The Tower: A Novel (98 page)

The summer drew on, the ladybirds disappeared as suddenly as they had arrived. The City Cleansing Department swept up the remains of the seven-spot beetles, whole tons of red wings and black bodies. The eating and cooking apples ripened, there promised to be a good crop of Gute Louise, even though that year the pear trees on the slopes of the Elbe from Loschwitz to Pillnitz had been attacked by rust. Herr Krausewitz stood in the garden of Wolfstone, chin in hand, a look of concern on his face, unable to agree with Libussa what could be done about it: water mixed with crushed walnuts and poured round the trunks of the affected trees did nothing to get rid of it, nor did any of the pesticides from the chemist’s. Clouds of Wofatox enveloped the trees, leaving a grey deposit on the leaves.

The message in Meno’s typewriter had been a forgery.

In September Ulrich was fifty, Niklas in October. The parties were held at home, with just family and friends.

And on one of the sunny, almost windless days in the late autumn, filled with calm warmth, like an Anker glass with cider, Richard took the postbox-yellow oilcan off the black shelf, went over to the Hispano-Suiza, poured a drop here, smeared some over a running part there, while Stahl, his hands in the pockets of his work overalls, stood staring up at the sky spread out over Lohmen quarry like a silk parasol, said, ‘Finished. Really, it’s finished, Gerhart. Can’t wait to see how it works.’

Sputnik
magazine, a digest of the Soviet press, was banned.

And on another late-autumn day, which would turn into a sunny, almost windless late-autumn day, there was loud knocking on the door of the House with a Thousand Eyes at four in the morning. Still half asleep, Meno groped his way into the hall, where he was pushed aside by a squad of men in uniform demanding to see Herr and Frau Stahl.
Stahl came out of their bedroom, bleary, his sparse remaining hair tousled, Sabine behind him.

‘Herr Gerhart and Frau Sabine Stahl?’ He was arresting them, in the name of the Republic, for the intention of leaving the Republic illegally.

‘You,’ another of the men in uniform said, turning to Meno, the Honichs and the Langes, who, wakened by the noise, had appeared in the landing, ‘will also be questioned and are to report for questioning at Grauleite at nine this morning. Your employers will be informed.’

‘Well, all this you’ve been telling us is a bit mysterious, Herr Doktor. Just think: a man builds an aeroplane in the same shed as you. A real, live aeroplane, not one of those radio-controlled things like I’ve made for my boy that can go whizzing round the pond, no – a real flying machine, our experts have said it’s actually capable of flight. And you say you didn’t notice anything. Come on now, I don’t believe even you believe that yourself. So you just tell me about it, one step at a time. – My God, Herr Doktor, you do have a talent for getting into difficulties. So this Stahl was working on the plane without your knowledge? And he must’ve tried it out too, mustn’t he?’

If you say open-cast mining, you say wind. The wind was always there. It came from all directions, bringing the smells of Samarkand, the yellow fog, the carbide dust and the quicklime from the lime works. When the cloud was low, the slim-waisted funnels of smog would swing like umbilical cords between rust-red placenta zones on the
ground and lazy, genie-in-a-bottle cloud-foetuses; it would start at the edge of the mine, where even the weeds didn’t thrive, jump down, elegant and self-assured as a paratrooper, onto the lower, churned-up terrace, turn into a child splashing contentedly in the bathtub, push and shove the W50 and Ural lorries, making the tarpaulins billow out and, where they’d been attached too casually, tear off the hooks and flap up and down like the wings of trapped prehistoric birds; or it would blow buffers of dry soil at the lorries that were so fierce the drivers had to step on it even when going downhill. And they couldn’t see any farther than the inside of their windscreens, in front of them the brown grit, already containing coal, swirled, easily swallowing up the light of the headlamps so that vehicles coming towards them, now pushed by the wind and grabbed by their tarpaulin collars, emerged abruptly, immense, out of the booming darkness. To the roofs of their cabs the drivers had fitted special horns that reminded Christian of ships’ foghorns (he didn’t ask, perhaps that was what they actually were), but even the bellow from these throats, which could normally be heard kilometres away, broke off when the wind decided to swing round uphill. The wind would hop down exuberantly from terrace to terrace, but patiently spend time on each one of them, chewing and biting into lumps and bumps, smoothing out the track, a spiral going down in tighter and tighter hairpins, that the lorries, with the shifts on the lurching, bone-shakingly shuddering wooden benches on either side of the open back, slithered up and down. At the bottom, on the circular floor of the crater of the open-cast mine, the wind would sometimes pause for minutes on end. An almost arrogant pause, Christian thought, raising his head and listening in the gaseous darkness with its wash of white from the lights on the machines. The wind was waiting. Was it gathering its strength for an attack on the excavators as they moved with stolid finality? They pushed the wind up onto their shoulders, unconcerned. But the wind seemed at last to have found a challenge to clear the fun out of its rage (it reduced its strength), to hand out and
receive the blows of a worthy opponent that make victory triumphant, radiant (like the cut through a valuable, incredibly irreplaceable early-Victorian sideboard that has been handed over to the circular saw); the wind returned, keeping, since for the moment it couldn’t get the better of the excavators, close to the ground, over which, if they wanted to shift their position, they had to move and needed to be as flat as a tabletop. Brutal as they were in the way they ripped into the layers of gley and seams of coal (the bucket chains ate into them as if they were Trinkfix cocoa powder), they were powerless to resist an incline: however ungainly it looked, an excavator, Christian had learnt, was a finely balanced system, even the slightest slope of the underlying surface could cause it to tip over. The wind dropped, ceremonially (somehow the idea of spats came to Christian in his seat high up on the excavator), and opened out like a Swiss army knife, only the tools the wind exposed were cudgels or, to be more precise … flails. On the one hand the furious and, in some respects admirable, choreography (only human beings were capable of the ruthlessness and obsessiveness with which the wind declared certain areas of the ground, and not always the most suitable ones, a threshing floor) made Christian feel like laughing (he suppressed it, he was afraid of this wind), on the other it stimulated, surprisingly for him, his boldness in a fit of vitality that was rare, but for that all the more violent and, because it was not free of cruelty, frightening: he jumped down from the excavator as quickly as he could and stood in the middle of the fight between the wind and the ground surface, lifted up his head to the bolts of air falling down from the night sky, as heavy and quiet as chandeliers, and screamed. That relaxed him. He thought of Burre, of Reina. And couldn’t resist singing out his own modest happiness against the deafening vehemence of calamity.

He was the third man on the excavator. His job was to clean the bucket wheel. The soil above the coal was systematically removed, starting with the top edge of the overburden in which a channel a good
metre deep, the length of the extended bucket-wheel arm, was cut out from right to left and, on the next level down, from left to right. Did one cut last twenty minutes, half an hour? Christian couldn’t say, he wasn’t allowed to wear his watch on the excavator. The bucket wheel stopped at the highest point and Christian, as nimble as an orang-utan once he had become accustomed to the work, would clamber up the struts, gratings and railed walkways to the front of the boom at the end of which, about fifteen metres from the body of the excavator, his work began: knocking off the clumps of soil stuck to the wheel. For that he used a pickaxe that the driver, at the beginning of the shift, sharpened in the crow’s nest of a workshop in the top storey of the excavator, as well as a butcher’s cleaver that was not a piece of standard equipment, brought for him by the second ‘man’ (a giant of a woman of indeterminate age in men’s work clothes, who kept her mittens on all the time, even while eating during breaks, and didn’t say a word), who demanded it back with a sullen grunt at the end of the shift. Christian hacked away like a murderer, on his back he could sense the eyes of the driver, who, from the lower cab, was examining the darkness above the calm glow of his cigarette; as a joke, the driver would switch on the wheel after precisely ten minutes, sometimes sooner, just for a try-out and ‘to wake him up’, as he said. Christian tried to stick to the interval between the chimes of the ten-minute clock but he couldn’t summon up the period of time that he thought had become part of him. When it wasn’t freezing, the soil that had been rolled flat against the bucket-wheel cover had the consistency of cork; the pick and cleaver bounced back off it and more than once the implement had slipped out of Christian’s hand and landed below, beside the crawler tracks, like a pathetically thin toy. When it was freezing the soil, in the minute it took him to get from the recreation room to the bucket wheel, became as hard as a tree trunk, and then Christian could only hack and split and cut the dark brown mass off in shavings and splinters, working as hard as he could, driven on by the fear of being caught by the wheel
as it suddenly started to turn. Up there the wind went to work roughly, without the cajoling and, when they paused, hypocritical blandishments of its ground troops, without the boxing gloves of its dust-welterweights, which gave a muted sigh as a punch was landed, without the air cushions beneath their flat-footed leaps onto the conveyor belts for the overburden, above which tin lamps swayed like drinkers who had tried to slip out without paying being shaken by a strapping landlord. The ship’s doctor had told Christian about sailing ships in a storm, how the sailors were hanging on the yards, the raging sea twenty or thirty metres below them, balancing on footropes, clinging on to a recalcitrant sail that was furiously trying to burst its bonds and they were trying to reef, ‘one hand for the ship, one hand for your life’. That’s overdoing it, Christian thought, you’re not on a ship. But the idea helped, forced a breach in the reality, made it in an uncomplicated way more bearable. Water … and rats. The water gathered at the bottom of the open-cast mine, clearing it away was a task that was almost beyond the pumps, whose groans the wind occasionally released, a sound that seemed to Christian like the death throes of creatures that were active in the machines (enslaved and imprisoned by some modern curse) and for which Christian felt sorry because they had to drink just water all the time – which he took as further proof that there was also a gradual side to the tortures. The rats were fat and uninhibited and had the slippery suppleness of animals you had to hold tight between your two hands (feral cats, polecats, old toads); when the bucket wheel swung into the hillside and started its work as a mechanical mole, the driver, whose name Christian never learnt, only his nickname (‘Schecki’ or ‘Scheggi’ depending on the degree of alcoholic merriness), liked to shoot at them from his cab with an air rifle, his ambition being to hit them with a ‘clean’ shot – in the eyes or, which counted for more, in their slimy, pink, bare tails that would then ‘come to life’ as a whip with St Vitus’s dance – Schecki said in one of the few conversations he had with Christian; it had started with a vague wave of the hand in
the direction of the top of the slope and a grunted ‘There used to be graveyards up there’, after Christian had found a half-decomposed foot in one of the buckets. Schecki grinned, took a sip of the rosehip tea the management distributed free to the workers, pressed the switch on the excavator radio and shouted ‘Food’ at the diaphragm; the reply was an irritated croak from Schanett’s (that was the name of the woman unloader) cab. Schanett left the wagon she’d just filled, slammed the cab door, bent over the boom and gave a shout confirmed by a panting whistle from the locomotive in front of the spoil wagons. She stomped into the recreation room, where it was Christian’s task to lay the table with four of the scratched plastic plates, with ‘Property of the Brown-Coal Combine’ on the back, and three sets of aluminium cutlery (Schanett ate with a butcher’s knife of her own) and to switch on the frying plate that stuck out from the wall next to the locker with Schecki’s change of clothes. When the plate was red-hot Schanett stood up, skewered a cube of margarine on the end of her butcher’s knife, slapped it down on the plate, which was bent up at the sides, where the margarine fizzed round (the surplus dribbled into a rusty Wehrmacht helmet Schecki had found in the spoil and fixed under the plate), took (without removing her mittens) four gammon steaks wrapped in newspaper out of her rucksack, let the blood drip off, chucked them angrily onto the plate, turned them, scattered pepper, salt and garlic over the sizzling meat out of a tin containing all three spices together and, when the steaks were ready, nodded Schecki and the engine driver, who were exchanging dirty jokes that were going round the mine, over with a contemptuous gesture. She would serve Christian herself, hesitating for a moment before giving the plate a push in his direction, sending it slithering across the table with sauce and blood splashing over onto the oilcloth fixed to it with steel clamps. They mostly ate at two in the morning and the plate cooled down as they did so. They all lived
in the coal
; the open-cast mine was only one of many that belonged together and formed a conglomerate of churned-up ground, mud,
spoil heaps, coal seams stretching to the horizon with the excavators squatting on them like grasping treasure-seekers and the bloodsucking insects of the dumper trucks buzzing round.
In the coal
: somewhere in the darkness, which came either from above (the quickly turning sky) or from below (clay, gley, the oily shimmering puddles it was best to avoid), were the remains of a small town: fire walls, rotten fences, houses torn apart at an oblique angle, scraps of wallpaper with the shapes of furniture still visible, a Konsum branch, no longer open (Schecki, Schanett and the engine driver were self-sufficient, had a few cows and pigs, grew what they needed). Schanett lived on a farmstead, left over from a village, alone with her bedridden father, the former village butcher, with no electricity, no running water, not even one of the mine railways went out there. For the last hour of the night shift Christian took over the unloader. Schanett went, guided by her sense of smell and precise knowledge of the constantly changing tracks in the working area, past the palely lit wagons and the kilometres of conveyor belts, in order to be able to feed her stock at daybreak. Beside the window in the unloading cabin there was a poster, green islands in a green sea.