The Tower: A Novel (19 page)

In the Service Combine in Webergasse Meno joined the queue and observed the way the staff went about their business, moving with fluent slowness and emphasizing every syllable when they spoke. Below a sign saying ‘Using Every Mark, Every Minute, Every Gram of Material with Greater Efficiency’ shirts were drying out on frames, billowing and bulging like a jazz trumpeter’s cheeks, stretching out plump, tube-like sleeves. Not all the drying dummies seemed to be working: now and then the air came hissing out, the shirts spat the sealing clips away and gave up the ghost with a grunt.

After he’d been served Meno sat down in the waiting area of the New Line hairdresser’s, which was on the same floor as the dry cleaner’s. Anne’s shirts would be ready in half an hour.

Sometimes he thought back to the years in Moscow. He remembered the autumn of 1947, the 800th anniversary of the founding of Moscow. He had been seven, Anne just two, Ulrich nine. A dark, untidy sky above the people in their Sunday best; in the parks there were brass bands, people selling candy floss and military bands waiting in the avenues.

Parked outside the Krasnaya Zvyozdochka kindergarten were the black limousines in which the Kremlin children were brought and picked up; the chauffeurs waited, smoking.

Girls in school uniforms with white aprons trotted past, chattering excitedly, holding little flags, they turned into the ‘Street of the Best Workers’, posters as high as the walls smiled down on the lines of demonstrators. Heroes of the Great Patriotic War, Heroes of Labour, of the Soviet Union. The girls had classes in the afternoon, in the second shift. The pupils from the first shift, which started at half past
nine, were streaming out of the schools. Trolley buses, trams, lorries with slogans and decorated with flowers; the heavy Podeba and ZIS limousines came from the Arbat, jaunty marches rang out from the loudspeakers, everywhere red flags were fluttering. Portraits of the ‘most human of human beings’, attached to balloons, were swaying over Moscow. Meno recalled songs, fragments of lines drifted to the surface, he murmured the Russian words: ‘Stalin is a hero, a model for our children, / Stalin is the best friend of our youth’; ‘Our train goes full-steam ahead / and stops in communism’ … the starved faces of the people, Meno thought, Father’s emaciated hand holding mine, I ask about Mother and he answers, as he has for several months, that Luise is abroad, she sends the children her best wishes and hopes we are working hard at school. One day he takes Ulrich with him to the prison: Father waits until his letter of the alphabet is called. He goes to a counter to pay in money. If the official accepts the money, Mother is still alive.

Richard parked the Lada outside the ‘House of German–Soviet Friendship’ on Pushkin Platz and decided to walk. Leipziger Strasse was bustling with the evening throng, the lamps cast weary light over the traffic. A number 4 tram heading for Radebeul rattled past, swerving on the rails, Richard saw the cluster of passengers holding on to the straps sway to and fro. He crossed the road, but so slowly and immersed in thought that a military-green Volga stopped and a Russian soldier, driver for a senior officer whose gloves Richard could see making impatient gestures in the interior, stuck his head out of the window and
shouted a hoarse but not unfriendly sounding ‘Nu, davai’ to him. Richard got out of the way, the Volga, a big limo, slithered off in the slush.

Cries came from the Paul Gruner Stadium, they were playing handball; there was still a league, mostly made up of workers and employees of the state concerns Robotron, Pentacon, Sachsenwerk. Indoor handball had long since taken over but here, in the suburbs, it still went on. Richard knew the changing rooms in the Paul Gruner Stadium, the photos of old sporting heroes: the Dresden footballer Richard Hofmann, known as the ‘Bomber’ because of his shot; the German and Hungarian teams of 1954, with signatures; the boots of players for Dynamo Dresden who had played in the youth teams here. The breeze freshened, bringing along smells: there was the brackish smell of the nearby Pieschen harbour, coming from the old arms of the Elbe in which the river water was stagnant and even in a harsh winter only formed soft ice. The fumes from the slaughterhouse in the Ostragehege district on the other side of the Elbe added a revoltingly sickly-sweet element to the river smell, then the wind changed, bringing the smells of the industrial district: vehicle exhaust fumes, metal, the acidic chimney smell of inefficiently burning lignite. Night was falling swiftly. How quickly the days pass, Richard thought. You leave the house in the dark and you go back home in the dark. And he was struck by the thought that he was now fifty and that there was something incomprehensible about it, for the day when he’d found a bird’s nest in his father’s garden and leant down in astonishment over the eggs with their green and rusty-red spots didn’t seem that long ago and yet it was forty years. He watched the people. The way they drifted along in the darkness wearing grey or brown coats, only now and then was there a little colour, pale blue, beige, a cautious pink, and everyone deep in thought and cogitation, no one with their head raised, looking at other people with an open expression: all this filled him with sadness, with a feeling of inevitability and hopelessness. Fifty years – and it was only yesterday that he’d kissed his first girl! She was older than him, nineteen or
twenty, almost a woman for him at twelve. Her name was Rieke, a quiet girl who’d graduated from commercial college and was doing community service as a nurse, her firm having been completely demolished in the air raid. What beautiful hair she’d had: light brown with a few blonde strands; sometimes, when he looked at Christian or stroked his hair, he had to think of Rieke – and to repress a smile no one else would have understood; an explanation would have ended in a bad mood all round. How light and gentle the touch on his skin had been as she smeared on ointment or rubbed his back with cognac, and he could feel her breath as she sat on the bed, bending down behind him, and a rebellious strand of hair that she kept blowing back. She leant back before something that was aroused in him, giving him a presentiment of something previously unknown, throbbing, forbidden, could no longer be seen as mere chance, as an incidental contact that kept occurring during this kind of treatment. One evening, when they were alone, it lasted too long for his senses, erect, over-sharp antennae, and he turned over, not knowing himself what he was doing, or why, or where he found the courage, just that something was driving him beyond his fear and stuttering pulse to take her nonplussed face in his hands and kiss her on the lips. She didn’t pull back, didn’t give him a slap. Afterwards she sat there in silence, looked at him, began to smile and, with a shy gesture he found strangely arousing, pushed back her hair, which had fallen over her face. ‘Well, you are starting young,’ she murmured and he thought, What comes next? as his mind was swamped with a flood of scraps from books he’d read on the sly, hints and dirty jokes from older anti-aircraft auxiliaries, obscene pictures in magazines. Then an expression that he didn’t recognize appeared in her eyes, a kind of tender and respectful mockery; she lifted up his pyjama trousers: ‘Well, you are a one. Only twelve and already you can see the effects.’ He said nothing, she laughed quietly. ‘Come back later, you need to feed yourself up a bit first.’ At the time he’d felt insulted, he could very well remember the dull, vague feeling of shame
mixed with indignant sadness; now Richard had to laugh. Thank you, Rieke, you tender young woman with your smell of cognac and soap. Tell me, has life been kind to you? I hope it has – I still lust after you! Richard gave a little leap and then, when an approaching passer-by looked at him in astonishment, pretended he’d just managed to avoid a dog turd on the pavement. He went past the Faun Palace and remembered some of the films he’d seen in the cinema that used to be a dance hall and meeting place for the workers. A building full of nooks and crannies, the seats with threadbare upholstery; on the walls of the vestibule were dusty silhouettes of Hans Moser, Vilma Degischer, Anny Ondra and other stars of UFA or Wien-Film. Framed signed portraits of DEFA actors were hung either side of the wooden kiosk housing the ticket office that, with its projecting front and brass fittings on its rounded corners, looked like a stranded carriage of the Orient Express. On the post of the wide, curving staircase with the worn fitted carpet was a snake plant some long-departed owner of the cinema had brought back from the tropics. Richard called it that because it had white and green speckled leaves hanging out of the pot like a bunch of sleeping snakes. He reminded himself to ask Meno its proper name when the opportunity arose. He saw the long queues outside the swing door of the cinema, the flickering greenish light in the display cases with the posters of Progress Film Distributors: a man in a trench coat with the collar turned up, behind him the tower of Lomonosov University, with the red star on the top stretching up into the evening sky, and facing him a woman whose wide-open eyes expressed disappointment, a last remnant of love and farewell. She looked like Anne, Richard turned his head away. He was overcome with sadness, melancholy; Rieke’s smile, the cheerful mood that had brightened his day only a few minutes ago, had vanished, vanished so completely it was as if it had never been. He tried to repress the thoughts that came to him, but it was impossible. Anne, he thought. Fifty, he thought. You’ve been made a Medical Councillor, just as Manfred prophesied at the birthday party:
speech, thanks in the name of the people et cetera, certificate opened, certificate closed, handshake, applause, speech of thanks, one-two, buckle my shoe, just like marionettes. And Pahl did get the Fetscher Prize … a good surgeon, someone ought to tell him that at our age we should be beyond these little vanities. Fifty, he thought, and memories. You’re full of memories, but where has your youth gone? The laughter, the exuberance, the ready-for-anything energy … ? The wind, the wind blowing through your hair. He’d read that somewhere recently, probably in one of those magazines the nurses read during the night shift; perhaps it was a line from a pop song, one of those trashy songs they played on TV in shows with titles like
Variety Bandbox
or
Your Requests
, songs he couldn’t listen to without a feeling of distaste and revulsion. But sometimes it was these simple, sentimental and often all-too-calculatingly naive tunes that contained a phrase like that, a single line that stuck out from the rest of the concoction and touched a nerve in him that many of the serious, complex and harmonically much richer scores in the concert halls missed, leaving him cold. They rang out but they didn’t go through the seventh skin to his innermost heart … Where the secret lay, unfathomable to all, even those closest to him.

He had hardly rung the bell for a second than Josta was embracing him, kissing him. ‘You’re late.’

‘No reproaches, now.’

She grasped his shoulders and, as so often, he was amazed at how undisguised the emotions that could be read on her face were. A changing flush of hurt, pride, anger, defensiveness and the hunting urge of a hungry cat flitted across her face that was a Mediterranean brown with black-cherry eyes.

‘Ah, Count Danilo is in a bad mood again. As he came up the stairs to see his mistress that old hag Frau Freese watched him through her spyhole. In the lobby it smells of wet washing and –’

‘Oh,
do stop it!’ he broke in grumpily. ‘And give up these silly nicknames, I’m no Count Danilo.’

‘Well, what are you then? My little spoilt darling.’ Josta threw her head back and laughed so that he could see the single amalgam filling in the row of her teeth, took his hand and stepped back.

‘Your eyes, you … witch!’

‘Ooh, I can see it,’ Josta cried merrily, lifted his hand to her mouth and took a vigorous bite at the ball of his thumb.

‘Stop! that hurts.’ She bit even harder, undid his belt.

‘Daniel,’ he murmured.

‘Playing football. He knows you’re here. At the moment he has no great need to see you. Unlike me.’

‘Where’s Lucie,’ he whispered as Josta knelt down.

‘Don’t worry, the apple of your eye is fast asleep.’

He looked at the bite marks on the ball of his thumb, dark red and deeply incised. His desire, which had flared up so abruptly, subsided as he looked through the corridor door into the living room, where the television he’d got for Josta through connections was on. He was overcome with resentment and a sudden feeling of disgust at the sight of the gas meter in the corner of the hall behind the sliding door into the kitchen and, on a shelf beside the key rack, the two dolls with loving smiles holding out their hands in a tender gesture. Josta stood up and embraced him, remaining silent. He released the ponytail that stuck out sideways; it looked pertly determined to go its own way and had caught Richard’s eye the first time they’d met, in the Academy photocopying office, of which Josta was the head.

‘Happy birthday,’ she said quietly.

‘Fifty, for God’s sake.’

‘For me you’re younger than many a thirty-year-old.’ They went into the living room. Richard switched the television off. It was one of Josta’s idiosyncrasies to leave it on while they were talking.

‘I’ve got nothing for you – apart from myself,’ she said with a
kind of furtive coquettishness. ‘You’ve forbidden me to give you anything.’

‘A tie I pretend I bought myself? Scent?’ Richard smiled sarcastically. ‘I can’t take it home.’

‘You could leave it here?’

He looked up. A slight undertone of bitterness in her reply told him she was trying to challenge him again.

‘Josta …’

‘Your family, I know. Oh, don’t keep using your family as an excuse. You’ve got a family here just as much as there. Your daughter’s here, your son’s here –’

‘Daniel isn’t my son.’

Josta came up to him, twisting her lips in a mocking grin. ‘No, he’s not your son. But he calls you Dad.’

‘He despises me. I can feel how he always goes on the defensive when I’m here and try to get closer to him.’

‘No, he doesn’t despise you! He loves you …’

‘What?’

‘I know he does, I can sense something like that, I know him very well. That penknife you brought him is sacred, and recently he got into a fight because of you, the mother of one of his classmates was a patient of yours and supposedly was treated badly … supposedly on your ward … He’s coming up to twelve …’ Josta turned away. ‘I was so looking forward to your visit. You’re the one who’s cold, not Daniel!’

Richard went over to the window. This grey sky over the district and tenements opposite with straw stars and sad washing fluttering stiffly in the wind … Down below, a fenced-off playground illuminated by lamps with well-wrapped-up mothers keeping an eye on pale children who were shooting at each other with toy cap pistols. Along the wire fence of the playground was a row of overfull dustbins, the snow round them stained by piles of ash that had simply been
dumped beside the bins because of a lack of space. ‘I can’t come at Christmas.’

‘No, of course not.’ Josta clenched her lips in a forced smile. ‘But Lucie’s made a present for you. You can’t forbid her to do that. Oh, she’s woken up now after all.’ Lucie came in, a teddy bear under her arm. Her hair was sticking out all over, she looked pale and tired. When she saw Richard, she ran straight over to him without a word. He knelt down, she wrapped her arms round his neck, a gesture that suddenly made him feel easy and free, as if Lucie’s embrace had broken the dejection he had felt even on the way to Josta’s.

‘Tummy ache,’ she said. ‘Daddy, make my tummy ache go away.’

‘My little girl.’ He stroked and kissed her. ‘My little girl’s got tummy ache … Let’s have a look.’ She lay down, Richard carefully palpated her stomach. The abdominal wall was soft, there was no point of pain and Lucie didn’t have a temperature either. Nothing serious. He asked how long she had had stomach ache, what she had eaten, how her digestion was. Josta waved his questions away. ‘She has that quite often.’ Richard kissed Lucie’s stomach and covered her up again. The little girl laughed. ‘Better now, Daddy.’

‘There you are.’

‘Do you want to see the drawing I made for you.’

‘Show me.’

It was a sheet of paper covered with numbers. They had arms and legs, happy and sad faces, a seven was wearing a hat, a fat-bellied five was smoking a cigar and had a little, chubby, sheep-like eight with dachshund ears on a lead.

‘Lovely! You’ve drawn that beautifully. Is this for me?’

‘Because it’s your birthday.’

‘What made you think of the numbers?’

‘I saw them. When Mummy takes me to the kindergarten, we always go past a seven.’

Josta
laughed. ‘It’s a poster for 7 October. They’re learning the numbers in the kindergarten just now, that’s why.’