The Tower: A Novel (62 page)

‘You really want to invite me over for Christmas? I didn’t know, Herr Londoner … Oh, then I’m in your debt,’ Altberg said and Meno was irritated by the formal way Altberg had suddenly started to address Londoner until he realized he was talking to Philipp, ‘but then has your father … aha. However, please understand me … can I speak to him? Hm. I find that a little embarrassing, I have to say it comes as a surprise, of course I’m very grateful, you can … What? You’re right there again … Would you pass on a message to your parents from me?’ Then Altberg expressed – Meno hadn’t intended to observe him but he felt a strange satisfaction to see Altberg in this situation, so he remained seated – Altberg was trying to express something, was struggling to find the right word and, since it didn’t occur to him immediately, cast a number of rhetorical nets to try and fish it out: Would Philipp be so kind as to inform his parents of his, Georg Altberg’s, decision … no, ‘decision’ sounded inappropriate, too familiar, Philipp would know what he meant and should remember how condescending … At the moment he was working on a story that had a beggar in it, not anything that took place here and now, of course – where were there beggars in our country? – but there happened to be one in his story and what a nice discordant note it would strike if he were to make this beggar decide to accept the alms the other had been so kind as to offer; was his father working or had he been urgently called to the Academy? – However that might be, he wanted to inform him of his intention, ‘Hm’ – Altberg smiled, scratching his head, which he held on one side as he walked up and down – ‘hm … my intention, good God, please forget that slip of the tongue, my dear Philipp’, when you thought
about it the telephone was a really strange business, you were speaking into the mouthpiece to another person who was nothing but a voice and whose physical appearance you had to imagine to go with the voice, which didn’t always work satisfactorily, naturally Philipp knew that it wasn’t his, Altberg’s, intention, that was, it was that of course, only he didn’t intend with the self-confident overtones that went with the word, ‘intend … my God, Altberg, you’re in highfalutin mode again today’, stretched out his hand and fanned the air round the receiver as if in that way he could reduce the unpleasant word, which had unfortunately been spoken and heard by the other, to fragments that would make their original shape unrecognizable; ‘that means quite simply, I want to, that is, I’d like to … Would you tell him I’m coming?’

Meno was too much taken up with his reflections to see Altberg’s look and silence, after he’d put the telephone down, as aimed at him; it was one of those searching looks behind which thoughts are going round and round seeking something, and suddenly present it as a possible answer to the unspoken question; it was the silence that knows it is the final barrier before something possibly ill-considered is said – ill-considered because spoken in too hasty confidence – the silence before the uncertainty about to what extent the other person is what he appears to be, about whether one will come to regret it bitterly if one says the word that at the moment is still well-guarded in the depths of the complicated machinery that is needed to put a stamp on it, to turn it into the currency of language and speech; one doesn’t know whether one’s initial impulse, to let the word slip out right away, is really worth following or whether the word, once and therefore irrevocably spoken, will turn into a coin that will bribe the sentry guarding the other’s silence or blood money for the unknown Judas inside oneself that for one brief, dangerous moment abandoned its excellent camouflage. In his mind’s eye Meno could see Londoner, sitting at his desk copying down extracts from something, beside him a slip of paper
with names on it that he weighed against each other and against considerations you go through as you contemplate your fingernails; could see Londoner, on coming to Altberg’s name, perhaps reach out for his telephone but leave his hand hovering and then call Philipp and tell him to convey the invitation to Altberg; and after Philipp had left the room Londoner had, perhaps, sat there, legs crossed, tapping his chin with the rubber on the end of his pencil in cool calculation for a few seconds before tearing the slip of paper into little pieces on which not even the letters of the names were legible any more.

Touching the glass. Sticking a knife into a kilo packet of sugar full to bursting. Breaking the bird’s egg they’d taken from the nest when they were children. First clear white, the yolk on glassy threads, then yellow, soft as a Dall clock, spilling over the jagged edge of the shell and into his mouth. Dreams like that.

When he couldn’t sleep at night and Anne was at work, Richard wandered round the living room. He woke up quite often now, would lie awake for a while then put on his dressing gown. When she was on night shift and he wasn’t on call, Anne took the car. If it was parked outside, he would get dressed and drive somewhere or other. He didn’t stay out for long. When he got back she didn’t question him, just asked him to be quiet and not to wake Robert. Sometimes he would wake up bathed in sweat and with cramp in his hands, stare round the room, in which a street lamp cast a pale silver veil, feeling afraid. The contours of the bedroom wardrobes, the washing basket, the candelabra with the light discs were drawn in thin lines; the wardrobes were blocks,
darker than the rest of the room, at the foot of the two beds, which had been pushed together and seemed to him like a rectangular island, a raft on which he and Anne had found refuge. It didn’t move. The town, the country were asleep, sometimes the distant sound of a manoeuvre could be heard from the Russians’ firing ranges. Anne slept well, he no longer did, a consequence of the nights on duty, riddled with telephone calls, knocking at the door, the disturbance. Sometimes he would feel for Anne and she reacted, murmured in her sleep, which moved but didn’t calm him. When she wasn’t there he had the feeling figures were coming closer, that the blocks were not wardrobes but secret doors through which they came in. He opened and closed his hands, in these hours of wakefulness the right one with the healed tendons felt as if it were under a sewing machine, the needle of which was slowly, as if the current transmitter were being cautiously tested out, piercing the jagged suture.

Sometimes he took out one of Christian’s letters, which Anne kept in a file with the things that had to be immediately to hand should there be a fire (an air raid, as had happened to Emmy and Arthur; an arrest, as with Kurt and Luise). He would read one or two and then put them back. He would have liked to tear them up or given the boy to understand, in a way that didn’t hurt him or cast him down, that he shouldn’t write any more for it pained him to see the way they made Anne suffer. He had no idea whether it was all true or whether the lad was exaggerating for some particular reason – a desire to attract attention, a need for tokens of love, a certain emotional extortionism, a masochistic tendency (look how I’m suffering)? Because of his injury, Richard had not been conscripted, Ulrich and Meno had spent their time stuck in orderly rooms, Niklas had been called up to the reserves and had spent eight weeks sweeping the runways of a military airport.

He was probably being unjust to the lad.

When he heard the sound of an engine he would start and wait. The front door was locked, Griesel made sure of that, but that wouldn’t
bother them, they could get through any door. They came at night, when everyone was asleep, like their fellows in their bomber jackets and sharply creased trousers everywhere on the islands of the socialist archipelago.

He’d heard no more from them since Josta had separated from him. No summons to a meeting, no confidential communication, no telephone call in which the caller did not give his name and you only heard his breathing; no one who folded a newspaper and followed him when he left the clinic, until a car drove up to the pavement and a door was opened with the engine still running. They seemed to be waiting. But for what? Were they taking it out on Christian? The post of medical orderly he’d been definitely assured by the husband of a former patient who worked in the army district command had been postponed in a rather suspicious way … Were they planning measures against him? Against Robert? Anne? Would they get their claws into Lucie? The thoughts went round and round inside his head. Sometimes, when he didn’t put the light on in the room and watched the street, he had the impression he could see the glow of a cigarette outside the house opposite … That meant that they were watching him as well, knew that he couldn’t sleep. Was afraid. And they wanted him to notice them, they were keeping the area under surveillance, making that clear to him and not even being particularly discreet about it. If they were showing themselves, they could afford to … Then he went to the hall and quietly opened the wardrobe by Robert’s door, where, without telling Anne, he’d hidden one of his doctor’s bags. He’d packed everything in it he thought was necessary and if they came, he’d be ready. Sometimes he felt he couldn’t bear it any longer and would most of all have liked to go out into the street to challenge the spy, to tell him to go to hell. But he didn’t know whether he was imagining the spy, the glow of a cigarette could be an illusion, his view was restricted by hedges and trees. And even if it wasn’t just his imagination, there might be someone having a cigarette there who wasn’t interested in him.
Perhaps they’d even given up on him, in silence, without informing him … Josta had left him, that couldn’t be used as blackmail any longer. And he assumed that by now Anne knew, or at least suspected, everything: an anonymous letter, delivered when she was at home and he at the clinic, would, like damp powder, not spark off any response. But who knows – he’d better have a chat with Glodde, the cross-eyed postman.

He waited, stared at the grandfather clock with the heart-shaped tips to the hands, the bulbous glass over the face. The top hook on the pendulum door, which had to be opened to wind up the three lead weights, mustn’t be closed: there was pressure on the glass, his father had said, it could crack if the hook were closed and variations of temperature in the room changed the elasticity of the glass. Richard went over to the clock. The glass drew him to it but it would crack the moment he stretched out a finger, of that he was convinced.

Christmas came and went and the mood in the household was depressed. Anne cried because Christian wasn’t there, was stuck on a watchtower in icy wind or had to drive out to the field camp with horrible people. ‘If something should happen to the boy … He has no idea about these technical things. Those awful tanks, I can’t imagine Christian inside one and then he’s training to shoot at other people …’

After an unfortunate fall (on Sundays he wound up all the clocks in his collection, he had to use a ladder to reach the cuckoo clocks) Arthur Hoffmann was in hospital with a broken ankle. He didn’t want Richard to operate on him. ‘Your hand will tremble when it’s your father and, who knows, perhaps now that I’m defenceless you’d like to get your revenge for this or that,’ he said with morbid humour. ‘Moreover, I don’t want special treatment. I’ve never needed it. I refuse!’ Since it was way off on the outskirts of the region, the supply situation in the district hospital in Glashütte was distinctly worse than in the clinics in the regional capital. Richard talked to the chief surgeon and,
by bribing the Academy pharmacist with a few Hermes books given by Meno, at least managed to arrange for a few important drugs to be passed on from the Academy stores to those of the ward where Arthur Hoffmann was.

Emmy spent the whole of Christmas Eve wallowing in gloom and neither the music of the spheres from the Holy Cross choir nor the present of a shopping trolley with a tartan cloth cover could stop her insisting that soon everything was going to blow up and that the woman next door was a witch, a jealous cow who was plotting against her and was out to kill her. ‘Yes, really. It’s as true as I’m sitting here. She’s after my living blood, she is, the storm-hag!’ Moreover her neighbour ‘kept on’ finding money, something that she, Emmy, had never managed to do. But her neighbour had her nose to the pavement all day, her ear to the wall and her fingers in other folks’ letter boxes and on other folks’ fruit, even if it didn’t hang over the fence into her garden. When Robert, at Richard’s insistent request, played a sequence of lively pieces for clarinet, she shook her head morosely, adding that the lad would never get anywhere, he was a Hoffmann and Hoffmanns always got stuck. And besides, Arthur had abandoned her.

Snow fell in large, soft flakes, hanging in the trees like semolina pudding, covering the ash-smeared streets. The Stenzel Sisters brought their steel-edged skis down from the loft; they had spring bindings and had glided over the snow in Innsbruck, in the Norway of the Telemark and Cristiania turns, on the cross-country runs of the Oberwiesenthal and Oberhof, where Kitty, with the carefreeness of a recent pensioner and the bravery of a bareback rider in the Sarrasani Circus, had secretly gone down the ski jump.

In the evening Meno would sit at his typewriter or microscope in the House with a Thousand Eyes wearing his coat and gloves with the fingertips cut off, puzzling over reports or Judith Schevola’s prose, studying zoological preparations Arbogast had lent him. Something seemed to be happening in the country, the rigidity, the inertia were
now only a thin layer beneath which something was moving, an embryo with as yet unclear outlines developing in the womb made of habit, resignation, perplexity, sometimes the people seemed to sense the movements of the foetus, the pregnancy of the streets, of the smoke-clouded days. Spurred on by Ulrich, Meno had started to read books about economics, a subject that had never particularly interested him and whose number-juggling precision, mathematical modelling and apparently irrefutable self-assurance repelled him just as much as the matter-of-fact way human traits, that is fallibility, favouritism and illogicality, were pinned to the ice-cold drawing board of the laws of nature. But he began to suspect something … People’s fear that this crystal-clear science, its axioms that society in his country had been resisting for years, might be right … The per-head coal allocation had been reduced. As a bachelor who only had books to bribe people with (the car spares had to be kept for darker times) he had no pull with Hauschild. And you couldn’t go and buy the extra hundredweight you needed from another coal merchant – the coal merchants worked according to the district system and had lists of the registered inhabitants. Meno burnt wood that he and Stahl, the engineer, had cut down illegally in the forest; they were committing a punishable offence, but Stahl said he didn’t care – if the state couldn’t manage to supply its children with sufficient fuel then he, Gerhart Stahl, had to help himself. The Kaminski twins noticed these woodland excursions, waited, hands in their trouser pockets, in the hall and asked if they could be of any help. Stahl was still suspicious of them, but they could certainly use two pairs of extra hands and ears. Busse, the forester, and his dog were faced with a difficult task, for of course the large sleigh covered with a tarpaulin on which the men from the House with a Thousand Eyes transported their spoils was observed by thoughtful eyes, even in the dark.

On New Year’s Eve 1984 an inspection team from the Communal Housing Department arrived. They established that Meno Rohde and
the Langes had too many square metres of apartment and that the Langes’ use of Meno’s bedroom for their son Martin was unauthorized. A new apartment, with the right to use the Langes’ and Rohde’s bathroom, was set up, consisting of the bedroom, the cabin and Alois Lange’s study on the corridor side, that is of rooms in different parts of the house. In the basement, beside the laundry room, was the former scullery (where Libussa preserved her fruit); that too was allocated to the new apartment. The Stahls, Langes and Meno protested, but it was futile, the Housing Department was not open to reason and insisted on its right to allocate living space. At the beginning of January a middle-aged married couple moved in and caused even greater disruption to the lives of the other tenants than the Kaminski twins had done with their uninvited appearance in the conservatory.

In the middle of January, Regine received a letter from Coal Island. In plain terms she was informed that her application to leave the country had been refused.

‘What are you going to do?’ Anne asked. They had gathered at Niklas’s to discuss the situation.

‘I’ve renewed my application every two weeks and I intend to continue doing so.’

‘Then you’ll be committing an offence,’ Richard said. ‘I talked with Sperber, the lawyer, who strongly advises you not to make any more requests. Your request has been refused and they can arrest you, if you start again.’

‘The bastards,’ said Ulrich.

‘But what happens next?’ Regine covered her face with her hands. She was emaciated and had dark shadows round her eyes. Gudrun went out to make her a cup of tea; it wasn’t warm in the living room, she was wearing knitted cardigans over several pullovers or waistcoats she had made herself out of scraps of fur from Harmony Salon; Ezzo was practising in the next room. Reglinde, in gloves, woollen scarf
and bobble hat, was ill in bed, in her little, icy-cold room beside the Tietzes’ second toilet, which froze over in winter.

‘If they send you to prison, they’ll take the children away, perhaps even beforehand,’ Anne said. She was pale, her nose sharp; Christian had been writing fewer letters.

‘It was good that Jürgen simply stayed over there. I know someone in the orchestra whose brother took their social security card with him; it meant his wife couldn’t prove she’d known nothing beforehand; she was accused of complicity and her son ended up in a children’s home.’

‘Shh!’ came from several sides. Index fingers pointed at the walls.

‘Oh, don’t exaggerate.’ Niklas waved away their warnings.

‘I have to sell the car. The pittance I can earn as an untrained secretary … Over the last year I’ve sold a few pieces of furniture, we managed, more or less. Hans is getting on for sixteen and grows out of everything so quickly and Philipp needs new things all the time … Pätzold will give me twenty thousand for the car.’

‘For a Wartburg with less than a hundred thousand on the clock? And it’s in good condition, Jürgen looked after it really well. Don’t you want to put an ad in the paper and wait for a better offer. I’ve been to Pätzold too … the crook!’ Niklas exclaimed indignantly.