The Tower: A Novel (74 page)

Was that not one of the grey sisters, as Falkenhausen had called them, floating down? Common spider to you, garden spider to me. Or was it a winged fruit from one of the shady trees that surrounded Lietzenburg, only allowing the sun to tiptoe in? The spider scuttled up the window frame, paused, raised its rear end (now it was presumably releasing its gossamer thread, you couldn’t see it), waited until the pull told it that it could let go – and off it went. Meno looked up at the sky: clear, cloudless days, a dry blue, Our Lady’s weather as the old people in Schandau used to call it. Summer’s surface scraped away, hot days paid for with chilly nights; already an extravagance of blossom and insect activity, a burden pulling down upward-striving forces. He thought of the cliffs at the north end of the island. There the god Svantevit vented his swirling fury, boiling current and mud, flowing over sticky loam, the smooth-washed, putty-white flesh of the beach, turning potters’ wheels in the swell, grating on water-organs, binding fast wave-frisbees that swept every swimmer along, sharpening the breakers into knives that cut deep into the island’s body, clawing up shingle and clay, tirelessly paring away, in ever-new upswings of rage, grooves, tunnels and caves in the steep faces that were sagging, eroding, crumbling; sappers’ trenches edged forward between two projecting rocks that marked the line of terra firma, long since gnawed away, and, heralded by trickling, rolling rubble and clouds of dust, collapsed into the sea or onto the remaining narrow strip of sand. Meadows tore off from the overhang like wet paper. Pines, brave and tenacious in the carousels of wind and hurricane, tumbled over. The sparse vegetation on the cliff flanks was scraped off. The tidal runnels gurgled, raged, lashed, sobbed, fizzed, drummed, pounded, depending on the strength
and direction of the wind; in the autumn squalls, said the Old Man of the Mountain, who had the room opposite Philipp Londoner’s at the end of the corridor, it sometimes sounded like a ship being wrecked: creaking wood, splintering masts, drowning bodies whirled down into the gullet of the sea surrounded by the howling, growling tarantella of the storm orchestra. A garden spider on the fan of the spokes. So they were already flying, the young spiders. The Indian summer was early this year. For Judith Schevola just one more reason to borrow other people’s clothes (despite the half-dozen pieces of luggage – ‘I always find someone to lug my stuff’), to wear Meno’s pullover with Philipp’s suit when they were sitting round the hall fire in the evening. There was a knock at the door.

‘Are you coming? We’re going for a swim.’ Judith Schevola, a rainbow-bright beach bag, made from strips of cloth sewn together, hanging from her left forefinger, came into the room without waiting for Meno’s answer, pushed the carriage of his typewriter until it went ‘pling’, opened, after having hung her bag on the line-space adjuster, the cupboard and started to rummage through Meno’s things. ‘I would have bet you’d have several of these things. One to dry, one to use, one as replacement. What did I say?’ In triumph she held up three pairs of swimming trunks. ‘How can you sit in here in weather like this – doing what? Don’t tell me you’re writing? Poems?’ Her gravelly laugh had become less husky, the sea air was obviously doing her good and she seemed to be smoking less. ‘You can’t write in here. These crocheted lampshades, these tablecloths, one square red, one square white, the same on the bedspread, red square, white square and always tiny little squares.’ She switched on the room radio. ‘You can hear the sea!’ she commented on the froth of noise interspersed with a swirl of hissing and crackling, occasional deep-sea Scandinavians and snatches of Tchaikovsky, abruptly clear then breaking off, coming from the loudspeaker grille under the faded photograph of the chairman of the
trade union. Meno looked at Judith’s bare feet, which, as she walked, no: tripped, produced cheeky facial expressions at the back of the knees of her frayed jeans. She went over to the washbasin, smelt the Fa soap (a present from Ulrich), sniffed at his aftershave, peered at his bushily splayed shaving brush, unscrewed the top of his toothpaste tube, squeezed out a blob onto her index finger and quickly rubbed it round her mouth, not seriously cleaning her teeth. Then she gargled, spat out, said ‘Big nose’ to her mirror image, stuck out her tongue at the fascinated and flabbergasted Meno. ‘Come on, then. What are you waiting for? For the house dragon to come and give us a lecture on socialist morality?’ From Lietzenburg there was a path through dog roses and thickets of sea buckthorn. There was a smell of henbane. Lizards were sunning themselves on broken steps and only gave way hesitantly to a cautious foot. Philipp Londoner and the Old Man of the Mountain were already on the beach. Philipp had built a stockade of sand and put a windbreak between the walls. Now he was busy making the names of the users by laying pebbles in the sand, he’d already done SCHEVOLA and ALTBERG. He was sitting there, naked and tanned, immersed in this, as Judith Schevola declared with a laugh, very German activity, wearing a straw hat underneath which his long hair was blowing in the wind. The Old Man of the Mountain was naked too. Meno had some objections to naturism, and even more to the uninhibited way Schevola went about it. With a few quick movements she was undressed, just keeping her rubber sandals on; the beach was stony, as everywhere along this stretch of the coast. Meno observed her. Her lips curved in a malicious grin, she smeared sun cream all over herself with obvious pleasure. Was one not exposed to enough indiscretion in this country? The naked body was a mystery and should remain so. The same naked body was untouchable when bathing, when flirting it haunted your imagination; he thought you lost something when it was presented unveiled, however attractive it might be. It had
been seen, there was no room for the imagination any more. In the House with a Thousand Eyes, alone in the thick foliage of the garden on a warm summer morning, nakedness was something different. Meno stared at Schevola’s beach bag, Philipp at his pebbles, the Old Man of the Mountain pursed his lips and occasionally pretended he had to shake his ears out.

‘Would one of you gentlemen be so good as to rub oil over my back?’

Philipp threw his pebbles on one side, Meno avoided the Old Man of the Mountain’s eye; he scratched the silvery mane on his chest, put his head on one side and, with intricate excuses and verbose self-irony, did it himself.

The water was cold, light green in the shallower areas, with a slight peppermint flavour. Meno put up stoically with Judith Schevola’s attempts to splash water all over him. She seemed to be disappointed that he didn’t squeal. The water in the tank at home in the Elbe Sandstone Hills wasn’t any warmer. Philipp was a good swimmer, he wanted to go out to the Cape and beyond, the Old Man of the Mountain warned him that there were unpredictable whirlpools and the coastal police – he nodded at the concrete tower on the Dornbusch hills – didn’t like to see swimmers heading out for the open sea. So for a while they played with Lührer’s dark-blue Nivea ball.

Meno went for a swim, did the crawl with long, regular strokes. The sun had the sharp clarity of a burning glass. He saw the Cape. There was a cordon of stones round it to break the waves, the spray was thundering against them. Once long since. The Mandelstam lines came back to mind, he and Anne had learnt them off by heart; he’d come across them again in a Reclam volume called
Finders of Horseshoes
that Madame Eglantine had lent him; the book was printed on poor paper and came armed with a whole battery of afterwords against expected objections. He died in 1938, in the gulag. Now there was Gorbachev and no one had forgotten. To distant lands you sail. The ball splashed in the water beside him, Schevola shouted something to
him; Meno punched it back in the direction of the shouts. He propelled himself gently backwards with his arms, sensed he was getting into deeper water, it was darker, colder. ‘
Bessoniza. Gomér. Tugije parussa
,’ he murmured to himself. Lay with his face down, saw the ripples in the sand, finely ribbed, as if drawn with rakes or sculptor’s combs, at an enticing depth already, he was surprised he didn’t feel afraid. They shouted, he wanted to go a bit further. He suddenly felt his pulse accelerate and that made him go a bit further. He felt himself being pulled down, as if by filaments, caressingly, blue-washed hair, then slender, delicate fingers; for a moment he was disorientated, he struck out and only realized from the rising wall of water that it was in the wrong direction; he dived, the mountain thundered over him, carried him back into the light green of classical antiquity, now he was swimming frantically, for it came back from the beach, mingled with the breakers heading for the shore, forward and back were struggling against each other, on the surface waves grabbed him by the neck, pushing him towards the beach, below currents heading out to sea had taken a fancy to him; he wasn’t making any progress. He dropped into a vertical position: no bottom; the lumps of rock stuck in the clean sand, the seaweed and shells looked deceptively near.

Once he was out, he hoped no one could tell what he’d felt. He waved away Philipp, who’d had his suspicions. Felt Schevola’s mockery at his back and was grateful to the Old Man of the Mountain for interrupting his ‘philosophical sandwalk’ (shoulders hunched, bronzed, slightly paunchy stomach, ribs sticking out and duck-like flat feet with toes marking the sand well in front of the rest of the foot) and starting to argue about the conditions for a game of volleyball; Schevola, Meno could see over his shoulder, seemed to go along with that, at least she still possessed some tact, then. Meno wrapped a towel round his waist, stuffed a towel under the towel, checking that his skirt was unlikely to fall down. His trunks were hanging over his skin like a sodden nappy. He shivered in the wind, which had become sharper, crumpled briefs,
shirt and trousers up into a balanceable bundle and slipped over towards the dunes. No volleyball after all, he saw out of the corner of his eye. The Old Man of the Mountain had returned to his reflective walk, Schevola, Philipp and Lührer were stretched out on beach towels by their sand fortress, looking to the right and left, Schevola down; but now – the rubber strap of Meno’s left flip-flop had slipped to a painful position between his longest toe and his big toe – she raised her head. Meno skipped up the dune. The place where the marram grass was particularly tall and thick was already occupied by a courting couple. Skipping was strenuous, he tried to run, but with the tightly tied towel he was holding with one hand while the other was clutching the bundle of clothes he could only manage little, ridiculous waddling steps. By now Schevola was openly devoting her full attention to him. That annoyed him. He wasn’t a specimen to be studied. Now he was skipping again, jumping without looking. Too late it occurred to him that he could have used their sand fortress. He was so annoyed that he didn’t pay attention to the stones stuck in the sand, brown, smooth and rounded, like darning mushrooms. His foot slipped. Meno folded at the waist, stuck out his free leg behind him, obstinately holding on to his towel with his right hand and waving his left to compensate. But the bundle made him unbalanced, for a while he whirled it around in the air, finally dunked it in the sand. As he struggled to right himself, he found himself performing a gymnastic position on one leg, wobbling, his arm and other leg forming a downward slanting line and the towel flopped over, allowing the sun to shine on the Herr Editor’s derrière, pale as two white loaves. ‘Oh, spiders!’ he muttered, using the favourite curse of Mr Fox from the children’s
Sandman
television programme.

DIARY

(Tuesday)

By now her hair is more ash blonde than grey. Kim Novak’s hair in
Vertigo.
Hydrogen peroxide. Don’t think Judith uses that. She asked me about
Christian – and whether I’d brought my Dawn alarm clock with me. Then we talked about plums (the Old Man of the Mountain’s brought some Zibarten schnapps, a delicious speciality). I told her the Zibarte was a wild plum variety from the late Celtic period. She shrugged her shoulders. Me: ‘Best of all I like plums when they’re young and still almost green; they’re already juicy, plump but without grubs.’ She: ‘But when they’re ripe they’re sweeter, heavier, more intense. These young things, don’t they give you stomach ache?’ Me: ‘Only when you’re insatiable.’ She: ‘You’re not insatiable – as far as plums are concerned?’ I continued my lecture on the Zibarte plum, an interesting excursion into botany. Judith turned away, bored (?). And round here there are cherry plums, bigger and lovelier than I’ve ever seen on the slopes above the Elbe. As a name ‘cherry plum’ shows an odd lack of imagination; I would have called
Prunus cerasifera
a peach. The Old Man of the Mountain shook his head slowly from side to side, explaining that one did not rechristen something that bore the name
myrobalan
from the depths of time. – How does Judith know I have an alarm clock?

(Wednesday)

One word about breakfast, for all I have to say about early-morning exercises that here (I have to be fair) are recommended rather than compulsory is: since so far I’ve still managed to get up at five for my lauds and snip off a bit of the day’s work with the scissors of my willpower, I can observe the gathering of keep-fitters on the sports field behind Lietzenburg with an easy eye. You can borrow the army tracksuit – you have to sign for it, of course. Later on in the day the man in charge of Fun and Games (as the official name has it) is the house electrician – they say Günter Mellis, when he’s staying here, is generous in his offers of help – caretaker, messenger and boilerman in winter as well. I spent ages wondering where I’d seen him before: when I met Arbogast on the way to see the Old Man of the Mountain. The man leading the students from the House of the Teacher. Our F&G leader insisted he’d nothing to do with him, he’d always worked here,
at Lietzenburg. Similarly Frau Kruke, housekeeper, charwoman and watchdog, Judith’s ‘house dragon’. She insists she’s never heard of Else Alke, even though she’s the spitting image of her. A dwarf shuffling along in slippers. – To get back to breakfast, which she’s in charge of. As Judith takes her plastic plate with the standard two slices of Tilsiter cheese, two slices of blutwurst, two slices of bologna, one little slab of hotel butter, two slices of pumpernickel (Saturdays rolls from Kasten’s bakery, Sundays a piece of cake), Lührer, the writer, who’s in front of her in the queue, says, ‘Enjoy your meal’, and apologizes that ‘recently’ he voted for her expulsion, she must understand that he had four children to provide for. – That’s all I needed! (Judith) Breakfast starts on the dot of eight. At the moment there are thirty-three of us in the house. In the canteen eight tables, each spread with a red-and-white-checked cloth and decorated with a light-green, transparent plastic vase, stand silent. In each vase there is water rising to a line marked one centimetre below the rim and pierced by a single artificial flower, style: red marguerite, from the workshops in Seibnitz. All the stems are ground like a cannula and slightly curved, inclined, as seen from the canteen door, to the right, so that the blooms all look to the east and at eight o’clock on the dot they all (assuming it’s a good day) don a little cap of light the size of your thumbnail. On every table the latest copies of
Neues Deutschland
,
Junge Welt
and the
Ostsee-Zeitung
, in aluminium napkin holders in the shape of a half-sun, await the guests; in addition, on the men’s tables there is
Magazin
and on the women’s
Für Dich
and
Sowjetfrau.
The copy of the satirical weekly
Eulenspiegel
is chained and on such a short chain that it can only be read at the occasional table by the entrance. There is a board with slots for strips of paper (blue and pink, typewritten) and each morning you have to check where you’re sitting. In order to make us mingle as much as possible and to ‘assure the maximum communicative contact’ (quoted from house regulations) the men and women – always separate – go from table to table. But what is the use of that when the Old Man of the Mountain spreads out his personal napkin, Philipp brings
his own cutlery, Judith responds to Karlfriede Sinner-Priest’s comment that Fräulein Schevola actually had no right to be there by sweeping her plate off the table and strolling out of the room, and Lührer, the writer, all too pointedly places a jar of Nutella between himself and the poor editor, Rohde
?