The Tower: A Novel (56 page)

Regine waited. Under the ricepaper lamp in the living room that Jürgen had made and decorated with pictures of flying fish, in the garden of the house in the street in Blasewitz that was named after a resolute woman who fought for socialism, by the woodland park where the children tobogganed and skated in winter and in summer the ice cream and lemonade vendors sold colourful refreshment – in the garden, surrounded by the statues Jürgen had carved out of the sandstone from the Lohmen quarry: a frieze of cubes with children beneath fruits, a female torso, two boys based on their children, Hans and Philipp, she sat and waited. She waited beside the telephone when Richard and Anne left the living room in Caravel to leave her alone with Jürgen’s voice, which, from the hubbub of the great light-spattered city of Munich far away at the other end of the crackling, hissing line, would say, accompanied by a further crackle, ‘Hi’; when they went for a walk so as not to hear Regine sobbing, not to witness the silence that could arise after four years of separation and that everyday matters could
never quite cover over: How are the kids? Are they doing OK at school? Is there anything you want, what should I send you? – And you? Have you found a job yet? An apartment? My God, all that’s incredibly expensive. Regine waited when the lamplighter took his metre-long pole with the hook on the end off his black bicycle, inserted the hook in an eye in the grubby glass hexagon of a gas lamp, blew up a ball of light, one after the other in the streets of the district; she waited on the Thursdays when the ice cart came, drawn by two apathetic Haflinger horses, when the iceman’s attention-demanding loud bell rang out, as if hurt, through closed windows and undrawn curtains along the summer-quiet street, to announce with its shrill ‘Here I am!’ the delivery of fresh blocks of ice that the iceman took down from the cart with a cramp-iron – shimmering like fish, glassily smooth, the hunks were put into the kitchen icebox, where, within a few days, they melted onto bowls hung underneath them; pre-electric chilling for butter and meat, milk and jam.

It is the month of the workers’ celebrations. ‘Everyone out for the first of May’ was the wish expressed on a placard on the wall of the Dresden-Tolkewitz city graveyard.

It is the time when every Wednesday at 1 p.m. the wail of a siren can be heard over the city, practising for the real thing, when at night the rattle of machine-gun fire from the Soviet training grounds all around the city penetrates their sleep, when by day the vapour trails of fighter-bombers circle round the blue sky, followed a few seconds later by the roar of jet engines. And what point is there in ignoring the fact that the coconut, well-known for its ability to migrate across oceans, is able to find its way up the Elbe and seems to exist in reality and all its fibrous hairiness, the size of a cannonball, on some of the fruit racks in Frau Zschunke’s shop one cold afternoon in May? The widowed Frau Fiebig first looks at Frau Zschunke, who lowers her eyes and nods. Then she looks at the other customers: long-suffering housewives, pensioners kept supple by all the running around, Herr Sandhaus, an
ally. Ignoring the fact that they don’t stand a chance not to be, they decide to be fair: first of all the widow Fiebig secures two of the phenomena of existent reality for her basket and impresses on Herr Sandhaus that he’s not to take his eyes off it. Then she runs out into Rissleite, right in front of Binneberg’s café, where Dresden ladies indulging in nostalgia along with their cream cakes have already registered her hurried behaviour, makes a megaphone of her hands round her mouth and shouts three times ‘COCONUTS!’ out into the depths of the life of a socialist district that has no choice but to be the mode of existence of protoplasm (as Friedrich Engels wrote), which consists essentially in the constant renewal of the chemical constituents of that substance. The widow Fiebig’s cry does not go unheard and, since consciousness is a developmental product of matter, it is followed by the realization of the necessity of transferring one of the fibrous, tropical, travelling cadres in Frau Zschunke’s ‘dump’ from property of the people to private property. Meno, happening to be in the right place at the right time for once, has already secured one for the Hoffmanns in Heinrichstrasse and one for himself (that is, for the Stahls and their few-months-old baby) when Frau Zschunke, with an insistent, ‘One nut per nut, no more’, asks him to replace the excess specimen. As Meno bears the Hoffmanns’ coconut in the direction of Heinrichstrasse past a hundred-metre queue, from which dark looks speak of layers of consciousness that have supposedly been long since overcome, he has, for the first time for years, the feeling of having performed a solid, truly useful, unqualifiedly good deed deserving of praise – Judith Schevola’s book is subject to delay at Dresdner Edition, assessments cause ideological stomach ache; Meno is powerless to do anything about it. That evening the coconut, cleaned, defibred (Barbara: ‘Don’t throw the stuff away, Anne, who knows what we might be able to use it for?’) and scrubbed, is standing upright on the kitchen table before the disbelieving looks of the whole family. It’s a small kitchen, they’re crowded together, it’s stuffy. There are candles burning all round the
coconut, another of Barbara’s over-the-top ideas, Meno thinks as he quietly enjoys his triumph.

‘Come on, Richard, crack the nut,’ Ulrich says teasingly. Robert is holding the Kon-Tiki book by the Norwegian ethnologist and adventurer Thor Heyerdahl, in case anyone should have any doubts that coconuts have eyes, which have to be bored out if delicious milk is to flow. Anne has put out bowls. A sip for each one of them. Richard picks up the corkscrew and digs it into one of the darker spots that could be one of the ‘eyes’ Heyerdahl talks about. Richard manages a few twists, pulls with all his might, the nut between his feet, and retrieves a fibrous plug and a bent corkscrew. The milk refuses to flow. Hesitantly Robert points out that Heyerdahl was talking about green nuts when he described himself and his men drinking coconut milk on the Marquesas. Barbara shakes the nut; it is as it was: round, compact and mute. The nutcracker from Seiffen beside the samovar, a carved wooden figure of a miner with a hinged lower jaw, is too small and breakable; more brute force is required, but Anne’s steak hammer is no use either, it just chips a few splinters of Sprelacart laminate off the work surface and Ina puts her hands over her ears because Ulrich is hammering away at it in blind fury. Richard goes out with Ulrich onto the balcony, where he keeps some tools and, using an anvil as a firm base for the nut, raises a claw hammer, the nut slips off to one side and hits Ulrich on the shin. Hasn’t Richard got a sledgehammer, he’s had enough now and he’s not going to let himself be beaten by a damn coconut, even if he has to drive the Moskvitch over it! Richard doesn’t have a sledgehammer. Neither the Stenzel Sisters nor their neighbour, Dr Griesel, own such a weighty argument but André Tischer has a cutting torch with which Ulrich threatens the coconut as a last resort. Richard has a vice. They tighten it until the spindle starts to bend. The nut, a tough nut to crack, has no intention of giving up. ‘We could throw the thing down from the balcony onto the pavement, really slam it down.’ – ‘But then the pieces would go all over the place and I’d like, no, Snorkel, I
want
to have drunk something like that for once in my life. Just imagine there’s some milk still in it and it goes all over the pavement flags.’ They try with a saw, but it won’t grip, keeps slipping off the smooth surface. ‘Perhaps it’s got a screw top and you just can’t see it,’ Robert ventures to suggest.

Summer came. The twelfth grade have their final exams. Final parade: We wish you all the best for your future in our socialist society. Flowers, handshakes, one last visit to a disco together, booze and cigarettes, partying.

Muriel was sent to a reformatory. She had been warned but she still insisted on saying what she thought in civics classes.

Hans and Iris Hoffmann are accused of having failed in their upbringing, they are stripped of their parental rights. The guidelines say: ‘The aim of a reformatory is to overcome individualist personality developments, to smooth out peculiarities of thought and behaviour in children and young people, thus creating the basis for normal personality development.’

Jolting
and creaking, illuminated by the murky light of the upper station and a few lamps in the interior of the car, the suspension railway left the passenger bay and sank on its rail under the horseshoe steel supports into the open and down towards the valley. It was a cool evening in late autumn. Judith Schevola was shivering in her thin coat, Philipp Londoner had lent her his scarf, which she had wound round her neck like a ruff so that only the tip of her nose and her coolly observant eyes were visible; with an oversized flat cap, such as UFA film stars used to wear with knickerbockers, her head threw a bat-like shadow.

‘If the guard at the top had asked to see my identity card one more time –’

‘– you’d have exploded.’ Pulling down the scarf, Schevola gave Philipp a mocking glance. ‘Perhaps he could tell that and decided not to risk it. Who knows, perhaps that’s a reaction that’s become more frequent recently from people who’ve been to see Barsano.’

‘They dismiss these things as if they were nothing. Barsano didn’t even look at the document. As if he were getting that kind of stuff daily now. He smiled and gestured towards the buffet like a … bourgeois old fogey. And you …’ He nodded at Meno. ‘… hang back, say nothing and keep your head down when one of your superiors –’

‘You know very well you’re talking nonsense, Philipp,’ Meno broke in calmly. ‘What is there I could say about your theses and figures? I haven’t even read them.’

‘I
must speak up for him. He really stood up for my book and just because Redlich supported him doesn’t make that any less courageous. You came barging in with your position paper.’

‘Came barging in my arse! I’ll tell you something. The meeting was actually arranged to discuss points that came up in the Institute’s paper. What you writers had to do with it is a mystery to me; perhaps he just invited you out of cowardice, as a let-out … After all, one or other of his reptilian secretaries will have prepared him on the subject.’

‘Philipp …’ Meno nodded a warning in the direction of the conductor sitting, motionless, at the controls at the other end of the car. Philipp was unimpressed. ‘OK, if you insist, they’re not reptiles, just toadies, jellyfish! – And that’s a standard answer anyway: I’m not familiar with this, I don’t understand it, submit it to those whose responsibility it is.’

‘Is it Barsano’s responsibility?’

‘Don’t you realize what’s at stake here, Judith?’

‘You call her Judith, aha,’ Meno broke in, surprised. ‘You’re getting loud,’ he hurried to add when he saw the two of them exchange glances.

‘Eschschloraque would have a witty response ready for that. Something like: Beethoven is still Beethoven no matter at what level the volume control is set,’ Philipp said in a fairly arrogant tone of voice. Schevola breathed on the window, wiped it, tried to see out. ‘And you think he’ll be happy to see us. Not everyone likes unannounced visitors. Especially not here in East Rome. Perhaps he’s an evening type and is working on one of his plays in which nightwatchmen are chairmen of the State Council in disguise.’

‘That I’m coming, he knows, that you’re coming, he doesn’t. Surprises stimulate him, he says. – And you haven’t answered my question, sweetheart.’

Philipp, Meno thought, had a peculiar sense of humour now and then. Judith Schevola seemed amused by the nickname and the use of
the familiar ‘
du’
, perhaps she’d heard them more than once already. ‘We’ll continue the discussion outside, Comrade Professor, we’ll be there in a moment.’ Lifting up her face, she mimicked the hard-boiled vamp: ‘Baby.’

Philipp rang the bell when Kosmonautenweg came in sight. The car slipped into the stopping bay, shuddered as it came to a halt; the car going in the opposite direction had stopped on the other side. Meno saw two passengers sitting in it; they nodded to him: Däne, the music critic, and Joffe, the lawyer, who seemed to be having an animated conversation. Perhaps about the Semper Opera House, which was due to be reopened on 13 February, perhaps Joffe was asking Däne about a composer for an opera since he’d written a crime libretto from which Erik Orré had performed some gory street ballads the previous winter. The doors creaked open, Philipp gave Judith his hand to help her alight, one of his inconsistently bourgeois courtesies, as Marisa would have said; Meno was tempted to ask after her but decided not to. After a short wait, during which no other passengers appeared, the conductor set off again with the empty car. Gesticulating vigorously, the critic and the lawyer glided on uphill.

‘Since we’re talking about modes of address, shouldn’t we use the “
du
” to each other?’ Judith Schevola sat on the handrail and tried to slide down but the drizzle had made it tacky. Philipp Londoner laughed, gave Meno a friendly, condescending pat on the shoulder, ‘Want to bet he says no, Judith? With me he was as coy as a young virgin even though I’m the brother of his ex-wife. I’ll never forget what you said to me: “There’s nothing we’ve been through together that would justify such a step, we haven’t fought together yet, we don’t yet know what we should think of each other.” Meno, our little warrior. What made you say that?’

‘As long as it doesn’t give you another opportunity to mock me – experience. I don’t like being disappointed, that’s all. And I don’t like
disappointing other people either.’ He turned to Judith Schevola. She was watching the other car disappear like a brightly lit bathyscaphe in the tangle of the steel supports. ‘I don’t want you to feel insulted but I think it’s better if a certain distance between author and editor is retained. What would you do if, while addressing you as “
du”
, I tore one of your chapters to pieces?’

‘I’d say, “You arsehole” – using the familiar “
du”
– and bear it with a smile.’

‘Why don’t you give it a try, Meno? Vain as she is, she certainly won’t laugh.’ That evening Philipp was clearly enjoying provoking her.

‘Vanity’s when you can say to your image in the mirror: so you had a bad night too? What about it?’ she said, turning impatiently to Meno.

‘I’d prefer to sick to the more formal “
Sie
”. You just wait and see, you’ll be grateful to me for it one day. Moreover I never want to see you as a moaning minnie. There’s something off-putting about wailing geniuses, they lose status, and familiarity leads to the sight of rooms with dog ends and mouldy biscuits lying all over the place. Not something for me.’

‘Well, that’s that sorted out then,’ Judith Schevola replied, somewhat put out.

‘I suspect a man’s never refused you something in such a matter-of-fact way before.’ Philipp grinned. Suddenly his expression darkened again. ‘Let’s get on. If we’re going to surprise Eschschloraque, then at least let’s do it punctually.’

Kosmonautenweg was a series of steep winding bends, ending at steps that led through romantic woodland, held back by walls, down to Pillnitzer Landstrasse. In winter the steps were slippery, anyone going up had to pull themselves up laboriously by the rail, carrying the shopping they’d had to do in the town on their back, like a mountaineer, in order to keep both hands free. In the summer there was a smell of moss, it was damp and cool as a gorge on the steps that cut
through between Eschschloraque’s house and a guarded property, the entrance to which was blocked by a broad iron gate; the park had been allowed to run wild. Rumour had it that Marn, the right-hand man of the Minister of Security, would come here to recover from the stresses and strains of his responsibilities in the capital. A further set of steps linked Kosmonautenweg with the higher parts of East Rome, they were hardly wide enough for one person on foot and now, when the autumn rains had begun, full of rotting leaves on which it was easy to slip; the wooden handrail was rotten and longish sections had completely broken off.

‘How’s your nephew doing?’

‘Not particularly well, I assume. He’s got to go into the army soon. Three years.’

‘I have pleasant memories of that evening in your garden,’ Schevola said after a while. ‘I thought your nephew – he’s called Christian, isn’t he? – was, in a strange sort of way, nice.’

‘What d’you mean, in a strange sort of way? Are you going in for baby-snatching now?’ Philipp laughed but it didn’t sound genuine.

‘Very charming you revolutionaries are. But for you lot revolution’s a male thing anyway.’

‘When it comes to fighting, yes.’

‘While your wives are at home warming your slippers. By nice in a strange sort of way I mean that normally I can’t take a man I call nice seriously. Your nephew’s nice but I still take him seriously, that’s what I find strange. He seems to know a lot. Perhaps a bit too much for his age. And he’s attractive to women. Interestingly, he doesn’t seem to be aware of that.’

‘I hope you’re not going to put that idea into his head,’ Meno warned more brusquely than he intended.

‘Don’t worry,’ Judith Schevola replied, ‘I don’t believe he’s unthinking and carnal enough to climb into bed with a woman who’s twice his age and could therefore be his mother. There are men who, in
a certain way, always go to bed with their mother and others who hate that. He probably belongs in the second category.’

‘Young things belong together.’

‘How tactful you are, Philipp. From mature women young men can learn what sensual fulfilment and discretion are. And they’d soon lose the desire to play war games.’

‘You have an uncomfortable way of assessing other people,’ Philipp remarked, hurt. ‘You often base it on mere outward appearances.’

‘Don’t you start getting profound with me, Comrade Professor. – Revolutionaries! You only have to scratch the surface a bit and the home sweet home appears. And a kitchen with a stove and a red-and-white-checked tablecloth with a cosy samovar making heartwarming drinks to go with the cake.’

‘You’re accusing me of that? Me? Of being a bourgeois old fogey? I think you need someone to knock some sense into you.’

‘Don’t worry, my friend, there are lots who’re trying to do that. By the way, you’re welcome to bring your little Chilean woman along. I was never particularly taken with middle-class morality.’

‘Here we are,’ Meno said.

Eschschloraque’s house was built into the slope. A dilapidated-looking bridge, with cannonballs in iron baskets and chains between them as a guard rail, led from the wrought-iron gate, a bent bee lily at the top, to the first floor of the foreign-looking building set amid gloomy firs. The street lamp on the steps down to Pillnitzer Landstrasse cast a faint light over the gable and part of the roof that, with its ornamental shingles, looked scaly, like dragon’s skin. ‘Cinnabar House,’ Judith Schevola murmured, reading the inscription written underneath a rusty culverin between half-timbered gables.

Eschschloraque flung the door open, surveyed Philipp, who still had his hand stretched out for the bell push, then Meno and Schevola. ‘We’re busy with glue,’ he said, nodding for them to come in. ‘For the more advanced part of the evening we had thought of lectures on
repetitions and preservatives. Anyone who has something to contribute to that should not be shy and raise their hand; and it would make the quality of the Michurin dinner seem forgivable should anyone urgently desire to correct something even while chewing. Albin!’ he cried to the smiling young man waiting behind him in the hall who seemed to favour the same pastel-colour suits as Eschschloraque, although Albin’s was an iridescent lilac and Eschschloraque’s the silvery shade of fishes’ fins. ‘We have visitors.’

Albin was wearing a monocle and introduced himself with a bow, sketched a kiss on the hand for Judith Schevola. ‘Albin Eschschloraque, whether pleased to meet you remains to be seen. I’m – the son. My father gave me strength and height, my lack of application. My mother, I beg you, nothing at all. Welcome.’ He pointed to a row of sandals and through the barely furnished hall into the living room. It was like the spacious cell of Japanese monks that seemed to receive them with a severely elegant mien; a sparse room, not made for putting your feet up in the evening; two desktops on roughly hewn sections of tree trunk stood facing each other, some distance apart, like proud, unapproachable chieftains, a plank, sticking out into the room from a bookshelf, like a springboard, held a few little bonsai trees up to the bright white of a spotlight. On the sofa under it Vogelstrom, the painter, was sitting with a sketchbook on his knees; he’d torn out several pages and placed them down in front of him on the low wooden table with the clearly defined wavy grain. The ‘Michurin dinner’ kept its head down in a stainless-steel cart. The most striking thing in the room was an aquarium where, in pleasant, slow motion, colour-coordinated choreography, a wide variety of tropical fish alternated in the dreamy oxygen bubbles of its clarity.

‘Philipp, my friend, before you reveal to me how understanding Barsano was of your, I’m sure, polished, trenchant report, sparkling with figures, I’d like to ask you to cast your eye over my aquarium. Can you tell what heinous deed this individual’ – he pointed to Albin,
who was still standing by the door, arms folded – ‘committed against my darlings, against their Mozartian weightlessness? And you, Rohde, you who are usually slitting allusions with red commas, can you see it? Ah, Fräulein Schevola, you who have Schiffner piping like a billy-goat, demonstrate your gift for observation undimmed by that fine bottle of Scheurebe, the label of which you were just examining.’

‘You have to admit,’ Albin explained, detaching himself from the door frame and approaching, theatrically limp-wristed, ‘that it can’t have been easy. The slipperiness of fish in general and of their tail-fins in particular, thin and gossamery as they are, resists the adhesive power of even the best glues. And then glue is water soluble-ollubel-wollubel, oh yes.’ He giggled extravagantly. ‘But in this country many things are possibul. Even special adhesives. A spot on every tail-fin, slight pressure in the hollow of your hand – they wriggle like butterflies – then straight back into their element. See, it sticks, they’re heading pointlessly in different directions.’

‘You’ve stuck the tails of my most valuable fish together,’ Eschschloraque retorted, taking a ham sandwich from the Michurin cart. ‘Was it an ideological test? This way or that? What were you up to?’