The Tower: A Novel (92 page)

The official name for the U-boat was Detention. Detentions were announced at roll call. Before Christian went to the U-boat he had to go and see the doctor ‘to determine suitability for detention’. The doctor was a young but weary man in a white coat but with no stethoscope. He asked Christian whether he was taking any medicine or had any illnesses.

‘Acne vulgaris,’ Christian said.

‘That blooms even in the dark.’ The doctor put a weary scribble on the detention-suitability-assessment form.

The U-boat was dark, since there were no windows, and Christian spent a long time there, a week, he guessed. During that time he had felt his way round every nook and cranny of the cell. The bucket beside the table for him to relieve himself had an enamel lid with two wire guide brackets; Christian learnt to use his sense of touch like a blind
man, the writing on the lid was slightly raised and said ‘Servus’. The blankets smelt of Spee washing powder and – it took him a while to work this out – of the lamas in Dresden Zoo, of lamas in the rain to be more precise. For a long time in the even longer darkness of the cell Christian could not get rid of the idea that he had reached the innermost point of the system. He was in the GDR, the country had fortified frontiers and a wall. He was in the National People’s Army, which had barracks walls and guarded entrances. And in Schwedt Military Prison he was stuck in the U-boat, behind walls with no windows. So now he was entirely there, now he must have arrived. But more than that he must, Christian thought, be himself. He must be naked, his self laid bare, and he thought that he must now have the great thoughts and insights he’d dreamt of at home and at school. He sat naked on the floor but the only thought he had was that if you sat naked on stones for a while you got cold. That you were hungry and thirsty, that you can count your pulse, that in darkness you also get tired, that for a while you can hear nothing but dead silence and that then your ear starts to produce its own sounds, that your eye is constantly trying to light little cigarette-lighter flames, here and there and there, and that you go mad in the darkness, however many poems you know, novels you’ve read, films you’ve seen and memories you have.

Now, Christian thought, I really am Nemo.
No one
.

On a hot day in July, Christian, Pancake and twenty-eight other prisoners were sent to Effects. They were being transferred, they were told, to the Orient, as the chemical area round Leuna, Schkopau and Bitterfeld was known because of the colourful effusions from the factories. The chemical industry brought bread, prosperity and beauty and for it they needed workers. Handcuffed, they followed the Friendship oil pipeline that went from the town on the Oder, whose high-rise buildings were bright in the distance, to the Orient of the chemical industry in its main area, Samarkand, in the south-west of the Republic.

Apart from crows, there were no birds there. As the summer twilight began to fall in the garden of Caravel the yearning, melodious lament of the blackbird could be heard; here, on Carbide Island there were no bird calls apart from the ugly, coarse croaking of huge flocks of crows that seemed to feel at home on the foam-washed banks of the Saale, the bend of which could be seen from the window, and gathered every evening in the pale skeletons of trees for sleep and for the stories of the day, the poet’s ‘day that has been today’ … They chattered and cawed and fished around in the scum for edible matter, which was presumably washed up in sufficient quantities, and sometimes, when the lights went out in the cells on Carbide Island, they seemed to be laughing, giving voice to their gratingly repulsive mockery. Like a cloak of invisibility, the colour of their plumage, that shining coal-black, blended with that of the river, which flowed sluggishly and, almost every evening now, in August, illuminated by an iron-red sun, through the landscape of the chemical industry over which, fixed to the platforms at the top of the furnaces, the flag of Samarkand fluttered: a yellow flag, the yellow of the quarantine flag for ships, with a black retort on it. Christian and the others had been sent from Schwedt to Camp II, which took up a separate corridor on the fifth floor of the prison. On the corridor wall, beside the table for the guard on duty, was a ‘daily schedule of work’, abbreviated to DSW. It was similar to the one in Camp I: the early shift was woken at four (though here it was by the rising and falling wail of a siren, as if an alert for an impending air raid), followed by morning exercises and washing. Here the taps over the basins were fixed, but there wasn’t always water – when Samarkand was ‘on a lift’, as they put it, when all the machines,
filtering installations, cooling systems, works conduits were demanding water, it was a dribble that came out of the washroom taps. Also it wasn’t drinking water that came out of the pipes but a liquid that was sometimes rusty, more often as yellow as soup, and smelt of floorcloths and rotten eggs. People said the smell came from carbide, from ‘the other side’, from across the Saale on the bank of which, connected to the prison by a bridge that looked as if it were coral-encrusted, there was a carbide factory. From the bridge, which the company approached at an easy march, it looked like an old steam locomotive that was bending down for a drink from the Saale. Pouring out of a cyclopean chimney were clouds of light-grey smoke that, below the clouds, mingled with the discharges from the coking plant, the chlorine works, the power stations lower down the Saale, creating a dark, unmoving swirl that widened out at the top like a flower head.

Christian and his companions went in with the early shift along a passageway barely lit by fluorescent tubes, past a porter’s lodge with flowery wallpaper, through a barrier with a ‘No smoking’ sign over it. Conversations ceased, silent and hunched up, driven on by Staff Sergeant Gottschlich’s ‘At the double’, the prisoners hurried into the factory. It was already light, the air already oppressive, it was going to be a hot day. The company waited in a yard that the tall grey-dusted buildings on either side turned into a well-shaft. Cylinder drums, running diagonally across the yard, turned slowly, workers in blue-grey clothes and hard hats were running to and fro on gratings above the drums. Water was pouring over the drums, it seemed to come directly from the Saale. The drums boomed and rumbled as if boulders were turning round inside them. Strange noises came from the buildings – a shrill, dangerous-sounding hum, as if a special kind of stinging insect were being held captive; as if there were a new breed of long-extinct Meganeura dragonflies or carboniferous hornets behind the closed doors. The buildings were grey: mud-grey, the colour of lead dust, carbide dust that had settled in thick layers on pipes, walls, stairs, even
on the windows, simple openings with flapping rags made in the walls. What Christian saw was a coral reef of muck and in every second during which the rust-brown cylinder drums turned and smoke from the chimneys crept up under the clouds, darkening the sky, dust was trickling, falling, crackling in fresh layers on the old ones hardened by wind and weather. Christian looked across at a woman parking her red Simson moped by a furnace and heading off towards a square brick tower at the back – he saw the outline of her shoes in the dust, at first cut sharply into the yielding layer but soon powdered over with the dust drifting down, the sharp edges blurred, gradually the footmark filled in, became invisible. After a ten-minute wait there were epaulettes of grey powder on Pancake’s shoulders, their caps, boots were snowed up; Staff Sergeant Gottschlich wiped his wristwatch clean. The dust got between their teeth, in their eyes, making them inflamed, rubbed against their groin until it was raw. And then there was the wind. The wind, ferreting round, bringing unrest, the blind marshal of the weather. Like a dark-grey djinn rising out of an unsealed bottle, a spiral of dust swelled up over the carbide factory; at ground level, where clumps of grass stuck up like the mops of hair of people buried in the carbide powder, the spiral was as slender as a boa, rising up, against the wagons on the goods line behind the factory, like a trombone that twisted and turned, spreading out its bell above the furnaces lining the top of the locomotive.

Pancake accepted it with a shrug of the shoulders. He’d heard that work in the carbide factory was well paid and when a foreman came to instruct them in their work he brightened up and started to haggle. Gottschlich was occupied elsewhere and the prisoners were left to themselves and the carbide people. Christian saw the bars on the windows of the furnace shed where the foreman took them. Here, not far above the ground, the windows were of glass, wiping them had left bright smears, like bull’s-eye glass, slim triangles of dust had built up in the corners.

‘But
you can pay me extra.’ Pancake smiled. Aha, so he’d only kept his self-assurance hidden. He was a smart lad, knew when it was better to keep your head down and say nothing. To play the repentant: Christian hadn’t believed his ‘reformed character’ act. In the evening he would often talk about prisons he’d been in. There were people, even ones as young as Pancake, who saw the country from the prison perspective, with ‘bars before their eyes’. They’d been round the prisons of the Republic, knew the guards, their preferences and weaknesses, knew whether you could bribe them and what with. Pancake didn’t know Schwedt and Carbide Island, but they knew him, as Christian discovered. Pancake had immediately come to an understanding with Gottschlich, each sensed a ‘brother’ in the other. Chance, sometimes just the accident of birth, could decide what dress you wore: dark blue or striped. The only difference in expression was whether you hit people as per the law or not. That was something Christian had had to learn: that you didn’t waste words. A punch was quicker than a word and who was right was not sorted out by discussion, at least not by oral discussion.
Do you want it in writing? To get something in writing
. That meant something different in there from
outside
, that had to be learnt as well.

‘We’ll see,’ the foreman said. Pancake raised his head, had a quick look round.

‘You can look after it for me. I’ll collect it when I’m out again. You won’t lose out on it.’

‘For the moment you get your seventeen per cent.’ The prisoners were entitled to 17 per cent of the normal wage, if they reached their targets. If the foreman was open to discussion like that, the situation regarding the workforce must be bad and with that their prospects of reaching the planned targets. Christian was put in the Gustav furnace shop.

Carbide. He had heard of the substance, seen the film
Carbide and Sorrel
, knew that Grandfather Arthur’s Wanderer bike had a carbide lamp; but he had no idea exactly how it worked. That was now explained
to him by Asza Burmeister, the tapper of furnace 8 in Gustav furnace shop, an oldish worker who had been ‘in carbide’ for twenty-two years, had trained as a carpenter and had also been to sea. He took a piece of carbide and poured some water over it. ‘Y’see, Krishan,’ (he called him the same as Libussa, which pleased him) ‘now that makes acetylene. It’s welding gas, that is, welding gas. An’ now when I hold my cigar against it,’ (he smoked Jägerstolz cigars) ‘there’s a bang an’ it lights up. That’s the way a carbide lamp works. Only no bang, it shouldn’t go bang.’ Asza spoke very quickly, it was difficult to follow him, he often repeated individual words, rolled his ‘r’s in a dialect Christian had never heard before. ‘I’m a Sudeten lousewort,’ Asza said, avoiding a direct answer. Asza: an unusual name, but Christian didn’t ask. He couldn’t ask many questions. Questions were forbidden. Conversations were forbidden, fraternization. The workers and the prisoners should have as little as possible to do with each other, but the prisoners had to be trained, that was where the problems started. Gottschlich was supposed to keep a check but, as Christian soon realized, appeared only rarely. That had two reasons and they were: heat and dust. What is heat? Asza, if he hadn’t been so taciturn while working (during the breaks he would sit, left leg over a chair, with his Jägerstolz and a bottle of rhubarb juice, which was available to the carbide workers at a reduced price, muttering ‘Piraeus, Faroes, Bordoh’ – the harbours he’d seen), Asza could have said, heat, brother, you can’t explain it. The furnace has a white heart and each heartbeat comes flying like a red-hot iron. The shift lasted twelve hours. That had its good side for afterwards the prisoners didn’t have to go to the ploughland as they called the training ground: drill, assault course, tactics, instruction in protection. On the other hand it was twelve hours in an atmosphere Christian would not have thought imaginable. When Ron Siewert, the Free German Youth secretary of the Thälmann work team, came over from the furnace next to theirs Christian would only see him when he was two or three metres away. Along with Asza, King
Siewert, as he was known, was the best furnace tapper: no absences, no dawdling, no boozing at work, no negligence.
Negligence
was bringing carbide into contact with water; negligence was not wearing a hard hat; negligence was working without wearing welder’s goggles. Siewert would appear out of the greenish haze of dust (hanging lamps on completely encrusted wires that looked as if they were inside the wreck of the
Titanic
), open his beard and shout to ask Asza how the furnace was to be run.

Carbide. The word pursued Christian into his sleep, for here he didn’t dream. When he got back from his shift, he was
all in
. He flopped onto his bunk and fell asleep. Pancake had to shake him awake when Gottschlich did his rounds.

Carbide. What was it? Trees (there were meadows along the banks of the Saale that were reduced to ash) were living beings, they felt heat and cold, growth and decline, they blossomed and withered. But this, this grey stuff, this carbide? Time consists of water, the future of carbide, they said in Samarkand. The furnace was several storeys high and it produced carbide, carbide, always the dazzling white melt when Asza burnt a hole in the skin of the viscous carbide with the flame cutter, directed along caterpillar tracks, so that it would run along the ‘fox’, as Asza called the tapping spout, into the ‘walrus’ (the water-cooled cylinder drum). Christian thought, I can’t stick this out. Christian thought, Meno would say, There, you see, that’s completely unironic. Christian thought, if only you were like Pancake. Keep your head down. Always fall on your feet. Take things as they come with a shrug of the shoulders. He doesn’t get worked up about being locked up here but about the fact that he earns so little money. What sticks in his craw is the 17 per cent wages, not the hundred per cent Carbide Island. Still, Christian had
become smarter
. To be smarter meant keeping your trap shut. A few of the others in the cells still hadn’t become smarter, still talked about
error
and
misfortune
, wanted
consultations with their lawyer
, and
appeals
and
visits
. But no visits were allowed on Carbide Island.
They moaned instead of sleeping. They were
damaged
. They ended up in the U-boat. There everything was as per regulations.

Carbide. When the wind turned to the south, it blew the dust onto the island. Roses grew against the southern wall. Christian would have liked to know what colour they were. They had no scent. The flowers looked as if they were made of plaster. Even the leaves and shoots had a light-grey dusting, a stucco-like beauty heavy with sleep.

Asza said, ‘Anyone who sticks it out for a whole summer in the carbide will stay.’ Carbide. What was it, what did they need it for? Christian learnt: it needed coke and quicklime, the mixture was called Möller. A round furnace was charged with it. Christian had assumed the furnaces here would work in the same way as the stove at home with coal on a grating through which the ash fell into the ash pan underneath. But he had never seen – never mind heard – a stove anything like this furnace. Three Soderberg electrodes, several metres high and arranged in an equilateral triangle, jutted down into the furnace, were electrically charged and, since the material from which they were made formed resistance, became hot, creating an arc with a temperature of up to 3,000°C. In it the Möller reacted to produce calcium carbide. The arc was dazzling white and hummed in the furnace opening that Asza called the nostril of hell. The hum was accompanied by the thump of the coke-crusher, since, before they were put in the mixing tower to be made into Möller, the coke and limestone had to be of a certain particle size. It sounded as if a herd of bison were stampeding across the shed, a knocking and rattling, sometimes a deafening clatter, as if goods wagons full of sheet metal were being tipped out. The furnaces used an immense amount of electricity – so much that on some days in Halle-Neustadt the lights went out when the early shift started and high-rise blocks stood there in the semi-dark like angry mountain trolls. Furnace 8 was a vicious dragon. Asza knew it well and respected it. When Asza burnt open the carbide crust, it sounded like a record arm being pulled right across the record, potent and
dangerous, and it wasn’t always carbide that shot out into the ‘fox’, there were impurities, residues of quicklime and coke that ought not to be there. The shift supervisors knew that and kept quiet about it; they were under pressure from the targets and twenty-two tappings per shift were the norm, twenty-two times the white-hot snot had to pour out of the dragon’s nostrils. But the god of industrial processes had blocked them with lumps. Even at 2,200°C the molten mass of the Möller tended to form lumps and the chemical reaction threatened to come to a halt. Preventing this was Christian’s job. With iron poles several metres long that they called rods he poked around in the glowing mass. What did such an iron pole weigh? Enough for it to be too heavy after half an hour. There was a steel thermometer beside the steps up to the top of the furnace, over the years it had been covered by more and more layers of flue dust and now looked more like a stalactite than a thermometer. When he was standing at the furnace using the rod, Christian had the feeling he was being smelted into a new kind of creature, a cross between an otter (sweat, the side away from the furnace) and a broiling fowl (facing the opening). The heat made you tired, despite that you had to be alert. Sometimes hot oil would spurt out of a leaky pipe, land on your tough cotton clothing and sparks would spray out from the burner, setting the cloth alight. Once Asza was in flames but Ruscha, the second tapper (they worked in fours per furnace and shift), calmly threw a blanket over him and smothered the blaze. Pancake, working the rods with Christian, had leapt aside in alarm. The dust made your throat scratchy and this was soon followed by the cough, a never-ending retching and barking to clear out the dust; it was worse over in the chlorine works, Asza said, over in the chlorine works they exceeded the officially permitted level of air contamination by 100 per cent. The heat made you thirsty.