The Tower: A Novel (72 page)

One day Nip ordered Christian to come to his room. He ran his thumb over a bundle of postcards. ‘This letter is confiscated, Hoffmann. It has marks from a non-socialist country. From the class enemy! In a facility of the National People’s Army!’

Christian recognized Ina’s handwriting on the envelope. ‘Cuba is a socialist country, Comrade Staff Sergeant. My cousin was there on her honeymoon.’

‘It’s been franked in Hamburg. There are two alternatives. We make a fuss about it, you complain … or the letter disappears. You should be grateful. According to regulations …’

Christian
stared at Nip’s collection of pot plants. Anne would have advised him to let the matter drop. Meno, with his coolly observant scientist’s manner, would presumably have waited to see what his nephew would do. Robert would have said, Sell him the letter, you can see how keen he is on it, the poor slob. Try to get something out of it. Only Richard would have lost his temper.

Richard, from whom Christian had inherited his mania for justice, as Barbara put it. But his father wasn’t there. Christian was certainly interested in what would happen if he insisted on having the letter. The Hoffmanns’ daredevil recklessness. Spin the ball and see what turns up on the roulette wheel. ‘Yes, Comrade Staff Sergeant.’

Chug-chug-chug and put-put-put, rumbling and grumbling, baboom, baboom,

‘Something’s rattling, shut the door, Robert.’ – ‘It is shut.’ – ‘I said something’s rattling’, baboom, baboom,

crawling (the traffic jams on the Berlin ring road) and jolting (the hot Pneumant tyres over asphalt bulging out of the joins in the concrete slabs) lip-smacking (hard-boiled eggs, liver sausage on bread, Golden Delicious, peeled cucumbers and carrots at the concrete tables of the autobahn picnic areas) pissing (as Niklas said, there was no other word for it when you had to go into the scraggy pine trees beside the picnic areas where plastic bags, empty bottles, swarms of flies round the traces left by your predecessors – for the women there was a path leading deeper into the little wood – tons of toilet paper all seemed to say, Oh God, how happy we were) baboom, baboom,

Plastics
from Schkopau
baboom,

Faster – higher – further
baboom,

Plastics from Schkopau
babang (pothole),

Forward to the XXth Party Conference
baboom,

Plastics from Schkopau
badong (deep pothole),

fill the tank (
VK 88 the fuel that takes you further
) boom

(bomb crater – Niklas drove onto the shoulder and checked – the bumper was still attached),

and give thanks (survived it once again, Gudrun groaned in Stralsund, as we straightened ourselves out):

thus one drove away on holiday across the German Democratic Republic.

Stralsund was a sad town. No proud Hanseatic flags any more, no noble regattas. Störtebecker, the pirate, was dead. After being beheaded he walked until he stumbled over the leg of one of the officials. Crumbling brick, dilapidated roofs. The sun was grey, enveloped in clouds of rubbish, hung low over the Sound. They parked the car but left Meno’s luggage in it. He was going to travel on alone. There were a few hours before the ferry for Hiddensee left. Gudrun suggested they wander round the town; Anne and Niklas wanted to go and see the churches; Christian, Robert and Richard were hungry; Meno wanted to go to the Museum of the Sea. The market square was belly-up like a dead fish, gleaming in the fatty air rancid with kitchen fumes; all that was left of the light was some brownish dross that stuck to the walls like traces of tartar. The few people in the market square, which no longer seemed to be the centre of town, kept their heads down and disappeared hurriedly along side streets, as if they were being pursued. The town hall with its pointed Gothic gables seemed glaringly alien; the town was being eaten away by mould and acid discharge from brown coal. There was a long queue at an ice-cream stall offering vanilla ice in a wafer for fifty pfennigs and a cone for a mark; those queuing had the
poor, pale skin of holidaymakers from inland before their holiday. Christian and Robert joined the queue. Meno, who had last been in the town as a student – youth hostel, excursions to the Museum of the Sea – wanted to go round by himself.

‘Back at the car in two hours,’ Anne, who seemed to distrust his sense of direction, told him.

In the side streets yellowing curtains were raised and lowered. The window frames had splits, cracked panes were held in place by screws or replaced by plywood. Meno stopped outside a butcher’s; there were two sides of bacon and one sausage hanging in the window, he couldn’t understand why there was still a queue outside. As soon as he bent down to look in the window, where a poster with ‘Long live Marxism–Leninism’ hung over piled-up cans of meat, a woman started to scold: he should kindly join the queue at the back like everyone else. ‘Tourists!’ he heard someone else moan. ‘Probably from Berlin, eh? Buy up everything here then put on airs!’ – ‘Clear off.’

The way to the Museum of the Sea was signposted. Meno slowed down once he could no longer hear the vituperation. He thought about Judith Schevola. He hadn’t seen her since the events at the annual general meeting; she was probably at some machine doing a job no one else wanted. After she’d been expelled from the Association there was hardly anything else left for her. Perhaps Philipp knew more details. At least the book had been printed, in the West, by Munderloh’s publishing house. A few smuggled copies would certainly already have found their way through customs and be passed round the nomenklatura or as typewritten parts stapled together like school exercise books in the Valley of the Clueless. Those in the senior ranks of the Party and favoured officials of the various associations had no need of such subterfuges, they could acquire books from the West quite legally. Perhaps Jochen Londoner had the book and could lend it to him.

An odd idea, housing a museum of the sea in a former monastery. And equally odd that the brickwork of the monastery and the
aquariums harmonized, that disciplined drawing, a Gothic silver pencil and unfettered painting, the play of colours, soiled by reality and never to be found in an entirely pure state, should live together so peaceably. The skeleton of a finback whale with a gigantic shoe-shaped mouth and jawbones as thick as your arm hung down from the vaulted ceiling. Children, probably from a holiday camp, were making a racket under the shrill-voiced supervision of two teachers. That, Meno felt, was the unpleasant aspect of natural-history museums: there were always children scurrying around, especially when there was no school, shouting and playing the fool with no consideration, no feeling for the fawn-like stillness, waking the corals from their sleep, making even snails moulded from plastic or alone in jars of formalin pull in their horns. Why could people not stand silence? Zoology was a quiet science and as he walked past preserved dolphins and aquariums bubbling with oxygen, he recalled scenes from his student days in Jena under Falkenhausen, the fraught and taciturn interpreter of the world of central-German spiders who called his predecessor, Haeckel, a fool, though a commendable one, and the Phyletic Museum in Jena a Planet Goethe.
Art Forms in Nature
. Dried plants, dust-encrusted chandeliers in the shape of jellyfish in blown glass, drawings of diatoms the size of a saucer, Radiolarians, Amphoridea: a stranded kingdom gradually fossilizing.

No more noise, the children had gone; there was no one to be seen, apart from an attendant dozing in a chair. Someone licked Meno’s hand; in the aquarium by which he had stopped there appeared the guileless, panting face of a black dog.

‘Do excuse me. Kastshey’s still rather rude. It’s difficult to teach this breed anything, but they’re good watchdogs. And anyone they’ve taken a liking to … Good afternoon, Herr Rohde.’ Arbogast tipped his cap with the stick with the gryphon handle. The Baron looked fresh and healthy; his usually grey face, which his steel-rimmed spectacles gave an extra touch of coolness to (now he was wearing glasses with tinted oval lenses, a Western pair), had a deep tan. The skin where his
watch and ring had been was still white. Arbogast noticed Meno’s glance and, inviting him to walk along with the gesture of an expert guide, explained that that year, contrary to his habit, he had not taken off his watch before going on holiday, nor his ring, which he now hardly noticed during his everyday business; however, it did bother him while sailing. At the moment his boat was in Stralsund harbour. Had Herr Rohde received – ‘as promised’, Arbogast smiled – the packet of pencils? ‘No? Then it’s on its way, or arrived after you left. You’ve moved up, so to speak, there have been some changes in our Institute. I presume you’ve heard that already from Fräulein Schevola?’

Meno said no.

‘Some of my physicists, including Herr Kittwitz, have not come back from a conference in Munich. It caused quite a stir. I spoke up on their behalf to make sure they could go, but they abused my trust. That requires a certain lack of imagination or, to put it better, a fair amount of selfishness, just to clear off like that. They want to go to India. There’s a lot of poverty in India. And they shouldn’t think that all that glitters in the West is gold.’

You can talk, Meno thought but said nothing. He was surprised to hear that Kittwitz had left the country and he felt a stab of pain, for although he had only met the physicist once, he had sense of loss. Contemporaries form a cohort; they watch out for each other, even when the years pass and no one drops a hint.

‘You’ll be thinking I don’t practise what I preach.’ Arbogast pointed to a room with aquariums arranged according to themes, one was ‘The Baltic’, one ‘Symbiosis’, one ‘Poisonous Sea Creatures’. Kastshey was attracted to the ‘Harbour Basin’ aquarium in which wrasse and butterfish, codling with barbels on their lower jaw (they made Meno think of Lange’s goatee), turbot and mackerel were swimming round.

‘I don’t want to sound impolite, but for my part I’d love to travel and I think I’m not the only one who feels like that. I’m sure lots of people would like to see what the world outside is like for themselves,
instead of getting it at second hand.’ Meno watched a cuckoo ray with dark blue spots rising up with calm shimmering movements.

‘Of course, there’s no disagreement on that, my dear Rohde. The people in charge should accede to those wishes. Privately I advised the General Secretary to do just that but I fear he’s forced to ignore the suggestion. Unfortunately. In their greed people would take the West for paradise and not return.’ Arbogast pointed to some sea anemones and their iridescent colours. ‘From our own cultures. We’ve had great success at trade fairs.’ He took Meno by the arm and walked on a few steps, as a ruler in affable mood might do with one of the ‘ordinary people’ when it’s politically opportune and there’s a camera nearby. ‘The country would empty, as it did before ’61. The time it took for people to realize their mistake would be enough for the useful and meaningful experiment of socialism to collapse. How are your affairs in Thomas-Mann-Strasse?’ That was where the Hermes offices were. Meno hesitated. Arbogast took a glasses case out of the inside pocket of his elegant, white-linen summer suit, swapped spectacles and, leaning forward, mouth slightly open, observed a red lionfish that was languidly fanning its fins. Its antennae, red-and-white-striped like a stick of candy, were erect.

‘We’ve been sidelined.’

‘Hmmm’ – Arbogast tapped the glass, the lionfish turned away – ‘that’s not the way to go about original projects. – You’re on holiday? In this area?’

‘On Hiddensee.’

‘Kloster? I guessed so. I can take you there.’

‘There are seven of us,’ Meno lied.

‘A nice number. Usually one too many and quarrels break out. No offence meant, you know I like jokes. There’s one they ought to put in the quarantine basin.’ A weever fish with half its tail-fin missing limped past. ‘Taking seven people wouldn’t be a problem on my boat.’ It was a proper yacht, Arbogast explained, and, of course, not only
meant for pottering along the coast. His wife was there too, they were heading across the Baltic to the Soviet Union, he had authorization to enter their territorial waters, to sail at night and PM 19, permission to cruise to the land of their socialist brothers. Meno hesitated.

‘I can see I’ve caught you by surprise. But you must come to one of our evenings again. People are already asking if you’re coming. We have an interesting programme.’ Arbogast waved Kastshey over.

Hagstones warded off misfortune. There were some threaded on a faded clothesline over the door of the waiting room in the holiday season doctor’s bungalow, with dazzling white shells with holes bored in them between the stones. To take one off and keep it for later was to steal good fortune and that didn’t count; neither Christian nor Robert touched the chain. Genuine stones with a natural hole were difficult to find. In the grey-yellow sand of the lagoon they found empty ink cartridges, shards of glass, dried dog shit and, if they were lucky, a rusty key; but the white flints, smooth and round from the sea with a hole you could thread a string through, were rare. Mostly a hollow of varying depth had been ground into the stone. Boring it through didn’t count. The hole had to go right through, a talisman-eye for the view from Fuhlendorf beach across Bodstedt lagoon to the Darss, for the pearl-white balls enclosing the bathing area, the jetty with its boathouse, the fish-traps further out with cormorants and seagulls perching on them; to see through to the Baltic sky, to the reeds cradling the August of bleached hair and freckles. Anne thought the lagoon was too warm, too shallow, too unsavoury. Children with brightly coloured buckets built messy sandcastles, threw mud as they waded in the water while their mothers dozed under sunshades, paddled on air beds, dreaming they were on the Kon-Tiki, below them the 5,000 feet of the Humboldt Current full of bonitos and snake mackerel, above them clouds driven by the trade winds, before them South Sea islands. In the lagoon there were ruffe, roach and
occasional eelpouts. For zander you needed a boat. Robert had brought his angling equipment and went for non-predatory fish, Christian took the spinning rod, attached a 0.35 mm green line and cast spoons and blinkers. Ruffe bit, little spotted guys with spiny fins and huge appetites, some were shorter than the blinker lure that they’d taken for their prey.

The summer season doctor – for three weeks in August that was, alternating daily, Richard Hoffmann and Niklas Tietze – lived with his family in the bungalow on the village street. A white flag with a red cross was unrolled and placed in the mounting beside a bug-plastered lamp. As soon as the inhabitants of Fuhlendorf, nearby Bodstedt and the communities as far as Michaelsdorf saw the flag they remembered various infirmities that couldn’t stand the long journey to the hospital in Barth and, silent and within their rights, occupied the plasticized-linen waiting-room chairs. There were four rooms in the bungalow, one of which served as the doctor’s surgery. Two WCs (private and patients’). The rooms each had two bunk beds at right angles to each other, two cupboards and a washbasin with a cold tap. If you wanted a shower, you packed your flip-flops, picked up your toiletry bag and went through the German Mail holiday camp, to which the bungalow belonged, into the shower shed beside the canteen kitchen, where you hung your things under one of the clouded mirrors in the corridor and waited on bleached duckboards, a potential source of athlete’s foot, in the cabins open to the corridor, surrounded by cheerful and cursing voices, for warm water to come.