The Tower: A Novel (93 page)

‘Some time ago,’ said King Siewert, ‘they used to give us vitamins, fresh fruit, oranges – but now? Rhubarb juice! Rhubarb juice all the time! Nothing but rhubarb juice every day!’

‘But
you’re in the Party,’ Ruscha said, ‘you tell those up there what it’s like here. Where’s Monkeydad?’ Monkeydad was what they called the departmental Party Secretary. ‘Sitting at his desk but never gets his arse off it. Polishing up his speeches … You tell him, King.’

‘I do, I do! But they never tell you anything. I’m none the wiser when I come out than when I went in.’

‘They’re driving the furnaces to rack and ruin. If one of them should blow up, then Yuri Gagarin here’ll be in the landing capsule; some red-hot communists at last.’

For their thirst there was rhubarb juice, pressed by VEB Lockwitzgrund. The juice was brought on a cart by a woman, ‘Rhubarb-juice Liese’. Of indefinite age, though already a pensioner, she sold the juice throughout Samarkand in order to supplement her pension. She was thin and bent as she walked, probably from the advanced stages of osteoporosis, and Christian never saw her other than in the same old-fashioned black dress, to which the yellow hard hat with the retort emblem of Samarkand formed a jarring contrast. People said that Rhubarb-juice Liese was not quite right in the head, she had lost her husband and her son in the war and had been raped, not by the Russians but by a Canadian unit. She had worked in ‘the chlorine’, which had left her with a rusty laugh that could be heard during the breaks, when the furnaces (contrary to regulations) were shut down and the noise fell to a bearable level. With a trembling, claw-like hand she gave out the bottles of rhubarb juice and took the money, which she kept in a leather conductor’s bag, giving it a long and thoughtful look. She stopped in front of Pancake, who was resting next to King Siewert, and felt his face, which confused him; he frowned in irritation.

‘She fancies you,’ Ruscha joked.

‘Oh, shut your gob.’ Pancake stood up, walked away from Rhubarb-juice Liese.

‘You just be careful, she’s got the evil eye,’ Asza said. ‘I once went to see a fortune-teller in Piraeus, she had just the same look.’

‘So
that’s why you’re still here! Twenty-two years!’ Ruscha tapped his forehead. ‘Only a nutcase would stay in carbide for so long.’

‘And you?’ Pancake had come back and looked Ruscha up and down contemptuously.

‘I’m not here to improve my mind, chum, but to make money. I do my twelve hours –’

‘And all the rest can go to blazes, eh?’ King laughed.

‘There’s fire everywhere,’ Ruscha replied, shugging his shoulders.

Christian sat on one side in silence, listening to their stories, mostly about carbide and women, and trying to get some rest. He sensed that he wasn’t taken seriously. Pancake, the former blacksmith with the strength of an ox, they did take seriously. Not him. He was one of the ‘white collars’ as the workers contemptuously called the management. He worked like them, they didn’t make things easy for him, they didn’t help him. Despite that, he wasn’t one of them, there remained an insurmountable barrier. He hardly took part in the conversations at all, perhaps it was his silence that made the others so reticent. One day, however, Ruscha stood up and strolled over to Christian, who was drinking his rhubarb juice. ‘What I wanted to ask, mate – you don’t happen to belong to the firm, do you?’

‘Sit down, Ruscha,’ Pancake said.

‘Wouldn’t be the first time they’d dumped a stoolie on us,’ he said threateningly.

‘Not everyone likes shootin’ his mouth off like you,’ Asza said. ‘Just be happy we’ve got the lad, or do you want to do extra shifts again?’

‘If the dough’s right …’

‘The class standpoint can go to hell …’

‘Rhubarb juice, rhubarb juice, I’ve got the very best rhubarb juice,’ said Liese, praising her wares.

Once Christian had settled in, he began to observe Asza, Ruscha and the other workers and spent a lot of time thinking about them. Ron
Siewert lived in a high-rise block in Halle-Neustadt, which was cut through by a four-lane motorway connecting Samarkand with the rest of the Orient. He got up at four for the early shift, went to bed at eight in the evening. His apartment was tiny, he and his wife had one child; his grandparents lived in a little room. Dumper trucks were going round and round the building day and night, the paths consisted of wooden planks. The children played on the piles of rubble or in the rubbish containers by the huge central shopping mall. White and decked out with flags, it was stuck in a sea of mud. Asza dreamt of going to sea again, as he had done when he was young. He wanted to go round all the harbours he’d been to again, in an ocean-going yacht with a four-man crew. He lived in Halle-Neustadt as well, Housing Complex 2, Block 380, House 5, apartment 17.

‘And if you come to visit me, Krishan,’ Asza said, ‘and can’t find my apartment, ’cause it’s a bit difficult, difficult – it’s the one with the red flowers on the balcony, all the others just have white ones.’

When they sat on their chairs during the breaks, silently smoking, silently sitting with their heads leaning forward:

(because there’d been an explosion: because there was a fault in the water-cooling system, water had come out of the cracked rubber hoses and combined with carbide to produce acetylene, which was spreading,

because acetylene was inflammable and exploded in the temperatures in the furnace,

because the carbide in the air, the dust fairies, also combined with the moist air to produce acetylene so that sometimes ball lightning seemed to be zooming round the furnace shop,

because molten carbide could suddenly shoot out of the furnace and hit the tappers and rod-men,

because impurities could be deposited on the furnace shell and gradually eat their way through the fireproof masonry of the furnace wall then be hurled out of the furnace like lava surrounded by tongues of flame,

because the dust-removal vent hadn’t been built,

because the effluent from the process was spewing out of open pipes as a toxic slick into the Saale,

because carbide was an indispensable component of plastic, artificial fibres, synthetic rubber,

because Samarkand urgently needed the long-overdue investment for other parts of their operations so therefore nothing would change,

because the hum of the furnace transformers, the interconnected single-phase transformers with an output of 53 MVA, and the rotary current transformer that, in order to increase output, was in parallel with the neighbouring carbide furnace, caused headaches, unbearable throbbing headaches,

because these transformers had a tendency to short-circuit and in the shower of sparks Asza would start to pray that the Lord would let them all get home safely, because there were planned targets and therefore ‘blanking’: at the times of peak demand, during the day, when there was often less power available, the furnaces were cut back, working like pumped storage power plants as buffers for the public network – but operated at full power during the night and on Sundays, when there was power available, to make up for the loss of production,

because there was not only carbide in Samarkand, there was the vinyl chloride department, electrolysis, where the workers inhaled toxic gases and died at fifty, the lime works where the carbide factory got its quicklime from, the fibre-spinning mill, the ball crushers, a conveyor belt with capsules the size of spaceships revolving on rollers, which ground the brown lumps of carbide to dust,

because retirement at sixty had once more been cancelled,

because the cars on the four-lane urban motorway drove and drove on and drove past)

they sat in silence, seeming to Christian like damned souls.

He
observed Pancake. He’d driven Burre so far, he and others.

‘Why did you do it? Support me?’

‘Because it wasn’t right, Mummy’s Boy.’

‘And Burre?’

‘He was weak, that’s all.’

‘You think that’s right?’

‘The weak have to serve the strong, that’s the way things are.’

‘No, it’s the other way round. The strong have to support the weak.’

‘Well, yes, if it’s a matter of your own turf. Everyone has their own turf and anyone who belongs to your own turf has to be protected. Even if he’s weak. That’s what it’s always been like.’

‘But that’s why I still don’t understand why you supported me.’

‘You have a home, you have someone who comes to visit you, you have a place where you belong.’

‘You haven’t?’

Something strange happened: the resistance Christian had long felt inside himself – to society, to socialism as he experienced it and saw it – disappeared, gave way to a feeling of being in agreement with everything. It was right that he was there. He was an opponent of the army and of the system and that was why he was being punished. No country in the world handled its opponents with kid gloves. Christian sensed that here, in the chemical empire eaten away by brown-coal open-cast mines and poisoned rivers, he was in the right place for him. He had found his place in society, he was needed here (he could see the despair, the quiet pleas behind all the severe masks). He did what he was told to do and if he wasn’t told to do anything, he did nothing. And when he was doing nothing, he took pleasure in little things: a dandelion in postbox yellow, the clarity of a line of migrating birds (as autumn began, the greylag geese passed over the Orient). It was so much simpler to let go and not resist. If you did exactly what was demanded, the punishments passed you by, you were left in peace. Why struggle? What use was it knocking your head against a brick
wall until it was bleeding? A wise man, he remembered, walks with his head bowed, humble like the dust.

In the evening he sometimes looked out of the cell window. By that time the swirling wind had mostly died down; across the black Saale and beside the coke-drying plant, which let off its soot now, sending housewives dashing out in their aprons to save their washing, you could see the housing estate where Asza, King Siewert, Ruscha and many of the other carbide workers lived. New blocks surrounded a square, in the middle was a windmill, its sails turning against the chemically inflamed sky of Samarkand.

If you wanted to know what was new in the district, the place to go to was Veronica, a building in Querleite where a communal bathhouse was run for those who didn’t have a bathroom of their own or, as in the House with a Thousand Eyes, where there was only one used by too many tenant families. At the beginning of the winter of 1986 three events caused a stir: the return of Muriel Hoffmann from the reformatory, the strange operation of the Minister of National Defence and the story of the exchanged child. Meno went to the bathhouse once a week, as the water allocation and usage plan allowed, showered, observed, listened. Herr Unthan, who was in charge of the bathhouse, was blind. He made his way round the cellar of 12 Querleite, where the baths were housed, with its atmosphere of steam and spray, dimly lit by Schuckert bulbs, from its time as a popular sanatorium, whose contacts could still withstand the damp, with the sureness of a sleepwalker. The cubicles were approached along duckboards with pimpled rubber
mats; two still had the good zinc baths with the wind vane symbol of the Erzgebirge firm of Krauss that had originally been installed there; two others were wooden tubs and the last two injection-moulded plastic baths with original enamel signs above them on which was written, in black Gothic letters: ‘O Krauss, O name of fearful chime – I never bathe, I love my grime’ (the sarcastic advert was by Joachim Ringelnatz), as well as, presumably, to deny the boys of the district any excuse: ‘This rule holds true for ev’ry house: you need a bath – you need a Krauss.’ The cubicles were secured with brass padlocks that hung in the gloom like greeny-gold jewel beetles; since, however, the wood of the doors had become so rotten with the damp and mould you could easily put your hand through them, this security measure was like trying to keep jewels in cardboard boxes with strong metal locks. Beyond the baths, farther back in the cellar, there were shower cubicles with brown plastic swing doors that reached from the knees to the shoulders of an average adult and sounded like a Jew’s harp when opened or closed. Herr Unthan had a grandfather who had played the violin and since Herr Unthan senior lacked both arms, he’d done it in a circus, with just his toes; Herr Unthan junior had a shellac record, ‘incontrovertible proof’, that he never played to anyone, even though when the Tietzes came to have a bath Ezzo would, by his expressions of disbelief as far as his grandfather’s skills were concerned, provoke Herr Unthan to statements such as ‘He died poor, but with rich eyes.’

Niklas too would have liked to have had the record for the Friends of Music but Herr Unthan junior’s response to all offers was silence, as he lugged bucket after bucket of hot water to the baths and showers using a yoke decorated in folk-art style. The communal baths had only two cold-water connections, which were linked by pipes to a tank over a stove, for which there was a significant pile of briquettes in the backyard of Veronica, tipped out there in the summer by Plisch and Plum from their boss’s Framo pickup truck and, if the winter was long, Herr
Unthan very busy and the deluge ‘after us’ cool, people stole without compunction.

‘Well, Meno, too much ink on your fingers again?’

‘And you, Niklas? Washing off the rosin?’

‘Oh well, you know how it is.’

‘Frau Knabe, I’ve forgotten my bath salts, could you pour me some over?’

‘But it’s from over there, Frau Fiebig.’

‘But that’s what I meant, Frau Knabe. Could you pour me some from your cubicle over there into my bathtub. If you would be so kind.’

Laughter, the hum of voices. Curses and jokes. Gossip and scandal from the district and the town. Sometimes someone would start singing and mostly others would join in. Herr Unthan slaved away with the water (it never occurred to anyone to help him) and Meno listened:

‘You still haven’t told us the story of the minister, Herr Tietze.’

‘Ah, this is how it was, Herr Kühnast.’

The Minister of Defence, who naturally took a military approach to matters, was, as happens to men of a more advanced age, visited by a problem in a place where orders are no use. The Minister of Defence thought about it and called his adjutant.

‘Find me the best specialist in the Republic!’

‘The best specialist for the task in question, Comrade Minister, is in Dresden, St Joseph’s Hospital.’

Surely he wasn’t trying to tell him, the Minister growled, that in the whole of the capital of the German Democratic Republic there was no specialist for that manoeuvre of the same rank!

‘The specialists were unanimous in naming that name, Comrade Minister.’

‘All right, then. Make the necessary preparations and have the comrade brought here.’

Dr Focke, the Chief Urologist at St Joseph’s was, like many
urologists, a man with a tendency to fly into a rage and express himself very directly.

‘Then I’ll just have to fly to Dresden,’ the Minister told his adjutant. ‘I have to check out things at the Military Academy there anyway. See to it that everything’s prepared in that hospital and have the helicopter on stand-by. I want this Dr Focke to operate on me the day after tomorrow.’

Dr Focke said he was willing to do that. He asked for all the documents to be sent to him immediately. He had reserved a single room for the Herr Minister, but he refused to have the crucifix over the bed removed.

The Minister, who had led many companies, battalions and regiments, been in command of many attacks on the Eastern front as a young officer and spent time in the Nazis’ prisons, was a man with a tendency to fly into a rage and express himself very directly.

‘And so,’ Niklas Tietze explained, as he knocked the long-handled wooden back-brush against the cellar ceiling, making the brush head, which could be hired from a whole collection for twenty pfennigs, come off and drop into the next shower cubicle, ‘and so a compromise was agreed.’

It did not, as every sensible person would have imagined, consist of moving the operation to another Dresden hospital. Dr Focke wanted his tried-and-tested team around him, wanted to be able to concentrate fully on the task in hand and not be ‘stuck in an alien atmosphere’, as he explained to the adjutant on the telephone. But it was the Minister they were talking about! The latter, listening in on the second receiver, was, Niklas told his amazed audience in their bathwater or under dripping showers,
in the picture
; first he had gone bright red then, with a grim smile and crushing the receiver in his hand, stomped up and down muttering ‘
Nu zayats – pogodi
.’ Just you wait, hare.

‘Then he had a look at a map of Dresden and tapped a large patch of green with his finger. The large green patch close to which, on the
other side of the busy Stübelallee, St Joseph’s lay, was the Great Garden. Just there, on the meadow that had been hurriedly reconnoitred and declared suitable, even though already attacked by hostile, negative hoarfrost, a tented camp was erected by the 7th Armoured Division, which was stationed in Dresden and had been put on unscheduled alert, and the officer cadets of the Friedrich Engels Military Academy. The Dresdeners were probably wondering why on that day there were diversions in operation on the busy Stübelallee, the equally busy Dr-Richard-Sorge-Strasse and the Brücke der Einheit, why the open-air Junge Garde stage, the exhibition centre on Fučikplatz, even the Zoo on the other side of the large patch of green, remained closed. Only the little narrow-gauge railway carrying cheerful schoolchildren through the fresh morning air had been forgotten, at which the Minister’s adjutant flew into a rage. The whistling might disturb the doctor, it was to be stopped at once! The adjutant, a far-sighted man, had even taken into consideration the fact that the operating area, since it was situated in an open meadow, might be liable to instability, which was confirmed by a call to the department responsible: there was a plague of voles that had long been out of control. Several companies of soldiers with torches had therefore spent the night emptying standard cartridges of carbide down holes in the ground; on the morning of the operation they had managed to blow away the oppressive stench by means of an aeroplane propeller mounted on a lorry.’

‘And Focke?’ Herr Kühnast asked.

‘It took him four hours. He told me he
enjoyed
it.’

‘Poor Gudrun,’ Meno murmured.

But Gudrun started to sing, first of all a folk song, then ‘A shower bath, a shower bath, to wash those blues away, Annie’s got a new sweetheart, the handsome Johnny Grey.’ She sang alone, for they were lines she made up while scrubbing the children, Niklas and herself in the shower. Then something of the merriment would return that she must have bubbled over with as a girl and that reappeared at rare
moments, sometimes for no reason at all. Then it could happen that Gudrun would put a washbasin on her head, shout something to Herr Orré, if he was in the neighbouring cubicle, at which the actor would leap out into the corridor, naked apart from a washbasin on his head and holding an elderly umbrella, which was used to keep the spray from the first shower out of the bathtubs, and perform a flip-flop-slapping tap dance with Gudrun Tietze to the accompaniment, bawled out rather than sung, of the other bathers: ‘We were often stony broke, / bein’ broke it ain’t no joke. / But now I’ve got a new hat / an’ I feel much better for that. / Life has its ebb an’ its flow, / you get tossed about to an’ fro, / sometimes you’re here, sometimes there / but now I’m a millionaire!’

Herr Unthan had difficulty getting past the two dancers. The buckets had to be emptied – into the zinc storage tanks that, like lavatory cisterns only higher, were hung from the cellar ceiling to provide the necessary water pressure. In order to get the water out of the buckets and into the containers, there were rails fixed to the sides of the shower cubicles up which rope hoists ran; they had tipping handles, to which the buckets were attached, and when Herr Unthan pulled a lever that worked via the rope hoist the bucket, just three metres above the floor, tipped forward and emptied the water into the storage container that could take enough water to shower a family of four. Since there were only two buckets, it didn’t make sense to accelerate one’s shower, as some intelligent observers had wanted to do, by simply pouring the contents of a bucket over one’s head. In the first place that wasn’t a proper shower and would have hurt Herr Unthan’s professional pride; in the second a safety regulation indicated that such a procedure was not permitted.

‘Good day, Herr Rohde. I hope you don’t mind but Herr Unthan’s put me in the
banja
with you.’

‘Hello, Herr Adeling. No water for you at home either?’

‘Oh, water, yes, but the stories, Herr Rohde, the stories. May I put
my soap beside yours. There’s a cat winking on yours, quite unmistakable.’

Frau Knabe, the dentist, was telling the story of the exchanged child. And while she was talking, in his mind’s eye Meno could see the Roecklers, the couple who ran the dance school of the same name on Lindwurmring, to whose daughter the unbelievable event, which had been a topic of conversation in the town for months, had happened.

‘One day Silke Roeckler, their youngest daughter, went to the shop of the military hospital. You can go in, the guards let you through and sometimes they have things you can’t get from Frau Zschunke’s or in Sweet Corner or Konsum.’

Meno heard the click of the abacus that Frau Knabe was imitating, making her majestic bosom press against the plastic door, to the delight of the men in the shower cubicle opposite. Frau Roeckler was small with a pale, waxy complexion in the white pleated dress she wore with the gold lamé shoes for the dancing lessons partnering her husband in his black tails. In perfect posture, with doll-like make-up, as graceful as one of Kändler’s Meissen figures, she would float, her still-black hair swept up in a shiny 1950s style, across the chessboard floor of the dance school on the first floor, accompanied by the drizzle of the grand piano beside the pale-leaved Monstera, on which, when the central paste chandelier was lit, the shadow of a stuffed hobby from the Bassaraba pet shop, which was hanging from the stucco ceiling, would fall.

‘I think she went to the shop because, unusually for August, they had oranges there, and when she came out, she found a different child from her own in her pram.’

– Pliés, pirouettes, complicated tango steps: Eduard Roeckler seemed born to do them, even though dancing had not always been his profession; it was his passion, as was art in general; he was deeply moved by the passion and beauty it can convey. He wanted to be a painter and did a course in microscopic drawing at art college and that saved his
life during the war, in which he ended up in Königsberg and Riga; he met a woman, that same floating Magdalene Roeckler, who came from a dynasty of dance teachers; after that war he too wanted to do nothing but dance. Hundreds of pictures on the walls of the dance school bore witness to his continuing passion for painting and microscopic drawing; he thought the large mirrors, such as they had in other dance schools, pointless. ‘If you have to have a mirror, let it be a face close to you,’ he used to say.

‘The guard called for a doctor; on that day the microbiologist of the military hospital, a Romanian called Doctor Varga, was there. He gave her an injection and she came round. They established that the child had had many operations. Silke Roeckler screamed, she was completely hysterical.’

‘How can you say that, Frau Knabe?’ Herr Kühnast objected. ‘You have no children of your own. Put yourself in the poor woman’s situation, simply terrible. – What happened next?’

‘There was an immediate investigation, of course. The whole complex of the military hospital, all the Russians’ houses on Lindwurmring and Grünleite were cordoned off.’

And Meno remembered how he had been called upon as an interpreter, for he too had heard that there were oranges in the shop there, and had gone home early on that day, a hot Friday in August, to get a little present for Anne; he’d called Barbara, and she had come from the furrier’s; a woman had looked at him and said, ‘You’re another of these stooges of the Russians’, in a quiet but clearly audible voice. The commander of the military hospital was in despair, he promised to do everything in his power to clear the matter up and get the stolen child back.