The Tower

Interlude: 1984

In the evening doors into the dream opened. In the evening the cast-off skins of the body were left behind after the magic word ‘Mutabor’ had been spoken. In January ’84 the dustbins were overflowing, ashes had to be tipped out on the snow beside them, sometimes the Tower-dwellers, on the initiative of a citizens’ meeting, would heave the dustbins up onto a lorry that took the ashes out into the woods. Newspapers piled up, were torn to shreds in gusts of wind sharp with frost. The District Hygiene Inspector’s office recommended putting a layer of lime over the garbage. The lime was distributed to designated individuals in each street from whom the inhabitants filled their buckets: ‘Causes severe eye damage. Keep out of reach of children.’

Andropov died.

‘So what now?’ the Tower-dwellers asked while they were queuing at the butcher’s, the baker’s or outside the Konsum. ‘The next juvenile lead will take the stage,’ they whispered with an apprehensive shrug of the shoulders.

Cigarette smoke, aquarian swirls of incense, eyes on the ceiling in the dim light of a guttering candle in an apartment somewhere in the Prenzlauer Berg district of Berlin. Shutters with the paint peeling off, cracks plugged with newspaper, putty rock hard and crumbling; the tiled stove is doing its best but plywood, fenceposts, mouldy coal are only enough for a few hours’ heat a day. Men in woolly pullovers with biblical beards, workers’ hands, beer mugs in their nicotine-stained fingers and a Karo or an F6 between their lips, are listening to a poet reading out poems typed on wood-pulp paper, hastily, making mistakes, deliberately avoiding pompous declamation, they’re all friends together, highfaluting stuff is not what’s required here. Judith Schevola is listening, observing, smoking. She has introduced Meno to this group, to which you only gain admittance after passing through several rear courtyards with bullet holes from the last war, after giving a password at the cautiously opened door with no nameplate, after submitting to partly furtive, partly openly aggressive scrutiny the newcomer has to accept: there are too many spies and instinct is not always infallible. Meno senses that he is a foreign body, but his presence is accepted, no one seems to be holding back in what they say because of him. The poet reads. They are poems with turned-up collars and flat caps pulled well down. He’s been published in one of the magazines lying on the table in the middle of the room, where the air is so thick with sweat and tobacco smoke you could cut it with a knife. Without the Communist Manifesto under one of its legs the table would definitely wobble; the Communist Manifesto performs this service alternately with a brochure about venereal diseases after protests from members of the audience committed to grass-roots democracy. The magazines all give off the fresh air of insubordination, have titles such as POE TRY ALL BUM, bones of contention, AND, POE TRY ALL bang, and are screen-printed on thin Czechoslovak copy paper at ten crowns per 2,000 sheets — solely for the church’s official use, thus avoiding the need to apply for permission to print. They lack a stapler that can reliably staple more than fifteen pages. There’s a lack of paper: the entry fee to the reading was a certain amount of writing paper that can — for the church’s official use — be stapled or folded into little booklets and filled with controversial articles on environmental issues in editions of between fifteen and fifty.

‘My hand for my product.’

And then? the Tower-dwellers ask.

Sarajevo calling, a wolf-cub waves to the viewers watching television. Skyscrapers, bare mountains surrounding a basin, a dreary urban landscape that is not sought out by any reporter accredited to the first Winter Olympics to be held in a socialist country nor recorded by the camera that cannot lie. Here is the ice rink, there the tracks of the cross-country ski run, the ski jump where Jens Weissflog from Oberwiesenthal flew on strictly parallel skis to gold and silver. Did people recall a summer’s day seventy years previously when a student was waiting on a street corner for the car of the heir to the Austrian throne? The Ice Queen sets out on her free programme. Her trainer stands behind the barrier, stony-faced, while her protégée, with fluttering miniskirt and Kirgiz eyebrows, inscribes flowing cursive periods on the ice. The exclamation marks of a triple toe-loop, pirouette flourishes, bouquets of roses in cellophane, Heinz Florian Oertel wallows in tulle and taffeta. Torvill and Dean dance to Ravel’s Bolero, a Swede runs up the slopes with skating steps. There is a smile on the fairest face of socialism.

It was Christian’s winter holiday from school. He had been accepted for medicine at university. Oddly enough, he hardly felt delighted at all, relieved rather, also weary; a guilty conscience for those who had been rejected. Becoming famous didn’t seem that important any more after his experiences at the training camp and with Reina. He’d hardly done any school work since the start of the twelfth year, his marks had got worse, which was a matter of concern to more than just Dr Frank — there had been discussions in the staff room: he’d stopped singing in Uhl’s choir, had resigned from the Free German Youth committee without giving any reason, cut himself off more and more. When Hedwig Kolb set an essay on the essential characteristics of socialist literature, Christian wrote a single sentence: ‘It lies.’ Hedwig Kolb didn’t give his essay a mark, took him on one side and told him that she had to insist he did the essay: couldn’t he? As he knew, his acceptance for university was still provisional, so couldn’t he? He was kept in for an extra hour, under the surveillance of Herr Stabenow, who was still full of enthusiasm for physics, a critical attitude to research and the unprejudiced pursuit of the truth, and he put together some rubbish with the usual platitudes that Hedwig Kolb returned to him without comment but with a two minus mark. He avoided Reina. Verena was in Dresden a lot now. Siegbert had to find another career, since he’d been rejected for the merchant navy because of a lack of social commitment. He still didn’t know what to do. When Svetlana started a discussion at the supper table in the hostel, Christian would silently drink his soup, and when Falk started fooling around and set Jens Ansorge off as well, he went out for a walk, stood for a long time on the bank of the Wilde Bergfrau or Kaltwasser reservoir, where there were just a few ice fishers with Mormyshka rods, sitting staring gloomily at the holes they’d made. He often went out for walks when he was at home, which made Richard remark that the lad had been ruminating and brooding over things too much recently, perhaps a regular work-out would do him good, a girlfriend; he, at Christian’s age … Anne said that with all those walks at least he got out in the fresh air and if he didn’t want to talk they ought to respect that. Christian neglected his cello. In his pocket he had Reina’s letters. There were long queues outside Hauschild’s coal store, the conversations of those waiting cut across by the sharp sound of the shovels with which Plisch and Plum removed the swiftly diminishing mountain of briquettes. It was the time of theatre productions, of Erik Orré’s Recitation Evenings, Adeling’s (the waiter) and Binneberg’s (the pastry cook) ‘Chocolate kitchen for children and those who want to become one’ in the foyer of the Felsenburg: cooking chocolate was melted in pots and pans to a dark brown molten mass with a Christmassy smell and poured into baking moulds from Binneberg’s cake shop: chocolate caravels stuck out their curving bows that Binneberg, an obese man with a network of burst veins and cheeks like a bulldog, provided with frosting sails and a sweet dribble of rigging from a piping bag; Pittiplatsch with his tongue sticking out and a white fondant cowlick multiplied on the edge of the table as if in a hall of mirrors; heads of Napoleon and culverins attacking the fortress of Königstein delighted the fathers. For each chocolate moulding Binneberg and Adeling charged one mark, which they put in a money box on which ‘Solidarity’ was written; they used the money to buy toys in König’s toyshop on Lübecker Strasse that they gave to the children in the Arkady Gaidar children’s home on Lindwurmring: an extensive, dilapidated building in the Swiss style beside the villas requisitioned by the Russians.

Once the cold season begins the heating levels are announced daily on the radio. The heating levels apply to firms and institutions with buildings and plant that do not have functioning output regulators. They set maximum heating times: heating level 1 means the heating is on for at most four hours a day with the proviso that the room temperature must not exceed the limit — for offices, schools, cinemas and other social institutions that is 19–20^°C. Heating level 0: no heating for any firms or institutions, special arrangements are in operation for certain buildings or spaces (e.g. hospitals). The date at which space heating starts (heating level 1) is determined by the director of the energy combine after consultation with the chairman of the District Energy Committee.

‘Learning from the Soviet Union means learning to freeze’ is the joke going round the queues outside Hauschild’s coal store.

In the spring Josta broke up with Richard. She wrote him a letter: since he refused to divorce his wife, she had drawn the obvious conclusion; moreover there was another man now. She was going to get married. She and her fiancé would take action to prevent any attempt by Richard to see Lucie again, to influence her or to challenge their right to custody of the child. Her fiancé had connections. ‘Farewell.’

One evening Christian saw his father come round the corner of Wolfsleite into Turmstrasse. Richard had dug his hands into his coat pockets and his eyes were on the ground. Christian’s first impulse was to hide behind one of the parked cars and wait until his father had passed, but Richard had already seen him. ‘Well, lad,’ he said, raising his shoulders like a large, skinny bird that felt cold. He seemed tired, he didn’t have his usual coolly searching look. ‘Problems?’ Richard went on, prodding Christian gently with his elbow without taking his hand out of his pocket.

‘Nah.’ Christian made an effort to make his voice sound unconcerned. ‘And you?’ He was alarmed at his familiarity, the forced joviality hung in the air. He’d never talked to his father like that before, as an equal, it just wasn’t done. He drew his head down into the collar of his parka.

‘Keep everything bottled up, hm?’ Richard said with a soft laugh. ‘Keep everything bottled up, that’s the way it is. The Hoffmanns and the Rohdes — we keep our mouths shut.’

‘Meno says, “A wise man —” ’

‘ “— walks with his head bowed, humble like the dust.” A Chinese proverb. He’s good at following it. The art of lying … You might perhaps find it useful some day, who knows?’

‘Are you going home?’

‘Not yet.’

‘Can I walk along with you?’

Richard looked up, then he suddenly went to Christian and embraced him. ‘I have to walk a bit by myself, my lad. — Sorry I couldn’t do anything about the army. The guys at district headquarters promised they’d conscript you into the medical corps.’ But that hadn’t happened, Christian had been conscripted into an armoured division.

‘I’ll survive.’

‘You go that way, I’ll go this.’ Richard pointed in either direction along Turmstrasse.

It’s a time for reading: Orwell is read, circulates in laboriously typed copies — transcripts by hand, such as the monks made, would be too easily recognized, cases were known in which State Security had sent registered mail to every household in one district in order to have a sample of handwriting on the receipt they could use for comparison, checked dictations done by children at school, students’ test papers, documents written by the spouse who hadn’t signed the receipt. It’s the time of the chain letters, of transfers, the time when poetry albums go from hand to hand in the classrooms and boys whose voices are breaking fill them with sparks of genius such as: ‘There’s no place like home’ or ‘Roses are red / violets are blue / sugar is sweet / and so are you.’ It’s busy at the post office: beside the buzzing long-distance booth — Herr Malthakus calling a philatelist who lives abroad; beside the booth for local calls — the mother of Frau Zschunke, the greengrocer, has been admitted to hospital; there’s a queue at the parcel counter to send solidarity parcels to Poland. Outside the church Pastor Magenstock has put up a list of items that are most urgently needed, which should be sent to make the long journey (because they fetch the highest prices on the Polish black market, though that reason doesn’t feature on the list, of course); addresses have also been attached to the notice. People have little trust in the officials of the German and Polish post, border control and customs, in dark hands in the interior of the People’s Republic of Poland. Coffee, sugar (whole shopping-bagfuls of one-kilo packets at 1.55 marks each are lugged there from HO Lebensmittel or Holfix), children’s clothes, cigarettes, flour. In the furrier’s section of Harmony Salon the clippings of fur are collected; ‘It’s all going to Poland,’ Barbara informs the children who ring at the door; the dressmakers do extra shifts to make the scraps into winter clothes that they proudly deliver to the parcel counter, where the assistant, wheezing asthmatically and wearing DVT-stockings and slippers with furry pink mice on them, is heaving weighty string-tied blocks up onto the scales with a regularity that usually only occurs at Christmas, writes the postcode on the wrapping paper with a blue wax crayon (zeros the size of hot-water bottles), brushes the completed dispatch form with glue and slaps it onto the parcel. There’s a smell of glue in the post office. There’s a smell of wet umbrellas drying in a plastic stand in the entrance; there’s a smell of Postmaster Gutzsch’s St Bernard, who’s lying, like a calf, on a blanket in the passage behind the counters. The special stamps to mark the forthcoming thirty-fifth anniversary of the founding of the Republic only have a faint smell of glue, and of Gutzsch’s extinguished cigar — he sometimes puts it down on the edge of the sponge used for moistening the glue on the stamps when he’s checking that both the recipient’s and the sender’s address on the envelope are written correctly; he draws one of the narrow-gauge railway series with the fine edging past his cigar across the wet sponge or takes a statue from Balthasar Permoser’s seasons series of stamps out of a folio-sized post office file and measures the space up meticulously before sticking down ‘Spring’ and ‘Summer’, then picking up the rubber stamp and thumping it down twice: pa-dum, first of all on the rich black of a pre-war Pelikan inkpad, then, joyfully, on the virgin stamp.

Regine waited. Under the ricepaper lamp in the living room that Jürgen had made and decorated with pictures of flying fish, in the garden of the house in the street in Blasewitz that was named after a resolute woman who fought for socialism, by the woodland park where the children tobogganed and skated in winter and in summer the ice cream and lemonade vendors sold colourful refreshment — in the garden, surrounded by the statues Jürgen had carved out of the sandstone from the Lohmen quarry: a frieze of cubes with children beneath fruits, a female torso, two boys based on their children, Hans and Philipp, she sat and waited. She waited beside the telephone when Richard and Anne left the living room in Caravel to leave her alone with Jürgen’s voice, which, from the hubbub of the great light-spattered city of Munich far away at the other end of the crackling, hissing line, would say, accompanied by a further crackle, ‘Hi’; when they went for a walk so as not to hear Regine sobbing, not to witness the silence that could arise after four years of separation and that everyday matters could never quite cover over: How are the kids? Are they doing OK at school? Is there anything you want, what should I send you? — And you? Have you found a job yet? An apartment? My God, all that’s incredibly expensive. Regine waited when the lamplighter took his metre-long pole with the hook on the end off his black bicycle, inserted the hook in an eye in the grubby glass hexagon of a gas lamp, blew up a ball of light, one after the other in the streets of the district; she waited on the Thursdays when the ice cart came, drawn by two apathetic Haflinger horses, when the iceman’s attention-demanding loud bell rang out, as if hurt, through closed windows and undrawn curtains along the summer-quiet street, to announce with its shrill ‘Here I am!’ the delivery of fresh blocks of ice that the iceman took down from the cart with a cramp-iron — shimmering like fish, glassily smooth, the hunks were put into the kitchen icebox, where, within a few days, they melted onto bowls hung underneath them; pre-electric chilling for butter and meat, milk and jam.

It is the month of the workers’ celebrations. ‘Everyone out for the first of May’ was the wish expressed on a placard on the wall of the Dresden-Tolkewitz city graveyard.

It is the time when every Wednesday at 1 p.m. the wail of a siren can be heard over the city, practising for the real thing, when at night the rattle of machine-gun fire from the Soviet training grounds all around the city penetrates their sleep, when by day the vapour trails of fighter-bombers circle round the blue sky, followed a few seconds later by the roar of jet engines. And what point is there in ignoring the fact that the coconut, well-known for its ability to migrate across oceans, is able to find its way up the Elbe and seems to exist in reality and all its fibrous hairiness, the size of a cannonball, on some of the fruit racks in Frau Zschunke’s shop one cold afternoon in May? The widowed Frau Fiebig first looks at Frau Zschunke, who lowers her eyes and nods. Then she looks at the other customers: long-suffering housewives, pensioners kept supple by all the running around, Herr Sandhaus, an ally. Ignoring the fact that they don’t stand a chance not to be, they decide to be fair: first of all the widow Fiebig secures two of the phenomena of existent reality for her basket and impresses on Herr Sandhaus that he’s not to take his eyes off it. Then she runs out into Rissleite, right in front of Binneberg’s café, where Dresden ladies indulging in nostalgia along with their cream cakes have already registered her hurried behaviour, makes a megaphone of her hands round her mouth and shouts three times ‘COCONUTS!’ out into the depths of the life of a socialist district that has no choice but to be the mode of existence of protoplasm (as Friedrich Engels wrote), which consists essentially in the constant renewal of the chemical constituents of that substance. The widow Fiebig’s cry does not go unheard and, since consciousness is a developmental product of matter, it is followed by the realization of the necessity of transferring one of the fibrous, tropical, travelling cadres in Frau Zschunke’s ‘dump’ from property of the people to private property. Meno, happening to be in the right place at the right time for once, has already secured one for the Hoffmanns in Heinrichstrasse and one for himself (that is, for the Stahls and their few-months-old baby) when Frau Zschunke, with an insistent, ‘One nut per nut, no more’, asks him to replace the excess specimen. As Meno bears the Hoffmanns’ coconut in the direction of Heinrichstrasse past a hundred-metre queue, from which dark looks speak of layers of consciousness that have supposedly been long since overcome, he has, for the first time for years, the feeling of having performed a solid, truly useful, unqualifiedly good deed deserving of praise — Judith Schevola’s book is subject to delay at Dresdner Edition, assessments cause ideological stomach ache; Meno is powerless to do anything about it. That evening the coconut, cleaned, defibred (Barbara: ‘Don’t throw the stuff away, Anne, who knows what we might be able to use it for?’) and scrubbed, is standing upright on the kitchen table before the disbelieving looks of the whole family. It’s a small kitchen, they’re crowded together, it’s stuffy. There are candles burning all round the coconut, another of Barbara’s over-the-top ideas, Meno thinks as he quietly enjoys his triumph.

‘Come on, Richard, crack the nut,’ Ulrich says teasingly. Robert is holding the Kon-Tiki book by the Norwegian ethnologist and adventurer Thor Heyerdahl, in case anyone should have any doubts that coconuts have eyes, which have to be bored out if delicious milk is to flow. Anne has put out bowls. A sip for each one of them. Richard picks up the corkscrew and digs it into one of the darker spots that could be one of the ‘eyes’ Heyerdahl talks about. Richard manages a few twists, pulls with all his might, the nut between his feet, and retrieves a fibrous plug and a bent corkscrew. The milk refuses to flow. Hesitantly Robert points out that Heyerdahl was talking about green nuts when he described himself and his men drinking coconut milk on the Marquesas. Barbara shakes the nut; it is as it was: round, compact and mute. The nutcracker from Seiffen beside the samovar, a carved wooden figure of a miner with a hinged lower jaw, is too small and breakable; more brute force is required, but Anne’s steak hammer is no use either, it just chips a few splinters of Sprelacart laminate off the work surface and Ina puts her hands over her ears because Ulrich is hammering away at it in blind fury. Richard goes out with Ulrich onto the balcony, where he keeps some tools and, using an anvil as a firm base for the nut, raises a claw hammer, the nut slips off to one side and hits Ulrich on the shin. Hasn’t Richard got a sledgehammer, he’s had enough now and he’s not going to let himself be beaten by a damn coconut, even if he has to drive the Moskvitch over it! Richard doesn’t have a sledgehammer. Neither the Stenzel Sisters nor their neighbour, Dr Griesel, own such a weighty argument but André Tischer has a cutting torch with which Ulrich threatens the coconut as a last resort. Richard has a vice. They tighten it until the spindle starts to bend. The nut, a tough nut to crack, has no intention of giving up. ‘We could throw the thing down from the balcony onto the pavement, really slam it down.’ — ‘But then the pieces would go all over the place and I’d like, no, Snorkel, I want to have drunk something like that for once in my life. Just imagine there’s some milk still in it and it goes all over the pavement flags.’ They try with a saw, but it won’t grip, keeps slipping off the smooth surface. ‘Perhaps it’s got a screw top and you just can’t see it,’ Robert ventures to suggest.

Summer came. The twelfth grade have their final exams. Final parade: We wish you all the best for your future in our socialist society. Flowers, handshakes, one last visit to a disco together, booze and cigarettes, partying.

Muriel was sent to a reformatory. She had been warned but she still insisted on saying what she thought in civics classes.

Hans and Iris Hoffmann are accused of having failed in their upbringing, they are stripped of their parental rights. The guidelines say: ‘The aim of a reformatory is to overcome individualist personality developments, to smooth out peculiarities of thought and behaviour in children and young people, thus creating the basis for normal personality development.’