The Tower: A Novel (83 page)

Christian tried to switch the engine off with the lever above the knurled section but he was paralysed, could see the lever, the brown, oval plate of hard plastic you pulled down and pushed from side to side to regulate the revs but couldn’t reach it; now others were shouting, ‘Switch off, you idiot’ and ‘Down’, he saw the soldiers leap off the goods wagon; their task would have been to wedge the hefty steel chocks with the spikes into the wooden floor of the wagon in front of and behind the T55:

He pulled the steering levers into the ‘second position’ but the tank didn’t stop, as it ought to have, an old Russian thing, Christian thought,

and:

I might not be able to answer Reina’s letter at all

and:

What shall I say to Mum?

and:

This thing’s tipping over –

Growth; a moment, gentle as a pinprick at the beginning, a break, a tear, Richard could see the shed, Stahl’s bent back and, when he turned round again, the overgrown quarry in the sudden and alarming second of an explosion after which there were smells all at once: sun-warmed stone; plants keeping their flowers at the ready, like crazy archers desperate to start shooting, a bundle of ten arrows on their bowstring; of axle-grease, chicken shit; the light swivelled like a cutting torch, hitting his face full force: it made you want to suck in the fresh spring air, fists
clenched, get
drunk
on the colours (a postbox-yellow oil can on a black shelf) – the way all that was growing and sprouting and bursting and splitting rotten husks, the way the sap was returning to the trees, making them vibrate and the leaves, like a thousand green fingers that touched and wanted to be touched, swell out, branches hummed with bee electricity; and how it was growing, his ‘baby’, as he called the Hispano – that wasn’t a car, wasn’t a lifeless machine, it had eyes that looked now happy, now sad, it was a living being with nickel veins and character.

‘Damned useless rubbish.’ Stahl threw a wrench on the ground.

‘I can’t join you, Gerhart. They’ve got me in their sights anyway.’

‘I know, you explained that.’

‘But are you really going to do it? With an aeroplane?!’

‘Crazy, yes. But there’s method in my madness. That’s exactly why it’ll succeed. They won’t be expecting something like that. And it will work, I tell you. With two MZ motorcycle engines. Fuselage wooden planks, covered in plastered fabric. Very easy to make, despite that warp-resistant. Plastic for the cockpit, I was thinking of the windscreen of a Schwalbe motorbike.’

‘Four of you!’

‘Martin will be at the back, all of us lying down. The engines ought to produce the power, I’ve done the calculations. – The only question is – can I trust you?’

‘And if you can’t.’

‘Then it’s just my bad luck. It’s not possible without outside help. And you’ve told me about your problems yourself. That wouldn’t have been very clever of you if you were going to report me.’

‘For God’s sake, I could still do it now.’

‘Like hell you would. I think I know you better than that.’ –

tipped, and Christian said, ‘Nono’, screamed:

‘No!’

felt
the tank, the steel hull weighing tons, slowly sink down, so slowly that it probably looked as if it were making itself comfortable, and Christian, in the oddly uncertain light on the ramp, had time to look at everything again and take in all the details: the distressed but interested expressions of the soldiers watching, a few officers who had become aware of what was happening, Pancake’s expression that seemed to be saying, stupid, you don’t turn like
that
, the searchlights, the flat goods wagons along which he should have driven:

The tank fell on its track, which, since the engine was still running, dug into the ground beside the rails. Christian saw a spot of gold on a puddle, perhaps a reflection of the turret searchlight, the tank came to a stop on its side, its barrel pointing in the direction of the town, Christian felt someone grasp his shoulders and pull him out through the hatch and just let it happen, it was pleasant and the guy who’d grabbed him by the scruff of the neck would know what he was doing, it would be what was necessary; Pancake’s face, turned into a huge, black puffball by the shapeless helmet, the white side-pieces, the sheepskin of which had a bizarre glow – phosphorescence? could it be? – dangling like a dachshund’s ears: ‘Man, you could be dead!’

another voice, ‘The turret would have squashed him flat, like a mashed potato. He was sitting right at the top. Funny, a machine like that turning turtle.’

‘Must’ve been out of his mind, mustn’t he?’

‘An SI … That’s an SI … as perfect a Special Incident as you could hope to see that Hoffmann’s managed to cause … ’s he still alive?’

‘– or drowned. It probably wouldn’t ’ve squashed him but drowned him in that puddle there. I waded through it earlier on, it was deeper than I thought. Shit, I’ve got some of it in my boots.’

‘You mean head down?’

‘Head down and he can’t get out. I mean, who’s going to heave a tank up just with his feet and nothing to brace himself against?’

‘But
don’t y’think it could’ve squashed him anyway? First of all snap-crack and then glug-glug.’

Then Christian was standing to one side, like an Untouchable, recalling a lesson at school when he was a child and the teacher, when there was no other way, had made him stand in a corner of the classroom (‘Facing the wall and there’ll be trouble if you move’), recalling the whispers and the quiet laughs, the idea, which made him break out in a cold sweat, that something might be wrong with his shoes, stockings, trousers, with the seat of his trousers: could he have … had his shirt gone threadbare at the back and split open, did he look funny from behind (for the first time he was made aware that others could see him from behind, could see a Christian Hoffmann he himself didn’t know); over there they were dragging the tank, the tracks of which were still going round and round, back into its normal position, organizing hawsers and the tank recovery vehicle – What’s going to happen now? Christian thought. What will they do with me? He whistled a tune. Would there be birds’ nests in this station? He’d seen a lot of bird droppings. Pigeons. He rummaged round in his pockets felt his penknife, box of matches, army ID – and something that rustled, something granular and yielding: a packet of lemonade powder, already much the worse for wear, he tore it open, tipped the contents into the hollow of his hand, spat on it, making it foam up, licked and ate the lemon-tasting powder until there was none left apart from a thin film of food-colouring on his hand that couldn’t be licked off. –

Richard waited until it was dark. On the mezzanine floor of the building, one of the typical Striesen-Blasewitz ‘coffee-grinder’ houses, the light was on, illuminating the path from the garden gate to the entrance; that would make it more difficult. Richard put on the work-jacket that he wore out in Lohmen, tightened the laces of his trainers, pulled the buckle of his belt round to the side (he’d heard that electricians working on pylons did that). It occurred to him that it
would be better to creep up from the back. He climbed over the garden wall, swung himself hand over hand past an arbour, jumped down onto a concrete path. He avoided the dark, loosened soil of the flowerbed beside it, there was a shimmer of early flowers (crocuses? narcissi?) in it, pale ghosts. A trellis was no use to him, the bevelled posts were too thin and the soil below it had also been dug over. He felt the ground with the tips of his toes at a point on the wall that seemed suitable; a paving slab would provide a firm enough base for him to push off from; the slab was granite, vaguely lit by the light in the room above the window ledge: children’s room? bedroom? he didn’t know; often in this kind of house the rooms of growth and sleep were at the back, giving onto the garden. Strange how the silence seemed to fill with sounds, like a funnel sucking them in but letting too few pass through; as if the sounds were like him, waiting in the dark for a movement, but losing patience sooner since their time was limited: the crunch of a car driving out, clocks striking from the lungs of the house, garden whispers, the Sandman’s evening greeting from the television. Now a baby was crying, sobs of tired protest, it seemed to come from the other side of the apartment. Josta’s little one, Richard thought. Off we go! He jumped up but couldn’t reach the window ledge. The impact of his soles on the slab sounded unexpectedly harsh. Take off his trainers? And if he had to run for it … ? You’ll be doing that anyway, he joked. What did it matter? He took his shoes off and tried again. This time he jumped higher, reached the window ledge, dangled there. Immediately his right hand, his forearm weakened from his old injury, started to hurt. What was worse was that the window ledge was sloping and was made of smooth tiles. Richard, holding on with four fingers, started to slip. One sock got stuck on the trellis when he scrabbled with his feet on either side to try and find support; in the pale light his bare foot looked like an anaemic flatfish with fringes, the house wall was icy cold. He jumped down, his bare foot landed on a piece of gravel which made him hop around in silence for a while. The sock had been pulled
off by a splinter of wood precisely between his big toe and second toe. A piece of luck. He tried again with his shoes on, hung there, swaying, couldn’t manage to pull himself up. He thought of rock climbers on an ascent but that made him feel weak all at once. In an access of rage he flung up his left leg, his foot, clenched in the trainer, stuck on something, fairly high up, fragile; Richard pulled himself up; centimetre by centimetre, his fingers trembling with the effort, until he could see in through the window. He was breathing stertorously, it sounded like a faulty compressed-air valve, his right hand found something strangely flexible to hold on to (radio cable? lightning conductor?), just at that moment he felt the urge to laugh. Daniel was sitting in the room, applying dubbin to a football; Lucie, opposite him, was sitting at a children’s table wearing a white coat and a cap with a red cross, with, above it, an examination mirror such as ENT doctors use; she was bent over a naked doll, cutting a leg off with a bread knife.

unload, travel, pine twigs, parts of puzzles, bizarre, unsolved. The Elbe at Torgau was awake, Christian had never seen an awake river before, large clock face numbers were drifting down it. Could Muriel hear it? The reformatory was somewhere round here. Fields, filled with surf, bursting, crackling. Swill? Wind? Ready to pounce. The wind was grimy, heavy, little slowcoaches of graphite grease in it. ‘Alight!’ was ordered. Searchlights. Playing at knitting. The Elbe at Torgau was an awake river, a livingmost giant, no: it was whispering, shivering: a ‘listening-post giant’. With rotting boots. Yes, precisely, that was it, Pancake swirling piss-flowers over the ground covered in bird feathers: a bed linen factory (cambric; he knew the word from Emmy) in the vicinity. The river had eyeballs, one after the other. Then none again. Colour? Shoe-polish black. Keep a tight hold on it. Streaks of rotten-apple-brown, there where the crêpe-paper-grey fairy rings are dotted down. Forest honey, ever so glutinous. Just don’t try it.
Flapping, swallowing: nightingale-box paint, that black. Swish, swish: trees crumbling in the star-swell, on the downriver bank where the company’s taken up position. Listen. A river like that is alive, sleeps, dreams, digests, tosses and turns, lives its giant’s life. What has it got to say?

It’s talking of the wheat.

Whispering of the ships it’s seen.

The haulers that pulled the barges upstream on chains. There were still milestones. The burlaks sang, the singsong of the barge-haulers, on the Elbe, the Volga. He recalled a picture by Ilya Repin, men in tattered clothes, greybeards and downy-faced youths, in broad harnesses dragging the ship upstream. They said, What do you want? – Music. To be alone in silence. The music of the river, the throaty murmuring down the ages. ‘To walk until you’re free, that is what you want,’ Christian chattered, unconcerned whether anyone could hear. The river wanted nothing. The river was a molten magnet, a baroque ship was stuck in it, wanted to sail on but the algae, the filth, the garbage from the towns made a slick round the bow, twisted round the throttled propeller. It couldn’t move forward, it couldn’t drift back. It was full of people, it was a city, you could see houses, electric cables, the entrails of the city. Dresden … the sigh went through the air, Dresden … a stranded ship, stuck in the past, clinging with every fibre onto the past that had never been as beautiful as the raptures you go into. Dresden … Christian took a mouthful of water. Am I a human being? What do you want? No one’s interested in what you want. Now orders will come and you will have to obey them. Now orders will be expected and you will have to give them. What is an order? How is it that there are orders anyway?

The river didn’t know. It stank of cellulose and sewage farms. Of solid glue and burnt animal skins, of shampoo from Wutha, yellow as marzipan, washing powders from Ilmenau and Genthin: IMI, Spee,
Wofalor: don’t forget anything. Don’t forget anything. At Torgau the Elbe was a dead river; the water was rusty and if you threw a pfennig in, it floated for a long time.

Christian looked for a flat pebble and had a go at skimming: he heard the stone hit the water four times. It should have been five since seven times for a first try (and he hadn’t done it since he was a boy) would have been unrealistic. One too few, Christian thought. One too few is a broken leg: as the saying Anne had brought from childhood went.

The most disagreeable thing about a tank was that it gave you the feeling of being safe and sound. The company commander was pacing up and down in the preparation area, checking with the platoon leaders, the crews that were making their T55s ready for the underwater drive, known as a UD. Christian had been on one twice, for Pancake it was something new, he kept running over to the machines beside theirs. The Elbe at Torgau was wide and it was also more than a metre deep, the tanks couldn’t get across without assistance. The two underwater drives Christian had been on had been in daylight; this time they were to cross the river by night, an exercise everyone was afraid of. The preparation area was lit by several floodlights, it was a sandy clearing in a pinewood. The crews were working hurriedly, the commanders had to report their tanks as ready for UD in thirty minutes. All the things that had to be done! There was a lot Christian had had to learn; he had to know this, to be able to do that; he was the commander for whose orders the crew would wait if they didn’t know what to do next. He had to know what came next. He bore the responsibility for the crew and he would never have dreamt of being in such a tricky situation: hating the tank, the noise, the drill, the military life – but having to have mastered it because he was the commander. Technology, the principles of operation (why can’t I start a tank cold, why must the driver pre-heat the diesel and, if there’s an alert, why must I run to the tank hangar, in my pyjamas if necessary, in order to switch on the pre-heating battery?), writing surveys on tactical and strategic
problems. Here as well, in the army, he was part of a Great Plan, of a great computation of mankind; here as well they used the words ‘collective’ (his crew was a ‘combat collective’) and ‘main task’.