The Tower: A Novel (79 page)

‘I can understand you, believe me. But Barsano has protected you. There are those, and not only here in the clinic, who are unhappy with the opinions on certain things you often express quite openly.’ A fragment of the pocket-torch light from South I slipped into the stone in Müller’s signet ring. Beautifully cut, Richard thought. Does he take it off when he’s doing an operation? It wouldn’t fit under the gloves and disinfection to a surgical level wouldn’t be possible either. Why not operate on Robert, take the reprimand and resign?

‘And suggest you have to prove yourself. Nonsense, if you ask me. As if you hadn’t proved yourself here.’

Not a threat, more a plea for understanding. Richard sensed he was getting nowhere the way things were. ‘So far we’ve no power, no X-ray, we can only use one room, if any at all.’

‘The CAT scanner’s working again. Tellkamp has been informed, he’s waiting. The technicians are running a cable from Admin and Nuclear Medicine to us. We’ll be able to operate and X-ray again, even if we don’t have mains current very soon – which I reckon we will. For the moment the generator ought to be enough for the ICU. I’m only halfway through my operation too.’ Müller suddenly spoke in an unusually understanding tone: ‘We’ll manage. You never know, Fräulein Barsano might arrive immediately and you’ll be able to operate on both. Lord alone knows what’s wrong with her: sent with multiple traumas, arrives with athlete’s foot.’

‘But why here, of all places. Can’t she be treated up there in Friedrich Wolf?’

Müller
nodded. ‘I’m sure they won’t have a power cut up there, but I’ve no idea, Herr Hoffmann. – Thank you for your cooperation.’

Accident and Emergency did not empty. The doctors from the various surgical areas had formed teams (no one there said ‘collectives’ any more, Richard thought), those from Internal Medicine went to and fro between the wards, Endoscopy and Outpatients. Whenever Richard thought the stream of patients was slackening off, the outside door would swing open and Rapid Medical Assistance, a taxi driver or a relation would bring more people with injuries. They also brought news of how things were in the city outside. From what they said, which was immediately passed on by the nurses rushing in and out, by doctors, porters, waiting patients, the situation outside must be chaotic. Trams were stuck on Platz der Einheit, the power was off there too, passengers had forced open the doors, the people who lived in Neustadt didn’t have far to go and could trudge home through the snow; anyone who wanted to get across Marienbrücke to the city centre tried to hitch a lift from one of the cars crawling past; worst off of all were those who had to go up to the high residential area: with no possibility of hitching a lift, they were faced with several kilometres on foot. The Elbe was covered with a sheet of ice, a Czech tug had been squeezed against the Blue Miracle, the bridge had had to be closed. None of the ferries between the north and south bank were running any more. When Richard went out to get a breath of fresh air, the Academy looked like a darkened honeycomb: the roofs waxy with ice, the snow on the paths and roads knee-deep. In many of the ten-storey buildings in Johannstadt, in the new developments of Prohlis and Gorbitz, the central heating wasn’t working; the people there were shivering in their beds, envious of those on the slopes of the Elbe with their tiled stoves that devoured coal and produced ash but also – and that was the important thing – warmth.

In Outpatients no one seemed to know who had already been treated and who still needed treatment, who could be transferred to a ward
and where which of their colleagues was occupied with which case. Wolfgang was still ensconced behind the desk, flanked by sheets of paper on which he tried to provisionally record the details of the arriving and departing patients, telephones were ringing, always someone wanting to know something: patients when they’d be treated, family members where their relations had got to, staff where there were supplies of syringes, bandages, admission forms – and couldn’t someone finally make a decent cup of coffee, after all the emergency generator was working now!

‘Yes, in the ICU and the patient lift to the operating theatre, clever Dick.’

‘Clever Dick yourself! Then they can just make the coffee up there and send it down to us!’

‘And when’s the light going on here again? Oh, sorry, nurse, missed again. But you can hardly see anything here.’

‘I’m sorry to have to put it so frankly, but you’re an old goat.’

‘You’ve completely misunderstood me, nurse. It must be this pitch darkness. Goats have two horns.’

‘Where’s the testicle?’ Frau Doktor Roppe, a urologist, called across Outpatients, arms akimbo. ‘The strangulated one. – You’ve called me away from a septic catheter, Wolfgang, you’ll be sorry if it’s a false alarm.’

‘Here,’ a faint voice said shyly, ‘here, Herr Doktor.’

A National People’s Army tanker was expected but still hadn’t arrived. Scheffler, the Rector, had formed a crisis committee and inspected the clinics. Walkie-talkies were taken out of the Administration safe, important telephone calls, listed in a sealed plan, were made in the prescribed order. The Intensive Care Unit in Internal Medicine was supplied by the emergency generator there, the one in Gynaecology was working too. The idea of transferring urgent surgical cases there was dropped: moving there with all the equipment would be too much of an upheaval, and beside that Eddi and his men
were already in the process of laying cables through the Academy’s system of tunnels to supply Outpatients and the operating section. A simultaneous ‘Ah!’ rang out when the lights flickered back on. The heavy X-ray machines started to hum again, the coffee maker in the rest-room sputtered water over the coffee powder, X-rays appeared on the lightboxes, nurses who had been holding torches over lacerations and scalp cuts in Minor Surgery could return to other tasks. Richard helped Grefe with the resetting of broken bones and subsequently putting them in plaster, between the cases (a wearying, mildly comic coming and going between fractures of the radius on the left, fractures of the radius on the right) he went to the enquiry desk, impatiently looking for Alexandra Barsano, telephoned Intensive Care but Kohler couldn’t be spared yet.

Richard had aspirated the haematoma on Robert’s wrist himself and given the anaesthetic that made resetting bearable for the patient. But that he had asked Dreyssiger to do, that brutal-seeming bending up and down over the broken wrist; then they’d put it in plaster, done an X-ray (Dreyssiger had done the resetting excellently, but Richard insisted on the operation; that type of fracture mostly did not stay stable), and put Robert in the duty doctors’ room. Kohler arrived an hour later.

‘I will not operate on your son, at least not immediately.’ Kohler didn’t wait for Richard to respond. ‘All patients have equal rights, you’ve always told me that, Herr Hoffmann, should we disregard it today of all days?’

‘He’s my son, he wants to be a doctor … his hand, he needs his hand.’ Richard was so taken aback by Kohler’s attitude that he didn’t ask him but Müller, who came over, ‘Would you not give your son preferential treatment?’

‘My father’s sitting out there,’ Kohler said calmly. ‘Wolfgang gave me the patients’ names in order of arrival. Others come before him, I don’t want to give anyone an unfair advantage, nor put them at a disadvantage.’

Richard
flew into a rage. ‘Strictly according to the rules … like a blockhead!’ How dare the fellow, he’d given him a formal order! ‘Head down and follow the plan, head down whatever the cost, that’s the way it goes … You’re leaving your own father sitting there for the sake of your convictions?’ Richard asked, suddenly interested.

‘I give others the same rights as him. And do you know what?’ Kohler adopted an impatient, hostile tone. ‘He even approves of it. That’s the way he taught me to be. As a convinced communist. Which you are not.’

‘Gentlemen.’ Müller stepped between the two of them, for a moment Richard was surprised he wasn’t furious, that he seemed to have ignored Kohler’s open refusal. ‘Gentlemen,’ he repeated, a pointless, plaintive request, ‘gentlemen!’

‘It is against my beliefs as a doctor to give anyone preferential treatment.’

‘Herr Kohler –’ Müller ushered him out.

‘Herr Hoffmann,’ Wolfgang called from behind the desk, ‘Frau Barsano’s here.’

But it wasn’t Alexandra Barsano coming towards Richard as he went out, but the wife of the Regional Secretary. She was standing, very upright, by the door of her Wartburg. Richard plodded over to her, the blizzard had died down a little, beyond the entrance to the Academy snow-clearing teams could be seen, a lorry, perhaps the impatiently awaited army tanker, was flashing its indicators. The even blanket of fine powder snow seemed to gather the light and reflect it back onto the paths as high as the hips of the passers-by. Frau Barsano’s expression looked reserved when Richard shook her hand. The interior light flickered, he could see Alexandra Barsano, she was staring into space and holding a discoloured bandage round her left wrist.

‘We’re colleagues, of course,’ Frau Barsano said, getting straight down to business, ‘and you have problems here. My husband tells me they’re pulling all the stops out to resolve it and you should have power
again in one hour, at the latest two.’ She lit a cigarette, blew out the smoke, looked at the glowing tip that lit up her face when she drew on it. ‘I suggest I treat my daughter in our place, I mean at the Friedrich Wolf Hospital. Herr Müller –’

‘– informed me. – As you wish, Frau Barsano.’

‘That’s also what my daughter wants. We have everything necessary there.’

‘You don’t owe me an explanation. Nor your daughter.’

‘We have even acquired magnifying spectacles and a operation microscope. – Good. I would like, and my husband would also like’ – she inhaled then threw the cigarette away – ‘nothing of this conversation to become more widely known. Can we rely on that? Thank you. Goodbye, Herr Hoffmann.’

‘Goodbye.’

The Wartburg slithered off, Richard watched it go. A few minutes later a figure emerged from the shadow of the park, spoke into a walkie-talkie. The flurries of snow were thicker now. For a few moments the man stood there, irresolute, then raised his arm in an awkward salute. A car drove up. When the chauffeur opened the door, the man bent down to get into the seat; the interior light revealed Max Barsano’s face.

The wind had died down, the Party secretaries fallen silent, in the living rooms there was the flicker of the evening programmes:
Potpourri
,
What’s It Worth?
,
Portrait by Telephone
, a cowboys-and-Indians film with Gojko Mitić. Meno felt he could almost hear it, the whole
country breathing a sigh of relief: at least we’ve made it, a comfortable run-up to Christmas with festive roasts, warm stoves, slippers and enough beer. The provision of pretzel sticks and peanut puffs for the New Year was guaranteed, as long as people didn’t go crazy. The masters of entertainment, of giving the people a thrill, calming them and lulling them to sleep, had taken up the baton, Willi Schwabe, in his velvet smoking jacket, white hair neatly parted, went up to his junk room to the tinkling doll-like strains of Tchaikovsky’s ‘Sugar-Plum Fairy’ and chatted, once he’d hung his carriage lamp on a hook, about the Land of Smiles that had been set up in the UFA studios of Potsdam-Babelsberg or of Wien-Film … an old charmer, a soigné
esprit
from the world of yesterday sashaying elegantly in front of a backdrop of black-and-white photos and theatre curtains, leaning against the curve of a grand piano with a lighted candle on it. Meno loved the programme,
Willi Schwabe’s Junk Room
, he was annoyed when he missed it, and when, sometimes on a Monday, as he came home late from the office, he could see in many windows of the district the simultaneously changing pictures of GDR TV 1 and imagined he could hear through the glass the well-modulated tones of the presenter reminiscing about Hilde Hildebrandt, Hans Moser, Theo Lingen, ‘the great Paula Wessely’. Once, once there was … and the silent snow, goose-white, downy flakes with grains of soot, more like organisms (starfish, children’s hands) than lifeless crystals, floated through the even tenor of the days. Once, once there was … but the clocks struck, the ten-minute clock signalled the hour with softly resonating strokes; in the evenings the theme tune of
TV News
crept through the houses, made its way through the apartments on Lindwurmstrasse without upsetting the creations of Lamprecht, the hatmaker, without making the apprentices in Wiener’s hairdressing salon pause in sweeping up the day’s production of fallen hair, rummaged round the premises of Harmonie, the furrier’s, where the manager was still sitting, bent over accounts, with a dutiful sewing machine humming away on fur waistcoats
or mittens (no, Meno knew better: at this hour no one was sewing for the people), ignored Dr Fernau’s curses with which, in camel-hair slippers, an open bottle of Felsenkeller-Bräu in his hand, he would toast the newsreader with the lower jaw faultlessly grinding out reports of successes for the annual accounts, made Niklas Tietze, when he stopped below the windows of the Roeckler School of Dancing on his way home from his practice to listen to the out-of-tune piano, the slurred waltzes of the violin and cello, open his bag and pull out his tattered diary: for it was the time, the signal swirling in uncertain outlines from the windows and through vestibules, that reminded him of the time: was it not already Thursday today, which meant he was invited to the
regular hour
at Däne’s, the music critic’s, on Schlehenleite, had Gudrun asked him to do something that he might possibly have forgotten, were there still house calls he had to make, Frau von Stern, for example, who had an iron constitution but also a will of iron that insisted on her weekly examination by Dr Tietze, who, ‘as always’, ordered cold affusions that did her, the ‘old lizard’ (Frau Zschunke) of over ninety, no harm, prescribed ‘as always’ cardiac drops and digitoxin tablets, that she regularly collected from the pharmacy (one shouldn’t let them go to waste, should one?) and equally regularly (as Meno knew) mixed into the food for her ageing cats, that she called by name to prevent the young ones from snatching their food …

… Atlantis, the contours of which Meno saw returning behind the rooms, a kind of parallel displacement, a flickering projection; the planks, uprights over the Rose Gorge, with a scab of barnacle-like rust, Grauleite was listening in with slowly rotating parabolic dishes, at that hour, when the wooden snow shovels had cleared the paths between the banks of dog roses and been knocked clean beside the snowed-in cars, pupils of the Louis Fürnberg High School were going to the funicular, throwing snowballs onto the roof of Arbogast’s little observatory, at the elegant black numerals of the white enamel oval house numbers – and Meno could hear, when the 11 wasn’t running
and he had to use the funicular to go into town, the pupils in the car cheerfully prattling about football (Dynamo Dresden, BFC Dynamo): they were going to Helfenberg Manor Estate for a day’s ‘Instruction in Technical Production’, where they would assemble K-16 cameras, trying to match the standard time and get a good mark. And the elephant-backed dustcarts of the City Cleansing Department were grinding along the streets again, leaving snakes of ash beside their tyre-tracks. ‘Rice pudding with cinnamon’ the Dresdeners called it, glad that the dustcarts, with the coarse-mouthed dustmen on the boards under the dumping device, who were so good as to bowl the dented dustbins out of the yards – cleared and sanded,
if you please
– were running again; they were said to be the best-paid workers, supposedly earning more than a professor at the Technical University. Lange, wreathed in the smoke from his pungent cigars, muttered his lack of understanding for the overtones of envy in those rumours, reflected out loud on the due reward for hard work, before ringing Guenon House to see whether he should take a ‘decent bottle’ to Frau Fiebig’s rummy evening.

On the Wednesday after Richard’s birthday Meno decided to ask Madame Eglantine to remind him that on Friday he intended finally to start on his long-postponed winter washing. The winter washing! He dreaded the sight of the linen basket full of used sheets, and bed and cushion covers, which in the summer he could give to Anne and sometimes, if the washing machine was working, to Libussa – now in the winter that wasn’t possible, the women had enough to do with hunting for Christmas presents, baking biscuits, getting New Year firecrackers and sparklers. Madame Eglantine grinned as she reminded him and on Friday Meno went home with an uneasy feeling that he was faced with an impossible mountain to climb. Just his bad luck that that year the steam laundry wasn’t taking any more orders! The linen basket, woven out of willow with strengthening hoops, capaciously rotund, was sitting in one corner of his bedroom, brooding and full of malice. Meno dragged
the basket over, tried to empty it out, but the washing was stuck as fast as a deep-lying boil. Once he’d managed to pull out the top layer the rest of the washing burst out onto the floor, spreading itself with a sigh of relief. Meno went down to the laundry room, a spark of hope still glowing, even as he opened the door, that Libussa’s washing machine had been repaired, but its place was empty, the Service Combine had been fiddling around with it since the summer washdays. Meno looked round. How he hated this subterranean chamber! He hated it with the hatred of the bachelor who wants to read and smoke a pipe on the balcony before strolling back to his warm living room, at ease and relaxed, at one with the world, sniffing the scent of fresh linen promising a night of sweet dreams. What was it Barbara had said? The washing would turn out whiter if it was soaked overnight. So, take hope and a few spoonfuls of Schneeberg Blue, and off you go into the lye, you children’s ghosts.

He woke at around four in the morning after a terrible nightmare: an incubus was squatting on him, a sheet-demon that kept calling for more and more linen to come flying through the air and, with a grin, piled it up on its back – though all that had happened was that Chakamankabudibaba had crept into his bed and stretched out on his stomach. There were fern-patterns of ice on the windows. Meno went down to the laundry room. The water in the tubs had frozen over. Taking the dolly, he smashed the layer of ice: the sheets floated round in the solution like frozen lumps of dried cod. Too early to light the stove; with weary, leaden steps, Meno went back to bed, even though he was tempted to pay his new neighbours back for their lack of consideration in knocking others up, for the repulsively triumphal radio music accompanying Honich’s bending and stretching before he slammed the front door to go out for his early-morning exercises. But even a combat group commander was exhausted by the winter; and after the Kaminski twins had also quarrelled with him Honich at least showed some consideration at weekends. Meno dreamt of being able to sleep … but Chakamankabudibaba was prowling round the bed, mewing, and
upstairs Meno could hear Libussa, already busy with the coal scuttle for the bathroom stove. He dreamt of the laundry room … Saw the ox-like, hoop-bound washtubs, made by a cooper in a past age, quality workmanship the soap-manufacturer presumably thought he owed himself. They stood menacingly on their wooden stands over the drain that kept blocking. Then the male inhabitants of the house had to poke round in the darkness beneath them with long wires, hoping that the suds stuck there would find their way out to the pipes going down the garden slope … the toilets of the House with a Thousand Eyes also drained there and they, too, tended to get blocked. Stahl had explained that to Meno: if such pipes went down too steeply then the fluid quickly ran off but solids remained – and they had to rod them. For that purpose there were iron rods, about five metres long with hooks and eyes, and when Hanna and Meno had moved into the house the ship’s doctor had given them a short introductory course in the problems and peculiarities of life in an old building that hadn’t been renovated for decades. At the sight of the laundry room Hanna had just shaken her head in disbelief, until she’d got married her mother had done the washing for her and she knew nothing of unreliable ‘fully automatic’ washing machines, nothing of the tiny spin-dryers that consisted of a drum standing on end that was full with two towels and, when it was switched on by a plastic bow sticking out over the lid like a record arm, developed such dynamic imbalance that it started to move across the floor, the water came out of the drain-spout beside the basin and the spin-dryer pulled the plug out of the socket, thus switching itself off. Meno remembered Hanna going round the laundry room. The stove, made of bricks with a zinc tub let in, had to be fired up, each tenant taking the wood and briquettes out of their own allocation. There were a table, chunky slabs of soap, packets of powdered Schneeberger Blue that, according to the theory of complementary colours, was added as a whitener to washing that had yellowed. When clothes were being washed there was vapour, that warm, lethargic, cottony steam, saturated with
moisture, that made your clothes stick to you, made breathing a struggle and the laundry room a tropical cavern, vapour that billowed up out of the boiler piping hot when, protected by rubber gloves, you lifted the wooden lid in order to use the dolly (Libussa called it a ‘butter paddle’) to stir the 95
^°
C sludge that had a steel thermometer, long, thin, as beautiful as a tailor’s yardstick, stuck in it. There was a washboard for shirts and underwear; Meno dreamt of scrubbing hands that, instead of soap bubbles, had plectrums growing out of their fingers, making the rasping rhythm for jazz … The inexorable chainsaw screech of his
3ap
alarm clock bit into his benumbed mind.

One week later the washing was done and dried in the loft of Caravel. Meno and Anne had managed to get a slot on the wringer that was beside the steam laundry, an eighty-year-old fossil in Sonnenleite.

‘Well now, Herr Rohde,’ said Udo Männchen at Dresdner Edition, ‘are you going to need another day off for spring cleaning?’

‘It’s all very well for you to talk,’ said Meno, irritated by the typographer’s obvious pleasure, ‘living in a three-room all-comfort apartment and with a wife who looks after your, er, fabrics.’

The typographer had taken to wearing wide-sleeved jackets with cuffs at the wrist, self-cut and self-sewn, silk and linen combined and as colourful as the flags of developing countries.

‘How is it that the people in Central Office always go for this Garamond? Why not Baskerville for once, as in the Insel edition of Virginia Woolf? Three-room all-comfort! Are you pulling my leg? During the recent power cut it was three-room blind man’s buff! The maternity hospitals in this city have something in store for them, I can tell you.’

‘Persitif, persitif,’ said Miss Mimi, boldly and determinedly putting a ring of cactus spines round French yearnings.

‘A day off for doing housework? I assume, Herr Rohde, that you’re not a married working woman, so you have no right to a statutory day off for housework,’ Josef Redlich said. ‘Look, I too, wrinkled workhorse that I am, have to take leave when the washing gets too much
for me. “The tablets of chocolate and arsenic upon which the laws are written”, Lichtenberg, Volume D.’

A distant creaking in the morning twilight mixed, as Meno and Anne turned from Rissleite into Sonnenleite, with the clatter of the coal the apprentice at Walther’s bakery was shovelling into his wheelbarrow, with the hum of a transformer, the rasp of ice scrapers on windscreens. The creaking was approaching radially from Lindwurmring, Rissleite and lower Sonnenleite; soon Meno perceived dark patches laboriously trudging closer: the women of the district who, like Anne, had the day off for housework and were bringing their washing to the steam laundry in handcarts. They approached through the grey undulations of snow, the brighter patches of their faces gradually separating from the darker ones of their bodies (their coats came down below their knees, their clumpy boots sank into the frozen snow that the few lamps with their white glow made to look like paper; the snow clearers and the winter morning shift would start work later), of those broad-shouldered, warmly wrapped-up, non-gender-specific bodies that, heading, as if drawn by a magnet, for the point of intersection of their tracks (it seemed to be Walther’s bakery, which sold rolls after 7 a.m., there was already a queue), would form an arrowhead aimed at the laundry. The women nodded greetings, but weren’t speaking yet. The creaking was an acoustic foreign body in the morning quiet, Meno thought: a rusty bar rubbed through a pelt; unpleasant, as if it were dragging bad dreams out of the night and into the day. It was the sound of the handcarts in which the women were bringing their washing, the wooden wheels scraping against dry bearings; the wheels had iron rims, on many of which quarter or half circles were missing, or the heavy square nails fixing them had loosened, causing the carts to bump and jolt; it was the screech of the shaft in the pole arm, the rumbling of the stanchions over the front wheels and the knock of the supports over the rear wheels; a medley of sounds, grey as driftwood like the colour of the carts bleached by rain and sun.