The Tower: A Novel (99 page)

Time fell out of time and aged. Time remained time on a clock with no hands. Time above was its passage, the sun shone on dials, indicated morning, noon, evening, indicated the days on calendars: past days, the present day, days to come. It leapt, it circled, it hurried off, a marble rolling down a narrow spiral track. But time below pointed to the laws and didn’t concern itself with human clocks. A country with a strange disease, young people old, young people not wanting to be adults, citizens living in niches,
retreating into the body politic that, ruled over by old men, lay in deathlike sleep. Time of the fossils; fish were stranded when the waters receded, flapped mutely for a while, submitted, died motionless and fossilized: in the house walls, on the mouldering landings, they fused with documents, became watermarks. The strange disease marked faces; it was infectious, there was no adult who didn’t have it, no child who remained innocent. Truths choked back, thoughts unspoken filled the body with bitterness, burrowed it into a mine of fear and hatred. Hardening and softening were the main symptoms of the strange disease. In the air there was a veil through which one breathed and spoke. Contours became blurred, a spade was not called a spade. Painters painted evasively, newspapers printed lines of black letters; however, they weren’t what promoted understanding but the space between them … the white shadows of words that were to be sensed and interpreted. In the theatres they spoke in ancient metres. Concrete … cotton … clouds … water … concrete
…

but then all at once
…

Meno wrote,

but then all at once
…

Dances, dreams … Sleep became mushy, the early shift came and went, doors banged, from the rooms at the farther end of the corridor came Nip’s babbling, sending the duty NCO or his assistant to the nearest shop to get some schnapps (over in Samarkand, an hour on foot through mud and the proud lifelessness of no-man’s-land) … ‘To be
sloshed
for a whole week,’ Nip had said, ‘and then to get up as if nothing had happened, simply to
lose
, forget a whole week. Seven
empty pages in the calendar and despite that you’re still there.’ – ‘That’s too much of a luxury, boss,’ said Pancake, who enjoyed the privilege of being allowed to sit on the edge of the mine crater playing tangos for the excavators; he took the right to address him by that title from the deals he set up with Nip. But the sergeant seemed to be taking him for a ride, threatening him with a ‘you know what, Kretzschmar’, so that Pancake had started to make a list that he added up now and then. Too much of a luxury: not to know what was going on for a week, then just to smooth out your uniform, ‘not even kings can do that. And anyway, I’d be there. I like shirkers. Boss.’

Between the shifts, on the lemon-yellow linen that made the soldiers’ quarrelling somehow cosy, amid tobacco smoke, the clatter of dice, bored-frustrated card bids, Christian spent a lot of time thinking about things.

‘Do you think Burre was an informer?’

‘Course I do. What else could he do, Nemo?’

‘You’re not calling me Mummy’s Boy any more?’

‘No one who can stick out a summer in the carbide is that. Simple fact, simple conclusion. – That makes you feel good, does it? Applause is our food, as they say in the circus.’

‘I saw him outside the staff building. – You see a lot of people there, but not like that. It’s hard to say why, but I could imagine where he was off to.’

‘If I’d been him I’d have done just the same. You tell them this and that and you’re left in peace. It must be difficult to pin something on you after that.’

‘So what would you have told them about me?’

‘That you think too much for a convinced socialist brother. That makes you dangerous. A clever Dick who can keep his trap shut as long as you, who quietly observes and isn’t close to anyone, will never be satisfied with some provisional solution. He wants more. Freedom or justice, for example. And they’re always the ones who make difficulties.’

‘Perhaps
you’re an informer?’

‘I’d get nothing out of it. Would ruin my business. I depend on my reputation and something like that always comes through, like damp through the wall.’

‘Still.’

‘Anyone else would have had that stuck in his ribs by now.’ Pancake pointed to the crowbar propped against the shed wall.

Up to 29 December the winter was unusually mild; the cold arrived suddenly, Christian could see the puddles freezing over from the excavator, the rain abruptly turning into hail. The wires of the mine’s electric locomotives crackled. The wind blew cold dust at them.

‘Oh, brother’ – the foreman in charge of the shift adjusted his hard hat and looked in concern at the flurries of snow – ‘this really looks as if it’s going to be something. And that just before New Year’s Eve.’

‘Four o’clock sharp, Meno.’ Madame Eglantine’s cigarette-hoarse, guttural laugh drew one’s gaze to her eyes, which were as wide as a startled animal’s and had the vulnerable-seeming shine of chestnuts fresh out of their spiny shell, to her dress (natural-green linen with red felt roses sewn on with exuberant irregularity), to her melancholy gait, which didn’t appear to go with it, in cheap trainers or (in the winter) hiking boots that had been handed down to her, the laces of which she liked to leave untied: just a big girl, Meno thought as he followed her into the Hermes conference room, where another editor, Kurz, had already switched on the television for the live transmission of the ‘Ceremony of the Central Committee of the Socialist Unity Party to celebrate the seventieth anniversary of the founding of the German Communist Party’. But the picture vanished a few seconds later, the radiators crackled and went cold, the hum of the refrigerator in the hall ceased and Udo Männchen, the typographer, standing by the window, said, ‘Our life overall here is – underinstrumented. The whole of Thälmannstrasse’s dark. We ought to be publishing books in braille.’

‘You
suggested that last time and the joke doesn’t improve with age,’ growled Kurz. Frau Zäpter brought in candles, a Christmas stollen, home-made gingerbread. ‘I was just going to make tea anyway.’

‘Why else would we have a spirit stove?’ said the managing clerk, Kai-Uwe Knapp. ‘I’d even filled it – man is a creature that can learn from past experiences.’

‘How romantic,’ Miss Mimi and Melanie Mordewein, who was sitting next to her, sighed simultaneously; Miss Mimi had got the tone so exactly, so caustically right that the laughter came slowly and remained just an expression of admiration.

Putting on white gloves, Niklas tipped the record, a flexible EMI pressing given him by one of his State Orchestra patients, out of its sleeve and the paper protective covering lined with foil, held the disc between middle finger and thumb (his index finger supporting it on the red label with the dog listening to his master’s voice coming out of a gramophone horn), started to stroke it with extra-soft carbon fibres, which looked like a collection of seductive women’s eyelashes, in an aluminium brush from Japan (another present from a musician patient), which was said to remove the dust more gently and yet more thoroughly than the yellow cloth that VEB Deutsche Schallplatten put in with its Eterna albums, slowly and pensively combed the fine sound track until Erik Orré, who was free that evening and had been talking to Richard about duodenal ulcers, said, ‘That’s enough, Niklas, I think you’ve gained its trust now.’ The Schwedes (she, an operetta singer squinting with charming helplessness through lenses as thick as the base of a bottle; he, with handsome Clark Gable looks, Richard thought, a toothbrush moustache, a cardigan, worked in the branch of the Council for Mutual Economic Aid on Lindwurmring; the women there, as Richard knew from Niklas, called him by his first name, Nino) were standing by the window, both holding a tulip glass of beer; Nino said, ‘If it keeps
snowing like this we’ll be switching on our water-pipe heater again, Billie.’

The whole town seemed to be in motion, pushing and shoving, things quickly breaking out in the darkness, violence kept under control by the street lamps, perhaps also by the civilizing power of other people’s looks (violence, Meno thought, that grew remorselessly since you couldn’t see the eyes of the people you were swearing at, elbowing, jostling, hitting); groups formed but only to disperse within the next few minutes; the streams of people seemed to be following the most cautious changes in conditions, perhaps just a murmured rumour, a correction in the magnetism (pushing, hoping), and at the same time to be moving aimlessly, disturbed bees whose hive had been taken away. Screaming and groaning, shouts across the dark streets, the tinkle of broken glass: had looting started already? Meno wondered, trying to keep his composure. Clinging on tight to his briefcase, he crossed the Old Market, heading for Postplatz, where he hoped to find a tram that was working. There were still a few lights on in the Zwinger restaurant, contemptuously called the ‘Guzzle-cube’ by Dresdeners, as also in the House of the Book and the fortress-like Central Post Office, built by Swedish firms. Meno was caught up in a rapidly growing swarm of people who seemed to be drawn, with moth-like instinct, to the lights, heliotropic creatures that would perhaps have been better off in the dark. A blizzard started. The theatre was in darkness, the ‘Socialism will triumph’ sign on the high-rise building had gone out. The trams had stopped, marine mammals, frozen in a ball of snow.

‘Replacement bus service,’ one of the conductors kept shouting resignedly, carefully wrapping himself up in a blanket, to the people crowding round. The bus for the 11 route left from the Press House on Julian-Grimau-Allee and was crowded; Meno saw Herr Knabe, the Krausewitzes, Herr Malthakus in his good suit with a bow
tie, even Frau von Stern, who waved her senior citizen’s pass in sprightly fashion as Dietzsch helped her onto the bus and to a seat that had been vacated for her. ‘The opera, the theatre – all shut down,’ she shouted angrily to Meno. The bus took them as far as Waldschlösschenstrasse.

‘And the rest of the route? Are we to walk?’

‘Yes,’ the bus driver replied with a shrug of the shoulders. ‘I have my instructions.’

After walking for a few kilometres the little cohort that was left halted at Mordgrundbrücke. The hill before them wasn’t steep but, as they could tell in the strange brightness of the driving snow, covered with a milky sheet of ice. Halfway up a tram was stuck, frozen fast up to the top of its wheels; long, bizarrely shaped icicles were hanging down from the wires and the steep slope on the Mordgrund side of the hill.

‘A water main must have copped it,’ Malthakus said in an appreciative tone. ‘The question is, how are we going to get up there. Given that no one’s going to pull us up –’

‘A belay such as they have with roped parties in the mountains,’ said Frau von Stern. ‘We had that during the war when it was icy.’

‘– otherwise we’ll all have a nice slide and they can hack us out of the stream in the morning.’

‘I’m not going up there with my instrument anyway,’ a double-bass player from the State Orchestra declared; a French-horn player agreed. ‘Our valuable instruments.’

‘Why didn’t you leave them at the Opera, then,’ Herr Knabe asked exasperatedly.

‘What a … excuse me, but I have to say it: stupid question. I’m sure that even in these conditions your Mathematical Cabinet will be well secured, but our miserable artists’ dressing rooms?! Do you think I’d leave my instrument by itself?’

‘OK then, but have you another suggestion?’

‘We’ll
just have to go up by Schillerstrasse.’

‘But the water mains run along there too. They could well have burst as well … And Buchensteig is even steeper. But don’t let me stop you going to reconnoitre. Or you can simply stay here with your valuable instruments,’ Herr Knabe said scornfully.

‘What the hell, we can just turn round and go to a hotel,’ said Herr Malthakus. ‘I’ve got a few marks on me, perhaps they’ll let us stay in the Eckberg with a down payment.’

‘You’ll be lucky,’ Meno said, ‘they’re already full with evacuees from the Johannstadt district.’

‘Look – a snow blower.’ The French-horn player pointed to the stretch of road before Kuckuckssteig.

The cold bit deeper, the cold crushed up the white clouds from the cooling towers of the power station that usually bloomed like a drunken dream: finding heaven here on earth and swelling up, with explosive clarity, thrillingly, fantastically into short-lived atmospheric mushrooms; the cold gave the iron of the pickaxes a different sound; the power station cables, usually buzzing with electricity, whispered like the strings of instruments with mutes on, seemed raw and sensitive to pain under the coating of ice; made by humans. Christian had been working for seventeen hours continuously. The trains bringing brown coal were lined up outside the power station, but the coal was frozen fast in the goods wagons and had to be blasted out; the detonations briefly drowned the rattle of the power hammers that had been hurriedly brought from the Federal Republic. It wasn’t pleasant to be one of the squad whose job it was to move the wagons out of the way when the explosive charge hadn’t detonated.

‘We’ve two candidates,’ Nip said to the drivers, who were getting their bachelors to draw lots.

‘Hoffmann or Kretzschmar, who’s going?’ He tossed a coin, said, ‘Kretzschmar.’

‘Stay
here,’ Christian said, ‘I’m going.’

‘Why?’ Nip asked, flabbergasted.

‘Things’ll go wrong with him.’

‘All right then,’ Nip said, ‘it doesn’t bother me. I’ve nothing against heroes.’

‘Don’t fool yourself, Nemo. Your knees are trembling.’

‘Yes, but you’re staying here all the same.’ Nothing was going to happen, Christian decided. –

A helicopter landed, letting out a few big shots, who went here and there, waving their hands about nervously, clicking walkie-talkies, talking with the crisis committee of the Brown Coal Combine (plans were unrolled, held their attention for a moment, then there was something new and the plans, hurt, rolled up again and just stayed there);
decisionmakers
whose movements in front of the power station and the setting sun behind it seemed to Christian like a ritual dance of Red Indians. Before the
decisionmakers
climbed back into their helicopter, they stood motionless, arms akimbo, by the coal wagons, a collection of sad, impotent men.

30 December: the evacuees came out of the town on army lorries labouring up the track that had been chipped free up the Mordgrund; more water kept running down the hill and freezing; gravel and ash didn’t stop the route from turning into a dangerous skid-pan. Richard saw companies of soldiers and some of the staff from Grauleite swinging pickaxes to keep the way clear; some acquaintances were spreading grit. Where was the water coming from? The power cut – it was the south of the Republic that was said to be affected, the capital with its special fuse protection was still bathed in the pre-New Year glow – had allowed the water to freeze in many of the pipes, causing them to burst. But that was ice? Richard thought, as he strode through the snow beside Niklas observing the water flowing over the road; more kept bubbling up and quickly turned to ice, those spreading grit couldn’t
keep up with it. Niklas was pulling a handcart with bandages and medicines they’d taken from his practice. Richard was quietly cursing, he’d thought he was going to spend a relaxing New Year with punch, conversations, some post-Christmas reflections, a walk to Philalethes’ View to watch the blaze of rockets over the city and to drink to the New Year … Anne was still at Kurt’s in Schandau and of course there were no trains running; they’d arranged for Richard to phone the pastor of St John’s (Kurt still wasn’t connected) but the line was dead – that too, then. Now Anne was stuck in Schandau and he was trudging through ice and snow with Niklas to attend to the sick – and there were probably some waiting there already. They were going to the military hospital, that was where Barsano and his crisis team had set up their base, people were being evacuated there from the new developments: Prohlis, Reick, Gorbitz, Johannstadt.