The Tower: A Novel (57 page)

‘Science, Father. The gentlemen wanted a report.’

‘Science! That is a deity to whom I will gladly make a sacrifice.’ Eschschloraque picked up a net and took out the two fish that had been stuck together. ‘I’ll show you, Albin.’ He waved over his son, who adjusted his monocle suspiciously. ‘You’re going to do me ill, sir. Even Vogelstrom has noticed and is covering the caricature, which is not me, in tinder and fungus.’

‘Oh, just come here.’

With one bound Eschschloraque was with Albin, who had stepped towards him, grabbed him by the cheeks and tried to stuff the fish in his mouth. Albin didn’t spit them out but bit into them and chewed, stretching the second fish like a rubber toy animal and tearing it off. He threw it back into the aquarium, where the fish, injured and with
only half a tail-fin, swam behind a stone. ‘I need something to help me digest it. Are there no bitters there?’ Albin rummaged round in the cart. ‘Typical, they always forget them.’

‘You misbegotten son of mine.’ Eschschloraque calmly lit a cigarette. ‘If you want to be a dramatist and outshine me, you’ll have to think up better things than that. Although I do admit –’

‘– that I’m making progress? Have you any idea, dearest Father, what it cost me to acquire that special glue. I had to make serious sacrifices.’ In a pretence of indignation Albin let his monocle fall out. Judith Schevola leant over to Meno – while all this was going on they’d sat down on the sofa beside Vogelstrom, without his either uttering a word of greeting or looking up from his sheets of paper – ‘Albin resembles a castrated seal, don’t you think? The apples on his tie are so … tasteful. Should I get you a bowl of peanut puffs?’ she whispered. Meno looked at her out of the corner of his eye, she seemed determined to enjoy the scene to the full. ‘How do you know what castrated seals look like?’

‘Do you mind if I smoke, Herr Eschschloraque? – I have inclinations of which you know nothing,’ she said to Meno, letting the first smoke dribble out of her nose.

‘Would it perhaps not be better if we left?’ Philipp asked; the expression on his face had become cold.

‘Why the hurry, my dear guests? Are you not enjoying yourselves?’ Eschschloraque gave a mocking smile. ‘So what did it cost you, sonny? By the way, I suggest you check your gestures in the mirror. I know that it’s a cliché that pooftas make poofish movements, but you’re doing it like the worst possible actor.’

‘I must get it from you.’ Albin slurped his coffee with relish. ‘Always Goethe, Goethe, Goethe and nothing else … And then the most you get is amusement, a bite with your false teeth. A couple of jokes snatching at the Holy Grail when in fact it was just a cake tin floating past. Raspberry sauce instead of blood … The fate of the clown.’

‘Do
you know what it is that he holds against me?’ Eschschloraque flicked cigarette ash into the aquarium. ‘The fact that I’ve seen through him, right through to the aqueous humour of his expressionless eyes. He’s so desperate, deep down inside he loves me, that’s the problem, but he would rather the floor swallowed him up than descend to sentimentality …’

‘It was you who called me Albin! Albin! Only ducks or penguins are called Albin. How can one be taken seriously with a name like that!’

‘Yes, that’s it. Can you imagine that a dramatist who’s called Albin can be really good? Talented fathers almost never have talented children, they say. But does that mean that talented fathers should deny themselves the joy! of having children? That was what occurred to me at the moment when I … hmm, let’s say: set you off on your journey. I should have acted in a more responsible way.’ Eschschloraque scrutinized his son’s face, which he held in the harsh light under the bonsai shelf, to see what effect his words had, innocently opening wide his long lashes, silky like a woman’s. ‘The pleasure was at best moderate, anyway.’

‘Even wearily fired cannons can hit the mark.’ Albin was white as a sheet, though his movements were calm and measured, not even the flame of his lighter trembled as he lit himself a cigarillo.

‘That’s enough, the pair of you.’ Philipp stood up, waving his position paper. ‘We’ve more important things to talk about.’

‘If you think so,’ Eschschloraque replied.

‘Damn it all, no one’s listening to me. Here you are, indulging in your private quarrels, which, I have to say, I find in pretty bad taste, especially in front of –’

‘– your guests?’ Albin broke in, unimpressed. ‘So what? Let them learn how far admiration can go. Guests? They don’t bother me,’ he went on with a smug pout.

‘I think the way the pair of you are behaving is not only in bad taste
but immature. Surely in a family it must be possible to treat each other normally, naturally –’

‘Normally! Naturally!’ Eschschloraque sounded amused. ‘Two pathologists are discussing their clientele. “He was an artist. He died a natural death,” one says. “So he killed himself?” says the other. My dear Philipp –’

‘Eddi –’

Albin burst out in a fit of squealing laughter that Eschschloraque cut off with the remark that it sounded silly rather than genuine, that people who had imaginary complaints often laughed in that way. – Complaints! Albin laughed even louder. Then he suggested they should listen to Philipp at last, for what would become of revolutions without position papers. Passing over the comment in silence, Philipp, head bowed and hands clasped behind his back, raising his fingers to emphasize his succinct exposition, started to explain the ideas his planning staff had come up with. They concerned the reform of economic policy, a topic that clearly bored Judith Schevola, for she started peeking over Vogelstrom’s shoulder. The artist was sketching Philipp’s face in various stages between indignation and fervour until Philipp concluded, ‘You’re no more interested than Barsano was’, and dropped his arms in resignation. ‘If not even you, for whom socialist ideals still mean something, will listen to me …’

‘For which of those here do socialist ideals mean something?’ Eschschloraque asked, jutting out his chin imperiously. ‘Rohde’s a mere opportunist, inscrutable and taciturn, a mole perhaps; Fräulein Schevola’s interested in anecdotes and striking episodes for her sassy novel; Vogelstrom in his doodles; and that one over there –’ he pointed at Albin sprawled out in a free corner of the sofa with a grin on his face, sucking like an addict at his cigarillo – ‘is no socialist. He’s an enemy, a counter-revolutionary, worse still, a Romantic. Perhaps he’s even a Wagnerian, that would be worst of all. He desires our collapse, Philipp, one ought to –’

‘Yes,
yes, I know what “one” ought to do. “One” ought to inform on him, that’s what you were going to say, wasn’t it? As was the accepted thing in the era you think of as golden. You’d have handed me over without hesitation, a father his own son. Come on now, how many did you grass on?’

‘What a way to speak, you young whippersnapper!’ Philipp broke in angrily. ‘After all he is your father.’

‘That’s all right,’ Eschschloraque said with a wave of the hand, ‘I’m not afraid to answer that. I reported – to use a term I consider more appropriate – those who were against the system –’

‘Really against or only apparently? Or did you “report” them to save your own skin? By the way’ – Albin turned to Philipp – ‘I can’t remember having suggested you call me “
du
”. I’m not a child, you know, and we’re not poets or underground musicians, among whom it’s customary. For my part, I prefer the distance of the formal “
Sie
” since it opens up unknown territory. Anyone who uses the formal mode of address sees poetry and underground music as a country of vast, uncharted landscapes rather than a provincial place where everyone knows everyone else and no one can see any farther than the walls of their own back yard. A person who uses the formal mode of address is insisting on the dignity of his own specialism because he is thus saying that it is by no means exhausted, and anyone who cannot see that is simply demonstrating that he is on a lower level, a lower level of thinking, of understanding others.’

‘Sounds familiar. Is that irony?’ Philipp asked in an ironic tone, nodding to Meno.

Eschschloraque surveyed his son with an indulgent look. ‘You know the word impertinence, you look through the lens of contempt but you do not honour the word investigation and you do not like the word improve, my son. What do you know about those times …? I didn’t need to save my skin, as you put it. I was and am a professed supporter of the order established by Stalin and I’ve never made a secret of
it. – And “secret” in that expression,’ he said turning to Meno, ‘is a neuter noun, not masculine as I read recently in one of your publications. The corruption of the times is increasing, for it is the corruption of morals, and morals, like vegetables, start to go bad in little details.’

‘Details, is it? Nicely formulated. Always nothing but words, Father. What’s your opinion of the murders, to mention one of those, er, “little details”? Or do you deny them? The
chistka
? Did it never happen? All imperialist propaganda?’

‘No. In the big picture, the murders were necessary. Desperate times must not leave you desperate for means. The Soviet Union was surrounded on all sides, what should the Moustache do? What would you have done in his place? Waited until civil war had torn the land apart? Waited until the fascists conquered Moscow?’

‘I would have thought about whether the good things that were written on the standards were worth the evil they were starting to cost. He had the old Bolsheviks killed, his comrades from the revolution. He wasn’t concerned about the country, about the well-being of the people, all he was concerned about was power.’

‘He trampled the idea of socialism underfoot!’ Philipp exclaimed in agitation. ‘Are you out of your mind, Eddi? Am I in the company of madmen?’

‘Ah, now we’re back with the repetitions,’ Albin said. ‘You said that the last time you were here.’

‘Trampled the idea of socialism underfoot … Huh, that’s the way children talk who know nothing of the harsh hand of time, who do not know that the gap between weal and woe crushes those who hesitate indecisively.’

‘Just listen to my father! So strong the iron hand of time that right can only flourish in the land if we do wield the baneful sword of wrong, of wrack and ruin …’

‘How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to have a thankless child.’

‘Should I thank the hand that strikes me?’

‘You
hate the hand that feeds you.’

Albin stubbed out his cigarillo, lit a new one, at the same time offering his finely tooled leather case around but only Judith felt like trying one. ‘England hath long been mad, and scarred herself; the brother blindly shed the brother’s blood, the father rashly slaughtered his own son, the son, compelled, been butcher to the sire. – I have a letter. A charming, truly informative letter, a carbon copy of it, to be precise; I always carry it with me, although that’s not necessary, since I know it off by heart. A document. Listen.’ Albin leant back, blew out smoke and began to recite: ‘ “My son is the offspring of a musician and a writer and will therefore, as far as genetics allows us to judge, also seek to make his mark in the world of art and it was thus my duty as a caring father not only to show him my love, to assert it with words, but to prove it by (the uncomprehending majority will have little sympathy but we have drunk of dragon’s milk) – by doing something that was designed to make a life beside my shadow possible: I have disowned him, he will have acquired injuries but that has not, as far as I can tell, killed him; pain and sorrow: that is the propitious foundation for an artist; now he has something to write about, he does not need to live from hand to mouth, as would probably have been the case had I made things too easy for him. But that is the most important thing for an artist: his works. So as a good father I had to see to it that he had something to work on. He has strength and needed something he can fill with that strength; that I have given him, and to say that doesn’t look like a father’s love is a petty-bourgeois way of thinking and suggests the lack of a sense of particularities, also the lack of a sense of the laws that determine one’s fate that I, in less high-flown Romantic fashion, prefer to call the shape of one’s life. You may rest assured, my esteemed friend, that I do not willingly lay bare these confessions, but recently you adopted a posture such as certain heroes do in certain melodramas when they brandish their swords and mostly wish to find out what their names are (as if that would change anything). Selah.” ’

Eschschloraque
waited, no one said anything. He calmly spread his arms. ‘So? What am I? A pipe-smoking jackal?’

‘But you smoke cigarettes. No, no. You’re right.’

‘You say I’m right?’

‘Why not? I wouldn’t like to have a son like me. I’m in favour of the death penalty, but I hate Stalinism.’

‘My God,’ Philipp murmured. ‘You’re both mad.’

‘That is the remark of someone who doesn’t know life and doesn’t know it because he doesn’t know himself and he doesn’t know himself because he has never been compelled to get to know himself.’ It wasn’t clear whom Eschschloraque was addressing, his son or Philipp. Both stared into space.

… but the tram set off, leaving behind it Simmchen’s clockmaker’s shop, Matthes’s stationer’s, the ticking wall clocks at Pieper’s Clocks, 8 Turmstrasse, the babble of voices in Wiener’s hairdressing salon, where Colonel Hentter fought out old battles with polystyrene heads and curlers for little boys waiting for a fifty-pfennig haircut and ladies under the hairdryers leafed through yellowing copies of
Paris Match
; Christian did not turn round and look back at the street, he thought, I’m coming back; Malthakus bent over his stamps, photographic series from the former German colonies on New Guinea: names such as Gazelle Peninsula and Blanche Bay, Empress Augusta River and Bismarck Archipelago, which Siegbert, looking up from his comic books of seafaring adventures, had told him was where Corto Maltese and Captain Rasputin had met Lieutenant Slütter; Christian closed his
eyes so as not to see the children, satchels on their backs, trotting along to Louis Fürnberg High School, past the recycling depot, the clink of empty bottles in plywood boxes, the blue one-ton scales you weren’t to rest your hand on when the tied-up bundles of newspapers were being weighed, a wooden flap separating the customers from the blue-coated woman in charge of waste paper; in his mind’s eye Christian could see the chemist’s and Trüpel taking a record out of its sleeve and showing the silky black disc to a customer, shiny as a top hat and recommended by the Friends of Music; the train set off, on the right the Schlemm Hotel disappeared – there Ladislaus Pospischil would be serving widows sticky, richly coloured liqueurs to go with their memories of pre-war splendours, all Viennese elegance as they spooned up their cake; the bus stop kiosk was left behind with its numbers of
Filmspiegel
, under-the-counter copies of the magazines
Für Dich
and the
Neue Berliner Illustrierte
with a black-and-white photo of Romy Schneider, beside
Deutscher Angelsport
and
Sputnik
and
FF Dabei
, in which Heinz the ‘awkward customer’ told amusing stories about the Night of the Celebrities in the Aeros Circus; the Tannhäuser Cinema disappeared on the left, at that time of day there was no boy standing looking at the posters for
Once upon a Time in the West
and
Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger
that Robert and Ezzo were to go and see again and again until they could join in the dialogue, until they knew what Hyperborea was where the mysterious people of the Arimaspi lived and until they gave up trying to be able to reproduce Sinbad’s fabulous throw – his dagger nailed the mosquito that had been swollen by Zenobia’s magic juice to the doorpost of the cabin – with their penknives; the sanatorium was left behind, the Soviet soldiers strolling around in bandages, hobbling along on crutches, Lenin’s silver-plated plaster head in the middle of the spa gardens, the heating plant with the conveyor belts spilling ash, the Kuckuckssteig path below Arbogast’s chemical laboratory

… but the tram was travelling, and his father had said, ‘Goodbye’, Ulrich, ‘Keep your chin up, lad’, Ina that he just shouldn’t start to cry;
only Anne had said nothing and made him a mountain of sandwiches and had
been all over the place
for treats, and Kurt Rohde had scribbled a couple of lines on a postcard that Christian knew was in the bag round his neck, a card from the Danube delta, a melancholy hoopoe was sitting on a tree staring out over water and reeds: in the first place life is short and in the second it goes on; Meno had said, ‘Come what come may, time and the hour runs through the roughest day’ … day, day echoed in his memory like a bell tolling; Christian dug his hands in the pockets of his battledress and slipped forward to expose a greater area of his body to the underseat heating, pulled his case in out of the corridor: it had stopped raining, the window was covered in strands of watery hair, the passengers getting on and off left moisture on the grooved surface of the floor; he felt for the box of books with the tip of his toe: Reclam paperbacks, stories by Tolstoy, Gorki’s
The Artamanovs
, Meno’s
Old German Poems
, a few volumes from the Hermes-Verlag’s ‘Black Series’, he wouldn’t turn into a cabbage, he wouldn’t forget language, that was what he feared most – that they would manage to cut out part of his brain

… but the tram was travelling and he had a strange experience, he was sitting in a place where he was not yet present, he was still walking along Wolfsleite and Mondleite and was on the way to the House with a Thousand Eyes; he could still hear the Stenzel Sisters’ gramophone tunes in Caravel, watch Kitty doing her ‘Müllers’, enjoy the quietness in Wachwitz Park, where October made furious peace with the clay court outside the Roman Villa and its windows that couldn’t help the light casting itself on them so lavishly, the bushes looking like waiting cats spattered with honey and the fire of the rhododendrons already dying in the afternoon; he was still walking round the park, seeing the gardening implements, wheelbarrows, bottles of propane gas, and thinking of fleeing:
to stay here, to be here
, screwed up his eyes: the world in orange, opened them: reddish brown and ochre flitting through the tops of the beeches, leaves tilting like the visors of tiny sentries,
speckled with rust and definite, there were still gossamer threads of spiders’ webs floating through the air and he tried to catch them with outspread fingers, as if they were tissue hanging down from the cloud-steamers and he could unravel them or fly along with them like a little boy; but he couldn’t, he was sitting here on a grey seat in one of the red-and-white-painted Czech Tatra trams – and was yet still there; it was as if he were the shadow and the other Christian the man of flesh and now congealed blood (do I have everything with me? Conscription papers, military identity card, in a moment of hysteria he pulls out the bag round his neck, Kurt’s card is already dog-eared), and he, the shadow, were attached to the other at every point of his body by thousands of untearable but enormously elastic threads that were tearing him off, molecule by molecule, and filling the shadow (like swimmers who were attached to the edge of the pool by rubber ties and tried to swim a length, did thirty or forty metres then fought to at least touch the other end with their fingertips, their arms going round like the sails of a windmill, whipping up the water into foam, then the swimmers gave up, pretended to be dead and floated back, face down – but he was torn off)

… for the tram was travelling, he looked at the Elbe opening up in a wide curve on the left, on the other bank was the Käthe-Kollwitz-Ufer, the three high-rise buildings before Brücke der Einheit, blocks made with prefabricated concrete slabs stuck into the silhouette of the Old Town, he walked round the Old Town once more, as he had done the previous day: the Academy of Art seemed to be letting its shoulders droop in the blinding white sun, cranes were revolving over the Semper Opera House, the ruins of the Frauenkirche stretched the stumps of two charred arms up to the heavens, the Catholic Church of the Royal Court of Saxony lay athwart the river like a portly duck and seemed to be baked in sleep amid the agitation of the morning traffic; the Elbe, covered in grey-brown scales, resembled a dinosaur lethargically creeping forward and at this moment the other, the more real Christian was
sitting with Niklas on the chaise longue in the sparkling brightness of the music room, his parents, Lothar Däne, record shop Trüpel, Ezzo and Reglinde, Gudrun at the table with the filigree Meissen place settings, Gudrun’s father, bearded, morose and ignored in the armchair by the veranda: guests at a birthday party, musicians from the State Orchestra were standing in the hall recounting gossip, Robert was looking over Ezzo’s angling equipment in the children’s room, Christian was sitting beside Meno, who, as always, was quiet and observing the others; the tiled stove twittered softly, Niklas was fussing about with the arm of the record player, brushing the sapphire needle, checking the speed setting, he was going to play Weber’s
Freischütz
, with which the Semper Opera House was to reopen on 13 February, it had been the talk of the town for months.

… but the tram only stopped briefly on Rothenburger Strasse, allowing commuters heading for Sachsenplatz and Äussere Neustadt to alight, picking up schoolchildren and their teachers with their exhortations, office workers with briefcases under their arms, Christian thought of Muriel, the news that she was being sent to a reformatory had got round the neighbourhood

… and didn’t stop at Platz der Einheit, at the Transport Services’ high-rise building nor at Otto-Buchwitz-Strasse with the light-blue Central Post Office, he felt like simply getting out and walking down Strasse der Befreiung, past the memorial to the Soviet army with its heroic Red Guards and past the Schiller stele, past the four-ball clock and then going on to the Golden Rider, simply leaving his suitcase in the tram, let whoever wanted take care of it; to run away, yes; why could he not simply run away (because they’ll catch you), why did he have to be here (because you want to study medicine), but aren’t there people who managed to get to university even though they only did a year and a half (perhaps, but there’s that law saying you can only go to university after you’ve completed your military service … what if they don’t conscript you for years?); he wanted to see the Golden
Rider, now, to wonder about the circular hole at a particular place on August the Strong’s horse (where was the thingy kept, was it really made of gold?); he wanted to walk over Dimitroff Brücke to the Brühlsche Terrasse and he remembered at that moment, as the doors of the 11 closed and also singing could be heard from the other carriage, making a few passengers lower their newspapers and shake their heads, the apple his mother had placed on a white porcelain plate, the last apple from a, as Anne put it, priceless gift in kind Richard had been given by a patient in thanks for good treatment: a basket with old varieties of apple, priceless because unavailable in the shops; Star Rennet, English Strawberry Apple, Red Warrior, Mohrenstettiner (Meno used a regional name, Chimney Sweep, Richard knew it from his father’s garden in Glashütte as Red Eiser), which had given Robert stomach ache because they weren’t quite ripe; Yellow Bellefleur, Pomeranian Crooked Boot, Lemon Apple; they still grew on the slopes above the Elbe, but they were guarded by their owners, kept for their own consumption; boys who tried to steal them had to watch out for fierce dogs and even Lange only rarely gave away some of his treasured fruit (Meno got some in exchange for books); fragrance, the crackle of leaves when the autumn drizzle came, shiny green, full, harlequin-striped fruits on the branches, Christian remembered the clear, almost brazen red of the apple on the plate, a shallow, slanting oval of shadow licked like a tongue across the porcelain in the angora light of a November morning, the harsh, glazed-looking red, beside the living-room door was a jug with the same red bleeding down from its rim in decorative dribbles; now he was going out of the kitchen into the hall and listening, stepped on a place in the parquet flooring that creaked because all was quiet in the house, no Stenzel Sisters’ gramophone sketched gestures made of starch and melancholy, neither lawnmower noise nor doleful poodle slurped at the windowpanes, Plisch and Plum weren’t shovelling either, no stove-stirring plumbed the silence; he thought of cutting a slice out of the apple and placing it on the toaster – or holding it in a spoon over
the flame of the gas stove, as Robert sometimes did with honey substitute that he scraped out of a cardboard tub (the honey tasted of sugared wax), but he put the apple back on the plate and decided to walk round the house once more before eating the apple; he still had plenty of time

… as the tram took the Otto-Buchwitz-Strasse/Bautzner Strasse crossing and approached Neustadt Station, he was walking round Caravel thinking about the apple on the plate that was as red as a billiard ball and would be just as cool, and also too refined to tip its fragrances on demand and without exception into his greedy mouth, the flesh would crunch as he bit into it, perhaps there would be a trace of blood along the edge of the bite; the apple would taste of pride, of autumn or, to be more precise: of the frothy concord between the zenith and the calm of descent in which that
raphe
had pursued its course – he had found the term in the Leipzig anatomical atlas that medical students, as was recommended in a letter from the dean’s office, should purchase before their military service or their year of work experience, Richard had acquired the lavishly illustrated book with the orange binding for him from the duplicate copies of the library of an out-of-the-way academy – that
raphe
(Christian loved the word), the force with which, just for moments, the tidal waves of September and October collided, that point in time (but it wasn’t that, Stabenow had spoken of ellipses of time and blobs of time), this blob of time, then, would suck the essence of the autumn out of immense aromas: it was smells (for Christian autumn, October, the month of his birth, began with smells: the scent of the leather of old wallets that came from the gills of mushrooms, the smell of horses that came from wet foliage, the impotent sweetness of the fruit in the Anker jars that were heated in the preserving pans), it was haste going hither and thither, crossed by the lines of a great crested grebe in the shiny, sleepily quivering calm of the castles of Pillnitz, it was images furiously popping up and down (lemon sticks, spiders’ stars in the trees, moist wood washed up on the banks of the Elbe, decay, moss-green in forgotten sewer pipes and in the joins in the
wall on the lower section of Rissleite, the coral red of the rowan berries, peacock butterflies on the greying, sun-warmed wood of a window seat, the fine-pored stillness, slightly loosened at the edges, of a watering can in the corner of a garden, little, transparent camels of warmth slipping away from the radiator fins past chairs and sofas in the direction of cracks in the doors); and yet the apple had blemishes and ‘stocking marks’, as Barbara called them, scaly notches caused, perhaps, by some parasite or abnormal growth, so he wouldn’t bite into the apple but cut it with a Japanese blade, would delight in the moisture on the cut (the steel would turn blue from the malic acid and taste pleasantly bitter), he didn’t divide the apple into four pieces, as everyone else he’d watched eating apples did, instead he cut the apple across in slices as thick as your finger (Reina said she’d never seen anyone cut an apple like that before),