The Tower: A Novel (21 page)

‘What? Not the Rector?’

‘Exactly. That’s the scandal.’

‘We’ve not given up yet.’

‘But as far as I can see all that’s left is the Christmas Market.’

‘They’ve got nothing but walking sticks that would make us the laughing stock of the Academy.’

Müller’s face lit up as an idea came to him. ‘And twigs, Herr Hoffmann, and twigs.’

But, at the inspection, with a cool gesture Reucker, the head of the Internal Medicine Clinic, took a screwdriver out of the pocket of his snow-white coat, searched for a while, during which Müller’s lips pressed together until they were no more than a slit, then screwed off one branch of the proudly upright, symmetrically built surgical tree.
The nurses, doctors, diet cooks, nursing auxiliaries stood there, heads bowed; the crackle of their coats was audible. ‘The screw-tree does not grow in our land,’ said Reucker and he dropped the screw from high up into the hand of an assistant, who, engaged to a nurse from Surgery, gave a smug smile. In the house on Planetenweg they ate the best stollen in the world that evening.

The Christmas holidays were over. Alice and Sandor had returned to Ecuador, amazed at the ashes and snow, as they had said; amazed at an excursion to Seiffen, where the toymakers turned hoops of wood and cut sheep, cows and the pack animals of the Three Kings out of them, painted them and sold them, bright and new, at the Christmas Market. They’d seen a miners’ procession, breathed in the smell of ‘Knox’ incense cones and punch and, adding the East German marks they’d been forced to exchange to their West marks, they’d bought one of the tall, plain pyramids that were not sold at the Dresden Christmas Market but for which they had to knock at the low door of an Erzgebirge cottage and overcome the suspicion of the carver’s wife, who opened the door and regarded them in silence. And Dr Griesel, who lived on the upper ground floor of Caravel and kept the house register, said to Christian, with a sour expression on his face, ‘You can tell your father that it just won’t do … He told me nothing about that trip and his visitors are staying longer than intended. I shall have to report it.’

‘Oh, the clown can go to hell, he just moans all the time because he didn’t get our apartment. Yesyes, Herr Hoffmann, we’re always
helping to heat your apartment,’ said Richard, imitating Dr Griesel’s fretsaw voice. ‘But he’s always leaving his Trabbi in my parking space.’

Their neighbour’s gaunt knuckle tapped the register with Griesel’s entries in his engineer’s script. ‘I am the house supervisor and it is my duty to keep this register. The declared length of visit has been exceeded. And recently you left the front door and the cellar door open and all the cats of the neighbourhood came in and shat on the sand, the next time you’ll clear it up yourself with your bare hands. And we don’t heat the whole neighbourhood, either.’

At school the pre-Christmas torpor had vanished. A hum of tension, of hectic activity, had returned. Upstairs and downstairs the new building, which, compared with the old school, a concrete block for almost 1,000 pupils, seemed full of light, was abuzz with pupils repeating vocabulary and theorems. In the corridors the PVC reduced the sound of hundreds of pairs of slippers – Waldbrunn was the smallest senior high in the GDR – to a soft shuffle. Maxim Gorki’s eyes glittered on a photo in the display case on the first floor, below it were a trumpet, a Pioneer’s neckerchief, a copy of a letter from Gorki to young people, a letter of greeting from the Wismut workers to the new senior high school and, something a lot of pupils stopped to look at, an agate, the polished surface of which was covered in milky rings and fiery patterns. It came from Schlottwitz, not far from Waldbrunn, where many such stones were found.

For Christian the classes with Herr Baumann turned out to be the fiasco he had feared. ‘Well, Christian, thinking again, are we?’ Herr Baumann would say sympathetically, his rosy-cheeked face under the scholar’s brow crinkling in amusement when Christian pondered an exercise on the following model: Calculate where A and B will meet when they are building a road towards each other with A laying concrete slabs of size α at rate x; B concrete slabs of size β at rate y. To hell with those exercises! To hell with mathematics and its five lessons a week! What if B was a boozer and deviated from the set line … Of course, there was no boozing in maths.

‘Thinking
again, are we?’ Baumann smiled quietly and didn’t rate any of the busily scribbling pupils more highly than was necessary. ‘I’m giving you a B, Svetlana,’ he’d said recently when Svetlana Lehmann had to go up to the blackboard and, concealed behind one of the wings, wrestle with a vector calculation. ‘I’m giving you a B because I have to. A B means: good. So that means you’re good at maths. So sit back down. D’you know who was good at maths? René Gruber, he was good at maths.’ With that Baumann shrugged his shoulders and softly announced, ‘Now we’re going to put our folders in our desks and take out a piece of paper.’ The class sat there, paralysed with fear; only Verena had shining eyes. Yes, she was good at maths as well. When she did exercises, Herr Baumann didn’t smile and when, at the blackboard, she found another way of solving an equation and, in the middle of a tangle of formulas and unbelievably complicated-looking integrals and square roots, looked for help from Herr Baumann, who was sitting on the edge of the desk at the front, following, the rings of his blue irises, now devoid of gentleness, like two metal discs, he would answer, ‘What you were trying there was really elegant, Verena, but look at this’, then take a piece of red chalk and insert numbers in his copperplate handwriting in the gaps in Verena’s spiky lines. There were only two pupils whom he always addressed by the familiar ‘du’ – Verena and Heike Fieber, who sat next to Jens Ansorge at the front desk of the window row and during maths lessons held her freckled face in the sunshine that trickled over the hill with the motorway into the classroom. At such times Baumann would ask her, like a kindly grandfather asking his little granddaughter, ‘Well, Heike, dreaming? Or are you counting lorries?’ adding, ‘René Gruber could have looked out of the window. But, do you know, he didn’t.’ People didn’t talk about René Gruber at the Maxim Gorki Senior High School, it was an unwritten law. On the one hand René Gruber was undoubtedly a mathematical genius who had won both the GDR and the Eastern Bloc Mathematical Olympiad in Moscow – and that, as some malicious
Waldbrunners said, despite the fact that his mother was on the check-out at the local Konsum, next door to the angling club, and his father a simple forestry worker. On the other hand when they sent René, on the basis of his achievements, his political reliability and his family background, as a working-class child to the International Mathematical Olympiad in New York, where he won a special prize for the most elegant solution, he did not return but accepted instead the offer of an American university. From then on he was regarded as an illegal emigrant and traitor. Baumann never used that word when he talked about René Gruber, and that struck Christian. The closer he came to retirement, the more exclusively Baumann’s interests were directed towards mathematics, the pure sphere of conclusive proofs and irrefutable, crystal-clear conclusions.

During classes in the laboratory cubicles Verena sat on the bench beside Christian, only separated from him by the row of instruments. Siegbert Füger teased him: ‘Hey, Christian, you seem impressed by Fräulein Winkler.’

‘Nonsense!’

‘You keep looking across at her.’

If even Siegbert Füger, who sat in the window row, noticed, then he’d have to be more careful. It meant Verena would probably have noticed too. That would explain her curt and tart remarks when he said ‘Good morning’ to her for the second time in a day – which, as he admitted to himself, he did out of both politeness and a certain maliciousness … Of course, the politeness was exaggerated and since Verena would nod the first time he said it, she couldn’t be deaf or not have noticed him in the throng of pupils. He wanted to hear her voice, for her voice, an alto whose vibrations already had undertones of a mature woman, fascinated him; he tried not to let it be obvious. His fascination was such that when she was nearby, he would tell dirty jokes to make Falk Truschler or Jens Ansorge laugh but in reality were directed at Verena in order to provoke her to protest or express her
displeasure, and that he got to hear often enough … Sometimes then a particularly quick-witted reply would occur to him – at least he thought it was quick-witted; the way Jens and Falk fell silent seemed to confirm that. Verena would also fall silent and scrutinize him and he felt this eye contact, this deep shadow that had no coldness, as something delicious that far outweighed his embarrassment at his pimples. Stop, stay there! his eyes flickered, but he couldn’t interpret her look: had he, Christian, just thrown away his last chance and condemned himself to appear an incorrigible idiot in her eyes … ? And after one such look Jens had the effrontery to tell him he should take advantage of the moment of stunned silence between them and kiss Verena. ‘You’d do that?’ Christian asked in disgust.

‘Of course, you idiot. Anyone can see the girl fancies you,’ Jens roared.

‘Not that big-city peacock,’ she retorted.

Christian flared up. ‘How do you know that?’ he demanded. How pretty she looked now.

‘You play the cello in the cellar, everyone can hear it, you … poseur! Our gifted artist always immerses himself in his music just as 11/1 has finished and he can achieve the greatest effect, especially on Kerstin Scholz!’

It was true. Christian often found himself thinking of Kerstin Scholz, especially of her figure, when he was practising in the cellar. And that brought a certain intensity to his exercises.

‘Oh, how I suffer,’ Verena mocked, ‘but only in front of the others.’

‘So you do listen?’

‘Don’t kid yourself!’

He found her sauciness impressive … ‘Oh, you know, you … pretty little thing,’ was his lame retort. Jens pretended he was going to be sick. Verena went bright red. Falk grinned. She turned away without a word.

Herr
Schnürchel was strange in a way that made Christian go along with Schnürchel’s games. Christian thought, in the evening: he smiled when you finally got the Moscow pronunciation of the letter shtsha right. Creamy like a soft ice. On the one hand Herr Schnürchel crept round the hostel and school corridors with suede-soft steps, put on his dusting gloves with pleasurable meticulousness and with an expression of dismay turned up lots of dirt, complained about Christian’s black-and-white calendar and Jens Ansorge’s magnetic tapes with suspiciously invisible music – Christian knew that Jens listened to the German New Wave music from the West – on the other hand Schnürchel would have nothing to do with the linguistic slovenliness of previous Russian teaching and came to every lesson with a pannier brimful of Russian words that he would tip out at his hard-pressed pupils’ Heiko fountain pens. Christian was intrigued by this other side of Schnürchel, his ambition was aroused. Every morning – Russian was generally one of the first two classes – his eye would survey Schnürchel’s cheeks, so closely shaved they looked gangrenous, the horse nostrils of his narrow nose with the red ball at the tip, his black hair that he smoothed down with sugar water; it was divided by a parting as precise as the edge of a folder. Herr Schnürchel would sit at his desk, ready to pounce, his eyes wide open with a look that was too penetrating for seven o’clock in the morning and made even Svetlana Lehmann lower her eyes. Herr Schnürchel wore Präsent 20 suits with razor-sharp creases, his shirts and ties were striped and always had a badge pinned to them, a pennant with the hammer and sickle on it. When he sat down, he crossed his feet and tilted his chair impatiently so that the white flesh of his calves could be seen above his striped socks and garters.

One day in March, during the history class, he wrote a question on the board and told them to put their books and folders away in their desks. An unannounced class test. 1983, the Karl Marx Year. Wall newspapers had been covered with articles on the prophet-bearded
philosopher, gradually obliterating the black-edged Brezhnev portraits. On 1 May, International Workers’ Day, there was to be a ‘Karl Marx procession of the pupils of the high school and senior high school’, Principal Fahner had announced at assembly. Schnürchel’s question was: ‘By what can we tell that the victory of socialism over capitalism proceeds according to certain laws. Base your argument on Marx’s theory of history.’ Without hesitation the pens started to scribble. Christian was annoyed; he was badly prepared. Every grade was important – the final grade was the average of all the individual grades and anyone who, like Christian, wanted to study medicine had to be close to an A at the end of the eleventh year, since it was that year’s report with which you applied for a place at university. He started to break the question down into its component parts. ‘By what’ and ‘according to laws’ and ‘Marx’s theory of history’ seemed to be the key words. Marx’s theory of history … Nothing came to mind, however hard he tried. He remembered the history room at the Louis Fürnberg High School where a few pictures on the wall, with an arrow underneath running from darkness to light, showed the history of humanity: primitive men with raised spears facing a mammoth, hairy women gathering fruits, the boys sharpening arrows or chipping hand axes; then Roman heads, slaves bowed low under the yoke, the glint of the Spartacus uprising already in their eyes … In the Middle Ages peasants in revolt brandished their scythes; then the picture from the days of the French Revolution with the bare-breasted figure of Liberty storming the barricades (her breasts had been worn flat by pupils who liked to get physically to grips with history); then came the age of the bearded heads: Marx, Engels, Lenin, and then nothing more, there was no wall left, the arrow of time stopped at the corner. There were always lots of pieces of chewing gum there … When someone asked the question ‘What next?’ a dreamy look would come over Frau Dreieck, the history teacher and principal of the high school, and she would give an answer containing a lot about light and air, making Christian think of
Pioneer camps … the transition of imperialism, the orchid stage (flourishing on decaying ground) of capitalism, into socialism that somehow switched to or somehow softened into communism … He regularly pondered that ‘somehow’. The word ‘switched’ made Christian think of ‘setting the points’, a concept that frequently occurred in civics lessons; and now he had to set his points, in the direction of writing down his thoughts … Somehow. But what thoughts? Should he describe his amazement at the arrow of history ending in the corner of the classroom? Or would he be on the right lines (to continue the image), if he thought of a very ripe pear in his grandfather’s garden in Glashütte? Was history like the fruit, hanging proud and heavy with juice before the eyes of a humanity thirsting after water and sweetness? You could make excellent fruit brandy from pears like that … So was socialism the pear and communism the brandy distilled from it? Fruit brandy for everyone. And the hangover the next morning … ? Did that follow according to some law? The pear ripens, pests nibble at it and hollow it out, maggots leave a capitalist parasitical trail of waste matter, but then … If you ate you had to go to the bog, that too was a law of nature. Marx’s theory of history. Christian looked around for help, but he was sitting by himself and couldn’t crib from anyone. Herr Schnürchel was sitting, feet crossed, at the teacher’s desk, rocking back- and forward in his chair, his basilisk stare fixed on Verena. Verena wasn’t writing. She seemed to be taking a break or pursuing some thought that her pen would record in a few seconds. Verena was staring out of the window. As far as Christian could tell, the sheet of paper in front of her was white. Her neighbour, Reina Kossmann, was squinting over at her irritatedly. Verena wasn’t writing. When the bell rang, Christian had gleaned four pages from the treasure-house of memory. Verena handed in a blank sheet.