The Tower: A Novel (27 page)

‘There were problems. I was in the Protestant Student Society, in Leipzig, in ’68.’

‘I understand. Yes, those regulations. They were not necessarily to our advantage. When you remember how many valuable people, talented scientists … I know there’s this stipulation that the mark for your degree dissertation must not be more than one grade higher than that in Marxism–Leninism. That, I would say, is not very productive. But perhaps it was necessary at the time … We have largely overcome
that now. You must put yourself in the mind of the decisionmakers at the time, we were threatened on all sides, the situation was getting out of control in Czechoslovakia, drastic measures had to be taken. Which is not to say that in individual cases, probably in yours as well …’

Meno remained silent.

‘There were misunderstandings and overheated reactions, and yet …’ Arbogast made a conciliatory gesture. ‘You know how it is. I can understand you. And I have been told that you are an excellent editor. So you were expelled from the university?’

‘Not actually. But a scientist without a PhD, at a university—’

‘Yes. These are things that happen to people. But take comfort from me, my friend. I was only able to attend a few lectures at university and I’m only an honorary doctor. But I hope that I can say that despite that I have made something of myself, hmm? – Then you joined Insel Verlag?’

‘You are well informed, if you don’t mind my saying so.’

‘An experiment is only as good as its preparations.’ Arbogast twisted his lips. ‘Which is not to say that I regard you as an experiment. Yes, and now I remember – before Insel you were with Teubner’s, the scientific and academic publishers that also brought out my volumes of tables for electrophysics. You were a bit out of the firing line there, so to speak, but not far from your original field.’

He’ll have had his informants, Meno thought. B. G. Teubner, where I found work, Haube got me the position. A course at the Bibliographical Institute, evening classes. The bears at the entrance to the Zoological Institute … The light and the rooms come back into memory and if you see them again, they’ve become strange and have nothing to do with you any more – and yet they did belong to me, just as I belonged to them. The stockily built, bald Party Secretary of the Institute, in the conference room in Talstrasse; my mentor, who’s present at the summons; my fellow assistant, who has to take minutes and with whom I share a room in the student residence … The empty-looking pieces
of furniture reflecting Haube’s idea of socialist functionality – he hated flourishes, hated the baroque, the Catholic Church, hated Vienna, where he had grown up and we didn’t know and of which he, a large illustrated book in his hand, would speak in a tone of revulsion, hacking at the black-and-white photos with his index finger, the Theresianum, the Ringstrasse, the Capuchin Vault, the Hofburg: that had been the breeding ground for Hitler and his gang – the shit-brown criminals, ladies and gentlemen, there’s no other word for it, you will have to get used to my strong language in this respect.

‘Your eye collection is very impressive, Herr von Arbogast.’

Write it down, Hanna had said, and then perhaps you can get it out of your system. Those years in the sixties when we were young in Leipzig and carried two cards round with us in our wallets: one with a number, that was the
butter number
you had to give in the shop to get some of the rationed butter – or not to get it when the ration had all been used up: there’s none left, Herr Rohde, but I can give you a bit of margarine; and the
house fire basic card 1
, the coal card that you needed for your fuel allocation. – The Café Corso in Gewandgässchen, the decayed splendour of the cloth merchants, with its landlady who spoke in a Bavarian accent, its buffet on the first floor and sitting opposite it the fat ladies, who were worthy of a place in Heimito von Doderer’s
Demons
, the cream-cake-ladies as they were called; the hum of voices upstairs in the preserved Art Deco room: the sea-green fabric wallpaper behind which the Geiger counters ticked and the auriculate jellyfish listened, so people said; where, when the windows were open in the summer, the bellowing voice of the Regional Party Secretary was squeezed out of the pillars with the city radio loudspeakers; the Café Corso: Ernst Bloch would come and talk about Marxism; the university Rector, Mayer-Schorsch, with the fraternity duelling scars he was said to have acquired on the same duelling floor as Haube, would order half a dozen glasses of Hornano vermouth for himself, drink a toast to the goateed Chairman of the State Council on the
wall, stand a round for
his students
and argue about Brecht with the principal of the Institute of Literature, while we at the tables at the front would whisper about Sartre and Anouilh, Beckett, the poems of Yevtushenko and Okudzhava till our heads were spinning; to get that out of my system –

Arbogast had been playing with one of the pencils and staring pensively out of the window. Giving Meno, who was sitting slumped in his chair, a brief glance, he said, ‘Well, Rohde, I won’t keep you in suspense any longer. I’m writing my autobiography. Your publishing house has approached me, the book is something they’d like to see. What I need is a critical eye, an opponent I can take seriously … I read these pages to my family at weekends, they all nod, but I have the feeling this acceptance comes either from cluelessness or from a mistaken idea of love; perhaps they also want to spare my feelings … It could be that Trude is to a certain extent lacking in that respect … To put it in a nutshell: I need a partner. I’ve made enquiries about you, as I said, and you have an outstanding reputation.’

There was a knock at the door.

‘We’ll talk about this another time. Think it over carefully. Should you say no, you will be forfeiting a fee that would be, well, appropriate. If you say yes, you will have a large amount of work ahead of you, at an unusual hour now and then. I’ll call you tomorrow evening, at eight sixteen. Come in.’

‘The guests are arriving, Herr Baron.’

‘Thank you, Frau Alke.’ Arbogast picked up the gryphon walking stick and ushered Meno out of the room. They went down into the hall. Meno recognized Vogelstrom, who was talking to Dietzsch, a sculptor who was a neighbour of the Hoffmanns in Wolfstone, Lothar Däne, the music critic of the
Sächsisches Tageblatt
, the physicist Teerwagen in conversation with Dr Kühnast from the pharmaceutical factory, the dentist, Frau Knabe, who had the apartment above Krausewitz in Wolfstone. Her husband, who worked in the Cabinet of Mathematical and Physical Instruments in the Zwinger, was standing
with Malthakus, the stamp dealer, and a woman: Judith Schevola. Meno had heard rumours about her that were going round the literary scene and read a few remarkable stories by her in
Sinn und Form
… One of the most gifted young writers, she wrote with a passion that was rare in German literature. He had seen her a few times at meetings of the Writers’ Association, also at the Leipzig Fair, but had never spoken to her. She had grey, close-cropped hair, but seemed to be in her early or mid-thirties at the most. Everything about her face looked displaced and distorted, as if it had been put together out of many other faces. Only her eyes seemed to belong to her. She scrutinized Arbogast, then Meno, taking sips from a glass of pomegranate juice. The men were standing facing her, on the other side of the hall as well. Alke opened the door, letting in Sperber, the lawyer, Schiffner, the publisher, and a man with a slightly hunched walk and a fleshy lower lip hanging down, whom Meno knew all too well; he started back and grasped the banister, which the woman with grey hair seemed to register with simultaneous curiosity and hostility, then she looked up and followed Meno’s reactions; he thought: like an entomologist pulling a fly’s leg off to see how it will deal with the new situation. The man – who had noticed him and surreptitiously raised his arm – was Jochen Londoner, his ex-father-in-law.

‘Please make your way to our television room.’

‘One moment, Ludwig.’ Giving her husband a polite smile, Frau von Arbogast introduced Meno to the other guests. Judith Schevola’s greeting was brief: ‘We know each other. At the last Association conference you showed a great talent for falling asleep.’ Arbogast led the company to the door out of which Ritschel had emerged. Judith Schevola, Malthakus, the stamp dealer, and Frau Knabe, the dentist, stood looking at the painting over the dragon table and only came when Arbogast rang a little bell.

After his talk and the subsequent discussion, Meno went upstairs before the others; a buffet had been set up in the conference room. Alke and
Ritschel were busy at the table with the white cloth. A youngish physicist, who had sat behind Arbogast during the talk, gave Meno a friendly nod. ‘If there’s anything else you’d like to see …’ He opened a little door that led out onto an oriel running round part of the building.

‘Thank you, Herr …’

‘Kittwitz. I work at the Institute for Flow Research. And don’t worry, they’ll find you soon enough, Herr Rohde. I enjoyed your talk. The way the garden spider makes its nest – remarkable parallels to the buffet-encirclement behaviour at physics conferences … But I’ll leave you in peace now.’

Rohde went to the edge of the balcony. The cool air did him good, his face was burning and he was glad that Kittwitz’s friendly gesture had enabled him to have a few moments to himself. He was shaken by hot and cold shivers alternately, the excitement was gradually dying down, for a few seconds he was in a state between profound tiredness and cool alertness, like a clock spring, he thought, that is being squeezed tight by the fingers of a clockmaker but can slip out and fly open at any moment; this blasted stage fright, I didn’t speak well. In his mind’s eye he saw the face of his ex-father-in-law, bright, with the expression of concentrated listening that he knew and in which his lower lip drooped and was drawn up with a start at regular intervals, then Londoner became aware that he was being or could be observed; he would grasp his chin between index and middle finger and clear his throat; those nails that were always too long, Meno thought, the thick signet ring – master’s ring, Londoner used to say – like a yellow frog on the bottom joint of his index finger: one of those tropical amphibians with warning colours; but this one seemed to be asleep in a state of metamorphosis, especially when Londoner, as during his talk, let his hand dangle down and crossed his legs, kept his heavy eyelids closed and his nose – Hanna’s nose, too small for his full-fleshed face – became covered in drops of sweat. Arbogast’s introduction; Schiffner’s eyes,
unfathomable under his white bushy brows, variable: sometimes cool, sometimes concerned, sometimes with a kind of fatherly benevolence that fascinated and oppressed Meno in equal measure; and Madame – in his thoughts he used that instead of the ‘Fräulein’ that seemed inappropriate – Schevola, cold, head proudly thrown back: Do you think what you have to say is of any interest to me? Get it out of your system, Meno told himself, and that strange television room …

He searched for his cigarettes, Arbogast wouldn’t see that he smoked, but even if he did, he was presumably allowed one now. He hadn’t brought any with him and remembered that he had left the yellow packet of Orient at home, between his typewriter and an issue of
Sinn und Form
that Schiffner had given him to have a look at. The city lay dark below him, with sparse lights scattered round the edges, Kleinzschachwitz and Pillnitz upstream, above them, near Pappritz, the television tower with faintly phosphorescent antennae; the Elbe water meadows and the hills towards the Czech border mere inky-black surfaces; farther downstream the Johannstadt suburb with its prefabricated tenements; directly below him the continuation of the slope of Arbogast’s garden cocooned in marshy darkness, the Blue Marvel with its filigree double tent stretching so elegantly across the river, a number 4 tram was crossing it, Meno could see the conductor as a patch of shadow in the yellowish light of the carriage. A white smudge was dangling from the power cable over Schillerplatz, a fraying banner hanging down limply like a dead squid preserved in formaldehyde. When there was some movement in the air, bringing back currents of stench, he thought he could smell the decay away over Körnerplatz and the wooded slopes of the district on the edge of which Arbogast’s property stood. It was the smell of ash from the Mitte and Löbtau combined heat and power stations by the Brücke der Jugend, the chimneys of which looked down on the city with red Cyclops eyes. He heard the babble of voices from the conference room, he also had the
feeling his name was being called. His tiredness increased, at the same time he felt a strong desire for a cigarette. He watched, saw the Elbe like a spine of tar below him, the houses a gangrenous black, like decomposing flesh, shimmering movements in it, as if gleaming white trichinae had bored into the rotting stone flesh, ready to lay their eggs. There was a play of searchlight beams on the Käthe-Kollwitz-Ufer, fleecy arms of light feeling their way, with the movements of helpless swimmers, over the dark-lying cellular systems of the buildings in the sector of the workers’ housing cooperative; sometimes they were struck, as if by an indignant, hostile glance, by the gleam of a distant window, so there must still be life there. What kind of life, Meno wondered, what is life like down there? A ship with an orchestra on board could run aground, the cracks of light along the curtains wouldn’t get any wider. The Blue Miracle was deserted, only the Schillergarten restaurant on the opposite bank of the Elbe seemed to still be open. There, too, the curtains were drawn but a door opened now and then and a customer staggered out into the fresh air, either to go off in the direction of the bus stops on Schillerplatz or to disappear behind the restaurant. It was not the only such establishment to have problems with the sewerage system, Meno remembered the Bodega in Leipzig, a favourite meeting place during the book fair that possessed no conveniences, one had to use the back yard there as well … Now the Elbe was a bluish shade, then sea creatures seemed to crawl past, milky, misshapen beings made to look leprous by the water. The stench came, rolled up the slopes, Meno knew it from his tongue, it was the taste of a match that has been chewed too long, to which something like a dash of sauerkraut was added: the effluent from the Heidenau cellulose works that was let out into the water at night.