The Tower: A Novel (76 page)

‘You want to stab from outside but that’s quite wrong. Come on, I’ll show you.’ Marisa took the knife out of her hand, linked arms with Judith and they headed for Lietzenburg, deep in conversation, their heads close together
.

The Old Man of the Mountain started when the clock struck; there was no one in the library of Lietzenburg apart from himself and Meno. He took off his reading glasses, stood up, groaning, put the Apollodorus book back on the shelf beside the stack of
Sibylle
magazines from which, in the evenings when the watchtower on the Dornbusch sent segments of light feeling their way over land and sea, Karlfriede Sinner-Priest read out stylistic bloomers; they were hours pampered by the tick-tock of the grandfather clock and, since it was already getting cold when evening fell, the approving puffs of the stove with the windmill tiles. Two censors sitting together, she in a crocheted stole, he in a knitted cardigan, both with flushed cheeks, for when her rocking chair went ‘creak’, his rocking chair went ‘croak’.

‘Time, Herr Rohde. One doesn’t keep Barsano waiting.’

Marisa and Philipp joined them on the beach. They had guitars slung over their shoulders on brightly coloured, folksy woven straps and looked like adventurers with their hair stiff with salt under straw hats casting frayed star-shadows on their feet that, as they waded along the back-and-forth of the water’s edge with its unconsciously stumbling shells, they let glittering hands run over. They were heading for the Cape, the cliffs of which were already gathering the red of sunset,
climbing one of the steep paths leading up from the shore. Agrimony and yarrow, black mullein and woody nightshade grew along the path; to Meno’s surprise the Old Man of the Mountain identified them without having to think for long. ‘A pharmacist’s son, Herr Rohde, ought to have sufficient botanical knowledge –’ The rest of the sentence was drowned out by the roar of engines. Beyond the Cape, beach buggies were tearing through the waves and up the dunes that sandslips had rendered less steep there. Philipp shaded his eyes. Meno recognized the Kaminski twins, in the other three buggies were members of the Central Committee of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany. One of the twins roared up the slope, stopped in front of Philipp. ‘Well, Herr Londoner, in which column of your table does this activity come.’

‘Impudence,’ Philipp said without thinking; Meno grasped his arm.

‘Watch your tongue, Master Londoner, we’ve told you that before. Ah, Herr Rohde, you’ve been invited too? How are things at home? Frau Honich will be sorry you’re not there.’

Kaminski – Meno still couldn’t say which was Timo and which René – grinned, glanced briefly at Marisa, ignored the Old Man of the Mountain.

‘I thought motor vehicles were forbidden on the island?’ Philipp stared at Kaminski, who was coolly taking off his suede openwork racing-driver gloves. ‘Fancy a ride? I’m called Timo.’

‘Thanks, but no,
compañero
.’ Marisa tried to get Philipp to move on but Barsano was already waving them over. Timo Kaminski put two fingers to his baseball cap in salute. With a roar of the engine, the buggy shot back off towards the beach. Philipp swore at his departing back. His father, he said, was a highly placed cadre in the nomenklatura, a genuine fighter still, but his spawn, Philipp said, spitting on the ground out, were betraying the ideals of the revolution; they were wastrels, exploiting their connections. ‘An apartment – who gets one at that age, single students, huh!’

‘You
too,’ Meno ventured to object, but that only exacerbated Philipp’s rage.

‘It’s different with me. I got my flat through people I know … by fighting for it. Yes, you can certainly call it that. Moreover I’m not a student any more!’ Philipp’s tendency to fly off the handle, to become obstreperous; Philipp’s blindness for parallels (that he shared with Hanna); Meno said nothing, he was thinking what Judith Schevola had said on the way to East Rome: the Red aristocracy.

‘I can well imagine what you’re thinking.’ Philipp gave a bush, quietly dreaming of the peak of its aspirations, a kick. ‘And I’d like to remind you that without Father’s intervention you’d never have got the apartment on Mondleite. No question about it. But these guys … they’re gangsters, they have no scruples and belong to our Party – it’s been totally corrupted by bastards like that!’

‘He might be able to hear you, Philipp,’ Meno warned, nodding towards Barsano, who had got out of his buggy and was climbing up the dune. The Old Man of the Mountain whispered that it was impolite to stand around when the First Secretary was approaching, especially from below; he stooped and went to meet Barsano.

‘
They’re
the ones who have power in the Party, not the honest comrades who’re pinching and scraping at the base in order to preserve at least something … Now, don’t tell on me,’ Philipp said abruptly, outwardly composed again. They followed the Old Man of the Mountain, but Philipp held himself proudly upright.

‘A few toys’ – the First Secretary made a dismissive wave – ‘Father Kaminski had them delivered to the Central Committee’s holiday house. Wouldn’t have thought it was such fun to drive them. Where’ve you left Schevola? We don’t want to see her any more. We can forget her. Pity, we don’t see pretty women that often,’ he said to Marisa, holding out his gloved hand to her with a remark on the work of the Chilean Solidarity Committee. ‘They’re from the Federal Republic, those
things. We ought to build them here too. Perhaps Arbogast can manage it. – Off you go up there now, comrades, there’s something to drink at the top.’

When autumn came, the ash came. When November came, the rains and the new recruits came to Grün. During the last ten days of their service anyone who tried to rouse Rogalla and Ruden from their cheerful and yet, in the afternoon, impatient and despairing drunken rest was shown an aluminium spoon that had been rolled flat and made to look like a railway baton, holding up first the side painted red, then the one painted green: Stop. Departure. The discharge candidate’s ‘measure’ of his last months of service, self-made out of a brass grenade case containing a 150 cm tailor’s tape measure sticking out through a slit (was there not a VEB somewhere, Christian wondered, that could proudly announce it had realized its planned targets for these tape measures?) was shortened by one centimetre each day.

Sometimes, when the room and section cleaning was over and the polishing brushes were no longer clattering along the corridor, Christian, together with Burre, would go to fetch coal, that was one of the earholes’ tasks. Burre, whose first name was Jan – Christian never used
his nickname – would lumber along, a clumsy bear cub in his black overalls, grasping the rubber handgrips firmly in his work-mittens, muttering and humming, trundling the wheelbarrow with its pneumatic tyres over the cobbles of the road that, years ago, had been tarmacked, past the med centre, from which the bedridden soldiers in brown camouflage uniforms shouted snide comments, the maintenance unit, the tailoring workshop, and swung round, singing by now, towards headquarters, behind which, screened off by a few low-rise sheds and the swimming pool, lay the regiment’s coal supply. The piles were covered in rampant weeds – the coal had to be ordered far in advance and was delivered in the spring; skinny cats had dug out hollows for themselves (the coal was mainly slack, tiny lumps and dust rather than briquettes), crows were arguing over scraps of food: the kitchen dust bins, which never shut properly, stood, immersed in their own kind of melancholy, next to the piles of coal. Whenever Burre and Christian saw men with wheelbarrows from 1st and 3rd Battalions they would start to run and, if no one had got there before them, choose the best places and begin to shovel like mad – those who got the best coal had the hottest stoves and boilers. The full wheelbarrows weighed a good hundredweight and Christian would never have thought that he, the spoilt son of the educated middle classes who’d stayed on at senior high school, would be able to lift such a weight, never mind push it forward over greasy wooden planks between the grassy mounds and obstacles that made the coal in the cart, which looked like an upturned dissected frog, bounce merrily up and down. In addition to that, it was impossible to keep the load in the optimum position, on their tyres that weren’t properly pumped up the barrows wobbled this way and that, and those pushing them staggered like drunks; Christian had the feeling he was trying to transport an ox on a ruler. On the way back Burre would sing even louder, his muttering would become a droning and rhythmical ‘da-da-da’. At such times Christian felt so sorry for him he had to stop for a moment to fight down the sadness that swirled up
inside him like an unrestrained garden hose. The birch trees shimmered, from the square in front of headquarters they heard the officer shout, ‘Mount guard!’ Squirrels, fiery red, weightless little fellows, scampered along the barracks wall, overhung by elms. And yet, at such moments Burre was perhaps happy; he seemed to be in a world of his own, kept his head bowed, singing and muttering to help him forget the obstinate wheelbarrow, the evening noises of the barracks, his dripping nose that was a shining black from the coal dust. Christian thought of the slug-yellow paste full of gritty bits they’d have to rub all over their face, neck and hands; he didn’t want to but couldn’t help thinking of the lumps of black snot the size of broad beans they’d blow out of their noses, followed by a dry cough and shivers of horror at the things coming out of their bodies and into the washroom outflow. Burre was staggering and there was a regular occurrence when they drew level with the repair shop of the maintenance unit: there was a speed bump he tried to take at a run – the shovel lying across the barrow jumped up and to one side, lumps of coal squirted up and fell onto the road. Burre, trying to keep his balance, swerved like a figure-skater fighting the centripetal force of the ice in order to prepare another jump, braced himself, still singing, ever more desperately against the wheelbarrow’s determination to topple over and finally jumped aside to let it have its own, mindless way. Then Burre would start to laugh and Christian suspected that at that moment he saw himself from outside, that he burst out laughing at his own uselessness and the film-cartoon-like inevitability of the overturning, in a wobbly fit of shamefaced amusement that was as much a mystery to Christian as the fact that Nip would never allow them to fetch the coal before cleaning the rooms and section. They had to take it up the stairs and for that there was nothing apart from the ‘pig trough’ as they called the sledge, originally painted army green and presumably constructed from an ammunition case resting on two stringers, between the scraped planks of which, irrespective of the panting, the cursing, the gasped instructions from
the ‘earhole’ in front and the ‘earhole’ behind, brown coal powder trickled out, leaving a trail on the stairs and the freshly polished wooden floor of the corridor.

Burre came from Grün. He and his mother – his father had walked out on them when Burre’s little sister had drowned in the emergency water pond one winter – had two rooms in one of the tumbledown half-timbered houses behind the market; one evening he had pushed some photos under the dividing wall in the toilets: there, in one of the four stinking WC bays with their iridescent flypapers, was the only place you could have time for yourself, undisturbed, although naturally the more senior soldiers were aware of this and Musca liked to jump up the door, as if it were an assault wall, to see what was going on behind it.

Burre’s mother worked shifts as an adjuster in the Grün metal works. Every two weeks she sent her son a parcel, a tedious (the post office was at the other end of the little town) and expensive way of circumventing the unreliable guards at the barracks checkpoint, to whom she had at first given the parcels – Burre was never given a pass, Nip didn’t like him because, as the staff sergeant indicated, he was one of those who ‘ruin the company’s record’.

‘Injustice is the spice of life,’ Tank Driver Popov said, regarding his toes, which needed some attention, calmly sticking his cap on his head and a turnover in his mouth: Company 4 was on guard duty, five days before the discharge of the soldiers in their third and the NCOs in their sixth half-year. Christian saw Burre’s mother sitting with Musca, Costa and a few drivers who were not on duty; she spoke falteringly, mumbling, Christian was amazed at the similarity in timbre to her son (Burre also had that colourless voice of indeterminate register), the similarity in their features, while at the same time finding it depressing, and as he handed his machine pistol to Ruden, who locked it in a weapons cupboard, as he took off cap and belt (a minor pleasure every time), he tried to remember something that was connected with
that feeling of depression; but it only came back to him when he ran his fingers through his shorn hair: ‘The Hoffmanns’ hair whorl,’ his clock grandfather had said, ‘my father had it, I have it, your father has it and if you have children, Christian, you’ll find it on them, as faithful as ever … perhaps you’ll soon understand how funny and sad that is, you laugh and feel resigned. – Upbringing?’ He made a dismissive gesture. Christian had remembered that, although its meaning had remained unclear. Burre’s mother was dressed up in her Sunday best and Christian quickly realized she had come to plead for her son.

Ruden strolled over, said nothing. Rogalla explained it was nothing to do with him any more; Ruden, who probably had been going to say something, nodded, happy at this neat solution that relieved him of responsibility; he followed Rogalla out, holding up the spoon with the green side showing.

‘They were the worst,’ Costa said, ‘they’re leaving in five days’ time. Then he’ll be over the worst.’ Burre’s mother didn’t respond, she hadn’t taken her headscarf off, was still sitting there in her trenchcoat, one of those putty-grey ones with buttons the size of pocket watches, which were still available in the shops alongside green and forest-brown parkas, the sole difference between the men’s and women’s styles being (Barbara claimed) that the women’s buttoned on the left, the men’s on the right.

After a while she turned to Musca. ‘Haven’t you got a mother?’ she asked.

‘No,’ he replied. ‘And if I did have one she wouldn’t come strolling in with five hundred marks in an envelope.’

‘You have no mother?’

‘No, I haven’t! I come from a home, you see, my old lady drank herself to death. I drove her nuts, when I was little she put red wine in my bottle. I was quiet once I’d had it. But you – you just come barging in here with your money and fine words:
a sensitive boy
– I’m
sensitive too, gentlemen. If you only knew how sensitive I sometimes am and how my comrades here sometimes really piss me off –’

‘Heeheehee.’

‘Shutyertraparsehole. – So, what do you have to say to that?’

But Burre’s mother didn’t answer, for her son had come in. At first he didn’t seem to understand, looked irritatedly from one side of the table to the other, then, when he saw the envelope, he abruptly turned round, lowered his head, as if to think, fingering his pack frame with the pockets for his reserve magazine and his water bottle that, against regulations, he’d hooked on to it. ‘You shouldn’t have come here, I asked you not to. And certainly not with money, have we got a golden goose?’ He didn’t turn round, spoke agitatedly, shoulder raised, to an uncomprehending spot on the floor, from which his mother’s answer could reach him by ricochet.

‘But you told me he wouldn’t come,’ Burre’s mother murmured to Costa in a weary, monstrously sad voice.

When autumn came, the DCs left. Not after having given advice: Keep your tank water bottle clean. Your field pack in order. Tell the new ones they should get some material for slings and motorbike goggles.

The new ‘earholes’ arrived, stuffed with rumours, from ‘outside’ and from the cadet schools; they approached with trepidation, panting under the weight of the packed groundsheets, driven by a taskmaster with his hands behind his back, and dispersed into the various companies, like one of those lines of ants that resemble a procession of walking leaves – with one exception: Steffen Kretzschmar, who, because of his baker’s hands, his round face, his short, wiry black hair and ears that stuck out like handles, was immediately dubbed ‘Pancake’. Pancake was pulling a handcart in which he had his things (only the more senior servicemen had sailor’s kitbags, diverted from navy stores): a Weltmeister accordion with cracked mother-of-pearl buttons, a barbell and a box of juggler’s balls. When Musca exulted, he did it with
childlike openness, he pushed his cap onto the back of his head so that his protuberant eyes formed a lilac-blue centre in a face creased with laughter lines: widened by knowledge or ideas that were still in the state of chortling anticipation and only after a few seconds would send out shudders all over his skinny body, like a kind of nettlerash.

‘Just look at that dogface! Pullin’ a handcart, have y’ever seen anythin’ like that before!’ He went to his locker, put on his belt, aimed a cherry pit, still a pleasing red, at Karge on his bunk. ‘Hey, Wanda, get your finger out, the virgins are coming and one we can show what’s what.’

Even Christian was actually too tall for the tank, the limit was one metre eighty; but Pancake was at least one metre ninety. ‘The hatch’s goin’ to knock his head into his shoulders,’ Popov said, ‘well, perhaps that’s why they put him in the cavalry. How’s he going to park those spindle-shanks of his between the gear lever and the brakes … and a cap to fit that noddle just don’t exist.’

Musca drew himself up to his full height in front of Pancake, which looked rather ridiculous: he was a whole head shorter and looked like a buzzing insect that, in order finally to attract the attention of the giant explorer – Christian observed Pancake looking down on Musca, at first puzzled, then with increasing interest – had transformed itself into a dancing spider, a raving frog, a double-bass player during the ‘Flight of the Bumblebee’; except that after a while Pancake asked, ‘What d’you want?’

‘… anyway!’ Musca was waving his hands about; Pancake lifted him up with one arm, over his head, popped a cigarette between his lips with his left hand, lit it with the long flame of a red Bic lighter (Musca squealed, the flame was licking round the crotch of his trousers), waited until Musca’s boots had fallen off, then gently put him down in a November puddle, skilfully avoiding his fists flailing round in the air. Karge almost died laughing. ‘Great balls of fire!’

Costa said it served the bigmouth right. Irrgang came from the
depot and shouted that if that was one of the privileges accorded discharge candidates, then count him in.

Pancake accepted his nickname, even seemed to be happy with it and look on it as flattery, for he didn’t object to it, on the contrary, sometimes when he was on duty he would report as ‘Private Pancake’, grinning maliciously at the confusion he caused. During the first few days, Christian thought, he was trying things out, giving the officers a look-over: he respected Nip, who, giving him a look from his yellowed sclerotics, breathed out an alcohol-reeking, ‘Imtheonewhodecidesonthefunnybusinessizzatclearcomrade’, looked the battalion commander, Major Klöpfer (whom all the soldiers in his battalion thought totally incompetent), up and down, listened to the political officer with half-closed eyes, observed Christian, who was his tank commander. Pancake seemed to possess an intuitive knowledge of human nature that came to rapid conclusions, a cool ability to see through bluster and poses and assess people as ‘useful’ or ‘no use’, ‘dangerous’ or ‘harmless’, a crude but probably tried-and-tested classification on which he based his behaviour. He seemed to have problems fitting Christian into this classification for more than once Nemo, as Pancake also called him, felt the grey-flecked eyes under their sleepy, heavy lids on him. After a few days Pancake had declared poor Burre his ‘slave’ (what surprised Christian was that none of the other drivers protested; perhaps the performance he’d put on with Musca had convinced them?); Nip’s ‘humming top’ he dismissed with a twitch of his fleshy lips; the company commander did not interfere in the business of the lower ranks and Pancake was in the platoon leader’s good books because he was the best driver the battalion had ever seen. He was better than Popov, for Pancake had the confidence to reverse into the tank shed in the technical depot at full throttle (and without a guide, that was the game when a fractional movement on the steering lever could decide the fate of a Double-T carrier); on the old Wehrmacht practice course, which had been adapted to Russian conditions, he
lowered the company record that had been set by a legendary reserve officer in the early seventies; in Pancake’s fist the right-angled steel hook to open the hatch bolt looked as delicate as the handle of a lady’s hatbox.