The Tower: A Novel (20 page)

‘And are you staying here now, Daddy?’

Richard turned away from the bright little face looking up at him so trustingly; it hurt, and all the gloominess that the sight of Lucie had driven away came back. ‘Not today.’

Richard left. Josta stood at the window and didn’t return his farewell wave.

He went down the stairs in the darkness. It seemed not only to sharpen his eyes, he felt he perceived the smells and sounds more intensely than when he had come up the stairs half an hour ago. The smell of ash, damp washing, unaired beds, moisture and mould in dilapidated masonry, potato soup. From an apartment on the second floor – Josta lived on the fourth, the top floor – came loud voices, cries, bickering, the crash of crockery. Frau Freese on the upper ground floor, the block supervisor’s apartment under the Nazis, must have heard him, for even on the half-landing above it, where the door of a shared lavatory was open, letting out a pungent smell of Ata scouring powder, he could see that her spyhole was open: a yellow needle of light pierced the darkness of the staircase and disappeared immediately as soon as he tried to creep past on tiptoe – Frau Freese had either closed the spyhole or greedily glued her beady eye to the opening.

The front door snapped shut behind him. The air was cold as iron. He went down to Rehfelder Strasse and turned towards the Sachsenbad, where he kept his swimming things. The pool attendant knew him as a regular and had even offered, in return for a doctor’s certificate that kept him out of the army reserves, to give him a key, in case he should want to go swimming later because there were too many people doing their lengths. That he went swimming after work every Thursday, when he wasn’t on duty, was his alibi for Anne and the boys. Anne had accepted that once a week he needed some time to himself and firmly rejected all suggestions that they use the time together. Anne, he felt,
would not spy on him. Richard feared the boys, most of all Robert. During the week Christian was at the senior high school, so he was unlikely to meet him here. Moreover he tended to stay at home. Robert was different. He was adventurous, thought nothing of trailing all round Dresden with his pals, of getting on the city rail system or one of the suburban trains and, to Anne’s amazement, bringing home some bread and fresh rolls he’d bought with his pocket money from a baker’s in Meissen. Moreover he enjoyed swimming as much as he, Richard, did and there weren’t that many swimming pools in Dresden. Also he had the feeling that Robert sometimes watched him, scrutinized him sceptically when he came back from swimming on those Thursdays. Was he imagining things? He had assumed the rapid gait, sniffing for danger on all sides, of a timid person who feels observed. It was not only Anne and the boys he had to fear, there might be acquaintances he knew nothing about – Frau Freese might be the aunt or grandmother of one of Robert’s pals. Or of the boy Daniel had had a fight with … Chance, pure or not, loved such unfortunate encounters. Or one of his colleagues from work, a nurse or a physiotherapist who happened to live in the area, might see him and wonder what Dr Hoffmann was doing in the building where Frau Josta Fischer, the attractive – and divorced – secretary in the Administration department of the Medical Academy, lived alone with her two children in a two-and-a-half-room apartment on the top floor, even that was suspicious given the shortage of accommodation … And he couldn’t be certain that Josta kept to her part of their agreement with the same strict rigour, the same constant, never-slackening caution as he did … Were there questions regarding Lucie? Did Daniel keep his mouth shut? He felt miserable and would have given a lot to get out of the tangle of lies. Five years ago he’d tried to end his affair with Josta, but then she’d got pregnant; his immediate reaction was to suggest an abortion but she had refused categorically, even used the word murder to him. Do you want to murder your child? Even today her reproach made him shudder. If
he’d had his way, Weniger would have carried out an abortion, the box for ‘child’s father’ in the case history would have been left empty. His Lucie, his daughter whom he loved more than anything! Richard leant against a wall. What have I become … ! A beggarly scoundrel, a cheat who creeps through the town every Thursday, caught in a net of falsity, lies, nastiness … Sometimes he couldn’t look Anne in the eye, sometimes he was tormented by fear when he met Meno or Ulrich and they greeted him as their brother-in-law … What would they think of him, if it were to come out? That he was a swine, definitely, a vile wretch … who couldn’t get away from Josta. When her eyes flashed, as they had just now, when she threw her head back challengingly, especially when she had that ponytail on the side of her head, that for others was probably no more than a quirky detail – it aroused him, almost took his breath away, had aroused him the first time he saw it, that time when he’d taken the typescripts of his lectures to the office to be hectographed. She was twenty-five and in the prime of womanhood. She was aware of it and used it. Not like a girl who is flirtatious but doesn’t really know where it might lead because she doesn’t yet really know either the other sex or herself; but like a mature, experienced woman, and when you were alone in a room with her, it crackled with tension – every time he would be reminded of the plastic rods the physics teacher used to rub with a cloth and you couldn’t touch them without getting an electric shock. When he slept with her, he felt young, it wasn’t followed by the sadness that had overcome him with other women. She clutched him and whimpered and screamed, drove him to efforts he had hardly been capable of as a thirty-year-old. Josta was insatiable and made no secret of her sexual appetite and the pleasure it gave her. Everything about her was violent: her physical reactions, her desire, once it had been aroused – sometimes he thought it was like a powder keg and when you went past, all it took was a bit of friction to set it off – her fury, her muscles, her demands and her hatred. Wild rage, feverish desire, what he thought of as her witch’s fury
urging his blind scattering of seed on to the very last drop: that was how he had fathered Lucie in seconds of unimaginable happiness. His daughter! He thought of her hair, her large brown eyes that gave him such an intelligent, questioning look, the child’s calm, attentive quickness to learn, her unobtrusive curiosity and touching imagination. She’d given him a picture with numbers that had eyes, ears and clothes, numbers, ‘I saw them, we always go past a seven.’ He’d left the sheet of paper at Josta’s, but it was his best birthday present. He would really have liked to take it with him and show it to everyone! Sometimes he felt the urge to take the girl home with him, to present her proudly to Anne and to say, Isn’t she marvellous. My little daughter Lucie! Simply so that Anne could share the joy, this exhilarating feeling with him, so that he could give some of it to her and not selfishly keep it all to himself. Do you know what great happiness, of which you have no idea, there is in my life, come here and have a look at it, it’s called Lucie, Lucie, I can’t keep it to myself or I’ll burst, I’m crazy with happiness; I have to share it round liberally otherwise it will tear me apart! That was how he saw it in his mind. My God, am I really so naive, Richard thought, that’s impossible. Could I really do that to her? – You’ve already done it to her, he heard himself say. You’ve already done it to her.

It was clear that Scheffler, the Rector of the Medical Academy, didn’t know exactly what course to set: on the one hand Comrade Leonid Ilyich had died, scarcely two months ago, and the great ship of socialism was drifting along, leaderless. On the other, Christmas was
approaching – and every restriction beyond a certain limit would be interpreted not as respect for the dead, but as weakness, and an expression of paralysis. Richard glanced round the Rector’s office, Brezhnev’s gorilla face, with the sly look in his deep-set eyes beneath his bottle-brush brows, the black lines across the corner of the photograph, next to it the Comrade Chairman of the State Council in a grey suit before a sky-blue background, a
winning
smile on his lips; then the series of Scheffler’s predecessors.

‘So you’re rejecting my lecture?’

‘Please, Herr Hoffmann.’ Scheffler made a gesture of irritation. ‘You must understand my position. It’s bad enough that this stupid battle of the Christmas trees is starting again.’

‘We hardly have any painkillers, Rector.’

‘Yes, I know. The pharmacist came to see me this morning. There’s one thing I’m asking of you Herr Hoffmann – don’t panic. We’ll find a way to deal with it. This very day I’ve an appointment with Barsano. His wife will be there. I’ll ask for the Friedrich Wolf to help us out.’ That was something that hospital had never done, Scheffler knew that, Richard knew that. ‘Don’t panic, that’s the most important thing at the moment. There are enough rumours as it is. And what we’ve discussed is just between ourselves, yes?’ Wernstein said, as he and Richard were washing their hands outside the operating theatres: ‘They say the Internal Medicine people have found a beautiful Christmas tree.’

‘And ours?’

‘The senior nurse was at the Christmas Market, the Christmas tree stall: just the halt and the lame.’

That meant that the Surgical Clinic was in danger of losing the competition for the best Christmas tree, and to Internal Medicine of all people! That, it was decided in a specially convened meeting, must not be allowed to happen. In the Orthopaedic Clinic Wernstein had seen a rachitic specimen that had probably grown to maturity in the dry sand of Brandenburg; in the Eye Clinic a well-proportioned,
charming tree, but scarcely five dioptres tall; in Urology a hulking great Douglas fir, ten foot wide at the bottom but only eight high, moreover it ended in a three twigs arranged like a whisk. Neurology was entering one from the Christmas Market, three foot wide at the bottom and twelve foot high, thin, brittle and touchy, for it had immediately started to shed its needles and still hadn’t stopped.

That evening Richard went to Planetenweg. Kühnast didn’t have a telephone at home and the porter at the pharmaceutical factory hadn’t been able to put him through. Richard had rung the House with a Thousand Eyes and asked Alois Lange to put a note on the chemist’s door. All over the district there were boxes on the doors, with a pencil on a string, for that kind of message. Please knock, bell not working, it said under Kühnast’s nameplate.

‘Ah, Herr Hoffmann, do come in. I saw Herr Lange’s note. – No, no, you can keep your shoes on. This way, please.’ They went past bookshelves, with gas and electricity meters ticking between them, and into the living room. Ground-glass doors, damp patches on the hall ceiling, fine cracks, plaster flaking off. ‘My wife’s made a few sandwiches.’ Kühnast pointed to a tray. ‘What would you like to drink?’

‘One of your liqueurs, if you don’t mind.’

A pleased expression flashed across Kühnast’s face. ‘Of course, we’re only at the trial stage. Has it’ – the chemist adjusted his glasses, which had been mended with adhesive tape – ‘got round to you then? I can recommend the peach.’ Kühnast poured him a glass and watched Richard as he tipped the liquid – it was a lurid sunset-red – down his throat. ‘Strong.’

‘Isn’t it?’ The chemist sat down, crossed his legs. ‘Right then. What can I do for you, Herr Hoffmann?’

Richard described the problem. ‘… so I thought that you, being in the pharmaceutical factory …’

‘At the source.’ Herr Kühnast nodded and, after a while, took off his spectacles and dangled them by the mended earpiece. It would soon
be Christmas, he said, in measured tones. Richard didn’t quite understand. The Dresden Christmas stollen was famous, and justifiably so, Kühnast went on. Butter, sugar, flour, candied peel, sultanas – and every year it was becoming more and more difficult to get hold of the exotic ingredients; Walther’s bakery was increasingly compelled to only bake them if the ingredients were supplied. Sultanas, where could you get those? And the stollen ought to be rich in fat, when you squeezed it, the cut end should be damp, the stollen should be heavy, nourishing, rest comfortably in your stomach for a while, sweet but not sickly-sweet company for the digestive enzymes, the stollen should be rich in sultanas, the stollen should be from Walther’s bakery. ‘Twenty of them, Herr Hoffmann. All my relations, you know.’

With Wernstein and Dreyssiger, the most enterprising of the younger doctors, Richard went to Malivor Marroquin, the costumier’s; each of them hired a Father Christmas outfit. ‘A bit uncomfortable, but it’ll work. And we need camouflage.’

They parked the car with its trailer on the edge of the heath. The moon peered through the tops of the trees, making the snow beside the forest track shine like corrugated zinc. Dreyssiger shouldered the saw, Wernstein took the axe, Richard the bolt cutters.

‘As long as nothing goes wrong,’ Wernstein said. ‘If we’re caught, we’ve had it.’

‘Nah, we’ll manage it,’ said Dreyssiger, who was in high spirits. ‘Who dares wins. Or are you going to chicken out, Thomas?’

‘If only this stupid beard wasn’t so itchy. I’d guess it’s been stored in tons of moth powder. That’s what it smells like too.’

‘Careful from now on,’ Richard cautioned them. ‘It’s about ten minutes to the plantation from here. It’s guarded. By Busse, the forester, in a raised hide, and a soldier. The local pastor told me that. Busse will probably have his dog with him.’

Grinning, Wernstein help up half a blutwurst.

‘Excellent.’

‘I hate blutwurst, boss.’

‘The best tree is in the middle, slightly apart from the rest. It’s said to be clearly visible from the hillock before the plantation.’

‘Pretty well informed, your pastor.’

‘No one can stop him combining his woodland walks with observations. But let’s get on. The plantation’s fenced off, Busse’s hide is about fifty metres from the track; the soldier patrols the fence. We’ll creep up cautiously – and then this here.’ Richard held up the bolt cutters. ‘Snip, snip, snip and we’re through. Herr Dreyssiger, you and I will crawl over to the corpus delicti and saw it down. Herr Wernstein will keep a look-out. Can you imitate an owl?’

Wernstein put his hands together and blew into the gap between his thumbs.

‘Sounds OK.’ Richard gave a nod of approval. ‘Two hoots if things get dicey. From now on not a sound unless it’s absolutely necessary. And in a whisper.’

The baker’s mother had a heart condition and Walther was in principle sympathetic towards Richard’s request. But he had a bakery to run and a private one at that. ‘The taxes’ – he raised his floury hands – ‘the taxes, Herr Doktor. We have to have a new oven but the taxman takes all our profits.’ Richard gave him the sultanas from Alice and Sandor’s parcel.

‘I’ll make you the twenty stollen, Herr Doktor. But I need medicines for my mother.’

‘I’ll write you a prescription.’

‘No, no, they’re special ones from Dr Tietze. From over there. Made over here but for over there. And sent back from over there.’

They waited behind a tree on the top of the hillock overlooking the plantation and watched. The hide wasn’t to be seen, but the soldier
was; he was wrapped up warmly and, Kalashnikov on his shoulder, was walking up and down in front of a gate in the fence. Now and then he flapped his arms, switched on a torch to illuminate the surroundings and rubbed his hands. He looked at his watch. On the hour he set off on his round.

‘I estimate he’ll be back in a quarter of an hour.’ Richard wet his index finger and held it up. The wind was against them, so wouldn’t carry their scent to Busse’s dog. Once the soldier was out of sight, Richard gave the sign; Wernstein stayed behind. In the shadow of the track he and Dreyssiger slipped across to the fence; Richard checked the tension of the wire and cut it apart almost soundlessly. A criminal act! he thought. But the tree has to go through it. I hope it’s not visible and I hope the idiot in uniform doesn’t shine his light on that spot when he comes back. They crept into the plantation, stood up with some difficulty among the closely planted trees. They hung up their Father Christmas coats on a branch – they’d only be a hindrance in there and get torn – and worked their way through to the middle of the plantation. The trees were thinner there and a white rectangle was dangling from every tree. Dreyssiger shielded his torch, cautiously shone it on them. The signs bore names, all of them those of high Party functionaries; the finest blue spruce was labelled with the name ‘Barsano’. It was about ten foot high and completely regular in growth.

The nurses on North Ward 1 opened the last batch of painkillers. Kühnast was sympathetic towards Richard’s problem – in principle. ‘We could run a special shift. The problem is that I wouldn’t have any staff. It’s only possible on a Saturday, our big shots are never around then.’

Richard rounded up his students and arranged a
subbotnik
. He loved the kind of extra-curricular activity that this Saturday voluntary shift would be. His opinion as a university teacher was that his students
ought to know where they were studying, what they were studying and why they were studying. Germany had once been the world’s pharmacy and Dresden the cradle of pharmacology. The pharmaceutical factory, created by the amalgamation of the firms Madaus, Gehe and the von Heyden Chemical Factory, where acetylsalicylic acid – the basic material for aspirin, the most widely sold medicine in the world – was first produced on an industrial scale, had its main site in Leipziger Strasse, in Gehe’s former drugs and chemical finishing plant. The gutters hung crookedly, the windows wore cravats of ash, the smiles of award-winning workers on the photos along the works entry were eaten away by sulphuric cancer, as was the chalked ‘labourers of all kinds’ on the ‘We are looking for’ board hanging beside the porter’s lodge.

‘Psst!’ Dreyssiger held up his hand. They heard the cracking of the undergrowth and immediately scurried into cover.

‘Well, just look at that, it’s Magenstock!’ Richard ducked down. ‘Magenstock in person with one of his sons.’

The two of them headed straight for the best blue spruce, listened for a few seconds, during which Richard and Dreyssiger didn’t utter a word, and started to saw. Richard thought: should they jump up and say, Stop, we were here first? Dreyssiger was already doing that and striding over towards Pastor Magenstock. ‘Who are you?’ the pastor grunted. Dreyssiger shone his light on their faces. They had black make-up on, a kind of Indian war paint. ‘We were here first.’ Dreyssiger could hardly control his anger.

‘Oh, Herr Hoffmann,’ Pastor Magenstock murmured, pressing his hand to his heart. ‘So your questions were not without ulterior motive.’

With a wave of his hand Richard told Dreyssiger to switch his torch off. Hearts pounding, the four men listened. There was nothing to be heard apart from the whispering of the trees.

‘Herr
Hoffmann, what you are doing is … in the interest of a clinic?’ Pastor Magenstock was breathing with difficulty. ‘You see, I’m doing this in the interest of my faith. The custom comes from the womb of Christianity.’

At that moment Wernstein’s warning hoot sounded. The men pulled themselves to their feet. Magenstock and his son ran over to Barsano’s spruce and furiously completed their sawing. A dog started to bark. ‘Come on, let’s go,’ Magenstock croaked with remarkable coolness. Dreyssiger grabbed the saw, in his panic Richard left the bolt cutters on the ground. Already they could see the swaying beam of a torch through the branches of the young trees. The four of them crashed unhesitatingly through the lower branches. ‘Stop there! Stop!’ and ‘Get them, Rudo!’ came the cries behind them. Magenstock’s son bent the twigs back as he dashed on ahead, and sent them smacking into his father’s face. The dog was barking, interspersed with Wernstein’s nonstop owl cries; how pointless, Richard thought, it sounds like a drugged cuckoo. ‘Stop there! Stoooop!’

‘It just won’t do, Herr Kühnast. You can’t let just any old people in here. There are hygiene regulations, there’s a schedule for machine running time –’

‘They would only have done non-skilled work,’ the chemist said. ‘We’ve had problems in packing for months.’

‘Nevertheless. If something gets broken or an accident happens, what then? Anyway, you should have agreed it with me first.’ The expression on Kühnast’s superior’s face changed. ‘On the other hand, you’re here now. Just come with me a moment, Herr Hoffmann’, and he took him to a broom cupboard full of typewriters. ‘All faulty! I’ve been trying to get a technician from your brother’s firm for eighteen months now. You’ll get your medicines. Once our machines have finally been repaired. And give your brother my best wishes.’

‘I’ll
let you go, gentlemen. On one condition. One of you must play Father Christmas for my boys,’ the forester growled. ‘The little rascals don’t believe me any more.’ They tossed for it. Wernstein lost.

Richard took the First Party Secretary’s tree to Ulrich, who had agreed to send a technician to the pharmaceutical factory if he was given a Christmas tree with which his department won the coveted challenge cup in the socialist ‘Who has the best Christmas tree?’ competition – and the considerable money prize that went with it.

‘Will Dr Hoffmann please go to Professor Müller,’ came the announcement over the clinic’s Tannoy. Müller was walking agitatedly up and down. ‘If only Reucker wouldn’t give me those triumphant looks during meetings. I have to control myself, Herr Hoffmann, and I don’t like having to control myself.’ He twisted his lips in a sulky raspberry pout. ‘But it’s no use. I suppose we have to admit we’ve been beaten by the Internal Medicine lot this year. It’s beyond belief that Reucker is also the chairman of the Christmas Tree Inspection Committee.’