The Tower: A Novel (87 page)

‘Siegbert sometimes accused me of that.’

‘I’m
not reproaching you for that, far from it. It’s just … upbringing. I was brought up to believe in the country, in the ideals, the system. Well, brought up …’ Reina laughed nervously. ‘… there were so many things my parents couldn’t care less about. Apart from: as long as you expect us to support you –’

‘Can Verena continue her studies?’

‘She’s been kicked out. Before that she was one of the best, people couldn’t do enough for her – then her application and she was dropped like a hot potato.’

‘This tender butterfly with dark brown eyes.’

‘You were in love with her.’

‘Don’t think so.’

‘She wasn’t worth it!’ Reina declared in a sudden outburst of hatred.

‘She was so. – How’s her sister?’

‘She and their mother both still have their jobs. Her father was dismissed immediately she made the application. Apart from me all her friends have turned their backs on her. Siegbert already had problems of his own and one of them told him that if he didn’t break off his relationship with Fräulein Winkler they couldn’t guarantee anything any more.’

‘Does he still want to go to sea?’

‘Yes. That’s why they’ve got him where they want him. He’s studying education now, sport and geography.’

‘Siegbert a teacher! And his enlistment for four years?’

‘He’s withdrawn it. – All her friends have turned their backs on her. As if she were a leper. And me? What should I do? They tell me straight out that I should break off the relationship.’

‘Then do that. Eventually she’ll be over there. And what use will it be to you if Verena’s gone and you’re not allowed to go to university?’

‘Do you really think that? You?’

‘I
don’t know what I think. I just know the way things are.’

‘You can’t really think that. Siegbert yes. But not you. And you know that. It’s only for the sake of argument that you’re pretending to be so cynical. But you’re not like that.’

‘Why not? There’s something to what I said. Anyway, I don’t know myself what I’m like. But you claim you do know. We haven’t seen each other for ages and there was a time –’

‘What d’you mean by that – you don’t know yourself?’

‘There are situations, decisions you have to take … But things turn out differently and you’re surprised. Perhaps you were more of a coward than you thought. Perhaps you thought you were an honourable person who knew what was right and that there were certain things you wouldn’t do – and then you find yourself secretly reading somebody else’s diary. – What was it like at my parents’? Why did you go to see them?’

‘I’d done this work experience year, in a clinic. A small clinic. I saw things there … We had no syringes. Then we did have some: there were patients who’d gone to the West and brought back syringes and bandages from there. They go to the West and buy their insulin syringes, their cannulas, there so that we can give them to them. We did Socialist Aid in a care home. There were no nurses there, the old people were lying in their nappies that no one had changed. There was one male nurse, he went round the wards and said he’d wipe up the shit of anyone who had Western money. Said the oldsters can travel over there, I can’t. There are beds and whole wards you can only get in if you can pay with hard currency. Your father confirmed that. He explained: the health service doesn’t bring in foreign currency, it’s funded by the state, which urgently needs foreign currency and therefore has to sell what’s available –’

‘Yes, we weren’t told about that at school.’

‘Svetlana’s gone to the Soviet Union. There’s no fire here any more, she said, only ashes. She couldn’t bear it any longer, the weariness, the bureaucracy.’

‘And
now she’s looking for the fire in our friends’ country. She might be lucky enough to find some. There was a splendid one in Chernobyl recently.’

‘You’ve become very cynical. That’s not like you. I know Svetlana … was special. I felt more sorry for her.’

‘I believe she would have thought nothing of reporting Jens or Falk if they’d been careless enough to say what they really thought when she was listening.’

‘Do you know Svetlana?’

‘Go on, tell me she wouldn’t have done that.’

‘She was in love with you.’

Christian said nothing.

‘You often used to study in the school library.’ Reina smiled. ‘You were as arrogant as a turkey-cock. And condescending. Svetlana wrote a love letter to you on the blackboard on the easel, I was to check it for spelling mistakes. I thought the letter was somehow … unsuitable. Unsuitable for her. So self-abasing and at the same time schoolmarmish … She wiped it all off shortly before you came.’

‘And now she’s in the Soviet Union hoping for less bureaucracy. Oh yes.’

‘Schnürchel got her a university place in Leningrad, for Russian teachers. She must have met a man there. I respect her despite everything, for her it wasn’t just an empty word, socialism. And that everyone should have a decent life. Did you never wonder why she was a boarder – when her family lived in the next village? Her mother was an alcoholic, her father the same – and he used to beat them. She had six brothers and sisters, and Svetlana was a mother to them.’

‘And why are you telling me all this, what am I supposed to do with that sentimental story? What are you trying to prove? That I’m an arsehole? Funnily enough, Verena tried that. That I’m too quick to judge people? My uncle’s hinted at that already. Are you trying to teach me how to behave? – That’s what they’re trying to do all the
time – teach people how to behave!’ Christian cried. ‘Teach yourselves!’ A fit of rage was coming on, a crust was bursting open, heat fizzed through his veins, a generator seemed to be pumping dark electricity into his fingertips, loading them with manic power, sharpening his eye for some target he could demolish with one slash of the knife or punch of the fist or blow of the axe – Christian had raised the tank axe at his company commander. He could feel the fit coming on, that too part of his Hoffmann heredity, Richard was liable to frighteningly violent outbursts of fury, Christian had seen his grandfather Arthur, half-crazed with rage, smash the living-room window with a meat-grinder, raving, roaring, he’d bombarded Emmy with clothes pegs. Christian dragged Reina into an entrance hall, bit her hand, then kissed the place he’d bitten. Her armpit! he thought. You wanted to kiss her armpit first. Now that had come to nothing. There was rubble in the hallway, plaster had trickled down to form bright cones of dust on the floor. He had to laugh when he heard Reina protest. How soft she was, her arms, her cheeks – so soft. Splinters of sunshine came in from the back yard, where the dustbins were, but only as far as a rusted bicycle. He was in a blind rage of desire. Go out with her. Talk to her. Reina was crying. He noticed that he was pressing the bag with the cyclamen against her. A door shut somewhere on a higher floor. He pushed Reina away, she let herself slide slowly down the wall, crouched there, face turned away though not crying any more. He could see himself the way he’d looked at himself, naked, in the mirror, his nauseating skin, covered in pimples, that longed for a touch and feared it. He flattened a little pile of plaster under his shoe, waiting, uncertain as to what was going to happen. He’d have to say, Sorry, please, again, and then go, but he really didn’t feel like that at all.

When Richard was on night duty, the telephone rang and he set off with an orderly and a driver, he recalled the apartment in which his retired boss had given a farewell meal for the doctors and a few nurses – the long-serving workhorses, as Müller used to say; the apartment that seemed to consist entirely of crystal, even the front door greeted the visitor with palm trees and a bird of paradise engraved on the frosted glass, followed by glass hall-stands, crystal-clear mirrors, display cases with glass flowers by Blaschka & Blaschka of Dresden, who had supplied their fragile, handblown works of art to zoological and botanical collections from Harvard to Vienna, the dandelion-clock weightlessness of Eucalyptus globulus,

the telephone rang, the nurse in Casualty held out the phone to him.

‘Frau Müller, for you, Herr Doktor’,

or volvox algae, enlarged until they were clearly visible, fragile radial sketches, Richard was reminded of the microscopy courses when he was a student, ‘Eucalyptus globulus, habitat Australia and Tasmania’, Müller, shaking a glass of water with ice cubes, had explained,

‘Yes? Hoffmann’,

‘Yes,’ said Edeltraut Müller,

and while Richard was looking for a formulation that sounded less off-hand than What’s wrong, What can I do for you? she said, ‘Come. Now’,

after taking a sip of water Müller had patted his lip with his signet ring and Richard had been confused by the opulent clarity, the single-minded transparency of the apartment, confused that Müller was something like a representative of the Blaschkas, he spoke for them, and for Richard the two things didn’t fit together: Müller’s choleric rule in the clinic, the
contemptuously violent cut with which he opened up his patients’ abdominal walls, his silent, vigorous advance into the depths, passing by, uninterested, anything that wasn’t
relevant
– and these glass anemones, freshwater polyps, cacti with cat’s-tongue flowers, irises in ballet poses; preparations of hardened, unhearing delicacy in the flexible, aerosol-light fluid that came spurting out of the lead crystal chandeliers and wall candelabras as if out of atomizers, and Müller, Richard recalled, turned away in embarrassment, perhaps also fearful, at compliments, raised-eyebrow assessments of the cost of this crystal druse, as if his self-confidence in the clinic had only been outward show, as if a man’s ability to assert his will, his decisiveness, were called into question if the one who possessed, or claimed to possess, those qualities lived in an apartment filled with watery light, burgeoning silence and glass flowers, and perhaps Müller was sorry he’d invited his colleagues, had quietly regretted not having satisfied the custom of giving a leaving party by holding it in the clinic – or did vanity and the need to show off outweigh caution; this Now-I-can-be-myself, ladies and gentlemen, this So this is me the way I never wanted you to see me while I was still in employment, but now everything’s different, now I’m retired, now I’ve escaped from you and can do as I like, can even brag unpunished, and out of relief at that I request the pleasure of your company to enjoy your little, agreeable defeat?,

when Richard set off and they were speeding along in the Rapid Medical Assistance van to Schlehenleite on the Elbe slope above the Blue Miracle, he could still hear the words of Grefe, the junior doctor, who had come out of one of the patients’ rooms in Casualty in the fluttering, already somewhat tatty white habit of the duty doctor, still traces of plaster on his forearms and the backs of his hands: ‘The surgeon’s illness, Dr Hoffmann, pensioned off – and that’s it?’,

‘Come. Now’,

but her voice had sounded calm, controlled, not strained, not trying to maintain her composure for the emergency response physician, as often happened when they were on call,

Richard
recalled the long table with the, now emeritus, professor at the head, his relaxed, inviting gestures, and the way Trautson had tapped a glass with his fork to request silence for a speech, below the one painting in the apartment, the picture of a loaf of bread,

‘I don’t know, Dr Grefe, your aunt just said, “Come. Now”, is there someone here who can replace you?’ But Dr Grefe was already being called for the next urgent case,

amid the sound of the engine’s rpm angina, its whooping-cough chug-chug when the driver changed gear on a climb and double-declutched, Richard recalled that loaf painted in oils on the wall over the top end of the table, creaking (so immediate it seemed) like a carriage wheel, with a casual dusting from the lavish excesses of flour piled up beside it, partly in absolutist pointed cones, partly in churned-up heaps, as if the painter (strangely enough one didn’t think of the baker) had dug his fists into it; a loaf with its crust burst open in the form of a starfish with, coming out of the cracks, the soft, nutritiously steaming dough, giving the brown (chitin-brown, acorn-brown, double-bass-brown, tree-trunk-brown, rock-brown) crust stuttering outlines, jagging out ridges, here raising a plate that would splinter when you bit on it, there a tumour of crust swelling in a thin network of pores surrounded by the crumb that recalled the growths on gnarled beeches,

‘Bread, Herr Hoffmann. The man painted nothing but bread, bread all the time. It was his speciality, so to speak, and even if there’s something odd about obstinately sticking to one single subject, at least he achieved genuine mastery in that, as you will admit. The King of the Loaf’,

‘But a king at least,’ Dreyssiger broke in mockingly,

‘A king who is truly powerful, you never experienced the war, young man’,

Richard recalled before Niklas Tietze opened the door to the Müllers’ apartment or, rather, dragged it open across broken glass that crunched and crackled under his feet,

Richard
saw Niklas’s stethoscope through the gaps between the splinters still left in the front door, then his face, serrated by fragments of the bird of paradise and palm leaves hanging down like icicles, saw, silently observed by neighbours, Niklas’s hands, his bow tie, his Sunday suit that he wore when going to Däne’s Friends of Music,

‘Yes,’ Niklas said, ‘she came to fetch us, we’d been listening to Mozart and … it’s not far for her, we were still chatting’,

‘What happened?’ Richard saw the ruins, the smashed mirrors, the clothes stands in pieces, the thousands of glints shooting up from fragments of glass in the light of the few remaining bulbs,

‘He was sent a letter demanding he declare everything,’ Niklas said, waving the orderly and driver, who’d pushed their way with the stretcher through the rapidly growing crowd of onlookers, through to the back,

Joffe, the lawyer, came out of one of the rooms, hesitantly and with much shaking of the head – he was wearing checked slippers – seeking gaps in the piles of broken glass,

‘The police and forensic have been informed, everything will have to be cordoned off here, I couldn’t do more than that, Herr Hoffmann, this kind of thing isn’t my field’,

‘Thirty-nine ampoules of regular insulin, Dr Tietze immediately injected some glucose intravenously but I fear we were too late,’ Edeltraut Müller said, tapping a needle then pumping up a blood-pressure sleeve round Müller’s right arm, feeling in the crook of his arm with the stethoscope and slowly releasing the column of mercury with the knurled screw while Richard checked the pupil reaction with a torch: both pupils fixed; checked breathing, pulse, circulation and examined the two kidney dishes, in the one on the left the broken ampoules and two ampoule saws, a compress; in the one on the right the glass syringe with the injection cannula still attached,

‘He knew I was going to the Friends of Music, Dr Hoffmann, and that I’d be away for several hours; the neighbours above us were also away
and the noise wouldn’t have been very audible on the floor above them,’ she said, pumping up the blood-pressure sleeve again

‘the letter,’ she said,

‘Dear Dr Hoffmann, The ampoules of regular insulin come from the stock of the Surgical Clinics, please sort that out with Administration and with Senior Nurse Henrike.

Dearest Edeltraut, I thought they shouldn’t have the apartment. Please don’t go to any unnecessary trouble as far as the funeral’s concerned. I’ve made the necessary arrangements with Herr Pliehwe of Earthly Journey, the undertaker’s in the Service Combine. For your widow’s pension apply to Administration, Herr Scheffler will help you. I have done forty-one years of good work. As a communist and as a doctor. This isn’t the socialism we dreamt of.’

turned the membrane of the stethoscope, pulled out the earpieces with one hand, making them collide, pumped up the sleeve, made the column of mercury in the pressure gauge contract, but had forgotten to put the earpieces back in, pumped again, the hooks holding the sleeve had loosened so that it swelled asymmetrically,

‘And,’ Niklas said, his eyes fixed on the broken display cases, the smashed glass flowers, the hammer with which Müller had reduced the crystal pendants on the chandeliers to fragments,

‘Thirty-nine ampoules,’ Edeltraut Müller said, ‘he drew them up into a urology syringe, look’,

certainly with a raspberry-coloured pout of his lips, certainly his eyes concentrating as he scored the ampoules, broke off the necks with the compress between glass and fingers, certainly with his owl-like eyebrows knitted, his fingers lifting, cool, professional actions, regular insulin worked quickly,

‘They waited until he retired,’ Edeltraut Müller said,

Police
stomped over broken glass, the duty forensic doctor nodded to Richard, who caught Edeltraut Müller before she fell onto the splinters of glass beside her husband’s corpse.