meno, look around.’ Richard would talk about spark plugs, something that lasted despite the great strain put on it, as far as one could talk about earthly things lasting. No misfiring right up to the end, at least not in the West. Standing by the Benz, he talked about the first long-distance journey in a car, ironically the first car driver of all had been a woman: at the crack of dawn on an August day in 1888 Bertha Benz, the wife of the man who constructed the car, climbs into the rattling vehicle resembling a horseless carriage with her two sons, not before leaving a note for her husband that they had no intention of abandoning him, and sets off from Mannheim for Pforzheim to visit her mother. Climbing the hills of the Black Forest, Bertha and fifteen-year-old Eugen have to get
off, leaving thirteen-year-old Richard to steer. Downhill they go with smoking brakes; the leather brake linings get so worn Bertha has to have them replaced en route by cobblers. A blocked petrol feed is cleared with a hatpin, an ignition wire insulated with a garter after a short circuit. Petrol is bought at the apothecary’s. Everywhere people stand and stare, in one inn two peasants almost get into a fight over an argument as to whether the carriage is driven by clockwork – but then where’s the key to wind it up, it must be huge – or by supernatural forces. They reach Pforzheim before it gets dark. That was the start of the triumphant progress of the car. We went to the Museum of Transport, saw aeroplanes, ships, trains, the array of vintage cars in the glass-roofed yard; as Richard went round, more and more adults and children stopped to listen to his explanations – I had the feeling he was talking deliberately loudly to show off his knowledge, at least he had no objection to other people listening. After a few minutes he was accompanied by an entourage of visitors eager for information and anecdotes, attendants included, as long as they could remain within sight of their exhibits
–

After he’d bought the car, Richard went to Lohmen as often as he could. Stahl had more time; he worked in a department for rationalization and innovation and most of his suggested rationalizations and innovations were not accepted by the management. On weekdays when he wasn’t on call, Richard would drive out in the evening, at weekends at dawn. He left the money for Daniel with Nina Schmucke.