The Tower: A Novel (54 page)

After a week even the pale-skinned Reina was brown. They now managed to keep up with Meno without collapsing, half dead, onto their air beds in the evening. Lene did the cooking, the girls the shopping, the boys chopped wood for the winter. Ravenous, they fell on the Transylvanian dishes with the strange-sounding names like wild animals. In the evening Meno went out alone or typed on his Fortuna in his room; they stayed close to the house, just once Reina and Christian went back into the woods at twilight. They took Pepi with them and torches.

‘The way you toss your hair back, it’s so affected,’ she said, imitating him to his annoyance.

‘I’m not doing it out of vanity but because the quiff irritates me. I don’t like it when it falls down over my forehead.’

‘Then cut it off.’

‘So
my hair all sticks up.’

‘It does that already. Doesn’t look bad at all. I’d leave it, if I were you.’

‘Why?’

‘Verena likes it better too.’

‘How do you know?’

‘Do you really not like being called “Montecristo”?’

‘Not particularly.’

‘But it sounds so serious when I say “Christian”. And when it sounds so serious I can’t help laughing and I don’t really want to do that. – Have you heard whether you’ve got a place at Leipzig yet?’

‘No. What about you?’

‘I don’t know whether chemistry’s right for me,’ Reina said after some hesitation.

‘But you like it so much. Frank thinks very highly of you. You’re the best in chemistry, by a long chalk. It annoyed me.’

‘Really? Well, I think that’s great.’ Reina laughed, exuberantly kicking away a pine cone. ‘You’re so ambitious and always studying … do you know what they said about you?’

‘No. But I’m sure you’re going to enlighten me.’

‘Svetlana says you’ve got a screw loose. Verena thought the way you shut yourself off was a kind of immature reaction, compensation for some family traumas or other …’

‘I thought she wanted to be an art historian, not a shrink.’

‘Today Verena wants to be this, tomorrow something else. That tender butterfly with dark brown eyes. She should be glad you got her Siegbert out of trouble.’

Christian ignored that. ‘And you? What did you think?’ He gave Reina a suspicious look.

‘Do you really want to know?’

‘That’s why I’m asking.’

‘I thought you were afraid of girls. You really ought to see yourself when you’re talking to a girl. Always half turned away, always in a
defensive posture. I thought … you were gay. That was my first reaction. Then I thought: I wish I could be as disciplined as that.’

‘Gay, you said?’

‘You asked me for my honest opinion. Anyway, my brother’s gay. A very nice guy, I think you’d get on well together.’

‘Hey, are you trying to pair me off?’ A smell of dry wood, sweet woodruff, if the heat continues, Meno had said, we’ll have an infestation of bark beetles. Fireflies drifted ghostlike across the path. Pepi came back.

‘No one’s ever given me a flower.’

‘Not even for your birthday?’ Christian asked sceptically.

‘We don’t celebrate them at home. My father says, why should I congratulate you just because you’re a year older? If anything, we should be congratulating each other. And if you’re happy to be here you should be the one giving us a present.’

‘Sounds logical,’ he said, teasing.

‘In that case I’d rather have unlogical parents. – What will you do if you don’t get a place at university?’

‘I’ll go to the hospital, work as a nursing auxiliary. You can apply every year, eventually it’ll work out.’

‘Christian … What exactly happened at the camp? Will you tell me?’

‘Why d’you want to know?’ he replied coldly.

‘There’s too many rumours about it and that bothers me.’

Now she might well be thinking: Christian the hero. But he felt nothing when he thought back to the training camp. He saw Siegbert and Corporal Hantsch, his father’s expression of despair; he heard himself reply to the committee of inquiry. Mechanical, lying answers. The fear of being expelled. Fear of something worse: what did one know? Barbara had feared the worst, talked about being arrested, going to prison. Barred from going to university: nothing had been decided yet, it wasn’t over and done with. Reina walked along beside him, meditatively twisting and turning a twig. Fahner came to mind,
and Falk, the way he’d gone down the stairs in the administration block.

‘Perhaps later,’ he equivocated. ‘What d’you want to do, if not chemistry?’

‘Dunno. Perhaps I’ll do it after all. Or medicine. But for that I’d need a better average grade. Perhaps I could do something in foreign trade, I’d be interested in that as well. – Does your father talk to you about that kind of thing? What you want to be and what you have to do to get there?’

‘All the time. He even checks my homework. He rewrote an essay for my brother because he hadn’t formulated things cautiously enough.’

‘My father wouldn’t give a tuppenny fart for all that. My parents couldn’t care less what my brother and I do or don’t do.’

‘You poor thing. I feel
so
sorry for you.’ All at once he felt the need to mock; perhaps she was getting too close to him, the others might already be talking, would exchange meaningful glances when they got back.

‘Not half as sorry as I feel for myself.’ Reina laughed merrily, suddenly took his hand and he was too late withdrawing it.

Was this it, then? Was this what first love was like? A profound, quivering emotion turning his whole world upside down such as he’d read about in Turgenev? Reina his Juliet and he a Romeo out of his mind with passion? – When he looked inside himself he was disappointed. This wasn’t what he’d imagined. Reina had simply taken his hand without asking. (What would his response have been if she had asked? One of his snubs, probably.) And now they were, as the saying was, to go with each other. (What did you actually do when you ‘went’ with someone? He couldn’t imagine it as anything but boring.) Reina was to be the woman with whom he’d be his whole life long, have children? Children: from the pure chance that Reina and he were in the same class, that she was here now and had plucked up the courage to take his hand. And that was to lead to something as irrevocable as children … And what if Verena had taken his hand? (But she hadn’t, which meant
that her children would have Siegbert’s solitary-seafareresque figure, the bright eyes of Corto Maltese, and perhaps also a cruelty before which Verena would shrink back in trepidation.) And, anyway, what was it about love – had he not been afraid of it, did it not keep you away from your studies, turn men who could have been great scientists into narrow-minded, sofa-bellied home birds?

He didn’t mention Reina’s gesture. He decided it hadn’t happened. Reina didn’t remind him.

Mosses stayed cool in the hollows. Giant hogweed appeared, raising its threateningly thorny bell-tiers, Falk made a bow. Meandering conversation, banter about Reina, who had fallen silent and kept away from Christian. Siegbert was wearing frayed home-made togs, more and more, Christian thought, resembling a sailor stranded on some foreign shore for whom homelessness, banishment, a war was over.

‘Shall we be friends, Christian?’ he asked one evening. Meno and Falk had both gone their own ways, the girls were watching TV with Lene. ‘You and me, both at sea, that would be great. Me as an officer, you as ship’s doctor. The two of us. As blood brothers.’

‘And Verena?’

‘Women on board is bad luck stored, the old sea captains used to say.’

‘Then there’s nothing between you, between Verena and you?’

‘Who says there is something between us?’

‘Oh, come on, we’re not blind.’

‘You saved my skin. I’ll never forget that. If ever you want or need something – you can count on me.’

‘Promise?’

‘Cross my heart and hope to die. – Can I say something else?’ Siegbert seemed embarrassed. Christian waited, unsure what was to come. ‘I don’t know what’s going on between Reina and you –’

‘Nothing at all,’ Christian said brusquely.

They
watched timber being stacked in the Grosser Zschand valley. At twilight they went to the Affensteine to observe the pair of eagle owls that were still nesting in the cliffs there. They took a short cut to the Nasser Grund, a damp valley where the signposts were in disrepair and fallen trees blocked the gorge. At a bend in the path there was a crow that didn’t fly off when they went past it, only a few metres away. Christian felt frightened of the animal. Afterwards Meno, laughing and shaking his head, told them it must have been a sorcerer, for he’d never before seen a bird that could turn its head so slowly, like a human being. To observe! The animal’s eyes had been full of malice as well. – She had no idea zoologists, scientists with a materialist view of the world, were superstitious: Verena’s surprise was expressed without irony. – There were still certain matters; no gynaecologist, for example, knew what seemed the most simple thing: why a birth came about, Meno replied after a while.

Spiders hunted moths. Ground beetles, wasps, assassin bugs, ants pursued insects. Bats snatched at twitching life. Tachinid flies laid their eggs in caterpillars. Ichneumon flies drilled thinner-than-thin ovipositors into the soft, protein-rich bodies, laid their eggs. Meno explained: a bottling plant, for apple or gooseberry juice for example, the automatic out-and-in movement: thus they pumped their eggs into the hapless caterpillar, which became a walking placenta and was eaten away from inside by the maggots. The pupae of braconid wasps were stuck like grains of rice to their future food, ground beetles, gleaming metallic black, dragged their prey into the darkness. – Never pick up a hairy caterpillar, Meno warned them. Verena said she didn’t want to move to the coast.

The larvae of some kinds of caterpillar had up to 600,000 stinging hairs between their bristles; they broke off, causing allergies, rashes, asthma. Reina coughed, Falk scratched himself. The oak processionary moth made caterpillar nests; Meno showed them the crackling, glittering shape made of cast-off skins, held his fingers up in the air, there
was no wind. The wind blew the stinging hairs away, he told them, they could irritate the skin for years. Gypsy moth caterpillars were like extra-terrestrial warriors: black, with poppy-seed dots and red warty bumps (a forest of spears, darning mushrooms full of tiny splintered lances) commanded by a yellow head. Burnet moths flew, showing their red petticoats. They learnt how to distinguish fritillaries from tortoiseshells, ringlets from graylings: camouflage brown drew doors on the beeches.

Reina took the salt down from the shelf; Christian saw that her armpits had been shaved.

‘Does God exist, what d’you think?’

‘Christian wants to be a great research scientist, but he starts out with God,’ said Falk, still high from singing along, they’d been listening to Hans Albers records; ‘La Paloma’ had twisted the summer out of shape, homesickness and blue eyes had softened into musical pasta dough swirling round the full moon. ‘I’ve got another idea. Just imagine that at the end of the war Hiddensee – the whole of the island – had been made into a prison camp. Around five million prisoners. They’d have crapped in the Baltic every morning. That would’ve meant the Baltic’d be a sewage farm now and you could walk across it to Denmark.’

‘Why bother with a sewage farm, you can get to Denmark on the water just as well.’ Reina tapped her forehead at Falk. ‘Just imagine you and Heike got married. All you’d have would be latchkey children.’

‘A sewage farm becomes firm in the sun,’ Falk said, unimpressed.

‘And you think they wouldn’t arrest you while you were crossing your firm sewage farm?’

‘You’ve not got the point, Siggi. There wouldn’t be any border patrols with the stench. No one could stand it.’

‘I
believe in him.’ Verena was sitting with her legs drawn up, staring at the ground. ‘We get born and we live – but what’s the point if God doesn’t exist?’

‘God rhymes with clod.’ Siegbert twisted his lips contemptuously. ‘And my mother used to say OhGodohGod when I’d done something wrong. OhGodohGod, leave me in peace with your God-squad twaddle.’

‘Red Eagle would say that God is an invention of the imperialists to stultify the people. How does it go? Religion is opium for the people. – What do you say to that, Herr Rohde?’

Meno, who had listened to the discussion in silence, glanced at Reina, shook his head. ‘I’m going out for a bit. I’ll take Pepi with me.’

‘Religion is opium for the people,’ Christian repeated after Meno had left, ‘how do they know that, actually?’

‘They spent a long time thinking about these things and they were a bit cleverer than you,’ Reina sneered.

‘Other philosophers thought about these things long before Marx and Lenin, and perhaps they were greater than Marx and Lenin,’ Christian replied in irritation.

‘Funny that you never dare to come out with things like that in class. Only to us. But when Red Eagle or Schnürchel are there you chicken out.’

‘And you – you don’t chicken out?’

‘Why are you suggesting they’re teaching us nonsense?’

‘Because –’ Christian jumped up and walked up and down excitedly. ‘Because they’re lying to us! Only Marx, Engels and Lenin are right, all the others are idiots … And their slogans? All men equal? Then all philosophers must be equal and therefore at least as smart as those three,’ he concluded with a malicious smile.

‘Sure people are equal,’ Siegbert bellowed, ‘all men’ve got a dick and all women’ve got a pussy.’

‘Hold on a minute – there’s transsexuals and hermaphrodites as well,’ Falk chortled.

‘Do
you have to drag everything in the mud? You’re just like little children, can’t take anything seriously.’ Christian was still speaking calmly. ‘You say you’re my friend, Siegbert, but your language is … tasteless. Cheap and disgusting. How can you sink so low?’

Now Siegbert stood up as well. ‘Tasteless … disgusting … how can you sink so low?’ he mocked. ‘You’re in for a big surprise, my friend, when you see how things are outside. You were born with a silver spoon in your mouth. But not everyone’s had one of those to suck,
mon cher
. You’re pretty snooty for someone who wants to be a doctor, I think someone needed to tell you that.’